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Colleen Hroncich

Bramblewood Learning Community founder Danika Dunn says her oldest son didn’t have a bad experience when he attended first grade in his local district. But it wasn’t great. “School was fine, but I wanted something different,” she explains. “I knew that there were ways to do it that were better and more interesting than what the public school was offering. Plus, I felt like I never saw my son. So we pulled him.”

For the next few years, Danika says she bounced between Charlotte Mason education and unschooling. Then she heard about Acton Academy and loved the idea of project‐​based education. She started researching it, but most of what she found was tailored to public schools and other five‐​day‐​a‐​week programs. Danika experimented with ways to apply what she was learning to a homeschool or hybrid setting.

Located on her family farm, Bramblewood began in 2020 with 12 boys in grades fourth through sixth meeting once a week. “We started with just 1/2 day and we did it all outside because of the pandemic,” Danika recalls. “It was intense and wild and crazy, but it was also awesome. We were finding ways that the structure worked and things that we loved about the project‐​based approach.”

The next year, the program expanded to a one full day a week—and Danika made a point to set aside a certain number of spots for girls. Since she has five kids and the mom who was helping her also had multiple children, they opened additional classes for more age groups. Last year, it expanded again and became a two‐​day program.

For the upcoming school year, Bramblewood has 40 children signed up for the Tuesday–Wednesday program and an additional 20 coming for a separate Monday‐​only program. The expanded enrollment was enabled in part by a VELA Education Fund grant Danika received that she used to buy a large canvas tent for an outdoor classroom.

The two‐​day program has four levels, covering ages pre‑K through early high school. Student learning needs and abilities—not just age or grade level—determine placement in a specific level. Danika works with parents to determine the best fit for each child. Parents typically volunteer for a half day each week, which helps the program run more smoothly and gives parents greater insight into what their children are doing. The one‐​day option is geared more for younger kids in grades K–4 and operates as a drop‐​off program.

Students typically focus on independent core learning (math, language arts, etc.) during the first hour in the two‐​day program. They set goals with their parents and bring work from home for that time. During the morning meeting, the kids can connect with friends and go over the day’s schedule. The rest of the morning may include workshops run by mentors (what Bramblewood calls teachers) or small‐​group work. After lunch and recess, the students often gather for Socratic‐​style discussions and then work on group projects. Sometimes different levels work together on larger projects.

This is the first year Bramblewood includes a high school program, so Danika has been collaborating with parents to see what will be covered at school and what will be covered at home. There won’t be a high school math course, so parents will be responsible for ensuring their children complete math at home. But they expect to be able to meet the requirements for classes like English with the various projects throughout the year. And they’re building a science course that will include lab work, which can be challenging (and less enjoyable) to do solely at home. Students will also receive some suggestions for things they can do at home to get enough hours to earn high school credits.

Danika is very enthusiastic about the project‐​based model and encourages others to try it. “We recently had a big meeting where we were talking about the future of Bramblewood because there is a lot of interest in it,” she says. “We had to decide, are we going to try and make this bigger or are we going to keep it small? And we decided to keep it small. I don’t know if we’re going to keep doing the one‐​day program forever. Our goal would be to have somebody break off and make that a separate thing. I would love to help people who are interested in doing project‐​based co‐​ops. I think there’s a lot of interest in it, but there’s not a lot of literature out there for and by homeschoolers. It’s such a great way to homeschool—it’s natural, it’s real world, it’s passion based. It’s also collaborative and can be very rigorous if done the right way.”

The growth of microschools, hybrid schools, and homeschool co‐​ops around the country shows that many families are looking for different ways to educate their children. And education entrepreneurs like Danika are stepping up to provide those new options.

Jai Kedia

A CMFA article, published a few months ago, used a standard empirical macroeconomic model to bridge the two varying explanations for the post‐​COVID‐​19 inflation spike—supply problems and poor monetary policy. The use of a standard model showed that both factors played a role in causing inflation. The Joint Economic Committee recently released the 2023 Joint Economic Report (“JER”); a section on the fiscal causes of inflation references our prior CMFA article (see Box 1–3, pp. 181–183). It critiques our finding that fiscal spending had a minor deflationary effect because economic theory suggests that government handouts raise demand, thereby increasing prices. While the purpose of that CMFA article was simply to bridge the inflation explanations provided by Bernanke‐​Blanchard and Jason Furman at a Brookings event, not to specifically measure fiscal effects on inflation,[1] the JER’s point—which is essentially about an idea known as Ricardian equivalence—is well taken.

Ricardian equivalence is a well‐​known and longstanding facet of economic models that include perfectly rational and forward‐​looking consumers. Such consumers would know that any current government spending would necessarily be financed with tax increases in the future; consequently, they would save any current fiscal stimulus for future expenses and government spending would have no discernable effect on model variables.

The Smets and Wouters (2007) (SW) model, used in the CMFA article, contains such agents and in turn exhibits Ricardian equivalence. Therefore, to more accurately study the effects of fiscal stimulus, a different model such as Gali, Lopez‐​Salido, and Valles (2007) (GLV) is more useful. The GLV model assumes that a fraction of consumers does not have access to savings institutions and spends their entire per‐​period income on consumption (so called “hand‐​to‐​mouth” or “non‐​Ricardian” consumers). Consequently, fiscal spending can have effects on the real economy since these consumers cannot set aside savings today to account for government budget balances in the future.

This article incorporates GLV‐​style non‐​Ricardian agents into the SW model to create a medium‐​scale model that is more useful for fiscal spending analysis. This approach has the dual beneficiary effects of relying on the features of a standard benchmark macro model while also exhibiting the true effects of fiscal spending. The model is estimated to fit key U.S. macro time series data using a Bayesian MCMC algorithm. In line with empirical estimates, the share of non‐​Ricardian agents is fixed at 35 percent of U.S. consumers. While the in‐​depth details on the model are not included in this blog post, interested readers may find a full description of the model equations and empirical method here.

Figure 1 shows the same inflation breakdown from 2010 to 2022 into the same constituent shocks as our previous article. Note that price markup shocks, capturing supply factors in the goods market, as well as monetary policy, remain the key determinants of post‐​COVID‐​19 inflation. However, the effect of fiscal spending flips and now has a positive inflationary effect. The effect is not as strong as supply shocks or monetary policy, but nonetheless bridges the distortion between the negative effect of fiscal spending from the SW model and the Ricardian equivalence critique of the JER.

Not only do these results corroborate the JER critique, but they also demonstrate a key flaw in President Biden’s incorrectly named Inflation Reduction Act and its effect of the macroeconomy. While much of the conversation has surrounded the role of the Fed in allowing inflation to spiral, this is a good reminder that both fiscal and monetary authorities must act responsibly to keep prices stable.

For more information on the model, empirical methodology, and posterior distribution please click here.

Johan Norberg

Whenever I lecture around the world, whatever I talk about, there is almost always someone in the audience who wants to ask me about Sweden. Is it the successful example of socialism that many assume?

I try to explain that we have been socialists and we’ve been successful—but never at the same time.

I’ve written about this in a Cato Policy Report and I’ve done a documentary about it for U.S. public television, but people keep asking me. So I decided that I had to write a book about it for the Fraser Institute to tell the whole story, The Mirage of Swedish Socialism: The Economic History of a Welfare State.

And it’s actually one of the best examples we have of the benefits of free markets and the perils of socialism. Between 1870 and 1970, Sweden had a smaller government and a more open economy than most comparable countries, and that was the era when Sweden grew faster than any other developed country but Japan.

Then, when Sweden had already become one of the richest countries in the world, Sweden began to experiment with socialist ideas. From 1970 through 1990, government was massively expanded, taxes were raised, and the economy was regulated. This was not the golden era of socialist nostalgia, but more like an Atlas Shrugged moment: Swedish companies like IKEA and Tetra Pak and lots of successful entrepreneurs left Sweden and not a single net job was created in the private sector. It was the one moment in Sweden’s modern history that we lagged behind other countries.

After a devastating financial crisis in the early 1990s, politicians from both the left and right agreed to end this experiment. Instead, they reduced public spending, taxes, and regulation to get back to the growth model that made Sweden successful. Sweden started to outperform its neighbors again.

If Bernie Sanders and AOC wants to imitate actually existing Sweden today, they would have to liberalize markets in many ways, reform Social Security, introduce school vouchers, get rid of the minimum wage and most occupational licensing, and abolish taxes on inheritance and property.

Sweden still has a bigger welfare state than the United States, but the receivers pay for it themselves. The tax burden falls heavily on low‐ and middle‐​income households in Sweden, making the tax system much less progressive than in the United States and almost all other rich countries.

The lesson Swedes took from the 1970s was that you can have a big government or you can make the rich pay for it all, but you can’t have both.

I explain this history and detail how Sweden’s welfare state works in the book, but if you want the shortest possible takeaway from Sweden’s modern political history, listen to Kjell‐​Olof Feldt, Social Democratic Minister of Finance (1983–1990): “What we believed in as young socialists simply turned out to be impossible in practice.”

Jeffrey Miron

This article appeared on Substack on August 17, 2023.

This past week,

Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham published a peer‐​reviewed study showing that modified pig kidneys performed complex life‐​sustaining functions in a brain‐​dead patient for a full week.

In an apparent response, surgeons at NYU Langone Health announced that a kidney from a genetically modified pig continued to function well after 32 days in a brain‐​dead patient maintained on a ventilator, the longest period for such an experiment.

The patient has shown no signs of rejecting the organ, said Dr. Robert Montgomery, director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute. But the research has not yet been published in a scientific journal.

This is interesting from a scientific perspective, and perhaps pig kidneys will end up being be more useful than human kidneys, if genetic engineering can reduce their probability of rejection.

Yet such transplants are presumably years away:

So far, transplants of genetically modified pig kidneys have been made only to brain‐​dead patients. Dr. Locke and her colleagues are in discussions with the Food and Drug Administration about launching a first clinical trial in live patients.

Meanwhile,

More than 800,000 American have kidney failure, and over 100,000 are on a waiting list for a transplant. Kidney dialysis can keep patients alive, but the gold standard treatment is an organ transplant.

Yet fewer than 25,000 kidney transplants are performed each year because of a scarcity of human donor organs. Thousands of people on the waiting list die each year.

How can policy address the current shortage? By legalizing organ sales.

Romina Boccia

This month marks my one‐​year anniversary as Director of Budget and Entitlements Policy at the Cato Institute. When I joined last August, I set out to prevent a fiscal crisis in the United States and restrain the federal budget leviathan. Here’s a recap of major fiscal events that have occurred since and how things are going:

Fitch Ratings downgrades U.S. debt. This August, Fitch Ratings, one of three major credit agencies, followed Standard & Poor’s (S&P) in downgrading the U.S. debt from AAA to AA+. Unlike in 2011 when S&P announced its decision, this time U.S. bond yields rose. While bond yields declined immediately following the announcement, they have risen since, in part due to expectations of interest rates remaining higher for longer. Greg Ip with the Wall Street Journal argued that Fitch’s downgrade matters more now, than did S&P’s in 2011, because economic conditions have changed: “The global savings glut—the wall of money in search of safe assets that kept yields down a decade ago—is no more.” Congress should take this downgrade as a wake‐​up call to establish a credible mechanism for stabilizing the debt.

Congress and the President waive the debt limit. After House Republicans put forth a modest opening bid to raise the debt limit by first making a small downpayment on reducing the growth in the debt, the administration and Congress agreed to a rather shady debt limit deal in late May. The deal (the Fiscal Responsibility Act) established new spending limits on defense and non‐​defense discretionary appropriations, which make up a declining 28 percent of the federal budget. By leaving the biggest federal programs untouched, the deal leaves the debt crisis unresolved. Thanks to “side deals” and allowing for open‐​ended “emergency” spending, even those modest savings are unlikely to materialize. Meanwhile, suspending the debt limit through January 2025 will likely allow for about $3 trillion in additional debt accumulation.

Congress begins to ponder a new mechanism for stabilizing the debt. There’s a glimmer of hope that Congress will take action to correct the unsustainable fiscal course before it’s too late. I began advocating for an independent commission to help Congress address the main drivers of spending growth—Medicare and Social Security—back in February. To avoid yet another failed congressional commission, I recommend Congress staff the commission with independent experts and fast‐​track its proposal, following the Base Realignment and Closure model. In June, House Speaker McCarthy indicated interest in establishing a BRAC‐​like fiscal commission to stabilize the U.S. debt. Since then, a diverse group of members have joined together as the Bipartisan Fiscal Forum to explore such a commission. I am excited to support interested members of Congress in building this proposal out and I am optimistic that we can overcome concerns that Congress would delegate too much responsibility to an unelected body. I am particularly grateful for renowned conservative columnist George Will’s column for grappling with questions of constitutional queasiness considering the challenge before us.

Congress passed an irresponsible omnibus spending bill. As has become all too common, Congress passed a so‐​called Christmas tree bill in late December that drove up spending and debt, waived PAYGO (a budget rule forcing Congress to pay for certain deficit spending or face automatic spending cuts), was chock full of earmarks, and snuck through unrelated policy provisions such as components of the Secure 2.0 Act, which expanded the welfare state and changed certain retirement policy provisions. I am worried we may be looking at a similar effort this December with the House and Senate deeply divided over discretionary spending levels, how to fund federal disaster relief accounts, and whether to provide additional emergency spending for Ukraine. Members are more likely to vote for bills they disagree with against the threat of a government shutdown and the prospect of spending the holidays in D.C. I predict a continuing resolution into early December at first, and Congress kicking that can again to Christmas once legislators realize they can’t get their way, unless they up the pressure.

President Biden introduced a tax‐​and‐​spend budget. Amid high inflation sucking up the purchasing power of American families and driving up credit card debt as households struggle to make ends meet, President Biden introduced an unserious budget proposal in March. The President’s budget would have raised taxes and Americans’ cost of living while failing to address the unsustainability of Social Security and papering over Medicare’s trust fund exhaustion by borrowing from other parts of the budget. As an agenda for what the administration has coined as Bidenomics, this budget would do more harm than good.

Only the Republican Study Committee proposed a congressional budget. With the fiscal year coming to an end this September, neither the House nor Senate Budget Committees have released budget proposals, as dictated by law. Only the Republican Study Committee (RSC) managed to present a nonbinding budget proposal aimed at achieving budget balance, cutting taxes, and reducing red tape to unleash growth in June. With reforms to major health care programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, as well as modest changes to Social Security, the RSC budget is a welcome start toward tackling the growing federal debt crisis. For members of the congressional budget committees, perhaps it’s time to revive “no budget, no pay” as an added incentive.

Social Security needs fundamental reform. Social Security turned 88 this year. The program is financially unsound, poorly targeted, and economically harmful in its current form. Democrats are continuing to push Rep. Larson’s (D‑CT) Social Security 2100 Act, which would increase the cost of benefits in a misleading manner (phasing out new benefit increases after five years to keep the bill’s budget score low) while increasing payroll taxes permanently, first for households making more than $400,000 annually and eventually for everyone. Republicans haven’t rallied around a shared proposal yet. Sen. Cassidy (R‑LA) has floated limited provisions from his bipartisan effort with Sen. King (I‑ME), including increasing the retirement age (good!) and borrowing to invest taxpayer dollars in the stock market to finance Social Security benefits from the gains (bad!). Social Security reform will require bipartisan support and time is running out as the program’s trust fund ledger will be depleted in the next 10 years. The longer Congress waits, the fewer options remain for gradual benefit changes that protect the most vulnerable seniors without hurting American workers with higher taxes and a slower‐​growing economy.

Another Christmas tree bill down the road?

Congress faces several upcoming fiscal deadlines for the remainder of this year, including the end of the fiscal year this September 30, the expiration of the 2018 farm bill, and the possible exhaustion of the federal disaster relief fund as early as this month. Members of Congress are already discussing a new emergency supplemental to shore up disaster relief accounts and more, in part to sweeten a potential deal to kick the can down the road on continuing government spending past September 30 and extending current farm bill policies for several more months.

We must get Congress out of the habit of punting tough decisions to the days leading up to the Christmas holidays. Taxpayers are never served well by a last‐​minute deal forged against the backdrop of lawmakers missing quality time with their families. Incentives matter and in this case they are stacked against the American people.

Justin Logan

Today, Cato released a new Policy Analysis by Scott Semet on the enduring consequences of cutting off Europe (and the world) from Russian natural gas. Last year, Europeans were very anxious about the winter of 2022–23; thankfully, the combination of an extremely mild winter on the continent, a deliberate decision to throttle industrial output, and frantic efforts to buy up liquefied natural gas (LNG) from other countries helped Europe muddle through better than most observers feared, although poorer countries, like Pakistan and Bangladesh, that would otherwise would have bought that LNG, experienced rationing and riots.

But Semet, an expert on East European energy and finance markets, argues that the underlying problem has not been remedied and is unlikely to be remediable any time soon. Much of the model for European (in particular, German) economic growth was built around cheap Russian pipeline gas that is now gone. Moreover, the extreme measures taken last winter have had deleterious consequences that may compound over time: Germany’s inflation and “demand destruction” has led its economy into recession; skyrocketing natural gas prices were a major driver of historic inflation in the United Kingdom; and these economic realities are beginning to radiate out into European politics. The bottom line is that in the short run, there is no alternative to cheap Russian pipeline gas for Europe, at least without major additional declines in people’s well‐​being and further deindustrialization, which Semet suggests could lead to more discontent and political instability.

Even beyond Europe, the paper argues that corking Russian gas would have significant effects. For example, many have pointed to U.S. LNG as a potential savior of Europe. Three points are important here: First, LNG is much more expensive as it requires considerable energy to liquefy the gas, to say nothing of the cost of liquefication and regassification facilities, and LNG carriers. These higher prices will put more pressure on the European economy. Second, despite frantic efforts to expand exports, there are hard constraints on liquefaction capacity and LNG carriers. Third, to the extent U.S. producers could liquefy enough natural gas to make up for Europe’s lost Russian pipeline gas and cash in on significantly higher prices in Europe, given flattish U.S. gas output, the price of natural gas for American consumers would rise, negatively impacting the U.S. economy.

He also gets deep into the weeds regarding the impact of higher gas prices on U.S. electricity and heating costs as well as a host of other seemingly‐​mundane‐​but‐​highly‐​relevant inputs to daily life, such as fertilizer and plastics. The paper also discusses the results of pressuring the Global South to sanction and embargo Russia.

The paper doesn’t argue that the political and economic consequences of corking Russian gas mean that Washington should force Kyiv to settle for peace on any particular set of terms. But it does call on policymakers to pursue an end to the war with a greater urgency and not ignore this set of “hard and mostly immutable economic realities” which “cannot be overcome by political will.”

Please give it a read.

Jordan Cohen and Dominik Lett

President Joe Biden has requested $40.1 billion in emergency supplemental spending—$24.1 billion of which would go to Ukraine. For months, Congress has eyed a Ukraine supplemental bill to evade spending limits. Meanwhile, several House members are wary of going beyond the spending limits outlined earlier this year.

Legislators have good reason to worry. The potential positives of this emergency spending bill are ambiguous and conjectural. Nonetheless, there is clear evidence that additional emergency spending contributes to future security threats and worsens the U.S. fiscal trajectory.

Spending more for less security

As Ukraine’s counteroffensive stalls, it is unclear that sending additional arms is in the United States’ interests. By guaranteeing funding, Washington is encouraging Ukraine to adopt lofty and unrealistic goals. Specifically, Ukraine attempting to regain control of the entirety of its territory, including Crimea, becoming a member of NATO, or receiving some sort of security guarantee from the United States. These goals are unachievable and pursuing them has simply antagonized a nuclear power.

Moreover, there is legitimate evidence that the U.S. government is unable to track weapons sent to Ukraine. There have been two different government reports that suggest weapons are being lost both in transit to the warzone as well as after delivery. Weapons being dispersed to Russia, China, or Ukrainian actors that do not share U.S. goals actively harms U.S. security.

Finally, emergency spending on Ukraine allows the Biden administration to increase funding for other things that it considers security interests, beyond the funding that’s been allocated for defense purposes by Congress. For example, within the supplemental funding request, the Biden administration notes that it wants funding to protect “populations worldwide” that are impacted by the war in Ukraine, provide a “credible alternative” to Chinese lending and infrastructure projects, fight “the destabilizing activities of Vagner and other Russian Malign Actors in African countries,” and to “take quick action” to help fund partners and defend “strategic interests” in the Indo‐​Pacific.

Additional funding, therefore, would not go exclusively to Ukraine. Instead, the Biden administration has included five other security issues in its supplemental budget request. If Congress passed this supplemental funding bill, it signals that the Biden administration can always ask Congress for more defense spending, rather than having to prioritize certain security issues over others. Excess funding allows the United States to stay involved in crises across the world, including in areas where there are no clear U.S. security interests. This supplemental funding is in addition to a growing defense budget, in spite of new spending limits.

Emergency spending is fiscally irresponsible

Beyond the funding for Ukraine, the United States cannot afford additional emergency spending. The Congressional Budget Office projects that in just six years (2029), federal public debt (the debt borrowed from credit markets) will surpass the all‐​time high of 106 percent of GDP following the Second World War. The U.S. fiscal situation will continue to deteriorate as rising spending drives unsustainable growth in federal debt.

The president’s $24 billion request for Ukraine funding on top of the $113 billion spent on this conflict already should not be viewed in isolation. They are part of a larger pattern of irresponsible emergency spending. Over the last 10 years, Congress has spent more than $1.3 trillion on supplemental emergency bills. Add in emergency designations from regular appropriations bills and PAYGO emergency designations and the 10‐​year total rises to an inflation‐​adjusted $7 trillion—more than last year’s entire federal budget.

Because supplemental funding has no defined spending limits, it can act as a slush fund that grows without controls. Repeated rounds of supplemental defense funding are beginning to look similar to the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) fund from the War on Terror. The OCO fund acted as a nearly bottomless supply of cash used to support U.S. military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and throughout the greater Middle East.

Between 2001 and 2019, Congress appropriated $2 trillion in OCO funding. In fiscal year 2020, the year before the U.S. military withdrew from Afghanistan, Washington spent $70.7 billion via OCO, making the fund larger than all but three federal agencies (exceeding everything but the Department of Defense, Department of Veteran Affairs, and the Department of Health and Human Services).

While Ukraine funding makes up the majority of the president’s emergency supplemental spending, Biden also requested $12 billion for disaster relief and $4 billion for border security. Emergency funding should go towards urgent, unexpected, and non‐​permanent events. A vast majority of the supplemental funding does not meet these criteria.

About $60 million of the disaster relief funding supports pay increases for firefighters in Maui and elsewhere. The other 99.5 percent covers a pre‐​existing FEMA budget shortfall, something legislators have been aware of for months. FEMA now regularly relies on emergency supplementals to fund the Disaster Relief Fund. Such funding is reoccurring and largely predictable and should be handled through regular appropriations.

The border security funding covers everything from counter‐​fentanyl activities to biometric technology to migrant assistance. Setting aside the flawed policy rationale behind some of these priorities, little of the funding Biden proposes addresses “sudden” and “unforeseen” emergencies.

Congress should reject the Biden administration’s supplemental funding request and abide by the modest spending limits agreed to by the administration and Congress as part of the debt limit deal. Congress should furthermore resist the temptation to create another OCO‐​like slush fund to finance what should be considered regular national security interests, not emergency spending. Unsustainable and myopic fiscal policy has serious consequences for economic growth and national security. High and rising national debt suppresses private investment, reduces incomes, and increases risk of a sudden fiscal crisis. Excessive federal debt weakens the economy, which undermines the foundation of America’s military strength. If Congress agrees with President Biden that Ukraine, disaster relief, and border security merits additional funding, it should fund them through regular appropriations and by staying within established spending limits.

David J. Bier

You traveled a thousand miles and spent thousands of dollars to reach the United States. The immigration rulebook (sometimes called “the law”) says that if you made it, you could apply for asylum and that officials “shall” process you. But guess what? In this game, the government cheats. It doesn’t want to process you. It wants you to go home. So when you reached the border in 2019, the officials at the legal crossing point wouldn’t process you. They stood in the middle of the bridge to block you.

You joined a lawsuit, and a court said, “Government, what you’re doing is illegal. Stop.” So in November 2021, the government issued a new policy that says, “You border guys, you can’t tell people to go away.” But it then promptly ignored that policy “because of COVID-19.” But that excuse ended in May 2023, so it reiterated the policy in a formal rulemaking. It couldn’t be clearer: “Our policy is to inspect and process all arriving noncitizens.” So you’d think you would get processed if you arrived at the border. But no, the government cheats.

Border officials are telling people that they must make appointments before they can request asylum, and they cap the number of appointments, even though the new rules make it perfectly clear an appointment will not be required. You can’t even schedule an appointment at all. Rather, you are put in a lottery to decide if you can even request an appointment. When Isabel “Doe” showed up unannounced at a legal crossing point with her bleeding husband whom a cartel shot, she was turned away. Her husband was then murdered in Mexico.

You can read more about Isabel’s story powerfully described by American Immigration Council’s Dara Lind here.

Now Isabel and others are suing the federal government again to win a case that they already won, to obtain a policy that already exists on paper upon paper upon paper. It’s incredible: the government simply will not follow its own rules created by this administration and publicly announced just months ago enacted into law by Congress. It cheated, got caught, claimed it would follow the rules, and cheated again. It cheated on the rules that it wrote. This fraud—if perpetrated by an immigrant—would lead to prison time. But there will be no consequences for any government officials, even though their actions directly led to someone’s death.

The U.S. immigration system is complicated, to put it mildly. It is nearly impossible to immigrate legally for most people. Asylum is supposed to be the escape hatch—the way around the bureaucratic nonsense and path to safety. But exactly because it makes the impossible possible, government officials hate it. They want to decide who, where, and when.

Potential immigrants scrutinize the policy pronouncements coming from Washington, D.C. to see if they may get a chance to come. When a government agency promises to follow the law, immigrants shouldn’t have to second guess. People are betting all they have—their money and their lives—on what the government says. But this isn’t monopoly money, and there aren’t bonus lives. It’s not a game, so when the government cheats, it’s not just game over. It might be life over.

Scott Lincicome

According to various news outlets, the Chinese government has recently stopped publishing information on youth unemployment, deflation, and other statistics that paint a gloomy picture of China’s economy, while also instructing economists in China to “avoid speaking negatively about topics ranging from fears of capital flight to softening prices” and to instead “to present economic news positively in order to increase public confidence.” These moves appear to be part of the longer‐​term disinformation trend that, per the Financial Times, began under President Xi Jinping and accelerated in recent months:

As I explained in a column last year, China’s growing transparency issues are not just unsurprising (official Chinese data have long been suspect) but also a fundamental weakness in authoritarian regimes’ economic systems as compared to those of their liberal democratic rivals:

Authoritarian institutions… encourage misinformation from both the bottom up (e.g., local governments or generals) and the top down (e.g., the central government or leader), and they provide government officials with the mechanisms to forcibly restrict countervailing data. This informational vacuum might help a dictator look good (for a while, at least), but it’s obviously problematic for government and private sector decision‐​making on economic, military, public health, and other crucial policy matters. Open economies, by contrast, rarely suffer from such an affliction: Even where the state tries to distort or withhold information, private actors (media, academia, think tanks, for‐​profit research organizations, etc.) will eventually fill the void. And democratic accountability will probably (again, eventually) make elite leadership pay for any grievous errors.

This systemic weakness, along with several others (see, e.g., this recent column from economist Adam Posen), should give U.S. policymakers and pundits further reason to remain confident in Western democracy and free market capitalism instead of advocating for more “China‐​style” industrial policy and similar economic interventions:

In the long term,.. distant history and recent events give us strong reasons to doubt that illiberal strongmen are such a dire threat to the United States as to necessitate abandoning our open, liberal system and embracing illiberalism and central planning ourselves. Time and time and time again, authoritarian regimes’ serious institutional shortcomings make serious problems all but inevitable. And they render the common view of the omniscient authoritarian chessmaster, used to sell so much bad U.S. policy, beyond farfetched.

We liberals have problems too, of course, but our flaws are, importantly, out in the open. Authoritarians’ much bigger flaws are usually hidden.

Until they aren’t.

Hopefully recent events in China make these realities even clearer to those in Washington who have yet to accept them.

Clark Neily

Up until now, I’ve been hesitant to predict how the various prosecutions of Donald Trump are likely to turn out. But no longer. I believe yesterday’s indictment in Georgia sealed Trump’s fate, and it is now all but certain that he will be convicted of multiple felonies in one or more of the four pending cases against him. Here’s why.

The Georgia indictment is a bombshell—the equivalent of a Texas Hold’em poker player shoving their entire stack of chips into the middle of the table and declaring, “All in.” In sum, the Georgia indictment alleges that Trump orchestrated a sprawling criminal conspiracy (or “enterprise,” in the language of the indictment and Georgia’s state RICO statute) involving more than 20 named and unnamed co‐​conspirators ranging across half‐​a‐​dozen states for the purpose of unlawfully changing the result of the November 2020 presidential election. There is nothing subtle or nuanced about this indictment—in effect, it accuses Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark, Sidney Powell, and a dozen others of staging an unsuccessful coup. If the case goes to trial, which seems likely, the jury will either believe that characterization or they will not. I think they will, for three reasons.

1. Trump’s disdain for truth. America has seen its fair share of lying politicians, but Donald Trump is in a class of his own. He appears to view literally any interaction with another human being as an opportunity to be exploited and a game to be won. In Trump’s world, rules are for chumps, norms are for losers, and the truth is whatever you can get another person to believe— nothing more. And of course, history makes clear that this approach has been quite effective at advancing Trump’s interests in certain settings—preening on the set of a game show, for example, or spinning up a fawning, frothing crowd at a campaign event.

But not only will those antics not work in a courtroom, they will backfire. Given the nature of the allegations against him, Trump will have to take the stand even though he has a right not to, and given his nature, he will lie to the jury just like he has lied to everyone else his entire life.

Trump will look those jurors in the eye and tell them that not only did he believe the election was stolen at the time, he still believes it now and in fact it was stolen. And Trump will double down on his risible assertion that his post‐​election harangue of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger—during which Trump demanded that Raffensperger “find” 12,000 votes in order to flip the result there and suggested that Raffensperger might be committing a criminal offense if he failed to do so—was “an absolutely PERFECT phone call.” Moreover, some of Trump’s co-defendants—Mark Meadows, perhaps, or Jeffrey Clark—will cut deals with the prosecution to save their own skins, and Trump will, with great bombast and zero credibility, falsely accuse them of lying when they testify honestly and plausibly about who said and did what.

At the end of the day, the jury will have to decide who was lying to them—a parade of credible and often highly sympathetic prosecution witnesses, or Donald Trump—and he will make it easy for them.

2. Trump’s disdain for process. Again, Donald Trump doesn’t see the world the way normal people do. Instead of institutions to be respected and rules to be followed, he sees marks to be gulled and systems to be gamed—emphatically including elections and trials. Trump’s complete disdain for fair procedures—and for people who meekly accept the results of those procedures when they lose—will be on full display throughout every stage of all four of the criminal cases against him. As we have already seen, Trump will not be able to resist the temptation to manipulate the process by threatening or cajoling witnesses, insulting prosecutors, and slagging judges who rule against him. Then, having displayed nothing but contempt for the proceedings, Trump or his counsel will turn to the jurors at the end of each trial and remind them of their solemn civic duty to carefully consider the evidence, arguments, and burden of proof—and render a verdict of acquittal. The jurors will remember their civic duty, alright, and they will condemn Trump for disregarding his.

3. Complexity. The third reason Trump will be convicted in one or more of the cases against him is this: complexity. Litigation is a complicated process featuring an often mind‐​numbing interplay of procedural rules, substantive laws, court filings, documents, discovery, fact witnesses, expert witness, and a constant procession of unforeseen twists and turns that evoke the maxim that no plan survives contact with the enemy. And that complexity multiplies geometrically with the number of related proceedings going on at the same time, which means that Trump’s legal teams will find it nearly impossible to coordinate across all four of the ongoing prosecutions in New York, Florida, DC, and now Georgia. But it’s even worse than that.

Litigation complexity is hard enough to manage with a client who plays it straight, both with the court and with their own counsel. But Trump doesn’t play it straight—he never has, and it appears he’s constitutionally incapable of doing so. So he will lie: in court, in public, on social media and—fatally—to his own lawyers. Simply put, Trump’s defense teams will not be able to keep track of all the different positions their client has taken (or directed his various lawyers to take in different proceedings), and eventually things will come completely unraveled. Judges will become increasingly disgusted by the shenanigans and stop giving Trump any benefit of the doubt; there will also be internecine squabbling among members of his defense teams, and some will likely quit when they refuse to execute some of their client’s more unethical demands or realize that he has no qualms about taking them down with him when the time comes.

One last point. These three dynamics are not isolated and discrete; instead, they’re dynamic and mutually reinforcing. Being an inveterate liar is a major liability in litigation. So is being openly disdainful of the entire process. And so is complexity. But put all three of those together at the same time for the same defendant, and his goose is cooked. So you can put a fork in Donald Trump—he’s done.