Monthly Archives: September 2025

Wrong Answer

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This time it’s Jason Riley, of The Wall Street Journal, who’s missing the street for the potholes. He wrote in his Tuesday op-ed,

The latest results from the National Assessment of Education Progress were released earlier this month, and they weren’t pretty. High-school seniors recorded the worst reading scores since 1992, and math scores were the lowest since the current test began two decades ago. Elementary-school students have also lost ground. Just 31% of eighth-graders scored at or above the proficient level on the science assessment.

And,

The ramifications extend far beyond our borders. The Program for International Student Assessment exam is a global assessment of 15-year-old pupils. In 2018 only 8% of US test-takers scored in the top tier in mathematics, compared with 15% in Canada, 18% in Japan, and 29% in Hong Kong. Today’s students will populate tomorrow’s labor force, and employers who rely on workers with math, science, and engineering backgrounds have been complaining for decades that too many Americans are uninterested or ill-prepared to fill these jobs.

 

But then he wrote,

Which brings us back to Mr Trump, who wants to make it harder for US companies to hire foreign nationals. On Friday the president announced that he was imposing a new $100,000 fee on applicants for H-1B visas, designated for skilled migrants who disproportionately specialize in science, technology and math occupations.

It’s true enough that we benefit from suitably skilled foreigners who enter our nation legally—those immigrants and Riley’s “migrants.” But the problem, which seems to have blown right by him, even as he wrote it, is identified by those employers…complaining for decades that too many Americans are uninterested or ill-prepared to fill these jobs.

The answer to the problem is not making it easy for qualified immigrants to enter our nation legally, even as that helps at the margins. The answer is to fix our education system. That must begin with eliminating, root and branch, the rent- and fee-seeking teachers unions who collect massive dues and lobby (too successfully) for government money while they work just as assiduously to block local, State, and Federal efforts to improve the public school systems those unions hold in thrall. An early move in this beginning step would be to recognize that teachers and their unions who work for public schools are public servants and public service unions just as are the civil servants and their unions working for any other arm of government, and bar them from striking, just as many civil servant unions are barred.

Our education system would be further improved by getting those unions and their hip-pocket politicians at the various levels of government out of the way of voucher and charter schools and home schooling, accepting that competition works toward product improvement in education as well as it does in industry.

At that point, the cherry on top would be to have local, State, and Federal funding not go directly to the schools, but instead follow the student to the school or home to which he transfers, or with which he stays after having transferred, for use then by the school or parent receiving the student.

The Press in the Pentagon

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SecDef Pete Hegseth is severely restricting the press’ access in the Pentagon and what the press can print about the doings in the Pentagon.

The policy would require credentialed reporters to sign a pledge agreeing not to publish information unless it has been cleared for release. That would include materials that have already been unclassified. Journalists who refuse could lose their access.

After all,

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth defended the change and said it was designed to curb leaks and protect information at the Pentagon.
“Time and time again, classified information is leaked or peddled for political purposes to try to make the president look bad,” said Hegseth at a news conference in June.

He’s right about that, and it’s too bad the press has become addicted to leaks, especially given that the leakers are themselves intrinsically dishonest, instead of being willing to do the hard work of original investigative reporting.

The uproar over the restrictions is, though, justified, in one respect. The prevention of leaks getting published at the expense of national security could be more efficiently achieved in a different way.

That way would have the SecDef expand the various Pentagon Public Affairs Offices, with the Public Affairs Officer in the SecDef office controlling the PAOs below. This expansion and hierarchical nature of the PAO structure would be necessary due to the following. Restrict all journalists from all of the Pentagon—no wondering the halls, no ducking into unlocked offices, and so on—other than the PAO offices and any gatherings and meetings to which the press or specific journalists are explicitly invited.

Any DoD person, civilian or military and of any rank, a journalist encounters during duty hours and who is asked a question by the journalist, must be required to answer the question by directing the journalist to the nearest Public Affairs Office while saying nothing else in response to the question. The flip side of this is that the journalist must get responses from the PAOs within an hour of asking his questions, whether those responses are answers or decisions not to answer.

If the person is not on Pentagon grounds and is off-duty, he must make clear to the journalist that he is not speaking for DoD; he is solely expressing his personal opinion. Journalists who do not make note of that early in their publications should lose their Pentagon access.

Similar rules should be applied to all US military installations around the nation and the world as well as to all civilian facilities that are operating under DoD contract.

The Party that Invented Political Weaponization

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Progressive-Democratic Party politicians have been bleating for most of this year about the alleged weaponization of the Department of Justice. However, Party invented that weaponization with ex-President Barack Obama’s DoJ and his Attorney General Eric Holder, who swore fealty to Obama with his “I’m his wingman” oath, and then proceeded to use his AG office to go after us American citizens for daring to disagree with Obama’s pen and phone activities. Obama expanded that weaponization with his use of the IRS to go after Conservative nonprofit political organizations.

Biden expanded, while particularizing, that Party weaponization with his DoJ and its subordinate FBI categorizing concerned mothers as domestic terrorists and traditional Catholics as far-right extremists that bore watching. He and his followers engaged in explicit, politically motivated prosecutions of Trump over the riots at the Capitol and over his concerns about election integrity in the aftermath of the 2020 election.

Trump has been attacking political opponents during his second term? Or is he going after wrong-doers who happen to be, also, in the other party?

Whatever those answers might be, here’s Party’s House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D) promising more, explicitly more, Party weaponization with promised attacks, not just on Trump, but on anybody “doing the bidding of the Trump administration.”

One thing to understand as people who are flirting with the Trump administration, or doing the bidding of the Trump administration, or engaging in the “pay to play schemes” of the Trump administration, the statute of limitations is five years…there will still be accountability to be had. And that process begins now, but it will not be complete until there is an independent Department of Justice and certainly an independent House of Representatives in Democratic hands.

In Democratic hands—my irony meter pegged hard.

This is the level of integrity Party has on offer for 2026, 2028, and in the out years.

Insufficient

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A deal for TikTok is in the offing, but it’s wholly insufficient in my not very humble opinion. The deal breaker for me:

Under the agreement, a new entity would be created to run TikTok in the US. A consortium of new investors including private-equity firm Silver Lake and Oracle would own roughly half. Existing investors such as trading firm Susquehanna International would hold about 30%. TikTok parent ByteDance‘s stake would dip below 20% to comply with a 2024 law requiring the company to do a deal or stop operating in the US.

ByteDance is domiciled in the People’s Republic of China, and so it is subject to the PRC’s national intelligence laws. One of those laws requires PRC companies to answer intelligence community requests for information about its doings in other nations and about the doings of enterprises and individuals in those other nations that do business with ByteDance and those associated with it, and to go get that information—commit espionage—if it doesn’t have it already.

ByteDance‘s under 20% participation in the new TikTok entity might coincide with the American law, but it still leaves the PRC company, and so the PRC government, with too broad a window into American private affairs. Any window, of any size, is too much.

Second Verse Same as the First?

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The last time France tried a wealth tax, just a few years ago, it lost a lot of economic income, and the associated tax revenue on it, as the tax-targeted wealthy pulled up stakes and headed to other nations.

Now it looks like the French government is fixing to try that again.

France’s slide into political and fiscal dysfunction is generating a groundswell of support for a sweeping wealth tax that would represent a radical break from the pro-business agenda of President Emmanuel Macron.
The proposal is the work of French economist Gabriel Zucman, a former adviser to US Senators Bernie Sanders [I, VT] and Elizabeth Warren [D, MA]. He wants to impose a 2% tax on the assets of people with net wealth of 100 million euros, equivalent to $118 million, or more.

Here, though, it’s not just the politicians who have trouble even saying the words “cut spending.” The French unions continually demanding their cushy short work weeks and their even cushier pensions are actively aiding and abetting the government’s wastrelly profligate spending and those politicians who push that spending.

This is a tax that won’t end well for France.