Here’s the truth: raising the minimum wage does not cause meaningful job loss and has a negligible effect on prices. This has been proven time and again. Instead, it reduces poverty and hardship, improves health, reduces reliance on assistance programs, increases federal revenue, raises wages for workers already earning above the minimum wage, and bolsters the economy.

The question is not whether America can afford higher wages. It is why highly profitable companies are allowed to pay poverty wages, causing their workers to be subsidized by taxpayers.

The claim

If the government raises the minimum wage, businesses will have to fire workers, cut hours, replace people with machines, or raise prices so much that workers lose whatever they gained.

This is the argument used every time people ask for better wages. It sounds like it could be common sense until you look below the surface.

Why higher wages do not automatically mean job losses or huge price increases

I’m going to dive into all the data showing what really happens when the minimum wage is raised in a moment, but first I want to explain why raising the minimum wage does not affect prices and jobs the way you might expect.

The argument against raising the minimum wage usually treats businesses like a simple math problem: if wages go up, the business must either fire workers or raise prices by the same amount.

That sounds logical until you remember that labor is only one part of a business’s costs.

If a worker’s wage rises by 20%, that does not mean the price of a burger, pizza, hotel room, or grocery item needs to rise by 20%. The wage increase only affects the labor portion of the cost, and even then, only the workers whose wages are actually increased.

A restaurant, store, hotel, or warehouse also pays rent, utilities, insurance, equipment costs, debt payments, franchise fees, advertising, technology costs, ingredients, supplies, shipping, executive pay, corporate overhead, and profits to owners or shareholders. That is why a significant increase in the minimum wage does not translate into an equally large increase in prices.

Instead, price effects are usually small. San Jose raised its minimum wage by 25%, and restaurant prices rose by about 1.45%. California raised fast-food wages to $20 an hour, and Berkeley researchers found prices rose by about 1.5%, or roughly 6 cents on a $4 item. The wage increase was large. The price increase was not.

Here is what the CEO of McDonald’s said during a 2020 earnings call:

“Our view is the minimum wage is most likely going to be increasing, whether that’s federally or at the state level as I referenced, and so long as it’s done … in a staged way and in a way that is equitable for everybody, McDonald’s will do just fine through that.”

And here is what Denny’s CFO said about California minimum wage increases to investors:

“As they’ve increased their minimum wage kind of in a tempered pace over that time frame, if you look at that time frame from us, California has outperformed the system. Over that time frame, they had six consecutive years of positive guest traffic—not just positive sales, but positive guest traffic—as the minimum wage was going up.”

Quite a different tone and view than what we often hear from the restaurant industry in public about minimum wage increases. They say it will hurt business, hurt workers, and negatively impact the economy, but when it comes to their own business, they admit minimum wage increases won’t hurt them and may even improve their operations.

Sources for this section

• National Restaurant Association, “Elevated labor costs had a significant impact on restaurant profitability in 2024.” Reports that salaries and wages, including benefits, represented a median of 31.7% of sales among limited-service restaurant operators in 2024.

• Allegretto and Reich, “Are Local Minimum Wages Absorbed by Price Increases?” Finds that San Jose’s 25% minimum-wage increase raised restaurant prices by about 1.45%, and explains that restaurants can absorb labor-cost increases with relatively small price increases because labor is only one part of total costs.

• Berkeley IRLE, “Effects of a $20 Minimum Wage.” Finds that California’s $20 fast-food minimum wage increased wages without reducing employment and increased prices by about 1.5%.

• Dube, Lester, and Reich, “Minimum Wage Shocks, Employment Flows, and Labor Market Frictions.” Finds that minimum-wage increases reduced worker separations and new hires among affected workers without reducing overall employment levels.

• Newsweek article discussing what companies are telling investors about minimum wages versus what they say publicly.

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California’s $20 fast-food minimum wage

The most recent major study of this issue examined California’s increase in the fast-food minimum wage to $20 an hour. That increase went into effect on April 1, 2024, and covered workers at large fast-food chains.

This is a particularly important study because a $20 wage is a livable wage in many parts of the country, and the fast-food industry is exactly the kind of low-wage industry where opponents always predict disaster.

The disaster did not happen.

A Berkeley Institute for Research on Labor and Employment study found that California’s $20 fast-food minimum wage increased average weekly wages for covered workers by about 11%. It did not reduce employment. It did not reduce weekly hours. Prices increased by about 1.5%, which equates to a 6-cent increase on a $4 item.

Workers got a meaningful raise. Jobs did not disappear. Hours were not cut. Prices went up only a little.

A separate study from The Shift Project at Harvard Kennedy School surveyed fast-food workers during this wage change and also found no evidence of reduced work hours, increased understaffing, worse scheduling instability, increased wage theft, or reduced fringe benefits.

This is important because companies often claim they will be forced to respond to higher wages by cutting hours, worsening schedules, reducing benefits, or forcing fewer workers to do the same amount of work. The Shift Project did not find evidence of that happening after California’s fast-food wage increase.

Sources for this section

• Berkeley IRLE, “Effects of a $20 Minimum Wage: Evidence from Granular Data on Wages, Employment and Prices.” This is the main California fast-food study finding an 11% increase in average weekly wages, no employment reduction, no implied reduction in weekly hours, and a 1.5% price increase.

• The Shift Project, “Early Effects of California’s $20 Fast Food Minimum Wage.” This worker survey found no evidence of reduced hours, increased understaffing, worse scheduling instability, wage theft, or reduced fringe benefits.

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Other minimum-wage increases show the same pattern

California’s fast-food increase is not the only example. The broader research points in the same direction: higher minimum wages raise pay, while the predicted mass job loss does not appear.

One of the most famous studies looked at New Jersey’s 1992 minimum wage increase. New Jersey raised its minimum wage from $4.25 to $5.05 an hour, while neighboring Pennsylvania did not. David Card and Alan Krueger surveyed fast-food restaurants in New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania before and after the increase. They found no evidence that the higher minimum wage reduced employment in New Jersey fast-food restaurants compared with Pennsylvania.

This study became famous because it challenged the old textbook assumption that raising wages automatically means fewer jobs. It showed that real labor markets are not as simple as the corporate talking point.

A later study by Dube, Lester, and Reich compared counties on opposite sides of state borders from 1990 to 2006. That design allowed researchers to compare neighboring local economies where one side had a higher minimum wage and the other did not. They found no adverse employment effects in restaurants and other low-wage sectors.

Another major study by Cengiz, Dube, Lindner, and Zipperer looked at 138 state-level minimum wage increases from 1979 to 2016. Their finding is one of the easiest to understand: jobs paying below the new minimum wage largely disappeared because they became better-paying jobs, not because the jobs vanished.

Price studies tell a similar story. When San Jose raised its minimum wage by 25% in 2013, restaurant prices rose by about 1.45% on average. That is almost the same price effect found in the California fast-food study, where prices rose by about 1.5%.

This is what the evidence keeps showing: wages rise a lot more than prices. Workers gain real income. Businesses adjust through a mix of small price increases, lower turnover, productivity changes, reduced margins, and other adjustments.

The evidence does not support the idea that higher minimum wages cause mass job loss or huge price increases.

Sources for this section

• Card and Krueger, “Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast-Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.” Classic fast-food natural experiment finding no evidence that New Jersey’s minimum wage increase reduced employment compared with Pennsylvania.

• Dube, Lester, and Reich, “Minimum Wage Effects Across State Borders.” Contiguous-county study comparing counties across state borders from 1990 to 2006 and finding no adverse employment effects in restaurants and other low-wage sectors.

• Cengiz, Dube, Lindner, and Zipperer, “The Effect of Minimum Wages on Low-Wage Jobs.” Study of 138 state minimum-wage increases from 1979 to 2016 finding that low-wage jobs shifted up in pay rather than disappearing.

• Allegretto and Reich, “Are Local Minimum Wages Absorbed by Price Increases?” San Jose restaurant-menu study finding that a 25% minimum-wage increase raised restaurant prices by about 1.45%.

• Berkeley IRLE six-city study. Examined higher local minimum wages in Chicago, D.C., Oakland, San Francisco, San Jose, and Seattle and found higher earnings without significant employment losses.

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Higher minimum wages benefit workers — and everyone else

The most obvious benefit of raising the minimum wage is that low-wage workers get paid more. That alone is enough reason to do it.

Higher wages mean people can buy more food, pay rent more easily, cover utility bills, repair a car, go to the doctor, avoid debt, and live with less constant stress. Recent research has linked more generous minimum-wage policies to lower food insecurity among households with children, and broader research connects higher minimum wages with improved health and standard of living.

A person working full-time should not need to live in survival mode.

But higher minimum wages do not only help the workers who were making less than the new minimum. They also help workers who were already making a little more.

Economists call this the ripple effect, or spillover effect. When the wage floor rises, employers often raise wages above the new minimum too. They do this to preserve wage ladders, retain workers, compete with other employers, and avoid situations in which experienced workers leave for easier or less stressful jobs paying nearly the same amount.

That means higher minimum wages can benefit far more people than the workers who were literally making the old minimum wage.

Multiple studies and policy estimates show this effect reaching well beyond the minimum-wage worker. Some research finds wage spillovers extending up to around the 30th percentile of the wage distribution. In 2019, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that a $15 federal minimum wage by 2025 would directly raise wages for 17 million workers and could also raise wages for another 10.3 million workers earning above the new minimum. The Economic Policy Institute estimated that a $17 federal minimum wage by 2030 would affect about 22.2 million workers, or 15% of the U.S. wage-earning workforce, even after accounting for state and local minimum wages already higher than the federal floor.

The exact number depends on the size of the increase, the timing, and the wage distribution. But the pattern is clear: raising the minimum wage pushes wages upward for a large group of workers, not just the people at the very bottom.

Higher minimum wages also reduce the amount of low-wage work that taxpayers are forced to subsidize.

When companies pay workers too little to live on, those workers often need SNAP, Medicaid, housing assistance, the Earned Income Tax Credit, or other public supports to survive. Those programs are necessary because people need to eat, get healthcare, and keep a roof over their heads. But when profitable companies pay wages so low that workers still need public assistance, taxpayers are effectively helping subsidize the low-wage business model. Raising wages shifts more of that responsibility back where it belongs: onto employers who benefit from the labor.

Research from the Economic Policy Institute found that among workers in the bottom three wage deciles, every $1 increase in hourly wages reduced the likelihood of receiving means-tested public assistance by 3.1 percentage points. Another analysis from the Center for American Progress estimated that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 would reduce federal nutrition assistance spending by $46 billion over 10 years.

Reduced reliance on assistance programs means the government spends less. Increasing wages also means more people will pay federal income tax, which increases the government’s revenue. Paying workers more improves the government’s financial situation, which is critical at a time of rising deficits and dangerous levels of debt. On top of all that, higher wages increase spending, which in turn improves production. 70% of the US economy relies on consumer spending.

That is why this debate should not be framed as if higher wages only help “someone else.” They improve prosperity for the entire nation.

Sources for this section

• CBO, “The Effects on Employment and Family Income of Increasing the Federal Minimum Wage.” Estimated that a $15 minimum wage by 2025 would raise wages for 17 million directly affected workers and many of 10.3 million potentially affected workers earning slightly above the new minimum.

• EPI, “The impact of the Raise the Wage Act of 2025.” Estimated that a $17 federal minimum wage by 2030 would affect 22.2 million workers, about 15% of the U.S. wage-earning workforce, and provide $70 billion in additional annual wages.

• Redmond, Doorley, and McGuinness, “The Impact of a Minimum Wage Change on the Distribution of Wages and Household Income.” Found wage spillover effects extending to the 30th percentile of the wage distribution.

• Hamilton Project / Brookings, “The Ripple Effect of a Minimum Wage Increase on American Workers.” Explains how minimum-wage increases affect workers earning slightly above the minimum.

• EPI, “Balancing paychecks and public assistance.” Found that among workers in the bottom three wage deciles, each $1 increase in hourly wages reduced the likelihood of receiving means-tested public assistance by 3.1 percentage points.

• Center for American Progress, “The Effects of Minimum Wages on SNAP Enrollments and Expenditures.” Estimated that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 would reduce federal nutrition assistance spending by $46 billion over 10 years.

• JAMA Network Open / PMC, “State Minimum Wage and Food Insecurity Among US Households With Children.” Found that more generous state minimum-wage policies may reduce food insecurity among households with children at risk of economic hardship.

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We have done this before

America has already had a stronger minimum wage.

The federal minimum wage reached its peak in 1968. The country did not collapse. Businesses still existed. People still became rich. The economy grew at a faster pace than it does today. The national debt was much lower. The middle class was at its strongest.

That does not mean the 1968 minimum wage caused all of that on its own. The strong middle class came from multiple policies and conditions: stronger unions, higher taxes on the rich, more public investment, less extreme corporate power, and a political system that had not yet surrendered so much power to billionaires and corporate lobbyists.

The livable minimum wage was part of that system. A strong wage floor helped set a standard for the value of work.

Since then, Congress has allowed inflation to erode the federal minimum wage. The wage has been stuck at $7.25 since 2009. It has half the buying power today that it had in 1968, despite workers being more productive, the economy being much larger, and corporations earning record profits.

America was prosperous with a quality minimum wage in 1968, and it can be again today.

Sources for this section

• U.S. Department of Labor, “History of Changes to the Minimum Wage Law.” Official history showing the federal minimum wage rose to $7.25 on July 24, 2009 and has not increased since.

• EPI, “Setting high standards for a federal minimum wage.” Reports that the federal minimum wage reached $1.60 in 1968, equivalent to $12.62 in 2026 dollars, and was about 61% of the national median wage.

• EPI, “The federal minimum wage is officially a poverty wage in 2025.” Discusses the collapse in the real value of the federal minimum wage and the workers left behind in states still using the federal floor.

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The rebuttal

The minimum-wage debate is framed as either we have low prices and more jobs, or higher pay, higher prices, and fewer jobs. That framing benefits employers who want to exploit labor for profits.

The evidence shows the truth.

California raised fast-food wages to $20 an hour. Wages went up, employment did not fall, hours were not cut, and prices rose about 1.5%. San Jose raised its minimum wage by 25%, and restaurant prices rose about 1.45%. Broader studies across states, cities, and border counties repeatedly find little to no meaningful job loss from minimum-wage increases.

Higher minimum wages also ripple upward to workers who already earn above the minimum. They reduce hardship. They can reduce food insecurity. They can reduce reliance on public assistance. They put money in the pockets of people who will spend it in their communities.

If a business can only survive by paying poverty wages, then the problem is the business model. No one who works full time should be poor. America is rich enough to pay people a living wage. The only thing missing is the political will to make employers do it.

There was widespread public support for extending healthcare subsidies, but the Republican Party opposed that approach, opting instead to reduce them, leading to millions losing their coverage. Even if they were extended, the subsidies are, at best, a much-needed band-aid until a better solution is implemented.

The Democratic Party previously pushed for universal healthcare, as the rest of the world uses, but while there is broad public support for universal healthcare, that support is split between those who believe it should be through private insurance and those who prefer it to be through the government. And overall, the Republican Party still opposes moving toward any universal healthcare system, creating a significant political hurdle.

Even talk of a public option for health insurance is mired in debate. We find ourselves in a sort of healthcare limbo where the problem worsens while no solutions are implemented.

But there is one affordable solution we could enact first to improve the situation.

One of the most important and cost-saving forms of healthcare is preventative care. Discovering illnesses before they worsen makes them easier and less expensive to treat. It reduces hospitalizations and emergency room visits and results in fewer days of missed work. But while everyone can get treatment in an emergency room regardless of their insurance, not everyone has access to the most affordable and effective form of healthcare.

We can change that. We can provide universal, comprehensive primary care for all Americans for less than the requested increase to the military budget.

What is included in this comprehensive care?

• Annual primary care visit

• Preventive screenings

• Vaccines

• Chronic disease management visits

• Follow-ups ordered by a primary care doctor

• Post-hospital discharge follow-up

• Mental health screening

• Pediatric visits

• Pregnancy-related primary care

• Basic mental health integration

• Medication management

• Nutrition counseling

• Basic urgent care for non-emergencies

• Labs and routine diagnostics

• Dental and vision checkups

• A free pair of glasses once per year

• Community health workers for high-risk patients

Dental and vision care are often treated as optional, but they are not optional if you are the person who cannot see well enough to work, drive, read, apply for jobs, or help your child with homework. They are not optional if an untreated dental problem becomes pain, infection, missed work, or an emergency room visit.

Chronic disease management means that an illness that could have ended your career becomes something that is fully manageable. A person who can get their blood pressure treated, diabetes managed, depression screened, or asthma controlled is more likely to keep working, keep earning, and keep supporting their family. Healthcare is not separate from the economy. Health is what allows people to participate in it.

This is real, extensive medical care that can transform lives.

The cost for this type of program would be under $300 billion per year. The choice is not whether we pay for care. We already pay. We pay when untreated diabetes becomes kidney failure. We pay when uncontrolled blood pressure leads to a stroke. We pay when a treatable infection becomes a hospitalization. We pay when someone misses work, loses income, loses insurance, and ends up in medical debt. Universal primary care means we pay earlier, when it’s cheaper, and before people’s lives fall apart.

In 2017, there were 3.5 million hospital stays that cost $34 billion, but were preventable with proper care. And that is an important part of this program: $200 billion in costs could be recouped through fewer emergency room visits, shorter hospital stays, reduced medical debt, and lower private insurance costs, because primary care would no longer be part of their services.

Compare this to the military budget that already costs $1 trillion each year, and the request is to raise it to $1.5 trillion next year. All other nations combined spend $1.9 billion. That’s how close America is getting to outspending the rest of mankind on the ability to wage war. Why can we spend on waging unnecessary wars but not on keeping people healthy, active, and working?

We do not have to solve the entire healthcare system in one bill to make people’s lives dramatically better. We can start with the front door. Give every American access to a doctor, basic urgent care, dental checkups, eye exams, and glasses. Catch illness early. Keep people working. Keep families out of medical debt. Stop waiting until people are sick enough, desperate enough, or poor enough to qualify for help.

America already pays for untreated illness. Universal primary care lets us pay earlier, pay less, and save lives in the process.

The Claim

We often hear that the rich already pay more than their fair share of taxes. This claim is used to argue that wealthy people deserve more tax cuts or that raising taxes on the rich would be unfair.

If you challenge that idea, someone may pull out a chart like this:

At first glance, that sounds convincing.

The top 1% received 20.6% of adjusted gross income and paid 38.4% of federal income taxes. The bottom half received 12.3% of adjusted gross income and paid 3.3% of federal income taxes. So the rich must be overtaxed, right?

No.

The chart only looks at federal income taxes. It does not include payroll taxes, which are deducted from all workers’ paychecks. And it uses adjusted gross income, which excludes much of the wealth gains that make the richest households richer. It ignores the fact that America taxes work more than wealth.

Sources for this section

• Tax Foundation summary of IRS tax year 2023 data: Reports that the top 1% had 20.6% of adjusted gross income and paid 38.4% of federal income taxes, while the bottom 50% had 12.3% of AGI and paid 3.3% of federal income taxes.

• NTUF summary of IRS tax year 2023 data: Also summarizes the 2023 IRS percentile data and gives the top 1% threshold and tax shares.

The Reality

The first warning sign that a major part of the situation is being left out of the “rich pay more than their fair share” argument is that it starts with adjusted gross income and addresses only federal income taxes.

When we compare income taxes and payroll taxes to net-worth gains, the picture changes dramatically.

The bottom half of Americans received just 1.7% of the country’s household net-worth gains in 2023, but paid 3.3% of federal income taxes and about 16.5% of federal payroll taxes.

The top 1% captured 34.7% of household net-worth gains and paid 38.4% of federal income taxes, but only about 6.6% of payroll taxes.

There is a group paying more than its fair share, but it isn’t the wealthy. It is the lowest earners. That is because America prefers to tax work rather than money.

Sources for this section

• Federal Reserve Distributional Financial Accounts: The Fed’s DFA data provides quarterly household wealth by percentile group, including the top 0.1%, the rest of the top 1%, the next 9%, the next 40%, and the bottom half. The Fed describes this as a comprehensive measure of U.S. household wealth by group.

• FRED series for top 1% net worth: FRED lists quarterly net worth held by the top 1% in millions of dollars, sourced from the Federal Reserve’s Distributional Financial Accounts.

• FRED series for bottom 50% net worth: FRED lists quarterly net worth held by the bottom 50%, also sourced from the Federal Reserve’s Distributional Financial Accounts.

• Treasury Office of Tax Analysis distribution table: Treasury’s 2024 current-law distribution table breaks federal tax burden into categories, including individual income taxes and payroll taxes by income group. The payroll-tax shares above are calculated from that table.

When Wealth Is Not Income

Most working-class income comes from getting paid for doing labor. The government is great at taxing paychecks. Your employer reports your wages. Federal income taxes are withheld. Social Security and Medicare taxes come out automatically. At the end of the year, you file taxes to compare what was withheld with what you actually owed.

Wealth works differently.

A large share of wealthy income comes from investments. If you buy stock for $1,000 and later sell it for $10,000, the $9,000 gain is a capital gain. If you sell the investment after holding it for one year or less, it is a short-term capital gain and is generally taxed like ordinary income. But if you sell the investment after holding it for more than a year, it is a long-term capital gain and is taxed at lower rates.

High earners may also owe the Net Investment Income Tax, or NIIT. NIIT is a separate 3.8% tax on certain investment income for people above the income threshold. For single filers, the threshold is $200,000.

So the top federal rate on long-term capital gains is generally 23.8% when NIIT applies. Now compare that to income from work.

Ordinary income tax rates go up to 37%, and wages are also subject to payroll taxes. There is no special 0% tax bracket for wages, the way there is for long-term capital gains. And by the time a single filer’s ordinary taxable income exceeds $50,000, it has reached a 22% tax bracket. Quite a bit higher than how large wealth gains are taxed.

Even for the rich, the tax code does not treat work and wealth the same. Here is a simple example.

Assume a single filer receives $1,000,000 in wages. Now compare that with someone who receives $1,000,000 in long-term capital gains. Using 2026 federal brackets, the standard deduction, no state taxes, and including NIIT where it applies:

Even after including NIIT, $1 million in long-term capital gains can face about $160,000 less in federal tax than $1 million in wages.

If a stock or other asset rises in value but the owner does not sell it, the gain is unrealized. Unrealized gains are not taxed. This makes sense. The owner hasn’t yet received the money from the gains, and the value could rise or fall before they sell it.

Much of the wealth gains of the highest earners are in unrealized capital gains. But they have a trick for using and benefiting from those gains without paying taxes.

Wealthy people can take out a loan against the value of their unrealized capital gains and use that loan to pay their bills, buy things, or even invest further to increase their wealth, without ever paying any income tax. One reason this is worth it is that the interest on the loans is much lower than the tax rate that would be paid on the capital gains.

Even more incredible is that if the loan is used on another investment, the interest for the loan can be deducted from investment income, further reducing their tax burden. And this is exactly what many wealthy people do. Below are some links to great descriptions of this practice, which has sometimes been labeled as “Buy, Borrow, Die”.

We discussed the “Buy” and “Borrow” parts of that strategy. The “Die” part matters too.

When someone dies and passes an appreciated asset to heirs, the asset often receives a stepped-up basis. That means the tax basis is reset to the value at the time of inheritance.

Example:

• Someone buys stock for $1,000.

• They hold it until death, when it is worth $40,000.

• Their heir receives it with a stepped-up basis of $40,000.

• If the heir sells it immediately for $40,000, the $39,000 gain is not taxed as capital gains income.

That means the wealthy can grow their wealth, borrow against it, transfer to heirs, and avoid income tax on any of it.

Work is taxed now. Wealth can often be taxed later, taxed less, or sometimes not taxed as income at all.

Sources for this section

• DC Fiscal Policy Institute “Buy, Borrow, Die” rundown

• Yale Budget Lab “Buy-Borrow-Die”

• IRS Topic 559: Explains the 3.8% Net Investment Income Tax and the income thresholds, including $200,000 for single filers.

• IRS 2026 inflation adjustments: Lists 2026 ordinary income tax brackets and the $16,100 standard deduction for single filers.

• 2026 capital gains tax brackets: Kiplinger’s 2026 capital-gains tax guide lists the long-term capital gains thresholds, including 0% up to $49,450 for single filers and 20% beginning above $545,500.

When Income Is Hidden

The rich have numerous ways to hide their income to avoid paying taxes. Everything from loopholes, loans, deductions, charities, and offshore accounts.

There is the yacht deduction. The way this works is that someone can buy a nice, expensive yacht and, as long as they then charter it out to profit from it, they can deduct the entire cost of the yacht from their income the same year they buy it. So when a rich person does this and buys a $5 million yacht, their income is treated as $5 million lower than what it actually is.

Then there are huge charitable donations, which sound like a good thing, and can be, but some are simply shady ways to protect wealth.

Billionaire Charles Johnson donated a mansion to his own private foundation to gain $38 million in tax savings. The agreement was supposed to be that in exchange for these tax breaks, the mansion would be open to the public 40 hours each week. Instead, a few dozen lottery winners were allowed a 2-hour tour on Wednesday each week. It was not actually a gift to the public. It was just a tax haven often used for other, non-public events.

Over $1 trillion worth of real estate, artwork, stocks, and other assets are held in these charitable trusts. But many are not truly charitable.

There is a ProPublica article that discusses these foundations and includes a bit on Ken Xie, who had received $30 million in tax breaks from his charitable foundation. This foundation bought a $3 million home from his girlfriend and then allowed her to continue living there. Xie lived there part of the time, too.

The Trump Foundation was shut down for misconduct, and Donald Trump was forced to pay $2 million. Sometimes the abuse of the system is caught, but even then, prosecution can be lengthy, complicated, and expensive.

There are offshore trusts and shell companies used to hide income, some of it legal, some of it not. I talked about the yacht deduction. There are other clever ways to convert personal expenses, such as jets and cars, into business expenses through passthrough LLCs.

The wealthy hide their money, reclassify income, and do everything they can to avoid taxes. So whenever someone claims that the wealthy are paying more than their fair share, know that they’re hiding large portions of their share altogether.

Sources for this section

• ProPublica article on charitable trusts

• Press release on the Trump Foundation verdict.

Payroll Taxes Expose The Trick

Those who claim the rich pay more than their fair share intentionally leave out payroll taxes because it exposes how the tax burden is actually greatest on the lowest earners.

Payroll taxes are the taxes workers see every paycheck. They fund Social Security and Medicare. For many low- and middle-income workers, payroll taxes are one of the biggest federal taxes they pay.

The bottom half of Americans paid about 16.5% of federal payroll taxes, according to the Treasury’s distribution data. The top 1% paid about 6.6%. That is a very different picture from the income-tax chart. There are two major reasons. First, Social Security taxes are capped. In 2026, only the first $184,500 of wages are subject to Social Security tax.

Second, payroll taxes apply to work, not wealth.

Capital gains are not subject to Social Security payroll taxes. Unrealized gains are not. Loans against assets are not.

Medicare is different from Social Security because its tax cap was removed in 1993. High-wage workers also pay an additional Medicare tax above the income threshold. But Medicare payroll taxes still mainly apply to wages and self-employment income. They do not apply to capital gains.

There’s another trick the wealthy use to avoid Medicare taxes: exploiting a well-known loophole that has been abused for decades, one that Congress has backed down from fixing under pressure from the rich.

By creating a limited partnership through which money can be funneled, self-employment tax can be avoided through a loophole created while trying to stop the abuse of Social Security by government employees.

This loophole wasn’t used much until the tax cap on Medicare was removed, at which point the rich began looking for a way to avoid the larger tax. This article by ProPublica discusses the full scheme and even highlights a case where a person could form a limited partnership himself, with each partner being a different business he owned.

These are the lengths the wealthy go to in order to avoid paying their taxes.

Sources for this section

• ProPublica Medicare tax loophole: exposes limited partnership schemes to avoid paying Medicare taxes.

• SSA contribution and benefit base: The Social Security taxable maximum is $184,500 in 2026, and the OASDI tax rate is 6.2% for employees and 6.2% for employers.

• IRS NIIT explanation: NIIT is a 3.8% tax on certain net investment income above the income threshold, not a standard payroll tax on all wealth gains.

• Treasury distribution table: Used to calculate payroll-tax shares by income group.

Low Earners Are Not The Freeloaders

It is true that 31% of income tax filers do not pay any federal income tax, but this isn’t because they’re freeloading off the system. It is because they don’t have any money to give.

Just like how businesses only pay income tax on profits, not money that was used to operate the business, people get to exempt a certain amount of their income from federal income tax needed to live. We’ve acknowledged that it costs a certain amount of money simply to exist, so the government doesn’t tax you on that small amount.

These people struggling to exist, still pay payroll taxes, so it is wrong to claim they don’t pay taxes. There are also sales tax, state and local taxes, and tariffs, which are taxes. To suggest that someone who is being taxed in so many ways is a freeloader is shameful slander.

But what do you call it when the richest 25 Americans see their wealth increase over 4 years by over $400 billion but pay only $13.6 billion in income taxes, a 3.4% rate? Or when someone who increases their net worth by amost $4 billion in a year ends up paying zero federal income tax?

That’s what ProPublica found when looking through tax records of the wealthiest Americans, linked below.

One of the more shocking discoveries was that Jeff Bezos not only paid zero federal income tax in 2011, but he also claimed and received a $4,000 child tax credit while his net worth was around $18 billion. The government giving a billionaire money? Who is the freeloader?

America has a progressive income tax. Someone making billions isn’t supposed to be paying a lower rate than a teacher, firefighter, plumber, or any other hard-working American. The wealthy aren’t paying the proper tax rate because a lot of their wealth isn’t even being taxed.

Sources for this section

• ProPublica overview: Explains how billionaires can pay little or sometimes nothing in federal income taxes compared with their wealth growth.

• ProPublica IRS Files: ProPublica reported that the 25 wealthiest Americans saw their wealth rise by $401 billion from 2014 to 2018 while paying $13.6 billion in federal income taxes, which ProPublica calculated as a 3.4% “true tax rate” relative to wealth gains.

Pay Workers More

There is one obvious answer to the complaint that low earners do not pay enough federal income tax:

Pay workers more.

If workers earned more, more of them would owe federal income tax, and fewer would need help for federal assistance. Higher wages increase tax revenue, reduce pressure on safety-net programs, and boost the economy through consumer spending.

The problem is not that low-income workers are undertaxed. The problem is that too many workers are underpaid. The 2026 Dayforce/Living Wage Institute report found that half of full-time U.S. workers do not earn a livable wage. An increase of 5% since 2021. So when someone says low earners should pay more income tax, the answer is simple:

Pay them more.

Sources for this section

• Dayforce/Living Wage Institute: study on how many workers are paid livable wages.

The Stock Market Belongs Mostly To The Rich

Like trickle-down economics, the claims that lower tax rates on investments held over one year (long-term capital gains) increase corporate investment and economic growth turned out to be false. And, like trickle-down economics, the policy mainly benefits the rich.

The top 1% own half of the wealth invested in stocks and mutual funds, the bottom 50% just 1%. In plain language: the top 1% owns about half of the money Americans have invested in the markets, while the bottom half owns almost none of it.

Lower tax rates on long-term capital gains allow the rich to pay lower taxes.

Sources for this section

• FRED/Federal Reserve corporate equities and mutual fund shares: FRED provides the Federal Reserve DFA data series for corporate equities and mutual fund shares by wealth group, including the bottom 50%, top 1%, and top 0.1%.

• Federal Reserve DFA overview: Explains that the dataset breaks household wealth into percentile groups and includes wealth composition.

How To Fix It

The rich are not paying more than their fair share. They’re not even paying their share because large portions of their income are taxed at a lower rate, and much of their wealth gains are not taxed at all.

To fix that, we need to tax all money fairly, not tax work more than wealth.

1. Tax capital gains like income

Long-term capital gains and qualified dividends should be taxed at ordinary income tax rates for high-income households.

2. End stepped-up basis

Capital gains should not disappear at death.

If wealthy people can hold assets until death and pass them to heirs with the gains erased for income-tax purposes, then the capital-gains tax becomes optional for generational wealth.

End stepped-up basis, or tax large unrealized gains at death.

3. Limit buy-borrow-die

Ultra-wealthy households should not be able to live off loans against appreciated assets forever while avoiding capital-gains taxes.

Borrowing against large appreciated assets should be treated as a taxable event.

4. Make payroll taxes fairer

Lift or eliminate the Social Security wage cap.

Right now, a worker making $60,000 pays Social Security tax on every dollar of wages, while someone making $1 million in wages stops paying Social Security tax after the first $184,500.

5. Apply Medicare taxes more consistently

High-income business and investment income should not be able to slip around Medicare taxes through clever structures.

If ordinary workers cannot opt out of Medicare taxes, wealthy business owners and financiers should not be able to either.

6. Fund enforcement

A tax system that lets the rich use complex structures requires an IRS capable of auditing them.

Defunding tax enforcement is effectively a tax cut for people wealthy enough to hide behind complexity.

The worst part is that inflation is now rising faster than wages. Real average hourly earnings fell last month, meaning paychecks are buying less. Life is getting more expensive, and Americans are falling behind.

Crude oil production was hit by retaliatory strikes across the Gulf region in the early days of the fighting, and the Strait of Hormuz was closed, disrupting one of the world's most important energy supply routes.

But gas prices were only the beginning.

Higher oil prices mean higher diesel and jet fuel prices. Diesel powers much of the transportation system. It moves raw materials to factories, finished goods to warehouses, and products to stores and consumers. When diesel prices rise, costs rise. Jet fuel has pushed airfare higher as well. The strain is so great that an American airline declared bankruptcy, citing high fuel prices, and immediately ceased operations.

Oil is also used in petrochemicals, plastics, packaging, and countless industrial products. That means the war does not just affect what people pay at the pump. It affects the cost of making and moving the goods people buy every day.

The same pattern is showing up in food. A large amount of fertilizer moves through global shipping routes affected by the war, and higher fertilizer costs are adding pressure on farms. Fruits and vegetables are now up 6.1% over the past year, far above overall inflation.

There are also disruptions that most people never think of. Helium is one of them. With a major share of global supply disrupted, healthcare equipment that relies on helium becomes more expensive to operate and maintain. Most Americans will not see a line item labeled “helium” on a bill, but they will feel it through a healthcare system that is already becoming more expensive as cuts to healthcare subsidies go into effect.

That is the problem with this war. Its costs do not stay on the battlefield. They move through energy, food, transportation, healthcare, and consumer prices. And this is happening in an economy where households were already pushed to the brink with no room to absorb it.

Household debt has climbed to nearly $19 trillion. Credit card balances remain at record highs. Many families were already relying on debt, delayed purchases, and shrinking savings before this latest inflation spike hit.

At the same time, Americans are paying more in taxes while receiving less in return.

A Yale Budget Lab estimate found the average household is paying roughly $1,500 more because of tariffs. Meanwhile, the average tax refund this year only increased by a few hundred dollars. All of the claims that your taxes were being reduced were false. The taxes were shuffled around, and you ended up paying more.

The government is effectively taking more money out of working people’s pockets while reducing services and support. Healthcare subsidies were cut. Food assistance was cut. Affordable housing programs were cut. Environmental and Climate programs were cut. Green Energy funding was cut. Yet despite all of this, the deficit and debt are growing even faster than before due to major tax breaks for the wealthy and tax loopholes for corporations.

The job market is offering no relief. April added 115,000 jobs, but previous months were revised down by 16,000. Job growth in 2026 remains slightly better than last year but far weaker than in 2024. Unemployment has slowly risen, and labor participation rates have decreased. America has the largest share of men not working since 1948, something so few people have been discussing that it has been dubbed “the quiet catastrophe".

The Federal Reserve is now in a worse position, too. When inflation was cooling, rate cuts looked more likely. With inflation rising again, the Fed has less room to cut interest rates and may even raise them. That means higher costs can remain in place for mortgages, credit cards, auto loans, and small businesses. Families are getting squeezed by prices on one side and borrowing costs on the other.

There is also the direct cost of the war itself. The price tag has already risen to around $60 billion. That is more than enough to have covered two more years of federal healthcare subsidies that were cut because we were told America could not afford them.

That is the choice being made.

If the war ended tomorrow, prices would not immediately return to normal. Supply chains take time to repair. Shipping routes have to reopen. Inventories and transportation costs take time to work their way back through the economy. Americans saw this after the pandemic, when disruptions continued affecting prices long after the original crisis passed.

For now, there is no clear end in sight. Congress could end this war today. It has the power to do so. But Congress has refused to use its authority over war, just as it refused to fully confront illegal tariffs that raised prices on consumers.

That is why the midterms matter.

Congress is supposed to represent the public, control spending, and decide when America goes to war. If lawmakers refuse to exercise those responsibilities, voters have the power to replace them with people who will.

November is coming, and it is time to make a change.

It was an illegal war from the start, and it remains illegal even by the justifications given.

Going to war is a power that the Constitution bestows solely upon Congress to ensure debate, discussion, and public views are considered before sending the American people to war. The reason it took so long for the United States to join the Second World War is that the public was against it, and Congress wouldn’t authorize it.

Since then, Presidents have increasingly bypassed that power by claiming that their activities are anything other than war, using terms like “special military intervention” and “armed response”.

After the presidential overreach during the Vietnam War, particularly the secret bombings of Cambodia, Congress enacted the War Powers Resolution to place more formal restrictions on how presidents can utilize the military without Congressional approval. Congress was so united in this effort that it overcame a veto by then-President Richard Nixon.

This resolution gives the president the authority to deploy the military to address imminent threats and emergencies. It requires the President to brief Congress on the action he took within 48 hours and then allows 60 days of conflict before military forces must be withdrawn if Congress has not passed an authorization for the use of military force. Here is the specific text of the resolution regarding the 60-day timeframe:

Within sixty calendar days after a report is submitted or is required to be submitted pursuant to section 4(a)(1), whichever is earlier, the President shall terminate any use of United States Armed Forces with respect to which such report was submitted (or required to be submitted), unless the Congress (1) has declared war or has enacted a specific authorization for such use of United States Armed Forces, (2) has extended by law such sixty-day period, or (3) is physically unable to meet as a result of an armed attack upon the United States. Such sixty-day period shall be extended for not more than an additional thirty days if the President determines and certifies to the Congress in writing that unavoidable military necessity respecting the safety of United States Armed Forces requires the continued use of such armed forces in the course of bringing about a prompt removal of such forces.

There was no imminent threat. Iran was not working on a nuclear weapon. US intelligence confirmed this in their 2025 threat assessment. This report is available to the public. Here is what it says:

“We continue to assess Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003”

The report also warned that a conflict in Iran would cause it to disrupt supply lines in the Strait of Hormuz and attack other countries in the region, despite this administration claiming that Iran’s response was a surprise:

“Iran’s large conventional forces are capable of inflicting substantial damage to an attacker, executing regional strikes, and disrupting shipping, particularly energy supplies, through the Strait of Hormuz.”

Not only was Iran not working on a nuclear weapon, but the Trump administration claimed the bombings in June that utilized stealth bombers with bunker buster munitions had destroyed Iran’s nuclear program. Obliterated was the term he used.

Intelligence reports also concluded that Iran was not planning to attack US forces, only that it would retaliate if attacked.

All of this means Trump was required to get approval from Congress before starting the war. He did not, and Congress refused to hold him accountable. Today marks 60 days, and the war continues on in violation of the War Powers Resolution. Congress has not declared war, has not legally extended the 60-day limit, and the US is not facing an armed attack.

Not only has Congress not approved an authorization, but they left town as quickly as they could yesterday to avoid dealing with it.

The Iran War is the most unpopular war America has engaged in; support is even lower than for the Vietnam War, which, up until this conflict, had been the most regretted war in US history.

Republicans want to avoid the fallout from this disaster. The midterms are going to be a major repudiation for the Grand Old Party, and no one wants to be on the record supporting this poorly planned failure of a war.

Republicans are also too cowardly to stand against Trump and face his wrath of late-night tweets. So they’re avoiding dealing with the issue for as long as possible, even as Trump violates the law.

There is no clear goal for this war, no exit strategy, and gas has skyrocketed to the highest cost in four years. Inflation is at its highest level in 2 or 3 years, depending on the metric used, and continues to rise. All of this is because of a war that never needed to happen.

Without a Congress that is willing to do its job, the illegal war will continue.

It is up to voters to show how unacceptable this is. Voters must remove from office every politician who refuses to stand up to the president and do their job. The midterms are coming.

https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ATA-2025-Unclassified-Report.pdf

At the start of the war, it was claimed that Iran was planning to attack the US first, which is why America bombed the nation. The administration later admitted that Iran only planned to attack in response to being attacked. Then there was the claim about freeing the Iranian people from their oppression. Bombing an elementary school, bridges, and threatening to blow up every power plant in the country shows it was never about the Iranian people.

Another claim was that the attacks were necessary to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, something we’ve heard was imminent since the 1990s. US intelligence said that Iran was not working on a nuclear weapon, and we had supposedly destroyed their nuclear capabilities with bunker-busting bombs just eight months earlier.

And the final reason was that it was about regime change, but the Trump administration has given up on that idea and is attempting to negotiate with those in charge. Those negotiations continue to go nowhere, despite Trump claiming he’s already won and the peace deal is practically agreed to. At the same time, Trump has extended the deadline for Iran to agree to a peace deal five times, each time issuing threats, before giving up and saying there was no rush.

While all of this has been going on, the US has burned through critical munitions, leaving us with shortages that will leave America unable to properly respond if major conflicts break out elsewhere. Analysts aren’t sure we would even have the resources to defend Taiwan if China invaded. And reports indicate it could take six years to replenish these stockpiles, weakening America’s ability to project force around the globe.

Those shortages are also causing America to stop military deliveries to allies that have already purchased arms. This is increasing tensions and prompting allies to look elsewhere for new deals. This will likely have a long-term negative effect on the United States ability to obtain new military deals with NATO nations.

Despite all of the bombings, threats, and negotiations, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, and reports indicate it could take up to six months to clear the mines AFTER peace is achieved. That means ongoing disruption to trade routes and higher prices for the rest of the year.

After a brief moment of gas prices reducing by a few cents from hopes that a peace deal was just around the corner, prices are rising once again. Inflation spiked last month to the highest level in years, and wholesale inflation is even higher this month, suggesting we will continue to see rising prices in the months to come.

Trump never had a proper plan heading into this war. He thought he could bomb Iran for a few days and then they’d turn around and agree to peace. Instead, they fought back, they found ways to create economic pain for a country they can’t defeat militarily. Iran has been able to show the world the trouble it can cause when attacked, while the United States looks incapable of using its military might to decisively win a war against a weaker opponent.

In the end, America will be lucky to get a deal with Iran that is as good as the nuclear deal we had previously. The deal that Trump tore up in his first term. We didn’t go to war, lose 13 servicemembers, have hundreds more wounded, and have our military bases throughout the Gulf attacked to achieve that deal, because we had leaders who knew how to negotiate.

Meanwhile, Iran, which was not pursuing a nuclear weapon, learned it doesn’t need one to be taken seriously. It repeatedly penetrated Israel’s Iron Dome. It attacked the energy infrastructure of other Middle East nations. It showed it has the capacity to disrupt global markets to a degree where US alliances are fracturing, US citizens are outraged at their government, and the West’s adversaries are empowered.

America may end up with a deal limiting Iran’s ability to produce a nuclear weapon, but in exchange, Iran showed the world how dangerous it can be.

But that is only a part of the story. A larger refund does not necessarily mean that you came out ahead. For many Americans, it just means you paid more somewhere else.

When Republicans passed the One Big Beautiful Bill last year, they promised to keep more money in the pockets of everyday Americans. They described it as the largest tax cut in history, and that’s where the spin begins. It was not the largest tax cut in history. It was mostly an extension of the 2017 tax cuts that were set to expire, with smaller additions layered on top.

Those extra tax cuts were gimmicks, designed to create talking points for elections instead of any meaningful change.

Take the “no tax on tips” provision. It sounds nice, but only about 2.5% of US workers are tipped workers. Of those, nearly 40% earn too little to pay federal income tax, which means the policy does nothing for them. And anyone who does get the benefit still pays payroll and state taxes on their tips.

“No tax on overtime” is a similar situation. Only around 15% of US workers qualify for overtime pay, and only 6% regularly work it. Roughly 90% of Americans will never benefit from this provision. And, like tips, overtime pay is still subject to payroll and state taxes.

While those income tax changes did increase the average refund by about $350, other taxes took that money away.

Last year, tariffs, an additional tax on goods, cost the average household $1,000. That more than offsets the increase in refunds. Unlike income taxes, which are structured to place a larger burden on higher earners, tariffs are regressive. Lower-income households spend a larger share of their income on goods, so they feel the impact more directly. These combined policies mean people are falling behind, not getting ahead.

That tradeoff is no accident. Analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that these policy changes “will increase taxes for most Americans, significantly expand income inequality, and add trillions to the national debt, while delivering substantial tax cuts to high-income households, corporations, and foreign investors.” Middle-income households are projected to pay $900 more in taxes this year, while the very wealthy will receive massive cuts.

There is a pattern to the design of these tax changes. The provisions aimed at the working and middle-class Americans are minor and temporary. The tax breaks on tips and overtime expire in 2028. This is what happened with the 2017 tax law as well, where individual tax cuts were made to expire while corporate tax cuts were made permanent. This approach, over the last several decades, has created major compounding benefits for those at the top, while doing nothing but saddling everyone else with higher national debt. Since the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act took effect in 2018, the national debt has nearly doubled, going from $20 trillion to $39 trillion today.

If the goal were to genuinely help low and middle-income earners, there are easy, effective solutions that would apply to everyone. Expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit would provide direct benefits to workers across a broad range of incomes. Unlike deductions, tax credits can increase refunds even for those who do not owe federal income tax, making them far more effective for lower-income households than narrowly targeted tax exclusions.

Raising the federal minimum wage would also have a wider and more lasting impact. It has not increased since 2009 and no longer reflects the cost of living in any state. Research continues to show that higher minimum wages can raise earnings without significant job losses. A recent UC Berkeley study found that a $20 minimum wage for fast-food workers in California had only a minimal effect on prices, increasing the price of a $4 menu item by just 6 cents, while raising wages and without causing job losses. Policies like these improve the lives of tens of millions of workers rather than a small subset.

There is also a larger issue lurking behind all of this. Tax cuts aren’t free. They reduce government revenue, and when they are not offset, they drive deficits higher. Those deficits are used later to justify cuts to programs that lower-income households rely on, including food assistance and healthcare. At the same time, other areas of spending, such as the military, continue to grow, shifting the balance of who benefits and who bears the cost.

Tax cuts sound great. They’re easy to sell because they promise more money in your pocket. But the truth is that unless you’re already wealthy, these tax cuts are little more than a temporary distraction that does nothing to improve your life. They are more than offset by higher costs elsewhere. Most Americans are left paying more overall, while receiving fewer benefits in return.

https://itep.org/new-from-itep-trump-tax-policies-raise-costs-for-most-americans-while-delivering-trillion-dollar-benefits-to-the-wealthy/

https://irle.berkeley.edu/publications/working-papers/effects-of-a-20-minimum-wage-evidence-from-granular-data-on-wages-employment-and-prices/

The case they make is built on misinformation, bad logic, and a misunderstanding of how the alliance actually works. Leaving NATO would not make America stronger or richer. It would weaken American power, reduce our influence, and make the world more dangerous in ways that would ultimately find their way to our shores.

The new grievance from some conservatives is that NATO countries did not join the United States in its war against Iran. But NATO is a defensive alliance. Its core principle is Article 5: an attack on one member is treated as an attack on all. That clause has been invoked exactly one time in NATO’s history, after the United States was attacked on 9/11.

NATO nations do not have an obligation to join fellow members in wars they start, such as when the US and Israel launched a bombing campaign against Iran at the end of February. In past conflicts, NATO members have sometimes joined the United States through separate coalitions and prior coordination outside of the alliance. Trump did not coordinate with, or even inform, other NATO nations about the attack against Iran beforehand. This war also followed recently after the US had threatened to invade and take over Greenland, which is a territory of Denmark, a fellow NATO ally.

Another false narrative is that the United States has paid trillions of dollars to NATO while other countries freeload. That is false. The “trillions” people cite are really total U.S. defense spending, which is fully separate from NATO’s common budgets. NATO’s common-funded budgets are much smaller, up to about $6.2 billion for 2026. Under NATO’s current cost-share formula, the United States and Germany each pay 15% of those common budgets. In other words, America and Germany pay the same share toward NATO, even though the U.S. economy is six times larger than Germany’s. That alone tells you America’s burden is not what critics claim.

Anti-NATO arguments take U.S. military spending, pretend it is money handed over to NATO, and then claim America is being robbed. But if the United States left NATO tomorrow, that would not eliminate the U.S. defense budget. America would still maintain its military and, based on the budget requests coming out of DC, would continue massively increasing that spending. Leaving NATO wouldn’t save America money. It would leave the United States with the same massive military costs and fewer allies helping extend American power.

The last misleading point concerns defense spending as a share of GDP. NATO has long had a guideline that members should spend at least 2% of GDP on defense, but it is a guideline, not a legally binding requirement for dues payments. Even so, all NATO members met or exceeded that 2% benchmark in 2025. At the top was Poland at 4.48% of GDP. The United States ranked seventh at 3.22%. NATO’s new target is 5% by 2035. Some nations are almost at that spending level, but not the US, leaving little room for complaining.

With the misinformation cleared up, let’s discuss the ways NATO benefits the United States.

First, NATO multiplies American power. The U.S. does not have to maintain global leadership alone because it works through an alliance of 32 countries, sharing planning, infrastructure, logistics, and intelligence. American power extends farther because of allied bases, militaries, and coordination. NATO also helps create a much broader intelligence picture through consultations, intelligence-sharing, and joint threat assessment. That makes the U.S. stronger than it would be on its own.

Second, NATO lowers the cost of American world leadership. The alliance allows the United States to share burdens with other wealthy democracies rather than trying to deter threats on its own. European allies and Canada have increased defense spending sharply in recent years. NATO says its combined defense spending reached more than $574 billion in 2025, and the U.S. share of total alliance defense spending has fallen as other members have increased theirs. That is what burden-sharing looks like.

Third, NATO has real economic value. The alliance has preserved a stable Europe, and stable allies make better trade partners and better places for investment than a continent shaped by insecurity and conflict. Allied defense spending also feeds back into the United States. SIPRI found that 58% of major arms imports by NATO’s European members in 2021–2025 came from the United States. NATO is not a weapons sales program, but allied military spending often supports the American industrial base.

Fourth, NATO helps prevent the kind of major war that the United States would get dragged into. That is one of the alliance’s core purposes. NATO was created not only to deter outside threats but also to help prevent renewed instability and militarism in Europe. That stability has been one of the great strategic bargains in modern history. It gave the United States a more secure Atlantic world, more reliable allies, and a much stronger position from which to project influence globally.

Fifth, NATO makes American diplomacy more effective. Sanctions, coordinated pressure, and deterrence carry more weight when they are backed by a bloc of major allies rather than by Washington acting alone. It is one reason adversaries like Russia benefit when Americans start talking themselves into abandoning the alliance.

Contrary to the complaints, US involvement in NATO is not charity requiring other nations to be beholden to everything we demand of them. It is one of the clearest examples of the United States gaining more from an alliance than it pays into it. America gets greater military reach, extensive intelligence networks, stronger trade relationships, decisive diplomacy, and a stable, prosperous Europe. In return, it pays a modest share of NATO’s common budgets while maintaining a defense budget it would keep without the alliance.

If the United States left NATO, it would be an unforced error. America would lose influence, creating an opening for Russia and China to expand theirs. The United States became the leader of the Western world not by isolating itself, but by building institutions and alliances that amplified its strength. Abandoning NATO would mean giving away one of America’s greatest strategic advantages.

https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2026/global-arms-flows-jump-nearly-10-cent-european-demand-soars

“It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.

You can’t do it on a federal level. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.”

He followed that up by releasing a budget request that seeks to raise military spending by around $500 billion in 2027, bringing it to a total of $1.5 trillion, while also adding more money for immigration detention on top of the previous large increases for ICE and CBP.

At the same time, the budget calls for major cuts to renewable energy programs, climate research, NASA, agriculture, housing, health programs, education research, civil rights enforcement in education, and housing assistance programs, including cutting a program that helps people in need pay for home heating. AmeriCorps would be eliminated. Rental assistance would be weakened and capped for many adults. Homelessness programs would be cut so deeply that as many as 170,000 people could be at risk of losing their homes.

Budgets are moral documents, and this one shows that the President’s priorities are all wrong. Near limitless spending on waging foreign wars while cutting programs that are needed to address the struggles of unaffordable housing, healthcare, and childcare.

Social Security exists because the Supreme Court upheld Congress’s power to tax and spend for the general welfare of the nation. That understanding was once much clearer in American politics. Over time, it has been pushed aside in favor of a much narrower vision of government, one that treats support for the workers who grow our food, build our houses, and fix our cars as excess but rarely asks the same questions about ever-expanding military spending.

That shift has had consequences.

The minimum wage was left to decay into a poverty wage. Social Security was allowed to weaken, and its reserves to run dry. Healthcare funding has been cut so far that hospitals have shut down. The meager $6 a day for food assistance has faced cuts even as living costs soared. Meanwhile, there has been no serious movement to restrain the growth of defense spending. This year, military spending rose above $1 trillion. Now the president wants to pile another half trillion on top of that, while the Pentagon prepares to ask for an additional $200 billion to cover the costs of the new war in Iran.

Even more maddening is that many of the programs we’re told our nation can’t afford would save the country money.

Hospital administrative costs have exploded and, in 2023, were twice the cost of the care provided to patients. Administrative costs for health insurance almost doubled over the past decade, reaching $131 billion in 2024. A system built around universal coverage allows for lower overhead and stronger price negotiation. The result is healthcare that costs less, covers more people, improves outcomes, and reduces wait times. There is no practical reason to prevent this, but there are political ones.

Profit-making in healthcare depends on preserving the current system. Insurance companies have donated almost $500 million to political campaigns over the past five years, and the broader healthcare industry spent roughly $1 billion lobbying Congress in 2025 alone. Politicians are paid to not support the people.

We see similar issues in education.

One of the clearest ways to lower costs for families while improving long-term outcomes is universal Pre-K. It allows more parents to work. It reduces dependence on federal aid over time and improves children's life outcomes. All of which results in the program paying for itself over time.

The solutions to reduce hardship, expand opportunity, and lower long-term public costs are not mysteries. They have been known for decades. But billions of dollars are spent to block them, and that effort has been so effective that many Americans now accept as fact the idea that the federal government cannot do what it clearly can, and absolutely should.

What America could do for its citizens, the prosperity it could create, makes this military spending even harder to defend.

The proposed $500 billion increase in spending could fund:

• Universal Pre-K for 3 and 4-year-olds

• Universal low-cost childcare for 0-2 year olds

• Federal paid parental leave program

• Free school lunches and breakfasts for all

• Free College, Trade Schools, and Apprenticeships

Altogether, those investments would total roughly $183 billion to $233 billion a year. That is less than half of the proposed increase to military spending. Even covering last year’s $160 billion Social Security Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance trust fund deficit would still keep the total below the increase in spending.

Money is not being withheld because the country cannot afford to improve people’s lives. It is being directed elsewhere, often wastefully.

The federal government can spend far better to support the country than it does today. It can invest in families, wages, housing, food, retirement security, and education. It can strengthen the floor beneath ordinary people instead of pouring ever more money into war.

There are larger reforms worth debating, including whether the many different support programs should be replaced with something simpler and more direct. There are also easier steps that should have happened long ago, such as raising the federal minimum wage over the next five years until it reaches a truly livable level.

But those conversations won’t happen if we keep pretending that caring for the general welfare of the nation is somehow outside the role of the federal government, when it is specifically defined in our Constitution in the same clause, even the same sentence, as providing for the common defense.

The country is not protected when families cannot afford childcare. It is not protected when people lose housing assistance, when hospitals shut down, when children go hungry, or when workers are paid wages that keep them in poverty. National security goes far beyond missiles, drones, and guns. True national security requires a thriving, prosperous public.

It is time to stop spending trillions of dollars on unnecessary wars and start investing in America’s workers and families. Most importantly, we need a Congress that understands this, and if they refuse to listen, that is what the midterms are for.

Workers are trapped.

Savings are falling. Credit card debt is at record highs. Hardship withdrawals from retirement accounts are on the rise. For the first time in Gallup’s survey history, struggling workers outnumbered thriving ones.

The problem isn’t just that life has become more expensive. It is that the economy isn’t offering a path to something better. America needs a plan to turn this around.

China faced a version of this problem a decade ago.

By 2015, its economic growth was slowing. Debt was rising. Lower-end manufacturing was moving to even cheaper labor markets. And China depended heavily on imports for critical high-tech components. The model that had powered China’s rise was no longer enough to carry it forward.

China’s leaders recognized that its economy needed to change. Part of the inspiration came from other countries’ efforts to modernize, including Germany’s Industry 4.0 initiative, which aimed to drive a modern industrial revolution. China moved in the same direction, launching the Made in China 2025 initiative.

Its purpose was to shift China away from relying mainly on export-driven industry using low-cost labor and toward innovation, advanced manufacturing, and domestic strength in future-focused technologies. The targeted sectors included robotics, aerospace, electric vehicles, biotech, advanced information technology, rail, and new energy equipment.

A decade later, China is now the world’s largest producer of electric vehicles. It controls a large share of battery supply chains. It dominates solar panel production and has rapidly expanded renewable energy across its own grid. It built the world’s largest high-speed rail network and exports rail and infrastructure systems across the globe. It has also become a major force in industrial robotics and commercial drones.

China still has weaknesses. It relies on foreign components in parts of aerospace and trails the United States in the most advanced microchips. But it made major gains across many of the industries most likely to shape the global economy in the decades ahead.

When a country expands into growing higher-value industries, it creates more room for skilled jobs, stronger supplier networks, and better wages. It generates upward mobility. Workers move into sectors with rising demand rather than being left to compete for shrinking opportunities in industries facing decline.

That is what American workers are missing right now. The United States is facing its own version of this choice, but instead of building a consistent long-term strategy, the government has wasted years on half-measures, trade wars, and political fights over technologies that are moving forward with or without us.

The slogan “drill, drill, drill” has led to a refocusing on fossil fuels at a time when they are becoming the industries of the past. Coal has already declined significantly. Oil demand is declining in advanced economies and will begin declining globally within a few years. Natural gas is expected to plateau soon after. Fossil fuels remain a significant part of the economy, but their importance will fade further with each passing year.

America needs a strategy that is clear, practical, and focused on where the world is headed. That means investment in rare-earth mineral processing, batteries, robotics, advanced manufacturing, renewables, electric vehicles, and biotech. It means rebuilding domestic supplier networks instead of waiting until a crisis exposes how dependent we have become on rivals and adversaries.

These investments also need to survive changes in political power. America had opportunities in solar, and opportunities to move earlier and more aggressively in energy storage and supply chains. Treating electric vehicles, renewable energy, and other emerging industries as partisan symbols does not stop those markets from growing. It simply means more of the jobs, expertise, and production will be elsewhere.

That is why the most important investment is in American workers.

As jobs in older technology continue to decline, newer, better-paying jobs will require different skills, certifications, and training. If America wants workers to move into the future economy, then it has to build the bridge to get there.

Offer free training to workers displaced by industrial change. Expand apprenticeships. Partner with employers and community colleges. Create clear pathways into technical and skilled careers for younger workers trying to find their place and for older workers whose industries are fading beneath them.

Investment in future industries is not just about beating China. It is about whether workers will have access to the kinds of jobs that can support the American Dream.

This requires building an economy that creates new opportunities instead of forcing people to cling to the scraps of the past. It means stronger wages, more resilience, and reducing dependence on the rest of the world for critical technologies. It means choosing to compete in the markets of the future instead of trying to squeeze a few more years out of the past.

The United States still has the talent, capital, and workforce to achieve this. What it lacks is focus. If we want American workers to share in that prosperous future, we need to invest in it.

https://www.gallup.com/workplace/703280/worker-thriving-declines-job-market-pessimism-grows.aspx

Prices have risen sharply in recent weeks following the conflict with Iran. Regular gas is approaching $4 a gallon nationwide, while diesel is already above $5.

If you drive about an hour each day, you’ll spend roughly $3,000 a year on gas at $4 a gallon. That’s an increase of almost $1,000 compared to before the recent spike. It may not seem like a crisis on its own, but gas is an unavoidable necessity that is deeply tied to the rest of the economy.

Let’s start with the basics.

Financial experts generally recommend keeping total transportation costs between 10–15% of take-home pay. That includes gas, insurance, loan payments, maintenance, and repairs.

The median personal income is around $45,000. At $3,000 a year, gas alone can approach 10% of take-home pay for many households. At the same time, automotive maintenance and repair costs have been rising faster than wages in recent years, putting additional pressure on already tight budgets.

The burden is not evenly distributed. Roughly half of all workers fall below the median income, and those who live in suburban and rural areas often drive longer distances and have fewer transportation options, so higher gas prices take up a larger share of their income.

Unlike many other expenses, fuel costs are difficult to reduce in the short term. Most people can’t quickly change where they live, how far they commute, or what kind of vehicle they drive.

These rising gas prices are happening at a time when a large share of full-time workers struggle to consistently cover basic costs like housing, food, healthcare, and transportation. The Urban Institute finds that almost half of American households lack enough income to reach long-term financial stability.

We can see this strain in the data.

Total outstanding credit card debt has continued to rise since the pandemic, reaching a record $1.28 trillion at the end of 2025. Personal savings rates have fallen from 7.5% in 2019 to around 3.5% today. Hardship withdrawals from retirement accounts have also reached record highs, 3x higher than pre-pandemic levels.

The Federal Reserve has found that a large share of Americans would struggle to cover a $400 emergency expense, meaning that the only way to afford an additional $1,000 in gas costs is to take on more debt or draw more from savings and retirement accounts.

That is the direct impact of higher gas prices. The indirect effects are even broader as higher fuel costs raise the price of nearly everything.

Raw materials have to be transported to factories. Finished goods move from warehouses to stores, then to consumers. Each step depends on transportation, much of it powered by diesel.

When fuel costs rise, those increases compound across the supply chain. Even products that don’t rely directly on oil become more expensive as transportation costs feed into final prices.

And the timing adds additional pressure.

Wholesale inflation data for last month came in higher than expected. These costs often show up in consumer prices in the months that follow, and those figures were measured before the recent increase in fuel prices.

These higher prices haven’t been felt by consumers yet, but they will be soon enough, and that will impact the broader economy.

The United States is largely a consumer-driven economy, relying on consistent spending to sustain growth. As essential costs like gas rise, households adjust by cutting back elsewhere.

Consumer sentiment is already low, lower than during the pandemic, with many expecting economic conditions to worsen throughout the year. That expectation alone can slow spending.

The economy has become increasingly uneven. Higher-income households account for a growing share of total consumer spending, while many lower- and middle-income households face tighter financial constraints. That imbalance can become more pronounced when costs rise, forcing those with less flexibility to pull back their spending more quickly.

How much does a $1 increase in the price of gas matter?

In a strong economy with broad income growth and financial stability, the impact is manageable. But in an economy where many households are already stretched, savings are limited, and spending is increasingly concentrated among a select few, the effects will be significant.

Rising gas prices don’t just increase one expense. They expose the struggles of millions of Americans and how sensitive the broader economy has become to even modest increases in everyday costs.

https://www.lendingtree.com/credit-cards/study/credit-card-debt-statistics/

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/03/americans-retirement-accounts-hardship-withdrawals-new-highs/

https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2025-economic-well-being-of-us-households-in-2024-savings-and-investments.htm#:~:text=Among%20the%2037%20percent%20of,from%2011%20percent%20in%202021.

Trump presents himself as a figure of strength. To much of the world, he looks increasingly weak and desperate. These aren’t isolated incidents. They are a pattern.

On February 28th, U.S. and Israeli forces launched attacks on Iran aimed at eliminating its leadership and degrading its military. Trump did not consult key allies or seek congressional approval, as required by the Constitution, continuing a series of unilateral decision-making that has marred much of his presidency.

The initial announcement of the attack and the following press conferences showed overconfidence. Previous actions, including earlier strikes on Iran and the successful removal of Venezuela’s leader, reinforced the administration’s belief that escalation would be limited and manageable.

Iran did not fold. It retaliated.

It struck U.S. bases. It struck Israel. It struck oil infrastructure. And it moved to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint that carries roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply. Oil prices surged past $100 a barrel. Gas prices jumped. Markets dropped. Iran cannot match the United States militarily, but it can disrupt the global economy.

Disruption of the Strait of Hormuz is one of the most widely discussed outcomes in any conflict with Iran. Yet the administration appeared caught off guard. In response, Trump turned to the same allies he hadn’t consulted before starting the war. The same ones in an alliance he had threatened to abandon. The same ones he had just hit with tariffs.

He asked them to send forces to help reopen the Strait and even announced that a coalition would step in to deal with Iran before any of those nations responded.

Then they declined.

One after another, each nation refused to send help. They didn’t start this war, and they had no interest in joining it. NATO is a defensive alliance, not an offensive one, and the United States had not been a reliable partner in the lead-up to the conflict. There was no reason for them to get involved.

Trump responded by insisting he didn’t need their help anyway. That pattern—acting alone, then seeking support, then dismissing it when it doesn’t go his way—has become a defining feature of his presidency.

Ukraine has developed impressive capabilities to counter Iranian-style drone warfare during Russia’s invasion. Last year, it offered to share that expertise with the United States and warned about the growing risk of drone-driven conflicts.

The administration declined.

After Iranian drone attacks killed seven U.S. servicemembers and forced costly defensive responses, the United States turned back and asked Ukraine for the help that was previously refused.

Even as the United States was seeking assistance from Ukraine, Trump was escalating tensions with its leadership.

Trump has been frustrated with Zelenskyy since failing to deliver on his promise to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. Instead of directing that frustration at Russia, which launched the unprovoked invasion, he has repeatedly criticized Ukraine for refusing to accept a deal that would have required giving up territory and weakening its position against future attacks.

That tension spilled over again, with Trump publicly dismissing Ukraine’s help, even as its expertise could save American lives. Dismiss the risk, reject the help, then scramble when the consequences arrive. The cycle repeats.

American weakness isn’t limited to conflicts abroad.

Over the past year, tariffs imposed on allies and trading partners have weighed on economic growth. Job creation hasn’t just stalled; it has reversed, with thousands of jobs lost over the past 10 months instead of millions created. Manufacturing has declined. Farm bankruptcies have increased. GDP growth has slowed to just 0.7% in the most recent quarter.

The combination of war-driven market disruptions and a self-inflicted economic slowdown has turned an economy that was once the envy of the world into a case study in what not to do.

Domestically, the limits of Trump’s power have become more visible.

Courts have repeatedly ruled against the administration. They have blocked major policies, declared key tariffs illegal, and stopped attempts to use government power for political retaliation. Even the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney for New Jersey was removed by the courts for unlawfully serving by bypassing Senate confirmation.

Even within his own party, Trump has struggled to push through priorities, including the SAVE Act, despite Republican control of Congress. Lawmakers are increasingly wary of being tied too closely to an administration that is losing ground politically.

Since Trump took office, Democrats have flipped seats across the country, and the midterms are shaping up to be a significant blowback to the GOP, with a loss of the House majority all but guaranteed.

There is a lesson to be learned in all of this. Strength is not defined by acting alone. It is defined by outcomes, by alliances, and by the ability to shape events without losing control of them. This requires not just military force, but soft power and cooperation.

Trump set out to project dominance on the world stage. Instead, he has exposed how limited his power is and how easily his demands can be resisted.

The world is watching. And what it sees is not strength.

https://www.axios.com/2026/03/10/us-ukraine-anti-drone-offer

Those days are coming to an end.

Oil demand in highly developed nations peaked twenty years ago. Demand in developing nations is expected to peak in just a few years. Oil is becoming a commodity of the past, and America is stuck thinking about energy as if it were still 1975.

Unlike other fossil fuels, oil isn’t primarily used to generate electricity for homes and businesses. It is used mostly in transportation, accounting for about two-thirds of demand. Cars and light trucks make up the largest share of that demand, and they are also experiencing disruptive change.

The United States has been relatively slow to adopt electric vehicles. They account for about 10% of new car sales. Europe has moved faster at roughly 22%, while China has gone all in, with around half of the new vehicles sold being electric. This trend is expected to accelerate worldwide.

Electric vehicles are already reshaping oil markets. Analysts estimate that every one million EVs on the road reduces oil demand by roughly 15,000 barrels per day. Over 20 million new EVs were sold last year.

If all road vehicles in the United States were to transition to electric, US oil demand could fall by roughly 40%. That will take decades, but the steady shift from gasoline and diesel to electric vehicles will continue to reduce oil consumption, just as it has already in parts of Europe and Japan.

Most of the remaining growth in global oil demand now comes from developing economies. Those nations are already embracing electric vehicles, with sales in 2024 doubling from the year before.

After transportation, the next largest uses of oil are petrochemicals and plastics. Most plastics today are not recycled, but new chemical technologies aim to change that. Researchers are also developing plant-based plastics made from materials such as corn, sugarcane, and even algae. Some petrochemical production has already shifted from oil to natural gas.

In other words, alternatives are emerging across nearly every major use of oil, and the largest sources of demand are also seeing the fastest change.

America may be moving away from oil more slowly than some other nations, but global demand still determines the health of the American oil industry. Oil is a globally traded commodity, so supply and demand in other parts of the world influence prices everywhere. There is also another complication: not all crude oil is the same.

The United States produces more oil than it consumes, but much of that production is light sweet crude. Most American refineries are designed to process heavier crude oil. As a result, the U.S. exports large amounts of the oil it produces while importing the types its refineries require. That means America cannot insulate itself from global oil markets simply by producing more oil domestically.

Changing demand and a prolonged period of relatively low prices have made new drilling investments less attractive. Bringing a new rig online can take years, and with long-term demand projections becoming more uncertain, companies are hesitant to commit billions of dollars to new production.

During the shale boom of the 2010s, American oil companies collectively lost hundreds of billions of dollars chasing growth. Today, many companies are prioritizing shareholder returns over aggressive drilling expansion.

Despite campaign promises to “drill, drill, drill,” there are actually fewer oil rigs operating today than when Trump took office. Companies have instead focused on improving technology to increase output from existing wells while older rigs are retired.

The administration opened land in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling bids last year and in Alaska’s Cook Inlet this year. Neither effort attracted a single bid.

The United States even launched a military operation that removed Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, from power, a move closely tied to the country’s massive oil reserves. Yet American corporations have shown little interest in doing business there. Exxon told the president that Venezuelan oil was “uninvestable.”

America’s continued obsession with oil reflects an economic mindset stuck decades in the past.

The broader fossil fuel era is beginning to wind down. Coal use in the United States has already declined dramatically. Global oil demand will plateau within a few years. Natural gas will remain important for longer, but even that market faces growing competition as renewable energy becomes the cheapest source of new electricity generation.

If the United States wants to remain the world’s leading economic power, it must lead the industries that will dominate the next generation of global markets:

• Renewable energy

• Electric vehicles

• Batteries and energy storage

• Robotics and automation

• Rare earth minerals

China has invested heavily in these industries for years and now holds leading global positions in solar panels, battery manufacturing, electric vehicles, and rare-earth processing. If America waits too long to compete in these markets, catching up will become far more difficult and expensive.

It is time for America to invest in the industries of the future rather than chasing those of the past.

The United States, alongside Israel, launched coordinated attacks across Iran, striking numerous sites and killing its leader. The Secretary of Defense said, “The United States is prevailing in this war.” Trump warned that American lives may be lost because “that often happens in war.”

Other Republicans are taking a different stance. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said, “We are not at war right now. We’re four days into a very specific, clear mission.” Senator Markwayne Mullin said, “This isn’t a war. We haven’t declared war.”

The debate over whether to call this a war reflects a deeper problem: the Trump administration has offered a series of shifting explanations for why the United States attacked Iran, what the objective is, and how long this conflict could last.

Only Congress has the power to take our nation to war. Admitting this is a war would also mean admitting that Trump violated the Constitution when he started this conflict.

By calling it a special military action, Republicans hope to rely on the War Powers Act, which allows the President to use military force in some cases without first obtaining permission from Congress. But a critical requirement of the War Powers Act is that there must be an immediate threat posed to the United States or its interests.

There wasn’t one.

Iran was in negotiations with the United States about its nuclear program. There had been no attacks from Iran since the ceasefire following the previous strikes by the United States and Israel in June—strikes that Trump said had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program. By that account, the nuclear program couldn’t be an imminent threat either. And Iran doesn’t possess ballistic missiles capable of reaching the United States.

The Trump administration has been tripping over itself trying to explain its justification for this war.

Initially, reporters were briefed that intelligence felt there was an imminent threat of attacks against US bases in the Middle East. Then Marco Rubio briefed the press:

“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

Those comments immediately set off a firestorm. The idea that America went to war not because of any imminent danger, but because an ally was determined to strike Iran amid ongoing negotiations, created outrage.

The Trump administration attempted to backpeddle, with Trump saying that it wasn’t because of Israel:

“We were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion that they were going to attack first. They were going to attack. If we didn’t do it, they would have attacked first. I felt strongly about that.”

Rubio was sent back out in front of reporters to change his position. He now said that Israel did not force Trump’s hand and that these attacks needed to happen because Iran was hiding behind its ballistic missile program.

The administration hasn’t given a convincing response to the goal of this war. We were told it was about regime change, only to be told it wasn’t. They said it was because of the risk of Iran getting a nuclear weapon, only to admit that Iran wasn’t even working on a weapon. The most recent reasoning given is that Iran’s missile programs, nuclear program, and navy must all be destroyed to bring security to the region.

While the administration struggles to explain why the war began, the consequences are already here. Iran retaliated. Six US servicemembers have been killed. Others were seriously wounded.

There have been deaths in Kuwait, Israel, the UAE, Lebanon, Bahrain, and Iran. Cargo ships and oil facilities have been attacked. Multiple US bases have been hit. Protesters rushed the US embassy in Pakistan, leaving more than 20 dead.

The death toll has passed 1,000. At least 100 of those killed were Iranian girls when an elementary school was struck on the first day of the war.

Even the timeline is unclear. At first, we were told the war might last two or three days. Then a week. Then four to five weeks. Then maybe eight. Most recently, Trump said the United States has the supplies to fight forever.

This came as questions were raised about the stockpiles of missile interceptors. These advanced weapons have been sent to Ukraine, were used in June during Iran’s retaliatory strikes after its facilities were bombed, and are being used today. Supplies are not infinite, and these missiles are not cheap. While the US has military dominance over Iran, the question is whether we’d have the supplies needed for another war, and if being involved in this conflict emboldens adversaries elsewhere, such as with China and its desire to retake Taiwan.

That is what this war has brought more than anything else: confusion. Why did we go to war while negotiations were ongoing, Iran wasn’t building a nuclear weapon, and there was no imminent threat? Why wasn’t this war debated in public as the Constitution intends and voted on by Congress like the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were? What is the goal of this war? What does victory look like, and how long will it take?

The administration cannot clearly explain why the war started, what the objective is, or how long it will last, yet the bombs are falling anyway, and Americans are largely against it.

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/mike-johnson-trump-war-iran-b2931950.html

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/03/trump-israel-iran-war

The rising tension comes just eight months after the US and Israel bombed Iran’s underground nuclear facilities. Trump insisted that the strikes “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capabilities and dismissed reports that the attack only set back the nuclear program by a few months.

US special envoy Steve Witkoff now says that Iran is “probably a week away from having industrial-grade bombmaking materials.” It is important to understand what that actually means.

To field a viable nuclear weapon requires three separate elements: uranium enriched to weapons-grade levels, a device capable of triggering a nuclear explosion, and a delivery system such as a ballistic missile. While all related, these steps are distinct. When officials say that Iran is “a week away,” they are referring to the time needed to enrich uranium to weapons-grade levels, not the time required to design and deploy an operational nuclear weapon.

Enrichment Explained

After the last strikes, you may have heard the term “centrifuge”. Centrifuges are machines used to enrich uranium by increasing the percentage of Uranium-235. Natural uranium is mostly Uranium-238, with less than 1% U-235. Nuclear power plants require enrichment at 3-5%. Nuclear weapons require higher levels, typically at least 90%.

Iran is currently enriching uranium to 60%. Israel and the United States see this as a threat. Enriching uranium to this level requires significant technological capability, but once that threshold is reached, moving from 60% to 90% can be achieved relatively quickly. Enrichment alone does not mean a bomb is being built, and Iran is intentionally stopping at 60% when they could go further. They argue that their program is defensive, intended to show its capability and deter attacks. This level of enrichment is also reversible, should an agreement be reached.

In 2015, the United States, Europe, and Iran agreed to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA. The deal limited Iran’s enrichment to below 4% and allowed for inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency. In exchange, sanctions against Iran were eased.

In 2018, President Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement and reinstated harsh sanctions. Iran initially stayed within compliance after the US withdrew before gradually escalating its enrichment program to just under 20%, the limit for when it becomes classified as highly enriched uranium.

In 2021, Iran’s centrifuges were sabotaged for the second time in less than a year during efforts to revive the JCPOA nuclear deal. In response, Iran increased enrichment to 60%, sending a message about their capabilities. Iran then reduced the production rate substantially, another sign that the move was more for show than the intent of creating a weapon. Iran kept production rates low until 2025. Following more failed attempts to revive the nuclear deal and additional attacks on its program, Iran ramped up production once again.

Each step in enrichment has followed a breakdown in negotiations or a direct action against its program.

US intelligence assessments have repeatedly stated that Iran has not made the political decision to build a nuclear weapon. The concern is about how little time would be needed to enrich uranium to weapons-grade levels, not evidence of any active weapons assembly program.

Delivery Systems and Deterrence

Iran possesses one of the world’s largest stockpiles of ballistic missiles. Though none are believed capable of reaching the United States, it does have missiles that can reach Israel, which it considers to be a primary adversary. Following the June attacks, Iran launched a barrage of missiles against Israel, enough to overwhelm the nation’s missile defense systems and land several strikes. The scale of the retaliation appeared intended to demonstrate its capability without triggering a full-scale war.

That fits with Iran’s broader strategic goals.

Nuclear weapons change how countries are treated. North Korea is an oppressive regime that openly threatens the United States, yet it has not faced a direct military strike in the way Iran has. North Korea has nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles. The cost of attacking it is unpredictable and could be catastrophic.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is another example of how nuclear status shapes global responses. Russia is a nuclear power. NATO and the United States provided substantial support to Ukraine but imposed limits on how those weapons could be used, and have carefully avoided direct confrontation with Russian forces. The risk of nuclear escalation, no matter how unlikely, influences every decision.

Ukraine once inherited the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It agreed to transfer those weapons to Russia in exchange for security assurances from the US and Russia under the Budapest Memorandum. Decades later, Ukraine was invaded by one of the countries meant to provide it security, while the US was slow, careful, and measured in its response.

Why This Matters

Iran is an oppressive regime with a long record of human rights abuses and support for militant proxies. There are legitimate concerns about its behavior in the region. But the current standoff is not primarily about whether Iran would immediately use a nuclear weapon. It is about leverage. Once a country crosses the nuclear threshold, even if it never fires a shot, it becomes harder to restrain or attack.

The world has demonstrated that countries with nuclear weapons operate under a different set of constraints than those without them. Iran’s enrichment program, especially at 60%, signals that it wants to gain that extra leverage.

If Iran crosses the nuclear threshold, other regional powers such as Saudi Arabia could pursue similar capabilities, triggering an arms race. That is the core of the conflict: how possession, or near-possession of a nuclear weapon, reshapes the balance of power in the region.

https://www.sipri.org/commentary/essay/2021/why-iran-producing-60-cent-enriched-uranium

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/iran-dramatically-increasing-enrichment-near-bomb-grade-iaea-chief-2024-12-06/

I will break it down section by section.

Jobs

The job market came to a screeching halt last year, shifting from 120,000 jobs being created each month in 2024 to just 15,000 in 2025 for a total of 181,000 across the full year.

Companies laid off 1.2 million workers, an increase of over 50% from the year before and the highest amount since 2020. The unemployment rate increased from 4.0% to 4.4% from January 2025 to December, and the labor participation rate decreased.

Blue-collar workers were hit especially hard, with a net loss of 108,000 manufacturing jobs, along with losses in other sectors such as mining, transportation, and warehousing, totaling over 160,000 blue-collar jobs lost.

Wages

The lowest earners saw their real wages, wages adjusted for inflation, decline in 2025. This means they had less money to spend than before, and it is a sharp reversal from the several years prior, when that same group saw its wages rise faster than everyone else's.

The average real wages for all workers increased by 1.5%, but that is against headline inflation. Key areas of spending, such as healthcare, food, electricity, heating, and automotive repairs, rose faster than average inflation, creating a strain on the middle class.

One way we can see this is by looking at the personal savings rate, which is how much people put into savings after paying their expenses. It decreased from 5.1% in January 2025 to 3.5% in November. One-third of Americans reported having less emergency savings than they did the year before.

We can also see the impact on debt, with total outstanding credit card debt reaching a record high of $1.28 trillion. A LendingTree survey found that one-quarter of buy now, pay later loans were used for groceries, and that over 40% of borrowers had paid at least one buy now, pay later loan late in the past year.

Taxes

While real wages were stagnant or declining, America is set to get some relief with its tax returns this year. The average of early tax returns so far has increased from $2,065 to $2,290, a 11% increase of $225. While refunds do provide temporary relief, broader tax changes shifted in ways that hurt lower- and middle-income earners. That was seen in the tax known as tariffs.

The average household paid $1,000 in tariffs last year, and that amount is expected to increase to $1,300 this year. The government needs taxes. We have a massive deficit. So when you hear that income taxes are being reduced, they have to be offset by either more debt or higher taxes outside of income.

In this case, the top 1% received the largest tax breaks, while working- and middle-class Americans are paying for it through tariffs.

Income taxes are progressive, meaning the more you make, the more they impact you. Tariffs are regressive, meaning the lower your income, the bigger the burden. This is a bad shift for hard-working Americans.

Tariffs

Tariffs were intended to do three things, according to the current administration: generate revenue to reduce income taxes, reduce the trade deficit, and create US jobs, particularly in manufacturing.

American consumers are paying 90% of the tariff cost, and, as we discussed above, that burden is heaviest on the lowest earners. The trade deficit was $900 billion in 2024. It is still $900 billion in 2025. Tariffs failed to reduce it because they were applied to food America doesn’t grow and products America doesn’t make. There weren’t any alternatives to switch to, and companies can’t spin up new factories that quickly. Manufacturing didn’t attempt to take on this production, as 108,000 manufacturing jobs were lost last year.

Tariffs failed to achieve the administration’s goals, but did exactly what economists said they would.

The economic drag from tariffs was bad, and now the legal foundation for them has collapsed. The Supreme Court ruled that Trump’s implementation of many of the tariffs was illegal. Whether this will result in refunds, or tariffs applied through other means, or Congress finally voting on tariffs is yet to be seen. That means more uncertainty for the year ahead, and uncertainty is bad for the economy.

Uncertainty means companies delay hiring, as we saw last year with the almost non-existent job growth. Investments are put on hold, and purchasing slows, stalling supply chains. When companies can’t reliably plan for the future, workers and the economy take the hit.

Federal Impact

Gross Domestic Product growth saw major swings across the year, with an initial decrease in the first quarter as companies rushed to import as many products as they could afford to get ahead of tariffs, followed by big gains in quarters when companies imported little while relying on their inventory stockpiles. When all of that settled, the fourth quarter saw a small 1.3% growth, resulting in a 2.3% GDP growth for the full year compared to 2.8% in 2024 and 2.9% in 2023.

The US economy slowed down.

The deficit remained at $1.8 trillion, the same as in 2024, but the national debt increased to $2.2 trillion, reflecting changes in interest costs and Treasury cash management.

Conclusion

2025 saw a significant economic slowdown, and tariffs played a major role in that, both directly through the price increases businesses and consumers had to deal with and indirectly through the continued uncertainty as tariffs were declared, adjusted, reversed, and declared again.

The lower your earnings, the more you were affected by this economy, with the lowest earners seeing their buying power decline and their emergency savings deplete, while the middle class struggled to stay afloat, saving less and increasing their reliance on debt to get by.

America is not on the right track. A course correction is desperately needed because if we continue down this path, 2026 will not be any better. The only way that happens is if Congress looks at the data and decides to end the trade war tariffs and invest in our nation and its workers.

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/working-class-people-struggle-to-find-opportunities-in-trumps-economy/

https://www.lendingtree.com/personal/buy-now-pay-later-loan-statistics/

https://www.bea.gov/

Without them, the national debt would be past the breaking point, the population would be shrinking, and Social Security would have run out of money long ago.

The Cato Institute is a Libertarian think tank that recently analyzed the economic impact of immigrants from 1994 through 2023. They found that immigrants paid more in taxes than they received in government benefits every single year.

This is true for both legal and undocumented immigrants and doesn’t account for indirect economic effects such as productivity growth, increased demand, and reductions in debt spending. Meaning that the full positive impact is much greater.

Immigrants are more likely to be working age and employed than native-born Americans. They fill critical worker shortages, increase tax revenue, and use fewer benefits, while the native born population is getting older and increasingly relying on those benefits.

The math goes even further. Without immigrants, US debt-to-GDP would have already exceeded 200 percent, a threshold that makes paying even just the interest on that debt untenable, creating a crisis of rising interest rates, skyrocketing debt, and a weakening dollar that spirals out of control. Immigrants reduced deficits by one-third over the past 30 years.

Undocumented immigrants pay billions into Social Security despite being unable to claim those benefits. This has kept the system funded for citizens at a time when it is rapidly exhausting past surpluses. When those surpluses are used up, benefits will decrease significantly, something that would have happened years ago without these immigrants.

This is why mass deportation efforts don’t solve economic problems; they create them. We are spending hundreds of billions to decrease output, shrink the tax base, and reduce funds for important benefits like Social Security. Amid the scaled-up deportation efforts last year, native unemployment rates increased while labor participation rates decreased, and only 181,000 jobs were created over the year, compared to 2024, when over 100,000 jobs were created each month.

The focus of deportation efforts should be on dangerous criminals instead of farmhands, factory workers, and day laborers. Over 70% of people detained by ICE last year had no criminal convictions. The reason so few detainees have convictions is that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at less than half the rate of U.S.-born citizens. This was made clear when large numbers of migrants arrived between 2022 and 2024, and national crime rates continued to decline rapidly. Legal immigrants also commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans.

Immigrants are critical to our nation’s prosperity. America’s birth rate is far below the replacement rate. Without immigration, the population would have been shrinking since the 1970s. A shrinking population means there are fewer workers, fewer consumers, and a strain on federal programs. It would be devastating to the US economy, which relies on consumer spending for 70% of GDP, and on the constant influx of new workers to support those who have aged out of the workforce and onto Social Security and Medicare. Japan is already facing this problem, and sells more diapers for adults than for babies. That means fewer workers supporting more retirees, causing increased pressure on public services.

The United States is currently falling 1.1 million births short each year of what is needed to maintain its population. Legal immigration fills 800,000 of the gap annually. The rest is filled by undocumented immigrants. Even if birth rates increased tomorrow, it would take two decades before those children entered the workforce. America will rely on immigrants to stabilize our population for at least the next 20 years, likely much longer, and has been doing so for the past 50 years.

Those immigrants have a higher rate of creating small businesses, have a disproportionately high share of patents and startups, and fill over half of the jobs in key areas like agriculture, construction, manufacturing, textiles, elder care, and hospitality. They aren’t taking our jobs. They’re creating them and filling gaps that native born Americans are not.

None of this means America should have open borders, but we do need to fix our immigration system. A country that depends on immigrant labor while forcing millions to live and work without legal status has built a system that is both economically and morally unstable.

If we want strong economic growth, financial security, and greater prosperity, then our immigration system needs to match reality. Caps on legal immigration must be raised to reflect the country's needs. Work visas should be easier to obtain in industries facing shortages. There needs to be a pathway to citizenship for long-term, law-abiding, hard-working undocumented immigrants.

It’s easy to say that they shouldn’t have come here illegally, but the truth is America needed them to, and didn’t provide a legal pathway for them to come here “the right way.” Over half of the undocumented immigrants living in America have been here for over a decade, and both political parties have failed to address the issue. Crossing the border is a civil offense. Punishing someone for it 20 years later, when they’ve spurred on our economy, paid for our benefits, and made a life for themselves here, is a cop-out. The blame lies with politicians and broken policies, not immigrants.

America has always been a nation of immigrants. We can have strong borders, stringent but fair asylum rules, and still welcome immigrants who will make our nation greater while building a better life for themselves.

America fails without immigrants, so we must not fail them.

https://www.cato.org/white-paper/immigrants-recent-effects-government-budgets-1994-2023

Job gains are a good thing, but it is important to keep this in context.

This report is an early estimate. These numbers will be revised multiple times in the coming year. Sometimes revisions go up. Sometimes they go down. We won’t know for a while where January truly lands.

What we do know is that the same report included major revisions to 2025 and late 2024, and they were ugly.

Instead of meaningful growth, all of last year — 2025 — saw just 181,000 jobs added in total. That’s about 15,000 per month. For comparison, the 2015-2019 average was roughly 190,000 per month. From 2021 to 2024, the average was around 235,000. And in 2024, with today’s revisions, over 100,000 jobs were created per month.

From over 100,000 jobs per month to 15,000 in one year. The job market has stagnated.

Beyond The Headline Number

A healthy job market isn’t defined by a single monthly figure. It shows up as:

• Low unemployment

• More job openings than job seekers

• Wages rising faster than costs

Last year, we moved in the opposite direction.

Unemployment rose from 4.0% to 4.3%. The number of unemployed Americans climbed from 6.9 million to 7.4 million. By the end of the year, there were more unemployed workers than job openings.

Hiring slowed. Job switching disappeared. Layoffs shot up to 1.1 million over the course of the year, a 54% increase from the year before and the highest since the peak of the pandemic in 2020. This is what a weak and slowing job market looks like.

Wages “Beat Inflation” — But That’s Not the Whole Story

On paper, average wages grew slightly faster than overall inflation in 2025. That sounds encouraging. But averages can hide a lot.

Low-wage workers saw their real wages, wages adjusted for inflation, fall by 0.3%. That’s a hard reversal from 2019 to 2024, where those workers saw their wages rise faster than any other group.

The other 90% of workers saw roughly a 1% real wage gain. But that figure is measured against overall inflation, which includes categories that don’t weigh equally on working families.

Prices that rose faster than average inflation last year included:

• Food

• Electricity

• Home heating

• Housing

• Healthcare

• Auto repair and maintenance

When everyday expenses outpace your wage gains, it doesn’t matter that televisions cost less.

People don’t experience “core CPI.” They feel the pinch of grocery receipts and rent increases. That disconnect is why, no matter how often Trump calls affordability a hoax, the American people are upset at how poorly he has handled the economy.

Where the Jobs Are — and Aren’t

The January gain of 130,000 jobs followed the trend of the past year, in which almost all the jobs created were in private education and healthcare. Outside of that, the broader job market was contracting. Manufacturing has now lost jobs for nine straight months, a slide that began after tariffs were enacted on “Liberation Day.”

Blue-collar workers have taken the brunt of this change, with over 100,000 jobs in manufacturing, construction, and other blue-collar industries lost in 2025.

So while the headline number looks alright, life tells a different story. Growth is limited, and losses are concentrated in sectors that matter deeply to working-class communities.

A Two-Speed Economy

One area is strong: asset markets. The stock market continues to climb. Corporate profits remain at record highs. Wealthy households, which hold the majority of financial assets, are benefiting greatly.

Consumer spending has increasingly relied on the top 10% of earners, who own 90% of all stocks. Their investment gains give them room to keep spending. The rest of America is cutting back and relying more on debt to get by. Credit card balances now exceed $1.2 trillion.

A relatively small share of Americans is doing extremely well. Most others are fighting hard to tread water, and some are slipping beneath the surface.

Should We Celebrate 130,000?

Even if January holds at 130,000 jobs after revisions, it’s hard to call that impressive.

It follows a year that averaged 15,000 per month. It trails the job creation seen in the pre-pandemic expansion, the post-pandemic recovery, and the return to normalcy. And, worst of all, it is heavily concentrated in just two sectors.

This is mediocrity dressed up as momentum.

What Would Actually Improve The Job Market

There is a clear, straightforward way to defrost the job market and turn the economy around.

Invest in America.

• Invest in domestic manufacturing rather than disrupting supply chains with unpredictable tariffs

• Expand infrastructure and clean energy projects that create high-wage jobs

• Support emerging technologies without igniting trade wars that raise consumer costs

• Strengthen labor markets instead of relying on stock markets to drive spending

Trade wars raise costs for businesses and consumers. They suppress domestic investment and slow hiring in industries that depend on global markets. The way to make America’s economy stronger isn’t to try to hurt other nations’ economies; It is to invest in our own to make it more competitive.

The Underlying Problem

Correcting our course isn’t hard, but there is one major hurdle: admitting mistakes.

Tariffs were a mistake. Ignoring the warning signs is another. Calling people’s affordability struggles a hoax only deepens the problem. Cutting investment in future industries makes recovery harder.

Mistakes happen, but unless we admit them and address them, we can't expect the economy to return to firing on all cylinders and bring prosperity to the nation.

https://www.epi.org/blog/low-wage-workers-faced-worsening-affordability-in-2025/

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

So why has a federal voter ID law become so controversial? Because popularity alone does not make a policy workable, constitutional, or just.

To understand why, we need to start with an important fact that has been deliberately lied about for years.

America Does Not Have a Voter Fraud Problem

Despite relentless claims to the contrary, the United States does not have a voter fraud problem. This has been examined repeatedly from every ideological angle, and it simply is not happening.

After the 2020 election, Donald Trump and his allies filed dozens of lawsuits alleging fraud. They were dismissed, over 50 of them in total, due to a lack of evidence. Recounts were conducted. Audits followed. Investigations at the state and federal levels reached the same conclusion again and again: the election was secure.

Even the Heritage Foundation, one of the most conservative think tanks in the country and a central player in Project 2025, maintains a database tracking voter fraud. Looking at 50 years of data, it found so few cases of non-citizens registering to vote, voting, or attempting to vote that it averaged less than one per year, and only 10 cases of in-person voter impersonation nationwide, out of hundreds of millions of votes.

Other investigations tell the same story. The Brennan Center found voter fraud rates as low as 0.0003%. A Department of Justice review of past elections found fraud at a rate so low as to be effectively nonexistent.

America does not have a voter fraud problem. It has a sore loser problem. And this matters because voter ID laws are being justified as a solution to a problem that does not exist.

Voter ID Laws Create More Harm Than Security

When fraud is vanishingly rare, adding new voter ID laws only makes it harder for legitimate voters to cast their ballots.

Even judges who once supported these laws have acknowledged this fact. Former conservative judge Richard Posner, who upheld Indiana’s voter ID law, later reversed his position and stated that strict voter ID requirements are now widely understood as tools of voter suppression rather than fraud prevention.

And that is exactly how voter ID laws are being used.

Republican lawmakers in multiple states have pushed to ban student IDs as valid voter identification. Indiana, Idaho, Arizona, North Carolina, and New Hampshire are among them. This has nothing to do with security. It is because the majority of students vote Democratic.

Politics has become an exercise in blocking opposition from voting rather than trying to win them over. It is a terrible game to be playing with our democracy.

That trend worsens with the SAVE Act.

The SAVE Act Goes Far Beyond Voter ID

The House Republican SAVE Act does not simply require a photo ID to vote. It imposes strict documentation requirements for registering or updating voter registration, which millions of Americans do not have easy access to.

Under the bill, acceptable documents include:

• A U.S. passport

• A military ID paired with proof of U.S. birth

• A government ID that lists place of birth or citizenship, which almost none do

• A birth certificate paired with a government photo ID

For the vast majority of Americans, this effectively means a passport or a birth certificate would be required.

Roughly half of American adults do not have a passport. Around one in ten lacks easy access to a birth certificate. Many birth certificates do not match current legal names due to marriage or other name changes, and the bill does not clearly allow name-change certificates to resolve that mismatch.

Others lost their birth certificates to fires, floods, or decades-old clerical errors. Some were born in eras where recordkeeping was inconsistent or outright discriminatory. None of that makes them less American.

The SAVE Act does not strengthen democracy—it weakens it.

“Just Use a Driver’s License”

When these issues are raised, defenders of voter ID laws often pivot to a simpler claim: just require a driver’s license.

That sounds reasonable until you look at who doesn’t have one.

Millions of Americans do not drive. Many urban residents rely on public transportation. There are elderly Americans who stopped driving but remain politically engaged. And some low-income Americans simply can’t afford to drive. Driver’s license ownership varies significantly by race, income, age, and geography.

If voter identification is the true goal, the solution is clear.

Universal Free Identification

If the federal government wanted voter ID without suppressing voter turnout, it would provide every eligible citizen with a universal, free, government-issued photo ID.

That could be as simple as a Social Security photo ID, issued automatically, free of charge, and usable nationwide. Nearly all Americans already have a Social Security number, and the government gives out Social Security cards, just not with a photo. Most of the infrastructure already exists.

Anything less turns voter ID into an undue burden.

Legal and Constitutional Problems

The 24th Amendment explicitly bans poll taxes, or a fee to vote. Courts have been inconsistent in their interpretation of how that applies to costs associated with obtaining identification, but the amendment's principle is clear. Voting cannot be conditioned on payment.

Beyond cost, there is another constitutional issue.

While Congress has authority over the time, place, and manner of federal elections, voter qualifications are reserved to the states. Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution, the Seventeenth Amendment, and the Tenth Amendment all reinforce that balance.

The SAVE Act would face immediate constitutional challenges, with strong arguments that it exceeds federal authority by imposing voter qualification requirements rather than election procedures.

It is difficult to imagine this bill surviving judicial review.

What Voters Actually Want

Polls do show support for voter ID. They also show strong support for measures that make it easier for citizens to vote, not harder.

Americans consistently support:

• Early voting

• Universal access to mail-in voting

• Automatic voter registration

• Same-day registration

• Making Election Day a national holiday

• Restoring voting rights to felons who have completed their sentences

Those who tout the polling on voter ID as a reason for their suppressive legislation routinely ignore those other results, and often specifically undermine any efforts to enact them.

The Real Choice

Democracy is not about making voting harder for people you disagree with. It is about ensuring every citizen can participate equally. If election security is the goal, then voter protection must come first. Free IDs. Automatic registration. Transparent processes.

Restrictive voter ID and registration laws tip the scales by excluding voters instead of working to win them over.

Everyone deserves a voice and a vote.

https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/voter-id

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/analysis-heritage-foundations-database-undermines-claims-recent-voter

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-widespread-is-election-fraud-in-the-united-states-not-very/

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/debunking-voter-fraud-myth

https://www.reuters.com/article/world/fact-check-courts-have-dismissed-multiple-lawsuits-of-alleged-electoral-fraud-p-idUSKBN2AF1FQ/

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/08/22/majority-of-americans-continue-to-back-expanded-early-voting-voting-by-mail-voter-id/

Pretti’s killing was different.

The footage was unmistakable. Agents threw him to the ground, beat him repeatedly, and then shot him while he was on his knees, posing no threat to anyone. After he collapsed, they fired several more rounds into his body.

The video was so disturbingly clear that the administration's best attempts to lie about the situation were drowned out by outrage from every corner of the nation.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a relatively new agency, created in 2003 by consolidating immigration and customs enforcement functions under the Department of Homeland Security. Immigration enforcement is split between two agencies: ICE and Customs and Border Protection.

That division matters because while public outrage has focused on ICE, CBP has been just as violent and just as lawless. Their operations blur together under DHS, especially with the current administration, where accountability disappears entirely.

Renee Good was killed by ICE.
Alex Pretti was killed by CBP.
Different uniforms. Same brutality.

Abolishing ICE alone would not stop the abuse. CBP is conducting the same raids, using the same tactics, and operating under the same leadership. The militarization, flashbangs, tear gas, eagerness to escalate, and willingness to fire weapons at unarmed citizens are approved from the top.

Donald Trump placed Kristi Noem in charge of the Department of Homeland Security. Before her nomination, Noem published a personal memoir, which included an account of how she was angry at the behavior of her 14-month-old dog, so she took it down to a gravel pit and shot it to death. In that moment, she remembered how much she disliked one of her goats, so she went and grabbed it, dragged it to the gravel pit, and then killed it too. A mindset where deadly force is the first response, not the last resort.

That cruelty is paired with corruption. As governor of South Dakota, Noem funneled money from a nonprofit into her personal company without disclosing it. She misused taxpayer funds to renovate the governor’s mansion with luxury additions and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on personal travel. When her daughter was denied a real estate license, Noem summoned officials to pressure them, and the denial was reversed days later.

This is the person now overseeing federal law enforcement agencies with virtually unchecked power.

Every time one of these incidents occurs, DHS rushes out a statement blaming the victim. ICE or CBP agents are always described as being “threatened” or “forced to defend themselves,” regardless of what the evidence shows.

In Pretti’s case, multiple camera angles show agents escalating the encounter, assaulting him, disarming him of a legal firearm he never touched, and then shooting him repeatedly. Noem still falsely claimed Pretti was brandishing a weapon and attacking agents.

When Marimar Martinez was shot five times during Operation Midway Blitz, officials claimed she rammed an agent’s vehicle. Once the case reached court and evidence was produced, it became clear that the agents initiated the confrontation. The charges were dropped.

This is not an anomaly. It happens over and over again.

Of the 30 non-immigration federal cases brought in Chicago from that same operation, half have already been dismissed. The pattern is consistent. Blame the victim immediately and hope the story moves on before the truth catches up.

This works because accountability is nearly nonexistent. Federal agents operate behind layers of secrecy, internal investigations, and levels of immunity that make prosecution rare even when evidence is undeniable. Without real consequences, escalation becomes routine.

Despite all of this, defenders insist that this brutality is necessary to remove violent criminals who supposedly flooded the country under Biden.

The data tells a different story.

• Undocumented immigrants commit crimes at less than half the rate of U.S. citizens.

• Roughly 14 million undocumented immigrants live in the United States, not the 20 million or more repeatedly claimed. In 2024, eight in ten had lived here for over a decade. Less of an invasion and more of a long-term immigration issue that Congress has refused to address.

• Nearly three-quarters of people held in ICE detention have no criminal convictions at all. Most of the rest were convicted of minor offenses, such as traffic violations.

• Arrests increasingly occur outside immigration courts, creating a Catch-22 where following the law gets you detained and avoiding court makes you here illegally.

• ICE custody and enforcement operations saw 32 deaths in 2025, the deadliest year on record. In 2026, at least eight people have already died during ICE and CBP operations

This is quota-driven policing. Agents are incentivized to grab whoever is easiest, not whoever is most dangerous. Daily arrest targets forces’ recklessness over investigation, and guarantees that mistakes, abuses, and deaths will continue.

When federal agents conduct warrantless raids, shoot citizens, lie about it afterward, and face no consequences, the Constitution itself is under threat. Trump has already discussed using ICE agents at polling places to intimidate voters. That is not law enforcement. It is authoritarianism.

Abolishing ICE is unlikely with this Congress, and even if it happened, CBP would continue the same operations under a different name. Real change requires accountability at the top.

Kristi Noem must be removed, and MAGA politicians must lose their majority in the midterms. Until that happens, Congress must block funding for illegal and brutal operations.

This violence cannot be normalized. History shows it will only get worse until we stop it.

https://www.commoncause.org/articles/top-5-most-corrupt-and-alarming-things-you-need-to-know-about-kristi-noem/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/28/deaths-ice-2026-