Oklahoma parents will soon have an easier time affording the educational options that work best for their children. On May 25, Governor Kevin Stitt signed legislation creating the Oklahoma Parental Choice Tax Credit Program. Previously, Oklahomans had access to vouchers for students with disabilities and tax credit scholarships that were limited to students who met income guidelines or were assigned to a lower performing public school.

The new tax credit program, which will take effect in 2024, is different from the existing tax credit scholarship program. With tax credit scholarships, businesses and individuals can receive a tax credit for donating money to scholarship-granting organizations that then provide scholarships for students attending private schools. With the new program, parents and guardians can receive a credit toward their own income taxes for education expenditures they’ve incurred.

Another key difference is that the new program is universal—any Oklahoma resident who is eligible to enroll in a public school qualifies for the tax credit.

The private school credits will incorporate a sliding scale based on income and can only be used for tuition and fees at eligible private schools. Families cannot receive credits beyond the tuition and fees they pay for each student. However, the credits are refundable, which means families can receive the full credit even if it is more than their state tax liability.

• The maximum tax credit, $7,500 per student, is reserved for families with household incomes below $75,000.
• Families whose income falls between $75,000 and $150,000 can receive a $7,000 credit per student.
• Those with income between $150,000 and $225,000 are eligible for a $6,500 credit per student.
• Household with incomes of $225,000 to $250,000 can receive a $6,000 credit per student.
• Families earning more than $250,000 get a $5,000 credit per student.

Homeschooling families are also eligible for the new tax credit program, but their credit limit is $1,000 for eligible expenses per child regardless of income. Eligible expenses include tuition and fees for nonpublic online learning programs, tutoring services, and textbooks, curriculum, or other instructional materials. Like the private school credits, the homeschool credit is refundable.

With this new program, Oklahoma has chartered a new path—joining a growing number of states with universal school choice eligibility but taking a different approach. In recent years, West Virginia, Arizona, Utah, Iowa, Florida, and Arkansas have adopted education savings accounts that are at least on a path to universal eligibility. While nine other states have some form of an education tax credit or deduction, Oklahoma’s is the first refundable tax credit that is open to all students.

The states are often referred to as “laboratories of democracy.” We’re seeing this play out real time when it comes to educational freedom. Just last week, Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen signed the state’s first private school choice program—a tax-credit scholarship. Educational freedom is on the move, and that’s only likely to increase as more families understand the tremendous diversity of educational models that are now available. Oklahoma’s universal tax credit will provide a new framework for lawmakers to consider in states where there has been resistance to ESAs and other programs.

In a long line of cases on race and redistricting, the Supreme Court has generally ruled that some race‐​conscious line drawing is okay in applying the federal Voting Rights Act, so long as things don’t go overboard with crazy lines and such. “Racial gerrymandering, even for remedial purposes, may balkanize us into competing racial factions,” warned Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in the first case in this series, Shaw v. Reno (Shaw I, 1993). A 1995 case, Miller v. Johnson, further established that a map will generally be struck down if race was the “overriding, predominant” force in its inception.

These rules, together with the interpretive framework laid out in a 1986 case called Gingles, have long been open to a practical and a constitutional objection. The practical objection is that they have proved incoherent in operation, with lower courts deciding cases inconsistently and the outcome of cases hard to predict. What, exactly, does it mean for race to be “predominant” as a force? The constitutional objection is that the nation’s governing document disfavors treating voters and citizens differently according to race, and that what exceptions there may be to this principle, such as remedial use of race to correct past violations, are fading in significance. If race is an improper ground for government action, why should it be approved or even required in redistricting so long as it stops short of being “predominant”? 

In Allen v. Milligan today, a five-Justice majority of the Supreme Court resisted the logic of both the practical and the constitutional critique, upholding a lower court ruling that had ordered race-based redistricting in Alabama to create a second black-majority U.S. House seat. It’s a long and complex set of opinions and I’ll stick to a couple of highlights: 

• As colleague Ilya Somin points out, what determined the outcome today may have been Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s embrace of the view that even a very ill-considered interpretation given by earlier Courts to statutory language should generally be followed as stare decisis. This applies more to statutes than it does to constitutional interpretation, since Congress has long been free to correct the language of the Voting Rights Act that resulted in the rickety Gingles test, but has not done so. 
• Four Justices suggested the lower court opinion would flunk even the lax current standard since race did, in fact, predominate in the minds of plaintiff experts proposing alternative maps. In fact, when computers were used to generate millions of random maps, not one created a second black-majority district in Alabama. Only when the computer was specifically instructed to consider race did this happen.
• Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who unexpectedly brought the liberals their victory today, nonetheless came under immediate fire for supposed inconsistency because he had voted differently on an earlier bid to block the 2022 use of the districts. But the explanation, and his defense, is plain: he takes seriously the principle (which lawyers call Purcell) that judges should refrain from interventions relatively late in an election cycle, when remedies such as obligatory remaps would be maximally disruptive.

However it may handle the statutory-interpretation side, it’s unlikely that the Court can go on dodging the constitutional logic forever.

In 2020, Netflix began streaming the French film Cuties. The film follows an 11‐​year‐​old Senegalese immigrant, Amy, torn between her family’s conservative culture and a more progressive French society. In the film, Amy is shown joining a pre‐​teen dance group (the “Cuties”), whose sexualized routines are heavily influenced by social media. The film’s message is critical of the influence of social media on young girls, but the film itself attracted significant controversy for its scenes depicting the dance group’s provocative performances.

There is room for reasonable debate as to whether the film is in good taste and whether the scenes of the sexualized dance performances were necessary to tell the story the film intended. But one Texas prosecutor went beyond merely criticizing the film and has criminally prosecuted Netflix for streaming the movie. Lucas Babin, the district attorney for Tyler County, Texas, first brought charges against Netflix under a Texas obscenity law. But during the course of that prosecution, a Texas appeals court in a separate case held that the law Babin had charged Netflix under was itself unconstitutional. That court held that the law was phrased too broadly and thus banned speech that did not fall within the narrow First Amendment exception for “obscenity” (an exception that essentially applies to only hardcore pornography).

Once this decision was issued, Netflix moved to have its own case dismissed on the same constitutional grounds. But rather than drop the case entirely, Babin surprisingly changed his entire legal theory of the case. He dropped the charge against Netflix under the obscenity statute but then brought new charges against Netflix under a more serious child pornography statute. This prosecution made no sense because there is no underage nudity in Cuties, something the state of Texas itself had previously conceded to be a prerequisite for conviction under the child pornography statute. The only nudity in the film, which occurs for less than a second, is that of an adult.

Netflix concluded that Babin brought these new charges not in good faith, but rather to punish Netflix for its constitutional challenge to the earlier charge and to drag out the legal saga for as long as possible. Netflix then filed suit against Babin in federal court, asking for an injunction stopping Babin’s new prosecutions. While the general rule is that federal courts do not step in to stop state prosecutions, an exception exists when the state prosecution is brought in bad faith. A federal district court in Texas agreed with Netflix, finding that Babin brought the charges in bad faith. The district court therefore enjoined Babin from further prosecuting Netflix.

Babin has now appealed to the Fifth Circuit, where Netflix is defending the district court’s decision. Cato has joined a broad coalition of organizations that defend and advocate for First Amendment rights to file an amicus brief supporting Netflix and urging the Fifth Circuit to affirm the injunction. In the brief, we explain why it is important that federal courts remain available as a last resort to quickly end bad‐​faith state prosecutions that infringe First Amendment rights. Many speakers don’t have the same resources as Netflix and would be financially devastated by defending against a multi‐​year prosecution. When such prosecutions are brought in bad faith, the process itself is the punishment, and federal courts must be available to end that process.

In the brief, we further point out that for the sake of free discourse, it is particularly important that serious criminal statutes like Texas’s child pornography law not be misused. Many vital works of journalism and art touch on sensitive and important subjects involving minors, such as sexual abuse, eating disorders, and pregnancy. If the prosecution against Netflix is allowed to continue, other speakers and filmmakers may be chilled and dissuaded from working on these sensitive and important subjects, for fear that similar laws will be misused to prosecute them. The Fifth Circuit should emphatically shut the door on this possibility and affirm the district court’s injunction.

In Iowa, Holy Family Catholic Schools announced that they would be raising prices 10 to 40 percent, depending on a families’ relationship to the parish, given the state’s new education savings account program. In Florida, St. Paul Catholic School announced an increase in tuition for parish members from $6,000 to $10,000, and from $7,000 to $12,000 for nonmembers. Both generated consternation from school choice opponents, who decried “gouging” and a “cash grab.”

Concern about aid translating into skyrocketing prices is well founded—just look at higher education. It is not, however, a serious problem at the moment. Indeed, to have a private sector that can survive against public schools, much less compete on a level financial playing field, schools must be able to raise prices.

As seen in the chart below, which compares private school tuition from the 2022–23 school year to the latest federal data, adjusted to 2022 dollars, on total public school per-pupil spending, private schools charge much less per pupil than public schools spend. Nationally, average private school tuition is about $12,300 and per-pupil public school spending is around $17,800. That’s a $5,500, or 45 percent, difference. At the state level, other than three New England states long home to some of the country’s most exclusive, and pricey, private schools, average private school tuition is consistently lower than what public schools spend. Among the states with greater public-school spending than private tuition, the difference ranges from roughly $800 in Utah to $15,500 in Alaska.

The orange bars denote states that have recently passed universal school choice programs, which have prompted the latest fears. In those states, private school tuition is typically well below public school per-pupil spending. In Florida, public school spending is roughly $13,400 and private tuition $9,900. Even at the peak price of $12,000, St. Paul won’t match average public-school spending. In Iowa, public schools spend roughly $16,600 while average private school tuition is just $5,500. Holy Family is only raising its tuition for members of supporting parishes to around $5,010, from $3,580.

Private schools often have other sources of income than tuition, including donations from benefactors and, for many religious schools, church collections, so the money they get from tuition is not all that they have. Holy Family, for instance, says it will charge a maximum tuition of $8,600 for high school but spend $10,600 per student. On the flip side, private schools also sometimes provide financial aid, and except where vouchers or ESAs exist, all of that funding is voluntary, not taken ultimately by force like the vast majority of public-school money. And public schools also get some charitable support, boosting their revenue, nationally, 1.2 percent.

As Quakers in New Jersey noted when the state ended revenue sharing among public and private schools in 1866, the only way for their schools to hope to survive was to charge low prices and provide the best quality possible. The former, to try to compete against “free” financially, and the latter to make the schools sufficiently attractive to justify families paying twice for education—once in taxes, a second time in tuition. Many did not successfully thread that very narrow needle.

Subsidies fueling price inflation is a serious concern. But right now, many private schools are much closer to extinction than cash-hoarding. Their raising prices just begins to level the steeply slanted playing field on which they’ve been forced to contend.

I have written often about the so-called Iron Law of Prohibition: “The harder the law enforcement, the harder the drug.” Prohibition incentivizes purveyors of the prohibited substance to develop more potent forms that can be smuggled more easily in smaller packages and subdivided into more units to sell. As I explained to members of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Government Surveillance in March, doubling down on law enforcement was largely responsible for fentanyl replacing heroin as the dominant black market opioid, and will only serve to fuel the development of more potent drugs to replace fentanyl—as we are already seeing with the advent of tranq. Now researchers report in the American Journal of Public Health that those law enforcement crackdowns can also fuel a rise in overdose deaths.

In this retrospective population-based cohort study, researchers looked at data from Marion County, Indiana from January 1, 2020 to December 31, 2021 to see if there were changes in the number and type of overdose deaths in areas where that corresponded to increases in drug seizures by law enforcement. The results:

Within 7, 14, and 21 days, opioid-related law enforcement drug seizures were significantly associated with increased spatiotemporal clustering of overdoses within radii of 100, 250, and 500 meters. For example, the observed number of fatal overdoses was two-fold higher than expected under the null distribution within 7 days and 500 meters following opioid-related seizures. To a lesser extent, stimulant-related drug seizures were associated with increased spatiotemporal clustering overdose.

The researchers concluded, “Supply-side enforcement interventions and drug policies should be further explored to determine whether they exacerbate an ongoing overdose epidemic and negatively affect the nation’s life expectancy.”

One possible explanation is that drug users in the areas where the drug busts occurred were forced to obtain their drugs from alternative, less reliable sources with whom they have no prior relationship. They were unable to be as confident about the dose or purity of those drugs. Furthermore, the drug seizures might have created temporary supply chain problems for dealers, causing them to improvise and adjust the recipes and doses of the drugs they sell. Both of these reasons can explain a bump in overdoses after drug busts.

It has always been obvious that enforcing prohibition fuels the development of more potent and dangerous drugs and this indirectly increases drug overdose deaths. This new study provides evidence that enforcing prohibition increases overdose deaths more directly.

I think it’s fair to question whether or not the current House Oversight Committee inquiry into allegations against the President and his son, Hunter Biden (with respect to questionable business dealings with a Ukrainian energy company), is the kind of issue the committee should be spending its time on. It’s not fair to question the legitimacy of the subpoena and related document demands the committee has made of the FBI for an FD-1023 Confidential Human Source (CHS) report allegedly related to the Biden matter. You can find an example of a previously released FBI FD-1023 here.

To be clear, relying on single-source reporting for any kind of investigation—unless that source is a wiretap or another form of electronic surveillance that can be clearly tied to a suspect—is not a sound law enforcement or intelligence analysis technique. And in some cases, even multiple, independent sources of human intelligence (HUMINT) can be incomplete, misleading, or outright false. That’s exactly what the FBI did in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation targeting the Trump campaign, relying on unverified (and ultimately unsubstantiated) information from both the Australian government and a former British intelligence officer—with disastrous results. The issue here is whether this particular CHS account in the Biden episode is credible, and whether there is other information to validate or refute the source’s claims. At present, we don’t have definitive answers to either question.

It’s worth remembering that Democrats controlled the gavels in the House during the previous congress, they were not at all shy about using subpoenas to request documents and witness testimony in connection with the investigation of the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol—including seeking contempt charges for those who refused to cooperate. The country was the better for that oversight effort, which is why their opposition to Comer’s actions undermines the credibility of their allegations that House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer’s (R‑KY) is simply on a partisan mission to get the Bidens. House Democrats opposition to attempts to get the FBI to at least let all committee members be able to review the document undermine what should be a bipartisan effort to get to the truth of the matter.

In the last few years, Congress has authorized as much as $2.1 trillion in domestic subsidies for preferred industries such as steel, semiconductors, and electric vehicles—a flood of taxpayer cash that supporters have cheered for boosting U.S. manufacturing and the economy more broadly. As Cato scholars and others have long cautioned, however, a proper assessment of industrial policies’ efficacy requires considering far more than a simple correlation between new government spending and new private investments, jobs, and products. Among the necessary considerations is the spending’s opportunity cost, i.e., what Congress—operating in a world of finite budgets, time, and political capital—could have done with these trillions instead of industrial policy.

To help clarify that point, we’ve considered one alternative to U.S. industrial subsidies that Congress could have pursued: improved tax treatment (so-called “full expensing”) of companies’ domestic capital investments. As Michel explains in a new Cato paper out this week, current tax law discourages innovation and private investment in the United States by requiring that business tax deductions for spending on research and development, equipment, and construction be spread out over long periods. The 2017 tax law temporarily addressed some of this problem, but as the law now expires, new U.S. investments have again become more costly.

Delaying investment deductions erodes their value over time—especially in times of high inflation. For example, the most innovative U.S. businesses are only able to recoup as little as 83 percent of their real research costs under the current (pre-tax reform) regime. By contrast, allowing businesses to recoup their full investment deduction immediately through permanent full expensing would significantly boost associated investment, employment, wages, and economic growth more broadly (and especially investment in capital- and research-intensive projects such as semiconductor manufacturing). Expensing also avoids the capital misallocation, cronyism, and other costs that—as Lincicome has documented—too often result from targeted industrial subsidies (including the new ones that Congress just authorized).

This smart, pro-growth policy, however, isn’t free—a broad tax reform package would likely lower federal tax revenues by hundreds of billions of dollars over a 10-year budget window. Yet, as shown in the following chart, even the most aggressive, pro-growth expensing package would still be dwarfed by the amounts that Congress has just spent on industrial policy via the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (2021), the Chips and Science Act (2022), and the Inflation Reduction Act (2022).

In particular, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act’s will spend about $517 billion over 10 years, possibly rising by as much as $100 billion due to higher contract authority in the second half of the decade. CBO further calculates that the Chips and Science Act will cost $79 billion over 10 years, including about $50 billion in direct funding and $24 billion in tax credits. If Congress appropriates the remaining funds in future years, as planned, the cost of the legislation could increase to almost $280 billion. Estimates of the industrial policy spending in the Inflation Reduction Act are much higher. Goldman Sachs and the Joint Committee on Taxation calculate that the energy subsidies will, depending on various assumptions, cost between $645 billion and $1.2 trillion over 10 years.

In each of the estimates, we’ve focused on the spending that is intended to put the federal government—not private investors—at the center of directing the location, timing, and inputs of elected officials’ preferred economic activities. Given that industrial policy estimates vary, we provide both lower ($1.2 trillion) and higher ($2.1 trillion) totals. We provide something similar for full expensing: a lower bound estimate using only neutral cost recovery for structures and an upper bound estimate that lets structures be immediately expensed in full. (Neutral cost recovery simply allows deductions for investments in structures to be indexed for inflation and time.)

As Figure 1 shows, the industrial policy spending is as much as four times as costly as a pro-growth tax reform package, and even the more conservative industrial policy estimate exceeds the more aggressive expensing estimate by more than $300 billion. Of course, this isn’t really a fair comparison because, at best, the subsidies will just reallocate existing resources, whereas pro-growth tax cuts would expand the pool of total private investment and, just as importantly, put private investors—not politicians—in charge of determining where new investments should go.

Of course, tax reform isn’t the only pro-market policy that should have been pursued instead of those trillions in new government spending. As Lincicome has explained repeatedly, for example, both regulatory reform and liberalization of current U.S. trade and immigration restrictions would undoubtedly benefit capital-intensive, high-tech manufacturers in the United States. But looking at tax policy is particularly apt, given that Congress actually chose to let certain full expensing provisions expire right as it was implementing new subsidies in 2021 and 2022. As of last year, research and development spending—including related wages and other associated costs—can no longer be immediately deducted, and starting this year, full expensing for other business investments begins to phase out.

In short, it’s a perfect (albeit depressing) example of what Congress could have done to boost domestic investment and economic growth instead of industrial policy—with more economic benefits, less political favoritism, and at just a fraction of the budgetary cost.