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President needs to tighten his belt

That’s my message to Donald Trump. Most of us know that when you’re living on a budget, you need to prioritize. You don’t spend money on things that aren’t necessary. Like that dress in the window? Sorry, rent’s due. Gotta get food for the family. There’s a doctor’s appointment next week. The dress will have to wait. Nationally, that ballroom would be spectacular and those bronze statues really should be gold. But the sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln need food. Hawaii and several other states had major floods and people need help. There are problems with food born ...

School choice saves families struggling with affordability

Jeri Penrod and his family — his wife and their four children, Chloe, Andrew, Clara, and Ananias — faced financial ruin. But a few timely scholarships provided the family not only with a solid education but also with the financial stability they needed to persevere. For the past five years, the Penrods have been on the move. As a United Methodist pastor, Jeri has moved his family several times, as his denomination has appointed him to communities in need of his spiritual guidance. But this mobile lifestyle hit a brick wall in 2023. Jeri’s appointment unexpectedly ended, leaving ...

Economy — and Federal Reserve — stuck

The economy is not falling apart. But important parts of it are barely moving. The major exception is investment. Business spending on equipment and intellectual property remains strong, with the AI buildout clearly part of that story. And private domestic demand more broadly has not stalled: real final sales to private domestic purchasers rose at a healthy 3.9% annualized rate in the second quarter. So the weakness isn’t everywhere. It is showing up most clearly in hiring, labor-force growth and household purchasing power. At the same time, households have been saving less: the ...

Tax credit programs extend school choice

This year marks the 25th anniversary of Pennsylvania’s Educational Improvement Tax Credit program, which — combined with the Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit program — has served more than a million kids. However, instead of celebrating this milestone, some lawmakers placed this popular and successful program on the chopping block. Democratic state Rep. Nikki Rivera, D-Lancaster, introduced legislation that, by our calculation, would have cut thousands of scholarships. But after facing significant public pushback (including from concerned parents), House Democrats amended the ...

Rare break from quietly expensive law

Since March, America has been running an accidental experiment and glimpsing what the country might look like without one of its dumbest statutes. The results are in, and they embarrass a century’s worth of U.S. lawmakers and defenders. The statute is the Jones Act, passed in 1920 to rebuild and protect the U.S. merchant marine fleet after World War I disrupted American shipping capabilities. It requires that any vessel moving cargo between two American ports must be built in an American shipyard, be American-owned and be at least three-quarters American-crewed. Miss any one of these ...

Was Orwell’s Animal Farm fiction?

I was very young when my sister gave me George Orwell’s Animal Farm to read. The book was about animals on a farm who were mistreated by the mean, nasty, and cruel farmer. They revolted. The animals got rid of the farmer and put the pigs in charge. Well, as it turned out, the pigs were worse overlords than the farmer had ever been. When I read Animal Farm, I had no idea that it was a parody of the Russian Revolution. I knew there was something strange about the book and the theme, but it took my fifth grade teacher to explain to me what I had read and its meaning. Following my ...