Recent Viewpoints

Kerby Anderson President Trump has been promoting the positive impact of his tariffs, while his critics argue that ultimately Americans will be paying the price for his tariffs. The editors of the Wall Street Journal point to inflation data to argue that American households will be paying. However, they also acknowledge that an increase in consumer prices hasn’t shown up yet, perhaps because companies had large cash reserves. Tim Carney argues that if you dig into the data, the question…

Kerby Anderson Steven Camarota concludes that “Illegal Immigration Can be Controlled.” For the last two decades or so, we have been told that immigration is like the weather. It can’t be controlled, so you might as well get used to it. In fact, that was the title of a 2023 New York Times op-ed “Biden Can’t Stop Immigration. Time to Embrace It.” As even the mainstream press will admit, that turned out to be false. We are not even a…

Kerby Anderson For more than a year, I have been talking about the phenomenon of “debanking.” Now that the president has issued an executive order, you would think that the issue would be covered more extensively by the legacy press and understood by the public. That is not the case. Even on a recent radio program, I had a guest who didn’t seem to understand why a bank would turn down money someone wanted to put in their bank. In…

Penna Dexter The frontrunner in the New York mayoral race, has a lot of bad ideas. Soon after Zohan Mamdani won the Democratic primary, John Catsimatidis, owner of New York City’s 2 oldest and largest independent supermarket chains, wrote an op ed for the Wall Street Journal.  In it, he warns about what is probably the worst of the candidate’s campaign promises:  “a government-run alternative to private supermarkets.” Mr. Mamdani calls this a “public option” and he wants to start…

Kerby Anderson No one knows for sure who called the U.S. Senate the “World’s Greatest Deliberative Body,” but it is often attributed to President James Buchanan. It was the venue where orators like Daniel Webster and Henry Clay delivered great speeches. That is not the U.S. Senate of today. The senators today spend most of their time voting on routine presidential nominations to the executive and judicial branches. And as I documented last week, they haven’t even been doing that…

Kerby Anderson A recent NPR story begins with this introduction: “About a year before the pandemic hit, a scientist in China, He Jiankui, revealed that he had secretly engineered the birth of the first CRISPR gene-edited babies.” The scientist was imprisoned for three years for violating medical regulations. But now some are beginning to suggest we should begin to genetically engineer babies. One bioethicist observes that there seems to be “a convergence of people who are thinking that they can…

Kerby Anderson New job creation in this country is down. There are many reasons, but one of those is artificial intelligence. Microsoft said it was laying off thousands of engineers because of AI. Walmart cut more than a thousand corporate jobs in anticipation of AI. Texas-based CrowdStrike slashed part of its workforce because, they said, “AI is reshaping every industry.” Dario Amodei (CEO of Anthropic) has been willing to go on record saying that AI will result in much more…

Kerby Anderson You have probably heard the observation that often the military is “fighting the current war with the tactics of the previous war.” There has been a tendency for military leaders to rely on strategies and approaches that were successful in the past, even when they were ineffective due to new technologies. Christian Brose argues that “America Must Prepare to Face the Foes of the Future.” He illustrates that by quoting the Washington Post, “Ukraine Attacks Russian Air Bases in…

Kerby Anderson When Texas Democrats fled the state to avoid a vote on redistricting, all of us started learning more about the phenomenon of gerrymandering. Even though I have written at least a half dozen commentaries about gerrymandering, I learned how significant the issue has become. For example, most of those Democrats fled to Illinois, which was given two F grades by the Princeton Gerrymandering Project and described by some commentators as “the most gerrymandered state in the Union.” Many…

Penna Dexter The fertility rate in the United States just hit 1.6 children per woman, an all time low. The replacement rate — the level that will keep the population stable —  is 2.1 children per woman in the U.S. and 2.25 globally. Drop below 2 and depopulation begins. Two economists at the University of Texas, Austin outline the factors leading toward depopulation and warn against allowing it to happen. The Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip reviewed their book, After…

Kerby Anderson You may have seen the announcement that astronomers have found an asteroid (Asteroid Psyche 16) that has been found to contain gold reserves worth $700 quintillion. That announcement was followed by the statement that this would be enough to make everyone on Earth billionaires. Numerous comments correctly noted that it would make gold worthless, and we would all still be poor. Many recommended that the person writing the headline should take an economics class. There is no evidence…