In October of 2022, the “W Series,” a free-to-enter, female-only open-wheel racing league using Formula 3 cars two levels below the F1 cars you see on Drive to Survive, canceled the rest of its season and declared bankruptcy. The raison d’etre of the W Series had been somewhere between logically dubious and downright stupid. Its logic had been, in essence, this: The only way to ensure women can compete against men at the highest levels of motorsport is to make sure they don’t have to compete against men on the way there. Much of the racing world looked at its failure and said something along the lines of “Stop trying to make women’s-only pro racing happen. It’s not going to happen.”

That, however, didn’t stop Formula One from immediately reenacting the W Series as something called “F1 Academy.” F1 Academy works like so: The relatively poky F3 cars of W Series have been replaced by even slower “F4” cars. They are the opening act for Formula 2, which in turn is the opening act for Formula One at several events. Each F1 team must “hire” a female driver to drive in the series and put its livery on that driver’s car. 

This is bizarre for a few reasons. There are already multiple F4 and Formula Regional leagues around the world. None of them prohibits female drivers, and most already have at least one woman participating on a regular basis. The gap from “F1 Academy” to F1 is roughly equivalent to the gap between middle school football and the NFL. The F4 cars themselves, although they look professional, are slower than many amateur race cars, including the “Radical” series driven by 12-year-old boys, your 52-year-old author, and many competitors who have long been collecting Social Security. On a full Formula One track, the cars are small and slow enough to look like they are merely pace-lapping. It’s not compelling spectator material.

Not that it really matters. F1 is no stranger to what may be fairly called performative wokeness. When they aren’t busy printing money through lucrative deals with autocratic and conflict-ridden venues like Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Azerbaijan, the sport’s directors adore cringe-worthy stunts like the mandatory “#EndRacism” driver T-shirts of 2020, or hiring a “sustainability director” for a schedule that reportedly creates 256,551 tons of CO2 emissions per year. It’s hard to imagine that F1’s senior people see the Academy as anything but additional window dressing to distract from some unpleasant truths regarding their product.

Chief among those truths is the fact that money, not gender, is the real barrier to entry in racing. It often costs well over a million dollars, starting around the age of five, to train a child to the point where he or she might be eligible for sponsorship besides the Bank of Mom and Dad. A season in F4, the destination for most 15-year-old prospects, costs a minimum of $150,000 but can soar to three times that. About half of the current F1 grid comes from wealth; the other half typically secured a long-term sponsor early on. Lando Norris, winner of the Miami Grand Prix, has a father who retired at 36 with a nine-figure net worth. Sergio Perez has a personal relationship with billionaire Carlos Slim via family connections. 

Another problem is the physical nature of Formula One itself. Jamie Chadwick, who won the W Series championship three times, has publicly questioned whether it’s possible for women to drive the current cars at their limit for an entire race, a sentiment echoed by a female former F1 test driver, Carmen Jorda. A study of female athletes showed that their average VO2 max, a measure of aerobic capacity and potential strength, was about half that of an F1 driver. Even the fittest men struggle at times. When F2 standout Oliver Bearman was unexpectedly drafted into an F1 race for Ferrari, he was unable to hold his head straight for 90 minutes of 5g cornering, and ended up denting the car’s headrest surround with his uncontrolled helmet. This doesn’t mean that there are no women capable of driving the car, of course, merely that fewer of them, by percentage, will have what it takes.

Last but not least, there is the fact that although women make up 13% of competitive youth kart racers, only about half of them do any racing past karts. And the rate of attrition among female racers over time is higher than that of their male counterparts. Walk through any karting paddock and you’ll quickly observe an open secret that somehow never makes it into the sports media: there are a lot of girls whose fathers all but force them to race karts, and those girls quit the moment they can make their own choices. This, too, reduces the pool of available Formula One prospects. 

Against these realities, you have the magical thinking of F1’s polling, which tells them that more than 80% of their fans believe there will be female drivers in the sport within 10 years. Anything short of this outcome will be seen, however unreasonably, as discriminatory. Which explains much of F1 Academy, from the novice-friendly cars to the forced team affiliations that allow these lightly trained and credentialed drivers to dress, act, and post on social media like they are proper Formula One participants.

It’s obvious, therefore, that the real purpose of F1 Academy is to keep a multibillion-dollar business rolling along without interruption, rather than to actually create top-level opportunities for female drivers. The irony is that F1 Academy standouts may find themselves being compared, likely unfavorably, to women like Sophia Flörsch, who has scored points in the F3 series competing against men, and who called the W Series “a step back on a sporting level” upon its introduction.

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Miss Flörsch is not alone. Your author is married to a female racer with multiple wins and series championships, all earned against men. She never misses an F1 race, but has zero interest in the Academy. “What’s the point of it? Racing against each other instead of the men they’d see in Formula One? They should…”

“…stop trying to make it happen?” I suggested.

Jack Baruth was born in Brooklyn, New York, and lives in Ohio. He is a pro-am race car driver and a former columnist for Road and Track and Hagerty magazines who writes the Avoidable Contact Forever newsletter.

In the spring and summer of 1979, a series of diplomatic missteps and miscommunications contributed to then-President Jimmy Carter losing a greater share of the Jewish vote than any Democratic presidential candidate in American history. The Carter administration’s most significant error stemmed from maneuvering at the United Nations. 

When Arab states introduced Security Council Resolution 465 condemning Israeli settlements and describing Jerusalem as “occupied territory,” Carter wisely declined to support the resolution. Later, believing that the objectionable language had been removed, Carter and then-Secretary of State Cyrus Vance approved a vote in support, only to learn after the fact that much of the inflammatory language about Jerusalem had been retained. This blunder not only propelled Carter to lose to Sen. Ted Kennedy in the New York primary, but it cost him 26 points of the Jewish vote that had supported him in 1976, dropping from 71% to 45% support in the 1980 general election. Worried about rising antisemitism and unsure of Carter’s intentions for Israel, Jewish voters abandoned Carter in favor of independent candidate John Anderson. Ronald Reagan’s 39% was also the highest share of the Jewish vote for a Republican nominee since Dwight Eisenhower.

How quaint yesteryear’s outrage over U.N. machinations seems from the vantage of spring 2024. In the seven months since Hamas’s barbaric Oct. 7 attack, we’ve witnessed a concerted and emboldened effort by Democratic leaders in the administration and Congress to force maximum appeasement by Israel and empower antisemitic behavior in public life. Importantly, this has been the Biden administration’s instinct from the start. On the day of the attacks, Secretary of State Antony Blinken initially posted that he “encouraged Turkey’s advocacy for a ceasefire and the release of all hostages by Hamas immediately” only to delete the post and replace it with “Israel has the right to defend itself, rescue any hostages, and protect its citizens.” On the same day, the State Department’s Office of Palestinian Affairs posted that it “unequivocally condemned the attack of Hamas terrorists and the loss of life that has incurred. We urge all sides to refrain from violence and retaliatory attacks. Terror and violence solve nothing” — only to delete and replace it with a generic condemnation of the attack.

Thus, from early October, even as President Joe Biden told Israel, “You are not alone,” his embrace seemed designed to constrain America’s chief ally in the Middle East rather than empower it. As the weeks unfolded, a diplomatic charade of the administration talking tough to Israel in public while effectively greenlighting its operations in private gave way to clear attempts to undermine the legitimacy of Israel’s prosecution of a just war, most notably Biden’s State of the Union quip that he and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were going to have a “Come to Jesus” conversation. In March, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) took to the Senate floor to issue a call for new elections to replace Netanyahu — an unprecedented and brazen attempt to interfere with the internal affairs of a close ally. Then, finally, after the World Central Kitchen tragedy, Biden seized on the moment to try and force Israel to stand down, accusing Israel of not doing enough to protect aid workers or civilians and calling for an immediate ceasefire. Continuing in form after Iran’s unprecedented direct attack on Israel two weeks later, the administration leaked that Biden told Netanyahu to “take the win” rather than retaliate.

Finally, in an unprecedented attempt to undermine Israel in negotiations and on the battlefield, Biden announced on Wednesday that an invasion of Rafah would result in the United States halting shipments of critical offensive weaponry.

“I made it clear that if they go into Rafah — they haven’t gone in Rafah yet — if they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities — that deal with that problem,” Biden told CNN.

“We’re going to continue to make sure Israel is secure in terms of Iron Dome and their ability to respond to attacks that came out of the Middle East recently,” he added. “But it’s, it’s just wrong. We’re not going to — we’re not going to supply the weapons and artillery shells.”

Meanwhile, across the U.S., the landscape of the public square has been equally bleak. The administration hesitated to confront thinly, if at all, veiled antisemitism masquerading as progressive principle for fear of internal backlash. Only belatedly did Biden make a speech and announce expanded campus antisemitism initiatives as the protests and the school year wound down. What began with callously tearing down missing fliers for Israeli and American hostages has metastasized into full-fledged rebellion against support for the only Western democracy in the Middle East in favor of an open-armed embrace of terrorist entities such as Hamas and Hezbollah. As campuses across the nation descend into violence and antisemitic attacks have spiked nearly 400% since Oct. 7, one can only wonder how much is too much for American Jews.

The Jewish abandonment of Carter in 1980 proved to be an anomaly. Without another exception, Jewish voters have overwhelmingly supported Democrats since the early 20th century. In 2021, the Pew Research Center found nearly 7 in 10 Jewish voters still support Democrats. However, the simmering tension in the Democratic coalition between its traditional (Jewish-supported) wing and the newer, progressive flank has reached a flashpoint. To that end, AIPAC has committed to spending $100 million in Democratic primaries against progressive candidates in what looks to be an all-out war within the party. 

In 1979, Carter frantically reached out to Jewish groups after realizing his administration’s error. By contrast, in 2024 the Biden team seems much more concerned with losing Arab support in Michigan. Barely a month after the Oct. 7 attack, NBC News reported on polling in the state that found two-thirds of Arab and Muslim Democrats opposing Biden and three-quarters willing to consider a third candidate. There are 240,000 Muslims in Michigan, a state Biden won in 2020 by 150,000 votes. By comparison, the state is home to just over 100,000 Jewish adults. However, it is unclear if Biden’s cynical math will play well in the rest of the battleground states.

If Sen. John Fetterman’s (D-PA) rejection of the progressive label and forceful moral clarity in support of Israel is any indication, the Pennsylvania voters Biden needs are likely nonplussed by his Israel policy. In a recent interview with Chris Stirewalt, Fetterman gave an idea of how university radicalism is seen by Pennsylvanians, saying, “There is a germ of antisemitism in all of these protests — and sometimes it flares up.” The junior senator then continued, “Israel has not only a right to defend itself but to strike back against its aggressors. … For true peace, you cannot allow Hamas to function.” This is a position at direct odds with the Biden administration’s efforts to prevent an invasion of Rafah and the ultimate defeat of Hamas.

Will enough Jewish voters abandon Biden to make a difference in the 2024 outcome? Outside of the Orthodox community, former President Donald Trump remains wildly unpopular. Furthermore, there are extreme elements on the Right, such as Nick Fuentes and the Proud Boys, with their own history of trafficking in antisemitism. But despite Trump’s execrable equivocation over Charlottesville, the vast majority of the Right has repudiated this element time and again, consigning it to the margins of political discourse. Former Rep. Steve King is no longer in Congress. Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) is a pariah. This stands in stark contrast to the progressive embrace of the rank antisemitism of Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN) or the indefensible timidity on display in the face of deplorable behavior on elite campuses across America. 

It’s easy to envision a scenario in which many Jewish voters just don’t show up on Election Day. Furthermore, many Jewish voters are highly concentrated in bright blue states that Biden will surely carry regardless of turnout. 

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But even if Jewish voters don’t abandon Biden in battleground states, the rest of America is watching, and they do not share Biden’s hesitation about Israel. In fact, the Harvard CAPS-Harris survey consistently finds that 80% of voters support Israel in its conflict with Hamas. And while people typically don’t vote on foreign policy, the outlandish campus protests are transmogrifying this into one about American values. 

Voters who may not be moved by the foreign policy component are likely to have strong feelings about intifada banners hanging from university administration buildings and Palestinian flags flown in place of Old Glory. An escalation of these tactics in Chicago this summer by an emboldened progressive wing could very well spell electoral disaster for Biden in November.

Steve Stampley (@stevestampley) is a conservative writer and former Hill staffer. He’s contributed to the Washington Examiner, the Dispatch, National Review, ArcDigital, and elsewhere.

Another five U.S. citizens remain alive in Hamas’s custody, according to the latest available information.

Here are their stories.

Keith Siegel, 65

Keith Siegel set out for Israel in 1980, following his older brother Lee, who had moved to a kibbutz in central Israel four years earlier as a young member of the Labor Zionist movement. Their father, Earl, was the son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, born in 1924 and raised to dream of the founding of an independent Jewish state in Mandatory Palestine — a vision made real by the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. Earl Siegel, who embarked on a medical career with the U.S. Navy before taking a professorship at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, passed that devoted Zionism to his children.

“We were a politically informed family. Social justice was very important to my parents, and they instilled that in us — along with the importance and significance and love for the state of Israel,” Lee Siegel told the Washington Examiner. “And we, you could say, were the culmination of a dream for the family.”

They entered the kibbutzim — the agrarian communities whose residents tried to bring into reality, along with the state of Israel, the socialist ideal of communal living. Keith and his wife, Aviva, whom he met on the kibbutz where his brother and sister-in-law lived, moved to Kfar Aza, another community closer to the Gaza Strip, where they raised four children, one of whom chose to join the kibbutz as an adult, as Keith pursued a career first in occupational therapy and then the pharmaceutical industry.

“He is a very sensitive person. He is very generous,” Lee Siegel said of his brother. “He is very engaging. If he were in a room with you and there were 10 other people and he was speaking with you, you would know that he’s speaking with you. … He loves music — loves folk music, hard rock, rock. Even though he was born in ’59, he could have been a child of the ’60s, you know, a teenager of the ’60s, let’s say — and a very loving man.”

Their community of about 900 people suffered heavy losses on the morning of Oct. 7, with 62 killed and another 19 taken hostage, including Keith and Aviva Siegel. “That’s a nightmare that most people who live on kibbutzim down there saw as something that could happen,” Lee Siegel said. 

The couple were forced into their own vehicle and driven into Gaza as hostages. Aviva Siegel was released in November, on the fourth day of a short-lived truce that saw daily exchanges of Israeli women and children for Palestinians in Israeli prisons. The truce broke down after seven days, for a given reason that feels flimsy from the perspective of the hostages’ families: Hamas proposed to include men in the eighth tranche of hostages, and the Israeli government took that as a violation of the truce deal, which had prioritized women and children. “Rather than Israel deciding, ‘You know what, it’s better to just keep the hostages coming home alive,’ Israel decided, ‘You’ve broken the agreement. We’re going back to war,’” Lee Siegel said, citing communication from the Israeli government. “That was the justification that they gave.”

Sagui Dekel-Chen, 35

Sagui Dekel-Chen has a wife and three daughters, only two of whom he has ever met. The son of a Connecticut native who migrated to Israel in 1980 and teaches history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Dekel-Chen inherited his father’s sharp mind and love of the Boston Red Sox; he played center field when Israel’s junior national team faced Team USA in the 2005 Maccabiah Games. Around Kibbutz Nir Oz, however, he was better known for his ingenuity and leadership. “He is an extraordinary athlete, that’s for sure, but more importantly … growing into manhood, he became a true builder and creator of things,” his father, Jonathan, told the Washington Examiner.

Sagui is the national project coordinator for the Jewish National Fund, United Kingdom, tasked with helping to coordinate the charity’s efforts to aid the development of southern Israel’s Negev desert. In his spare time, he enjoys overhauling old buses and putting them to a new use. The first of those projects was a mobile home. He has converted two others into mobile grocery stores, deployable to food deserts across the south. “Having grown up in the countryside, he understood the importance of [having] good food suppliers in our geographic periphery,” Jonathan Dekel-Chen said. “On Oct. 7, that morning, he was off and working on his latest rendition of converting old buses into mobile technological classrooms for Bedouin and Jewish communities here in the south.”

That diligence put him in position to be the first to catch sight of the terrorists, warn the kibbutz, and speak to his pregnant wife before leaving home again to resist the attack. “He looked at me and said, ‘If they come in, it’s over,’” Avital Dekel-Chen told an Israeli broadcaster, per a Tablet magazine translation. “I’ll do everything I can, OK? But they can’t come in.”

In the event, Nir Oz was the scene of one of the worst disasters of the day: 46 people murdered and another 71 residents taken hostage, including Sagui. “No soldiers got to the kibbutz” while the attack was underway, his father said. “The IDF never fired a shot. … All of the fighting that was done that morning was done by very, very brave young and not-so-young men from the kibbutz.” 

His mother was captured and wounded but managed to escape and make her way back to the kibbutz, where she was tended to by Sagui’s sister and brother-in-law, who hid in their safe room throughout the day. Jonathan Dekel-Chen, who was traveling in the United States at the time, credits the new construction of their house with saving them from the flames that Hamas attackers applied to older houses. 

Others were far less fortunate. Hamas fighters managed to break into about half of the safe rooms, whose residents faced execution or captivity. The Simon Tovs, an Israeli American family of six, were massacred when Hamas fighters shot the father and mother and burned the house down around the three children inside. Their grandmother was murdered separately. Jonathan Dekel-Chen gave their eulogy. Avital Dekel-Chen gave birth to another girl and named the child after one of the Simon Tov family’s 5-year-old twins, as Tablet noted, but Sagui still has not returned to meet his newborn. The sense of abandonment felt in Nir Oz on Oct. 7 has been reinforced by a perception that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is unwilling to make the compromises necessary to free the hostages for fear of alienating his coalition partners from further to the right.

“There was a moment not too long ago when it did seem that at least our prime minister had shifted somewhat in terms of his willingness to, grudgingly, prioritize the lives of the hostages over his own narrow interests to remain in power and, perhaps, avoid prosecution,” Jonathan Dekel-Chen said. “Over the course of the last few days, I’ve begun to doubt that again.”

Omer Neutra, 22

Ronen and Orna Neutra thought that life in New York City would free their family from at least the kinds of terrorist threats that had loomed on the horizon when they served in the Israel Defense Forces. Instead, she found herself walking, eight months pregnant, across the Queensboro Bridge on Sept. 11, 2001, astonished at the destruction of the World Trade Center. She gave birth to Omer on Oct. 14 of that year. 

A native of New York City, Omer was the captain of his high school volleyball team and basketball team at the Schechter School of Long Island. “In many ways, he’s an all-American kid and went through the regular route of his friends, although he did go to Jewish day school,” Orna Neutra told the Washington Examiner.

After graduating from high school, Omer moved to Israel with the intention of taking a gap year, only to realize while there that he “couldn’t just go back to his kind of cushy life in New York,” as his mother put it, leaving his friends to join the Israel Defense Forces.

“He’s a serious but very casual guy. He’ll walk into the room, he’ll see 200 kids, and in his mind, he’ll think, ‘OK, who here is going to be my friend?’” Orna Neutra said. “He’s this combination of, on one hand, very lighthearted and, on the other hand, very serious and with a strong sense of duty and leadership. And that’s what makes him, you know, very special.”

Omer was serving as a tank commander near Nir Oz on the morning of Oct. 7. His was “one of the first tanks, if not the first,” to mobilize in response to the attack, his father said, but the tank “had a malfunction” that slowed it down enough to be surrounded by Hamas terrorists. “They managed to put explosive on the tank and basically forced the team out or else they’ll be burnt alive inside. They opened the tank, and they were taken out,” Ronen Neutra said. “At that time, some videos were taken, so we can see our son being dragged out, and that’s the last we’ve seen.”

Edan Alexander, 20

Edan Alexander was born in Tel Aviv and raised in Tenafly, New Jersey, the oldest of three siblings and a student at the local public school. When he heard a presentation about “a program that helps young Jews around the world to move to Israel and serve a significant service in the Israeli IDF as Lone Soldiers,” as the Tzofim Garin Tzabar website puts it, he was “very excited” about the chance to serve in the military and live closer to his grandparents, his mother explained in a recent interview with Israeli media.

“I come from a very large, very warm and welcoming family,” his mother, Yael, told Haaretz. “We’re four sisters and one brother, and I have amazing parents who live in Tel Aviv. Edan knew he’d have a caring family here and that he’d feel safe.”

And that was how a kid from Tenafly ended up an infantryman in the Israel Defense Forces, where he befriended a tank commander from New York, of all places. “We didn’t know the family beforehand, but after the fact, we’ve been told that our boys knew each other and that they shared a lot, being that they had a similar background,” Orna Neutra told the Washington Examiner.

Edan managed to speak with his mother that morning, in the early stages of the Hamas attack. “He said, ‘Mom, what’s happening here is really war. We’re being bombarded. I got a piece of shrapnel in the helmet, but don’t worry, I’m protected,’” Yael Alexander said. “So I sat down and said to myself, ‘What do you mean shrapnel in the helmet? What the f***?’ I told him to take care of himself, not to be Rambo. He told me not to worry, but I could hear that he was stressed.”

Yael and her husband, Adi, attended the 2024 State of the Union address as guests of Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), their hometown congressman. It was just one event in a relentless itinerary as they’ve joined the relatives of other hostages as advocates for the release of their loved ones. The Israeli government has been a difficult interlocutor — “I haven’t met with anybody from the Cabinet. … I also feel that they don’t want to meet with us,” Yael Alexander said — but President Joe Biden’s administration has shown more empathy. The people of Tenafly, for their part, have conducted weekly marches on Friday evenings in solidarity with the Alexanders and the other hostage families.  

“America is our home,” she told Haaretz when asked about antisemitism in the U.S. “I love Israel, but our home is [America]. … In our area, I feel that there’s a lot of sympathy, and the community has really embraced us. Everybody wants to help, and everybody is very upset about it. Everybody wants to do what they can to be supportive, and it’s very moving.”

Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23

“I love you.” And then: “I’m sorry.” That is not a pair of text messages that a mother wants to receive from her son early on a Saturday morning. Rachel Goldberg-Polin looked at her phone and “knew something horrible was unfolding in my world,” as she would tell reporters at the United Nations later that month. 

Rachel had moved to Israel with her husband, Jonathan Polin, when her son Hersh was 7 years old. He soon developed a love of soccer that his parents, who migrated to the Jewish state as adult Americans, couldn’t quite share — a fan especially of Hapoel Jerusalem, a century-old soccer team associated with the Israeli Left.

“He was always teased for being a lover of peace, a crunchy granola dreamer,” his mother told the Lever in December.

Hersh grew into a young man enthusiastic about travel and music. He left home on the evening of Oct. 6 to attend a music festival in southern Israel, just a few miles from the Gaza Strip. That festival would end in carnage as Hamas terrorists surrounded the remote site and murdered more than 250 attendees, according to first responders. 

Hersh and one of his best friends, Aner Shapira, managed to reach a roadside bomb shelter where 27 others also sought refuge. Hamas terrorists surrounded the place and tossed 11 grenades through the door. Shapira, whose great-grandfather reportedly was a signer of the Israeli Declaration of Independence, “managed to pick up eight of them and throw them back out,” as Rachel Goldberg-Polin emphasized during that October press appearance, before succumbing to his wounds.

A video recorded by Hamas confirmed the account and showed Hersh being forced into the bed of a pickup truck, bleeding from the stump of his left arm. Rachel Goldberg-Polin has emerged as one of the most internationally prominent advocates for the release of the scores of hostages held by Hamas.

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“There are many of the 133 [hostages] that the world never hears about because there is so very much noise,” she told the attendees of an April 7 rally in New York City. “I don’t hear a lot about the eight Muslim Arabs being held hostage or the eight Thai Buddhists or the two black African Christians. There are hostages from Mexico and Nepal who are Catholic and Hindu. We do an injustice when we erase these people when we are talking about who is still being held hostage.”

A few weeks later, her son appeared in a new proof-of-life video released by Hamas amid fraught negotiations over a ceasefire and hostage deal. “We’re here today with a plea to all of the leaders of the parties who have been negotiating to date,” Jonathan Polin said after seeing the video. “That includes Qatar, Egypt, the United States, Hamas, and Israel. Be brave, lean in, seize this moment, and get a deal done.”

This story was updated to correct a photo.

It happened during the Obama years, the Trump years, the Biden years, and this year is no exception.

“The FY ’25 defense budget is extremely tight, and that’s being generous,” groused Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, at an Army budget hearing last month. “At $895 billion for the year, that is a less than 1% increase over FY ’24. And when you factor in inflation, that 1% increase is actually a 2% decrease in defense spending.”

And that’s pretty much how every congressional budget hearing begins this cycle, with a rhetorical complaint that President Joe Biden’s budget request for the military doesn’t come close to meeting the challenges America faces.

“In the past few months, two of our combatant commanders have told me that the threats we face today are the most dangerous than any that they have seen in any time during their careers,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) said at an appropriations subcommittee hearing in early May.

“We must be cleareyed that this budget request would represent a real cut in funding for the Department of Defense, since it fails to keep pace with inflation. It proposes a defense funding increase of just 1%. … That amount is well short of the $22.5 billion year-over-year increase that the department would need simply to cover projected cost escalations related to fuel, military and civilian pay, and medical care.”

And it’s not just Republicans complaining.

“The military services and the combatant commands are telling us they have unfunded requirements in excess of $20 billion,” Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) said at the same subcommittee hearing, addressing his comments to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

“I will tell you this, Mr. Secretary, that ranking member Collins and myself think we need a bigger number.”

There is a strong bipartisan majority in Congress that shares that now is not the time to force the Pentagon to trade off funding future capabilities to meet today’s needs, which Austin concedes is the plan.

“We made tough but responsible decisions that prioritize near-term readiness,” Austin testified. “Our approach dials back some near-term modernization for programs not set to come online until the 2030s.”

That doesn’t make sense, argues Collins and many others, at a time when China — identified as America’s “pacing challenge” — is modernizing its military at a breakneck pace, all while vowing to unify with Taiwan by force if necessary.

“China’s military budget and navy continue to grow, including a 7.2% increase in defense spending,” Collins pointed out. “Our naval fleet of 290 ships is already smaller than China’s fleet of more than 370 ships. Under this budget, the Navy’s overall fleet would grow by just one ship — a single ship — during the next five years, far fewer than the 435 ships China will have.”

In normal times what defense hawks in both parties would do is work together to bulk up the president’s anemic request with $20 billion to $30 billion in additional funds. 

Except this year Congress is hamstrung by the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, the deal that former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was forced to make by his unruly hard-right flank intent on using the absolute need to raise the debt as leverage to rein in federal spending.

Raising the debt limit to avoid the national default on its bills used to be a pro forma task, but McCarthy brokered a deal to cap the 2025 budget that included acceptance of Biden’s proposed 1% increase for defense spending.

With default hanging in the balance, the Fiscal Responsibility Act passed with a bipartisan 314-117 House vote — followed by a 63-36 vote in the Senate, and Biden signed it, making it the law of the land.

So while Republicans moan about the need to spend more to restore American deterrence, they have no one to blame but themselves.

“The 1% increase is entirely inadequate,” Rogers lamented. “But this is the hand dealt to us by the Fiscal Responsibility Act that we all have responsibility for enacting.”

Democrats argue that all the handwringing about inadequate defense spending is at best unfair and at worst disingenuous.

“I voted for the Fiscal Responsibility Act not because I agree with the spending levels in the deal, but because this country could not afford to default on its debts,” Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN), ranking member on the appropriations subcommittee, said, pointing out it was Congress — not the Pentagon — that imposed spending caps on the defense budget. 

“I think those of us who voted for that law, we need to remember that,” McCollum said. “I hope Congress has learned a hard lesson, that we should not hold our national debt limit hostage over arbitrary spending caps.” 

Congress has worked under budget caps before. 

For 10 years from 2011 to 2021, under the Budget Control Act a provision known as sequestration, increases in defense spending were linked to commensurate increases in domestic spending, which resulted in years of gridlock.

The workaround was often passage of an annual supplemental appropriation for “overseas contingency operations,” which ended up being a catchall account where other funds could be added without triggering the spending limits.

Only recently has the Pentagon and Congress weaned itself from such budget gimmicks, only to find itself passing a $95 billion emergency appropriation this year for Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and the U.S. Navy’s submarine construction program.

Another supplemental could be one way to fund urgent needs that the Pentagon left out of this year’s budget.

But not everyone’s convinced the U.S. can’t buy a decent defense for nearly $900 billion.

“It can be summed up as big threats and a tight budget, and you have to figure out how to make that work,” says Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee.

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“I don’t see a rain of more money coming anytime soon, so we’re going to have to get more creative,” Smith said at a hearing last month. “But we do have a fair amount. Where are we spending money that we shouldn’t be spending money? And how can we get more out of what we’re spending? Because, you know, we are $33 trillion in debt.”

“I would like to use the Winston Churchill quote about how, ‘Gentlemen, we’re out of money. Now, we have to think.’”

Betraying Israel to pander to his far-Left voter base by cutting off arms supplies unless Jerusalem agrees to military micromanagement by the dotard in the White House is a new level of disgrace even for this awful administration.

Biden told CNN Wednesday night that he won’t send artillery shells and bombs to the Israel Defense Forces if they enter Rafah city, where a million Palestinians are being used as human shields by four brigades of Hamas terrorists.

“If they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah. … It’s just wrong,” he said.

What’s really wrong is, first, Biden limiting Jerusalem’s scope for action against an enemy that endlessly threatens and repeatedly attempts genocide against the Jews and, second, seeking to justify this with the lie that Israel takes too little care to avoid civilian casualties.

This is not how a good nation treats perhaps its most important ally. 

Even if one uses inflated numbers supplied by Hamas, Israel has achieved a lower civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio than almost any other nation, including the United States, has ever managed in urban warfare. It has done so despite Hamas hiding in hospitals, schools, apartment blocks, and other civilian clusters — a war crime.

It is not uncommon for Washington to set conditions on the use of arms it supplies to allies. It also should be acknowledged that we cannot know all the permutations of Israel’s need to take Rafah, whether to root out Hamas terrorists, to destroy tunnels, or to control the Gaza side of the border with Egypt. It is also unclear that Israel lacks the bombs and shells it needs for the Rafah operation, so Biden’s move to cut off the flow might be largely symbolic.

But it is just as bad for being so. It is a gesture of repudiation intended to pander to Democratic voters who are with the pogrom program, persuaded by Hamas propagandists, professional domestic agitators, and the money and machinations of America’s big state enemies such as China, Russia, and Iran.

Biden declared that he had not abandoned Israel, saying, “We’re going to continue to make sure Israel is secure in terms of Iron Dome and their ability to respond to attacks that came out of the Middle East recently.”

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What does that mean? It means Biden will allow Israel to put up a shield when it is attacked by enemies with missiles and drones, but he will try to stop Israel from taking the battle against its genocidal attackers to their lair to root them out.

He is willing to arm our ally when its enemies go ballistic, in other words, but until his reelection is secured, he won’t help prevent Hamas fighters, in the kaffiyeh costumes that American protesters think so chic, from using Gaza as a base from which to sneak into Israel and slaughter Jews with guns and knives and garden hoes.

Is Joe Biden the new Jimmy Carter? The comparisons are striking. The most recent Gallup poll found Biden’s job approval at an anemic 38%, just a shade above Carter’s 34% that Gallup found at a similar point in the latter’s presidency. Moreover, Biden, like Carter before him, is plagued by domestic problems and international crises. Carter and Biden struggled to tame inflation, and as Biden is now handling a hostage crisis involving an Iranian-backed terrorist group in Israel, so also did Carter have to handle the Iran hostage crisis.

There is an instinctive tendency for conservatives to compare every Democratic president to Carter. The 39th president serves as a kind of symbol for what the Right sees as the failures of postwar liberalism and the incompetence of the ruling class of the Democratic Party. As conservatives usually think that the current Democratic president, whoever that might be, embodies these same failures, they look in hopeful expectation to the prospect that he will meet the same electoral fate that Carter did in 1980. This impulse is perhaps even greater when it comes to Biden, and not just because of external circumstances. Like Carter before him, Biden seems utterly incapable of handling the basic duties of governance.

But in fact the differences between Biden and Carter are just as striking. For one, Carter fought against the demands from the left wing of his party for greater government spending. Inflation was running high during Carter’s tenure, and the president called for austerity on the home front, even as he proposed increasing military spending to counter the new militarism of the Soviet Union, which invaded Afghanistan under his tenure. Carter also pushed for welfare reform and generally sought ways of making government serve the same functions more effectively for the same cost. For all of this, he drew a primary challenge from Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy. Carter ultimately won the nomination, but he had to struggle through the primaries to win it and beg Kennedy to bury the hatchet at the party’s convention that summer.

Biden has made no such moves to aggravate the Left. In the face of inflation hitting 40-year highs in 2022 and remaining sticky ever since, Biden has kept the government’s spending spigot running at full blast. This year, Washington, D.C., is running a deficit that is roughly 6% of GDP, unprecedented in a period of peace and economic growth. But the Left demands, so Biden relents. And while Carter and Biden have similar overall job approvals, Carter suffered more among Democrats, while Biden has sacrificed independent support to hold his party together. 

So it goes in the realm of foreign affairs, especially the Middle East. Both Carter and Biden have been saddled with crises that they could not successfully handle, but those efforts are qualitatively different. In November 1979, American diplomats stationed in Tehran, Iran, were taken hostage by the supporters of the Islamic Republic, a radical Islamist government under the direction of Ayatollah Khomeini. Initially, the crisis gave Carter a noticeable bump in the opinion polls. Before the crisis, the Gallup poll found the president’s job approval at a paltry 30%, but shortly after, it shot up to 60% in late 1979.

But the “rally around the flag” effect was not to last. The crisis dragged on and on, furthering the impression that Carter was out of his depth. The administration’s diplomatic overtures failed to secure the release of the hostages, and Operation Eagle Claw, the military operation to release the hostages, ended in catastrophe, with one of the helicopters crashing. The Iranian debacle prompted Secretary of State Cyrus Vance to resign, and by the spring of 1980, the president’s job approval was sinking once again.

Comparing how Carter dealt with the events of 1979-80 to Biden’s approach today, we see superficial similarities but deeper differences. Then as now, there are American hostages who have been taken hostage by Islamic extremists. And while Americans as a whole are angry at Biden for his failure to secure their release — RealClearPolitics found his average approval on foreign policy is 35%, lower than it was a year ago — that is hardly the animating impulse on the Democratic side. If anything, Democrats, especially young Democrats, are driven not by a desire for more aggressive action to free American hostages but rather to restrain Israel’s efforts to ensure that Hamas no longer can perpetuate such crimes against humanity. Indeed, the very fact that American citizens are being held hostage right now by a terrorist organization hardly registers in the mainstream conversation at all. The president and his handlers are loathe to talk about it, the legacy media are hardly interested in focusing on this problem, and the left wing of the Democratic coalition is pushing in the opposite direction. 

Once more, we also see a difference in the character of the two men. Biden and Antony Blinken, his secretary of state, have been responsive to the demands of the American Left, exhorting Israel in the strongest possible terms to stand down. While Carter has been a notable critic of Israel in his lengthy post-presidency, it is hard to imagine he would show such little regard for American hostages who have been in captivity now for over half a year. 

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The responses of the Carter and Biden administrations to their respective crises also illustrate changes in the makeup of the Democratic Party, especially on matters of foreign affairs. It is inconceivable that in 1979, any major faction in the United States, left, right, or center, would not only accept taking American hostages but actively celebrate the group that did it. Yet that is exactly what is happening throughout campuses across the country, as young leftists chant in support of a global intifada, supported in many instances by faculty members and buttressed in turn by a growing chorus of Democratic politicians whose main demand is not for Americans to be released but for Israel to be restrained. Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) has shown great political courage in standing on the side of Israel and demanding the release of hostages. But the fact that such a position is courageous is a sign of the shifting attitude of the Left over the last half a century.

Carter has since been remembered among conservatives as an incompetent leftist, but that is only half true. His administration was no doubt marked by domestic and foreign policy failures, but he was his own man — a centrist and pragmatist who came from outside the political establishment. Biden is none of these things, at least not anymore. His tenure in the Senate was often one characterized by independent thinking and moderation, but his presidential tenure belongs to the Left, which, unlike in the late 1970s, is sympathetic to Islamist forces, even at the expense of the freedom of American hostages. 

Jay Cost is the Gerald R. Ford senior nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Franchised businesses are often stereotyped as fast-food establishments. The type of businesses that are franchised run the gamut from, yes, food (McDonald’s, Popeyes) to hardware (ACE) to hospitality (Red Lion) to haircuts (Great Clips) to animal care (Woof Gang Bakery and Grooming), and so much more. These are boom times for franchise branding.

This is doubly impressive when you consider that two different recent presidential administrations have pushed changes that would cut franchising down to size. Both former President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden‘s administrations have tried to pass something called the joint employer rule through the National Labor Relations Board, as a sop to trial lawyers and organized labor.

If it is implemented, critics charge that the joint employer rule would open franchisers, the companies that create the brands, to greater liability and mass unionization drives. It would also likely cut down on the profitability and autonomy of franchisees, the smaller businesses that rent those brands. It could burden other industries as well, but the challenges to franchising border on existential.

How have franchises managed significant growth in spite of regulatory efforts aimed at the heart of their business model? It doesn’t hurt that majorities in Congresses have objected to these efforts, one industry representative said.

“We are grateful to the bipartisan majority in Congress who have stood up for franchising against the NLRB’s joint employer rule,” Michael Layman, senior vice president of government relations for the International Franchise Association, told the Washington Examiner. “Three times Congress voted to nix this harmful policy.”

Most recently, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted to invoke the Congressional Review Act and disapprove of the new rule by a vote of 207 to 177. The Democratic-controlled Senate agreed to the resolution by a vote of 50 to 48. The bill landed on the Oval Office desk on May 1.

Layman added, “President Biden’s decision to stand with the NLRB and against small businesses shows where his support lies.”

In vetoing the CRA resolution, which would have canceled the joint employer rule, President Joe Biden argued in a statement that the rule will “prevent companies from evading their bargaining obligations or liability when they control a worker’s working condition — even if they reserve such control or exercise it indirectly through a subcontractor or other intermediary.”

The president explained, “If multiple companies control the terms and conditions of employment, then the right to organize is rendered futile whenever the workers cannot bargain collectively with each of those employers.”

Congress then tried and failed to override Biden’s veto. Whether or not supplying, say, uniforms and signage and milkshake machines really counts as “control[ling] a worker’s working condition” then became a matter for courts to sort out.

Thus far, the rule isn’t faring well in the judiciary. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce sued the NLRB. United States District Court Judge for the Eastern District of Texas J. Campbell Barker vigorously criticized and vacated the rule in a March 8 ruling.

Barker found that NLRB had “largely backhanded and thus failed to reasonably address the disruptive impact of the new rule on various industries.” Franchised businesses, for instance, had about $825 billion of economic output in 2022, and more than 8 million workers.

The judge wasn’t willing to upset that economic apple cart based on what he found to be the government’s flimsy rationale. He argued that the rule “runs headlong” into Supreme Court precedent and “exceeds the bounds of the common law.”

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The NLRB can appeal Barker’s ruling, but it may not fare better in other courts or in the U.S. Supreme Court down the road.

If the joint employer rule does finally go away, most folks in the franchise industry will likely breathe a sigh of relief and then quickly get back to work. There’s a great deal of food to be made, rooms to be rented, hair to be cut, and goods to be sold.

“I know what Nevada families are going through,” Rosen said. “It’s why I first ran for Congress. And it’s why in the Senate, I’ve worked with both parties to solve problems. And always focused on making a difference in people’s lives.”

It’s clear why Rosen, 66, is placing such an emphasis on independent voters. It’s worked well in her fast-rising mid-life political career, which she pursued after time as a computer programmer and, among other things, volunteering as president of the Congregation Ner Tamid synagogue, a Reform Jewish congregation in the Las Vegas suburb of Henderson. Rosen won an open House seat in 2016 and, after a single, two-year term, moved to the Senate in the 2018 elections by beating a Republican incumbent.

And Nevada has a famously independent and hard-to-pin-down electorate due to its frequent population churn. Swaths of people move to the Las Vegas area between elections, seeking lower housing costs, job opportunities, and desert sunshine, among other factors. Some stay in what’s still an often boom-and-bust economy based on the service industry, but large numbers of others leave, which forces candidates each election cycle, from statewide to local office, to scramble to identify and persuade likely voters.

A near-top Republican target

Senate Republicans are eyeing the Nevada seat as a key pickup opportunity in their quest to overturn Democrats’ 51-49 majority. Senate Republicans already have one state effectively in the bag, West Virginia, where Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) is retiring and is virtually certain to be replaced by a Republican in a state that turned out to be former President Donald Trump‘s second-best showing in 2020, when he beat President Joe Biden there 69% to 30%.

The top two Republican targets are Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Jon Tester (D-MT). Knocking them off, plus claiming West Virginia, would provide a healthy 52-48 majority. That’s where the Nevada seat comes in, with Senate Republicans eyeing a pickup opportunity in a state that’s being fiercely contested at the presidential level. In 2020, Biden only beat Trump in Nevada 50.05% to 47.67%. It’s a similar situation in Pennsylvania, where Republicans are bullish on nominee David McCormick’s chances of beating Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA), in a kind of undercard race to the fierce presidential fight being waged in the Keystone State.

That explains why Rosen has not always voted in lockstep with her more liberal Democratic Senate colleagues. In May 2023, she was among a small group of Senate Democrats to join Republicans in passing a resolution, 56-43, to overturn a measure passed by the Council of the District of Columbia aimed at police accountability. It would have banned the use of chokeholds, required officers to use de-escalation tactics before the use of force, and provided public access to body camera records. Republicans had seized on the bill as a sign Democrats are “soft on crime” and not doing enough on the matter.

Rosen was also among a group of Senate Democrats who called on the Biden administration to freeze the $6 billion in assets to Iran after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack against Israel.

In her reelection bid, Rosen is leaving little up to chance. Her campaign recently placed a $14 million ad reservation in Nevada. It will run from late July through the November election in the Las Vegas and Reno markets.

Senate Republicans, though, scoff at these moves, arguing the eventual GOP nominee, either retired Army Capt. Sam Brown or wealthy dermatologist and Trump administration U.S. Ambassador to Iceland Jeff Gunter, is in a strong position to defeat Rosen.

The National Republican Senate Committee, the campaign arm of the chamber’s GOP lawmakers, is actively linking Rosen to Biden, whose middling approval numbers leave him in a near-dead heat with his vanquished 2020 Republican rival a bit under six months out from this year’s election.

“Jacky Rosen is stuck in the low forties in the polls because she has done absolutely nothing to separate herself from the national Democrat brand,” said Mike Berg, NRSC communications director.

“Voters don’t know anything about her other than that she is a rubber stamp for whatever Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer want,” Berg added, in reference to the Senate Democratic leader from New York, a popular Republican political punching bag.

In the June 11 Republican primary, Brown is the most prominent candidate. He was courted by NRSC Chairman Steve Daines (R-MT) to run for the seat. A 2006 West Point graduate who later earned a master’s degree at Southern Methodist University, Brown is an Afghanistan war veteran who sustained burns to 30% of his body due to an improvised explosive device injury in 2008.

A recent Emerson College-Hill poll showed Brown would have some ground to make up against Rosen as the Republican Senate nominee, with the incumbent ahead 45% to 37%.

Still, Brown is looking forward to the general election, challenging Rosen’s bipartisan credentials in a statement to the Washington Examiner.

“Jacky Rosen has championed 98% of Joe Biden’s disastrous policies prioritizing the wants of Washington over the needs of Nevadans,” Brown said. “As a result, housing, grocery, and energy prices are out of control; our border is a war zone with crime and fentanyl flooding our streets; and the education system is excluding parental involvement while simultaneously failing our children.”

Gunter, meanwhile, has the ability to self-fund a campaign against Rosen — if he can get that far. He and Brown are among 12 GOP candidates seeking the nomination, a field that includes former Assemblyman Jim Marchant, a 2020 election denier and the 2022 GOP nominee for secretary of state. 

Gunter has sought to tie Brown to retiring Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and claim the mantle as the top MAGA Republican in the primary.

“Dr. Jeff Gunter is the quintessential MAGA candidate, committed to President Trump’s transformative policies and prepared to invest substantially to secure victory in Nevada,” Gunter spokeswoman Erica Knight said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “With robust grassroots support demonstrated at the recent Nevada GOP convention, Dr. Gunter is uniquely positioned to unseat Senator Jacky Rosen and champion conservative values in the Senate.”

Trump has not endorsed a candidate in the race, most likely due to his ties with Gunter and the NRSC’s backing of Brown.

Rosen support back home

With the fall race coming more into focus, Rosen’s campaign continues to emphasize what it calls her ability to work across the aisle on behalf of her constituents.

“Jacky Rosen has been ranked one of the most bipartisan and effective Senators in the nation because of her proven record of political independence and her work across party lines to deliver for Nevada,” Rosen spokeswoman Johanna Warshaw said. “While extreme MAGA Republicans are busy tearing each other down in a divisive and expensive primary, Senator Rosen is focused on communicating directly to voters about the work she’s doing to fight for Nevadans.”

Vince Saavedra, executive secretary-treasurer of the Southern Nevada Building Trades Unions, also touted Rosen’s bipartisanship in an interview with the Washington Examiner.

“She is not an extremist, which we love,” Saavedra said. “Whether it’s far left or far right, she could work across the aisle easily, and that’s why she’s going to have the building trades support.”

Rosen voted with Biden nearly 93% of the time during the 117^th Congress, according to analysis from FiveThirtyEight. In the 118th Congress, she has voted with the president nearly 99% of the time.

In 2023, Rosen was the third-ranked Democratic senator to break ranks with her party, according to CQ Roll Call and the Lugar Center at Georgetown listed her as one of the top 10 bipartisan lawmakers in the Senate in 2022.

The Trump campaign and the GOP are seeking to make the 2024 race focused on inflation increasing the cost of groceries and gas and a rising immigration crisis at the southern border.

In Nevada, the consumer price index for all urban consumers was 3.45% in April, up from 3.1% the previous month but down from 6.5% one year prior. The “Core” CPI Inflation was 3.9% in April, 4.0% the previous month, and down from 5.7% a year prior.

In contrast to the GOP, Rosen and the Biden campaign are seeking to make the election focus on abortion, which has proven to be a potent turnout matter for Democrats.

Organizers in Nevada are working to get an amendment that enshrines abortion rights into the state constitution on the ballot. Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom, the group leading the effort, said it had amassed 110,000 signatures, more than the 102,362 required to be on the ballot, in April.

“I think it will have a big impact because this is a family issue,” said Susie Martinez, executive secretary-treasurer of the Nevada state AFL-CIO.

“It’s ridiculous that your politician should have anything to do with you and your doctor,” Martinez continued. “It’s just these extremes have just gotten out of hand, and that’s why every time anything comes up with (abortion), it’s a losing battle for the Republicans because women are not going to put up with that, they come out to vote for that.”

Brown and his wife Amy spoke with NBC News in February about the abortion she received before they married, with Brown embracing Nevada law allowing abortion up to 24 weeks and supporting individual states setting abortion standards.

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The NRSC, however, is confident both Trump and Brown can win back the Silver State from Democrats.

“Polls in Nevada have consistently shown President Trump leading Joe Biden in Nevada, and Sam Brown is already neck and neck with Jacky Rosen despite having less name identification,” Berg said. “That is why Cook Political Report recently shifted the race from ‘Lean Democrat’ to ‘Toss-Up.’”

So when Kelton and her coterie of socialists put out an hour-35-minute documentary detailing their defense of MMT, your resident economics columnist watched Finding the Money so you don’t have to.

MMT operates off the axiom that a government responsible for minting its own currency can always print more when necessary. Finding the Money spends extensive time claiming that money didn’t result as a medium of exchange or record of debt more efficient than direct bartering between individuals (in classical economics, the basic definition of a market). Rather, in the MMT worldview, money is a creation of government. And crucially because government is solely responsible for making money, it is also the rightful owner of money.

In practice, MMT is a word game for progressives to justify driving up exponential debt growth.

“You could take the National Debt Clock that scares everyone and just rename it the ‘U.S. Dollar Savings Clock’ and I think everyone would have a very different kind of reaction,” Kelton said in the film. “And so I think 95% of the problems that we have getting better policy is probably down to the words we use to describe what’s actually happening.”

Convenient, isn’t it? In Kelton’s telling, our $32 trillion in national debt does not consist of “real resources” owed, such as net interest payments to foreign bondholders or Social Security checks or military aid to Ukraine. Instead, “their deficit” is private sector “surplus” because only the government is capable of creating real wealth, according to MMT.

The “documentary,” if we can call it that, mocks mainstream Keynesians like Jason Furman, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers for much of former President Barack Obama‘s second term. The film chides Furman for pointing out that public spending indeed crowds out private investments and that increased government deficits push the interest rates on Treasuries higher.

“How can he say that?” Kelton says in disbelief. “How can he say that knowing what we have been doing for decades?”

Beyond centuries of empirical economics, we can simply point to the past five years, as the annual deficit skyrocketed from fewer than $1 trillion to multiple consecutive years of $2 trillion or higher, and the corresponding and sustained surge of both long-term and short-term Treasury yields.

The doc only mentions MMT’s real-world test, the worst inflationary crisis in 40 years, under Biden, with 17 minutes to spare. That’s when Kelton gives the game away, saying, “You can actually spend money and reduce inflationary pressures.”

One of Kelton’s fellow travelers, Fadhel Kaboub, president of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity, adds, “If [inflation is] coming from a shortage from the energy sector, we can reduce our consumption of oil with policies to conserve, drive less, fly less, no fees for public transit, work from home, shorter work weeks, and we can also increase the capacity of that sector to relieve some of the pressure and bottlenecks.”

Though MMT argues that the money itself isn’t a constraint, what about those “real resources”? What if, as now, an economy is operating at full employment?

“Then the resources have to be freed up or created,” Kelton said, graduating from mere socialism to a flirtation with full-on communism. “How do you do that? I think of Medicare for All as a huge opportunity in this respect. We have the biggest, most expensive healthcare system in the entire world, roughly 18% of U.S. GDP. If we were to transition to a leaner, more efficient form of healthcare delivery, it’s going save us a lot of resources.”

Kelton adds, “Eliminating the middle man. Defense, military-industrial complex! And we have this behemoth of a finance sector.”

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Rather than an ideology with political conclusions that follow, MMT is better understood as a progressive wish list reverse-engineered to explain away and distort economic realities into an incoherent framework. The goal is not even to justify the passage of the Green New Deal, the shared policy aim of all MMT adherents, but rather to collectivize all means of production.

Kelton and company do not care that when put to the real test of the past three years of multitrillion-dollar deficits, inflation has not constrained the deficit, and the Federal Reserve has proven unable to constrain inflation unilaterally. Rather, they care about making the case you that the government is responsible for creating your own prosperity and earnings, and in turn, it is the government that should own the means of production in a way that would make Karl Marx proud.

The discussion draft, called the American Privacy Rights Act, would set a first-of-its-kind national rule for how companies can collect, use, and move a consumer’s data. It would also allow users to opt out of targeted advertising, access and delete their data, and take their data with them to other digital businesses. Larger social media platforms and companies dealing in sizable amounts of data would face heightened scrutiny under the law, while businesses with less than $40 million in annual gross revenue would be exempt from the proposal’s requirements. 

Crucially, the proposal addresses what have been logjams in previous efforts: federal preemption of state privacy laws and a private right of action. Senate Commerce Committee Chairwoman Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) released the draft bill and hope it contains enough concessions to gain both Republican and Democratic support.

Congressional Republicans may favor the proposal’s preemption of state privacy laws, including California’s strictest in the nation. In the absence of a federal rule, companies doing business in multiple states often comply with the most severe state regulatory regime rather than accommodating a patchwork of different rules state by state.

In a statement, the CEO of the Consumer Technology Association, Gary Shapiro, praised the draft bill. “We support a national privacy standard that preempts state laws, providing legal clarity for companies to operate and consistent protections across state borders for consumers,” he said. Most of the industry has long called for certainty and a unified rule on privacy.  

Democrats may be pleased with the private right of action in the proposal, allowing users to pursue damages in court if companies violate the new law. It remains to be seen if those concessions bring support from members of both parties or give them cause to stay away.         

Industry is still absorbing the details of the plan. Sarah Barrows, global head of privacy and product counsel for NextRoll, a digital marketing company, told the Washington Examiner that any “dreaded right of private action” included in any proposal “should be laser-focused on encouraging compliance and rectifying actual harm to actual American citizens and not to a plaintiff’s bar rubbing their hands together in glee.” She added that the APRA “does seem to strike a balance by limiting this right with a notice to cure in cases alleging harm, requiring pleading and evidence of harm.”

Privacy matters have been driving actions in varied policy areas lately. Concerns over U.S. user data ending up in the hands of the Chinese government helped pass the “divest or be banned” law against TikTok last month. In a separate bill, passed just days later, the House voted 414-0 to make the sale of American user information from data brokers to adversarial countries illegal. 

The Federal Communications Commission recently fined AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon nearly $200 million for allegedly illegally sharing access to customers’ location data. Interestingly, under the APRA, the FCC would be stripped of that authority, instead empowering the Federal Trade Commission with oversight of data privacy matters.

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But the fate of the APRA remains unknown. The bill has yet to be introduced and must pass both chambers before President Joe Biden can sign it into law. Biden has stated his support for federal privacy action but has largely focused on children’s safety concerns online. With the election looming increasingly largely in the minds of elected officials, the shot clock is running down on passing any legislation. An additional challenge is that one of the bill’s assumed sponsors, McMorris Rodgers, plans to step down from Congress in January.

This time crunch may make it harder to refine the details of the bill and get industry on board. Barrows noted, “The uncertainty and overreaching of sloppy drafting creates an undue and significant burden on businesses who may want to comply but cannot afford it or take the risk of getting it wrong and having their compliance efforts thwarted.”