The Daily Chart
February 14, 2025 — Steven Hayward
Back in the 1790s, there was a vigorous debate in Congress about whether to make a small appropriation of foreign aid to the French colony of Santo Domingo, which had experienced a slave revolt that generated about 2,000 refugees to the U.S. Not wanting to have more refugees (sounds familiar, no?) was the reason for sending money to help stabilize the island. But Congress in those days took its constitutional
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February 13, 2025 — Steven Hayward
Over at my “Political Questions” Substack site today I have a piece about Cass Sunstein that briefly treats the “social cost of carbon” (SCC), a key part of the climate policy debate. It’s an arcane subject in econometrics that can quickly generate a headache. In one sentence SCC is the attempt to calculate the net present value of the economic damage climate change will supposedly exact decades from now if
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February 12, 2025 — Steven Hayward
Continuing with our theme from yesterday’s Daily Chart that we should not soon let up on pointing out how supremely awful the Biden (p)residency was, today we can point to the trashing of “Bidenomics” by Jason Furman, the chief economic adviser to President Obama. (Hat tip to our friends at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity for noting this startling defection from the party line.) Writing in Foreign Affairs under the
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February 11, 2025 — Steven Hayward
It is already getting hard to recall that Joe Biden was ever president. Yes, yes—I know, he was never truly president, but there was an administration that governed in his name, and the cabal should face investigation and possibly prosecution. In any event, we should never lose sight of how irresponsible and reckless they were. Like this: Chaser—never forget this either (and don’t waste your time wondering why there was
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February 10, 2025 — Steven Hayward
With the Super Bowl now safely over, we can get back to real sports—taxes and spending and our bloated national government. Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that the blockbuster trade that sent Dallas Mavericks’ star Luca Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers is going to cost Doncic about $15 million in higher income taxes over the next three years of his current contract because of California’s 13% income
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February 7, 2025 — Steven Hayward
After the Supreme Court wiped away the marriage laws of all 50 states in its Obergefell decision that legalized same-sex marriage, it was thought the next frontier in “love, liberty and privacy” would be a push to allow polygamy again. Instead, what erupted in just a few weeks was the entire transgender crusade. As CNN’s Harry Entin notes, public opinion has always been against men in women’s sports, but has
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February 6, 2025 — Steven Hayward
It has been widely understood going all the way back to the Reagan elections that many union members don’t go along with their union leaders in the voting booth. Here we have some interesting data from the most recent election: Looks like there ought to be more agitation in the wake of the Janus Supreme Court decision for union members to demand more of their dues back.
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February 5, 2025 — Steven Hayward
Following the egregious Bishop Budde’s hectoring of President Trump at the National Cathedral right after inauguration, it emerged that she headed an organization that had received over $50 million in federal funds in 2023 to help “resettle” migrants. The New York Post reported this aspect of the story, nearly alone among the major media. The math is amazing: for $53 million, Bishop Budde’s program resettled 3,600 individuals. That comes out
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February 4, 2025 — Steven Hayward
One of the great books about the growth of government over the last century is Robert Higgs’s Crisis and Leviathan: Crucial Episodes in the Growth of Government. It explains and gives examples of the “ratchet effect,” whereby a crisis—a war, economic calamity, or . . . a pandemic perhaps—provides a reason for the expansion of government power and spending in response, but then the government never shrinks back to its
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February 3, 2025 — Steven Hayward
It may have been the late great Jesse Helms who first joked back in the 1980s that by all means we should encourage public schools to teach sex education because then nobody would know how to do it. And in fact teen pregnancy has been falling over the last generation—one of the few happy trends among youth these days. But the inability of the public schools to teach basic reading
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January 31, 2025 — Steven Hayward
The New York Times has a crew of computer graphics geeks who love to put together lots of novel and interactive features that no other newspaper can do. Usually they are a chore to use, but yesterday they put up a nifty map that dramatizes just how badly Democrats lost votes in their biggest strongholds—deep blue metro areas—and among their strongest voting demographics, mainly lower middle income, working class, and
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January 30, 2025 — Steven Hayward
If you drop “Sweden” into our search window, you’ll see a long line of posts going back several years reporting on Sweden’s growing problem with immigrants, such as the fact that Sweden has one of the highest immigrant crime rates around, and culminating in this recent story about Sweden thinking of changing its constitution to allow it to strip citizenship and expel people. Imagine if Trump proposed this! But I
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January 29, 2025 — Steven Hayward
We’re already had one look at the rapid drop in illegal crossings at the southern border since January 20, but here’s another useful look: I suspect we’re going to see a lot more charts with effects like this over the next year or two, on crime, welfare dependency, federal employee levels, wasteful spending grants to NGOs, etc.
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January 28, 2025 — Steven Hayward
We know that Britain’s social media landscape—and media in general—are for worse than ours in terms of bias and especially censorship, and here’s one look at just how bad it is: England’s problem is not the far right; it has never been the far right. Right now it is the far left, which has taken control of the government.
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January 27, 2025 — Steven Hayward
In 2017 Trump did not have the traditional first term presidential “honeymoon,” when the opposition and the media are at least nice to you, and cooperate to some extent on one or two of the new president’s priorities. In fact Trump came into office with negative approval ratings—I believe the first in the history of polling (which only goes back to the late 1940s). And Congress blocked his main priority:
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January 24, 2025 — Steven Hayward
One of the reasons for public disgust with government today at all levels is the obvious incompetence of government today. Governments are proving themselves increasingly incompetent at basic tasks, like preserving social order, preventing crime, defending borders, or building public works projects (like California’s high-speed rail, to pick a spectacular example of incompetent excess), while thinking they have the competence to control the planet’s temperature, and make everyone equal by
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January 23, 2025 — Steven Hayward
A couple days ago we noted the Wall Street Journal story on Harvard MBAs struggling to find jobs as a “feel good headline of the day.” Some people might think that business schools ought to be one precinct of our rotten universities that aren’t woke and stupid, but in fact a lot of business schools have been caught in the vortex of wokery. You’ll find lots of emphasis on “corporate
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