Meet the Medicaid Double-Dippers

by the Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal, July 21, 2025.

Excerpt:

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) reported late last week that 1.2 million Americans last year were enrolled in Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program in two or more states. The agency worked with software engineers to review enrollment data, and it found another 1.6 million enrolled in both Medicaid and an ObamaCare plan with taxpayer subsidies in 2024.

Young Workers Could Lose $110,000 in Lifetime Earnings to Keep Social Security Solvent

by Romina Boccia and Ivane Nachkebia, Cato at Liberty, July 22, 2025.

Excerpts:

According to the latest report from the Social Security Trustees, Congress would need to raise the payroll tax rate immediately and permanently by 3.65 percentage points—from 12.4 to 16.05 percent—to close the program’s $25 trillion, 75-year funding shortfall and pay benefits as scheduled under current law. For a hypothetical median worker entering the workforce at age 22 in 2025, this tax increase would reduce lifetime earnings by more than $110,000 in present value terms over a 45-year career (see the appendix for our methodology). That’s roughly equivalent to giving up 20 months of pay at the worker’s average monthly wage.

And:

Even eliminating the Social Security tax cap, making all earned income subject to payroll taxes, won’t solve the program’s financial issues over the long term. As the Manhattan Institute’s Jessica Riedl has detailed, eliminating the payroll tax cap would only cover half of the long-term funding shortfall and would involve a massive marginal tax increase on the upper middle class, making such a proposal politically and economically challenging. Specifically, eliminating the cap would push the top marginal federal labor income tax rate above 50 percent and the average top state, local, and federal rate to almost 60 percent, which would almost certainly be on the wrong side of the Laffer Curve (i.e., above the revenue-maximizing level). Importantly, eliminating the cap would generate temporary surpluses that Congress is unlikely to lock away for paying out future program benefits, instead spending the revenues elsewhere. As these surpluses would still be credited to the program’s trust fund, the Treasury would later need to repay what Congress spent, most likely through trillions of new borrowing, as past experience suggests.

I Once Thought Europeans Lived as Well as Americans. Not Anymore [sic]

by Tyler Cowen, The Free Press, July 20, 2025.

Excerpts:

European governments do a great deal to discourage air-conditioning, whether central AC or window units. You might need a hard-to-get permit to install an AC unit, and in Geneva you have to show a medical need for it. Or in many regions of Europe, the air conditioner might violate heritage preservation laws, or be illegal altogether. In Portofino, Italy, neighbors have been known to turn each other in for having illegal air-conditioning units. The fines can range up to €43,000, though most cases are settled out of court by a removal of the unit.

In Britain, even if you can get through the regulations, the cost of energy can be double that in America, so good luck with your bills. By refusing to build out its nuclear and wind power, and moving away from coal, Britain has ended up short of affordable energy, which has penalized its manufacturing and tech sectors as well.

And:

We are at the point where Mississippi, the poorest U.S. state by many measures, now has higher per capita income than many of the major West European nations, and is almost on a par with Germany. Those numbers do not capture all features of life quality, including leisure time, but it is hard to see them as good news for the Europeans.

The crime rate is still worse in America, but that has fallen a great deal. In New York City, for instance, the murder rate today is about one-sixth of its peak in the 1990s.

And a strangely discordant note:

I am distressed when I see how many American tourists are milling about southern France or Amsterdam, but that too was quite different 40 years ago.

He doesn’t explain why he’s distressed.

Burning down the library: How AI laws are reviving the worst ideas of campus censorship

by Greg Lukianoff, The Eternally Radical Idea, July 22, 2025.

Excerpt:

These laws — already passed in states like Texas and Colorado — require AI developers to make sure their models don’t produce “discriminatory” outputs. And of course, superficially, this sounds like a noble endeavor. After all, who wants discrimination? The problem, however, is that while invidious discriminatory action in, say, loan approval should be condemned, discriminatory knowledge is an idea that is rightfully foreign. In fact, it should freak us out.

One point Adam and I make in our National Review piece is that, rather than calling for the arrest of a Klansman who engages in hateful crimes, these regulations say you need to burn down the library where he supposedly learned his hateful ideas. Not even just the books he read, mind you, but the library itself, which is full of other knowledge that would now be restricted for everyone else.

Note: Image created by ChatGPT4.0.