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America needs to build more homes

Young adults need lower housing prices, not longer mortgages. The median age of first-time home buyers is now 40, according to a recent report from the National Association of Realtors. Among all buyers, the median age was 59. Home buyers are more likely to be near or at retirement age than young, married parents. It wasn’t always like this. In 1991, the median age of first-time home buyers was 28. It has generally been around 30 for decades. In 2017, the median age of first-time home buyers was 32. In 2025, those same buyers are now 40 — the current median age for first-time ...

Mamdani’s campaign promises start to deflate

The election of Zohran Mamdani as New York City mayor set off — for his fan base, anyway — great expectations of a more “affordable” city. But the Democratic Socialist hasn’t even been sworn in, and some of his marquee promises are already history. Start with free buses. For a city dependent on public transportation, free buses are a nice idea but also a bad idea. Fares pay for the buses, and even if you plug that hole with another revenue source, free buses would siphon riders from the subways, in effect defunding them. Mamdani spun visions of the state raising taxes to ...

Important to open up about mental health

“Someone could be smiling, someone could be dancing, laughing, having a great time, expressing all this joy, but on the inside, they could really be fighting a battle that you never know about.” These are the poignant words of Dallas Cowboys defensive tackle Solomon Thomas in describing his teammate Marshawn Kneeland, who died from an apparent suicide after fleeing a traffic stop in Frisco, Texas, on Nov. 6. Kneeland’s death sent shockwaves through the Cowboys’ locker room and the NFL, and from reading teammates’ fond descriptions of him, it appears that no one detected ...

We’re not going to take it anymore

I’m forming a new political party. I’m going to call my party The Nuisance Liberation Front, and you’re welcome to join. We’re not going to tackle any hot-button social topics — you can go somewhere else if you want action on wedge issues. We’re dealing only with the stuff everyone agrees on, but no one ever takes action about. Here are just a few of the planks in our platform: A permanent end to corporate welfare. Recently, the CFO of ChatGPT company OpenAI, which lost an estimated $5 billion last year, said the federal government should “backstop” their $1.4 ...

Ellis Island sharp contrast to recent border crossings

Between 1892 and 1954, approximately 12 million immigrants arrived at the now-iconic Ellis Island to enter the U.S. — or nearly 200,000 legal entries per year. All were registered, documented, and given rudimentary health exams. They arrived as rich and poor, white and non-white, and, without exception, legally. With the gradual decline of such great influxes, Ellis Island finally ceased operating roughly 71 years ago. Yet Ellis Island’s successful tenure offers a sharp contrast to the failures of our recent open-border catastrophes. Americans will never know how many ...

We must address the affordability issue

Affordability. It’s the word on everybody’s lips. Ever since self-described socialist Zohran Mamdani became the frontrunner in the New York City mayoral election by saying the word “affordability” with talismanic regularity, we have been told that the key to modern politics is that word’s repetition. Say “affordability,” and watch your polls rise. And yet the world becomes ever more unaffordable. Why? Because there is, in the end, only one way to make things more affordable: to reduce prices. And there are only two ways to reduce prices: to reduce demand, or to ...