Firms respond to minimum wage hikes in multiple ways. 

One study considers a 2023 California bill that raised the minimum wage for fast-food workers from $16 to $20 per hour. 

The researchers estimated 

a 4.9–5.1 percent increase in fast-food prices and a 2.1–2.2 percent increase in full-service prices.… Additionally, [the] findings suggest that price increases reduced consumers’ demand for fast food by 3.9–4.1 percent and for full-service meals by 1.7–1.8 percent.

The textbook for AI Policy 101 does not exist. There is no AI Governance for Dummies. Recent incidents involving internally deployed AI models escaping the testing environments crafted by their developers sound like the stuff of science fiction. Yet cybersecurity, biological, surveillance, and loss-of-control risks from frontier AI models are very much real and very much something that existing government institutions are poorly equipped to evaluate.

Complexity, however, is not an excuse for inaction. Regulation of the securities sector through the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or FINRA, provides one example of Congress developing a regulatory framework that moves at the pace of the underlying industry, incorporates industry expertise, and retains federal oversight. It is therefore unsurprising that labs and lawmakers have rallied behind the idea of a FINRA for AI.

The Trump administration is pressuring local governments to sign cooperation agreements with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) by threatening access to grants for ambulance services, police gear, and rape prosecutions. This escalation will lead to fresh rounds of litigation and policy uncertainty. If successful, it would establish a concerning precedent that would allow the executive branch to use the expansive volume of federal grants to coerce other levels of government into following a president’s policy agenda.

Turning Grants into a Power Grab

With many state and local governments refusing to use local resources to support deportation efforts, the Trump administration has used a variety of methods in seeking to eliminate sanctuary policies. This includes attempting to claw back previously disbursed Homeland Security funding and issuing agency-wide memos freezing certain grants based on immigration policy demands. Affected governments sued to retain access to the funds. Although some cases remain ongoing, other cases led to courts blocking the administration’s moves.

Read the rest of this post →

JD Vance’s new book, Communion, includes a chapter railing against economists. The central thesis of his chapter “A Dismal Science” is that the government has preoccupied itself with GDP maximization at the expense of well-being. Americans only seem so well off, Vance argues, because “we bombard [them] with all manner of creature comforts and add their consumption—price club mega-size junk—to our national GDP.” 

The vice president’s criticism is mostly a strawman. I don’t know any economists who advocate GDP maximization. In fact, most economists talk about ill-defined concepts like “social welfare” all the time. The limits of GDP as a proxy for human welfare are emphasized in any 101-level economics course, including this study aid for high schoolers. As my colleague John Cochrane tweeted last month: “GDP answers the question posed to it…. What is the total value of goods and services produced in the market economy…. It is a terrible measure of things it wasn’t designed to measure: consumer surplus, welfare, non-market activity, happiness, etc.”

Read the rest of this post →

In April, the US Department of Justice brought an indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center, a prominent left-of-center nonprofit, charging it with offenses including making false statements to a federally insured bank and wire fraud at the expense of its donors. On Friday, August 7, federal judge Emily Marks of the Middle District of Alabama denied a defense motion to dismiss the indictment as vindictive, saying the defense had not met the (substantial) burden of showing that the charges were improperly motivated by retaliation against protected speech.

Leaving aside the question of how courts are to distinguish vindictive prosecutions from the regular kind at a time when the president of the United States openly instructs the Department of Justice to go after his political opponents, the merits of the complaint are likely to emerge into sharper focus.

Read the rest of this post →

On August 14, the 91st anniversary of the Social Security Act, I’ll debate Wendell Primus of the Brookings Institution about how to address Social Security’s looming insolvency. We agree that Congress should act to avert automatic and indiscriminate benefit cuts and that Social Security should be reformed without exacerbating the federal budget crisis.

Where we disagree is more fundamental: What should Social Security be?

I believe the program should be changed to provide a fiscally sustainable, predictable retirement benefit based on years worked, while enabling Americans to build wealth through private savings by not increasing their tax burden.

Read the rest of this post →

A federal district court ruled last week that key provisions of the National Firearms Act—including the registration scheme for so-called “silencers” (properly called suppressors), along with short-barreled rifles and short-barreled shotguns—are now unconstitutional. The reasoning is refreshingly simple. 

The NFA was never anything but a tax law: Congress used its Article I taxing power in 1934 to impose steep “transfer and making taxes” on disfavored weapons, and the registration and application requirements existed only to help collect that tax. But in 2025, as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Congress zeroed out those taxes for most NFA firearms. A tax that raises no revenue isn’t a tax at all—and without a live tax to enforce, the regulatory scaffolding built around it has nothing left to stand on. As Judge James Wesley Hendrix put it in Silencer Shop Foundation v. ATF, the government cannot retroactively justify a statute under a power Congress never invoked, like the Commerce Clause, just because the power Congress did invoke stopped working.

Read the rest of this post →