Of note: PolicySphere will be off for the Paschal Triduum and Easter Monday. We wish you a happy Easter!
Bonjour! Here’s your PolicySphere morning briefing! If you were forwarded this, here’s more about who we are and what we’re doing and, of course, don’t forget to sign up.
#AI – Ted Cruz and Phil Gramm write a WSJ op-ed against AI regulation.
#Realignment – Listen to American Compass’s Oren Cass discuss his think tank’s fascinating new survey on Americans’ attitude to the size of government. Here is also an FT column summarizing his findings.
#Housing #PurchasingPower – Important paper from AEI’s Tobias Peter: “Market-oriented Reform Principles and Policies that Would Help the Housing Market” Difficulty getting on the housing ladder for the young generation is a very important sleeper issue.
#Immigration – Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), 17 other Senate Democrats and an independent sent a letter to President Biden asking his administration “take all available action” (read: executive action) to speed up the process for granting lawful status to migrants. Naturally, one reason why they’re asking for executive action is they know no such measure can pass the Congress. (The Hill)
#Immigration – Washington Examiner editorial: “Obrador and his socialist allies in Caracas, Havana, and Managua have weaponized mass migration to blackmail America, and Biden is letting them get away with it.”
#EPA #Emissions – Heritage’s Miles Pollard and Laura Gorceac: “EPA’s tailpipe emissions rule rides roughshod over our freedoms“
#TaxPolicy #FamilyPolicy – Ramesh Ponnuru points out that the Federal tax code doesn’t really favor stay-at-home moms and breadwinner households. (NRO)
#DEI #Education – Manhattan Institute’s Dan Morenoff: “The federal government conditions approximately $1 billion of grants each year on schools certifying prescribed racial balances for their student bodies.”
#Healthcare – Cato’s Marc Joffe and Jeffrey A. Singer: “State lawmakers should expand pharmacists’ scope of practice to allow them to independently treat a wide range of medical conditions.”
#Healthcare – Reason: “After botching COVID test approvals, the Food and Drug Administration wants power over thousands of other tests.“
#Agriculture – Do you like them apples? Many new breeds of apple are appearing on the market. According to Reason magazine, this is because the US government almost killed the apple, and the free market saved it.
#AI – From R Street Institute: “A Policymaker’s Primer on Adversarial Machine Learning Threats“
#Surrogacy – A Chicago veterinarian was arrested because of evidence collected by the FBI that “he and his husband were expecting the birth of a child by a surrogate on March 29, and that he planned to sexually assault the child after it is born.”
#Energy #Infrastructure – Niskanen: “The market efficiencies of high-voltage transmission“
#Civics #Citizenship – Hoover Senior Fellow Chester E. Finn: “The country needs some shared understanding of what it means to be an American and what’s changed — and hasn’t — over these several centuries.” Easier said than done… But perhaps worth attempting…
#LGBTQ – Sacramento becomes first transgender ‘sanctuary city’ in California
#OccupationalLicensing – New economics paper: “a 10 percent rise in regulatory restrictions leads to a 3.3 percent rise in hourly wages but a 4.4 percent decline in employment.”
#Self-Recommending – Manhattan Institute’s Carolyn D. Gorman reviews centrist psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation, reviewing the teenage mental health epidemic.
Chart of the Day
Top 10 countries whence America’s immigrants come from, via Project for Immigration Reform:
Meme of the Day
We liked this quote from The Free Press about the left’s latest manufactured micro-scandal which, apparently, concerns a famous podcast health guru who, apparently, had consensual sex with several grown-up women. To New York Magazine this earth-shattering event qualified for a cover story, even though their previous cover story endorsed “gender transitions” for children. Sorry, today’s Meme of the Day is funny but darkly funny.
