RealClearPolicy Articles

American voters are famous for our focus on domestic, not international affairs. However, conservatives and libertarians in the US should be paying close attention to events across the pond—and not just because President Trump recently wrapped up a visit to Scotland so we’ve seen plenty of British and Scottish flags flying on our TV screens of late. While debate in the US rages about whether and how to further regulate Big Tech, with a huge number of our Members of Congress continuing to push the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), the United Kingdom just put our version of the law...

Republicans have plenty to tout in their One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB), including its extension of the 2017 Trump tax cuts, improved border security, and  strengthened national defense. But the new law also is noteworthy for leaning on key welfare reforms with a proven track record of success. Those policies—namely, applying work requirements and creating a financial interest for states to limit benefit rolls—achieve significant benefit savings now and should be expanded in the future to further boost work and keep federal deficits in check. The Congressional...

The second Trump Administration is committed to reversing decades of government-sanctioned wokeism funded by taxpayer dollars but working against taxpayers’ wishes. The Department of Justice (DOJ) is spearheading this effort, using every tool at its disposal to obliterate every shred of DEI patronage, gimmickry, and red tape that hinder efficacy. Executive orders fly, newly negotiated settlements with DEI-captured institutions drop daily and DOJ memos warn against the "legal pitfalls" of racial preferences under a colorblind Constitution. But despite the administration’s...

Thursday, August 7th is now tariff day, just postponed from August 1st and originally from Liberation Day in April. Despite delayed execution, tariffs, in combination with the One Big Beautiful Bill, are central to Making American Great Again. Some may be surprised that MAGA is a plan, not just a slogan. Last month’s Monthly Treasury Statement showed tariff revenue running already at annual rate of $324 billion, or $3.2 trillion over the next decade. In early June, the Congressional Budget Office scored Trump’s emerging tariff regime at $3.0 trillion over the decade....

Last month my old boss, former SEC Chairman Jay Clayton, told CNBC’s Squawk Box that “when governments select what a market structure ought to look like, innovation dies.” That insight was our guiding principle in my years at the SEC, and the warning it contains is more than theoretical. It is visible today in the way fintech innovators are being treated by regulators, industry incumbents, and the press.  The American financial system has long advanced through disruption. From ATMs to online securities trading, innovation has typically arrived with controversy in tow....

In the chaos of the initial weeks of the COVID-19 financial strain, most people struggled just to keep their heads above water. But for Robert and Laurene Yurkovich, a retired couple from Calgary, what was supposed to be a temporary financial setback turned into a devastating, life-altering catastrophe. In March 2020, Citibank shockingly sold nearly 3 million shares from the couple's account, obliterating over $6 million of their hard-earned wealth. This was not just a poor decision made in bad timing. It was a reckless move executed despite their objections and directly violated a prior,...

Policymakers around the country are grappling with a generational crisis in the face of learning loss that resulted from pandemic lockdowns. But ask any classroom teacher and they’ll tell you: the massive investments and resources dedicated to academic recovery won’t mean much if a substantial number of students are not in the classroom to begin with. The U.S. Department of Education reported that over 30% of students in 20 states missed at least three weeks of school in 2022-23, the most recent data available. This isn’t just a matter of empty desks; absenteeism...

Earlier this month, Americans learned that the final culmination of Elon Musk’s fallout with President Donald Trump has been the formation by Musk of the America Party. Likely to focus on reducing the national debt, spurring and better harnessing more technological innovation, and defending free speech—or so we can divine from a Musk retweet— the appeal might seem obvious. Unless you’re Donald Trump, of course. Elon did a great deal to help put Trump in power. Now, Elon wants to put him in a jam—with the help of an apparently huge swath of the...

After President Trump signed H.R. 1 into law, working Americans won a quiet but critical victory — one that protects their wallets, their communities, and the institutions they trust. We owe a special thanks to Congress who stood firm against a powerful lobbying push from Wall Street banks to impose a new tax on credit unions. As the bill moved forward, behind the scenes banks seized the chance to try to pad their profits. They lobbied hard to strip the longstanding federal tax exemption that credit unions pass to members in lower fees and rates on checking, auto and home loans, and...

America is at a crossroads. After decades of industrial decline, driven by a rules-based global trade system that failed to protect domestic competitiveness, a realignment is underway. The United States, under the Trump administration’s tariff doctrine, has challenged this broken order in a bold effort to restore the country’s economic foundation. For more than forty years, successive U.S. administrations accepted the premise that global trade liberalization would inevitably lead to competitive domestic markets and political democracy around the world. But this assumption has...

American education is in a free fall. Math test scores among nine-year-olds recently saw the largest drop in 50 years, and reading scores are declining as well. Despite the United States ranking fifth in K-12 spending and second in higher education spending among OECD countries, our students are in the middle of the pack in international math and science assessments. Even at elite American colleges, professors report that their students can’t read books. In response to this crisis, reform-minded states across the country have responded with bold and innovative policies to completely...

With all the noise surrounding tariffs and the changing rates for nations threatened weekly, there is a little-noticed war that will hit the consumers of tomatoes. The Department of Commerce announced in April that they were ending an agreement with Mexico that will spike the price of that fruit imported by 17%. This is bad news for unsuspecting consumers who don’t know that the tomatoes they love will end up being the next eggs with regard to prices. Egg lovers will never forget late last year when they very likely encountered empty shelves at their local grocery stores. The Biden...

Calls for sweeping AI regulation are growing louder—from D.C. hearings to tech think tanks. But amid all this hand-wringing, we can’t lose sight of what made America the global tech leader in the first place: freedom to innovate. That freedom doesn’t need to be smothered with red tape—but it does need defending, especially from foreign threats hiding in plain sight, like China’s DeepSeek. Congress had a golden opportunity to protect that freedom by halting the explosion of conflicting state-level AI laws. A simple moratorium in the Big Beautiful Bill would have...

[PHOTO CAPTION: Non Sibi Playground, Casabianca, Tolima Colombia 2013] In late April, I stood in the well-appointed lobby of the Sofitel Hotel in Bogota, Colombia, breathless with altitude sickness and nervous that the reunion for which I’d flown from Washington would fall through. It had been 13 years since Angelica and I met at a USAID-sponsored event in Cali. Though she’d confirmed she’d make the three-hour bus trip from Villavicencio to meet me for a recorded interview, I wasn’t sure she’d come. When Angelica appeared, we hugged like long lost friends. The...

The Trump administration is cracking down on the flood of illicit flavored e-cigarettes that bad actors are illegally importing and distributing in American communities and to American children. Attorneys general of 28 states and Guam are pleading for action. To win this battle, they need local law enforcement. Officers can well identify the potential trouble ahead when they see neon-colored, candy-flavored disposable nicotine vapes. They also can – and should – help authorities track them to the distributors and international smugglers who poison our children and...

From the Paragon Institute's Brian Blase: The U.S. House of Representatives has passed the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB), sending it to President Trump for his signature on July 4. OBBB is a sweeping package of tax cuts, program reforms, and spending measures. Its health policy provisions largely reverse the reckless and inflationary Biden administration policies that led to massive improper enrollment in Medicaid and the Obamacare exchanges—and unleashed unprecedented levels of waste, fraud, abuse, and corporate welfare. Notably, enacting the OBBB reforms required Congress to overcome...

Small business owners across America are telling similar stories. Caught in the crossfire of a global trade war, tariffs are crushing their bottom lines, limiting their growth, and driving up prices for consumers. Their stories need to be heard – and National Taxpayers Union is leading the charge to amplify their voices with The Tariffs Report.  Consider Auratone, a Tennessee-based family business making speakers since 1958. Although its products are assembled in the U.S., some necessary components must be imported. As tariffs drove up those costs, the company faced an unthinkable...

This past week, NATO leaders met in the Hague to tackle the globe’s most urgent geopolitical flashpoints, from the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine to turbulent defense and economic relations. But right here in our own western hemisphere, a national security crisis is quietly escalating with potentially catastrophic consequences – the unrestrained rise of Mexican drug cartels exploiting the policy divide between the U.S. and Mexico. While Mexico doesn’t have a seat at the G-7 table, it must have a seat at ours, particularly when it comes to securing our southern...

Americans take great pride in owning a home and all that it represents: financial security, the ability to build generational wealth, and the freedom to live the American Dream. Far more than the right to “the pursuit of happiness,” the great thinkers of the Enlightenment knew that the right to property as essential as life and liberty as the foundation of a free society — principles that are ingrained in our nation’s DNA. With people to this day recovering from the reckless corporate behavior of the 2008 financial crash, those principles are further tested amid...