Before your links of the day, a confession: we put together this daily email by reading many, if not most (or at least we try) of the material put out by think tanks, policy journals, policy wonks, and other media, about public policy in the United States, every day. We do this because we believe that there’s plenty of coverage of horserace politics out there, which is fine, but not enough smart coverage of public policy. However, in the heat of a Presidential election, most people never stop talking about the election. Right now, this newsletter is built on curation because many of our subscribers–that’s you–have told us they find this format useful. But what to do if there’s nothing to curate because everyone is talking about the latest election news? We will continue to do the briefing, but we may change the format. As always, we welcome your feedback.

#Reg – If you have been reading the Morning Briefing for a long time, you will know that we have covered the Biden Administration’s regulatory bulimia. Mostly under the radar, the Biden Administration has published thousands of pages of new regulations, mostly, but not only, under the guise of environmentalism, to an extent not seen in Democratic administrations in many decades. Meanwhile, Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Wayne Crews points out in the WSJ that the Trump Administration was one of the most strongly deregulatory in recent decades, with this striking stat: Crews “calculates that the Federal Register in 2017 finished with the fewest pages since 1993.” In regulation there are lots of devils and lots of details, but when it comes to supply-side reforms to unleash innovation and growth, there is a lot more merit to deregulation, which often involves removing dumb rules that serve abstract ideological goals (DEI, environmentalism) or protect cartelized incumbents, than high-income tax cuts in a high-inflation, high-deficit environment.

#Reg – Speaking of deregulation, the other great hope is Loper Bright. And though we have highlighted examples of where the end of Chevron might help businesses challenge more regulations, it also won’t be an automatic magical device for removing all regulations, since judges will still have to apply existing laws and regulations and come up with their own interpretations of them. More regulations will be challenged but also not all those challenges will be successful. There needs to be a little bit of sanity added to this issue. Mercatus’ Satya Marar does this in The Hill.

#AI #Healthcare – We are enjoying this R Street series on AI and public health. Here, Adam Thierer cites a striking statistic: “physicians spend half their in-office time doing administrative work—mostly filling out forms—instead of interacting directly with patients.” This is an obvious area where AI could prove very helpful.

#Tech #Healthcare – Speaking of useful, practical tech and healthcare: Medicare’s telehealth flexibilities are set to expire at the end of 2024. The Bipartisan Policy Center has done great work on expanding telehealth and using that to cut the cost of healthcare. Here are their proposals for making those changes permanent.

#Macroeconomics – Bloomberg’s Joseph Weisenthal, one of the smartest economic analysts out there, has interesting analysis of President Trump’s views on macroeconomics, as put forward in his latest Bloomberg BusinessWeek interview.

#LGBT – The legal fight against the Biden Administration’s new Title IX rule, which reinterprets “sex” to mean gender identity, continues. With the latest injunction, 700 more colleges are free of the rule, Inside Higher Ed reports.

#VibeShift – The fight against corporate DEI continues. Activist and former Congressional candidate Robby Starbuck just got a major win from John Deere, who released a statement saying they would commit to : “No longer funding pride parades, No hiring quotas or pronoun usage, Business resource groups will no longer be divided on identity lines, Audit all training materials to ensure the absence of socially motivated messages”. This type of conservative activism is getting results, and showing a potential path back to normalcy in American life.

#Inflation – This is pretty obvious stuff, hopefully, but it’s still good to see it written in black and white and with a breakdown of the data: no, Elizabeth Warren, inflation was not caused by all corporations suddenly deciding to become more greedy at the same time.

Chart of the Day

The vast majority of Americans prefer colorblind merit-based equality of opportunity to racial quotas.

Meme of the Day