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The Republicans aren’t able to punt on the health care issue

Columns

The debate over affordability is now truly and fully joined. After the off-year elections, Democrats are coalescing around a cost-of-living message that makes more sense than their anti-Trump obsessions (not that we aren’t going to hear a lot about those). For its part, the White House has concluded that affordability is a vulnerability, and Trump has thrown out a raft of proposals to address it, from $2,000 tariff rebates to 50-year mortgages. Health care will be a major front in this fight, a traditional Democratic policy strength that the party emphasized during the ...

Want lower prices? Red states are more affordable

Columns

The buzzword of the month is “affordability,” and based on the election results from New York, New Jersey and Virginia, voters think that’s declining. Democrats think they’ve found a winning issue to win back the hearts and minds of voters. It’s true that people are angry about prices. But who’s to blame? President Donald Trump said he would bring prices down; that hasn’t happened. His tariffs have nudged up prices on certain products like coffee and cars. But since Trump came into office in January, the inflation rate has fallen. If we go back to the start of COVID-19, ...

We’re here, we’re annoyed and we’re not going to take it

Columns

I’m forming a new political party. No offense intended to the two major ones we already have, but they stink. OK, well, if I’m being honest, some offense was intended. Currently, we’re at “invading Venezuela to distract attention from the Epstein files” levels of incompetence, so a bit of change seems warranted. I’m going to call my party the Nuisance Liberation Front, and you’re welcome to join. We’re not going to tackle any hot-button social topics — you can go somewhere else if you want action on wedge issues. We’re dealing only with the stuff everyone ...

Let’s open up about mental health issues

Columns

“Someone could be smiling, someone could be dancing, laughing, having a great time, expressing all this joy, but on the inside, they could really be fighting a battle that you never know about.” These are the poignant words of Dallas Cowboys defensive tackle Solomon Thomas in describing his teammate Marshawn Kneeland, who died from an apparent suicide after fleeing a traffic stop in Frisco, Texas, on Nov. 6. Kneeland’s death sent shockwaves through the Cowboys’ locker room and the NFL, and from reading teammates’ fond descriptions of him, it appears that no one ...

Zohran Mamdani already has started to deflate

Columns

The election of Zohran Mamdani as New York City mayor set off — for his fan base, anyway — great expectations of a more “affordable” city. But the Democratic Socialist hasn’t even been sworn in, and some of his marquee promises are already history. Start with free buses. For a city dependent on public transportation, free buses are a nice idea but also a bad idea. Fares pay for the buses, and even if you plug that hole with another revenue source, free buses would siphon riders from the subways, in effect defunding them. Mamdani spun visions of the state raising taxes to ...

The threat produced by an overproduced class of elites in America

Columns

Success breeds failure. Policies and practices well suited to society at one juncture in history are often poorly suited to the world they have beneficially transformed. If you carry a good thing too far, it can turn out not to be a good thing. Case in point, one of the most successful public policies in U.S. history, the World War II G.I. Bill, which financed college educations for military veterans. Signed by former President Franklin Roosevelt, it embodied New Deal generosity even as its chief backers included the racist Democratic Mississippi Rep. John Rankin and the supposedly ...