By now, those following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) have largely identified their preferred culprits for the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history. But regardless of where one assigns the most blame, it’s clear that the post-Global Financial Crisis regulatory regime neither prevented SVB’s demise nor an extraordinary federal reaction to it. While some take the fall of SVB as a reason to double down on the usual medicine, this bank failure is a case in point for allowing progress in monetary and financial alternatives.

Ultimately, SVB failed to manage risks, some of which it took on strategically, others of which caught it flatfooted—and all of which observers should consider as potentially enabled by the overhang of moral hazard from previous bank bailouts. Prominent among these risks was acute interest rate exposure through both SVB’s depositors and its investments.

SVB specialized in catering to a relatively undiversified depositor base concentrated among tech startups. Startups are a sine qua non of technological innovation and economic dynamism. As venture-funded bets that are typically long term, taking time to achieve profitability, startups also tend to be sensitive to interest rate hikes. In addition, when rates were low and SVB’s depositors were flush with cash, the bank invested heavily in long-dated securities, which also would decline in market value in the event of rising interest rates.

As interest rates rose, SVB was caught between a rock and a hard place. A vicious cycle kicked off, with deposit drawdowns leading SVB to sell investments at a loss to raise cash and those balance sheet losses eroding confidence. Notably, depositors in the startup space are tightly networked—i.e., they talk (not to mention tweet)—and a “bad-news run” on SVB followed.

The failure of a bank serving such a critical sector as the tech startup ecosystem has led many to question the health of our monetary and financial status quo. One lesson of SVB is we should let markets develop more new financial tools and institutions, not fewer of them. Not every innovation may be right for every business, but policymakers should treat private alternatives to our legacy system as rational responses to manifest flaws and unmet needs, not incipient threats to an already-perfected order.

New technologies can enhance, unbundle, and repackage bank services, efficiently reorganizing risks and capabilities as best suits users. In the fraught weekend following SVB’s takeover by the FDIC, many questioned how a corporate treasury could mitigate bank run risk going forward. Financial technology already is enabling new capabilities for businesses to manage their war chests, including by more seamlessly integrating multiple accounts and account types—a resiliency feature brought into focus by FDIC insurance “limits” in recent days.

SVB’s failure not only jeopardized the security of corporate funds but also companies’ ability to move money over its payment rails. Here too, financial technology has offered an improvement over the status quo. Blockchain-based stablecoins do not rely on legacy payment rails maintained and gated by centralized intermediaries like SVB to move tokens from one user to another. For example, a company with stablecoin reserves held in a self-custody wallet could both access and transfer tokens permissionlessly and on demand. As fears over SVB depositors’ ability to make payroll this week indicated, having resilient payment capabilities is a serious matter.

Like all solutions, stablecoins are not perfect or risk free. Although an intermediary may not be necessary to move stablecoin tokens between users, collateralized stablecoins do require some degree of intermediation of the on/​off ramps that convert tokens to fiat currency and vice versa. For that reason, SVB’s failure led to a de-pegging of the asset-backed stablecoin USDC—which held some of its reserves at SVB and temporarily declined in market value from $1.00 to, at one point, $0.88 per 1 USDC over the weekend.

While trustworthy reserves clearly are essential to an asset-backed stablecoin, it was SVB that failed USDC, not vice versa. There’s no reason in principle stablecoin reserve assets must be held at a commercial bank operating on a fractional reserve model (though they can be if that’s the preference of the stablecoin’s users). Instead of bank deposits at a lending institution, stablecoin reserves can be backed by short-duration securities held by a limited purpose investment company or other vehicle, as my colleagues Norbert Michel and Jennifer Schulp explain. In fact, the failure of SVB gave the lie to the idea that, as the President’s Working Group proposed, a sound stablecoin can only be one involving an insured depository institution.

Among the ways to achieve a more resilient corporate treasury, the idea of “narrow banking” also gained attention in the wake of SVB’s failure. Narrow banking, as my colleague George Selgin explains, is a “widely discussed if seldom put into practice” alternative to banking with insured depositories that involves fully backing deposits with cash reserves (e.g., Federal Reserve notes or balances in a Fed master account). As Selgin further explains, uninsured “narrow stablecoins”—private stablecoins backed with wholesale Fed account balances and, potentially, certain U.S. Treasuries—should be one more addition to the payment ecosystem, among others, providing competition not only to enhance the payment system with better-priced and better-quality services, but also to improve financial inclusion.

Banks’ ability to extend credit, pay interest on deposits, and facilitate payments have made them one of the most important technologies for economic growth in history. Nonetheless, as the failure of SVB makes clear, the current system of regulated banks is far from one that cannot be improved upon. New technologies are enabling new suites of tools that can be alternatives, as well as improvements, to bank services. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, but more diverse products can allow businesses to make more efficient risk-based tradeoffs. They and their consumers, not policymakers or pundits, should get to decide what these tradeoffs and tools look like.

In the latest episode of “Cops Practicing Medicine,” the Drug Enforcement Administration announced new telehealth guidelines for patients with substance use disorder receiving medication-assisted treatment (MAT) with buprenorphine. Last December, Congress passed the Mainstreaming Addiction Treatment (MAT) Act with bipartisan support. The act removed the onerous rules and regulations surrounding the “X waiver” that the DEA required health care practitioners to obtain if they wanted to treat addiction with buprenorphine. These requirements deterred many health care providers from offering medication-assisted treatment to patients with addiction. According to one study, 87 percent of people with opioid-use disorder go without treatment. By removing these restrictions, lawmakers hope more health care practitioners will begin treating substance use disorder and thus expand access to addiction treatment.

Alas, the cops think they know better how to treat addiction. The new rule requires that any patients initially begun on buprenorphine via telehealth must see the prescribing practitioner in person within 30 days. The rule limits the prescription to a 30-day supply. This means if the patient can’t get an office appointment with the provider within 30 days, the buprenorphine treatment abruptly ends. It already averages 26 days to get a new appointment with a primary care provider, so there is no guarantee a new buprenorphine patient can get an appointment within the 30-day window. It might be even more difficult in rural or other areas with primary care provider shortages.

The cops continue to stigmatize people with substance use disorder. They fear that patients will use the buprenorphine to get “high” or sell it on the street to other non-medical users. But buprenorphine is a weak partial opioid agonist, unpopular among recreational drug users. Studies indicate that most people who buy buprenorphine on the street are self-administering medication-assisted treatment with buprenorphine because they can’t get appointments for treatment.

The new DEA rule is likely to cause the abrupt cessation of buprenorphine MAT for many patients who just began treatment. Shortened or abrupt cessation of treatment will very likely cause patients to resume non-medical use of opioids in the dangerous black market.

The DEA should get out of the way of health care practitioners who want to help Americans seeking help for addiction. The agency has no business dictating how to practice medicine.

In 2012, during his second failed campaign for president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador promised repeatedly that, if elected, he would send the Mexican army back to its barracks within six months of his inauguration. The country’s militarization was a political issue since 2006, when former president Felipe Calderón, who narrowly defeated López in that year’s election, resorted to the army to combat the increasingly powerful drug cartels.

During his third campaign in 2018, when he finally won the presidency, López remained a critic of Mexico’s militarization, promising to use the warm embrace of criminals instead of ammunition to overcome the country’s persistent security crisis. Since taking power, however, López has not only maintained the army on the streets; he has also increased its power and widened the scope of its activities.

Under López, Mexican soldiers still fight the drug war, and they still fight in vain if you consider the cartels’ unassailable profit margins. But they are also building infrastructure, most visibly, the Tren Maya railway scheme, López’s grand projet on the Yucatán Peninsula. Additionally, the army is in charge of customs duties at ports and airports, gasoline and fertilizer distribution, school textbook deliveries, and the provision of hospital materials, among other mundane or strictly logistical tasks that, even in many Latin American countries, fall well outside the military sphere.

In 2019, López created the National Guard, a new branch of the armed forces that, he assured, would be run by civilians. Instead, the guard has remained under the army’s command. Today, it is a force of 113,000 regulars (compared to 215,000 in the army proper) that carries out federal policing functions and, according to López, will remain under army control until 2028. The growth of the armed forces, with all of their augmented power, journalist Ivabelle Arroyo writes, has made Mexico “a country of soldiers.”

What caused López’s radical volte-face regarding the military’s role in Mexican society? According to Guillermo Guevara, a security analyst, López, whose own approval ratings remain well above 60 percent, realized he could exploit the institution’s overwhelming popularity. With nearly nine out of 10 Mexicans approving of the army’s performance according to a 2020 poll, it constantly outranks the police, politicians, congress, the political parties—all of which are perceived as irredeemably corrupt—and even the Catholic Church.

There are at least two reasons behind the army’s extraordinary popularity. On the one hand, there is what Arroyo calls Mexico’s “olive green myth,” an official narrative of the army’s heroism—introduced to children in primary schools—that stems from its origins as the “constitutionalist” side in the Mexican Revolution that began in 1910, the country’s formative event in the 20^th century. On the other hand, in recent decades, Mexicans have often witnessed media footage of army personnel rescuing people in natural disasters zones, or delivering much needed supplies in marginalized areas. As a result, Arroyo explains, the population regards its soldiers as “efficient, loyal, disciplined, and willing to sacrifice their lives for others.”

Academics and commentators have settled on the term “authoritarian populism” to describe López’s governing style. I don’t mean to echo the vogue. “Demagogy,” philosopher Nicolás Gómez Dávila wrote, “is the word democrats use when democracy scares them.” What is true is that the army’s perceived altruism—and the humble origins of recruits and officers alike—complements López’s relentless promotion of himself as the Mexican people’s tribune, its elected redeemer. The army, he says, “is the people in uniform.” All of which obscures the many ways in which military men—and particularly the army’s top brass— have come to enjoy privileges that are hardly within the reach of the populus.

The army, Arroyo recounts, lobbies Mexico’s congress and changes laws for its own benefit. It also receives a constant slew of lucrative government contracts. So far, public opinion has looked the other way, as occurred after several high-profile cases of army members’ abuse of their armed power. One vital question, however, is how long the army’s popularity can withstand a growing array of corruption scandals within the institution.

Nonetheless, corruption within the armed forces has been rife across Latin America. More specific to Mexico has been the military’s hold on the ministry of defense, a unique scenario among the region’s largest countries save for Venezuela post-Hugo Chávez. Until López’s presidency, the unwritten rule was that the generals named to head the defense ministry would stick to their brief and keep clear of politics. Hence the shock when General Luis Cresencio Sandoval, López’s defense minister, called for the public to support the “national project” and Mexico’s current “transformation,” terms easily interpreted as euphemisms for the López-army alliance.

The largest protests against López so far have not concerned the president’s militarism, but rather his plan to enfeeble the National Electoral Institute. Many consider this institution to be an independent pillar of Mexican democracy since the year 2000, when seven decades of uninterrupted rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) came to an end. For López, the institute is a bloated bureaucracy manned by the smug, overpaid functionaries who, he claims, stole the 2006 elections from him.

The president does not appear intent—or, for that matter, able— to change the constitution, which forbids reelection, so as to remain in power. But a newly politicized electoral system could allow López’s party, Morena, to dominate Mexican politics much in the vein of the PRI of yesteryear. This mock democratic system, which Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa once called “a perfect dictatorship,” seemed to be a vestige of Mexico’s past. Now, López could ensure that it also plays a role in its future.

Warnings about Mexico’s pivot to autocracy under López abounded well before his presidency (a good example is Roberto Salinas León’s 2019 policy report for Cato). However, the degree of militarization during the last four years has surprised even some of López’s longtime critics. No one should forget, however, that the Mexican army only began to recover part of the political might it exerted in the past as a result of the Washignton-led war on drugs. Along with hippopotami roving along the Magdalena River, the rapid militarization of Mexico is yet another of the drug war’s unforeseen consequences.

Recently, the University of North Carolina voted to “ban” the requirement of politically charged prompts, like diversity statements, from any considerations for admission, hiring, promotion, and tenure. Such statements were deemed “compelled speech” and therefore antithetical to intellectual freedom. UNC’s Board of Governors, which approved a policy that disallows making applicants “affirmatively ascribe to or opine about beliefs, affiliations, ideals, or principles regarding matters of contemporary political debate or social action as a condition to admission, employment, or professional advancement,” has also started a School of Civic Life and Leadership—an institute formed to ensure that viewpoint diversity and academic freedom are allowed and respected. All in all, this looks like a victory for free expression, in general.

As someone who is left-of-center but against the political and educational manifestations of critical social justice, I see this as a step in the right direction. However, part of me thinks this move by UNC may have traded one problem for another. The problem with diversity statements, for instance, is not their existence, per se, but the nature of their existence. It has become clear that, regarding many of these statements, only one kind of answer is acceptable; the answer has to align with the tenets of Critical Social Justice and/​or other critical theories, most saliently the tenets that racism is always already going on, that institutional structures are the sole cause of racial disparities, and that the oppressor/​oppressed dichotomy is always at play regarding interactions between white people and minorities, especially black minorities. What’s more, around the country, colleges insist they can ask for diversity statements without compelling speech, but one can infer from the advice given on how to compose a diversity statement, like that given by University of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and even UNC, that a certain kind of person is being sought: a person who has DEI as a veritable area of specialization or, at least, a salient area of competence. The fact that DEI statements written by Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, and other legends of racial justice could be rejected by some of the more “woke” hiring committees as too “white” is the real travesty. Would it have been enough to mandate that a variety of viewpoints on DEI be accepted?

Also, I don’t think it is inherently unjust to ask candidates what they can contribute to diversity, equity, and inclusion; it just shouldn’t be a mandatory consideration for hiring. Requiring applicants to respond to what amounts to a litmus test on one’s political leanings should be discouraged, but would a paragraph in an otherwise traditional cover letter describing one’s thoughts on racial justice be acceptable? What if a full diversity statement is requested but not required? This can get tricky in other ways. How is the Board of Governors defining terms like “political” or even “diversity”, “equity,” or “inclusion”? What is beyond the pale? For example, if a committee sees two very comparable job applications, but one applicant has experience with social justice initiatives, would it be wrong to choose the latter candidate over the former for that reason, all else being equal?

There does seem to be a kind of loophole in UNC’s new policy. Apparently, if hiring committees believe a diversity statement is imperative to a particular job, they must “obtain prior written approval to include such a requirement or solicitation from the President following discussion in open session of a meeting of the Committee on University Governance attended by the requesting constituent institution’s chancellor, its provost, and its chair of its board of trustees.” This addresses part of the issue, but the devil is still in the details. Again, operational definitions of diversity, equity, inclusion, etc. would need to be established. Also, the Committee on University Governance needs to be staffed by good-faith actors and those who can tell the difference between classic civil rights and contemporary “woke” social justice. That last statement leads to what may be the ultimate question: how thin is the line between UNC’s new policy and the all out attack on DEI indicative of the political maneuvering of people like Ron Desantis, who has been accused of going too far in his battle against “woke” politics?

To be clear, I think the banning of “compelled speech” is a victory, and may be the beginning of a trend. As I write this essay, Texas universities are banning mandatory diversity statements or pausing all DEI initiatives until further review, respectively. However, questions remain about how, exactly, this new policy will be exercised. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

In March 2018, the New York Times ran an op-ed about the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act (the Economic Growth Act). The piece claimed the bill “would roll back or eliminate parts of the Dodd-Frank Act.”

Fast forward to March 2023, when the Times ran an op-ed by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D‑MA) about the Silicon Valley Bank failure. In it, Warren points to the Economic Growth Act and argues the demise of Silicon Valley Bank was “the direct result of leaders in Washington weakening the financial rules.”

Though separated by five years, both opinion pieces widely miss the mark on the Economic Growth Act.

First, while the Economic Growth Act did amend the Dodd-Frank Act, it didn’t eliminate a single title or section of Dodd-Frank. More importantly, the Economic Growth Act amended the Federal Reserve’s “enhanced supervision and prudential standards for certain bank holding companies.” (Emphasis added.) That is, the Economic Growth Act amended how the Fed can regulate the companies that own commercial banks, not how it can regulate the commercial banks themselves.

There’s a huge difference. Right now, several large firms are in talks to buy SVB Financial Group, the holding company that owned several financial companies, including Silicon Valley Bank. Although Silicon Valley Bank is now under control of the FDIC, SVB Financial Group is a separate entity.

That said, even the 2018 Times piece exaggerated how much the Economic Growth Act “rolled back” the regulations on bank holding companies.

The biggest regulatory relief in the Economic Growth Act was what it did to the so-called systemically important financial institution (SIFI) standards, the enhanced supervision that Dodd-Frank imposed on bank holding companies with assets of more than $50 billion. (See Title IV.) On close inspection, though, even these changes weren’t so big.

Superficially, the bill raised the size threshold for enhanced supervision, so heightened regulations would apply only to bank holding companies with total assets of more than $250 billion. But the bill only technically changed the threshold from $50 billion to $250 billion because it also authorized the Fed to “apply any prudential standard to any bank holding company or bank holding companies” with total assets of at least $100 billion.

In other words, bank holding companies with at least $100 billion—not $250 billion—were still subject to the Fed’s enhanced supervision if, how, and when the Fed decided. The bill also authorized the Fed to “tailor or differentiate among companies on an individual basis or by category, taking into consideration their capital structure, riskiness, complexity, financial activities (including financial activities of their subsidiaries), size, and any other risk-related factors that the Board of Governors deems appropriate.”

So, the bill left the Fed with a great deal of discretion. And the Fed used it.

The Fed implemented a number of new rulemakings, the most relevant (for this discussion) being the new Prudential Standards for Large Bank Holding Companies, and the Changes to Applicability Thresholds for Regulatory Capital and Liquidity Requirements. The short version is that these new rules established a set of categories for evaluating capital and liquidity ratios, each based largely on the size (total assets) of the bank holding company. (For a handy 61-page summary, see this Davis Polk & Wardwell document.)

Essentially, under the new rules, the Fed applies enhanced standards to the following four categories of bank holding companies:

1. The very largest institutions, the U.S. G‑SIBs (global systemically important banks).
2. Total assets more than $700 billion (but not a G‑SIB).
3. Total assets between $250 billion and $700 billion.
4. Total assets between $100 billion and $250 billion.

Under the new rules, the Fed applies different standards based on which category the company falls in, but it maintains the discretion to apply different standards to each institution. (For details, check out this handy summary from Deloitte.)

Ultimately, firms falling into the respective categories are responsible for different reporting requirements and for meeting different minimum capital and liquidity ratios.

Setting aside whether any of these regulations actually make the banking sector safer and more stable, we can use SVB Financial Group’s annual reports to track their capital and liquidity measures from 2015 through 2022, the years when they crossed several regulatory thresholds. If the financial statements are to be trusted—and if they’re not, we have a much bigger problem—it is exceedingly difficult to argue that the new rules weakened SVB Financial Group’s commercial bank. (For each annual report, a continued search on “leverage ratio” brings up a discussion and eventually a table with reported ratios.)

For brevity, let’s focus on the new $100 billion threshold.

During 2020, SVB Financial Group finally crossed the $100 billion threshold. As a result, the firm was labeled a category IV firm in 2021. Yet, despite facing new requirements, the firm continued to be overcapitalized, a trend it maintained since at least 2015. Just for example, its required leverage and tier 1 risk-based capital ratios were 4 percent and 8.5 percent, respectively. However, SVB Financial Group reported a leverage ratio of 7.93 percent and a tier 1 capital ratio of 16.08 percent.

These figures were well above the required ratios and higher than in previous years. For anyone wondering, SVB Bank reported similar ratios, well above the minimum required.

The 2022 financials show similar ratios for SVB Financial Group, with a slightly higher leverage ratio of 8.11 percent and a slightly lower tier 1 capital ratio of 15.4 percent. (Silicon Valley Bank also reported similar ratios, both higher than in 2021, and both well above the minimum required.)

It is very difficult to make a pure comparison to what the company’s requirements would have been had the Economic Growth Act not amended Dodd-Frank. However, SVB Financial Group did cross the $50 billion threshold in 2017, prior to these amendments. And the financial statements show—much like in 2022—a company that was extremely well capitalized, with ratios roughly twice as high as the requirements. (At least one analysis suggests even the higher liquidity coverage ratio standards would have made no difference in preventing the Silicon Valley Bank failure.)

So, SVB Financial Group (and the commercial bank itself) had capital ratios approaching twice the minimum required, even after if crossed the $100 billion threshold. Given that the 2018 amendments to Dodd-Frank were at the holding company level, and that what regulators have done to implement enhanced requirements after Dodd-Frank effectively amounts to higher capital and liquidity ratios, it is quite a reach to connect Silicon Valley Bank’s failure to the Economic Growth Act.

If anything, members of Congress should listen closely to Michael Barr, the Fed’s vice chair for supervision. With regard to the Federal Reserve’s supervision of Silicon Valley Bank, he announced “We need to have humility and conduct a careful and thorough review of how we supervised and regulated this firm, and what we should learn from this experience.”

The truth is that if people expect to see zero bank failures, they are expecting much too much of federal regulations and federal regulators. This incident should be used to finally face the fact that increased regulation does not guarantee safety.

In the early, scruffy days of the modern libertarian movement, the late 1960s and early 1970s, a popular libertarian slogan was TANSTAAFL — “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” See the buttons at the right. It meant that government can’t hand out free stuff indefinitely — benefits have to be paid for. Or more generally, to economists, it refers to opportunity costs. But who said it first? 

In my recent study of the citations in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, I saw that the editors listed the slightly more grammatical version, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch,” as “attributed” to Milton Friedman. They could have cited his 1975 book by that title. And Friedman did make the point frequently. As did Johan Norberg in this discussion of Friedman and the “no free lunch” idea.

But Friedman wasn’t first. Science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein had popularized the phrase and the abbreviation in his 1966 Hugo Award-winning novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. He even posited a new country with TANSTAAFL on its flag. That’s likely where early libertarians came across it. Including a young economist named Edwin Dolan, who published a book in 1971 titled TANSTAAFL: A Libertarian Perspective on Environmental Policy. So was Heinlein the first?

The website Quote Investigator dug deeper, and found a 1938 newspaper article titled “Economics in Eight Words.” It was a fable of a king who demanded that his economic advisers give him a “short and simple text” on economics. As they presented him with massive tomes, he repeatedly executed some and demanded that the others come back with the short text he had asked for. Finally there was just one elderly economist left, who said to the king,

“Sire, in eight words I will reveal to you all the wisdom that I have distilled through all these years from all the writings of all the economists who once practiced their science in your kingdom. Here is my text:

“There ain’t no such thing as free lunch.”

That seems to be the first time the phrase was used specifically as an economic principle. The fable was unsigned, but Quote Investigator found evidence that it was likely written by Walter Morrow, editor-in-chief of The Southwestern Group of Scripps-Howard Newspapers. And now, perhaps for the first time, the 1938 article is published online at Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.

I’d say that Heinlein’s book generated the buttons and bumper stickers produced by the early libertarian activists. Friedman’s repeated use of the term and the concept brought it to a wider educated audience. But Heinlein just might have read one of the 1938 newspapers in which the “Eight Words” article appeared. 

The Biden administration has proposed its federal budget for 2024. The administration has an expansive view of federal responsibilities and calls for new spending on health care, college aid, paid leave, child care, preschool, housing, and numerous other items.

The new spending is discussed in the budget summary, which starts with the president’s message and runs through chapters for each department over 132 pages. I looked at the document’s language to see what it reveals about the administration’s worldview and priorities.

One prominent word in the Biden budget is “historic.” The administration uses it 74 times to pat itself on the back regarding its legislation, executive orders, international agreements, increases in funding, deficit reduction, progress in schools, the economy, and many other things. Even the “seventh replenishment” of a certain “Global Fund” is called historic spending, even though the fund has apparently been replenished six times already.

The budget proposes to increase spending by 8 percent in 2024 and $2 trillion over the coming decade above the baseline. Many of the budget’s 132 pages describe new spending and subsidy proposals, yet the document uses the word “spending” just five times and “subsidy” four times.

Luckily for the administration, there are alternate words that don’t sound as profligate. Here are the budget’s synonyms for spending and subsidies with word counts in brackets: “investment” (233), “investing” (36), “funding” (230), “support” (287), “strengthen” (158), “bolster” (53), “robust” (30), and “resources” (103). But let me be clear, all this bolstering is not a free-for-all because Biden will “target” (26) and “prioritize” (18) it.

The main theme of the budget is that the administration is boldly tackling America’s problems. The budget would “advance” (156), “address” (165), “transform (24), and “reform” (48) many things, each with an “initiative” (66), a “strategy” (45), or a “commitment” (52).

“Global” appears 88 times, often in ways that suggest our federal government is a sort of world government, or in ways that suggest our government is a subsidiary of world government. Some examples are: “America’s global leadership,” “global action,” “global stage,” “global challenges,” “global public health,” “global progress,” “global energy security,” “global security,” “global infrastructure and investment,” “global needs,” “global tax framework,” and “global clean energy manufacturing effort.”

“Goal” appears 45 times. The government should set goals for its operations, such as balancing the budget and improving bureaucratic efficiencies. But the budget mainly uses “goal” in a central planning way, that is, ways to remake society with top-down spending and regulations. This is a good example: “The National Strategy on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health provides a roadmap of actions Federal agencies will take and makes a call to action to all sectors of society to collectively achieve the President’s goals.” All sectors of society to follow one man’s goals. There’s a name for that.

Here are some other word counts in the budget:

• “worker” (109), “entrepreneur” (7).
• “equity” (57), “equality” (11).
• “communities” (201), “federalism” (0).
• “restraint” (0), “spending cut” (0), “downsizing” (0).
• “freedom” (1), “liberty” (0), “free speech” (0).

In sum, this year’s budget language is similar to last year’s with little focus on freedom but even more “historic” achievements.

Note: I excluded words in page headers and the summary tables at the end from the counts. A few of the word counts include closely related words. For example, “advance” includes “advanced” and “prioritize” includes “prioritized.”