Prospects Favorable For Resuming Tennis. Out Of Date op Ed's That Still Have Substance.

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 I went to Ernie Ledesma for an agility evaluation and he said with a certain amount of specific exercise and some tennis lessons, I should be able to get back to playing. He is going to work with Deanna, my trainer, so I can reach my goal. Mid August is my target date.

Tennis is both a social and physical activity for me, as for most tennis players, and it get's me out of the house and off the computer at which I spend too much time .

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Meanwhile, this memo will be devoted exclusively  to some out of date WSJ op eds that substantively are still worth reading.

In all these articles there is a common theme. Elites, who are in bed with powerful organizations, are in charge of the government we have.  This government does not serve the citizenry as was intended and the courts are the only refuge left since Congress is dysfunctional. 

Consequently, the elites must now turn their hypocrisy against the courts.  The Waters of the world want to pack SCOTUS and overthrow minority legislative protections.

Prepare for rioting and destruction by paid rioters and unhinged  single issue radicals.

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Ukrainians are willing to die to save their homeland.  Does the West have the will to supply them in a timely matter so they can try and win? I seriously doubt it and Putin is betting on that fact. China is watching.

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Return of the Arsenal of Democracy

As the Ukraine war drags on, it will test America’s and the West’s commitment.

By William A. Galston

With slow but steady Russian advances in the Donbas, the war for Ukraine has entered a new phase. The West must decide how to respond, now and in the long run.

After initial defeats, the Russians are waging war the only way they know how—with brute force. They are using their long-range artillery to pulverize key targets and to make it costly for concentrations of Ukrainian troops to hold their positions. Only after relentless shelling has softened their targets do Russian troops move in. Military analysts believe that this strategy has reduced Russian losses to a sustainable pace, and Ukrainian officials are not hiding their own rising casualty rates.

Ukraine Loses Territory as It's Outgunned by Russia

It is above all the artillery imbalance between Russia and Ukraine that is driving current results on the battlefield, and Kyiv is urgently asking Europe and the U.S. to expand and accelerate its deliveries of heavy weapons. Mykhailo Podolyak, a key adviser to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, has said that the country needs 300 multiple rocket-launch systems and 1,000 howitzers to combat the Russians, far more than its allies have considered providing.

In addition, the Ukrainians are desperately short of ammunition for their Warsaw Pact-era artillery. According to Oleksandr Danylyuk, another top Zelensky adviser, the Russians are firing as many as 50,000 rounds per day into Ukrainian positions, compared with only 5,000 to 6,000 rounds in the other direction. Ammunition stocks in other former Warsaw Pact countries have been drawn down during the early months of the war, and the Biden administration is reportedly pressing several of these countries to ramp up production.

This will take time, and so will deploying modern NATO artillery and missile launchers. The problem is not only providing equipment, but also training troops to use them, which can take several months. American instructors are trying to shorten this cycle, but even in the best case it will be a long time (if ever) before Ukraine can attain parity in artillery and missiles.

In the coming months, then, the West’s task is clear. We must do everything in our power to help Ukraine survive the Russian onslaught while we infuse our aid efforts with a new sense of urgency. Key European countries—especially Germany—must overcome political opposition to providing Ukraine with heavy weapons. The U.S. must become what it was in years before Pearl Harbor—the arsenal of democracy. Anything less would risk new Russian victories that could be very difficult to reverse.

Stabilizing the situation on the battlefield should be uncontroversial. What comes next is more contested. Mr. Zelensky hopes to reverse the territorial gains Russia has achieved since the start of the war, promising to liberate cities such as Kherson and Mariupol. “It only takes enough weapons,” he has said, and getting these weapons depends simply on the West’s “political will.”

Military experts I’ve consulted are less confident. Russian forces are digging in to defend the territory they’ve captured, and they can draw on large stockpiles of equipment and ammunition and secure supply lines. Even with Ukraine’s superior morale, reaching in arms and equipment parity with the Russians probably would not be enough to deliver an outright victory. Still, the Zelensky government deserves a fair chance to liberate what it hopes to, and its partners should support this effort. No one should try to force Kyiv into premature negotiations with the Russians, which the Ukrainian people will never accept while the prospect of victory seems realistic.

The real problem is what happens if the Ukrainians fall short and the war settles into a bloody World War I-style trench-warfare stalemate. A recent survey conducted by the European Council on Foreign Relations found that in nearly every European country surveyed, more citizens want a quick end to the war, even at the cost of territorial concessions, than want to punish Russia for its aggression and restore Ukraine’s territorial integrity. As the fighting drags on, it becomes more likely that European publics will rebel against soaring energy costs and the economic slowdown the conflict has caused.

In the U.S., meanwhile, House Republican opposition to large aid packages for Ukraine has risen since the beginning of the war, and a GOP takeover of the House this fall could make it harder to push through additional assistance.

If the war turns into a protracted conflict of political will, Vladimir Putin could prevail, despite the best efforts of the Biden administration.

It is not too soon to start thinking about what it would take to persuade Ukraine to accept a settlement that ensures its survival and sovereignty, even if restoring its full territorial integrity is not possible. If I were Mr. Zelensky, I would want nothing less than a new Marshall Plan for reconstructing my country, a fast track with a timetable for entering the European Union, and binding security guarantees from a coalition of the willing led by America.

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The Revenge of the Locked-Down Voters

The Covid pandemic revealed how complicated the private economy is—and how easy it is to wreck it.

By Daniel Henninger

The good news for Joe Biden is, or was, that he won the 2020 election. The bad news for Joe Biden, well, let’s just say he’s got company in the disapproval dumpster. All over the world, voters are engaging in what can only be called payback to the national leaders who ran their lives during the pandemic.

After Mr. Biden’s two years at the top, some 70% of the population thinks the country is headed in the wrong direction, an astonishing number. On Sunday, France’s Emmanuel Macron’s centrist party lost its legislative majority, with gains for protest-vote parties on the left and right. In Colombia, the far left came to power this week with the election of a former M-19 guerrilla.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s own Tory party tried to dump him recently, and the U.K. is now experiencing a massive sit-down strike by the railway unions. China’s Xi Jinping will win “re-election” as Communist Party leader this fall, but China’s population, especially the locked-down young, is in an ominously dark mood about its future.

Amid this turmoil, a well-known phrase has returned to usage: It’s the economy, stupid. Commentary on that phrase normally emphasizes “the economy.” But with so many governments faltering in the pandemic’s wake, we’d like to elevate “stupid.”

The current global discontent with economic life is overwhelmingly a function of one other word: lockdown. Lockdowns are normally associated with prison riots, not the world’s economies. One may admit that the first months with the mysterious Covid-19 virus were a time of generalized panic, and governments defaulted to the epidemiologists’ standard fix of social quarantining. But then leadership essentially let the public-health bureaucracies take over their countries’ economic life.

What’s impossible not to notice is how the lockdowns exposed the intricacies of the world’s market economy. We are hearing a lot now about long Covid, the physical aftermath of the virus. As debilitating is long economic Covid.

Long economic Covid is why anyone you sit next to at dinner can dilate on the arcana of interrupted global supply chains. We’re now coming to realize how the market economy’s performance and benefits are taken for granted. All those goods—made, purchased, packed and shipped—were as reliably available as turning on a light. Actually, one of the things we’ve learned during this time is that even turning on a light isn’t like turning on a light. Disrupt the always-on but complex power grid, as in Texas and California, and the lights stop coming on.

This persistent post-pandemic disruption is the result of government choices. In 2020, the public sector told the private sector simply to stand down. When the pandemic lockdowns were extended deep into 2021—in the U.S., France, U.K. and elsewhere—the global economy’s extraordinarily complex grid of relationships fractured at every level.

Layoffs were widespread, ending paychecks overnight. Trucking hasn’t recovered. Airlines are struggling with flight-canceling staff shortages. Manufacturers can’t fill orders for lack of basic parts, workers or a reliable transport system.

We have arrived at stupid.

Governments and the private economy have coexisted uneasily for decades. But during that time, as often argued here, left-of-center politicians, notably in the Democratic Party, lost their understanding of how the private sector works. Some liberal commentators have worried for years that this self-imposed ignorance was turning middle-class wage-earners into the collateral damage of antibusiness policies. The lockdowns just killed these workers.

Past some point of the pandemic’s policies of systemic closure—of businesses and schools—the politicians had no clue about how to manage the mess they’d made. Mr. Biden and his party sent several trillion dollars of temporary income support into an economy unable to absorb it efficiently. We have ruinous inflation. Mr. Johnson’s government imposed Mickey Mouse taxes, such as a 2.5-percentage-point increase in the payroll tax to prop up the National Health Service.

The cluelessness won’t stop. As the energy industry attempts to right itself and restore production, some in the U.S. are proposing a windfall-profits tax, as recently imposed by Mr. Johnson in the U.K. Great idea: Let’s get rehired workers laid off again.

Mr. Biden says he’s presiding over a fundamentally strong economy. But as the economy finds its footing, the dislocations of the lockdowns persist across the U.S. Small businesses say they can’t compete for workers with corporations, which are offering inflated wages. This isn’t just Labor Department employment data. Those small companies are crucial to the normally smooth functioning of economic life. Meanwhile, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, like King Canute commanding the tides to recede, has ordered the airlines to hire (and hopefully train) more customer-service workers. From where?

The political backlash is coming from below. The long suppression of national economies has primarily hurt individuals at the lower end of the income scale, and where countries hold real elections, incumbents are getting axed.

In the U.S., the revenge of the locked-down voters is likely to return conservatives to power this year and in 2024. Republicans should run on just five words: We will do the opposite.

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Will men eventually be told they cannot have vasectomies' or is that relevant?

Democrats Lose ‘Gun Control’

This week’s Senate compromise reflects a recognition of legal and political reality.

By Kimberley A. Strassel

If this week’s Senate gun compromise and Supreme Court ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen highlight anything, it’s how much gun politics has changed since 1994. The left’s 30-year campaign for sweeping “gun control” is hitting an ever-taller wall

The media is hailing the Senate bill as the first federal gun breakthrough in decades—since President Clinton signed the short-lived “assault weapons” ban. The more honest headlines concede an all-important point: This is a “gun safety” compromise. It’s an acknowledgment of what isn’t in the bill—not a single flagship provision of the left’s gun-control agenda. No universal licensing. No bans on classes of firearms or types of magazines. No raising of the purchase age or limits on firearms purchases. No national database to track gun owners.

Instead, the overwhelming bulk of this “gun” bill consists of provisions aimed at mental health, school safety and tougher prosecution of gun crimes—precisely where conservatives have insisted for years that the federal focus needs to be. When even Democrats admit their standard prescriptions are nonstarters and make a deal anyway, that’s a notable political moment.

GOP gripes aside, what small changes the bill makes to existing gun laws are items even Second Amendment stalwarts (like this columnist) can support. Uploading juvenile adjudications and mental-health records to the background-check system is a no-brainer; blowing out 18 candles doesn’t suddenly make one a law-abiding citizen. Concerned that red-flag laws in blue states are a constitutional train wreck? This bill might help. It contains no mandates, and what grant money it offers is conditioned on states incorporating stronger due-process provisions in red-flag laws.

The modesty of the bill is an admission that despite Democrats’ campaign to leverage mass shootings into gun bans, there remain nowhere near 60 votes in the Senate for more gun control. And that’s a reflection of just how deeply ingrained Second Amendment rights have become in recent decades—partly thanks to the Supreme Court. Despite the press using every mass shooting to highlight liberal states that respond with more gun laws, those states remain the distinct minority.

Most of the country has gone the opposite direction. As Thursday’s 6-3 decision striking down a New York gun law noted, only six states and the District of Columbia still had what are called “may issue” laws—in which gun licenses are left to the discretion of public officials. Forty-three have “shall issue” laws, under which licenses are provided to anyone who meets established, objective criteria. That number has been steadily rising since the late 1980s.

More notable, 24 of those 43—along with Vermont, which has no permitting system for guns at all—are “constitutional carry” states, which allow law-abiding adults to purchase and carry firearms without a license. Alaska’s decision in 2003 to rescind its permit requirement opened a floodgate that continues today. A dozen states have passed or expanded constitutional carry in the past three years alone.

Gun ownership is on the rise, and across new demographics. In an online survey conducted by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, firearms retailers who saw an increase in sales reported that they sold 58% more guns to African-American customers in the first half of 2020 than a year earlier. The figures were 49% for Hispanics and 43% for Asian-Americans. Some 5.4 million people bought a firearm for the first time in 2021—30% of all purchases. For all the media touting of surveys that purport to show Americans want “gun control,” that support is concentrated in pockets of urban America. The message is a harder sell across most districts and states, where the conversation these days is increasingly about prosecutors’ failure to enforce existing laws and jail criminal gun offenders.

Meanwhile, even the left understands that the high court’s rulings since District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) potentially kill key parts of its gun agenda. In Bruen, the justices reiterated that the Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms in “common use.” As the media never ceases to remind us, AR-15s—and other “assault weapons” the left wants to ban—are pretty common these days. Would the Supreme Court agree to a law raising the purchase age to 21, given the long history of 18-year-olds fighting and dying for America?

What politics drove the bipartisan Senate deal? Republicans had an obvious interest in moving beyond the gun debate and returning the midterm focus to inflation. The Democratic motivation is more complex. Party leaders wanted to show that Democrats can govern and to give vulnerable members something fresh to advertise to constituents. But the decision to compromise was also an acceptance of political and legal reality. The notion that “ ‘we’ll get more later’ is just rank bulls—,” an anonymous Democratic senator told Politico this week. “For the foreseeable future, I think this will be the high-water mark.”

That could change if progressives manage to destroy the filibuster, or if the high court’s composition alters. But neither is on the immediate horizon, meaning Democrats need to rethink. Federal “gun control”—for now and for some time—is a dead letter.

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The Potomac elite and unions hated DeVos because she wanted to help America's under educated. Why?  Because, as noted in the attached op ed by Jason Riley,  "... She supports vouchers, education tax credits and home schooling. She funds grass-roots organizations that lobby for school reform. She and her husband, Dick, started a charter school in Michigan. Critics, led by the teachers unions, claimed she wasn’t qualified for the position, but their real issue was her belief that K-12 education places the interests of adults ahead of the interests of children—a dynamic she has spent more than three decades trying to change via school choice. “The school union bosses’ problem with me wasn’t that they thought I was unqualified,” she writes. “It was that they knew I was dangerous to their agenda.”

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Betsy DeVos’s Mission to Rescue Teachers Unions’ ‘Hostages’

In an interview, the former education secretary says she thinks the pandemic was an inflection point.

By Jason L. Riley

The philanthropist and veteran school-reform advocate who served as education secretary under President Trump says the Covid pandemic was an inflection point. “During the last two years, the failings of the school system have been laid bare to families in a way like never before,” Betsy DeVos told me by phone on Monday. “I think it’s hastening the moment in time when we will be able to get significant policy change implemented to support families and kids rather than the system.”

That “system” is the subject of Mrs. DeVos’s new book, “Hostages No More: The Fight for Education Freedom and the Future of the American Child.” The title is taken from Horace Mann, the 19th-century politician and educator who is widely credited with founding the public-school apparatus. “We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education,” Mann once wrote, “are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause.” In a book that is part memoir and part school-reform manifesto, Mrs. DeVos makes a compelling case for freeing the hostages.

Betsy DeVos would have been a controversial cabinet pick even if Donald Trump hadn’t been the one to tap her. She supports vouchers, education tax credits and home schooling. She funds grass-roots organizations that lobby for school reform. She and her husband, Dick, started a charter school in Michigan. Critics, led by the teachers unions, claimed she wasn’t qualified for the position, but their real issue was her belief that K-12 education places the interests of adults ahead of the interests of children—a dynamic she has spent more than three decades trying to change via school choice. “The school union bosses’ problem with me wasn’t that they thought I was unqualified,” she writes. “It was that they knew I was dangerous to their agenda.”

Democrats and teachers unions officially wed in 1979, when President Carter signed legislation to establish the Department of Education. Three years earlier Mr. Carter had cut a deal with the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, to create the new federal department in exchange for the union’s support in the election. The Democratic Party has been doing more or less what teachers unions demand ever since.

Democratic politicians who aspire to higher office know the risks of getting crosswise with teachers unions. Before she was a U.S. senator from Massachusetts and a presidential candidate, Elizabeth Warren supported school vouchers. In a 2003 book co-authored with her daughter, Ms. Warren argued in favor of a “fully funded” and “well-designed voucher program” that would “relieve parents from the terrible choice of leaving their kids in lousy schools or bankrupting themselves to escape those schools.” That’s exactly the type of school choice that Mrs. DeVos has spent her adult life advocating, yet it didn’t stop the senator from becoming one of Mrs. DeVos’s most vocal opponents.

The behavior of Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey was even more shameless. Before he was elected to the Senate, Mr. Booker was mayor of Newark, a staunch school-choice advocate, and a recipient of the DeVoses’ largess. In the 2000s, he and Mrs. DeVos served together on the boards of several organizations that supported educational choice. In a 2016 keynote address to the American Federation for Children, a national school-choice advocacy group that Mrs. DeVos helped create, Mr. Booker said “the mission of this organization is aligned with the mission of our nation.”

Eight months later, Mr. Booker opposed Mrs. DeVos’s nomination for education secretary. “I reached out to him to meet, both before and after my confirmation hearing, but he was never available,” she writes. “I was disappointed and hurt by Cory’s actions, but I wasn’t surprised. He was running for the nomination of the Democratic Party for president in 2020. He couldn’t betray the well-funded, well-organized interest groups that held his political future in the palms of their hands—and held our children as hostages to their self-interested cause.”

As the teachers unions continue to throw their weight around the Democratic Party, Mrs. DeVos said their behavior during the pandemic has hurt their standing with Americans. “There’s a real tone-deafness to the kind of damage their politicized agenda and decisions have inflicted on kids, and we won’t know the full extent of it for years.” she said. “It’s the kids who could least afford to be locked out of school who were out the longest.”

She believes the current curriculum fisticuffs over racial propaganda and sexualized early learning can only help the school-choice cause: “The lightbulb has gone on for many families who weren’t aware of the things going on in their children’s schools. They’re becoming aware of how little knowledge or control they’ve had. Support for the notion that resources should follow the child—versus going to the system—continues to rise.”

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A Good Week for Religious Freedom

The Supreme Court reaffirms that states can’t disfavor schools on account of faith.

By Richard W. Garnett

The Supreme Court on Tuesday affirmed that the state of Maine may not selectively discriminate against religious schools or the families who choose to send their children to them. Carson v. Makin is long overdue but still a welcome win for educational choice and pluralism.

Maine operates a tuition-assistance program for parents who live in school districts without their own secondary schools. The parents choose a school, public or private, and the state helps them pay to attend. A range of schools are eligible, including ones outside Maine, and many offer elite programming and plush amenities that differ dramatically from public offerings. Yet the state refuses support to families that choose a “sectarian” school—one that “promotes the faith or belief system with which it is associated” or “presents the material taught through the lens of this faith.”

A six-justice majority held that this violates the Constitution’s protection of the free exercise of religion. The First Amendment, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, prohibits denying otherwise available public benefits to religious individuals and institutions. He insisted that Maine’s desire to separate church and state “more fiercely” than the Constitution requires is no excuse for this denial.

Twenty years ago, in an opinion by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, the court abandoned its historically unfounded view that programs that provide evenhanded educational assistance to students attending faith-based schools somehow “establish” religion. Contrary to widespread but misguided sloganeering that religion-neutral school-choice programs erase the distinction between church and state, the Court held in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris that they promote education.

This ruling sparked education-reform efforts across the country, but it was insufficient as some states continued to enforce their own rigid rules excluding religious schools from funding programs. But three decisions by Chief Justice Roberts finished the job.

In Trinity Lutheran v. Comer (2017), Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020) and now Carson, the justices made clear that the Constitution neither requires nor permits discrimination simply on the basis of religion in education funding. Cooperation between governments and religious schools doesn’t establish religion, and antireligious discrimination is inconsistent with the guarantee of free exercise.

The justices rejected the idea that a state’s desire to marginalize religious education in ways the Constitution doesn’t require is a sufficiently “compelling state interest” to justify denying benefits to parents who choose religious schools. They also were unmoved by the argument that exclusions targeting “sectarian” schools and religious “uses” are less legally offensive than rules denying benefits on the basis of religious “status.” As the chief justice emphasized, “educating young people in their faith, inculcating its teachings, and training them to live their faith are responsibilities that lie at the very core of the mission of a private religious school.” Efforts by state regulators to comb through a school’s practices, materials and mission to identify the elusive point at which the school becomes too religious entangle church and state in ways that the no-establishment rule is designed to prohibit.

Justice Stephen Breyer returned in dissent to a regular theme. He worries that “with greater religious diversity comes greater risk of religiously based strife, conflict, and social division.” He believes courts should interpret the First Amendment to avoid, manage and tamp down such unpleasantness. Yet it is not the role of unelected judges to evaluate policy choices based on their own fallible predictions of division and disagreement. A policy’s contentiousness is irrelevant to its constitutionality. Similarly, a state’s unease about the potential for divisiveness doesn’t excuse discrimination that the Free Exercise Clause prohibits.

In a separate dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, like many commentators over the years, opens with a tired warning that the court is dismantling “the wall of separation between church and state that the Founders fought to build.” Masonic metaphors notwithstanding, the Founders and those who followed were familiar with various forms of education-related cooperation between religious and governmental bodies and understood that such cooperation is entirely consistent with a healthy secular politics. The Constitution distinguishes between religious and political authority. It differentiates between church and state, and prohibits official interference with religious affairs, to protect religious freedom, not to license antireligious discrimination.

More than 25 years ago, school-choice advocates first challenged, unsuccessfully, Maine’s exclusionary tuition program. Tuesday’s vindication was a long time coming, and the faithful and nonbelievers alike can appreciate the benefits for educational diversity.

Mr. Garnett is a professor of law at the University of Notre Dame and an associated scholar with the Religious Freedom Institute.

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Biden Is Practically Engineering a Recession

His regulatory and tax agendas seem designed to negate the good things the economy has going for it.

By David R. Henderson and Casey B. Mulligan

Most discussion about the possibility of recession focuses on the Federal Reserve’s monetary policies. But there are also factors on the supply side of the economy that may tip the U.S. economy into a recession. Among them are the tax and regulatory policies of the Biden administration.

A recession is sometimes defined as a decrease in employment. Other times it is defined as a reduction in real gross domestic product for two quarters or more. Strong labor-force and productivity growth are supply-side factors that make a recession less likely, as is recovery from the pandemic. But increased regulation and increased taxation of capital—two Biden administration policy priorities—are supply-side headwinds that make recession more likely.

Adult population growth is normally an economic tailwind. But it has fallen substantially, from above 1% between 1980 and 2018 to about 0.4%. President Trump’s restrictive policies on even legal immigration are partly to blame for this decline. President Biden has done little to reverse those policies.

Recovery from the pandemic has also been a tailwind. It will continue to lift employment, but most of the recovery in employment has already occurred. Workers lost skills and capital laid idle during the pandemic. These are recovering, though strictly from an accounting point of view, their recovery won’t be fully recognized in the growth data.

GDP and productivity levels were exaggerated during the pandemic as many goods were unavailable or low in quality in ways the GDP data didn’t capture. Even though public-school teachers stayed home, for instance, national accountants assumed that they were as productive as ever merely because they continued to be paid. As they get back to traditional teaching, this won’t be officially recognized as economic progress for the same reason the pandemic regress was never acknowledged.

In normal years, workers’ productivity rises by about 1%. That alone is a strong economic tailwind causing GDP growth, making recession by the reduced GDP definition less likely than otherwise. Unfortunately, Mr. Biden’s economic policies will likely cause productivity growth to fall. A 2020 analysis by one of us (Mr. Mulligan) and three co-authors concluded that Mr. Biden’s economic agenda would cause full-time equivalent employment per capita to be 3.1% lower than otherwise and real GDP per capita to be 8.5% lower than otherwise. If that effect were spread over five years, the reductions relative to the baseline growth would be 0.6% and 1.7% a year, respectively. That by itself makes a recession likely in one of those five years.

Mr. Biden’s regulatory agenda seems to be going ahead as expected. The good news is that the Senate rejected David Weil, the president’s nominee to the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division. But Mr. Biden’s mask mandates offset that good news by disrupting hiring and employee retention when supply chains are already strained. His regulatory agenda will likely cause employment growth to fall by 0.2 percentage point a year and real GDP growth to fall by 0.7 point a year.

Although Mr. Biden’s Build Back Better bill would increase taxation of capital, it’s unlikely to pass. High inflation, however, is increasing taxation of capital without any action by Congress. Mr. Biden is almost certain to let temporary capital-taxation provisions in the 2017 tax cut law expire. The effect will be to reduce growth of real GDP by about 0.4 percentage point a year.

The combined effect of increased regulation and increased taxation of capital is a reduction in employment growth by about 0.25 percentage point a year and of real GDP growth by about 1.1 points a year.

Taxation of labor is a wild card. The $300 weekly unemployment bonus created an implicit tax on work: If you got a job, you lost the bonus. Because that bonus expired last summer, the implicit tax rate on work fell. Unfortunately, when economies enter recessions, politicians of both parties, wanting to “do something,” typically expand unemployment benefits. If that happens this time, it could easily and quickly reduce employment by 1% or more. On the other hand, various federal health-insurance subsidies are about to expire. Letting them die will encourage work.

Viewed only from the demand side, a recession seems reasonably likely. Unfortunately Mr. Biden’s supply-side policies seem tailor made to encourage one.

Mr. Henderson is a research fellow with Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and editor of the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. Mr. Mulligan, an economics professor at the University of Chicago and a fellow with the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, was chief economist for the White House Council of Economic Advisers, 2018-19.

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