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Last year at this time, I posted my 2024 annual wrap-up.

This year, I was planning to do this same.

Instead, I want to take a minute to acknowledge this newsletter’s first and greatest supporter, the person who has encouraged and praised my writing since I was 6 years old, and who has masked and protected me from COVID reinfections without protest: my mom.

Her birthday is Christmas Day, and this Christmas she turned 73.

While I was growing up, she always insisted that we carefully identify which presents were “Christmas” presents and which were “birthday” presents- ensuring that no one used the date as an excuse to skimp out.

Unfortunately, three days before Christmas (and her birthday), my mom had a bad fall on the stairs in our family home. She had previously been diagnosed with Parkinson’s dementia, which likely led to her fall.

Since then, she has been in the ICU. She has bleeding in the brain which has been ongoing for a week. We are unsure whether she will recover, but desperately hoping that she will.

I have been unable to travel to my mom’s bedside since I’m homebound and largely bedbound with Long COVID in DC, and my parents live in Pittsburgh. I cannot drive anymore, nor am I well enough to fly.

The United States Constitution establishes a republic, not a monarchy. If an American president ever had royalist or autocratic aspirations, it would pose an existential threat to the Constitution. Numerous Americans believe that’s what made President Richard Nixon so dangerous. When House Speaker Carl Albert denounced Nixon’s “one‐man rule” in 1973, he was channeling the opinion of many at the time—and since. But removing a monarch from office is no smooth, straightforward affair. If it’s true that Nixon acted like a king, then the closest the country has ever come to regicide was the drama of Watergate. The scandal began with the arrest on June 17, 1972 of five men working for the Republican Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CRP), who were caught breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, located in the Watergate Office Building. The scandal appeared to end with Nixon’s resignation speech two years later, on August 8, 1974. The successful removal of the president took presidential authority down in its wake, condemning any president who tries to recover it as another Nixon, another monarch-in-the-making. This has itself become a scandal, a stumbling block to understanding some of the most tumultuous years in American history, when the country and its politics changed forever.

Gen Z women, the most liberal demographic in the country, are becoming a powerful share of the electorate. Yet conservatives are misreading what actually drives our political decisions. While the legacy media fixates on a supposed surge of right-leaning youth, the reality is more complicated. Young women are not moving right because Republicans keep repeating the same mistakes Democrats made with young voters in the last election cycle. 

Last year, I wrote about former presidential hopeful Kamala Harris’s failed attempt at being hip with the cool girls during her 2024 campaign. During a year when women were suffering sexual violence in conflicts from Gaza to Ukraine, and when the prospect of marriage and family felt economically out of reach, Harris had countless opportunities to show young women she understood our concerns. Instead, she fixated on the fact that British musician Charli XCX made a pop culture reference about her, invited social media influencers to the Democratic National Convention, and appeared on a sex podcast while Americans were dying in a hurricane. Harris’s endeavor to win over the youth was more than wildly unsuccessful. It was vapid, unserious, and embarrassing. It communicated a belief that young women’s concerns begin and end with oversexed pop culture. 

Following my annual practice, I have listed here my “novel” reading for 2025. This is a way of documenting what I get through in a year’s worth of reading on the commute to work, in the evenings after work, and while travelling outside of my “normal” academic reading. My use of the term “novel” reading is loosely adopted, as you will see from the list to include fiction and then really important non-fiction work I get excited to read in my spare time. As you will see, my novel reading shifted away from novels to much more academic reading in my “free time” and then back again. But that approach has been richly rewarding.

This year my imagination was captured by Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall Trilogy, a choice inspired by old school friend Mike (“Sarge”) Denson, who is still educating me now as much as he did back when we were teenagers. Aside from reading, Mantel’s core rule for writing is “show up at the desk”, which is pretty much relevant to us all as writers of whatever form.

This post updates my previous writings on how inequality data based solely on income ignores housing tenure, wealth and social transfers in kind. This fundamentally misunderstands hardship and inequality and leads to poor policy.

The post Revisiting Issues of Affordability, Income and Inequality appeared first on Greg Ogle's After Dinner Political Economy.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

We Wish You a Merry Christmas | The Roundtable

This week, hosts Ryan and Spencer sit down as the year closes out to share their Christmas plans and recommendations: music, theater, food, drink, and more! Stay tuned in the new year!

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

Noam Chomsky once said “The more privilege you have, the more opportunity you have. The more opportunity you have, the more responsibility you have.”

Today, this profound quote from an important figure is ensconced in irony, not only in light of Chomsky’s close ties with Jeffrey Epstein, but also regarding the entire ruling class structure’s facilitation of the pedophile’s rise to the top. Anand Giridharadas, in his book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, talks about this privilege and the elite delusions that capitalism and capitalists can save the planet from the very problems that they create.

As we close out 2025, the Trump Administration has racked up many big wins. But none are as significant as what President Trump and Secretary of War Hegseth have done to repair the recruitment crisis that took place during President Biden’s watch.

When I served in the House of Representatives, I chaired the Military Personnel Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, so I saw firsthand how bad things got under Biden, especially at the Pentagon and in our military.

When Biden was president, he presided over the worst recruitment crisis since our military became an all-volunteer force over 50 years ago.

In 2022, the Army set a goal to recruit 60,000 new soldiers, but it only managed to recruit 45,000. That’s 15,000 soldiers short. And the same thing happened again the following year, when the Army was again 15,000 soldiers short of its 65,000 recruitment goal. When you add up the recruitment losses under President Biden between 2021 and 2025, the Army shrank by 40,000 soldiers due to a lack of recruits. That’s as many as four divisions of troops.

The Navy fared no better. In 2023, it was 7,500 sailors short of its recruitment goal of 37,000. In 2024, it was nearly 5,000 short of its goal of over 40,000 new sailors. So between 2021 and 2025, the Navy shrank by 16,000 sailors, which is about three aircraft carriers’ worth of United States sailors.

That’s how bad the recruitment crisis got during Joe Biden’s watch.

The assassins who conspired against Julius Caesar could have stabbed their victim in the street, but they chose to commit their crime in the Curia of Pompey while the Senate was in session. The location’s symbolism was part of the message they intended to send. Charlie Kirk was assassinated on a college campus with a microphone in his hand as he answered questions from the crowd. It was the style of debate that earned him the love of millions and the admiration of many powerful figures, including the president of the United States. It was also the activity that led his murderer to mark him as someone who “spreads too much hate” and therefore deserved to die.

Charlie Kirk was a once-in-a-century talent who will not be replaced. He had boundless energy, acute judgment, and a capacity to evolve that was unusual in a public figure. His organization, Turning Point USA (TPUSA), and its political affiliate, Turning Point Action, managed a turnout operation for President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign that helped achieve the biggest popular-vote victory in a generation. Kirk himself could have been on a presidential ticket someday, possibly even the first ticket for which he would have been eligible. Had he lived, he would have turned 35 a month before the 2028 election.

Confronting new analysis reveals renters in some of Australia’s capital cities are thousands of dollars worse off this Christmas compared to last, with Sydneysiders facing an extra $3,770 in rent annually.

Everybody’s Home has analysed SQM Research data on weekly asking rents to find the annual increase in rents from December 2024 to December 2025 across capital cities.

The analysis reveals renters in Sydney are paying an extra $72.50 per week to rent a house this year compared to last year, adding up to $3,770 extra annually, while unit renters face an additional $2,109.

Brisbane renters are paying $2,839 extra annually for a house, while renters in Perth are facing an additional $2,639.

On average across the capital cities, renters are paying $2,567 more annually to rent a house compared to last year, and an additional $1,823 to rent a unit. 

The only capital city that is bucking the trend is Canberra where rent caps have kept increases significantly lower – just $0.79 extra per week to rent a house this Christmas compared to last. 

Rent increases for units and houses

Maureen Egan

Each year brings a new set of economic challenges: In 2025, major areas of focus included tariffs and trade tensions, as well as the financial pressures facing younger adults. New York Fed economists contributed insightful research on both topics—and readers took notice. In fact, all five of the year’s most-read posts on Liberty Street Economics analyzed aspects of these issues. Read on to see how the restoration of student loan data to credit reports affected borrowers’ credit scores, whether the costs of a college degree are still worth it, how businesses are responding to higher tariffs, and why the U.S. runs a trade deficit.

The Albanese Government’s announcement of a gas reserve for Australians is an acknowledgement that there is no gas shortage, and that excessive exports have driven up energy prices for Australians.

The Gas Market Review Report acknowledges that unrestricted exports linked Australian prices to world prices, tripling the cost of gas on Australia’s east coast over the last ten years.

Currently 80% of Australia’s gas is exported including two thirds of gas produced on the east coast.

The new policy will require gas exporters to supply between 15% and 25% of gas they produce to the Australian market, as opposed to simply being required to “offer” it to Australians.

Next, the government needs to address:

• • The giveaway of gas resources – over half the gas exported from Australia is given to gas exporters for free, with no royalties and no petroleum tax paid.
  • The need to stop new gas projects – Australia has no need of new gas projects that damage the climate and divide communities.
  • Reducing gas demand – helping Australian businesses and households use less gas.

“Finally, after a decade of policy failure, the Government has acknowledged there is no gas shortage and exports are the problem,” said Mark Ogge,Principal Advisor at The Australia Institute.

“This is an acknowledgement that the gas industry’s constant claim of a gas shortage was a lie, designed to force governments to support their unnecessary new gas export projects.

“Ana minkum wa ileikum,” shouted 34-year-old Zohran Mamdani, newly elected mayor of New York, to the heaving crowd in Brooklyn’s Paramount Theater just before midnight on Election Night. I’m one of you!

What did he mean by that? Mamdani, after all, can come off as almost comically foreign. Look at the way he waves as he walks to the podium. He doesn’t swing his arm like a regular American. He doesn’t even wiggle his hand, as the late queen did. He frantically flaps his fingertips against his thumbs, the way kindergarteners do when they are pretending to listen to an imaginary friend. There’s something a bit “off” about Mamdani, like those German spies in old movies who, despite their perfect English, give themselves away by not knowing who won the last World Series. Or like Barack Obama, who proclaimed his affection for the Chicago White Sox and then proved unable to name a single player who’d ever taken the field for them. (Mamdani fends off baseball questions, such as whether he’s a Yankees or a Mets fan, by professing himself a fan of English soccer.)

D.C. wasn’t supposed to be like this. Hard as it is to believe today, the capital was set apart as its own district not to make it an untouchable bureaucratic citadel, but to make it work for all Americans. Unattached to any one state and free from the control of any one constituency, our government was supposed to serve the whole country. Decades of misunderstanding, however, have muddled this design. Federalization gives us a fighting chance of restoring it.

Sergio Correia, Tiffany Fermin, Stephan Luck, and Emil Verner

Call Reports are regulatory filings in which commercial banks report their assets, liabilities, income, and other information. They are one of the most-used data sources in banking and finance. In this post, we describe a new dataset made available on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s website that contains time-consistent balance sheets and income statements for commercial banks in the United States from 1959 to 2025.

The Journal of Australian Political Economy regularly publishes articles on contentious issues of public concern. Because real-world challenges are continuously evolving, timely analyses of the underlying political economic forces are recurrently needed. This latest issue of JAPE focuses on key public policy issues, both globally and nationally.

The nature and effects of US trade policies are the focus of the first article. As we know, the dramatic tariff hikes implemented by the Trump administration during 2025 have had jarring effects throughout the global economy. But is there method in the madness? Patricia Ranald’s article looks at how international trade policy theory and practice has evolved over recent decades, leading up to the Trumpian disruptions. It associates Trump’s policies with a mercantilist approach to political economy as well as a shift from democracy to authoritarianism. Looking at the causes as well as the consequences of these recent policy changes, it posits ‘brutal coherence behind the chaos’.

There is no denying Australia’s sense of safety has been shattered. There is no denying antisemitism exists in Australia and that the fears of the Jewish community have been horrifically realised in a way that perhaps we will never recover from.

There is no denying that in the days and months to come we will learn more about what could, should and didn’t happen to prevent what was supposed to be an unimaginable tragedy in Australia.

Jewish fears of an attack have been very real, with schools, synagogues, sporting and religious events requiring additional security. There are few communities (Muslims an exception) that would ever understand the cultural and psychological impacts of that. For Jewish people, last Sunday’s massacre came on top of those effects.

But there is also no denying that rather than try to promote unity, healing and a national stand against all forms of hate, some have sought to exploit that tragedy amid a completely unprecedented moment in Australian political history.

Never before has there been an opposition that has blamed a government for an act of terror and mass murder. Before Sunday, the rule for both major political parties was to place national unity ahead of any political gain.

In modern political history, Labor has been in opposition when Australia has experienced these nation-shaking acts. It has, in response, held firm to whatever line the Coalition government of the day was promoting.

The horrific anti-Semitic terrorist attack in Bondi, the most deadly mass shooting since the Port Arthur massacre thirty years ago, makes gun law reform in Australia necessary. Suggestions from former prime minister John Howard and others that gun law reform is just “a distraction” are cynical in the extreme.

Precisely no one is suggesting gun law reform is the only solution in response to the atrocity at Bondi. Clearly, there is much more than can be done to tackle rising antisemitism and hate speech effectively.

It has been interesting to watch many politicians who defended the right to be bigot just a few years ago, now leading the charge to criminalise hate speech. There may also have been intelligence failures that need to be examined. But when a man whose son was investigated by ASIO for links to Islamic State extremists is able to enact mass murder with a stockpile of six legal firearms, it is clear Australia’s gun laws are not working as intended.

Australia is not the United States; gun ownership is not a right, it is a privilege. Australians accept that many people have legitimate reasons for owning guns, like farmers. But most Australians think we should restrict who has guns, how many, why they have them and what kinds of guns they have.

This article is read by Eunice Wong, a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible’s list of Best Women Narrators. Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actor

Text originally published December 15, 2025.

Often, it’s the small stuff

 — Author: Heidi Li Feldman — Saturday 20th December 2025

I had coffee with a friend and fellow activist today. My friend was upset, and was surprised by how upset, over Trump renaming the Kennedy Center. She was not so disturbed about the illegality of it, though that certainly bothered her. As we talked, we realized it is the sheer insolence and vulgarity of Trump associating himself with a slain President who, whatever his imperfections, was worthy of the office.

Monuments and memorials like the Kennedy Center honor what a person at his or her or their best stood for. There is nothing admirable or worthy in what Trump represents or aspires to. He puts his name on buildings to aggrandize himself, even though there is nothing about him worth aggrandizing. When he smears his name on sites that stand for ideals of culture or ethics or warranted patriotism, Trump taints those sites with his own venality, bigotry, and misogyny.

People with any sort of ethical sensibility recoil from actions that so clearly evince Trump’s ethical void. They also recoil from the lackeys mindlessly doing his bidding, whether that is installing lettering with his name on the Kennedy Center or ending a diversity green card lottery on a pretext or murdering people on boats in the Pacific and the Caribbean.

More…