What You Should Be Reading: September 2025
David B McGarry
October 2, 2025
Welcome back to “What You Should Be Reading,” a monthly blog series in which the Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA), unlike the federal government, remains open and hard at work, commending to your attention important and interesting research on economics and public policy.
This month’s edition includes the best means to protect children online, the fiscal emergency of irresponsible emergency spending, and the doomed quest to resurrect midcentury manufacturing employment.
So, without further ado…
NetChoice: NetChoice’s Digital Safety Shield for America
More than any other, the cause that has secured for tech policy an entrenched position in the national mind is that of children’s online safety. The most concerned observers have found somewhere in the ether of the digital world the origins of all ailments that afflict young Americans: depression, anxiety, suicidality, self-harm, attention lapses, atrophied manners and social skills, and more. As TPA has written previously, the most zealous prosecutors of digital devices and social media at present lack the evidence needed to vindicate their case. The most draconian tech-policy proposals, which range from enforced age verification to the suppression of online speech, often violate the First Amendment and have little promise to achieve their ends. Unconstitutional, ineffective, and predicated on dubious data are three descriptors that no legislator should wish to be applied to his proposal. Yet, despite their sterling intentions and honest concern, the staunch critics of social media persist.
However, these observations (understood properly) do not march inexorably towards the conclusion that no policies can be enacted to better protect children online. This month, the trade group NetChoice published a report outlining how this might be done.
NetChoice outlines the following six reforms (in the trade group’s language):
- Invest in law enforcement for child safety online
- Lock up more predators and cybercriminals who target children on digital services
- Educate young Americans on digital tools in the classroom
- Help parents learn about parental control tools and resources
- Craft narrowly tailored, clearly defined rules that punish the bad actors who abuse digital tools
- Secure a federal data privacy framework
Each point’s importance for children’s safety, and how exactly each point ought to be made manifest in legislation, could occupy an essay of its own—multiple, probably. But a few simple facts concerning online predators and the duty of law enforcement (too often neglected) to hunt down and imprison them deserve brief mention here. According to a report from Stop Child Predators (SCP), despite the fact that in a “90-day period, there were 99,172 IP addresses throughout the US distributing known CSAM images and videos through peer-to-peer networks,” “law enforcement only had the capacity to investigate 782, less than 1%.”
And as TPA and SCP noted in a joint 2024 op-ed, laying the culpability for law enforcement’s failures on the red heifers of social media platforms (as many critics of tech attempt to do):
would allow government to shirk its law-enforcement responsibility to prevent and combat child abuse, instead offloading this task on private companies. Secondly, in doing so, it would siphon political and enforcement scrutiny away from the child abusers—the criminals—to online platforms, without whose voluntary cooperation any anti-abuse framework cannot succeed. Moreover, a myopic reliance on post hoc liability for platforms does little either to prevent abuse or to punish child abusers.
The child-exploitation black market is multinational and often sophisticated, and opposing it requires the resources and authorities of the criminal-justice system.
The ongoing and unpoliced crimes inflicted on children by online predators who ought to have been apprehended are often attributable to law enforcement’s dearth of resources, not a failure of will. Such bills as the Invest in Child Safety Act should—indeed, must—become the centerpiece of any child-protective tech policy.
Cato Institute: The $15 Trillion Emergency Spending Loophole
Imagine this: a shopper—call him Sam—pushes his cart to the register at his local grocery store, only to find that he is a bit short of the cash needed to purchase all the groceries he has taken from shelves. Counting the contents of his wallet, he finds that he has the money to pay for essentials—meat, eggs, milk, and bread—but not the box of cookies he had selected. Thinking fast, and feeling the pressure and awkwardness of the moment as the cashier looks on expectantly for his decision, Sam conceives of another way to cover the full expense. He fishes from his wallet a credit card labeled “emergency use only” and leaves the store with the entire grocery haul. And, of course, Sam never pays off that credit card bill.
Congress has committed “$12.5 trillion in spending since 1991—comparable to the entire amount spent on Medicaid and veterans’ programs combined,” writes Dominik Lett in a new paper from the Cato Institute. “This surge in off-the-books spending has added an estimated $2.5 trillion in new interest costs, accelerating the growth of the national debt and weakening the US fiscal position.” That amounts to a $15 trillion credit card bill, while the U.S. National Debt exceeds $37.5 trillion.
Lawmakers have discovered that declarations of emergency sidestep the irksome and inconvenient fetters that ordinarily constrain Congress to observe at least a shadow of fiscal responsibility. “Labeling spending as an emergency allows lawmakers to avoid tough budgetary trade-offs, claim credit for aid, and bypass regular scrutiny,” Lett reports. “It also enables parochial spending to hitch a ride with crisis packages under the banner of urgency.”
Politicians have long known the utility of emergencies. “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel infamously cautioned. “And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” Genuine crises, however, often fail to arise at moments convenient for ambitious politicians, a difficulty which such theories as William James’ moral equivalent of war seek to overcome. “Even during periods of relative calm, Congress retains elevated levels of emergency spending,” Lett notes. “Prior crisis responses serve to justify new expenditures, regardless of how flawed the results of previous spending might have been.”
And so Uncle Sam spends on (with your taxpayer dollars), and his credit-card bill remains unpaid. He will keep at it until reforms curtail the abuse of “emergency” spending.
American Enterprise Institute: How Many Manufacturing Jobs Will Trump’s Tariffs Create? And at What Cost?
All together now: Tariffs not only impose immense economic costs but also fail to achieve their primary policy aims and foster political dysfunction along the way.
A new report from the American Enterprise Institute, authored by Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Ye Zhang, asks these questions: “How Many Manufacturing Jobs Will Trump’s Tariffs Create? And at What Cost?”
The answers, unsurprising to free traders, will dismay protectionists. First, the authors conclude, “there is no going back to the ‘golden years’ of the 1960s when manufacturing jobs accounted for 27 percent of the labor force.” Time comes for all, including the economic status quo of fifty years ago. There is little hope, even assuming a draconian tariff regime, the U.S. manufacturing sector will comprise more than roughly 10 percent of the labor force.
Moreover, the authors calculate, “the cost to American purchasers of manufactured goods per manufacturing job created by tariff protection will be high, at least $225,000 annually per job-year for an indefinite period. More realistic calculations, with a tariff pass-through coefficient of 1.0, indicate a cost of $550,000 annually per job-year.”
Even if it is conceded that Americans ought to want a recomposition of the midcentury labor force—a dubious proposition—it cannot be assumed that protectionism or other neo-mercantilist policies will secure that end. Politics is the art of the possible, Otto von Bismarck famously said. This sentiment, although facially realist, is something of idealistic aspiration, for politics often devolves into the art of persuading voters that the impossible might, in fact, be achieved. Therein lies the protectionist conundrum.
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.