OPINION

Commentary I live in the Texas Hill Country. Before my family settled in Bandera County, we seriously considered buying property in Bastrop. We ultimately chose Bandera, but Bastrop has always felt like part of my broader community. We go to Fredericksburg often. These aren’t abstract places on a map to ...

Japan can watch debt-service costs consume its budget, or suppress rates and risk inflation. Decades of borrowing have eliminated the easy options.

Commentary Beneath the cacophony of media noise, an important untold story emerges: A manufacturing boom is unfolding across America right now, and especially so in the geographic center of the country. This developing boom represents an epochal shift because investments in factories and tangible production involve the stickiest kind of ...

Commentary There is a question increasingly worth asking: Why do some of America’s most privileged young people seem to have become among its harshest critics, not merely challenging policies but speaking as though America itself is fundamentally corrupt, oppressive, or unworthy of their loyalty? This is certainly not true of ...

Commentary Nothing is more natural when buying a house than looking into how safe the neighborhood is, and, if you have or plan to have children, whether the schools are any good. Yet the last Democratic presidential administration tried to prevent real estate agents from answering those kinds of questions ...

Commentary Since March, America has been running an accidental experiment and glimpsing what the country might look like without one of its most outdated statutes. The results are in, and they embarrass a century’s worth of U.S. lawmakers and defenders. The statute is the Jones Act, passed in 1920 to ...

Commentary CHAUTAUQUA, New York—The road here feels like one of those places that America keeps tucked away on purpose—the kind that you don’t stumble into by accident. You come in from the hills and hollows and farm country, past the modest storefronts and weathered porches, and then the land opens ...

Commentary New inventions and technologies, from the lightbulb to the farm tractor to the automobile to the laptop computer to Uber drivers, cause serious job market disruptions. They also cause a backlash, as horse and buggy operators, cab drivers, video rental stores and typewriter makers inevitably predicted chaos and job ...

Commentary Just last Friday, Aug. 7, the S&P 500 closed at a record high, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average was also at record levels. Yet beneath those headline numbers, the market was telling a very different story. Some individual AI and semiconductor stocks had suffered corrections approaching 50 percent ...

Commentary In recent years, growing numbers of young people have found communism and socialism to be appealing despite an unawareness about the actual theories, practices, and consequences of these economic and governing systems. How can anyone who lives in a democracy find favor with a centralized system that stifles liberty ...

Commentary An artistic experience is normally something we have to seek out. We make a point of visiting a gallery, attending a concert, or watching a play. Nowadays art plays almost no part in our everyday lives. Architecture, however, stands out as a notable exception. We cannot escape the buildings ...

Commentary As Washington struggles to overcome polarization, a local swim league has quietly preserved and passed on the habits that hold Americans together. Walking through my childhood neighborhood in Mosby Woods, I am struck less by what has changed than by what hasn’t. The trees are taller now. The traffic ...

Commentary Five states were very delinquent in providing their audited financial statements for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2024: Arizona, Illinois, Mississippi, Nevada, and Oklahoma. Nevada wins the trophy for being the last to publish, with its field work completed on June 26, 2026. State Controller Andy Matthews blames ...