What You Should Be Reading: April 2026

Welcome aboard “What You Should Be Reading,” a monthly blog series in which the Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA), in remembrance of the latest victim of the Biden administration’s antitrust policy, the dearly departed Spirit Airlines, takes its readers to higher altitudes for a better view of the public-policy landscape. Our flight itinerary: a steepening U.S. fiscal decline, mounting fears about data centers, and the theories underlying recent developments in antitrust policy.

Prepare for takeoff.

The Brookings Institution: “Spending, Taxes, and Deficits: A Book of Charts”

The U.S. now runs the largest budget deficit among OECD countries and, by 2029, is poised to surpass Greece and Italy in its debt-to-GDP ratio.

America’s national debt has exploded since the turn of the millennium, growing in raw dollars and as a share of GDP, regardless of the political party in control on Capitol Hill.

And with neither the political capital nor the capable leadership needed to restore fiscal sustainability, the U.S. government faces a $39 trillion national debt, nearly $1 trillion in annual interest costs, deficits approaching $2 trillion and 6 percent of GDP, and nearly exhausted major entitlement trust funds. The Brookings Institution’s Jessica Riedl’s chart book illustrates what is likely to follow.

Under current policy, deficits would soar above $4 trillion by 2036—a departure of more than $1 trillion from the CBO’s projections. Annual deficits, projected to reach 9 percent of GDP in a decade and 14 percent in three decades, are “headed to levels seen only during wars, deep recessions, and pandemics,” Riedl points out.

Even granting the CBO’s “rosy scenario that assumes no wars, no recessions, and continued low interest rates,” Riedl argues that debt held by the public would climb from the current 101 percent of GDP to 175 percent in just 30 years; in alternative scenarios, it could rise somewhere between that level and 379 percent.

Accompanying this soaring debt, interest expense would approach $2.5 trillion within a decade, per Riedl’s estimate—$400 billion above that of the CBO. Spiking interest costs present a chilling prospect. Debt service, after all, is just what it sounds like: trillion-dollar payments simply to make good on obligations the government created in the past. More than 30 percent of federal revenue would go to debt service by 2036—and more than half by 2056.

Importantly, each percentage-point increase above the assumed interest rate would raise interest costs by $3.3 trillion over the decade.

Riedl demonstrates that merely stabilizing the debt would require non-interest savings of 5 percent of GDP by the 2040s, however politically unpalatable that may be. Indeed, current trends are unprecedented and unsustainable, and they can no longer be reversed with ad hoc solutions.

Read the full piece here.

Center for Data Innovation: “Five Concerns About AI Data Centers, and What to Do About Them”

Loudoun County, in Northern Virginia, will receive almost half of its tax revenue from data centers operating within its jurisdiction in fiscal year 2027, while residents pay a property-tax rate 40 percent below the level paid a decade ago. Data centers’ contributions to local economies are increasing—but state-level opposition to the data-center industry seems to be growing in equal measure.

Hodan Omaar and Mitalee Pasricha at the Center for Data Innovation argue that “with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), these facilities have been thrust into the public and political spotlight.”

They identify the five most prevalent concerns (quoting the authors):

1. AI workloads use too much electricity.
2. AI workloads crowd out other uses of limited grid capacity.
3. AI workloads will raise household electricity bills.
4. AI workloads threaten grid reliability.
5. AI workloads strain local water resources.

In their latest report, each is explored at length.

About claims of AI’s excessive consumption of electricity specifically, the authors conclude:

Data centers are not uniquely straining the electric grid relative to other large sources of demand. So if the concern isn’t tied to a specific downstream harm—higher consumer cost, environmental damage, reduced grid reliability, or displacement of other users—then it is not really about a measurable system failure.…Treating absolute electricity consumption as inherently problematic substitutes reflexive resistance to AI deployment for a serious policy debate—without ever specifying what concrete problem needs to be fixed.

Data centers are to the AI age what factories were to the Industrial Revolution. While the report thoroughly rebuts criticism—often misconceived, rooted in fears that are largely misattributed and, at times, manufactured—the panic continues to spread. As the Irish satirist Jonathan Swift observed, “Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late.” The truth must catch up—and quickly—before America blindly regulates itself into technological obscurity.

Read the full piece here.

University of Southern California Gould School of Law: “Antitrust Theory Meets the Real World: Empirical Shortfalls of the New Conventional Wisdom on Competition Policy”

In competition law, the “big is bad” intuition often tends to target “business practices that pose no harm to, and may even enhance, competitive conditions,” as Jonathan M. Barnett puts it in his forthcoming Journal of Dynamic Competition article, “Antitrust Theory Meets the Real World.”

To limit intervention to economically justified cases, regulators incorporated sound economic methods and principles into antitrust enforcement from the 1970s until just recently. Barnett contends, “Today a new school of thought seeks to again transform…what has been the conventional approach to antitrust enforcement for about half a century.”

Adherents of this “new school” aim to substitute “loosely defined intuitions concerning ‘fair’ market practices” for consumer welfare and efficiency. They favor “categorical prohibitions” of certain practices over effects-based analysis that assesses whether a given practice generates economic efficiencies—efficiencies that evidence the proper workings of competition. And they likewise prefer freeing enforcers from legal restraints that limit the government’s discretion.

“The rise of this interventionist approach has coincided with a ‘transmission pipeline’ through which emergent theories of anticompetitive harm…are adopted expansively,” Barnett argues. Antitrusters now tend to use “an informational heuristic that relies on proxies for expert opinion in formulating policy positions or determining whether to take enforcement actions.” They increasingly pursue antitrust enforcement informed by a morass of “expert opinion,” stemming from groundless “theoretical arguments, ‘narrative-style’ reasoning, or preliminary or narrow empirical findings.”

Barnett outlines four widely adopted theories of antitrust harm that agencies in the United States, European Union, and other major jurisdictions have used to justify intervention against tech or tech-adjacent firms.

In Barnett’s wording, “These theories include:

(1) Patent holdup theory, according to which owners of standard-essential patents have incentives and capacities to extract supracompetitive royalties from device producers and other intermediate users.

(2) Killer acquisition theory, according to which incumbent platforms regularly acquire startups for purposes of terminating them after acquisition.

(3) Kill zone theory, according to which the entry of a large tech platform into a particular sector through startup acquisitions dissuades subsequent entry and venture-capital investment.

(4) Default effect theory, according to which default settings in computing and communications technologies shield incumbents from entry by exploiting users’ inertia bias.”

The mere possibility of antitrust action against large companies introduces uncertainty that carries unforeseen but not unfelt costs. Fear of enforcement alone chills innovation, as companies eschew sound business practices that could attract a lawsuit or investigation. And, of course, the costs of arbitrary antitrust policy are ultimately borne by consumers.

Read the full piece here.

Thank you for flying with TPA. Unlike Spirit Airlines, this series is scheduled to return next month.

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