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Kyle Wingfield| Opinion contributor

This is a column by Kyle Wingfield, president and CEO of theGeorgia Public Policy Foundation, a Libertarian-leaning policy think tank based in Atlanta.

No government, Ronald Reagan once observed, ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth!

That was true when Reagan said it almost 60 years ago. Nothing in the intervening years has proven him wrong.

Trouble is, nowadays were launching government programs by the trillions of dollars. And theres depressingly little reason to believe well see them disappear once the crisis used to justify them has ended.

Consider the stimulus package Congress passed in 2009, in the name of fighting the previous recession. That package, which eventually weighed in at more than $800 billion, was alleged to be one-time funding that would indeed disappear.

No such luck. Federal spending in 2009 surpassed $3 trillion for the first time, checking in at just over $3.5 trillion. It never again fell below $3.4 trillion. The one-time stimulus spending simply came to be baked into the cake.

Every number I just cited is fairly quaint by todays standards. Congress spent $3.5 trillion last year on COVID-19 relief bills alone, tacking on another $1.9 trillion earlier this year.

If you dont think these mind-boggling sums are on track to become permanent features of the federal landscape, recall that President Joe Biden has proposed more than $4 trillion in additional new spending. At least that amount would be spent over the course of several years. On the other hand, its only May; more proposals are probably on the way.

Just as the sweets you eat today will hang around your waistline well after tomorrow if you dont do something about it, consider one specific example of where thats likely to happen: education spending.

For decades now, spending on public education has been rising steadily, well out of line with increases in student enrollment (which has risen much more modestly) or standardized test scores (which have been mostly flat). Yet, the only refrain we hear from the education establishment is that our schools are underfunded.

We hear that even now, with costs related to the pandemic offered as a reason. Thats not really a reason. Its an excuse.

Georgia has 180 city and county school districts. After the 2019 fiscal year, the last one completed before the pandemic, their collective financial reserves were almost $3.2 billion. A year later, after the brutal first few months of the pandemic, and the attendant costs of moving suddenly to virtual platforms such as WiFi hotspots and laptops for students, that number was wait for it almost $3.8 billion.

Thats right: Georgia school districts collective reserves increased by more than $600 million even as things were collapsing all around them.

To be fair, not every district fared so well. Thirty-five districts saw their fund balances fall, some by several million dollars. But far more enjoyed increases, by more than $1 million apiece for almost half of the districts.

Its true that districts have since weathered two years of austerity cuts to their state funding, totaling almost $730 million. Even so, thats a fraction of the nearly $6.8 billion theyve received so far in federal emergency funding.

Add it all up changes in reserve funds, decreases in state funding and surges of federal funding and Georgias school districts are better off by more than $6.6 billion. Thats most of the way toward doubling their annual state funding. And every single district, even the ones that spent down some of their reserves, was net positive.

If you believe the education establishment will simply watch that money disappear, Ive got a desert in southeast Georgia to sell you.

It wont be long before we hear this money described not gratefully as a lifeline during a difficult time, but solemnly as how we should have been funding education all along.

There will be little accounting for how it was spent or what it achieved. Itll just become the baseline against which all future education spending is measured.

For once, Id prefer we prove Ronald Reagan wrong.

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Wingfield: Reagan's words on government programs still ring true - Savannah Morning News

A Georgia House committee on Thursday debated how much power social media companies should have to control content.

It comes as some Republicans notably former President Donald Trump have been banned for posting inflammatory statements.

Theres consensus among lawmakers that obscene posts or those that incite violence should not be allowed. But when it comes to opinions such as the false claims by Trump and his supporters that the Georgia election was stolen there is less clarity about where social media companies should draw the line.

James Taylor with the libertarian think-tank The Heartland Institute spoke before the House Science & Technology Committee. He says the First Amendment should be interpreted broadly.

Its more than simply a prohibition against government restricting our unalienable rights, Taylor said. It is an embodiment of our rights that cannot be taken away by any entity.

Taylor says more than 30 states are considering legislation to address what he calls censorship by social media companies. He says some of those bills have been proposed by Democrats.

When tech companies choose to become involved in the 21st century version of the public square and decide who or what points of view may be shared, I think thats very troubling, said Taylor.

Democratic Rep. Viola Davis says she values protecting free speech but also has concerns about the effects of hate speech and the incitement of violence.

When do we cross that line? And when do we hold people accountable that cross that line? asked Davis.

Democratic state Rep. Shea Roberts says terms of use agreements clearly spell out what social media companies can and cant do.

I dont see how thats different than other private companies making choices about how they want to run their business, said Roberts.

She also says there are countless other social media platforms for people to use if they disagree with the rules set out by Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Rep. Chuck Martin, a Republican, says social media companies should not favor one political viewpoint over the other. But he also cautions about government getting involved.

This is just something that one has to look and be very careful that theres not an overstep and be very careful that we dont express our subjectivity over the top of another set of subjectivity, Martin said. Because by doing that, were not making it any better, and we could actually be making it worse.

The committee did not discuss or propose any specific pieces of legislation Thursday.

Chairman Ed Setzler, a Republican, says he plans more hearings before deciding how or even if state lawmakers have a role to play in regulating social media.

We do well to define, Is there a problem, whats the nature of the problem, and if there is a problem, is it something the Legislature should address? Maybe we shouldnt, said Setzler.

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Georgia Lawmakers Grapple With Role Of Social Media Companies And Free Speech | 90.1 FM WABE - WABE 90.1 FM

Libertarian: NY Leads on Crazy COVID Codes

On Sunday mornings, Jerry Orbach Theater transforms into a church, allowing the 199-seat off-Broadway venue to fill to 50 percent capacity, writes Reasons Eric Boehm. A few hours later, its restricted to 33 percent for a performance of Perfect Crime, New Yorks longest-running play. That the exact same physical space that cant host more than 66 people for a performance is somehow considered safe when up to 99 people gather there to pray and sing together is a lingering reminder of the arbitrary and often nonsensical rules that have governed Americans lives and livelihoods for the past year. Thanks to Gov. Cuomo, New York has been a national leader in proving arbitrary restrictions on economic behavior are a poor way to fight this, or any, public health scourge.

Scientists: Duly Investigate Virus Origins

In an open letter to Science magazine, 18 scientists urge a proper investigation into COVID-19s origins. Theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover from, say, bats, both remain viable, but the China-World Health Organization study that found no clear support of either didnt give them balanced consideration: Just 4 of the 313 pages of the report and its annexes addressed the possibility of a laboratory accident. Knowing COVIDs origins is critical for mitigating the risk of future outbreaks. We need a probe that is transparent, objective, data-driven, inclusive of broad expertise, subject to independent oversight and responsibly managed to minimize the impact of conflicts of interest.

Conservative: Bidens Mideast Mess

Events in Israel, observes Victoria Coates at National Review, are eerily similar to those in summer 2014. Iran, then buoyed by talks with the Obama administration, empowered its terrorist proxy Hamas to attack Israel from Gaza and the US response delighted it. President Barack Obama was so enraged by the Jewish states audacity in defending itself, he ordered additional review on an urgent Israeli request for additional Hellfire missiles. Israel de-escalated as Obama demanded, leaving Hamas bloodied but still intact to plot future offenses, while Iranian officials, convinced they had their desired negotiating partners, signed the nuclear deal with its highly favorable terms. President Biden is returning to those failed policies, claiming moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas, providing the Palestinians unconditional aid and giving Tehran hope for sanctions relief, which has the regime upping its financial support for Hamas from $70 million a year to $30 million a month. In just 100 days, Biden has completely undermined the extended period of relative calm and expanding peace under President Donald Trump.

Diplomats: Keep the Line 5 Pipeline Flowing

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmers order to shut the Line 5 pipeline based on environmental concerns is threatening US-Canadian relations, warn former US ambassador to Canada David Jacobson and ex-Canadian envoy Gary Doer at The Wall Street Journal. You dont have to look far to see the consequences of such a shutdown the Eastern Seaboard just lived through them when the Colonial Pipeline halted operations. Line 5 supplies nearly half of Michigans propane, 45 percent of Ontario and Quebecs fuel needs and thousands of jobs. In 2012, diplomats managed to resolve a similar dispute involving a bridge connecting Detroit and Ontario; President Biden, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Whitmer need to do likewise. Millions are depending on it for their homes, jobs and businesses.

Foreign desk: How IDF Tricked Hamas

An Israel Defense Forces tweet last week announced that air and ground troops are currently attacking in the Gaza Strip, and, smiles Jake Wallis Simons at Spectator USA, nobody noted the careful ambiguity. Media assumed that meant the IDF was preparing a ground invasion and so did Hamas. The result: By evening, Hamas fighters had prepared for battle, swarming into the metro tunnels and manning positions in the open. Both those below and above ground were summarily wiped out by Israeli jets. Bonus: The trick siphoned Hamas fighters away from civilian centers, sparing innocent lives.

Compiled by The Post Editorial Board

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NY leads on crazy COVID codes and other commentary - New York Post

Westmoreland, County, Pa. The race is on for the special election for the 59th Legislative District for the State House representing parts of Westmoreland and Somerset counties.

The vacancy was left when Rep. Mike Reese suddenly died in January after being elected to a seventh consecutive term in the fall.

It was reported that Reese died peacefully with his family by his side, at 42 years old, Saturday afternoon at Excela Health Westmoreland Hospital in Greensburg following an apparent brain aneurysm.

[LIVE UPDATES: Pennsylvanias primary election]

Mariah Fisher is known to the local political landscape as a Ligonier Borough Council Member.

Republican Leslie Rossi is best known as the Trump House Creator in Youngstown.

Libertarian Robb Luther is a political newcomer.

Channel 11 made attempts to meet up with Rossi, who said she was spending the day in Somerset county before returning to Westmoreland later this evening. We caught up with Fisher and Luther this afternoon about how the last couple of months of campaigning has boiled down.

I think we should have choices in these elections. These local and state races are important and they affect our daily lives, and I think people need to know that and get involved and get out there and vote, Fisher explained.

My North Star is personal liberty and fiscal conservative spending. I wont spend a dollar more unless were saving a dollar and a quarter more, Luther stated.

Unlike other primary races, you do not need to be affiliated with a party to cast your vote.

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Special Election: The race to fill seat left vacant by death of Rep. Mike Reese - WPXI Pittsburgh

Evan McMullin, a conservative ex-CIA analyst so disgusted with former President Donald Trump that he launched an independent presidential campaign in 2016, got on 11 state ballots, and finished in fifth place with 0.5 percent of the popular vote, has co-announced on Thursday a "new political movement" of 150 mostly right-of-center political figures, including former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld, former Rep. Joe Walsh (RIll.), and former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, three conservatives so disgusted with Trump that they ran against him in the 2020 GOP presidential primary and lost by a combined 93 percentage points.

In a joint letter precipitated by the removal of Rep. Liz Cheney (RWyo.) from Republican leadership in the House of Representatives, and patterned consciously after the Declaration of Independence, McMullin and his anti-Trump co-signatories "declare our intent to catalyze an American renewal, and to either reimagine a party dedicated to our founding ideals or else hasten the creation of such an alternative."

As a political project, the would-be catalyzers face extremely long odds. The playing field of American politics these past six years has been littered with the corpses of failed or stillborn attempts to challenge Trump from the right. The only lasting third-party alternative in that span "dedicated to our founding ideals" is one that has put in a half-century of grunt work to get one percent of the vote.

But as a media and fundraising initiative, the effort may find more fertile terrain. McMullin's co-organizer of American Renewal is Miles Taylor, a government security analyst known mostly for being the anonymous author of the 2018 New York Times op-ed "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration," which he then spun into the bestselling 2019 book A Warning. In August 2020, a no-longer-anonymous Taylor accused his former boss of "playingon the Russian team and not the American team," and filmed a two-minute advertisement for Republican Voters Against Trump, a project launched by the 501(c)(4) group Republicans for the Rule of Law, which was co-founded by veteran Washington commentator and political schemer Bill Kristol.

"I'm still a Republican, but I'm hanging on by the skin of my teeth because how quickly the party has divorced itself from truth and reason," Taylor told The New York Times this week. "I'm one of those in the group that feels very strongly that if we can't get the G.O.P. back to a rational party that supports free minds, free markets, and free people, I'm out and a lot of people are coming with me."

Those people attracted to such concepts as truth, reason, "free minds," and "free markets" may find themselves nodding along to some of the principles espoused in the letter, especially if they have a strong stomach for portentous language. (The first line of the declaration reads: "These United States, born of noble convictions and aspiring to high purpose, have been an exemplar of self-government to humankind.")

McMullin, Taylor, & Co. favor "open, market-based economiesconsistent with our natural liberty," reject "populism and illiberalism, whether of the right or the left," and stress that "it is the prerogative of all to make personal decisions in accordance with their free will." They want to welcome lawful immigrants, keep regulation limited, and protect property rights. So far, so unobjectionable.

Where the manifesto begins to diverge most sharply from the Libertarian Party platform is the unspecific yet ambitious paragraph titled "Leadership": "Having thrived in the abundance of a choice land, we believe that these United States must work in conjunction with friends and allies to advance worthy interests abroad and to promote freedom by example and with the judicious application of power."

This passage, in a document arranged by two security-state veterans, and unveiled in the service of supporting Liz Cheney, is a good prompt to cross-check some of the names on the bottom of the petition. Sure enough, #NeverTrump 6.0 is endorsed by several people with fingerprints all over an activist foreign policy.

There is Michael Hayden, former director of both the CIA and the National Security Agency, who lied to Congress about torture programs, has likened air strikes to "casual sex," and made jokes about putting Edward Snowden on a kill list. There is former national intelligence director and serial ambassador to geostrategic countries (Honduras in the 1980s, Iraq in the aughts) John Negroponte, former State Department counselor and World War IV booster Eliot A. Cohen, and former Department of Homeland Security chief and indefinite-detention enthusiast Michael Chertoff, among several other lesser-known veterans of the George W. Bush administration.

Many of these same people lent their names to anti-Trump efforts in 2016 on foreign policy grounds, then cheered on the Russia-related investigations that dogged the 45th president, and are now threatening to start their own party if Trumpism isn't sufficiently cleansed from the GOP.

That pro-market anti-Trumpers are talking about a third party while ignoring the Libertarians, even though one of the signatories (Weld) ran as the L.P. vice presidential nominee as recently as 2016, touches on each of the three main obstacles to herding Trump-averse non-Democrats into anything like a single tent.

1) The three biggest anti-Trump blocs are ideologically incompatible. It has been clear since the dawn of the Trump era that opposition to the crudely mannered America First mercantilist would come most intensely from foreign policy hawks (John McCain, John Kasich, Bill Kristol), libertarian-leaners (Justin Amash, Mark Sanford, George Will), and Mormons (Evan McMullin, Mitt Romney, Jeff Flake).

While Latter-day Saints members can swing between hawkery and dovery (just think of the significant ideological split between Utah's Republican delegation to the U.S. Senate), the fault lines are obvious: Libertarians and neocons generally dislike one another, and even the most loosey-goosey of Mormons have a hard time embracing the full legal logic of personal autonomy for consenting adults. Any movement that requires these camps to get along will likely be short-term and transactional, not unlike the 2016 third-party voters who in 2020 held their noses to vote for President Joe Biden.

2) Noisy anti-Trumpism is mostly incompatible with holding elected office as a Republican. The American Renewal letter signatures look like the roster of a political reunion for the Class of '95. In addition to two-time Massachusetts Gov. Weld, there's former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, former California Rep. Tom Campbell, former Minnesota Gov. Arne Carlson, former Oklahoma Rep. Mickey Edwards, former Maryland Rep. Wayne Gilchrest, and dozens of others unburdened by the need to win reelection from the modern Republican electorate.

Of the vanishingly few current office-holders on the list, they tend to share a rare characteristic: recent defection from the GOP. Jim Hendren was the Republican majority leader of the Arkansas Senate until this January, when, disgusted by the Capitol riot, he stepped down from leadership, and then the next month left the party altogether. And California State Assemblyman Chad Mayes, the former Republican minority leader, left the party in late 2019 after drawing fire for his criticisms of Trump.

Prior to his departure, Mayes engaged in the kind of Third Way/No Labels activity common among many signatories of the American Renewal letter. From his Wikipedia page:

In January 2018, Mayes formed "New Way California," aiming to broaden the appeal of the Republican Party by advocating for "individual freedom, shared responsibility, educational excellence, environmental stewardship, efficient government and an open economy." The group has been publicly supported by former governorArnold Schwarzenegger, and both Mayes and Schwarzenegger along withOhio governorJohn Kasich headlined the group's inaugural summit inLos Angeleson March 21.The summit was criticized by some in theCalifornia Republican Party, including former chairman Ron Nehring, who described them as "elites talking down to grassroots voters."

As an independent and non-fan of Trump, I share the Renewalists' embarrassment at mainstream GOP fear of crossing Trump voters. Yet that is the world we live in. If you want to hold office as a Republican, and spend any measurable amount of time criticizing the former president, you better have a safe seat, stature, and bank vaults full of cash. Even then, you're going to get booed.

3) At a time of intense negative polarization, centrist scolds are popular mostly in limited corners of the media, and among opportunistic anti-Trump partisans. See: Jeff Flake, Howard Schultz, John Kasich, etc.

Arguably the most successful anti-Trump centrist initiative, at least as measured by revenue and media reach, has been The Lincoln Project, a political action committee of former GOP political operatives that raised scores of millions of dollars from Democrats to run anti-Trump ads in 2020. The project has been dogged by all kinds of scandal and controversy, particularly after the election was safely delivered to Biden.

Three of the American Renewal signatoriesGeorge Conway, Jennifer Horn, and Mike Madridwere co-founders of The Lincoln Project; former Michigan GOP executive Jeff Timmer, too, has been a key member. Evan McMullin's most likely path to success lies less in the direction of dreary third-party construction, and more in a Lincoln Project-style initiative to raise money and make noise about the Republican Party's regnant Trumpism.

But there's an obstacle on that road, too. America's high alert about Trump has nowhere to go but down. The man is not the president, he is not going to be the president, and most people worried about such have moved on with their lives. Sure, I would love to see a GOP that explicitly rejects its most internally popular figure, just as I would love to see a Democratic Party worried about the national debt. In either case, the short-term chances of that happening are the same: slim, none, and fat.

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Will a Coalition of Hawks, Mormons, and Libertarian-Leaners Form a New Third Party? - Reason