What You Should Be Reading: October 2026

Welcome back to “What You Should Be Reading,” a monthly series from the Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA). With the midterm elections having been concluded, those elected to the next Congress should study up on market-based policies to improve the lives of those who elected them, and the fine research presented below is an excellent place to begin.

This month’s edition explores a rescue plan for Congress to use in a debt crisis, the New Right’s economic nationalism, and a taxpayer-financed expansion and abuse of Obamacare.

Americans for Prosperity: “Recover Stronger: A Debt Crisis Playbook for Policymakers.”

James Madison wrote, “I go on the principle that a public debt is a public curse and in a republican government more than in any other.” With this quote, Kurt Couchman of Americans for Prosperity opens the second chapter of his recent Fiscal Democracy in America, a chapter titled “Bad Budgeting Is Catching Up with Us.”

Due to bad budgeting, the United States has run budget shortfalls for the past quarter of a century. Even as the national debt has surpassed $40 trillion, many members of Congress, including Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed (D-Mich.), who campaigned on the promise of Medicare for All, are advocating bold new spending agendas. Madison’s apprehensions have remained salient. So, too, is Couchman’s warning: “[u]nless Congress changes course, the federal government risks a fiscal crisis.” Annual deficits have reached $2 trillion primarily because of unsustainable commitments to major entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare, whose spending continues to rise unchecked.

Couchman’s recent playbook “lays out what Congress and the White House should do, and in what order, if rising borrowing costs, weak Treasury auctions, or other market stresses spiral from today’s heightened vulnerability into a fiscal confidence crisis.”

Recent downgrades of the federal government’s credit rating resulted from “persistent deficits, a rising debt burden, and poor governance,” Couchman argues. “Congress must address all three.” A credible and durable response to a fiscal crisis must (in his words):

• Protect full and timely payment of debt. Replace shutdown and debt-limit

brinkmanship with more productive fallbacks.

• Set clear fiscal goals. Make a 3% deficit-to-GDP goal the public target; use a glide

path to structural primary balance or surplus to reach agreed deficit and debt goals.

• Upgrade Congress, don’t bypass it. Leaders must set the overall target and negotiate

a down payment, but committees must increasingly fill in the details over time.

The main challenge in overcoming a debt problem is “to create better conditions for Congress to make responsible decisions easily and with enough political cover for members to make tough-but-necessary trade-offs routinely.”

One principle dominates Couchman’s recommendations: to restore fiscal responsibility and sound governance, lawmakers must deliberate and build consensus. As Madison envisioned, in a well-structured republican government, representatives consider, debate, and negotiate carefully before enacting legislation. In that same spirit, Couchman writes: “Leaders move away from improvising policy in crisis. Instead, members build coalitions to develop durable policy in committees and on the floor.” For Congress to develop a realistic and effective deficit-reduction plan, committee-led deliberation that culminates in broad agreement is necessary. Lawmakers must build consensus on how to produce savings, which programs to downsize, and what statutory changes and automatic adjustments to enact. “Ultimately, new legislation should include wins for many members.”

Read the full playbook here.

American Institute for Economic Research: “The Errors of Economic Nationalism.”

“Economic nationalism is once again in vogue,” Paul Mueller at the American Institute for Economic Research notes in his recent paper. Indeed, as of the Cato Institute’s latest count, the Trump administration has announced or completed deals to acquire ownership stakes in 40 private companies—a figure bound to rise. For this administration, tariffs have become not just a favorite word but a Swiss Army knife of policymaking.

Mueller observes: “Republican officials have been putting forward economic nationalist policies to strengthen labor unions, offer preferential regulatory treatment to large firms, and give other special tax exemptions or subsidies to favored companies and industries. This represents a significant departure from the limited-government, free-market principles of the political right only a few decades ago.”

Some adherents of the New Right may describe its economic policies, characterized by protectionism and hostility toward international trade, as “a new economic paradigm.” Yet these policies are better described as a rebranded version of old-fashioned mercantilism, refuted by Adam Smith two and a half centuries ago.

Furthermore, the New Right’s economic paradigm bears a close resemblance to the core economic beliefs of the Progressive Left. Mueller explains: “Both sides emphasize:

• National Interest Over Consumer Choice: Economic policy should serve the ‘common good’ of the nation rather than prioritize consumer choice and low prices.
• National Sovereignty and Reciprocity: Trade policy should protect national manufacturing capacity and prevent dependence on foreign powers, particularly hostile ones.
• Non-Supremacy of Markets: Democratic political institutions should be used to improve the lives of ordinary people.
• Rejection of Globalism: The New Right suspects global institutions like the WEF, the WTO, the UN, and the IMF insulate corporations from democratic oversight and thereby erode national sovereignty.”

Economic nationalism is not merely erroneous. Worse still, it “leads economic nationalists to recommend policies that distort markets, increase corruption, and reduce rates of economic growth, all of which slow or reduce improvements in people’s quality of life.”

Read the full paper here.

Paragon Health Institute: “State of the Affordable Care Act Exchanges Heading into 2027: Rising Premiums, Exploding Subsidies, and Fewer Phantoms.”

The Affordable Care Act marketplace plans have proven a costly and inefficient way of providing health coverage. In their recent report, Brian Blase and Mark Howell at the Paragon Health Institute find that “[f]rom 2014 to 2026, benchmark premiums for a 50-year-old increased 129 percent,” while premiums for employer-sponsored insurance rose only 63 percent and overall prices 39 percent.

Subsidized Obamacare enrollees, however, have been shielded from most of those increases, as taxpayers have borne their cost. Blase and Howell find that “[b]efore the pandemic, taxpayers already financed approximately 77 percent of premium revenue. By 2025, that share had increased to more than 86 percent.”

These generous subsidies, especially after their expansion during the pandemic, led to many enrollees paying no premium at all. Unsurprisingly, fully subsidized plans have enabled what is known as phantom coverage. “When coverage requires no premium payment from the enrollee, brokers can enroll people without their knowledge, and fictitious enrollees can remain on the rolls,” Blase and Howell explain. “People who are unaware they have coverage, or who do not even exist, cannot pay premiums themselves. Fully subsidized plans eliminate that natural check on enrollment while allowing insurers to continue collecting federal subsidies.”

In 13 states in 2026, more than twice as many people signed up for Obamacare marketplace plans claiming incomes between the poverty line and 50 percent above it as were estimated to qualify for government subsidies at those income levels. In Florida, Louisiana, and Utah, sign-ups exceeded three times the estimated number of eligible people. Although phantom enrollment appears to be declining following the expiration of extra pandemic-era subsidies and stricter checks on applications, taxpayers continue to pay billions of dollars for potentially wasteful and fraudulent coverage.

Read the full report here.

Note: TPA highlights research that contributes to public-policy discussions. TPA does not necessarily endorse the policy recommendations the featured authors make.