Ramesh Ponnuru

President Joe Biden’s plan to have the federal government pay off hundreds of billions of dollars in student loans has received blistering criticism, all of it deserved. It’s a constitutional offense: Congress is supposed to authorize sweeping spending programs, not the president acting on his…

While the world waits and waits to see whether Donald Trump will seek the presidency again, it is worth looking back at one of the enduring puzzles of his time in office: why he failed to achieve some of his key goals on immigration even when the opportunity to win seemed to be handed to him. …

Prices have been increasing at the fastest rate in decades, but we haven’t been having a debate about inflation. We’ve been having five. We might do a better job of thinking through the issues if we distinguish among them. The first debate concerns the magnitude of the current inflation: how…

Katherine Tai, the US trade representative, delivered a grim message about our trade conflict with China in a recent speech. The tariffs on Chinese imports that President Donald Trump imposed have harmed some US businesses. They have not induced the Chinese government to change the practices that…

Covid caseloads are rising again, with the seven-day average even exceeding the peak last summer. Just as in the spring of 2020, newspapers are running stories that the White House thinks are exaggerating the threat. Governments are reintroducing mask mandates, and public-health experts are calling…

There’s a strong case that Congress should give legal status to millions of immigrants who are here illegally, at least under certain conditions. There’s a case, reasonable though not as strong, that we ought to have legislative rules that allow a bare majority of Congress to make that change in…

We don’t have enough tests for COVID-19 in the US. President Donald Trump spent weeks minimizing the threat and still makes comments that undermine his own administration’s public-health efforts. Congress has not supplied sufficient funding for relief efforts, and left town without making provision…

Democrats are facing a challenge they haven’t confronted since the 1988 presidential election. They are trying to persuade enough Americans to kick a Republican out of the White House even though the economy is doing well. They failed that year – and as their latest presidential debate showed, so…

Any move by the Federal Reserve is the subject of concern and debate, as it should be. President Donald Trump has gotten involved in that debate, breaking a tradition of recent decades of presidential silence about Fed policy. He is “not even a little bit happy” about higher interest rates. …

The average wage earned in America has been stagnating for four decades, according to the Pew Research Center. It’s a shocking finding. Thankfully, there are two reasons to be less dismayed by it than an initial glance would suggest. In 2018, the average hourly wage was $22.65. Pew calculates…