1) Photo of the Day

The Wall Street Journal’s lead story this morning shows President Trump in the Oval Office holding up an Unleash Prosperity chart on faulty monthly Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs tallies.  

2) EJ Antoni To Head Bureau of Labor Statistics?

And the hits just keep coming: the WSJ reported yesterday that our senior fellow EJ Antoni is being seriously considered to repair the increasingly unreliable BLS. If anyone can fix this broken agency and give us accurate numbers, EJ can.

But Trump has an annoying habit of stealing away our best people. What are we? A farm team?

3) The (Education) Empire Strikes Back

The school year starts as early as next week across the country, and the education blob is having a panic attack that more and more children are now taking advantage of their option to leave public schools. Thanks to school choice victories, as many as an additional million kids will be enrolled in charters, private, or Catholic or religious schools this fall.

The Washington Post thinks that’s a bad thing. They published a front-page hit piece last week on the Arizona choice program, arguing so many kids are switching to private alternative schools that failing public schools in Phoenix may have to shut down. One school closing its doors is Roosevelt Elementary. The Post says the community is going through a “grieving process,” and some families are “heart broken.”  The school librarian pouts it feels like “death.”

Not to the parents whose kids have gained access to better schools. They're feeling liberated.  

We’re scratching our heads trying to figure out why it’s a bad thing that low-income families now have access to superior private schools.

This would be like complaining that a popular Whole Foods grocery store has moved into town and now the crappy grocery store down the street has to go out of business.

Apparently, the left's philosophy is that only kids from rich families should have access to great schools.

Buried deep in the Post story is an admission that “just 13% of students districtwide ranked proficient or better in math in 2023-24.” Amazingly, half of these schools are graded by the district as A or B schools.  

Would you send your kids to a school where only one in six students are learning basic math?

4) Fast Food’s Fast Exit From Blue States

This headline from Salon magazine - which is hardly conservative - punctuates a trend we’ve been calling out for years. Fast food restaurant chains are moving their headquarters and sometimes their stores from blue states.

The trend is unmistakable. Here's a list of some of the major changes of address:

• Yum! Brands

• KFC

• Taco Bell

• Pizza Hut

• In-N-Out Burger

• CKE

• Carl’s Jr

Salon's Senior food editor Ashlie Stevens writes that this relocation trend isn't just about taxes - and she's right.  It's also about minimum wage rules, energy costs, an anti-business regulatory structure, and fewer less exposure to trial lawyer harassment lawsuits.

Salon hisses there is a "tribal" element to the business migration patterns, and we're not sure what that means, but it seems like a snobbish attack against the culture of southern hospitality. Bible Belt states.  

Lynsi Snyder, In-N-Out’s CEO and the granddaughter of its founders, explained well the reasons for moving the headquarters from California to Tennessee: “California had simply become too difficult. There were so many pressures and hoops we were having to jump through. You have to do this. You have to do that.”

Stevens also writes, “…for brands still recovering from pandemic-era whiplash, red states offer something undeniably appealing: lower costs, looser rules, and an eager welcome.”

This chart shows where major restaurant chains were started:

5) Yes, Privatize Fannie And Freddie - But No Taxpayer Guarantees

The Trump administration is floating a plan to sell shares of government-controlled mortgage behemoths Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But it would retain the government’s implicit guarantee that protects their investors against losses. Bad idea.

As the 2008 financial crisis so painfully reminded Americans, permitting Fannie and Freddie to generate private profits, but requiring taxpayers to foot the bill for mortgage defaults, is a recipe for expensive financial disaster.

The implicit guarantee encourages more high-risk lending. It’s a “heads I win, tails the taxpayers lose” contraption. This inflates demand for mortgages with high default rates and makes another housing market crash and financial crisis more likely.

The American Enterprise Institute estimates these mortgage subsidies raise interest rates on federal debt by 10-15 basis points estimates, and annually adds about $29 to $43 billion to federal spending.

Privatizing Fannie and Freddie is the right policy – but only if the government eliminates their expensive and dangerous implicit guarantee.

6) Solution To the Farm Worker Shortage

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