Kerby Anderson
Earlier this month, Dominic Pino wrote about “Milton Friedman’s Revenge.” His argument was that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris got the economic policy they wanted and the voters hated. It’s worth looking back to understand why the election went the way it did.
Milton Friedman was an economist best known for saying that inflation is “always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” He believed that inflation occurs when the money supply increases faster than output.
Four years ago, candidate Joe Biden announced, “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore.” Of course, Friedman wasn’t running the show even before Biden was elected. But once Biden was elected, he proceeded to spend money and run up deficits. By 2021, the New Republic proclaimed: “The End of Friedmanomics.”
First came the American Rescue Plan Act, followed by an infrastructure law, the CHIPS Act, and then finally the intentionally misnamed Inflation Reduction Act. Biden spent more and more federal money. Democrats even invented the word “Bidenomics” to describe their economic theory. The Biden administration ran up budget deficits which as a share of GDP were greater than those in the Great Depression.
Rising inflation was inevitable. As I have mentioned in previous commentaries, economist Larry Summers warned that the American Rescue Plan would “set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation.” Someone should have paid attention to him since he served as Barack Obama’s Treasury Secretary. But his warning was mocked. He was right, and the skeptics were wrong.
When voters were given an opportunity to express their opinion about Bidenomics, two thirds (68%) of voters in exit polls said the economy was “not good” or “poor.” That’s why we can call this “Milton Friedman’s Revenge.”

Kerby Anderson
Donald Trump hasn’t even been sworn into office, and yet governors in blue states and the legacy media are already criticizing a deportation program that hasn’t even begun. Unfortunately, some of the comments aren’t merely hostile but grossly inaccurate. If we are going to have a worthwhile debate about deportation, then let’s get accurate facts on the table.
First, Tom Homan, the newly designated “border czar,” has made his three-step process very clear. The primary focus will be the deportation of national security threats, with a secondary focus on individuals with a criminal record in this country or their country of origin.
Second, there are more than 1.2 million people in this country illegally that have had full legal due process and have received a final deportation order from an immigration judge. Those were the numbers as of September a year ago. The actual number may be close to 1.5 million to 1.6 million.
Byron York points out that in an ironic twist, the Trump administration may end up using the Mayorkas Memorandum created by the current Secretary of Homeland Security in the Biden administration. The memo lays out the rules for deporting illegal immigrants.
It sets as the first priorities the “apprehension and removal of noncitizens who are a threat to our national security, public safety, and border security.” It explains that the first group was terrorists and spies. The second group were criminals. The third group were those who are a threat to border security. Those would be immigrants who were apprehended after November 2020.
Critics are already howling about the possibility of deportations, and the decibels are certain to increase. But Americans need to know that these first deportations will be the removal of people most of us don’t want in this country.