Policy

The Macmillan Event

Harold Macmillan Arrives in Time for the Midterms Events, dear boy. The October streets, the intact ham aisle, and the midterm ranking that does not move by itself. The Streets Did Not Look Like a Student Protest The streets of Limoges, Paris, Marseille, Lyon, and Milan did not look like a student protest over classroom conditions or the price of bread. A nineteenth-century town hall in Limoges burned until its roof collapsed. The tourist office went up in Lyon. Rioters entered and damaged town halls in Marseille and Lille. Looters emptied hundreds of shops in a single day. Police made between…

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The Dark Horse Senate Race

Republicans Can Win New Hampshire New Hampshire is not Massachusetts. The independent lane, the ground game, and the race that can flip the map. New Hampshire is the dark horse Senate race of 2026. I have had my eye on it for months. The campaign is playing out as I expected and it remains a very winnable race for John Sununu. Public polls still show Chris Pappas ahead by mid-single digits. Ratings have drifted toward Lean Democrat. Those instruments have misread this state before. They miss the independent and undeclared voters who decide races here, and they miss the non-response pattern…

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The Deadly Results of Democrat Policies

Illegal. Released. Again. Crime, immigration, and fraud are one chain. November is the sequel. I wrote in May that crime, illegal immigration, and fraud would be major midterm issues. I have written the fraud half of that sentence until the cows come home. The last ten days handed the country the staple. A coalition of Democrat states went to court to keep welfare off the green-card test. A rideshare driver who should never have been here was charged with raping a seventeen-year-old girl in Maryland after New York had already let him walk on a sex-abuse arrest. Same week. Same argument.…

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The Art of the Hemisphere, Part VII

The Infinite Life Greenland did not have to change hands. The lock on the door did. N.B. Read Parts I, II, III, IV, V, and VI of this series. See also Trump’s Greenland Gambit. May 8 was the mineral proof. August 28 closed the southern flank. Friday recorded the north. President Trump posted that the United States had entered an “Infinite Life” agreement with the Kingdom of Denmark and Greenland: permanent control over security “and all other needs,” no cost to the United States, no end date, and a rule that no adversary may put a base, a troop presence, or…

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Here’s to Better Ideas

Repeal the Surtax A $5,000 check is a rally line. Killing the 3.8 percent investment tax is a statute. Dallas, Wednesday night. The line was built for the hall. “If the Republicans win,” the president said, “you win with us and you get $5,000.” He called it a Trump Dividend. Spend it in America. Pretend he is on the ballot one more time. I have a counter-proposal. It is not a check. It is not conditioned on an election night. It does not require the Treasury to invent a mailing list of a quarter-billion adults and then police where they shop.…

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Carry the Water

The Rant and the Invoices Rick Santelli leaves the floor on October 2. The question he asked in 2009 is the fraud docket since May. February 19, 2009. Chicago Merc. CNBC had Santelli on the floor for a housing plan that would refinance the people who could not carry the note. He did not file a memo. He pointed at the traders and asked the country a question it still has not answered. Why don't you put up a website and let people vote on whether we subsidize the losers' mortgages, or reward the people who can carry the water instead…

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Expand the Child Tax Credit

Tax Parents Less. Do Not Put Them on the Dole. N.B. This follows "A Parent is Not a Vendor." If policy can pay a parent for being a parent, it can pay a person for being a person. That is the sentence the Vance draft cannot survive. A future Democratic administration will not need to love stay-at-home marriage. It will keep the payee and delete the adjectives. It will call the marriage gate discriminatory, relax the hours test, raise the income cap, and tell Congress the Child Care and Development Fund is oversubscribed, which it will be. Ro Khanna already wrote…

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A Parent is Not a Vendor

Do Not Put Parents on the CCDF Ledger A stay-at-home parent is not a vendor. A Clinton-era work pot is not a family stipend. Do the family work in the tax code. The Trump administration is drafting a rule that would let some married stay-at-home parents collect money from the Child Care and Development Fund. Vice President JD Vance has made the idea a priority. The draft invents a new category called "parent-based child care." One spouse works at least thirty-five hours a week. The other stays home with the child. The family meets the income test. The check, about nine…

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Positive Labor Day Numbers

Labor Day, and the Slope Changed The official story finally faces the same direction as the policy. Labor Day is the weekend America sets aside to praise work and then talk about anything else. This year the holiday has a plot. The government spent Friday morning describing a country that no longer looks like the one it described from 2021 to 2024. The border is not a monthly spectacle. The foreign-born population is not still climbing like a flood gauge. The job market did not fall through the floor when the inflow stopped. That is not atmosphere. That is the official…

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The Art of the Hemisphere, Part VI

The Orinoco Settlement N.B. Read Parts I, II, III, IV, and V of this series. January 3 was the writ. August 28 was the recording. This series has treated the Western Hemisphere as an operating theater, not a neighborhood watch. Part II called the Orinoco the biggest real-estate deal since Manhattan. Part IV flew Maduro and Cilia Flores to New York. Part V carried the same logic north to Greenland. Friday closed the southern flank. President Trump and Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, put a number on the prize named before the raid. Seventeen fields. Sixty-five billion barrels. A private company…

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