Stories credited to thedailyeconomy.org, by publication date. ChamberLight collects articles that mention the officials it tracks, so this shows its own coverage of this source, not how much the source publishes.

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Month	Stories	All outlets
January 2026	1	32 (collection gap)
February 2026	0	180
March 2026	1	1,094
April 2026	0	4,538
May 2026	0	none collected
June 2026	0	none collected
July 2026	0	none collected
August 2026	0	1 (collection gap)
September 2026	0	1,320

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Party of the officials these stories are mainly about, across all 2 officials named. A story counts once for each official it is mainly about, so the split is over 3 story–official pairs, from 2 stories.

Republican67% · 2 pairs
Democrat33% · 1 pair

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Good Look: 0 (0%)
Mixed: 1 (50%)
Informational: 0 (0%)
Bad Look: 1 (50%)

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Articles served from thedailyeconomy.org

Congress Knows It Has a Spending Problem, But Won't Fix It

At a recent Senate hearing on the fiscal outlook, legislators and budget experts said the quiet part out loud: the United States is running historically large deficits in non-crisis times, and we need to stop pretending that we can grow our way out of it. Washington’s problem isn’t ignorance. It’s that the only politically safe position is to acknowledge the debt crisis — and then do nothing to fix it. Congress lacks an effective mechanism to make politically difficult decisions possible. The message from the hearing was stark: this is not a crisis caused by recession or war. It is the result of policy choices lawmakers refuse to confront. The federal budget is increasingly tilted toward unsustainable promises made to older Americans, financed by borrowing that imposes the costs on younger Americans. Earlier CBO projections show that by 2029, the federal government will spend roughly 50 cents of every budget dollar on benefits for Americans 65 and older. The long-term picture is even worse. According to the government’s Financial Report, more than 100 percent of long-term unfunded obligations stem from just two programs: Medicare and Social Security (their combined shortfalls reflect the difference between their dedicated taxes and projected spending, which exceed the total because the rest of the budget shows a small projected surplus over the same period). Hosted by the Senate Subcommittee on Fiscal Responsibility and Economic Growth, the hearing featured Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Director Phillip Swagel, Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) President Maya MacGuineas, and Yale Budget Lab founder Martha Gimbel. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) offered a blunt assessment of the political stalemate during opening remarks. Democrats “insist the solution is simply making the rich pay their fair share,” he said, but then don’t follow through on meaningful tax increases. Republicans argue there’s a spending problem, yet “when they had the power to return spending to a reasonable pre-pandemic level, the One Big Beautiful Bill simply did not meet the moment.” In other words, Washington’s fiscal debate is a performance: each side criticizes the other for choices it is unwilling to reverse when it has the opportunity. The day of reckoning is no longer far off. Social Security faces financing constraints in just six years, triggering automatic benefit cuts of roughly 25 percent. Medicare’s hospital trust fund is not far behind. Whether Congress chooses slower benefit growth, means-testing, eligibility changes, higher taxes, or some blend, delay only increases the eventual scale of the adjustment. One illusion common to both sides of the political aisle is the idea that tough choices can be avoided with faster economic growth. As CBO Director Phillip Swagel noted, stronger growth raises revenues but also increases interest costs on a truly massive debt. Interest costs are already higher than defense spending and rising quickly. As debt rises to excessive levels, even good economic news can come with a fiscal price tag. The hearing also highlighted a generational injustice that Washington tiptoes around: the budget increasingly redistributes from younger, poorer Americans to older, wealthier ones. Swagel (CBO) noted that children ultimately bear the cost of borrowing that today’s voters authorize. MacGuineas (CRFB) and Gimbel (Yale) underscored how the federal government spends far more on seniors than on children. What’s more, today’s elderly, as a cohort, are not the economically precarious group they once were: senior poverty has declined below that of the general population. That’s because the budget doesn’t redistribute based on need. Spending favors the most politically organized constituency, while deficit financing shifts costs to those with the least political power. And acting to fix the fiscal imbalance requires something that Congress would rather avoid: imposing concentrated political pain today to prevent much larger, but more dispersed economic pain tomorrow. Every fix to the US debt path has identifiable losers — industries that benefit from tax preferences, higher-income retirees facing slower benefit growth, and special interests whose gravy train of federal taxpayers’ money might get cut off. Those groups show up, mobilize, and threaten to punish politicians at the ballot box. Beneficiaries of reform, however, including younger taxpayers, busy working families, and even future Congresses, rarely advocate on their own behalf. As economist James Buchanan observed in Democracy in Deficit, fiscal restraint rarely produces political rewards. Voters immediately feel spending cuts or tax increases, but they never see the crises that responsible policy prevents — the inflation that never erupts, the interest rates that never spike, the austerity that never becomes necessary. That is why the most valuable conclusion one can draw from this hearing is that the United States needs a process that can make economically necessary (but politically difficult) tradeoffs possible. I have argued for exactly that: an independent fiscal commission, modeled on the Base Realignment and Closure process. BRAC allowed Congress to close military bases it knew were unnecessary but couldn’t politically touch, and succeeded because it created political cover for difficult decisions Congress knew needed to be made. A fiscal BRAC would apply the same logic to the budget’s third rails and sacred cows. Congress would establish the commission, set specific guidelines and targets for what commissioners must accomplish, and reverse the status quo’s default of inaction. The commission’s recommendations could take effect automatically, with presidential approval, unless Congress voted to reject them. That shift — from requiring affirmative action to requiring affirmative obstruction — changes the political calculus. Critics object that commissions are a way to dodge accountability. This commission would do the opposite: return spending accountability to a system built to evade it. Congress abdicated control when it put the largest entitlement programs on autopilot. An effective commission is our best shot at correcting these programs’ unsustainable and unaccountable growth. Washington knows it has a spending problem. This Senate hearing made that clear. What it lacks is the will, and an effective mechanism, to do something about it. A BRAC-like fiscal commission won’t make tough choices easy. But it could finally make them possible. Discipline will come eventually. The question is whether Congress chooses it or waits for a crisis to impose it.

Mar 19, 20269 votes

Censorship and the Ratchet Effect: Threats to Free Speech Outlast Supposed Crises

Late last year, YouTube announced plans to reinstate accounts that had been banned at the behest of the Biden Administration for posting alleged COVID-19 misinformation. The announcement likely came as a relief to groups like the Children’s Health Defense Fund, a group associated with Robert Kennedy Jr.; and to Senator Ron Johnson; both of whom were punished by the social media giant for posting videos that ran contrary to the Biden administration’s official policy on the COVID-19 vaccine and on COVID-19 treatments. This is a good move. But we should remember, it wasn’t just YouTube that decided to punish speech disapproved by the prior administration. A report by the United States House of Representatives’ Committee on the Judiciary and Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government contains damning evidence that the Biden Administration leaned on social media companies to censor anti-vaccine content during the COVID-19 pandemic. The report details how Facebook, Amazon, and YouTube all shadowbanned or removed content that was critical of the administration’s official stance on the vaccines, the origin of the virus, and more. The administration’s actions were reckless, and endangered more than just our societal freedom of speech. For one thing, while it might be tempting to think that the Biden Administration only censored crackpots and conspiracy theorists, the truth is far worse. The report details how the Biden administration leaned on Facebook to censor the “lab leak” theory of COVID-19’s origins, a theory that’s now seen as highly plausible. It similarly asked Facebook to censor “negative information on or opinions about the vaccine,” and internal emails from Facebook report that ““The Surgeon General wants us to remove true information about side effects.” Prominent scientists who opposed the administration’s position on lockdowns, including Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (current head of the National Institutes of Health) were blacklisted by social media platforms. At the administration’s behest, videos featuring Bhattacharya were removed from YouTube. All of this did immense damage to our truth-seeking apparatus, during a time when finding the truth could not have been more important. When Facebook dragged its feet on censoring certain content, President Biden publicly accused them of “killing people.” But the same accusation could be made against the Biden Administration itself: by censoring scientific debate during a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, the administration virtually guaranteed that its response would be worse than if prominent critics were allowed to voice their concerns. Some proponents of censorship argue that the more important an issue is, the more justification there is for censorship. This makes a superficial kind of sense: after all, nobody wants hucksters selling snake oil to take advantage of sick people by claiming that they’re curing cancer. But more often, the inverse is true: the higher the stakes of a given issue, the more essential it is that experts on all sides be allowed to voice their concerns freely. By preventing this robust scientific debate, the Biden administration ensured that the policies it implemented (including lockdowns and vaccine mandates) were worse than if prominent critics had been given a seat at the table. The Biden Administration’s actions also took a sledgehammer to institutional trust in America, which has fallen to concerning levels. The decline of institutional trust worries critics across the political spectrum, from progressives concerned that our society is becoming anti-science to conservatives like Yuval Levin, for a simple reason: our society works better when we trust our institutions and when, in turn, they show themselves to be trustworthy. By politicizing the scientific debate about the COVID-19 pandemic, the Biden Administration did profound damage to institutional trust. A study by Pew finds that in April 2020, 87 percent of Americans “had confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests.” By late 2023, that number had fallen to 73 percent. By summer of 2024, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had only a 33 percent approval rating among Republicans. Many on the left chalk this trend up to Republicans being anti-science, but the House Judiciary report tells a different story: many on the right lost trust in an institution that they justifiably saw as having been shamelessly politicized. Trust in news has plummeted as well. In 2019, 18 percent of Americans had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of faith in television news. By 2024, that number had fallen to 12 percent. In 2019, 23 percent of respondents had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of faith in newspapers; by 2024, that number was just 18 percent. There are multiple reasons for this decline in trust, but it’s hard to see evidence of the administration jawboning companies into censoring so-called “misinformation” on COVID-19 and not conclude that many Americans are simply tired of feeling lied to by the news. The other problem created by the administration has to do with what economist Robert Higgs calls the “ratchet effect.” Here’s how Michael Matulef describes the phenomenon: The ratchet effect theory, as popularized by Robert Higgs in his book Crisis and Leviathan, refers to the tendency of governments to respond to crises by implementing new policies, regulations, and laws that significantly enhance their powers. These measures are typically presented as temporary solutions to address specific problems. However, in history, these measures often outlast their intended purpose and become a permanent part of the legal landscape. One danger of the Biden Administration’s actions is that they can become precedents for future administrations to further erode free speech protections in future crises. The Biden administration inured people to having their freedom of speech censored in the name of public health, which makes it that much more likely that we’ll be equally willing to shrug off future abuses. When it comes to free speech, we the people can feel like the proverbial frog sitting in a pot of increasingly hot water, and it should concern all of us whenever an administration decides to increase the temperature by a few degrees. When we’re discussing freedom of speech, First Amendment defenders can be strident about the principles involved; as more than one First Amendment absolutist has argued, even if there were no practical benefit to free speech beyond letting people speak freely, it would still be worth defending. That’s true, but we shouldn’t let ourselves forget that the First Amendment is also a profoundly practical tool for building a good society. When governments censor their people, they do profound damage to the truth-seeking apparatus and risk people’s lives and livelihoods with poorly-thought-out policies. They damage the institutional trust that keeps society functioning. No matter what we think of the arguments made by lockdown resistors and COVID-19 vaccine skeptics, we should be appalled that our government tried to censor them.

Jan 27, 202620 votes

Censorship and the Ratchet Effect: Threats to Free Speech Outlast Supposed Crises

Jan 27, 202616 votes

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Congress Knows It Has a Spending Problem, But Won't Fix It

Censorship and the Ratchet Effect: Threats to Free Speech Outlast Supposed Crises

Censorship and the Ratchet Effect: Threats to Free Speech Outlast Supposed Crises