I understand those concerns. As a father and economist, I want every child to thrive. But something can be beneficial without becoming a government responsibility. Families should choose how to raise and educate their children, while government focuses on protecting rights and enforcing the law.
​
Government Helps Make Childcare Unaffordable

According to Child Care Aware of America⁠, average childcare prices reached $13,184 annually in 2025. Before calling for more subsidies, policymakers should examine the rules driving those costs.

Staffing ratios, credential mandates, licensing requirements, zoning restrictions, and high taxes all limit supply and raise expenses. Research on childcare regulations⁠ estimates that allowing one additional child per caregiver could reduce center-based childcare prices by 9% to 20%.

Credential requirements can also exclude capable providers. Federal Head Start rules require bachelor’s degrees for many teachers, even though a degree does not automatically make someone better at caring for young children. Government should prevent abuse and neglect without dictating every detail of childcare.

Bianca King’s experience illustrates the problem. After losing her job during the pandemic, she opened a home daycare in Lakeway, Texas. She registered with the state, passed an inspection, and served local families, but zoning restrictions threatened her business. The Institute for Justice documented her case⁠.

When regulations prevent willing providers from serving willing parents, families face fewer choices and higher prices. Property taxes and excessive government spending add to the burden by raising facility costs and reducing parents’ disposable income.

Subsidies Don’t Fix a Shortage

Government often responds to these self-created costs with taxpayer subsidies. But subsidies increase families’ purchasing power without necessarily increasing the number of available childcare slots. When supply remains limited, prices can rise.

Economist Ryan Bourne⁠ notes that subsidies may change who pays without reducing the underlying cost of care. Policymakers should therefore address barriers to supply rather than assume more spending will make childcare affordable.

Is Pre-K an Investment?

Supporters of taxpayer-funded pre-K often cite research showing benefits for children and working parents. Some programs have produced positive results, but a review of preschool research⁠ finds that many large-scale programs fail to deliver lasting academic gains.

Even consistent benefits would not automatically justify compulsory taxpayer funding. The U.S. Constitution grants no general childcare power, and state education responsibilities do not require unlimited public financing of pre-K or daycare.

Let Parents Choose

The better approach is to reduce the costs government creates: lower taxes, reform and eliminate property taxes, end unnecessary credential mandates, reconsider staffing rules, and allow more home-based and private providers.

Parents should decide whether to use daycare, private preschool, family care, faith-based providers, or stay home. Churches, charities, and communities can voluntarily help families facing hardship. Where public education already exists, education savings accounts can expand parental choice and competition without creating another open-ended subsidy.

Children deserve opportunities. Parents deserve choices. Taxpayers deserve restraint.

Government doesn’t need to fund everything worthwhile. Spend less. Tax less. Regulate less.

​Why does the American Dream feel increasingly unaffordable, and what would make it attainable again?

Akash Chougule, President of FREOPP, joins me to discuss their new Affording the American Dream handbook and the barriers making housing, healthcare, energy, child care, education, and other essentials more expensive.

We discuss upward mobility, housing supply, government subsidies, the federal debt, and why lasting affordability requires reducing the underlying costs rather than simply helping people pay higher prices.

The goal isn't just helping Americans afford expensive things. It's making more things affordable through greater supply, competition, innovation, and opportunity.

Learn more at VanceGinn.com and get show notes at vanceginn.substack.com.

Originally published at Kansas Policy Institute. 

The debate over Medicaid in Kansas should start with a basic question: What should a safety net accomplish?

The goal should not be getting more people onto Medicaid or keeping them there. It should be protecting people who truly need assistance while creating better pathways for those who can work to earn more, obtain private health coverage, and become truly independent.

A new Paragon Health Institute analysis shows why this distinction matters. It estimates that 9.2 million people, or 46 percent of Affordable Care Act (ACA) Medicaid expansion enrollees, may not have met eligibility requirements in 2024.

That does not mean 46 percent committed fraud. Improper enrollment can result from outdated income information, government mistakes, incorrect classifications, or other eligibility problems.

But the result is the same for taxpayers: scarce resources are spent on people who may not qualify instead of being focused on those most in need.

The incentives contribute to the problem.

Under the ACA, Washington pays 90 percent of Medicaid costs for the expansion population, a much larger federal share than for traditional Medicaid. States determine eligibility while federal taxpayers pay almost the entire expansion bill.

Paragon estimates improper expansion enrollment cost federal taxpayers $32.9 billion in 2024. I recently discussed these incentives on my Let People Prosper Show podcast called This Week’s Economy, and in Medicaid Fraud: Following the Money.

Kansas provides another reason why accurate eligibility matters.

Through direct certification, information from programs including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and Medicaid can help determine whether students qualify for free school meals. The Kansas Legislative Division of Post Audit found that about 80 percent of qualifying students in 2023-24 were directly certified. Eligibility for the federal free lunch program is how the state determines funding for at-risk students.

Sharing accurate information can reduce paperwork. But inaccurate eligibility information can also spread from one government program to another. Verification matters.

The larger problem is dependency.

For work-capable, working-age adults, Medicaid should generally be temporary assistance, not a permanent destination. A better measure of success is whether people move into work, earn higher wages, and eventually obtain coverage they control themselves.

That fits the approach I have advocated through Empower Patients. Health policy should give individuals more control over health-care dollars and decisions rather than continually expanding government programs. More competition, transparent prices, portable coverage, and patient-controlled accounts can provide pathways away from dependence on Medicaid.

Federalism matters, too. Block-granting Medicaid to states could give states more flexibility while making them more responsible for how limited resources are used. That would change today’s incentive to chase federal matching dollars and give states greater reason to focus assistance on those most in need.

And Washington cannot finance everything forever.

As I recently wrote, states should prepare for a future in which federal dollars are less plentiful. With federal debt and deficits on an unsustainable path, assuming Washington will permanently finance 90 percent of Medicaid expansion is a substantial long-term risk.

The better question for Kansas is therefore not simply how many people Medicaid can cover. It is whether scarce resources reach those who truly qualify, whether taxpayers are protected, and whether people who can work have a clear path toward independence.

A safety net should help protect those who need it most while helping everyone else build a life beyond it.

Originally published on Substack. 

Economic debates can become complicated quickly. But one question cuts through much of the noise: Where do people prosper most?
​
The new Economic Freedom of the World 2026 report⁠ from the Fraser Institute provides overwhelming evidence that greater economic freedom is associated with more prosperity and better lives.

The report ranks 165 countries and territories based on five broad areas: size of government, legal systems and property rights, sound money, freedom to trade internationally, and regulation. The principles behind them are straightforward. People prosper when they can make more of their own economic decisions and voluntarily exchange with others.

Freedom and Prosperity

The differences between freer and less-free countries are substantial. Countries in the freest quarter had average GDP per person of $65,596 in 2024. In the least-free quarter, it was just $9,552.
​
Extreme poverty shows an even larger divide. Only 2% of people in the freest economies lived in extreme poverty, compared with 41% in the least-free economies. Life expectancy averaged nearly 81 years in the freest countries versus about 67 years in the least free.

These relationships do not prove that economic freedom alone causes every difference between countries. Geography, history, culture, institutions, and many other factors matter. But decades of research and the enormous differences across countries make the basic lesson difficult to ignore: societies organized around property rights, markets, voluntary exchange, and limited government tend to produce substantially better outcomes.

Look at the Rankings

Hong Kong ranks first, followed by Switzerland, Singapore, New Zealand, and the United States. Ireland, Denmark, Australia, Mauritius, Finland, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands are also among the leaders.
​
At the bottom are the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Malawi, Algeria, Iran, Myanmar, Libya, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and, dead last, Venezuela.

Venezuela is an especially powerful warning about socialism. A country with enormous natural resources was devastated by nationalization, price controls, monetary destruction, attacks on property rights, and centralized political power.

Free-market capitalism isn’t perfect because people aren’t perfect. But capitalism harnesses prices, competition, private property, profits, and losses to coordinate millions of decisions without requiring politicians to plan the economy.

Socialism moves in the opposite direction by concentrating economic decisions in government.

Don’t Misread America’s Ranking

The United States ranks an impressive fifth, with an overall score of 8.21 out of 10. But there is an important catch: these rankings reflect 2024, before President Trump’s second term and many subsequent policy changes.
So we should not use the fifth-place ranking as a scorecard for today’s policies.
​
In fact, the report provides a preliminary estimate for 2025 and concludes that U.S. economic freedom declined by 0.12 points, citing changes involving government size, property rights and the rule of law, and especially new trade restrictions.

That deserves attention from conservatives as well as progressives. Bigger government doesn’t become economically sound because the party expanding it changes.

Tariffs restrict trade. Deficits expand government’s footprint. Regulations constrain choices. Subsidies and industrial policy let politicians favor some businesses over others.

Economic freedom requires consistent principles.

We Lost a Decade

The historical trend may be the report’s most important message.

Global economic freedom declined sharply around the pandemic as governments expanded spending, regulation, trade barriers, and monetary intervention. Freedom has since recovered somewhat, but the average country still has not returned to its pre-pandemic level. The report describes this as effectively erasing a decade of progress.

History repeatedly shows what happens when government replaces voluntary decisions with political ones.
​
The better direction is free-market capitalism: restrain government spending, keep taxes low and broad-based, protect property rights, maintain sound money, reduce unnecessary regulation, and allow people to trade freely
.
Economic freedom isn’t primarily about corporations or statistics. It’s about people having the freedom to pursue their calling, support their families, start businesses, take risks, and improve their lives.

The evidence is overwhelming.
​
More economic freedom gives people more opportunities to prosper.

Originally published on Substack. 

​Four years ago this month, I launched Ginn Economic Consulting.

When I left the Texas Public Policy Foundation in September 2022, I honestly wasn’t sure what came next. I knew the work I cared about. I knew the principles I believed in. I knew I wanted to keep advancing policies that would help people prosper. But I didn’t know exactly what the path would look like.

Four years later, I feel truly blessed by what has happened.

What began as a new venture has grown into a more than half-million-dollar firm working with organizations across the country on fiscal policy, taxes, healthcare, regulation, energy, technology, economic freedom, and other major policy issues.

The work has included policy research, commentaries, testimony, media interviews, speeches, executive briefings, podcasts, strategic communications, and a growing library of ideas built around one mission:

Let people prosper.

Today, that work reaches a broad and influential audience. Across platforms, I have 60,000 subscribers and followers and generate more than 600,000 impressions each month.

The podcast side has become another major part of that platform. This Week’s Economy has reached Episode 184, while the Let People Prosper Show has reached Episode 220.

That is more than 400 episodes devoted to making economics understandable, telling better stories, having important conversations, and advancing solutions that expand opportunity and prosperity. You can follow the shows on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and now iHeart.

The work also connects to practical policy frameworks—from sustainable budgeting and empowering patients and doctors to technology, property-tax reform, energy abundance, and pro-growth construction policy.
I’m deeply grateful to the clients, partners, policymakers, readers, listeners, and friends who have trusted me along the way.

I’m especially thankful for Mollie Johnson at Three Brooks Marketing, who has helped sharpen strategy, strengthen communications, improve branding, and keep projects moving.

And Matt Webber at Logou Media, who has helped elevate the Let People Prosper Show and This Week’s Economy through stronger editing, production, clips, thumbnails, and consistency.

Looking back, four things have driven much of this small-business success:

Principles. Clarity. Networking. Productivity.

Know what you believe and why. Explain it so people can understand it. Build relationships and serve people well. Then consistently do the work.

Relationships create trust. Reputation compounds. Consistency beats virality. Serving clients well creates the next opportunity.

But above all, I feel blessed.

I didn’t know exactly what I would do after September 2022. Looking back, I believe this path has been what God wanted for my family and me.

My hope is that the blessing extends far beyond us—that the research, stories, conversations, relationships, and reforms flowing from this work help many more people experience greater liberty, opportunity, and prosperity.
The next chapter is about connecting:

Research → Narrative → Media → Clients → Policy Influence → Prosperity

I’m grateful for the first four years. And I’m just getting started!

Join me today—subscribe, listen, share the work, explore the policy guides, or partner with Ginn Economic Consulting as we build the next chapter. How can I help you?

When prices rise or resources become scarce, policymakers often respond by trying to control the outcome. But what if those interventions leave the underlying problem untouched?

In this episode of This Week’s Economy, I examine five current debates: federal deficits and inflation, H-1B visas, Texas data centers, prescription drug prices, and diesel exports. 

The issues are different, but the economic test is the same: What caused the problem, and does the proposed policy actually address that cause?

We explore why prices provide information about scarcity, how government can create its own bottlenecks, and why expanding supply, competition, innovation, and economic freedom can produce more lasting solutions.

Watch or listen to TWE 184 and get show notes and more at vanceginn.substack.com.

Originally published on Substack. 

Shareholders who believe a company is being sold unfairly should have a way to defend their property rights. But what happens when investors buy shares after a merger is announced because those shares also provide an opportunity to challenge the price in court?
​
That question is at the heart of the appraisal fight over Silver Lake’s acquisition of Endeavor Group Holdings. It also raises a broader question for policymakers: Do Delaware’s rules protect property rights while keeping the costs of investing and doing business low?

A $4.1 Billion Fight

Silver Lake acquired Endeavor in March 2025 for $27.50 per share, giving the company a roughly $13 billion equity value. The price was a 55% premium over Endeavor’s stock price before it announced a review of strategic alternatives.

Yet shareholders holding exactly 149,250,809 shares sought appraisal. Those shares were worth about $4.1 billion at the deal price⁠.

Under Section 262 of Delaware law⁠, qualifying shareholders in certain mergers can reject the merger price and ask the Court of Chancery to determine the “fair value” of their shares.

That protection can be valuable when shareholders believe insiders or controlling owners have treated them unfairly.

But incentives matter.

Buying Into the Lawsuit

Some investors can purchase shares after a merger has already been announced and then seek appraisal. They know the proposed deal price before investing and can pursue a higher court-determined value.

Research shows why this can be attractive. A major study of Delaware appraisal cases from 2000 through 2014 found that petitions increasingly shifted from individual shareholders toward specialized hedge funds. Petitioners earned an average annualized excess return of 32.9%⁠.

But there is another side. The researchers also found appraisal claims were more common in deals involving possible conflicts of interest, going-private transactions, minority squeeze-outs, and low acquisition premiums. Appraisal can therefore provide a useful check on unfair transactions.

The policy challenge is preserving that protection without making litigation itself an attractive investment strategy.

Rules Change Behavior

Delaware has already seen what happens when incentives change.

The state amended its appraisal law in 2016, and Delaware Supreme Court decisions later gave greater weight to market evidence such as the negotiated deal price. Appraisal filings subsequently fell sharply.

Research covering 2015 through 2019 found that average deal-level gross returns from appraisal arbitrage fell to 13.2%, compared with 98.2% during 2000–2014⁠. Even more telling, the judicially determined value relative to the deal price averaged negative 5.3% in the later period.

That is an important lesson for policymakers: Rules change incentives, and incentives change behavior.

Litigation Is Not Free

Buyers consider more than the purchase price when deciding whether to acquire a company. They also consider financing, taxes, regulations, legal expenses, and litigation risk.
If those expected costs rise, buyers may offer shareholders less, demand higher returns, or walk away from marginal deals.

Litigation risk can therefore operate much like a tax on investment. Government may not collect the money, but the added cost still affects decisions and redirects resources that could otherwise finance businesses, innovation, and workers.

Why Delaware Matters

This matters nationwide because Delaware is home to more than 2.28 million business entities and more than two-thirds of the Fortune 500⁠. Nearly 70% of U.S. companies completing initial public offerings in 2025 chose Delaware.

Delaware’s competitive advantage has long included predictable corporate law. Policymakers should protect it.
Shareholders deserve meaningful protection against unfair transactions. But policymakers should also examine whether buying shares after a merger announcement should provide the same opportunities to profit from appraisal litigation.

The goal should be clear: protect property rights, enforce contracts, keep the rules predictable, and minimize unnecessary barriers to voluntary transactions.

When legal uncertainty makes productive investment more expensive, fewer opportunities may make economic sense.

Better rules can protect shareholders while allowing more capital to flow toward productive uses that help people prosper.

​What happens when local governments try to do more while struggling to perform their basic responsibilities?

Mark Moses, Senior Fellow at the California Policy Center and author of The Municipal Financial Crisis, joins me to discuss municipal finances, public pensions, government balance sheets, AI, data centers, and the expanding scope of local government.

We examine why an annual balanced budget can hide longer-term financial problems, what taxpayers should understand about pension obligations, and how government policies can affect innovation and investment.

The broader question connects it all: What should local government actually do, and what happens when it tries to do too much?

This is also a natural follow-up to our first Let People Prosper conversation in 2022.

​Get show notes at vanceginn.substack.com. 

Originally published on Substack. 

You open a budgeting app and connect it to your checking account. Or maybe you apply for a mortgage and authorize another company to review your financial history. You should be able to decide who sees your information and how you use it.

But your data doesn’t move by magic. Someone builds the connection, protects it from hackers, verifies requests, monitors fraud, and maintains the technology.

Who should pay for all that?

That simple question is at the center of the fight over Section 1033 of Dodd-Frank⁠. With the Biden-era rule currently stayed and the Trump administration reconsidering it, Washington has another chance to get this right.

How We Got Here

Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act⁠ after the 2008 financial crisis. The massive 2010 law reshaped financial regulation and created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB.

Buried within Dodd-Frank is Section 1033. It generally requires covered financial companies to make certain information about a consumer’s financial products and services available to that consumer upon request.
That’s reasonable. Consumers should control their financial information. Not sure this requirement is necessary, as markets would work this out, but that’s the current law.

The Biden administration went much further. In 2024, the CFPB finalized its Personal Financial Data Rights rule⁠, creating an extensive framework for financial institutions to provide data electronically to consumers and authorized third parties. The problem isn’t consumer access. It’s Washington deciding how the market should provide it.

Zero Isn’t Free

As I explained in my 2025 report on Section 1033 at Americans for Tax Reform⁠, the rule prohibits covered providers from charging consumers or authorized third parties for required data access.

Consider what that means. Suppose you authorize a financial app to connect to your bank account every day. The app may benefit commercially from that connection, but your bank must build and maintain the secure infrastructure that makes the connection possible.

Engineers aren’t free. Cybersecurity isn’t free. Fraud monitoring, servers, software upgrades, and compliance aren’t free.

Washington can mandate a price of zero, but it cannot make the cost zero. Those costs will appear somewhere else through higher prices, reduced investment, fewer services, or some combination.

Imagine if Washington required one payment company to let its competitors use its network without compensation because the transaction ultimately belonged to the customer. We wouldn’t call that competition. We would call it a government mandate.

Consumer ownership of data and free access to someone else’s infrastructure are not the same thing.

Markets Were Working

The mandate is even harder to justify because financial companies were already solving these problems.

Banks, fintech companies, and data aggregators developed agreements and increasingly secure connections because consumers demanded them. Companies had incentives to make those connections easier and safer.

That’s how markets work. Consumers demand better services, entrepreneurs respond, businesses negotiate, and competing technologies improve.

Government should punish fraud and theft. It doesn’t need to determine every term of the transaction or set the price at zero.

Congress Should Decide

There is also a basic question of government authority. Section 1033 gives the CFPB rulemaking authority and directs it to promote standardized electronic formats. But the statutory language does not expressly mention APIs or data aggregators.

That deserves greater scrutiny after the Supreme Court’s Loper Bright⁠ decision⁠ overturned Chevron deference in 2024. Courts must independently determine what statutes authorize rather than deferring to an agency merely because the law is ambiguous.

Congress writes the laws. Regulators should implement them, not create new ones.

Another Chance

A federal court stayed the rule’s compliance dates⁠ in October 2025. Meanwhile, the CFPB is reconsidering major parts of the framework, including fees, data security, privacy, and who can act as a consumer’s representative.

As of late September 2026, that reconsideration remains at the proposed-rule stage and has been under White House Office of Management and Budget review since August.

Russ Vought, my former boss when I served as chief economist at OMB, now serves as acting CFPB director. The administration should use this opportunity to narrow Washington’s role rather than replace one sprawling rule with another.

Consumers should be able to obtain their information. Beyond that, companies should generally negotiate how they exchange data and what those services cost. Liability should follow the data, and reasonable security standards should apply to anyone handling sensitive information.

Let Markets Work

I’ve long argued that Congress should eliminate the CFPB and place legitimate consumer-protection responsibilities in more accountable institutions. But the immediate Section 1033 question is simpler.

Your financial data belongs to you. Someone else’s infrastructure doesn’t.

Washington should protect consumers, enforce contracts, and punish fraud. Prices should communicate costs, property rights should encourage investment, and competition should push companies to offer safer and better services.

That’s a much better model than having Washington decide the price is zero and pretending the cost disappeared. Let markets work so people can prosper.

​How Medicaid’s incentives affect taxpayers, states, doctors, and patients.

Nearly $2 billion recovered. More than 1,100 convictions. And $37.4 billion in estimated improper Medicaid payments. 

Those numbers matter, but they're not the whole story.

The bigger question I put on the table in this week's episode is: What incentives have we built into Medicaid itself?

Washington and the states share Medicaid costs. That can make another dollar of spending look relatively inexpensive from an individual state's budget, even though taxpayers ultimately finance the federal share too.

Then add provider taxes, intergovernmental financing, insurers, reimbursement rules, and layers of administration. The system can become better at moving money than empowering patients.

That's why I think reform needs to go beyond prosecuting fraud.

States should have more flexibility, paired with greater fiscal responsibility. Federal financing should reward better use of resources rather than simply encouraging additional qualifying spending. And reform shouldn't stop at the state capitol.
Put patients and doctors back at the center.

Patient-controlled healthcare dollars, direct primary care, useful price transparency, and greater provider competition can help reconnect the people receiving care with the people providing it.

Medicaid should remain a safety net for vulnerable Americans. That's precisely why its resources should be protected.

Watch or listen to the full episode and find more of my work at VanceGinn.substack.com.