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David Kemp

Nuclear power is in the news again. Motivated by projected increases in electricity demand and fueled by federal subsidies to research and investment in nuclear reactors, tech companies have recently made headlines with major nuclear deals. Microsoft has plans to restart a reactor at Three Mile Island, Google signed an agreement with nuclear company Kairos Power, and Amazon announced three nuclear deals with public utilities and X‑energy, which is developing its own reactor technology. 

Despite the flurry of attention, nothing suggests that the underlying economics of nuclear have changed. Nuclear remains expensive, and its costs likely outweigh its benefits as a zero-carbon energy source.

A recent Washington Post editorial, drawing heavily from a Department of Energy (DOE) report on pathways to deploying new nuclear power, summarizes the optimistic view of nuclear’s prospects. But to anyone who has paid attention to the United States’ historic and recent experience with nuclear power, the editorial and report are wildly overconfident.

The DOE argues that the US has the potential to deploy around 200 gigawatts (GW) of nuclear power in the next 26 years, tripling the current US capacity of around 100 GW by 2050. Getting there would require a ramp-up of nuclear construction, with the best-case scenario envisioning deployment beginning in 2030 and reaching a “steady state” level of 13 GW deployed per year in 2041.

This is a pace that has never been seen. In China, where the most recent large-scale growth in nuclear capacity has occurred, deployment averaged 3.4 GW per year between 2014 and 2023. According to the DOE report (reprinted here in Figure 1), annual deployment in the United States, which has the largest nuclear fleet in the world, averaged 6 GW per year between 1973 and 1987 and peaked at 10.5 GW in 1974. It has since stalled. In the past 30 years, the United States has commissioned 4.6 GW of nuclear capacity, an average of 0.15 GW per year.

The slowdown in the United States (and similar slowdowns in other Western countries, including France, Canada, and Germany) was the result of cost overruns and construction delays, though the causes have been hotly debated. Peter Van Doren and I conducted an in-depth look in a 2022 working paper and concluded that ineffective construction management and the high level of regulation on nuclear power plants both played an important role. However, there is no conclusive estimate of the relative shares of the cost increase that can be attributed to each factor.

The most recent US nuclear construction projects were designed specifically to deal with the historic drivers of cost increases. Construction on four reactors at two sites (Vogtle in Georgia and V.C. Summer in South Carolina) began in 2013. The projects benefited from a large amount of government subsidies, loan guarantees, and risk insurance to offset cost overruns, and the reactor technology used was the first licensed by a new Nuclear Regulatory Commission process designed to preclude past regulatory impediments.

It was hoped that these and other features would help the projects avoid past pitfalls. They didn’t. The Vogtle reactors finally came online in 2023 and 2024 at more than double initial cost projections (around $32 billion compared to predictions of $12 to $14 billion) and eight years late. Construction at V.C. Summer was canceled in 2017 after $9 billion was sunk into the failed project.

By backing new reactor technologies, Google and Amazon are concluding that their chosen projects will be different. If these projects are successful, they would be incredibly beneficial. But these decisions are not simply private companies taking risks. We should be concerned about the role the government is playing in these decisions.

Historically, the federal government has taken a two-pronged approach to nuclear, imposing a high level of safety regulation while also providing a substantial amount of subsidies. Recently, efforts have focused on reforming the NRC licensing process, especially to allow for more innovative reactor designs. We should applaud any efforts to reduce overly burdensome regulation. But considering that the historic cost problems have also been caused by other factors, these efforts alone will not fix nuclear’s shortcomings.

Meanwhile, the level of subsidies remains high. The Inflation Reduction Act applied new tax credits to nuclear power while last year the DOE spent more than $1.6 billion on various nuclear programs. These policies socialize some of the risk that companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft will take on if they elect to follow through on their nuclear agreements. R&D funding, tax credits, favorable loans, and subsidies don’t alter the intrinsic costs of nuclear, they simply transfer a portion of those costs to taxpayers.

Instead, we should remove both government barriers to and support for nuclear (and all energy technologies). If the calculus of nuclear makes sense to Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, they should take on the risk without taxpayers footing part of the bill.

Of course, the potential societal benefit of clean energy muddies the waters somewhat. But Peter Van Doren and I evaluated the economics of nuclear when carbon damages are included and determined that, with current nuclear costs and compared to a natural gas power plant, the benefit of zero-carbon electricity is vastly outweighed by the astronomical costs of construction. It would require a substantial reduction in these costs before nuclear is economical, even when accounting for climate damages.

Marc Joffe

While the presidential election and key Senate races are getting most of the attention this week, voters are also weighing in on hundreds of ballot measures around the country. Too often, the short summaries of initiatives, bond measures, and tax hikes appearing on ballots are not fully informative and sometimes are deceptive. Politicians and bureaucrats who criticize companies for misleading commercial advertising seem unconcerned with the fact that consumers in their role as voters are also being fooled.

Deceptive ballot language has been especially problematic in California, which pioneered direct democracy but now struggles with the effects of one-party state government. Partisan attorneys generally write state ballot titles that please the dominant party and its special interest group supporters, while litigation aimed at making the ballot language more accurate is rejected by the state’s courts, whose judges are most often politically aligned.

Nonprofit media outlet CalMatters reported on this phenomenon in 2020. Among the questionable ballot labels it cited was the one for that year’s Proposition 15, which would have raised commercial property taxes by more than $10 billion annually. But voters filling out their ballots saw the following:

Increases Funding for Public Schools, Community Colleges, and Local Government Services by Changing Tax Assessment of Commercial and Industrial Property

When the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association (HJTA) sued over the ballot language, a California judge concluded that while the title “may be somewhat misleading, the Court is not convinced the sentence is so misleading that it justifies judicial intervention.”

This year, California is seeing a similar dispute around Proposition 5, which would reduce the threshold for passing local government bonds from two-thirds to 55 percent. This month’s ballot summarizes the measure as follows:

Allows local bonds for affordable housing and public infrastructure with 55% voter approval.

The HJTA sued over this language as well but an appellate court upheld the attorney general’s wording, concluding that “the language for the ballot label, which incorporates a ‘condensed version of the ballot title and summary,’ concisely and accurately describes Proposition 5 in terms that are not misleading.” But voters unaware that the current threshold for bond passage is much higher than 55 percent would certainly be misled by this incomplete title.

Misleading ballot language is not limited to California. In Ohio, Citizens Not Politicians, a progressive group, obtained enough signatures to place Issue 1 on the November 5 ballot. If passed, the measure would replace a legislatively appointed redistricting commission with one appointed by retired judges and whose members cannot be current elected officials and which must include an equal number of Republican, Democratic, and non-aligned members.

The Ohio Secretary of State titled Issue 1 on ballots as follows:

To create an appointed redistricting commission not elected by or subject to removal by the voters of the state.

Citizens Not Politicians sued but was largely unsuccessful. Although the Ohio Supreme Court agreed to make some changes to the more detailed ballot summary, it left the biased title in place, stating, “The ballot title tells the voters, in condensed form, what they are being asked to vote on, and nothing in it is factually inaccurate.”

In Ohio, like California, courts defend elected officials’ discretion to mislead voters about ballot measures so long as they do not lie outright. One is left to wonder whether the government applies a similar standard to corporate advertising.

Los Angeles County’s Department of Consumer and Business Affairs provides examples of what it considers to be false advertising. The Department says that a retailer cannot say “Now through Saturday only $1.99” when the product’s retail price is $1.99 and will thus continue to be that price after Saturday. It also tells us that packaging for children’s toys must say “Assembly Required” if the contents are not fully assembled.

But companies violating these standards are not lying outright, so how are they different from state officials providing incomplete and thus misleading information on the ballot? 

Christian Schneider

As the presidential candidates roll towards Election Day, each is making a last-ditch effort to shore up support among their most favorable groups. For Vice President Kamala Harris, this means throwing a bone to the US labor movement, which has been in decline for decades.

On X (formerly Twitter), Harris recently announced her support for the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, writing that when she is president she will sign it “to make it easier to join a union and negotiate for better pay and working conditions.”

The PRO Act has been kicking around Congress for a few years and would abolish “right to work” laws in 27 states that have adopted them. This means non-union workers would have to pay union dues even if the state has said they are not mandatory. Further, the bill would expand the reach of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), giving it further powers to regulate the workplace to benefit unions.

But the bill would also make drastic changes to the way freelancers and independent contractors in America work, in many cases eliminating their jobs. The bill would force employers to treat large classifications of independent workers as employees, costing those businesses more money to keep those freelancers employed. The employer, then, will likely hire fewer independent contractors, potentially costing millions of Americans their jobs.

Freelance workers are more prevalent than most people realize. According to one recent study, there are more than 72 million freelancers and independent contractors in America. That ranges from writers to childcare workers to Uber drivers to artists, with myriad job classifications in between. Upwork, a platform for freelancers to find work, predicted that freelancers would become the majority of the US workforce by 2027.

That is bad news for unions, as it means more people will be taking jobs that are unsalaried and likely don’t require health and retirement benefits. And it would mean more people were demonstrating they don’t need to be in a union to do a job they find rewarding without having to pay union dues.

Over at The Dispatch, Cato’s Scott Lincicome rattled through the list of why freelance work is worth protecting. For one, freelancers and independent contractors actually prefer independent work over being classified as full employees. In one 2019 survey, 70 percent of independent workers cited flexibility as the reason they prefer freelancing.

That makes perfect sense if one considers that oftentimes freelance work is a side hustle, allowing workers to supplement their income outside of their primary job. Writing a column and getting paid on a per-piece basis (as yours truly does) or driving a car for a rideshare company can be done on one’s own schedule, a flexibility not typically afforded for traditional full employees.

The PRO Act did pass the House of Representatives in 2021 but stalled out in the Senate. Undeterred, the Biden administration attempted to achieve many of the bill’s goals via a Department of Labor rule redefining what an “independent contractor” is. These changes follow passage in 2019 of Assembly Bill 5 in California, which has made it more difficult for independent contractors to find and keep work. (For instance, after passage of the bill, the New York Times reported that Vox Media had fired 200 freelancers, citing the law’s requirement that independent employees were not allowed to write more than 35 “submissions” for the site per year.)

Following stories like the saga at Vox, California began exempting more professions from the law. There are now 110 occupations exempt from the law, meaning your ability to make a living could be directly tied to your ability to lobby the state government for a favor.

If the goal of AB 5 was to increase traditional employment, it failed spectacularly. According to a study issued by George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, traditional employment in California following passage of the law dropped 1.7 percent while self-employment dropped 10.5 percent during the same period. Overall, employment dropped 4.4 percent, meaning the bill didn’t come close to offering the benefits its supporters claimed it would. (Notably, the study’s authors do not claim AB 5 caused these job losses, only that they occurred after the bill was passed—a warning for those wanting similar provisions at the federal level.)

Naturally, the decline in jobs was most acute in areas where independent work was more prevalent before passage of the law. These professions saw a drop in independent work of 28 percent and a drop of up to 14 percent overall.

So while Kamala Harris might think the PRO Act means more people gaining salary and benefits, it will likely mean the exact opposite—making it more expensive to hire outside help will mean businesses will stop doing it, which could cost tens of millions of people their jobs. For many Americans, there won’t be more salary and benefits, there will be none.

Walter Olson

Tomorrow voters in six Western states (Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Alaska, and Montana) will consider versions of far-reaching primary reform. In two previous posts, I outlined what has been called the “primary problem,” referring to the way potential candidates of high quality and wide potential appear to get screened out because they don’t please one or the other party base. I also discussed why some of the alternatives to the current format have failed to win widespread adoption, including older “open primary” formats that invite participation in party primaries by persons not registered with that party, and the “top two” arrangement used by California and Washington. 

In this post, I’ll address why reform energy has moved on from two to higher numbers of finalists, in particular four and five, where ranked choice voting comes in, and what to make of a couple of objections. 

Allowing four or five finalist spots, rather than just two, makes it more likely that each party’s base will find at least one candidate to its liking on the November ballot. It also leaves room for candidates with crossover appeal and perhaps an independent, Libertarian, or Green candidate. It should also sharply curtail tactical primary efforts aimed at elevating the weaker of two rivals because the stronger will probably make it through anyway. And it preserves the arguably valuable winnowing function by which the political season gets divided into two phases: a free-for-all in which new talents can make their pitch and dissidents proclaim their message and a finalist round that lets the public focus its attention more closely on the candidates most likely to win. 

By itself, however, Top Four or Top Five would leave in place—or even perhaps worsen—a different flaw of conventional (“First Past the Post”) voting, namely the chance that the candidate who comes out on top will be one disfavored by a majority. In particular, it makes more likely a win by a candidate who might receive, say, 30 percent of the vote, against several opponents clustered in the 20s or high teens. 

We’re then back to the danger that a widely disliked candidate who commands a dedicated faction will slip by through divide and conquer. That’s why ranked choice voting would seem essential, rather than optional, in this particular reform format. 

As candidates and parties adjust to a new format, we can expect new strategies to evolve. In Alaska, which is now on its second cycle with Top Four voting, one trend has been for Republican leadership to twist arms to get all but the top-finishing GOP candidate to drop out between the two rounds (rather than rely on “Rank the Red” slogans to advance the same party-consolidation goal). Some object to these tactical dropouts as depriving voters of the vigorous competition that the system is meant to encourage. Maybe I’m just cynical, but I see collusion between candidates to limit electoral competition as one of the constants of all democratic systems, with the question being how best to preserve room for those who wish to compete. 

The new collusion patterns should ironically help quiet the worries some have expressed that primary reform will weaken the party system; more likely it will redirect the channels by which parties exercise influence. One practical question is whether when a Top Four finisher drops out, the law should provide for the ballot line to be left blank or instead for a fifth-place finisher to get promoted into the Top Four. (I like the latter.) And it also confirms my view that Top Five, as proposed in Nevada, is to be preferred to Top Four; it’s more resistant to collusion, and ranking five lines remains well within most voters’ competence. 

I’ll close with one more objection I’ve heard: that Final Four / Five is disadvantageous to third party voters who might prefer Libertarians or Greens. After all, a candidate commanding perhaps three percent of public support might not make it onto a Final Five ballot at all, at least in crowded fields (as when there’s a contested open seat). And the party would lose most or all of its “spoiler” leverage of threatening to take away enough votes from a major party candidate to change the outcome. 

To me, the demise of the spoiler effect would be more a feature than a bug, while there would still be plenty of scope for “message” campaigning in the chance to participate in an easy-to-enter first round (without onerous signature-gathering requirements). Moreover, small-party challengers will frequently make it into Final Five results in less crowded fields, as when a legislative incumbent is running, and at that point the distinctive advantages of RCV for “protest” voters come into play. It lets them send exactly the message they want by casting a first vote for the candidate whose principles they prefer while using their subsequent choices to help decide the practical outcome of the race between the leading candidates. What’s not to like?

Nicholas Anthony

The Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee has published a new presentation calling for central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) to replace stablecoins. Pointing to a history of so-called “wildcat banking,” the committee argued that just as the government monopolized the issuance of paper currency by establishing the Federal Reserve, the government should monopolize digital currency by establishing a CBDC:

In a similar manner to how privately-issued “wildcat” currencies were replaced by government-backed central currencies in the late-1800s, Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) will likely need to replace stablecoins as the primary form of digital currency underpinning tokenized transactions.

This statement has several problems, but let’s consider just three.

The first problem is the implication that the history of banking in the United States was a history of wildcat banking. The idea that banks were defrauding customers and disappearing with their money is certainly a concerning one. And it did happen at times. However, such wildcats were far from the norm. 

While it is difficult to put an exact number on the issue, George Selgin, director emeritus of the Cato Institute’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives, estimates that the total number of wildcats was “no higher than 173.” In contrast, he estimates there were around 2,450 banks in total during this time. 

Second, while many people like to suggest wildcats were the source of failures during this period, the bigger problem was that the laws governing banks had undermined financial stability. Again, as Selgin explains, “free banking” laws during this period,

forced banks to invest in … very risky securities—and especially in risky state government bonds—while the rule against branching limited their ability to diversify around this risk…. It was owing to these restrictive components of U.S.-style free banking that scads of American free banks ended up going bust.

Third, it does not follow that because the government took over one area of money, it should take over another. What the experience in the 1800s showed was that the government has a unique power over others. Competitors in the private sector must strive to offer a better product. The government, however, can undermine others through laws and regulations that make it nearly impossible for the private sector to function. For a modern example, one need only look to the government’s hostility towards stablecoins and other cryptocurrencies.

With these problems in mind (and many still on the table), it’s unfortunate that the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee found the wildcat argument persuasive. Yet the committee is not alone. This argument has been used by the likes of Senator Elizabeth Warren (D‑MA), Securities and Exchange Commissioner Gary Gensler, then-Federal Reserve Vice Chair Lael Brainard, European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde, European Central Bank board member Fabio Panetta, and countless others in the pursuit of expanding the state.

The real lesson from the “wildcat story” is that policymakers must be held accountable. They should not be allowed to undermine an entire industry and they should not be allowed to swoop in to monopolize it when it eventually fails. That was true in the past and it’s true today. The difference comes down to whether Americans let it happen again. 

Jeffrey Miron

In recent months, both President Biden and Vice President Harris have endorsed government interventions aimed at curbing rent increases, particularly targeting corporate landlords. Biden’s proposal to cap rent hikes at five percent under threat of losing federal tax breaks, alongside plans for affordable housing construction in Nevada, underscores a growing sentiment among policymakers that more regulation is the answer to rising housing costs. Similarly, Harris has vowed to “take on corporate landlords” with promises of rent caps as a cornerstone of her presidential campaign.

These policy proposals are short-sighted; in the long run, rent controls exacerbate the very problem they seek to solve.

Rent controls disincentivize investment in the rental housing stock since landlords may not be able to raise rents to cover costs. As a result, rent controls contribute to poor living conditions and housing shortages.

Rent controls also generate arbitrary redistribution because tenants who secure rent-controlled units benefit regardless of whether they are financially better off than those who pay market rates.

Rent controls also create mismatches, since tenants who occupy rent-controlled units may stay there even after their needs change, leaving families crammed in tiny apartments and childless couples in larger ones. A 2003 study estimated that 21 percent of New York apartment renters lived in apartments with more or fewer rooms than they would in a city without rent controls.

These ill effects extend beyond rent-controlled areas. The diminished maintenance and care given to rent-controlled properties may make these areas less attractive to potential tenants in non-regulated housing, decreasing the price of non-regulated units. And, landlords may attempt to compensate for reduced profits in rent-controlled areas by raising rent on their unregulated properties.

The right way to address housing shortages is to reduce zoning regulations. Increasing the allowable floor-to-area ratio would increase living space and decrease prices. Reducing housing-density restrictions would increase housing supply while lowering rent. Eliminating single-family zoning restrictions would reduce housing shortages, especially in expensive regions.

Thus, while rent control seems like a quick fix to the housing crisis, it ultimately worsens the problem by distorting market incentives, reducing housing quality, and exacerbating shortages.

This article appeared on Substack on November 4, 2024. Jonah Karafiol, a student at Harvard College, co-wrote the post.

Colleen Hroncich

In the early months of COVID-19, the private school sector took quite a hit. According to the Cato Institute’s Private Schooling Status Tracker, a whopping 130 private school closures were announced from March to August 2020. Around 85 percent of those were Catholic schools, which tend to be older, have lower tuitions, and serve a lower income population compared to other private schools.

Parents and community members sometimes pushed back when school closures were announced. For example, on April 17, 2020, the Diocese of Camden announced the closure of five schools, including Saint Joseph High School in Hammonton, New Jersey. A group of parents, alumni, and other supporters tried unsuccessfully to convince the bishop to keep the school open. However, after the diocese vacated the property, the supporters were able to lease it from the local school district, which owned it. It reopened that September as Saint Joseph Academy (SJA), an independent private high school rooted in the Catholic faith. 

Fast forward to today: Saint Joseph Academy is educating around 200 students in grades 9–12 and is preparing to welcome 8th graders next fall. Steve Cappuccio became head of school at SJA in 2022 after a 20-plus-year career teaching at and leading two other independent Catholic schools in the Garden State. He had been approached previously about taking the helm at the school, both when it was under diocesan control and when it became independent. But when he was asked again in the summer of 2022, it seemed like the right time to leave his previous school and take the position at St. Joseph Academy.

“It’s been a blessing. I’ve always had a dream of running my own school, and I thought that I would have to move either to a larger market like Philadelphia or somewhere down South to do that,” he says. “I live in Hammonton. So I live less than 5 minutes from the school, which is a blessing and a curse. But it’s been a great ride, and we’ve really done well the past couple of years and we’re excited about the future.” 

As a small school aligned with the Catholic faith, Steve recognizes that St. Joseph Academy needs to offer something distinct from other schools. He notes there is a lot of competition from public schools, including tech and magnet schools, as well as other Catholic schools. Because they don’t have the funding of a public school, they have to find different ways to provide something unique. To Steve, that means becoming the premier life skills school in the area.

“I think education actually should be more than just college. To me it’s about life skills—effective communication, collaboration, working on projects, critical thinking, writing,” he explains. “And we also really believe in experiential learning. So learning through service by going out and having different experiences, seeing different things, getting off campus and, you know, maybe thinking of independent studies a little differently than other schools do. Down the road, I see us doing something with the trades, like internships and residencies with some of the trade groups, and things like that.” 

Taking the idea of service a step further, SJA founded a Servant Leadership Institute over the summer. “Our kids are committed to doing more Christian service than any school in the state of New Jersey,” Steve says. “We have kids going out every week and doing all different kinds of service from cathedral kitchens and soup kitchens in Camden to environmental cleanups, to nursing homes, to veterans homes, to Special Olympics.” It’s gotten a very positive reception from students, parents, and the community, he says. Adding, “I believe the Servant Leadership Institute will be the very thing that changes Saint Joe and gives us our kind of our calling moving forward.”

Since many Catholic schools are struggling and possibly looking to stay open in a different manner, I asked Steve what advice he’d give other communities. “For any board or group of parents that are doing something like that, my biggest advice would be to bring in folks—either ad hoc or within your base—that have a knowledge of private education,” he says. This will help guide decisions in the way that makes sense for a private school, which may look different than what makes sense for other businesses. “And then—probably even more important than that—know what your mission is and stay in line with your mission,” he adds. 

Thomas A. Berry

In September I became the fourth director of Cato’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies. This is the biggest honor of my professional life, and it is also a tremendous responsibility. The Levy Center (or CCS, as we call it here) has been shaped by the three directors who came before me. And those three directors have also served as professional mentors to me over the last nine years. The best way to explain why CCS is so unique and so important is by sharing what I’ve learned from each of its previous three directors: Roger Pilon, Ilya Shapiro, and Anastasia Boden.

First, Roger Pilon. Roger founded CCS and led it for 30 years. Roger was the CCS director when I interned here in 2015 and when I served as a legal associate in 2016–17. When Roger founded CCS, the main philosophical dispute in constitutional interpretation was framed as “judicial activism” versus “judicial restraint.” Roger founded CCS to advocate for a then-radical third approach: judicial engagement. As Roger put it, CCS was founded “to encourage judges to be more engaged than many conservatives believed proper, and to locate the authority for that engagement in the Constitution itself, properly understood.” 

Roger made CCS the intellectual home of the idea that the Constitution strongly protects personal liberty in all its facets, including economic liberty. As Roger summed it up, the goal was “to help change the climate of ideas to one more conducive to liberty under limited constitutional government.”

On my first day as a legal associate, Roger sent me a reading list. If I had been starting at a law firm, such a list might have comprised style guides and legal hornbooks. But Roger instead sent works of legal theory and political philosophy. Thanks to Roger’s example, I’ll always remember that CCS is fundamentally about ideas—about legal and political philosophy put into application. The most important test for everything we do at CCS is whether it will help to advance the acceptance of those ideas by both the courts and the general public.

Next, Ilya Shapiro. Ilya made Cato’s amicus brief program what it is today. It was under Ilya that Cato began its practice of hiring four legal associates (recent law school graduates) per year to help draft amicus briefs that would be filed in state and federal courts across the country. Writing more than 30 amicus briefs per year with roughly a half-dozen lawyers is an enormous undertaking, but Ilya made it look easy. To run the amicus program, Ilya had to make many quick but informed decisions about which cases to file in, what arguments to make, and how much time to devote to each brief. By his example, Ilya taught me the judgment and organizational practices needed to make these decisions and run this program. As I now begin to manage Cato’s amicus program myself, I know that the task is feasible only because I watched Ilya do it firsthand.

Perhaps even more important, Ilya taught me how to write a Cato amicus brief. Again, he taught by example. As a legal associate, I was tasked with writing the first draft of several amicus briefs. And like most recent law school graduates, I thought I could show off by sprinkling in legalese, jargon, Latin phrases, and obscure words found deep in my thesaurus. As my editor, Ilya dutifully took out all of them. It was during my year as a legal associate that I learned the point of our briefs is to be understood, not to show off. 

I saw how Ilya transformed my drafts from middling to crackling. Short, snappy sentences. Section headings of just a couple of words. Direct language. And arguments that can be understood not just by lawyers, but by any educated layperson. As I now take on the role of final editor for Cato’s briefs, I still have Ilya’s editorial voice in my ear.

Finally, Anastasia Boden. I was fortunate to work with Anastasia when we were both attorneys at the Pacific Legal Foundation. When she came over to Cato and we were professionally reunited, she reinvigorated our amicus brief program with a litigator’s perspective. Yes, our briefs are about ideas. But they’re also filed in real cases involving real people. These human stories help explain why the ideas and principles we argue for matter. And these human stories deserve pride of place in amicus briefs just as much as they do in the parties’ briefs. Anastasia’s keen instincts as a litigator gave her a sense of what grabs a judge’s attention and what puts them to sleep. For the rest of my career, I will never be satisfied with a brief’s opening paragraph unless I think Anastasia would be satisfied with it.

My hope as CCS director is that I can put into practice what I have learned from each of my predecessors. My mission is for CCS to produce accessible legal writing that is both principled and personal. Our briefs and papers should explain the philosophical and historical case for our view of the Constitution. They should demonstrate the human cost of departing from that vision. And they should clearly communicate that message to both judges and the general public alike.

I’m keenly aware that Cato’s CCS fills a role that no other legal institution inhabits. We have filed amicus briefs defending a constitutional right to same-sex marriage and a constitutional right not to be forced to create speech endorsing a same-sex marriage. We’ve aligned with conservative legal groups in economic liberty and Second Amendment cases, and we’ve aligned with progressive legal groups in police accountability and Fourth Amendment cases. 

We defend every constitutional right on an equal footing, and we collaborate with anyone willing to defend that right with us. That has been CCS’s guiding principle since it was founded, and I won’t be the director who changes that approach.

Going forward, what do I see as the likely focus of CCS? As always, we will meet the moment with whatever legal arguments are most needed. In this moment, officeholders of both parties seem more interested in using political power to fight in the culture war than in getting the government out of the culture war. The CCS has opposed both “conservative” efforts to compel speech by private tech companies and “progressive” efforts to compel speech by private retailers. The CCS has opposed both a Texas prosecutor’s misguided crusade against a risqué movie and campus regulators’ overzealous suppression of edgy speech. 

Whenever the government tries to put a thumb on the scale in the free arena of public debate, Cato will step in and defend the principle of government neutrality.

In addition, this era continues to see the leaders of both parties try to circumvent Congress and erode the separation of powers. Cato has opposed both the Trump administration’s attempt to build a border wall without congressional authorization and the Biden administration’s attempt to waive student loan debt without congressional authorization. I’m immensely proud of this record, and it will continue no matter which party wins the next election.

Does the work that we’ll be doing at CCS sound exciting to you? If so, I’d love for you to join us. If you’re a lawyer with three or more years of legal experience, apply to be a legal fellow, which is a permanent scholar position at Cato and the position that I held for the last four years. If you’ll be graduating law school in 2025 or if you’re a lawyer with fewer than three years of experience, apply to be a legal associate. That’s a one-year position that will allow you to draft amicus briefs across all of Cato’s issue areas. And that was my first job out of law school. Finally, if you’re a current law student, apply to be a summer, spring, or fall legal intern. That was the first position I ever held at Cato. And the rest is history.

Tad DeHaven

With days remaining until Tuesday’s presidential election, the candidates are making their closing arguments to voters. One area Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have in common is their willingness to wield federal power to favor or disfavor particular businesses.

During his 2016 presidential run, Trump promised to “tax the hell” out of Carrier products for relocating an Indiana plant to Mexico. As president-elect, Trump and vice-president-elect Mike Pence (Indiana’s governor) cajoled Carrier’s parent company, United Technologies, to keep the Indiana plant. The change of heart stemmed from a $7 million gift from Indiana taxpayers and a direct “reminder” from Trump to United Technologies’ CEO that the company benefits from billions of dollars in federal defense contracts.

As president, it was more of the same behavior:

• Trump threatened Harley-Davidson with “taxes like never before” after the company announced plans to move more production overseas due to tariffs imposed by the European Union in retaliation for his tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. 

• After previously criticizing General Motors for building cars in Mexico, Trump threatened the company for announcing plans to stop production at uneconomical facilities in Michigan and Ohio. Following a call to GM’s CEO, he told The Wall Street Journal, “They better damn well open a new plant [in Ohio] quickly.” 

• In response to unflattering coverage of the president by The Washington Post, Trump attacked Amazon because CEO Jeff Bezos owns the newspaper. Calling the US Postal Service rates paid by the company a “scam,” he posted on Twitter that “Amazon must pay real costs (and taxes) now!” The following year, the Department of Defense (DOD) surprisingly awarded a $10 billion cloud-computing contract to Microsoft instead of Amazon, which was the presumptive favorite. The DOD’s decision came after Trump asked the Pentagon to look “very closely” at the contract.

• Trump used the official @POTUS account on Twitter to attack Nordstrom because the department store announced it would no longer carry his daughter Ivanka’s label “due to performance.”

• Following what he deemed an insufficient response to deadly violence at a white nationalist protest in Charlottesville, VA, the chairman and CEO of Merck resigned from the president’s manufacturing council. Trump responded on Twitter that “Ken Frazier of Merck Pharma … will have more time to LOWER RIPOFF DRUG PRICES!” 

• In response to social media companies silencing certain views, Trump stated on Twitter that, “We will strongly regulate, or close them down[.]” 

• Trump’s Department of Justice fought AT&T’s purchase of Time Warner on anti-trust grounds, but a judge ultimately approved the merger. AT&T owned CNN’s parent company, Turner Broadcasting. Claiming that CNN wasn’t fair to him, Trump had told a crowd a month before the election that “AT&T is buying Time Warner, and thus CNN … a deal we will not approve in my administration.”

The bullying continues on the 2024 campaign trail. As I recently discussed, Trump threatened to place a 200 percent tariff on John Deere tractor imports at a Pennsylvania rally because the company had announced plans to move some production to Mexico. He has threatened automakers with similarly massive tariffs should they move any manufacturing operations outside the US, although that’s been a regular threat since his first presidential campaign.

The flip side to a president disfavoring particular companies is favoring particular companies. For example, Scott Lincicome notes the Government Accountability Office found that the Trump administration’s “process for excluding certain goods from the tariffs suffered from political favoritism, untimeliness, and a lack of transparency.” Another study found that companies supporting Republicans, including Trump, were more likely to receive tariff exemptions. Trump also oversaw billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts for farmers hurt by retaliatory tariffs. 

A common excuse for Trump’s behavior is that he is a businessman and thus just employing his negotiating and deal-making prowess. In 2020, the Chinese company that owns TikTok came under bipartisan pressure to sell it to a US company. Trump stated that a large share of any sale proceeds would have to go to the Treasury, which he called “key money.”

Personal finance expert Rob Berger explains:

Key money is a dated term used in real estate transactions. It’s money a prospective tenant would pay under the table to a landlord, building manager or even another tenant to secure a lease. Think of a middle school bully demanding another student’s lunch money in exchange for safe passage.

Call it extortion or call it “Art of the Deal,” the fact remains the federal government is not a business. John Adams famously defined a republic as “a government of laws, and not of men.” As I explained years ago, government favors (or disfavors) for specific companies are “not just bad economic policy; they also violate the bedrock American principle of equality under the law.” That our country has failed, and continues to fail, to uphold that principle does not mean that it should be casually waived away when it serves a political preference. 

Now, in our current hyper-polarized political environment, the criticism of either Trump or Harris often invites “whataboutism.” To be clear, I have no horse in the presidential race. The idea for this post sprung from Scott’s recent discussion of the undesirable connection between policy uncertainty and economic uncertainty (the former fuels the latter). He notes, for example, “The Biden administration’s own [Electric Vehicle] subsidies and regulations … have been modified repeatedly, with dramatic and unforeseen effects on the U.S. market.”

When candidate Harris says her administration will make “investments” in the US economy, she often means she wants to use taxpayer money to subsidize commercial interests she favors. She’s also attacking businesses for having the audacity to, well, conduct business. 

From Ryan Bourne in today’s Financial Times:

Yet Democrats stubbornly deflect attention away from macroeconomic policy, even pretending that the federal government can compel companies to lower prices. Indeed, Harris is promising various price controls to reduce living costs. She proposes a federal law to limit how much supermarkets can increase food prices during emergencies. She also advocates for national rent control to cap increases from “corporate landlords” at 5 percent annually, along with government regulations to tackle “junk fees” across various sectors.

While Harris’s rhetoric may not meet the floor Trump has set, she is nonetheless bullying when she proposes to use federal power to “make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers during times of crisis to run up excessive corporate profits on food and groceries.” 

Speaking to a crowd in North Carolina, Harris nonchalantly attributes high food prices to pandemic-induced supply shocks and implies “big food companies” have taken advantage of the situation to make “their highest profits in two decades.” It was government policy, very much including the Biden-Harris administration’s spending spree, that sparked inflation. But “big corporations” make for easy scapegoats. 

So, who is worse? Readers can quibble over that question. Unfortunately, whichever candidate wins, American businesses in the economic arena will have to continue looking up at Caesar to see if they get the thumbs up or thumbs down.
 

Marc Joffe

The Federal Transit Administration’s (FTA’s) Capital Grants Dashboard shows that Austin, Texas, is on track to get over $4 billion of federal funds. The grant would cover 49 percent of the estimated $8.234 billion cost (including $1.1 billion of debt service expenditures) to build a 9.8‑mile light rail system through the city center. The nation’s 11th-largest city has experienced dramatic growth without light rail, but transit advocates prevailed upon voters to begin funding a system in the November 2020 election through a property tax increase. Some of those voters may now be experiencing buyers’ remorse, as they will have to cover the remaining 51 percent of the cost for a system with questionable benefits.

Given Austin’s rapid growth and serious traffic congestion, light rail might seem like an obvious solution. But continued rapid population growth is by no means a sure thing. Last year, Austin fell out of the top 10 US cities by population after being surpassed by Jacksonville, Florida. And Travis County, which includes Austin and surrounding areas, saw its first year of net out-migration since 2002. Both the city and county are still growing, but the rise in population could further slow or reverse given Austin’s high housing costs.

But even if Austin’s population flattens, there is still the question of how its 980,000 residents (plus visitors) can move about the city without causing traffic jams. Light rail is not a cost-effective solution to congestion, and there are other things the city could do to obtain some relief more quickly.

The light rail project is on track to get its Full Federal Grant Agreement (FFGA) in 2027. The city could then commence construction with an eye toward finishing the project in 2033. But these dates could well slip.

FTA typically requires a secure source of local funding before signing an FFGA. But the city is now defending a lawsuit filed by seven Austin property owners hoping to strike down the tax voters approved in 2020. Plaintiffs contend that the ballot measure called for a “citywide traffic-easing rapid transit system,” but Austin now plans to lay only a portion of the originally proposed track, violating its promise of a citywide system in the 2020 ballot language. As long as this lawsuit has a chance of succeeding, the federal grant agreement may not be forthcoming.

Once construction starts, there is no guarantee that it will be completed in six years. Indeed, other projects provide cautionary tales. Honolulu took 12 years to build its 10.75-mile Skyline. Maryland started construction of the 16-mile Purple Line in the Washington, DC, suburbs seven years ago and is not expected to start carrying passengers for another three years.

When Austin’s light rail begins operations, its impact on traffic congestion may not be that great. Project sponsors expect 28,500 daily riders by 2040, but past projections by other agencies have sometimes proved to be wildly overoptimistic. In Honolulu, for example, city officials expected 10,000 daily riders on phase one of its Skyline service, but thus far, actual ridership is only about a third of this projection. Rail projects in San Francisco and Southern California have also seen large shortfalls in actual versus expected ridership.

Further many future light rail riders may switch from existing bus service. Cap Metro’s 801 Rapid bus covers much of the route to be served by the light rail project, and many passengers from this bus line could be expected to become light rail passengers. As a result, even if light rail attracted 28,500 passenger trips in 2040, only a portion of those would replace car trips.

On the other hand, light rail will reduce the street network’s capacity through lane and road closures. For example, the city has proposed to close a portion of Guadalupe Street known as “The Drag” to vehicular traffic, diverting cars to Nueces Street. So, after spending $8 billion to slightly reduce car trips on a more constrained road network, the city may see little to no congestion relief.

But there are other things Austin could do to reduce traffic, and these options could be implemented well before 2033 at a far lower cost. First, it could make enhancements to the 801 Rapid and other core bus routes to reduce travel times, such as adding more transit priority lanes, traffic signal coordination, and level boarding (which saves time by removing the need for passengers to walk up and down steps at bus stops). These incremental measures might boost the 801 Rapid’s on-time performance above its current 75 percent level and thereby attract more riders. The city could also continue efforts to improve its CapMetro Bikeshare network by adding more locations and including scooters in the mix. Although shared micromobility is already popular in Austin, it has room to grow, as illustrated by Washington, DC. In the nation’s capital, shared micromobility utilization approaches 18 trips per day per thousand population, almost double Austin’s rate.

Big cities usually have some form of rail transit, and it is understandable that some in Austin would want to add this amenity as the city’s population approaches the million mark. But rail transit made more sense in the early 20th century when more personalized forms of transportation were less developed. As Austin hits its stride in the 21st century, its leaders should think carefully before investing heavily in a legacy form of transportation.