Occupational licensing is sold as consumer protection that screens out incompetent or dangerous workers. Today, about 22 percent of the American workforce needs a government license to do their jobs, and that safety and quality argument is what state and local lawmakers use to justify the entry barriers, licensing fees, and training hours that typically accompany it.

The trouble is that the claimed benefits have historically been difficult to test or measure, so the debate over whether licenses really protect anyone was fueled mostly by anecdotes. That’s why a new NBER working paper by Jonathan Hall, Jason Hicks, Morris M. Kleiner, and Yun taek Oh is so interesting. It leverages Uber data and finds no consistent evidence that a government occupational license improves riders’ ratings or drivers’ behavior on the road. The results suggest that, once a platform is already screening and monitoring its drivers, licensing adds no detectable, additional consumer protection.

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Finland is the latest country to join France’s nuclear umbrella, having finalized a deal with Paris earlier this week. This sounds like there will be nuclear weapons in Finland, a country that shares a 1,340-kilometer-long border with Russia and has an historic rivalry with it (see the Winter War).

Thankfully, Finland’s president, Alexander Stubbs, has clarified that no nuclear weapons will be stationed in his country. Instead, the agreement is meant to have Finnish conventional and French nuclear capabilities coordinate and communicate with each other in the event of a conflict between NATO and Russia. 

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Does banning a good or service substantially reduce its consumption? Or does it mainly drive the market underground or to substitute products?

Research on banning minors from adult websites suggests the latter. The researchers looked at 

individual-level browsing data from approximately 550,000 US desktop and mobile internet users between 2022 and 2024. … [The] findings reveal that age-verification laws reduced overall time spent on adult websites, but these effects were muted by users circumventing blocks and switching to noncompliant websites.

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In this case, a family in Parksley, Virginia, ran into an onslaught of opposition to their food truck from their local government. This resulted in an October 2023 ordinance specifically banning food trucks. But in enacting this ordinance, the town committed to the plaintiffs that they could continue to operate their food truck until May 2024, when their business license expired.

Plaintiffs then dared to complain about the food-truck ban to the press. The mayor saw this as a “betrayal” and became “angry … for the media attention that depicted Parksley’s government in a negative light.” In direct response to plaintiffs’ protected speech, the mayor instructed the town attorney to renege on the town’s commitment and send plaintiffs a cease-and-desist letter requiring them to immediately shut down their business. As the town attorney was drafting the letter, he stumbled across a previously unknown catch-all zoning ordinance that prohibited anything not expressly permitted (including food trucks).

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Note: The payroll tax calculator was updated on October 1, 2026, to reflect the CBO’s 2026 Long-Term Projections for Social Security.

Republicans have resisted broad tax increases for decades. Social Security’s approaching insolvency may be testing that commitment.

The Washington Post recently reported that several prominent Republicans are becoming more receptive to raising taxes to avoid Social Security reform. While much of the current debate concerns raising or eliminating the limit on earnings subject to Social Security taxes, Rep. Tom Cole (R‑OK), chair of the House Appropriations Committee, said he is “willing to look at the [payroll] tax rate” and “willing to raise the amount of income through tax.”

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74% Say President Trump’s Tariffs Have Raised Prices; 53% Say Tariffs Have Weakened the Economy, 70% Say the President Needs Congressional Approval to Impose Tariffs

A new Cato Institute/​Morning Consult survey of 4,150 registered voters finds that three in four (75%) say tariffs will be important to their vote in this November’s midterm elections.

Nearly the same share—74%—say that Trump’s tariffs increased the prices of things they buy at the store, including 66% of Republicans and 84% of Democrats. Majorities say the tariffs are a tax on Americans (57%) and believe they have weakened the US economy (53%), while just 23% say the tariffs have improved their personal quality of life. 

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Since the capture and removal of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro by the United States on January 3, chavismo, the socialist movement launched by Hugo Chávez in 1999, has tried to cling to power under the leadership of Delcy Rodríguez, formerly vice president and a longtime senior official of the regime. But 27 years of “21st Century Socialism” have left behind a legacy of destruction that is impossible to ignore. The following charts help explain that record and why more than 65 percent of Venezuelan voters rejected chavismo in the 2024 election—the last one held in the country and one the regime rigged to stay in power.

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