February 21, 2025

Now, on to the news…

In a letter to Governor Kathy Hochul earlier this week, Donald Trump’s Department of Transportation announced that it would withdraw approval from New York’s congestion-pricing plan. The move could cripple the MTA, giving the president leverage to extract concessions from New York’s leadership.

Manhattan Institute’s director of cities, John Ketcham, argues that Trump should use his leverage to force New York to prosecute farebeating and to reform its onerous construction and maintenance codes. The president, Ketcham claims, is positioned to induce “much-needed structural reforms” that would otherwise “be out of the question politically for New York’s leaders.”

Read the rest of his piece here.

John Ketcham

Trump Should Leverage Congestion Pricing, Not Kill It

The president could condition his support for the program on state and local reforms.

Republicans in Congress are eager to cut federal spending to help pay for a renewal of President Trump’s first-term tax cuts. But with such slim majorities in the House and Senate, can they get it done?

They have before, Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Chris Pope points out. “In 1981, Republicans’ fiscal policy objectives were similar to those today. The GOP held exactly the same number of Senate seats (53 out of 100) as it does now, and Republicans’ position in the House was even weaker (a minority of 192 seats out of 435, compared with their razor-thin 218 majority today).”

No matter: from 1980 to 1983, Congress reduced domestic discretionary spending from 5.1 percent to 4.1 percent of GDP.

Read how they did it here.

It’s possible for the Department of Government Efficiency to achieve its goal of slashing $4 billion in government spending each day—“if it addresses problems already identified by existing government watchdogs to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse,” writes Dan Lips, a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation. Read how he envisions DOGE working with government watchdogs—and Congress—to trim the bloat.

Judge Glock joins Jordan McGillis to discuss the history of 30-year mortgages and the future of the housing market in America. 

Did you know that the IRS exists to steal from the poor and give to the rich?

So contends Brooklyn-based writer Judith Levine. In a Guardian op-ed, Levine argues that IRS staffing cuts are designed to make it harder to collect taxes from the wealthy—forcing the government to collect more from the poor to pay off the rich.

Got it? (Don’t worry, we don’t either—the self-contradiction is the point, as they say.)

The only just solution, Levine reasons, is not to pay taxes at all:

“Maga wants to starve the bureaucracy. But it still wants money. And with the wealthiest awaiting gigantic tax breaks, they need it from the rest of us. With the Internal Revenue Service in effect transformed into a shell corporation laundering the money of the ultra-rich, why should we pay taxes? … The reason to withhold your taxes is not to cheat the government of much-needed funds. It is not even to cheat the crooks now running the country, satisfying as that may be. It is to expose the criminality of what is being done – and not done – with the money the state has a legal and moral obligation to collect and then to distribute, to serve all the people.”

Levine seems to have been absent the day they explained that the top 1 percent of earners pay 40 percent of America’s federal income taxes. And if you’re wondering how a Trump-Musk scheme to short-staff the IRS would make it easier to collect more money from innumerable smaller filers, yet harder to collect from a handful of well-known billionaires, Levine doesn’t have the answer.

We probably shouldn’t blame Levine for this mess of an argument; after all, confused writers in Brooklyn are a dime a dozen.

The real kicker? Panic attacks about billionaires notwithstanding, some do expect “the hoi polloi,” as Levine terms them, to shoulder their share of the nation’s tax burden. They work at tax-exempt organizations like, oh, theguardian.org, a 501(c)3 nonprofit that pays for journalism projects published by…the Guardian.

What was that about shell corporations, again?

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If you have Face Palm candidates—embarrassing journalism or media output; cringe-worthy conduct among leaders in government, business, and cultural institutions; stories that make you shake your head—send them our way at editors@city-journal.org. We’ll publish the most instructive with a hat tip to the source.

Photo credits: China News Service / Contributor / China News Service via Getty Images