Author: Eric Boehm

For most Americans, COVID-19 long ago stopped being an immediate crisis and has become little more than a dull annoyance, a mundane part of everyday life to be ignored when possible and dealt with when necessary. In Washington state, however, the pandemic will continue to be a literal emergency—for at least another seven weeks. Gov. Jay Inslee announced Thursday that he will end the state’s COVID emergency declarations on October 31—a mere 975 days after the first emergency order was implemented on February 29, 2020. In the announcement, Inslee conceded that “we’ve come a long way in the past two years…

If the inevitable tradeoffs are ignored, most people would be in favor of getting a free lunch. Unfortunately, there ain’t no such thing. A new poll shows that President Joe Biden’s decision to forgive $10,000 in student loan debt for many individuals who borrowed money from the federal government to pay for college (and $20,000 for those with need-based Pell Grants) is broadly popular—as long as people don’t think about the scheme’s knock-on effects. Once the potential consequences—including higher inflation and rising college tuition costs, are taken into account—support for student debt forgiveness craters, even among self-identified Democrats. “Support for cancelling…

A massive federal bailout of state and local governments during the pandemic had a negligible effect on overall employment levels despite costing taxpayers an estimated $855,000 per job saved. That’s the bottom line of a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper published this week. In the paper, a trio of researchers attempted to determine the effectiveness of nearly $1 trillion in pandemic-era aid distributed to state and local governments—the majority of which was delivered as part of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan passed in March 2021. Despite the eye-watering price tag, however, the stimulus spending had only “a modest…

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has finally determined what’s to blame for America’s recent shortage of baby formula. The FDA. More specifically, it’s the FDA’s unnecessary and protectionist rules that effectively ban foreign-made baby formula from being imported into the United States. On Wednesday, the agency announced plans to tweak those rules so foreign formula manufacturers can permanently import their goods into the U.S., giving American consumers greater choice in the marketplace and ensuring more robust supply chains. “The need to diversify and strengthen the U.S. infant formula supply is more important than ever,” FDA Commissioner Robert Califf said in a statement. “Ensuring…

Since President Joe Biden took office office early last year, America’s long-term budget deficit has grown by $2.4 trillion. But that fact seems to get obscured in coverage—even skeptical coverage—of the White House’s claims about reducing the federal deficit. Starting in this year’s State of the Union address and continuing through through his op-ed last month in The Wall Street Journal, Biden has constantly claimed to have overseen a huge one-year reduction in the budget deficit. Indeed, this year’s deficit is expected to be less than half of last year’s $2.8 trillion shortfall. Smart reporters and commentators have pointed out, correctly, that this drop in the deficit is a mirage…

Inflation has surged across much of the developed world in the past year as COVID-19 lockdowns eased and pent-up demand for goods and services collided with ongoing supply chain snafus. But inflation is running higher in the United States than just about anywhere else right now. Why’s that? According to a new paper from four economists at the Federal Reserve of San Francisco, it’s because the American government was relatively more generous during the pandemic, borrowing and spending trillions of dollars to not only fund COVID-19 relief efforts but to line the pockets of Americans with direct payments that enlarged…

Despite inflation running at a 40-year high, the Biden administration is pushing ahead with plans to hike wages for federal contractors—effectively undoing a Reagan-era policy that was implemented to help curb inflation. In a notice published on March 18, the Department of Labor announced that it would begin the process of updating its interpretation of the Davis-Bacon Act, the 1931 federal law requiring that so-called “prevailing wages” be paid to government contractors. The law essentially sets a price floor by forbidding would-be contractors from competing for government contracts by undercutting wages, and the unsurprising result is that artificially higher wages are typically…

Ten months ago, Jeremy Siegel issued a dire warning about the trajectory of prices. “The money supply since the beginning of the pandemic, so a little over a year, has gone up almost 30 percent. Now, that money is not going to disappear. That money is going to find its way into spending and into higher prices,” Siegel, a professor of finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told CNBC during an interview on May 14. “Over the next two, three years we could easily have 20 percent inflation with this increase in the money supply.” He was hardly the…

The optimistic scenario goes like this. America shakes off what remains of the pandemic in the coming months without the need for trillions in additional borrowing, Congress doesn’t pass any more deficit-busting spending plans while also allowing the 2017 tax cuts to expire in 2025 as planned, and the economy performs consistently well for the next, oh, three decades as we dodge recessions, wars, climate issues, and anything else the world might throw our way. Under that set of circumstances, the national debt will merely be twice the size of the entire U.S. economy by the middle of this century. If the…

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki has a theory about why Americans are paying higher prices these days at the grocery store. “The president [and] the secretary of agriculture have both spoken to what we’ve seen as the greed of meat conglomerates,” Psaki told reporters at the White House’s daily briefing on Tuesday. “The prices are higher. That is, in his view and in the view of our secretary of agriculture, because of—you could call it corporate greed, sure. You could call it jacking up prices during a pandemic.” Alas, Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D–Mass.) debunked and widely mocked claims about corporate greed…

President Joe Biden is reportedly considering a plan to hike taxes on individuals and corporations in order to help offset another splurge of government spending. Preliminary analyses of the possible tax hikes show they would transfer as much as $2 trillion from the private sector to the government, likely costing jobs and reducing wages for American workers. Of course, that’s what taxes do. Every dollar the federal government drains from the economy is a dollar that cannot be used to grow a business, cannot be used to purchase new equipment, and cannot be paid to workers or shareholders. Biden is…

Have you heard about the newest national emergency? No, not the COVID-19 pandemic. The most recent national emergency was declared just two weeks ago—when President Joe Biden granted himself emergency powers to freeze the property and assets of individuals and businesses connected to Myanmar’s military, following an attempted coup in the southeast Asian country. It didn’t make national news. But why would it? It’s just one of 34 currently active national emergencies—each coming with its own special powers that the president can use until he decides to stop. The longest-running was invoked by President Jimmy Carter in response to the Iran hostage crisis (which ended…