This week, Vice President JD Vance gave an address at the 2025 Bitcoin Conference. If you're into crypto policy, you should watch it.

Though it was light on policy specifics, beyond a general promise to have the government mostly leave the industry alone and an endorsement of the stablecoin bill GENIUS Act, there were some particularly intriguing passages.

The first is related to his endorsement of stablecoins: "In this Administration, we do not think that stablecoins threaten the integrity of the US dollar, quite the opposite. In fact, we view them as a force multiplier of our economic might. Dollar-pegged stablecoins, particularly once GENIUS is enacted, is only going to help the American economy, and it's only going to help the American dollar."

This is an interesting view, contrary to the policy consensus. According to the mainstream view, stablecoins compete with the dollar by creating alternative payment systems. But it's easy to see the mechanism: most major stablecoins (USDT, USDC) are backed by US dollar reserves; every stablecoin transaction is essentially a dollar transaction, even if it bypasses traditional banking; stablecoins make dollars more accessible in countries with poor banking infrastructure or capital controls; they create demand for dollar reserves (since stablecoin issuers must hold dollars to back the tokens); global stablecoin adoption could increase international dollar usage beyond what traditional banking could achieve. Fair enough.

A second, even more speculative idea, is this. After echoing (without fully endorsing) an idea put forward by Peter Thiel that while cryptocurrency is fundamentally libertarian or conservative, AI is in some ways "communist," Vance warned the crypto luminaries in the room: "What happens in AI is very much going to affect, in good and bad ways, what happens to Bitcoin."

He didn't go into any details and, frankly, it's hard to see what that means. One possibility is that AI requires massive computational power and energy, and so does Bitcoin mining. As they compete for electricity and semiconductors, this could potentially affecting the economics of Bitcoin.

A broader issue might be: bitcoin/crypto is all about decentralization; however, AI, by virtue of requiring massive computational power, is a force for centralization. A world where all tech is mediated by AI might be a world where all technology US is run through highly centralized platforms. This is a world where usage and adoption of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency would be more difficult.

And in that case, what would be the government's role to counteract this centralization? Especially given that, elsewhere, Vance and other luminaries in the Administration, have expressed their desire to support AI? Fascinating line of inquiry.

Policy News You Need To Know

#Immigration #DOGE #Governance — Interesting from legal publication JD Supra: "Employers should be aware that we anticipate a flood of Social Security Number (SSN) no-match letters in the coming weeks." In English, this means that DHS is checking employers' employment forms against Social Security records to detect whether employers are hiring or employing illegal aliens. When DHS finds out that an employee's number doesn't match their record, they send a letter to the employer, who has to vet the employee more closely. The rest of the blog post is fascinating. You'd think the government was already doing this, yes? No, of course not. Moreso, it was discouraging this: "In the world of I-9 compliance, companies are stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place. On the one hand, if they fall short in their compliance efforts, they face potential scrutiny from the Department of Homeland Security/Homeland Security Investigations (DHS/HIS). On the other hand, if they go too far in their vetting efforts, they face the wrath of the Department of Justice/Immigrant & Employee Rights (DOJ/IER)." In other words, the previous policy was that if an employer looked too hard to determine an employee's immigration status, the government might hit them with a civil rights lawsuit. There's another angle on this which has to do with good governance, something DOGE, or what remains of it, might look like: because it also looks like some of those no-match letters are sent erroneously. "Some of the companies we represent have been enrolled in E-Verify. In such cases, employers have already processed the employee’s information, including the SSN, through the DHS and SSA databases. The fact that some of these employees are now being flagged as having problematic SSNs has proven to be quite the mystery for these employers." Between civil rights law gone mad and general bureaucratic incompetence, it's like a perfect little parable about the US government in the year of our lord 2025.

#Immigration #HigherEd #Chyna — The Trump Administration has said it will drastically reduce, if not eliminate, visas for Chinese students. You sometimes hear that this is bad policy, because a key competitive advantage of the US is attracting the world's best and brightest (ok), and specifically, brain-draining China. There's a problem at least with that second part: a lot, and it really is a lot of those Chinese grad students are spies. Investigative reporter Joshua Philipp has the receipts.

#CTC — One argument against the child tax credit is that it disincentivizes work. In a Letter to the Editor of the WSJ, Josh McCabe of the Niskanen Center and Brad Wilcox of the Institute for Family Studies, argue against this idea. "In a new study, Indiana University economist Anna Strauss analyzes the effect that changes to the child tax credit as part of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act had on employment. Ms. Strauss finds that expanding the credit increased employment and hours worked among low-income single mothers and married parents. Each $500 increase in the credit increased employment by 0.9 percentage point and increased usual hours worked each week by 18 minutes for secondary earners in the credit’s phase-in range," they write. They add: "These findings demonstrate that the child tax credit incentivizes work among lower-income families while enabling greater parental investment in children among middle-income families. The changes to the child tax credit in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act advance both goals and deserve support."

#Woke #K12 #VibeShift — We are still tracking the extent of the "vibe shift" away from woke through the heavily non-scientific (but perhaps still telling) indicator of insane K12 reforms. San Francisco public schools unveiled an insane "grading for equity" scheme. But then, public outcry led them to abandon these plans! Vibe shift! Well, maybe. Today's episode in the saga: "Seattle Public Schools shuts down gifted and talented program for being oversaturated with white and Asian students." If only for the sakes of those gifted students, let's hope there's an effective outcry there, too.

#DOGE — Good column from Josh Hammer: DOGE failed at its stated goals of reducing spending by $1-2 trillion through efficiency gains, but it still deserves credit for putting the issue of government reform front and center.

#AI — Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, has issued a warning that the unemployment rate in the US will soon be 10-20% with as many as 50% of white-collar entry-level jobs being eliminated.

#AI — Interesting argument from AEI's Jim Pethokoukis: even if AI becomes "superintelligent" that doesn't mean it would take all the jobs. The reason, he thinks, is that "superintelligence could aid 'experiential entrepreneurship' — discovering and articulating new ways for humans to flourish."

#BigBeautifulBill — More Americans may be paying individual alternative minimum tax if a change in the House-passed Republican tax-and-spending package remains in place, reports Bloomberg Tax's Chris Cioffi. However, even if the change remains, it won't get close to pre-TCJA levels.

#Reg — President Trump just signed H.J. Res. 61 into law, a bill passed via the CRA which repeals the Biden-Harris Administration’s National Emissions Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants (NESHAP) for the rubber tire manufacturing sector. Release here. There really is a lot of exciting stuff happening on the reg front.

Friday Essays

One of the greatest moral philosophers within living memory, Alasdair MacIntyre, author of such classics as After Virtue and Dependent Rational Animals, has died. You should read this obituary by the great Nathan Pinkoski in Compact.

At his podcast Interesting Times, Ross Douthat has produced yet another must-read/must-listen interview, this time on the global fertility crisis, with British sociologist Alice Evans. Here's the transcript.

Speaking of Ross Douthat, he has been interviewed by The New Left Review, a journal whose tone and politics you can possibly guess at. It's a very good in-depth interview about "The Condition of America," prodding him about the relationships between various strands of his thought, such as his critique of American elitism and his endorsement of a working-class populist GOP, and the current Trump-MAGA moment.

A key principle of regulation of civilian nuclear power generation is called "linear no threshold," or LNT. This is "the hypothesis that the relationship between radiation dose and cancer risk to humans is linear and that there is no truly ‘safe’ level of radiation." The problem is that this idea is scientifically unsound, and it holds nuclear power back. In an essay very much worth your time, Alex Chalmers at Works in Progress goes over the history and the science of LNT and why it needs to go away.

The Financial Times has produced a very good deep dive on Chinese industrial policy, its strengths, its weaknesses, and the lessons Western nations can take from it.