Entering year three of divided government, our expectations for the 2025 legislative session were admittedly not high. With Katie Hobbs occupying the governor’s office and demonstrating that her only skill set is setting new veto records of good public policy, it can be difficult to muster a lot of optimism.
Yet even in politics there is room to be pleasantly surprised and in fact there are several, though likely underappreciated, wins to be celebrated from the first session of the 57th legislature.
Freedom to Move is on the Ballot
After three sessions of introducing a ballot referral to protect every Arizonan’s freedom to move, finally, 2026 voters will have the chance to vote on SCR1004. The timing couldn’t be better as several states are moving forward with the imposition of their own tax per vehicle mile. Most ironically, in Massachusetts lawmakers have introduced legislation which in a masterclass in Double Speak they are calling “The Freedom to Move Act” as well. Every objection The Club has put on the record to VMT targets and taxes is being heralded by the radical liberals in Massachusetts as the benefits to passing the legislation. They proudly claim VMT taxes as a method to achieving their Net Zero goals, forcing people to “choose” other modes of travel like biking and public transit, and though they say there are no “prohibitions” in the bill, they give themselves away when they admit that the state may “facilitate reductions in vehicle miles travelled” in other words driving rations. With the passage of SCR1004, Arizona could be the first state in the country to cut this freedom-crushing policy off at the pass.
Closing the Revolving Door at the Corporation Commission
In an event that was probably rarer than a blue moon or maybe a solar eclipse (whichever is rarer), Governor Hobbs actually signed a bill that The Club supported and advocated for all session long…
Suppose you were an evil genius who decided to create a permanent underclass out of a particular race. What provisions would you make to ensure that they remained permanently poor and outcast?
Here are some ideas. First, physically separate them from the rest of the population. Give them room to live, but make sure the land is not owned by individuals who could grow their net worth, but by the collective, each tribe with its own sovereign government within the national government.
Encourage economic dependency by supplying them with lots of free stuff, some available only to them. Create a bureaucracy to manage the financial affairs of only this particular race. Grant them special privileges exclusive to their race, such as the right to operate certain businesses, but again on the condition that the ownership is by the collective.
Finally, emphasize the history of oppression this selected race has experienced and how the guilty oppressors owe them these “favors” in perpetuity.
If you’ve deduced that this roughly describes the treatment whites accorded to American Indians, that’s because it does. We all know the story of how this came about. When Europeans settled the New World, the clash of civilizations often wasn’t pretty.
Yes, there were atrocities on both sides, and it probably was historically inevitable that the more technically advanced culture would prevail. Nevertheless, our treatment of the indigenous populations can never be totally defended.
In a better world, when the fighting finally ended, we would have worked out a shared arrangement where both sides would have enjoyed equal citizenship rights and responsibilities. We would all have had the right to participate in the religious and social structures of our choosing with no special legal status belonging to any group.
In short, we could all be Americans, a blessing sought after around the world.
That’s not what happened of course. Instead, in the words of an 1881 Supreme Court ruling, the tribes were fashioned into separate “domestic independent nations” with a relationship like “that of a ward to his guardian.” The federal government began management of the land use and title management for millions of acres in Indian country.
Moreover, the government to a large extent assumed responsibility for the care and upkeep of Indians, including everything from schools and medical care to infrastructure projects and routine maintenance on reservations.
The result in hindsight was predictable. American Indians, no surprise, did not become the first group ever to achieve prosperity through welfare benefits. Instead, of all the racial minority groups in America, they today have the lowest average income, despite, or maybe because of, receiving the most economic aid from government.
In fact, of all our ethnic groups, the less access historically to entitlements they have received, the more wealthy they have become.
Also unsurprisingly, the federal government has done a notoriously terrible job of overseeing Indian economic affairs. For example, 66 million acres of land are held in trust by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), presumably to be managed for the Indians’ benefit. Yet the lands have produced minimal profits for the tribes.
The reservation lands contain abundant uranium, coal, and gas reserves. Still, Senate hearings concluded that only two million of the 15 million acres of energy reserves have been developed, leaving $1.5 trillion in underground resources untapped.
BIA rules or “white tape” often result in stricter regulations for tribes than for others. The result is that up to 49 steps can be required to obtain an oil lease in Indian country that requires four elsewhere. Excessive regulation also explains why valuable farmland is often left unused.
Before the European conquest, American Indians operated self-governing states in which they were “strong, self-sufficient, self-initiating, independent powerful individuals,” according to an historian of the period. Now they’re trapped in a no-man’s land between citizenship and status as wards of the state. Worse, after living under these conditions, many Indians themselves have now developed the habits of chronic dependency.
Some sympathetic observers call for more effective supervision of Indian affairs. But bureaucracies are notoriously resistant to reform. Let’s work instead to achieve for our countrymen full status as free Americans.
Dr. Thomas Patterson, former Chairman of the Goldwater Institute, is a retired emergency physician. He served as an Arizona State senator for 10 years in the 1990s, and as Majority Leader from 93-96. He is the author of Arizona’s original charter schools bill.
“Rust Belt city benefits from Bidenomics” headlined an article last month in the Wall Street Journal, detailing the economic rebound being experienced by Terre Haute, Indiana, a former manufacturing center in decline for many decades.
Suddenly, due to an infusion of stimulus funding from the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, this community is experiencing such a windfall that the mayor is “running out of room on his whiteboard” tracking infrastructure projects. New factories are being built, new home starts have tripled, long vacant properties are rehabbed. The venerable Charlie’s Pub and Grub will get a new roof and awnings.
The new initiatives in Terre Haute are part of the hundreds of billions of dollars in federal subsidies supporting manufacturing, housing, and clean energy ventures doled out during the Biden administration.
But one question was never asked. Where is all this money coming from? You might think “taxpayers,” but the truth is that we spend $2 trillion more every year than we take in. There are no available tax-derived funds available to distribute.
Instead, we spend fantasy money, loans charged off to future generations who don’t vote yet. We really do love them, just not as much as the luxury of getting to have things that we don’t have to pay for.
The Terre Haute story, just one of thousands like it, contains several insights into why spending cuts are so difficult and rare. The public habits of mind we have developed about the role of government and the responsibility of government to live within its means are the ultimate reason we have fallen into such fiscal danger.
Earlier generations of Americans would have been alarmed, not heartened, at the gigantic unfunded Biden spending surge. We instead assume that none of us should endure hardship or decline and that if we do, it is the duty of government to rescue us. Personal responsibility is outmoded.
Government has never been known for its efficiency, so all these “free” things are actually quite expensive. The good news is we still have a productive economy that has generated 1.4% revenue growth, net of inflation, since 2001, the last year the budget was balanced. Reasonably prudent governance would have achieved budget surpluses.
But that’s not what happened. Politicians spent so much feeding our welfare addiction that spending grew by an inflation-adjusted 3.0% annually, creating the true crisis we now face. Present projections by the Congressional Budget Office indicate spending will continue to outpace revenues, absent reform. Our national debt stands at an unimaginable $36 trillion, while borrowing costs are rising.
We’re in deep trouble. It may well be too late to avoid fiscal collapse. Interest on the national debt, the only truly non-negotiable item in the budget, tripled during the Biden years. It now exceeds total defense spending.
Interest payments amount to half of the total amount borrowed We are borrowing money to pay interest on the growing sums already borrowed, with no plan in place to reduce the debt amount, the dreaded Doom Loop.
Yet at this point, millions of families and seniors, businesses and governments manage their finances based on the expectation of federal subsidies, without which they presumably would be bereft. Over 75% of the federal budget goes to support these private expenditures.
Can Trump be the white knight who rescues us from fiscal doom? The logistics aren’t all that ominous (e.g., raising the retirement age of Social Security by two years would help), and Trump has generated more support for cost-cutting than any politician in memory. But it’s a matter of simple arithmetic. We can never balance the budget without addressing entitlements. That’s where the money is.
Entitlements are termed “mandatory” spending, but they are really just creations of Congress which can legally amend them at will, if they have any.
Unfortunately, Trump so far shows more interest in the low hanging fruit (Department of Education, USAID, obvious fraud) than in the hard work of convincing the American people that substantial entitlement reform is risky but necessary. Without him, Social Security and Medicare will remain No-Go zones even for budget hawks.
The task only gets harder as time passes. We’ll see soon.
Dr. Thomas Patterson, former Chairman of the Goldwater Institute, is a retired emergency physician. He served as an Arizona State senator for 10 years in the 1990s, and as Majority Leader from 93-96. He is the author of Arizona’s original charter schools bill.
Shortly before his death in 2006, I had the privilege of interviewing Milton Friedman over dinner in San Francisco. The last question I asked him was: What are the three things we had to do to make America more prosperous?
His answer I have never forgotten: “First, allow universal school choice; second, expand free trade; third and most importantly, cut government spending.” That was long before Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden came along.
There are not too many problems in America that cannot be traced back to the growth of big and incompetent government.
It is notable that the two big bursts of inflation during modern times both occurred when government spending exploded. The first was the gigantic expansion of the LBJ “war on poverty” welfare state in the 1970s with prices nearly doubling, and then the post-COVID era spending blitz in the last year of Trump and then the Biden $6 trillion spending spree with the CPI sprinting from 1.5% to 9.1%.
Coincidence? Maybe. But I doubt it.
The connection between government flab and the decline in the purchasing power of the dollar is obvious. In both cases the Washington spending blitz was funded by Federal Reserve money printing. The helicopter money caused prices to surge. (I still find it laughable that 11 Nobel prize-winning economists wrote in the New York Times in 2021: Don’t worry, the Biden multi-trillion-dollar spending spree won’t cause inflation.)
The avalanche of federal spending hasn’t stopped even though COVID ended more than three years ago. We are three months into the 2025 fiscal year and on pace to spend an all-time high $7 trillion and borrow $2 trillion. If we stay on this course, the federal budget could reach $10 trillion over the next decade.
This road to financial perdition cannot stand. It risks blowing up the Trump presidency.
Upon entering office, Trump should on day one call for a package of up to $500 billion of rescissions — money that the last Congress appropriated but has not been spent yet. Cancelling the green energy subsidies alone could save nearly $100 billion. Why are we still spending money on COVID?
We could save tens of billions by ending corporate welfare programs — such as the wheel barrels full of tax dollars thrown at companies like Intel in the CHIPS Act. The Elon Musk Department of Government Efficiency is already identifying low hanging fruit that needs to be cut from the tree.
Along with extending the Trump tax cut of 2017, this erasure of bloated federal spending is critical for economic revival and for reversing the income losses to the middle class under Biden.
This is especially urgent because the curse of inflation is NOT over. Since the Fed started cutting interest rates in October, commodity prices are up nearly 5% and the mortgage rates have again hit 7% — in part because the combination of cheap money and government expansion is a toxic economic brew — as history teaches us.
Nothing could suck the oxygen and excitement out of the new Trump presidency more than a resumption of inflation at the grocery store and the gas pump. Trump’s record-high approval rating will sink overnight if the cost of everything starts rising again.
Cutting spending won’t be easy. The resistance won’t just come from Bernie Sanders Democrats. Trump will have to convince lawmakers in his own party — many of whom are already defending green-new-deal pork projects in their districts.
This is why Trump should make the case in his inaugural address that downsizing government is the moral equivalent of war. Borrow a line from Nancy Reagan: just say no — to runaway government spending. Say yes to what Friedman titled his famous book: “Capitalism and Freedom.”
Stephen Moore is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation and a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation. His new book, coauthored with Arthur Laffer, is “The Trump Economic Miracle.”
Here is my wish list for the incoming Trump administration to make America healthy and prosperous and great again in 2025.
1.Slash Job-Killing Regulations
The regulatory state is a $2 trillion tax on the American economy. We all want worker safety, a clean environment and consumer protections, but in too many cases the costs of regulations far outweigh the societal benefits. President-elect Donald Trump has promised to slash 10 rules for every new rule. Just do it, Mr. President.
2. Make The Trump Tax Cuts Permanent
As JFK, Ronald Reagan and others have proven throughout history, lower tax rates lead to more growth, more investment and more jobs. The Trump tax cuts meant that a typical family of four earning $75,000 a year saw their tax bill fall by half — a benefit valued at more than $2,000. And the corporate tax rate fell from 35% — the highest in the world — to 21%, bringing jobs and capital to America. Trump has promised to make all these tax cuts permanent. Why? Because they worked almost exactly as we anticipated they would.
3. Replace Welfare With Work
Growth will require more able-bodied Americans getting off welfare and into jobs. Welfare — which includes cash assistance, public housing, food stamps, disability payments, unemployment benefits and Medicaid — needs to be a hand up, not a handout.
4. Use America’s Abundant Natural Resources
America has well more than $50 trillion of natural resources that are accessible with existing drilling and mining technologies. This is a vast storehouse of wealth that far surpasses what any other nation is endowed with. We can use the royalty payments and leases to reduce our national debt while creating hundreds of thousands of jobs.
5. Cut Medical Costs by Demanding Health Care Price Transparency
One of many ways to bring health care costs down to consumers (and taxpayers, who pay half the costs) is to require hospitals, pharmacies, doctors and health clinics to list prices for what they are charging. The Committee to Unleash Prosperity estimates that $1 trillion to $2 trillion could be reduced from health care costs, with no reduction in the quality of care, by allowing consumers to shop around on the internet for the best price — just as we do when we buy groceries, a home or a car. This will foster free market competition and lower prices.
6. Allow School Choice for All Families
Test scores in America have been plummeting. Kids are graduating from high school — if at all — without even being able to read the diploma. America no longer ranks in the top 10 in many academic achievement ratings.
A child can get a better education at half the cost in the Catholic school system and in many charters.
Trump has endorsed universal school choice for all children regardless of income or ethnicity or race. This is the civil rights issue of our time.
7. Implement A Pro-America Immigration Policy
Trump’s committed to securing our border, but we also need legal immigrants through a merit-based immigration system. This visa system would select immigrants based on their skills, talents, investment capital, English language ability and education level. These characteristics all presage success in America.
8. Revive America’s Great Cities
Our once-great cities in America — from New York to Chicago to Detroit to San Francisco to Seattle — have come to look like war zones. Crime has run rampant. Businesses and people and capital are fleeing and leaving the poorest Americans — mostly minorities — stranded with tragically limited opportunities other than working at Walmart or McDonald’s for minimum wage. Since 2020, our major cities have lost nearly 1 million residents. And tens of thousands of businesses.
Trump wants to revitalize our cities and abandoned rural areas through deregulation, reduction in tax rates, changes in zoning policies and infrastructure investments.
9. Pull the U.S. Out Of The Paris Climate Change Treaty And Other Anti-America Agreements
We must end American participation in globalist treaties that hurt America most. This includes the Paris Climate Accords — a treaty with which most other nations have failed to comply, yet which places huge burdens on American companies and workers. Trump also has pledged to end global taxation — such as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s global minimum tax. Do we even need a United Nations?
10. Finally, Drain The Swamp
There is a reason why three of the five wealthiest counties in America are in or around Washington, D.C. Washington is getting rich at the expense of the rest of us. Fewer than 10% of overpaid federal workers (of which there are more than 2 million) are working full time in the office even though COVID-19 ended three years ago. These are swamp employees that often get paid $150,000 or more a year. Fire them if they don’t show up. And relocate federal agencies in other cities.
These are admittedly bold aspirations for an economic transformation toward freedom and free enterprise. But the one person who can get it done is Trump.
Stephen Moore is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation and a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation. His new book, coauthored with Arthur Laffer, is “The Trump Economic Miracle.”
