Larry Summers Misses the Point

Back in 2000, when Larry Summers was Treasury secretary, federal Medicaid spending was slightly more than $200 billion in today’s dollars. The recently passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB) would bring that figure to more than $800 billion by 2034.

Even so, Summers wrote in the New York Times last week about the “human brutality” of the law’s Medicaid cuts, stating that the legislation made him ashamed of his country. But as Judge Glock points out, “it’s hard to see what he—or the ostensibly moderate Democratic faction he represents—would consider reasonable,” given how mild the cuts are in reality.

“Medicaid spending under the OBBB will be four times higher than it was when Summers was overseeing economic policy—and nearly twice as large relative to a much bigger economy,” Glock writes. “Yet Summers felt no shame in helping fund a far smaller Medicaid program back then.”

It’s common knowledge that Honduran gangs operate open-air drug markets in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. But rather than trying to do something about it, activists and city leaders shrug and look the other way. Why?

“They were not interested in enforcing the law or challenging the orthodoxies of social justice activists, who were fighting to ‘decarcerate, decriminalize, and depolice,’” Christopher F. Rufo writes. This is why President Trump should direct federal law enforcement to shut down these drug markets, especially in the Tenderloin, L.A.’s Skid Row, and Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhoods, “which have become magnets for crime and chaos,” Rufo observes.

He points out that teams of heavily armed federal agents could arrest and deport foreign drug dealers, and their long-term presence would help to shame cities into action.

Read his take on how the administration should go about cleaning up the streets.

Earlier this month, on Fourth of July weekend, activists gathered in Chicago to attend a four-day conference, Socialism 2025. The point: “to discuss how to dismantle our constitutional republic,” Stu Smith writes. Video from the event shows attendees praising mass rioting and calling for an end to America.

This wasn’t just a fringe gathering, Smith notes. Speakers included Ivy League professors and union leaders. “Multiple professors endorsed using the university as a power base to destabilize the status quo and carry out their political designs,” he writes.

You can read more about the event here.

Passed in 1970, the California Environmental Quality Act requires state government agencies to disclose and mitigate the environmental impacts of their construction projects. CEQA has long impeded homebuilding, leading to a massive housing shortage in the state.

Now, two new laws provide exemptions from environmental review for infill housing development—a step in the right direction for alleviating the shortage.

Sure, the legislation could go further, Jason Sorens argues, observing that “the new laws do nothing to change one of the biggest barriers to building: local land-use regulations.” But even so, they’re better than the status quo—and that alone is worth celebrating.

Read more about the laws here.

“These kinds of rail projects are only failures for the taxpayers who pay for them and never use them.

There are winners, though. The contractors and labor unions, and the local politicians they lease with campaign donations.”

Photo credit: Kevin Dietsch / Staff / Getty Images News via Getty Images