U.S. Marriage Trends

In the African-American community in the U.S., these kinds of factors have led to fewer marriages, lots of female headed households, and lots of half-siblings. Working class whites and Hispanics in the U.S. have started to follow the same patterns.

Over the past half-century, U.S. four-year colleges have shifted from enrolling mostly men to enrolling mostly women, while the economic position of non-college men has weakened markedly. We examine how these changes correspond with the evolving structure of marriage markets across cohorts and places. 

As college men have become increasingly scarce, college women have maintained stable marriage rates by marrying high-earning non-college men. This shift—combined with the broader economic decline of non-college men—has sharply reduced the pool of economically stable partners available to non-college women: the share of non-college men who earn above the national median and are not married to college women has fallen by more than 50%. Cross-area evidence shows that education gaps in marriage are smaller where non-college men face lower rates of joblessness and incarceration. Taken together, the evidence suggests that deteriorating outcomes for men have primarily undermined the marriage prospects of non-college women.

from a new NBER working paper by Clara Chambers, Benjamin Goldman & Joseph Winkelmann.

Affordability

What are the easiest policies to make life more affordable?

* Unilaterally end tariffs.

* Legalize car imports from China and reduce trade barriers to importing smaller cars from Europe. This would greatly increase choices and competition for basic cars.

* Support the infrastructure to shift to electric vehicles making us less vulnerable to global petroleum prices and less incentivized to go to war over oil.

* Eliminate fares for high volume transit routes.

* Encourage renewable energy sources like solar and wind which are now cheaper than coal and are not subject to natural gas price fluctuations.

* Remove barriers to building affordable housing, especially zoning that restricts density and rules out multi-family housing, parking mandates, lot size limitations, and aesthetic building code requirements. Encourage high quality manufacturing of homes and large components of homes in lieu of stick building everything on site.

* Encourage the Fed to take a more gradual approach to increasing interest rates when economic conditions call for it to do so, so that housing markets have time to adjust to higher mortgage rates which decrease affordability until housing prices transition to adjust to the ability to pay.

* Tax unoccupied housing more heavily to discourage hoarding of empty housing that reduces housing supply and drives up housing prices.

* Enact policies that financially penalize profitable companies for the burden that they impose on government when a significant share of their workers need welfare to make ends meet, in part, by increasing the minimum wage.

* Shift revenue sources for ECE (early childhood education)-12 education from property taxes to income taxes. This makes the taxes more progressive. It increases funding equity between places with large property tax bases per student (like rich suburbs and resorts) and places with small property tax bases per student (like low income municipalities and rural areas). This also reduces housing costs.

* Make free meals for all part of the standard ECE-12 education package.

* Make access to ECE and kindergarten and afterschool programs universal.

* Encourage international students at colleges and universities who basically subsidize domestic students by paying full tuition.

* Publicly fund higher education, without significant student loans, with all students with a reasonable chance of completing their degrees, while limiting admissions for students who have a high probability of failing. This makes access to higher education possible for working class and middle class kids increasing their future incomes and class mobility while making the economy more productive, and reduces the squeeze on families at the low end of upper middle class who don't easily qualify for need based grant financial aid, but still pay higher shares of their income than others.

* Reinvigorate vocational programs at high schools and community colleges for students for whom a traditional liberal arts college curriculum or four year degree isn't a good fit.

* Establish new medical school and medical professional school capacity to increase the supply of doctors and other medical professionals.

* Welcome foreign medical professionals, thus increasing the supply of medical professionals whose compensation is driven up by a limited supply, especially in rural areas where domestic medical professionals are least likely to prefer.

* Medicare for all or similar universal health care financing, that cuts out health care billing and insurance company administration costs and profits, ends barriers to health care for the self-employed and unemployed and those with jobs providing only second rate health insurance with high deductibles, funds health care in proportion to ability to pay, ends medical debt and bankruptcies, takes pressure off high cost ER care, and improves the bargaining power over drug costs and other provider costs. Health care expenses of employers also reduce wages more or less dollar for dollar.

* Broaden access to long term care, including home health care and assisted living, on a basis similar to universal healthcare, and finance it with estate taxes.

Better Isn't Impossible, Other Countries Do It

 

Basic Skills In Decline Among Freshman At College

The UC San Diego Senate Report on Admissions documents a sharp decline in students’ math and reading skills . . . 

At our campus, the picture is truly troubling. Between 2020 and 2025, the number of freshmen whose math placement exam results indicate they do not meet middle school standards grew nearly thirtyfold, despite almost all of these students having taken beyond the minimum UCOP required math curriculum, and many with high grades. In the 2025 incoming class, this group constitutes roughly one-eighth of our entire entering cohort. 

A similarly large share of students must take additional writing courses to reach the level expected of high school graduates, though this is a figure that has not varied much over the same time span.

Moreover, weaknesses in math and language tend to be more related in recent years. In 2024, two out of five students with severe deficiencies in math also required remedial writing instruction. Conversely, one in four students with inadequate writing skills also needed additional math preparation. . . .

The math department created a remedial course, only to be so stunned by how little the students knew that the class had to be redesigned to cover material normally taught in grades 1 through 8. . . .

The report attributes the decline to several factors: the pandemic, the elimination of standardized testing—which has forced UCSD to rely on increasingly inflated and therefore useless high school grades—and political pressure from state lawmakers to admit more “low-income students and students from underrepresented minority groups.”

…This situation goes to the heart of the present conundrum: in order to holistically admit a diverse and representative class, we need to admit students who may be at a higher risk of not succeeding (e.g. with lower retention rates, higher DFW rates, and longer time-to-degree).

From Marginal Revolution. 

The deemphasis on standardized tests in admissions, which provide a means to test these skills in a way not influenced by high school specific grade inflation is probably the primary factor.

Admitting students who aren't academically prepared to college isn't doing them any favors.

Who Gets Into Ivy League Colleges?

We use anonymized admissions data from several colleges linked to income tax records and SAT and ACT test scores to study the determinants and causal effects of attending Ivy-Plus colleges (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Duke, and Chicago). 

Children from families in the top 1% are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores. Two-thirds of this gap is due to higher admissions rates for students with comparable test scores from high-income families; the remaining third is due to differences in rates of application and matriculation. 

In contrast, children from high-income families have no admissions advantage at flagship public colleges. The high-income admissions advantage at Ivy-Plus colleges is driven by three factors: (1) preferences for children of alumni, (2) weight placed on non-academic credentials, and (3) athletic recruitment. 

Using a new research design that isolates idiosyncratic variation in admissions decisions for waitlisted applicants, we show that attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average flagship public college increases students’ chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 50%, nearly doubles their chances of attending an elite graduate school, and almost triples their chances of working at a prestigious firm. 

The three factors that give children from high-income families an admissions advantage are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with post-college outcomes, whereas academic credentials such as SAT/ACT scores are highly predictive of post-college success.

That is from a new paper by Raj Chetty, David J. Deming, and John N. Friedman. One immediate conclusion is that standardized test scores help lower-income groups get into the best schools, compared to the alternatives.

From Tyler Cohen at Marginal Revolution. 

It is well known and consistent with experience that graduating from an Ivy-Plus college is a huge advantage over graduating from a flagship public university.

The fact that Ivy-Plus colleges favor legacies is well known. The fact that admissions favoritism for athletes disproportionately favors students from affluent families (often in obscure sports that students from less affluent families don't even encounter) is much less widely known. It is unsurprising, however, that neither of these factors (controlling for academics and Ivy-Plus admission) influence post-graduation outcomes much (or even hurt). 

It is also no surprise that non-academic credential are important for Ivy-Plus admission or that affluence is a plus in this department. But it is somewhat surprising that those non-academic credentials don't influence post-graduation outcomes much (or even hurt).

A few points that the abstract buries, however, are that SAT/ACT scores are moderately strongly correlated with socio-economic class, that SAT/ACT scores are strongly correlated with IQ (and are not ethnically biased), and that test preparation influences SAT/ACT score outcomes much less than most people (even people very familiar with the college application process) usually believe. See also here. As an aside:

ACT English + ACT Math are actually more predictive of college success and retention than the ACT Composite or the other two parts of the ACT that are more content based. In relative terms, here is how predictive each subsection of the ACT is:

Math (significant at p=0.01 level) 26

English (significant at p=0.01 level) 16

Reading (significant at p=0.05 level) 3

Science (not statistically significant) -1.

Race and ethnicity also influence Ivy-Plus admissions, although in ways rather more complicated than commonly assumed, and in a manner that is rapidly in flux at the moment in light of a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision.

None of this is terribly surprising, but it is a nice, compact analysis with a good methodology. It largely corroborates a similar study about two years ago. As a summary of that study explained:

About 7 percent of the country’s very top students come from the top 1 percent of the income distribution. These students tend to have scored at least 1500 on the SAT (or 35 on the ACT), received top marks on Advanced Placement tests, earned almost all A’s in their high school classes, and often excelled in science fairs or other competitions. . . . 

Perhaps the most surprising pattern involves so-called legacy students, those who attend the same college that their parents did. At the elite colleges that the researchers studied, legacy students had stronger academic qualifications on average than nonlegacy students. Similarly, graduates of private high schools had stronger academic records on average than graduates of public high schools or Catholic schools. 

* . . . About half of legacy students at these colleges would not be there without the admissions boost they receive.  

* A similar advantage applies to the graduates of private schools (not including religious schools). Schools like Andover, Brentwood and Dalton do such a good job of selling their students — through teacher recommendations, essay editing and other help — that colleges admit them more often than academic merit would dictate. Many college admissions officers think they can see through this polish, but they don’t.  

* Recruited athletes are admitted with much lower academic standards — and are disproportionately affluent. It’s not just true of the obvious teams, like golf, squash, fencing and sailing. In today’s era of expensive youth sports, most teams skew wealthy. If colleges changed their approach to sports, they could admit more middle-class and poor athletes (or nonathletes) with stronger academic credentials.

Most of these colleges do not admit only the hyper-qualified affluent students; they also admit many other high-income students. As I mentioned above, 7 percent of the country’s very best high school students come from the top 1 percent of the income distribution. But what proportion of students at elite colleges comes from the top 1 percent of the income distribution? Much more: 16 percent.

I didn't emphasize it when I wrote about this two years ago, but it also is worth observing that 84% of Ivy-Plus college students are not from families in the top 1 percent of the income distribution, although very few of them are truly poor (and if they are poor, they tend to have a very high socio-economic class and social capital despite their personal lack of affluence). This is less than the 93% it would be in a purely meritocratic system, but it is still the lion's share of these students.

Indeed, the colleges with the most affluent student bodies are not the Ivy-Plus schools, but slightly less selective elite liberal arts colleges, like Colby College in Maine and Colorado College in Colorado, that have relatively weak grant based financial aid resources.

The Idea To Action Pipeline

My education and life training was typical of a lot of people who grew up in upper middle class families and lots of upwardly mobile people who used education and skill training and socialization in the course of securing those things. There are maybe a hundred million people in the United States, a country of about 340 million people, who have been raised or trained to have the kind of mindset that I have.

As younger children, a key focus from my parents (and the parents and teachers of most people like me) was on making good choices, and that's also something that was an important part of what my wife and I, and most of our peers viewed as good parenting.

As I got older, and advanced in my education and socialization all of the way into college, I was raised and taught (formally and informally) to identify problems, to analyze them in evidence and experience informed ways, to be familiar with lots of proven problem solving strategies, to devise appropriate solutions to problem that would work, and to know how to evaluate what is likely to work and test proposed solutions to see if they work as expected (and to revised the solutions if they don't).

Even in law school, the curriculum, while it taught us to nuts and bolts of what the law says, was very oriented towards identifying legal rules and official policies that were good, or were flawed, partially so we could use this knowledge in our adult lives and careers to push for better policies, and partially so that when we encountered flawed rules that we couldn't change we could understand what we were up against, why the rules were a problem, and with this information could devise the best strategies for dealing with them.

We learned to be on the lookout for good ideas that other people had, from other countries and places within our own country, from history, from different cultures, from people with a good track record for innovation, from sources that specialize in identifying good ideas. In the areas of science, and technology and medicine, back before the Internet, we subscribed to Popular Science and Science News. In the area of style and food and architecture when we moved to the West, there was Sunset magazine. These days, for example, I regularly check in on the Boing Boing websites, and read the latest academic scholarship from free sources like the arXiv and bioRxiv and SSRN preprint websites, NBER, the Legal Theory blog, and the various law professors blogs.

It is a way of thinking and conceptual tool kit shared with modest variation, by a large swath of people trained to make up our classes of mangers, professional, and makers. It's an approach used by scientists, engineers, inventors, transactional lawyers, mediators, business executives, entrepreneurs, policy makers, and innovators.

One of the textbooks used in my first college level political science classes, at Miami University of Ohio, was called "Power and Choice". And, the training, upbringing, and inclinations that I developed and that a huge swath of people developed, was focused on the choice side of this formula.

One of the reasons that I blog, and a major theme of my life, and the lives of lots and lots of people, although I probably have the luxury and means to do so more than most people, is to float constructive ideas for how we as a society can make better choices and find better solutions. Sometimes they are proposed government policies or laws. Sometimes they are better way to fund or finance something. Sometimes they are new technologies to could be used in a new way. 

Sometimes they are concrete approaches to concrete problems like better ways to landscape our home in a city in what is almost a high desert, or a better kind of appliance, or coming up with a better way to keep track of what pills I've taken or need to take, or a better way to keep track of what we need to buy at the store and what we already have in a way that we can actually find it, or how to manage household plants, or a more efficient way to pay bills.

Many of these ideas are solutions to problems that somebody else has. How to make better military procurement choices. What tools we could make available for first responders and disaster responses. How to tax publicly held companies and multinational business in a better way. How to deliver better health care results for our society as a whole, while doing so in a more affordable way. How to cut red tape in big bureaucracies.

Collectively, most of us have much less familiarity, less training, and less comfort and familiarity with the power side of the "power and choice" formula, even many of those of us who are truly exceptional and extraordinary at the choice part.

A lot of us are attracted to politics because we care about and have a good skill set for making policy, but are adrift when it comes to securing the power necessary to putting those policies in place. A lot of the scientists who see most clearly what paths to new scientific discoveries would be most fruitful and which are most likely to be dead ends are stymied at how to generate momentum and funding for those ideas in the scientific community. Lots of us are aware of businesses that would be good to invest in, or would be good to short, but don't have the financial wealth or the influence with people who have access to money to do anything about this knowledge. Lots of us are aware of innovative technological solutions that could bring about a lot of constructive change, but don't know where to begin to go about getting those solutions adopted more widely.

People like me, and there are perhaps a hundred million of us in the United States, have lots of good ideas, but feel hopeless or frustrated when it comes to turning these ideas into action.

And, it isn't just that we are stupid or missing the obvious. The idea to action pipeline is hard for most people to locate, is clogged up, and is full of seemingly unnecessary twists and turns that make it less effective. Acquiring the power to make even a seemingly obvious on brainer innovation that is itself minor seems to take absolutely epic amounts of time, money, connections, and effort that seems grossly disproportionate to the swift moment it takes to recognize that an idea is good and should be put into action.

It is no secret that I am no fan of Elon Musk, who is the richest man in the world. And, Mr. Musk is not a particular genius when it comes to coming up with ideas of his own. The technological innovations behind Telsa, SpaceX, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, the Hyper loop, and his other projects were all the work of someone else. His ability to identify good ideas is slightly above average, but it isn't particular exceptional. Frederick W. Smith, who founded FedEx, is cut from the same cloth. He had identified one particular, not really profoundly innovative idea that could be implemented with technology that wasn't cutting edge but was still pretty new at the time he came up with it.

But, I have to grudgingly acknowledge that what Musk and Smith both excelled at (and may even continue to excel at) is securing the resources and momentum necessary to turn moderately good, although fairly obvious ideas that no one had implemented (as is so often the case) into action that allowed the ideas that were mostly children of other people to actually come into wide use.

In the case of Musk, being an heir to an emerald mine fortune helped a lot. Smith also grew up as the son of a wealthy, moderately successful business owner, attended the top local private schools, and went to Yale in some of the last years when doing so was more about money and connections than academic merit.

But turning ideas into action can be a lot more challenging for the rest of us, partially because we don't have nearly as much training in how to do this as we do in how to come up with good ideas (i.e. because we are much better at making good choices than exercising power), and in part, because the idea to action pipeline at the moment is mediocre and has deteriorated over time is a society that is starting to stagnate (something that Economist Tyler Cohen wrote a book about).

This is true even for people like me who have a solid nuts and bolts understanding of things like how capital is raised for businesses in the modern U.S. economy, how the political process works, and the inner workings of academia, while spending decades working side by side by quite successful political figures and business people and academics (albeit not necessarily the peak "A-list" individuals in their respective fields).

Yes, it is possible to innovate and turn good ideas into action, even if, in my humble opinion it is too hard to do so. And, it is true that innovation shouldn't be too easy or free of gatekeepers. There are also a lot of really bad ideas out there that, when implemented, do immense harm. The more easily ideas get turned into action, the more important it is that the ideas that receive the thumbs up are good ones.

For examples in the 20th century of bad ideas being adopted too quickly and causing immense harm, ask the people of the early Soviet Union, Maoist China, revolutionary Cambodia, or North Korea. Ask the members of cults like the one organized by Jim Jones. 

Ask the people who thought it was a great idea to cover beautiful hardwood floors with cheap vinyl who convinced tens of millions of American homeowners to do so. Further back, ask the people who thought that putting the ill-drafted Second Amendment into the United States constitution was a good idea.

More recently, look at the policy initiative of RFK, Jr., or the actions taken by Elon Musk's DOGE, or the "Liberation Day" tariffs in the second Trump Administration.

On the other hand, lots of opposition to new ideas is mindlessly stubborn, ignorant, corrupt, or mendacious.

Sitting in my living room under the ceiling fan on a hot, dry summer day in August, after returning to work at home after a morning in my office doing a lot of work that actually generates money, I don't have a solution for how to improve the idea to action pipeline. But, surely, even identifying this as a crucial and pervasive problem in our society is progress in and of itself and can lay a foundation for future progress.

Education Reduces Poverty

Education reduces poverty through economic development in economies that use this resource to make its economy more skilled. Specifically, it helps the poor in developing countries and not just a wealthy elite.

This article quantifies the role played by education in the reduction of global poverty. I propose tools for identifying the contribution of schooling to economic growth by income group, integrating imperfect substitution between skill groups into macroeconomic growth decomposition. I bring this “distributional growth accounting” framework to the data by exploiting a new microdatabase representative of nearly all of the world’s population, new estimates of the private returns to schooling, and historical income distribution statistics. 

Education can account for about 45% of global economic growth and 60% of pretax income growth among the world’s poorest 20% from 1980 to 2019. A significant fraction of these gains was made possible by skill-biased technical change amplifying the returns to education. Because they ignore the distributional effects of schooling, standard growth accounting methods substantially underestimate economic benefits of education for the global poor.

Amory Gethin, "Distributional Growth Accounting: Education and the Reduction of Global Poverty, 1980-2019" The Quarterly Journal of Economics, qjaf033 (July 22, 2025).

The GOP Budget In Charts

The Republican budget passed today passed the House initially by 215-214, passed the Senate in a 51-50 VP tie breaking vote, and passed the House the second time around by 218-214 with no amendments from the Senate version (which was slightly better than the original House version, mostly because bad non-budgetary riders were stripped from the bill). These razor thin majorities, however, have made immense changes to U.S. tax laws and federal spending that are unrivaled since the War on Poverty during LBJ's administration.

This will do irreparable harm in the next couple of years, at least, disproportionately suffered by Republican controlled areas and Republican voters, and the bill's provisions are wildly unpopular with the American public.

The big question is whether this bill, along with Trump's other horrible steps in governing, will lead to a catastrophic defeat for Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections as backlash, or whether the usual partisan tendencies will remain unchanged. Have Republicans committed political suicide? Or will the MAGA cult remain strong after encountering the "find out" part of the FAFO adventure.

I can't imagine how any decent person could sleep at night backing this proposal, and struggle to discern any values other than massively transferring wealth from the poor to benefit the rich, are served by it. But Republicans never cease to surprise me.

The big messages about the budget are that: 

(1) the tax cuts in Trump's budget are driving up the national debt immensely (more than any other bill in the Biden or Trump Administrations by a lot) and will drive up interest payments as a drain on tax revenues, 

(2) the number of people without health insurance will grow from about 25 million (out of a U.S. population of about 340 million) to more than 35 million due mostly to Medicaid changes and there will be a massive disinvestment in health care, 

(3) student loan payments for new college graduates will soar, 

(4) the clean energy investments that are eliminated will mostly hurt people in Republican Congressional districts, 

(5) the bottom 20% are much worse off, the next 20% break even very rich are much better off, while the poor are much worse off, the next 59% are modestly better off, and the top 1% and big businesses are vastly better off, and

(6) any improvements to economic growth are exceedingly small.

One key impact that the charts don't note is that many hundreds of rural hospitals (maybe more than a thousand), almost all in Republican dominated areas, will close. 

It also doesn't really capture how deep cuts to federal spending programs will be, except for defense and funds to carry out mass deportations which get big budget boosts.

The charts via the New York Times:

Education And Church Attendance In The U.S. And In Europe

The relationship between education and church attendance in the U.S. is the opposite of what you would expect in the U.S. according to data in this blog post. 

In the U.S., more education corresponds to more church attendance (New Hampshire, Maine, and Wyoming are exceptions to that trend and a number of states seem to be bimodal with the least and most educated people both attending church at higher rates), while in Europe (except for the formerly Communist Lithuania and Slovakia) more education corresponds to less church attendance (although the least religious countries like Finland, France, Germany,  Hungary and Iceland, are quite flat and the education-church attendance relationship basically breaks down).

I don't think that this means that more educated people in the U.S. are more religious, however.  

Rather, I think that it means that more educated people who are religious are much more diligent in attending church regularly as their religion dictates (in part because they have more time to devote to church attendance), than less educated people who are religious but not very diligent. As one comment to the post notes, free time to spend on anything but working, eating, sleeping, and the basic needs of your household is increasingly a luxury good.

There is solid evidence (for example from Pew) that more educated American are less religious in terms of belief and the importance of religion in their lives (although the magnitude of this difference isn't as big as one might intuitively expect), but this isn't necessarily inconsistent with higher religious attendance by more educated people, if more educated people who are religious attend church more regularly than less educated people who are religious.

Also, there is evidence that students and college graduates of more elite institutions are much more secular than college graduates of less elite institutions.

To the extent that Pew and the U.S. survey cited in the blog post are at odds, however, Pew is more credible and has a long track record of accurate data in this area. 

Also, it is worth noting that a variety of measures have shown that reported church attendance in the U.S. is much higher than the levels of actual church attendance. See, e.g., here and here. So, survey data on church attendance may not be the most accurate measure of actual behavior. 

I also don't give much credit to an anecdotal evidence based book pointing to a religious revival among Gen Z people in the U.K., which does more to capture the changing flavor of religiosity among the minority of young people there who are religious, than capture of growing rate of religious affiliation among British youth. 

I also suspect that there is a generational factor. The trend towards more secularism in Europe is 30-40 years older than it is in the U.S. So, older educated Europeans are much more secular than older educated Americans, an effect which may swamp differences in rates of secularization among younger people by level of education. Further, education levels rose sooner in the U.S. than they did in Europe, so in Europe, education level is a better proxy for age than in the U.S.

It is also worth noting that the European data breaks out far more detail among non-college graduates and among non-high school graduates. In part, this reflects larger numbers of immigrants to Europe with very low levels of formal education, and immigrants, in general, tend to be more religious (because religion thrives when it defends a threatened culture). Apart from people who didn't graduate from high school, the European data is quite flat.

U.S. Data

European Data

Reasonable And Mild Expectations For The Federal Government

There are some minimal expectations that the American people ought to have for how the federal government should be run that the Trump Administration isn't living up to:

* Appoint political appointees whom, however partisan they may be, have a basic level of competence in the area for which they are appointed and who don't want to actively undermine the laws that they are charged with faithfully executing.

* Don't appoint people to political appointments without doing a background check to determine if they have good character, and don't appoint them if there are serious concerns about their character or competence.

* Don't violate the law in the course of governing, even if it may be hard for someone to vindicate your violation of the law in court.

* Don't threaten illegal or improper conduct, whether or not you actually carry out the threats.

* Don't tolerate conflicts of interest, corruption, emoluments, insider trading, or illegal or improper conduct by people in your administration, or your political allies. Do not attempt to profit personally from public office.

* Don't abdicate overall decision-making authority at the top level to anyone other than legitimately U.S. Senate approved political appointees.

* Don't issue Executive Orders that are contrary to settled law.

* Don't impound Congressionally appropriated funds.

* Don't look for loopholes by which you can violate people's constitutional rights.

* Use Congressional legislation rather than Executive Orders to implement policies that the President doesn't have the authority to impose unilaterally.

* Don't use Executive Orders to circumvent the requirements of notice and hearing and judicial review of proposed regulations under the Administrative Procedure Act.

* Have lawyers with considerable professional independence vet your proposed Executive Orders for legality, authority, constitutionality, and the Administrative Procedure Act, before issuing those Executive Orders and honor the advice you are given on those issues.

* Do not violate collective bargaining agreements with unions of federal government employees.

* Do not exercise executive branch authority arbitrarily or without considering it on a case by case basis. Consider the consequences of your actions before acting.

* Do not micromanage decisions that are made by civil servants.

* Don't threaten to conquer territory in the sovereign control of other countries just because you want that territory. This is the war crime of aggression.

* Respect treaties to which the U.S. is a party until such time as it lawfully withdraws from those treaties.

* Don't use the federal government as a tool for personal revenge against people you have disagreed with, or who have been involved in litigation with you in the past.

* Don't put recently convicted felons in positions of trust in our government.

* Don't put people who have led insurrections against the U.S. government in public office.

* Don't lie to the American people or use lies to advance your policy agenda, and do not tolerate this conduct in your subordinates.

* Obey court orders and legal obligations in litigation.

* Don't threaten or vilify the press for doing its job or expressing opinions different from you own, although you may civilly point out disagreements over the factual accuracy of particular reports.

* Confer with your own appointees and advisors at length, take their input seriously, and come up with a plan that thinks a move or two ahead, before impulsively taking action.

* Don't lightly abandon long term, bipartisan alliances.

* Don't deny or censor scientific facts.

* Admit when you have made mistakes and remedy your mistakes.

* Admit that you have made misstatements of fact when you have done so and correct your inaccurate past statements.

* Dress appropriately for funerals.

* Speak in complete sentences with structured thoughts.

* If you are the President or another public official, don't make posts on social media without vetting them with you advisors and make them in a tone that appropriate for the dignity of the office.

* Give the public fair warning of your intended policy changes whenever possible.

* Don't purge civil servants and military officers for lack of personal loyalty to you.

* Don't try to circumvent laws related to government contracting so long as they remain on the books.

* Don't pardon people or commute their sentences, merely because they are your political allies.

* Don't try to intimidate judges, or law firms that are just doing their jobs, or media outlets, or colleges and universities. 

None of this says that you can't advance a policy that your political party agrees with while the opposite disagrees with, through regular legislative and regulatory channels, and respectable means. But the expectations above should be points of universal consensus.

What If They Get What They Want?

Suppose that Trump gets most of what he wants, just slower than he hoped, as SCOTUS takes time to overrule setbacks he faces in the lower courts, and as Congress enacts through legislation what he fails to achieve through Executive Orders.

* Massive cuts in federal government programs, even if a few of the initial cuts are rolled back as imprudent, will have a devastating effect on most red states, especially in the South and Appalachia. Federal aid is 50% of the government budget in West Virginia, for example. Local tax revenues won't be able to replace lost federal aid. 

* Special education will basically vanish there. Schools in low income communities will be deeply starved for resources. 

* More of the poor will start dying from preventable diseases in the tens of thousands a year.  Infant and maternal mortality will soar. Infectious diseases will become more common. Food poisoning will again be a concern in every day life. Increased pollution, especially in low income areas, will lead to diseases associated with dirty air and dirty water. 

* The elderly, the disabled, and military veterans won't be able to get by and will have to leave their homes to live with extended family, or will live far more meager lives of poverty and despair. Social security, realistically, won't vanish, but programs like social security disability will be much harder to access and benefits will probably be cut.

* Medical and scientific research will basically vanish. Federally supported financial aid (both grants and loans) with dry up, shutting working class and middle class students out of higher education to a great extent. International students will become much more scarce. The best professors and scientists, especially in fields not culturally tied to the U.S., like science and engineering and medicine, will emigrate. Their goal of making colleges and universities conservative will largely fail, notwithstanding witch hunts to try to root out liberals in academia. Red states will greatly reduce funding for their public colleges and universities and have few well-endowed private colleges and universities that will struggle to downsize as well. Blue states will pick up some of the loss of funding caused by lost federal support, but will nonetheless be seriously disrupted. And, even in blue states, all but a few of the most well-endowed colleges and universities will have a much larger share of upper middle class and rich students. Bright, academically capable, working class and middle class young adults, shut out of higher education, will turn to lower management and union leadership posts.

* Loyalty purges and cuts at the nation's military academies will within four or five years significantly reduce the quality of the U.S. military's officer corps in every single one of our military services. Impaired international trade and a declining domestic manufacturing sector and the loss of scientific and engineering talent will mean that the U.S. military pays more for less in military equipment procurement and produces less capable systems. But the U.S. retreat from a global military presence may mean that the new, less capable U.S. military won't be tested.

* Public schools across the nation will lay off teachers, and see their best and brightest and most caring teachers leave the profession.

* Mass deportations and trade friction and the loss of federal aid will cripple U.S. farmers, will probably cause more than half of U.S. farms to fail with abandoned farms dotting the landscape of every rural area in the country, and will greatly drive up the price of food while reducing its quality and variety. The same pressures will greatly shrink the construction industry. Working class men across the nation will see a dramatic surge in unemployment. Kids in high school and middle school will be pressured to work long hours in unskilled work to make up for the loss of immigrant labor, in the fields, at construction sites, and in the hospitality and food service industries.

* The U.S. manufacturing industry will crumble and the price of everything will surge.

* Reduced gun regulation and economic collapse will drive up crime rates. Drug dealing will rise as people try to cope with despair and that will also drive up crime rates because decriminalization will end and go backwards.

* Poverty rates will rise.

* LGBT folks will migrate away from red states to avoid active state sponsored persecution.

* New obstetrics and gynecology specialists will refuse to take positions in anti-abortion states, and a meaningful share of existing ones will also relocate, leading to greater maternal morality, more stillbirths, more unwanted pregnancies, and more congenital disorders in infants there. The loss of Medicaid funding will close down many rural hospitals and will hit labor and delivery wards especially hard.

* Financial and technology and manufacturing companies will relocate outside of the U.S., which will be a boon for places like the U.K., Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada, but will hurt the American economy greatly.

* Once conquered, Greenland and the Panama Canal, will see local military insurgencies emerge. An invasion of Greenland will end NATO and result in all European and Canadian military bases closing.

* Emboldened by a weak U.S., China will conquer Taiwan and make the Philippines a subject state, because the U.S. won't have the means or the will to fight China and China will have little to lose having been alienated in international trade from the U.S. China will also start supplying military equipment, supplies, and even troops to Russia, turning the tide in Russia's favor in the Ukraine War, despite vigorous and costly military aid to Ukraine from the rest of Europe.

* A complete U.S. withdrawal from Africa will give ISIS affiliated forces in Africa a modest boost.

* Canada will realign its economy to trade far less with the U.S. and far more with everyplace else, and will see a medium term boost as it absorbs high quality immigrants from the U.S.

* A major global economic recession will tank oil prices which will cause most U.S. oil producers to shut down and cause the U.S. to import far more oil which will be costly because the dollar will be much weaker.

* Disinvestment from the U.S. will drive up interest rates. This will squeeze the federal budget as the cost of interest on the national debt goes up, taking away lots of the gains from spending cuts, and combined with the blow to the construction industry, will make housing less affordable and contribute to homelessness. Migration for red states that are economically collapsing with less federal spending to blue states that were not so reliant upon federal spending, will also drive up blue state housing costs and lead to a surge in homelessness in blue states.

* Many immigrant professionals in medicine and tech will either leave positions they have filled in red states for blue state posts, or return to their homelands, leaving a shortage of skilled medical personnel and weakening the competitive edge of U.S. tech companies.

* Red states will start ignoring the establishment clause and have governments that are overtly Christian, leading non-Christians to migrate to blue states and making them even less tolerant of religious minorities.

* Smart and talented young people will move away to blue states at an even greater rate than they already do, leaving a lower quality work force in red states and undermining red state economic prosperity even further.

* Increased government corruption will strengthen a class of American oligarchs.

* New high speed rail and transit programs will end, almost everywhere.

* Tesla, with less government support, will wither and may even go out of business, with remnants acquired by its competitors.

* Carrying a passport on your person will become necessary for almost everyone, especially Hispanics and Asians.

* Museums and monuments documenting the history of anyone who isn't a white man will be looted with that part of U.S. history permanently lost to some extent, and minority and women's related and LGBT related books will be removed from public libraries in red states and will find themselves limited to private collections.

* Unemployment rates of minorities and women will be higher relative to whites and men than they have been historically.

* Suicide rates will increase greatly.

* The U.S. life expectancy will fall.

* Red state birth rates will rise by an amount that will offset rising maternal and infant and childhood mortality there, even as the raw number of births fall, as the number of women of childbearing age will fall as those women disproportionately relocate to blue states and immigrant populations fall, making it harder for young men in red states to find wives and partners. Birth rates will fall in blue states, partially made up for in absolute numbers of births by an increased number of young women in those states, but overall, U.S. birth rates will fall despite pro-natalist government incentives.

* The U.S. will experience a recession of a magnitude and duration not seen since the Great Depression.

* Unfair election reforms, both nationally and especially in red states, and targeted persecution of dissenters, will mute the extent to which increasingly unpopular sentiment towards Republicans translates into electoral results.

* Tooth decay will surge, but it will be harder to afford dental care.

* Income inequality will rise, and taxes will fall on the rich, although in blue states, this will be offset by new taxes that fall most heavily on high earners.

* More generally, "state capacity" will fall greatly across the U.S., and U.S. infrastructure, nationally, but especially in red states, will decay.

* Global warming will slow at a lower rate than it would otherwise, resulting in more climate change impacts in the U.S., especially in the South and the Southwest (which is more red than blue).

* The U.S., in general, but red states, in particular, will slip significantly towards losing developed country status and becoming a merely developing nation, in a collapse of economic progress unrivaled outside post-Soviet Russia. 

* The U.S. will sink further and further down in all manner of international ratings from GDP per capita, to productivity, to democracy, to corruption, to economic growth, to human development, to life expectancy, to cost of living (which will go up), to obesity, to intergenerational economic mobility, to education, and so on. The U.S. incarceration rate and crime rate will rise again.

* Tourism to the U.S. will plummet and a U.S. passport will become less valuable as other countries impose new visa requirements on Americans.

Simple Solutions To Big Problems

I'm a "Fox" and not a "Hedgehog". I know many things and focus on details rather than "one big thing" that solves every problem. 

But, I'm going to try to put on my hedgehog hat and come up with ways to address some of the biggest problems facing the U.S. today if forced to suggest just three solutions to each of them. The point of this exercise is partially to force prioritization of lists of proposals that can get bogged down with good ideas to solve small problems or to make lower priority reforms to big problems.

Affordable Housing and Homelessness

Housing prices in major metropolitan areas are high. What is the single biggest thing we can do to address that?

Eliminate virtually all zoning regulations of residential density, parking requirements,  minimum lot sizes, and regulation of the purposes for which buildings can be used. This primarily reduces the land value part of housing costs which is the main factor that makes housing in big cities so much more expensive. 

What is another big thing that we can do to address that?

End all property tax funding of public schools and replace the lost revenue, dollar for dollar, with increased state income taxes. This will typically reduce property taxes by more than 50% freeing up income for making principal and interest payments. It would also reduce inequities in school funding and would be more progressive as a tax source.

What is a third big thing we can do to address that?

Spend whatever it takes to provide basic housing first, immediately, to every single homeless person in the United States. Housing first is cheaper than letting people live on the street and paying the costs of that. This is less burdensome on the health care system, reduces crime, and improves quality of life for both the people who would be homeless and the people that their being homeless in their neighborhoods would impact.

Health Care

The U.S. pays far more per person for healthcare than any other country on the planet and gets poor results for its money, while inflicting great financial hardship on people. What is the single biggest thing we can do to address that?

Adopt "Medicare for All" financed with a higher Medicare payroll tax and a higher Obamacare tax on investment income. Roll in long term care coverage currently paid for, for many people, with the Medicaid long term care program. 

End Medicaid. End the Medicaid Estate Recovery System (i.e. the poor man's death tax). End private health insurance. End worker's compensation coverage of medical expenses. End the separate veteran's healthcare programs. End Obamacare insurance premium subsidies. End health insurance tax deductions and employer health insurance mandates and private health insurance mandates. End lawsuits by private individuals to pay for medical expenses. End casualty insurance policies designed to cover liability for medical expenses in lawsuits. This would greatly reduce administrative cost waste, bad debt, denial of care, linkage of health care to employment, would reduce health insurance and worker's compensation and CGL insurance expenses for businesses, would simplify tax returns for individuals, and would facilitate more effective cost control on provider payments. It would also increase use of preventative care thereby reducing more expensive acute care and would shift expensive ER care for the currently uninsured to more appropriate lower cost providers. This would especially help working class people who are mostly likely to have inadequate health insurance and to struggle with paying medical bills.

In round numbers, the U.S. federal and state governments spend about $2 trillion a year on Medicare, Medicaid, and VA health care, private health insurance policy premiums are about $1.5 trillion a year, and out of pocket health care expenses are about $0.5 trillion a year, for a total of $4 trillion a year of spending on health care, which still leaves about 27 million people without health insurance (in a country with about 336 million people). Cutting administrative costs, profits, marketing, provider level health insurance claim processing, bad debt expenses for providers, shifting ER care for the uninsured as a last resort to primary care and urgent care, price negotiation with providers from drug providers to hospitals to physicians and nurses, since the U.S. pays higher prices for everything than anyplace else in the world, substitution of preventative care that is foregone for cost reasons for later acute care, reduced worker's compensation, car insurance, homeowner's insurance, and other casualty liability insurance premium rates since they don't have to cover health care expenses, state and local public hospital funding, public employee health care funding, and reduced personal injury litigation costs associated with shifting payment obligations for medical expenses, could cut that $4 trillion to $3 trillion (about 25%). So, public expenditures for health care at all levels of government combined would increase by about 50% over current levels (some of which would be covered by eliminating tax exclusions, tax deductions and credits for health care under existing tax law) while largely eliminating household level and business level health care expenses, ending medical expense driven bankruptcies and collect litigation costs, and lower other household and business insurance premiums, and covering all 27 million of the uninsured. Tax bills for households and businesses would go up, but a lot of wasted time in households and businesses dealing with health insurance and medical bill related issues would disappear.

What is another big thing we can do to address that?

Legalize "recreational" drugs in a highly regulated and controlled manner similar to Colorado's marijuana legalization to reduce harm, while providing strong support for substance abuse treatment including drug based therapies and inpatient treatment funded with Medicaid for All resources. This would dramatically reduce the overdose epidemic, and would improve recovery rates for alcoholics and drug addicts, something that takes a particular toll on the poor and working class. This would also dramatically reduce gang crime and organized crime and would cripple cartels, and would reduce crime by addicts and would reduce incarceration costs associated with controlled substance users and jail deaths from drug withdrawal. The reduced demand would also dramatically reduce crime abroad from Columbia to Mexico, which would reduce the flow of refugees and migrants to the U.S. and would reduce corruption in the affected governments.

What is a third big thing we can do to address that?

Double the number of medical student slots for educating physicians by expanding medical school capacity and building new medical schools. We shouldn't have the same number of MD education slots as we did fifty years ago, with twice the population, and there is no shortage of highly qualified premed graduates to fill those slots. Limited supply also drives ups provider costs. Ending student loans for medical students and Medicaid for All ending bad debt issues and administrative costs for self-employed doctors and lowering malpractice insurance coverage due to not having to pay for malpractice related medical bill compensation would also allow reduced MD charges without undue hardship for MDs.

Higher Education

It is very expensive to go to college and many people leave college with large student loans that can't be discharged in bankruptcy. Many kids who are ready for college don't go, but many kids who aren't ready for college go at great expense in public funds and for themselves. What is the single biggest thing we can do to address that?

Provide 100% grant based funding for tuition, room, board, and books to students pursuing higher education whose grades and test scores and other factors show that they have at least a 50% chance of completing the higher educational program that they are enrolled in. Do not fund higher education for people who have a low chance of completing the higher educational program that they are enrolled in. End government sponsored or guaranteed student loans. This would much better utilize our nation's supply of academically competent students while reducing dropouts and failures by people who aren't currently ready for college at great expense and undermining personal self-worth. The status quo of indiscriminate state subsidies to in state students and very low admission thresholds that insure that huge percentages of students admitted at public and for profit colleges drop out without degrees is wasteful while still excluding poor and working class students at high levels from the system. Some of the political alienation towards higher education also comes from people who tried and had bad experiences since they weren't ready and dropped out and from people who were shut out of the system when they were prepared and take a sour grapes attitude towards it.

What is another thing we can do to address that?

Improve apprenticeship systems and vocational education programs, both for high school aged students whose academic performance indicates that traditional liberal education programs in a four year program don't make sense for them, and through community colleges. Adopt occupational specialty identification and training approaches used by the U.S. military for enlisted recruits for civilians. This would provide a path to missing middle occupations and recognize that not going to college doesn't have to mean that there is no path to the American dream.

What is a third big thing we can do to address that?

Forgive all existing federally guaranteed or federally provided student loans, and end the prohibition on discharging student loans in bankruptcy for all other student loans ten years after the repayment period begins if a degree is earned and professional certification is obtained in a pre-professional program, and after five years in all other cases. This would provide intergenerational justice to struggling Millenials and Gen Xers and Gen Z. These students could then better afford the American dream and could better afford to get married and have kids.

Poverty

Lots of people, especially children and single parents, but also many older adults with little education or skills, are poor and struggling. What is the single biggest thing we can do to address that?

Make the large, per child tax credit, that was available during the pandemic, permanent, and replace the complicated and audit prone earned income tax credit with a simple income tax credit equal to Social Security taxes (for both employers and employees) up to the minimum wage times thirty hours a week (or an equivalent amount of credit against self-employment taxes - reflected in not having those taxes withheld. The usefulness of the child tax credit in reducing child poverty in a simple way was demonstrated in the pandemic, and the EITC is far too complicated and has bad incentives for people trying to climb out of low income jobs and is too expensive to administer. This would make it more affordable for Millennials and Gen Z to marry, have kids, and achieve the American Dream.

What is another big thing that we can do to address that?

Reduce the regular Social Security retirement age to 55 years to people who do not have college degrees, without a reduction in benefits, and pay for any shortfalls in social security from existing obligations or new coverage, by increasing the payroll tax cap by however much is necessary to pay for it. Consider this payback for not imposing higher education costs on the public, and well as a rough justice categorical recognition that jobs that require less education are frequently more physically demanding and harder to continue to perform in late middle age. This would particularly help the Trump demographic. Many people in this demographic are already voting with their feet by leaving the work force and often applying for disability benefits which wouldn't be necessary with this categorical benefit that is much cheaper to administer and has better incentives.

What is a third big thing we can do to address that?

Provide paid maternity leave, at public expense, from six months of pregnancy to fifteen months after birth, as a short form, temporary, Social Security disability benefit. Add an additional six months to this time period for twins. Pay for this as well with an increased payroll tax cap. This greatly reduces the need for infant daycare, and increase the health of mothers and babies especially for working class families without unduly burdening employers. The pandemic proved that not being at work in late pregnancy out of economic necessity increases maternal and infant health. This would make it more affordable for Millennials and Gen Z to marry, have kids, and achieve the American Dream.

Transportation

Internal combustion engines are polluting and make up dependent upon oil. What is the single biggest thing we can do to address that?

Reduce trade barriers to importing foreign EVs and batteries, and subsidize high speed charging networks. There are lots of good EVs out there that aren't being exported to the U.S. due to trade barriers, especially from China. EVs reduce pollution and reduce fossil fuel dependency with petroleum dependency creating national security issues.

What is the second biggest thing we can do to address that?

Build dedicated high speed rail in interstate highway corridors where there is high traffic volume on medium distance routes (and upgrade medium speed rail corridors that already exist like the one in the Northeast Corridor), and use that high speed rail not only for passengers but for mail and package delivery by the USPS. Pay for this, in part, by shutting down low speed AMTRAK routes with the heaviest subsidies per passenger-mile. This could reduce pressure to expand highways, is environmentally sound, reduces highway maintenance costs, and provides mutual support between the rail system and the postal system. It would improve speed on these routes relative to both cars and to commercial flights. But it only makes sense where it makes some sort of economic sense based upon cost and demand. Medium distance, high volume routes are the sweet spot for high speed rail. Reducing petroleum dependency in addition to being environmentally and climate sound would increase national security and economic stability by reducing exposure to global oil production shocks.

What is a third big thing we can do to address that?

Convert short haul government fleet vehicles like garbage trucks, intracity and school buses, and urban postal delivery vehicles to EVs. This is a perfect niche for EVs even before charging networks are built out, reducing pollution and reducing oil demand with the benefits described above.