Today is Veterans Day. The day originally began as Armistice Day to mark the 11:00 AM ceasefire on November 11, 1918, that ended World War I. In 1954, Congress renamed Armistice Day as Veterans Day to honor the veterans of all our wars. Sadly, we are living in an era of increasing hostility toward America. A number of newly elected Democrat members of Congress actually despise the America our Founders gave us. Many young Americans voted for them. A false narrative has taken root on our college campuses. We are teaching our children not American history, but anti-American history. We are teaching that our nation is an evil, oppressive force, founded on slavery and genocide. No wonder growing numbers of young Americans and Democrats do not describe themselves as patriotic. Thank God Donald Trump is fighting this, but it is a generational battle that cannot be won in just a few years. Increasingly, the values that used to unite us now divide us. Monuments to our founding fathers are under attack. Even the Pledge of Allegiance is protested and denounced as “an instrument of white nationalism.” Of course, our veterans know better. They understand that America is a force for good in the world, that it is worth defending, that it is, as Abraham Lincoln once described it, “the last best hope of Earth.” Please find an opportunity over the next few days to talk to your children and grandchildren about what happened at Concord Bridge and Gettysburg, on the beaches of Normandy, and in more recent conflicts. There is a poem you have likely seen before, but I want to share it with you again, because it summarizes well what we owe our veterans.

It is the veteran, not the preacher, who has given you freedom of religion. It is the veteran, not the reporter, who has given you freedom of the press. It is the veteran, not the poet, who has given you freedom of speech. It is the veteran, not the protester, who has given you freedom to assemble. It is the veteran, not the lawyer, who has given you the right to a fair trial. It is the veteran, not the politician, who has given you the right to vote. It is the veteran, who salutes the Flag, who serves under the Flag, whose coffin is draped by the Flag.

To the millions who have always been there to stop the tyrant, protect the weak and preserve the peace — we have not forgotten you. A grateful nation thanks God for giving us heroes like you. Here at Campaign For Working Families, I pledge to continue to fight the good fight against the Islamist and Marxists who want to destroy the country you wore the uniform to defend.

In recent days, we have been digging deep into the election results. We didn’t do a Democrat-Republican analysis. We looked at the results through the lens of how they will impact faith, family, freedom, and the sanctity of life. Read more in my latest public policy update for the James Dobson Family Institute.

I’ll say this about Senate Republicans: .

Mom would be proud of my restraint here. So, I’m guessing, would Thomas Jefferson, for it was Jefferson who once advised , “When angry, count ten, before you speak; if very angry, an hundred.”

Alas, it didn’t work. I counted to 100, and I’m still every bit as disgusted by the decision of Senate Republicans to return John Thune as their leader despite last Tuesday’s resounding electoral shellacking. I mean, Thune oversaw the immolation of Republican seats in ostensibly solid red states such as Ohio, Iowa, Texas, South Carolina, and freaking Kansas, so why not reward him with a show of confidence?

You know what they say: You can lead a herd of do-nothing McConnellite RINO globalist elephants to water, but you can’t make them stop smearing feces on themselves.

As The Hill reports , “A Senate GOP aide announced late in the afternoon that Thune had been reelected as leader ‘by acclamation,’ despite objections raised by a handful of GOP senators over proceeding with the vote this week.”

“Acclamation” seems a weird word to describe the GOP’s lukewarm reelection of Thune, especially in the face of opposition from conservative fighters like Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson, who demanded a delay in the election and eventually walked out in protest. As Johnson put it in an X post:

I did not participate in today’s Senate leadership election because a defeat of this magnitude demands serious reflection and change. Holding a rushed election ignores the message our voters sent. We must acknowledge where and why we failed and develop strategies to succeed. I hope our conference can unite, learn from this moment, and do a better job listening to the American people and addressing their concerns.

“In order to best continue doing nothing,” quipped the folks at The Babylon Bee, “Senate Republicans reelect John Thune as Minority Leader.” Just so.

President Donald Trump tried to be diplomatic, but he still damned Thune with faint praise : “Well, look, he’s a very fine man,” said the president. “I know him very well, but that’s really up to the Senate. I like John Thune. I wish the Senate could get more done.”

Aside from acknowledging that he and his party got their butts kicked last Tuesday, Johnson and his fellow stalwarts also understand something else that Thune does not: Republicans are on the clock , and their ability to do anything legislatively ends abruptly on January 3. Or maybe Thune just doesn’t care. Johnson and his fellow patriots wanted Thune to cancel the upper chamber’s week-long Thanksgiving recess in order to pass key elements of the SAVE America Act and fund the Department of War through a budget reconciliation package — to which Thune not-so-enthusiastically replied, “We’ll see.”

Would you like to save our Republic, John, or just watch it burn? We’ll see .

Sadly, but not surprisingly, Thune’s lieutenants were also rewarded with reelection: Wyoming’s 74-year-old John Barrasso as whip, West Virginia’s 72-year-old Shelley Moore Capito as policy committee chair, and Oklahoma’s milquetoasty James Lankford as conference vice chair. That Arkansas’s Tom Cotton was reelected as conference chair is, I suppose, some small consolation, but it’s hard to imagine a less vigorous, less energetic bunch than this.

Over in the House, though, things are decidedly different. Speaker Mike Johnson, who’s been a solid, thoughtful, and articulate voice for conservative policies, honorably decided against running again for leadership, instead leaving it to a choice between current Majority Leader Steve Scalise and House Freedom Caucus cofounder Jim Jordan. Jordan won resoundingly by a vote of 106–73.

“Republicans on Tuesday,” the Washington Examiner reported , “declined the seasoned experience of Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA), who has served in leadership since 2014 and as the No. 2 House Republican under Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) for the last two years.”

In short, House Republicans elected a fighter rather than a fixture — which is precisely what Thune has been ever since he arrived in Washington.

There could hardly be a better contrast between two men than the tall, measured, perfectly coiffed and exquisitely attired Thune and the short, frumpy, frenetic, sleeves-rolled-up Jordan, the one-time NCAA champion wrestler.

But I’ll take Jordan’s serious substance over Thune’s vapid style every stinkin’ time .

Elizabeth Warren has spearheaded the Democrats’ populist economic message ever since she was elected to the Senate in 2012. After the Democrats swept into legislative power in last week’s elections, Warren wrote a TIME op-ed explaining her plan for the next two years. If you’d rather not read it, I’ll sum it up: Build Back Bidenomics.

Democrats, led by the former president’s autopen, created post-COVID inflation by pumping far too much debt-financed money into an overheating economy. He called it “Build Back Better,” but overstimulus payments sent out in the spring of 2021, along with other spendthrift policies, pushed inflation to 9.1% by the summer of ’22. Cumulative inflation surpassed 21% during Joe Biden’s long four years, though it was far higher than that in some areas.

Unfortunately, President Donald Trump did not solve this persistent problem.

Thus, Democrats seized the “affordability” issue as if they had no hand in creating it, and they used it to persuade voters to give them back the keys to the car they wrecked.

Warren’s dubious framing is a great example of what was ultimately a successful message:

In 2024, Trump swept back into power, declaring he would cut costs on “day one” and bragging he would “end inflation and make America affordable again.” Instead, Trump and Republicans took a wrecking ball to the economy, cutting health care to finance tax breaks for rich people and giant corporations, imposing chaotic tariffs, and launching a war with Iran. With astonishing brazenness, Trump has attempted to reengineer the federal government into a corruption machine designed to rake in profits for himself, his family, and his cronies.

Warren pointed to several Democrats who won in red states by promising to fix the “rigged” system of what South Carolina Senator-elect Annie Andrews dubbed “big insurance, big tech, big pharma, and the utility monopolies.” Frankly, this connects with voters because we’ve probably all groused about each of those things around our own kitchen tables. She added:

Just campaign rhetoric? Nope. Across the country, Democrats stood up for big policy changes like increasing the federal minimum wage, expanding child care, reining in Big Tech, data centers, and AI, and reforming health care. We came with plans — specific policies to dismantle a rigged system and beat back concentrated corporate power.

However, consider three economic spheres: college tuition, housing, and healthcare. Warren didn’t mention tuition or student debt in her op-ed, though she has regularly championed giving students more money, and Biden infamously transferred student loan debt to taxpayers while she cheered him on. More subsidies mean higher prices. Indeed, all three sectors have outpaced overall inflation in recent decades — and all three are areas where the federal government redistributes a lot of money.

Let’s focus on housing, which Warren does tout. “Democrats [put] in the work to earn the trust of voters,” she boasted. “Our new housing affordability law — that Donald Trump refused to sign — was a critical proof point.”

This is disingenuous for multiple reasons. First, her 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act essentially codified Trump’s executive order restricting institutional investors from buying homes. He only “refused to sign” it because he wanted Congress to pass the SAVE America Act first. Moreover, both Trump and Warren are wrong about this — the bill is, at best, inadequate and, at worst, will exacerbate housing prices.

Finally, Warren explicitly states what she wants: “We should reverse Republican health care cuts, expand health care coverage, and fund universal child care.” Furthermore, she wants to “pay for it by putting a little fairness back in the system” by “canceling the tax breaks Trump and the Republicans handed out to corporations, ultra-millionaires, and billionaires.”

Allow me to translate: She wants to raise taxes on workers and consumers via corporate taxes and redistribute that money to the least productive people in society. Corporations will reduce wages and raise prices to pay for the Warren tax hikes. Those hikes won’t “pay for” anything, either. Democrats will finance these giveaways with more debt, putting more upward pressure on inflation. That’s a pretty ironic policy considering they hate Trump’s tariffs, and yet their tax plan effectively results in the same thing — corporations passing those added costs on to consumers.

This all matters because Warren is no back-bencher. She’s the incoming chair of the powerful Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and Reuters says she “could be at the height of her power in [the] new Congress.”

As she concluded in her op-ed, “Democrats won this election by claiming we are on the side of working people, and working people are counting on us to deliver.” Given that Democrats’ claims are false, I consider that a threat, not a promise.

When the Democrats who won both chambers of Congress last Tuesday take office in January, they will get the gavels, every committee chair and broad investigative power. AIER's writer argues they will also inherit a fiscal problem that is already on the calendar: more than $40 trillion in national debt, $32.7 trillion of it held by the public, and a $41.1 trillion debt ceiling that the government is on pace to hit in the first half of 2027.

The warning signs are coming from lenders. In October the International Monetary Fund told heavily indebted governments to deal with their finances before they become unmanageable. Between February and September, the average 10-year government bond yield across the G7 rose by more than a full percentage point, to multidecade highs. For the United States in particular, the IMF found that long-term forward rates have become more sensitive to projected government debt. In the author's words, bond markets are beginning to lose patience.

The arithmetic is unforgiving. A one-point rise in yields on $32.7 trillion of publicly held debt eventually adds about $327 billion a year in interest, phased in as debt rolls over. That comes on top of the $1.05 trillion Washington already spent on interest in 2026. Another point would push the bill to roughly $1.37 trillion, and that assumes the debt stops growing. The Treasury paid an average of 1.6 percent on its debt in 2021 and pays 3.5 percent today. Because it has leaned on short-term bills, that average will keep rising. The author compares this to taking out an adjustable-rate mortgage you know will reset higher and still making only the minimum payment.

The incoming majority's early priorities point toward more spending, not less. Several members-elect who campaigned on affordability want to restore the Affordable Care Act subsidies first put in place during the pandemic. Those were billed as temporary, partly because a temporary program gets a lower cost estimate. The author quotes Milton Friedman: "there's nothing so permanent as a temporary government program." Reversing the Medicaid cuts would cost about $880 billion over ten years.

That brings calls for higher taxes. The IMF urges indebted countries to "strengthen tax systems," and some on the New Right talk about a "grand bargain" that pairs tax increases with promised spending cuts. The article raises two objections. First, Congress can set tax rates but not tax revenue. Since 1950 the top marginal income-tax rate has ranged from above 90 percent down to 28 percent, yet federal receipts have held near 17 percent of GDP, because people change how and when they take income when rates rise. Second, the money Congress collects is largely committed in advance to mandatory programs that sit outside the normal budget process and grow automatically unless benefits or eligibility are changed by law.

So why do governments keep borrowing when debt keeps getting more expensive? The author's answer is that it is good politics. Spending delivers visible benefits now to organized groups, while the cost of borrowing comes later and is spread thinly across taxpayers who barely notice each new issue.

The author expects a familiar script within months of the swearing-in. A Democratic Congress and a Republican president will fight over the debt limit, each casting the other as the villain, and then raise the ceiling without fixing anything. Real repair, he says, would take decades of sustained effort, which shows the problem is structural rather than technical.

It was not always this way. Until 1917, federal borrowing had to be tied to specific projects, such as the Louisiana Purchase and the Panama Canal, which let voters judge Congress's fiscal record directly. The debt limit began as a temporary World War I shortcut to speed approvals and has, the author argues, long outlived its purpose.

He concludes that the IMF and the bond market are saying the same thing: waiting makes stabilization more expensive. The new Congress can change the incentives that produced $40 trillion in debt, or it can wait for lenders to force the change.

Imagine buying George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm on your Kindle, only for Amazon to reach into your device and remove the two classic novels. It sounds unsettling, but it happened in 2009 when a third-party seller lost the rights to distribute the books. Customers got their money back, and Amazon acknowledged that it had handled the situation poorly. But the incident raised a troubling question: what does it actually mean to own something in the digital marketplace?

Had you bought those two books in hardcover, the retailer could not remotely remove them from bookshelf. But digital purchases can work differently. Consumers aren’t always buying a copy they can keep and control. Sometimes, they’re simply buying a license to access them for a certain amount of time and under certain conditions.

At first glance, this may not seem like a major economic issue. Both sides of a voluntary exchange expect to benefit from it. But digital rights create new information asymmetries that impede competition. Economists describe information asymmetry as a situation in which one party possesses relevant information that another lacks.

Say a consumer has two options for purchasing the same song or book for $15. Retailer A offers an independent downloadable file, while retailer B offers access through its digital platform, subject to certain licensing restrictions. Some consumers may prefer the convenience of retailer B, while others may value the greater control offered by retailer A. With clear information, consumer preferences would help determine which product succeeds. But when retailer B fails to adequately explain the limits of its license, consumers may not understand or may undervalue the additional rights retailer A offers, weakening competition on those terms.

Are consumers, then, well aware of the limits of their licenses when they make digital purchases? Research by Aaron Perzanowski and Chris Jay Hoofnagle suggests otherwise. In a 2017 article, the two researchers describe a survey of nearly 1,300 consumers involving a simulated digital marketplace. Among respondents presented with a “Buy Now” button, more than 83 percent believed they were purchasing ownership rights, while more than 86 percent believed they could keep the digital product indefinitely.

Perzanowski and Hoofnagle also tested a potential solution: giving shoppers a short explanation of their rights. In their study, 86 percent of respondents who saw the standard purchasing language believed they were buying ownership rights to an e-book, compared with 63 percent of those who received a clearer explanation.

Even among shoppers who received additional information, nearly two-thirds still believed they were buying ownership rights. Now, someone buying a movie to watch once may prefer a cheaper, temporary license (like renting from Amazon), while someone else would happily pay more for durable access. Both approaches are valid, as long as buyers can accurately distinguish between the two.

These ownership rights can matter greatly. With a physical good, a consumer might recover some of what she originally paid by selling a used copy to someone else. She could also lend it to a friend or donate it to charity. These options have value, and she might be willing to pay more upfront for a product that includes those rights than one that doesn’t.

Amazon’s Kindle controversy involved the removal of purchased files. A different vulnerability emerged when streaming service Funimation shut down in April 2024 and its operations were folded into Crunchyroll. Some consumers had purchased Funimation DVDs and Blu-rays that came with digital copies of the same shows. But Crunchyroll did not support those digital copies, so while customers could still enjoy their physical discs, they lost access to the digital component of their purchases.

The economics of intellectual property can cut either way. Licensing can expand access to creative works by allowing sellers to offer different prices, subscription models, and usage rights to consumers with different preferences. But goods can also be purchased, say, as independent, downloadable digital files rather than merely through access to some platform. Still, consumers may not always be aware of that option or understand how it differs from purchasing a license. With those differences made clear, we might reasonably expect competition to lead firms to differentiate their products on those terms.

Existing consumer protection laws already prohibit deceptive business practices, including misleading representations about what consumers are purchasing. But those laws don’t necessarily require digital retailers to clearly explain when a purchase provides only a license. Perzanowski and Hoofnagle’s proposal goes a step further by calling for clearer disclosures of consumers’ rights. In other words, companies should say “License” when they mean it, rather than leaving customers to assume they’re buying full ownership.

One version of this proposal has already become law. California’s Assembly Bill 2426 took effect on January 1, 2025, and, subject to certain exceptions, requires disclosures (or a consumer acknowledgment of those terms) when certain digital goods are licensed but advertised as purchases. Rather than prescribing ownership rights for digital goods, AB 2426 focuses on disclosure, leaving sellers free to compete over the rights they offer. That distinction matters when businesses are competing to offer consumers different ownership rights.

Rather than legislating ownership rights for all digital goods, AB 2426 focuses on disclosure, allowing digital sellers to compete over which sort of rights to offer. But disclosure could go further by addressing an important feature of a digital purchase: is it a standalone digital good that can be stored independently on my device, or is it only accessible as long as I have access to the retailer’s platform?

Including this distinction in existing deceptive trade practices laws, or laws like AB 2426, could better equip consumers to choose the digital goods they prefer. After all, how can consumers reward businesses for offering better ownership rights if they don’t know what they’re buying?