Outside the Beltway

Mother’s Day Tabs

James Joyner · Sunday, May 11, 2025 · 10 comments

The Atlantic, “The Real Motive Behind the Real ID–Deadline Charade“

Today, nearly 20 years after Congress passed legislation mandating a nationwide program known as Real ID, was the deadline for travelers to show the new identification for domestic flights. And yet nothing has happened. Although about 20 percent of the traveling public is still not compliant, because people have not obtained the required document (generally, a revised form of driver’s license issued by U.S. states and territories), Homeland Security has done little more than issue a leaflet that people really, really, really should have the correct ID next time.

The Trump administration may try to take credit for a smooth rollout—smooth because it wasn’t a rollout at all. Today’s deadline was largely artificial: According to the fine print of the regulations governing Real ID’s implementation, Homeland Security has until the end of 2027 to phase in the program in full. So the administration took today’s deadline to assure Americans that they could still fly, while it focused on another priority: immigration enforcement, rather than safety provision.

[…]

The performatively menacing noises in the buildup to this deadline were a threat to those who may not qualify for Real ID because of their immigration status. (In about half of states, undocumented migrants are not eligible for driver’s licenses.) In effect, the administration was trying to use a scare about Real ID as a stick to match the carrot of the president’s offer of $1,000 for undocumented immigrants to self-deport. Instead of a serious effort to move people to Real ID, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem could be heard saying, “Illegal aliens should not be allowed to fly in the U.S. unless self-deporting.”

JJ: While this seems very much a bad faith effort, I have zero sympathy for people who haven’t figured out how to comply with a 20-year-old law by now. I’ve had a Real ID compliant license for a very long time now.

WSJ, “Trump Brings Millionaire Tax Idea Back to Life“

The president, who rejected a “millionaire tax” April 23, is now considering backing a tax structure that would return the top individual income-tax rate to 39.6% from 37% for people making over $2.5 million, people familiar with White House discussions said Thursday.

Trump on Friday then both endorsed and backed off the idea, posting on his Truth Social network that he would accept a higher tax rate at the top but complaining that Democrats would criticize Republicans for breaking their word on no new taxes. Many Democrats want higher tax rates for upper income households, starting well below $2.5 million.

JJ: I don’t have a studied view on this, but a modest hike on marginal income over $2.5 million seems reasonable.

NBC News, “Key New York Republicans reject ‘insulting’ offer on ‘SALT’ tax break“

Four New York Republicans issued a blistering joint statement Thursday rejecting an offer they said came from House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and the House’s top tax writer on how to expand the state and local tax deduction, also known as SALT.

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Lifting the $10,000 cap on SALT deductions, which was imposed by Trump’s 2017 tax law, is a make-or-break issue for several GOP lawmakers in high-tax states like New York and New Jersey, who have been negotiating with party leaders on a compromise.

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“We’ve negotiated in good faith on SALT from the start—fighting for the taxpayers we represent in New York. Yet with no notice or agreement, the Speaker and the House Ways and Means Committee unilaterally proposed a flat $30,000 SALT cap—an amount they already knew would fall short of earning our support,” the four Republicans said in the statement.

“It’s not just insulting—it risks derailing President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. New Yorkers already send far more to Washington than we get back—unlike many so-called ‘low-tax’ states that depend heavily on federal largesse. A higher SALT cap isn’t a luxury. It’s a matter of fairness,” they added. “We reject this offer.”

JJ: While I can’t intellectually justify it, increasing the cap to $30,000 would be enough to make our household more-or-less whole.

NYT Magazine, “The $200 Billion Gamble: Bill Gates’s Plan to Wind Down His Foundation“

“You could say this announcement is not very timely,” Gates says, but the timeline isn’t short: He is committing the foundation to 20 more years of generous aid, more than $200 billion in total, targeting health and human development. And it comes laced with familiar humanitarian confidence, as Gates and his team now believe that their central goals can be achieved in much shorter time. But it is also disconcertingly definitive: The foundation will close its doors, permanently, on Dec. 31, 2045, at least several decades before originally intended. In the meantime, it will be spending down its endowment, as well as almost all of Gates’s remaining personal fortune.

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After leaping upward in the 2000s, global giving for health grew very slowly through the 2010s. The culture of philanthropy has changed somewhat, too, with the age of the Giving Pledge — in which hundreds of the world’s richest people promised to donate more than half of their great fortunes to charity — yielding first to the upstart movement called Effective Altruism and then to a new age of extreme wealth defined less by altruism than by grandiosity. After the Gateses’ divorce in 2021, Melinda eventually left the foundation to establish her own philanthropy; Warren Buffett, a longtime supporter, recently announced his plans to leave most of his remaining fortune in the hands of a charitable trust his own children will administer, and to give no additional money to the Gates Foundation beyond his death.

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To hear Gates and his team tell it, this is the time to go all in — given the yawning gaps produced by post-pandemic setbacks and the Trump assault, and given the promise of biomedical tools and other lifesaving innovations now in the development pipeline, and given A.I., a subject Gates returns to again and again. They even talk excitedly about a world in which the Gates Foundation has made itself unnecessary. 

JJ: There’s a certain weirdness to having super-rich individuals decide which causes get funding. But much of the gap that’s being filled here is from the Trump administration unilaterally withholding funds Congress had budgeted. $200 billion over twenty years is a paltry sum in comparison with the US Federal budget over that span.