When Abdul El-Sayed ran for governor of Michigan in 2018, progressive media hailed him as the next Barack Obama. El-Sayed did not appreciate the comparison. "I get compared to Obama because my name is funny, and I'm brown, and my politics are about inspiring us to believe in each other again," he told Vox at the time.

In El-Sayed's telling, Obama was a "fairly centrist, middle-of-the-road" Democrat. He did not intend that as a compliment. El-Sayed believed the administration's policies were not nearly progressive enough—indeed, he believed Obama had betrayed the agenda he ran on. The far-reaching financial, environmental, and labor regulations that Obama pushed through were not nearly enough for El-Sayed.

El-Sayed ultimately fell short in the 2018 Democratic gubernatorial primary. Eight years later, he's a much savvier political operative; now running for the U.S. Senate, he has welcomed Obama's support this time. Yet El-Sayed's commitment to a left-wing agenda has hardly diminished. If he defeats his opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers (R–Mich.), he will be one of the most far-left politicians to win a statewide election in recent memory—and in a purple-ish swing state that President Donald Trump won twice.

Like his friend and mentor Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), El-Sayed is not a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA); unlike Sanders, El-Sayed maintains that he is a capitalist rather than a socialist. Yet his political project has much in common with the DSA, and he has given every indication that he will align himself with DSA-affiliated members of Congress—veterans such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) and likely newcomers such as Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez, both of New York, who rode similar waves of populist resentment to victory over establishment Democrats.

El-Sayed's left-wing bona fides were evident during his debate with Rogers on October 8. The Democrat proposed giving the federal government vast new powers: up to 50 percent control over AI companies, a socialized health insurance program along the lines of Medicare for All, and price controls on the domestic oil industry. Asked what he would do to bring down the national debt and pay for all the new spending he wants, he had a simple, three-word answer: "Tax. Billionaire. Wealth."

El-Sayed's support for higher taxes exempts one important constituency: seniors. Like many Democrats—and Republicans such as Rep. Nancy Mace (R–S.C.)—El-Sayed wants to exempt retirees from property tax increases, a policy that critics have branded "total boomer luxury communism" because it forces younger, less wealthy Americans to shoulder ever more of the social burden. The new wave of leftist Democrats think that higher taxes on the 1 percent, combined with cuts to the military budget, would be sufficient to pay down the debt while vastly expanding the social safety net.

In fact, El-Sayed has proposed tying Pentagon spending to education, such that an increase in money for the military would necessitate more funding toward schools. Don't expect this to work the other way around: Under El-Sayed's plan, a decrease in Pentagon spending would not force the government to stop throwing so much money at failing schools.

Ann Arbor and Onward

El-Sayed was born on Halloween in 1984. He grew up in Bloomfield Hills, an affluent, predominantly white suburb north of Detroit. His parents divorced when he was young, and El-Sayed lived with his Egyptian father and white stepmother. In high school, he was captain of the football, wrestling, and lacrosse teams. He continued to play on a club lacrosse team at the University of Michigan, which he attended from 2003 to 2007. (We overlapped briefly, though I never met him: I attended Michigan from 2006 to 2010.)

That meant going to Ann Arbor, a progressive college town with a long history of radical activism. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the prototypical '60s New Left student activist group, was founded in Ann Arbor in 1960; its first president, Alan Haber, still lives there. The White Panther Party, a sort of hippie counterpart to the Black Panthers, was based in Ann Arbor for a while; in the 1970s, the socialist Human Rights Party won multiple seats on city council. Liberalism, as well as radicalism, has thrived in Ann Arbor: The same year the SDS was born, future President John F. Kennedy came to the town to propose the international volunteer organization that eventually emerged as the Peace Corps. In the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries, the student-run Michigan Daily naturally endorsed the inspirational liberal candidate, Obama, over the establishment favorite, Hillary Clinton.

Over the course of the next decade—as left-wing enthusiasm for the Obama project faded and was replaced by bitter disappointment—El-Sayed enrolled in Oxford University and then Columbia University, pursuing a career in public health. (He never completed a residency, which has led to some scrutiny, even from friendly media figures, regarding his decision to describe himself as a physician.) In 2015, the mayor of Detroit appointed him the city's executive health officer. He resigned that position in 2017 to run for governor. That pattern repeated itself a few years later: He was appointed health director of Wayne County, which includes Detroit, in 2022, and resigned in 2025 to run for Senate.

Unlike in 2018, El-Sayed's hard-left politics and contempt for the Democratic establishment were now well-calibrated to prevail in the primaries. He defeated a more moderate candidate, Rep. Haley Stevens (D–Mich.), in part due to her support for Israel—an issue that El-Sayed frequently discusses. The same phenomenon has played out all over the country, with establishment Democratic figures paying a huge price when perceived as indifferent to voter outrage over Israel.

What works in the Democratic primaries does not always do as well in the general election. But while El-Sayed's politics are well to the left of the state he seeks to represent, the president's unpopularity may be enough to push him over the finish line. El-Sayed is narrowly ahead of Rogers in the latest polling. The Republican has finally resorted to breaking with the president on key policy issues—he has said that he wishes to end some of Trump's tariffs, conceding that "Canada is not our enemy"—but it may be too little too late.

Moreover, El-Sayed's left-wing foreign policy positions, which are not necessarily antithetical to libertarian views, count for more in Michigan than in other places. The state has a significant Arab-American population that politicians have ignored at their peril. In 2024, dissatisfaction with President Joe Biden's failure to curtail Israel's war on Gaza prompted many Arabs in Michigan to cast ballots for Green Party candidate Jill Stein, or even Trump, over Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. Republicans have sought to portray El-Sayed as insufficiently supportive of Israel, but that doesn't always play well in Michigan—particularly at a time when dissatisfaction with Trump's blunders in the Middle East is strong among Democrats, independents, and even many Republicans.

El-Sayed does have a possible Achilles heel on foreign policy: His association with the far-left Twitch streamer Hasan Piker. To many outside observers, the candidate's courting of Piker reads as a huge unforced error. Not only did El-Sayed seek the approval of an internet personality best known for praising authoritarian governments and evincing sympathy for terrorist groups, but he brought Piker to Michigan, put him in front of a camera, and made him a de facto representative of the campaign. For everyone except the toxically online, Piker is a bizarre and marginal shock jock, a man who says things like "America deserved 9/11." Piker is what happens when you pay too much attention to podcasts. He is also a reminder that while the insurgent left often claims to speak for ordinary, blue-collar working people, its agenda tends to be most popular with the affluent and elite-educated. In El-Sayed's showdown with Stevens, polls had her up 22 points with noncollege voters and 46 points with black voters. (Stevens herself is white.)

Yet El-Sayed prevailed, and he dealt with the Piker issue by shunting him to the sidelines. When asked about Piker, El-Sayed dutifully recites that a Twitch streamer from California has nothing to do with a Senate race in Michigan. (The obvious retort is Well, you brought him here.) He has also adopted right-coded language to explain why he should not be held responsible for Piker's inflammatory comments, telling Politico that he was over "this whole gotcha game, platform policing, cancel culture."

The GOP, meanwhile, may have gone overboard in the other direction. Rogers, a traditional Republican more in the George W. Bush mold than the Trump mold, is not exactly a right-wing firebrand, yet he could not stop himself from suggesting that El-Sayed has some sort of connection to Islamic terrorists. Just as Democrats should genuinely worry that linking up with people like Piker will cost them Jewish votes, Republicans should think more about whether reflexively calling Muslims terrorists is a bad strategy to win in Michigan.

After all, the form of radicalism that El-Sayed typifies is not really Islamic. It's not even foreign. It's the radicalism of left-wing economics, of making the federal government larger and more robust. He wants to prohibit corporations from buying houses and to punish companies like Airbnb over "housing dislocation." He wants to raise the capital gains tax, the inheritance tax, and the top marginal tax rates. He wants to give the Federal Trade Commission expansive new powers. He thinks higher education should be free for everyone. If he makes it to the Senate, El-Sayed will be a reliable vote for the Sanders agenda, including moratoriums on new data center construction, a much stronger Environmental Protection Agency, and, of course, Medicare for All. Indeed, one of El-Sayed's most frequent criticisms of Obama over the years has been that the Affordable Care Act did not go nearly far enough, and that it may have even been counterproductive to the mission of building a socialist health system.

Obama appeared alongside El-Sayed in Detroit on October 24. The candidate was savvy enough not to bring up his thoughts about Obamacare.

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This Week on Free Media

I explain why it would be wrong to nationalize Elon Musk's companies.

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Worth Watching

I finally watched You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder's quasi-documentary about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. It was made with considerable technical skill, and there's plenty to like about it—but ultimately I landed in the same camp as Reason's Christian Britschgi. We will discuss the film on this week's episode of Freed Up; look for that later today on the Free Media YouTube page.

The post Abdul El-Sayed Is a Socialist in All but Name appeared first on Reason Magazine.

"We will always protect Social Security, Medicare!" says President Donald Trump.

That would be nice.

But when I look at these programs' balance sheets, I don't see how he's protected anything. Both Social Security and Medicare are on track to run out of money.

Politicians mostly ignore the problem. Worse, progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) say they want to expand Social Security benefits.

That's just irresponsible.

My new video points out what we've known for years: These programs are unsustainable.

The problem is that people like me live longer. We like getting monthly Social Security checks and medical care that appears free.

Since we vote more consistently than others, politicians don't want to make us mad by cutting our handouts.

My fellow geezers say, "Social Security is not a handout! I contributed to the 'trust fund' every year. I'm just getting back what I paid in!"

But that's not true. Today, most of us get back much more than we paid in.

In 1935, politicians created the handout, saying, even if you don't save for retirement, government will save for you.

But that was another political lie. They didn't create individual retirement accounts. They didn't save our Social Security payments. They spend every penny as it comes in.

It's why Social Security is like a Ponzi scheme.

Bernard Madoff went to jail because he used new investors' money to pay old investors. That's exactly what our government does.

Few Americans realize it.

"What happens to the money?" I ask people on the street.

"It's held in trust," said one woman.

It isn't.

When politicians started Social Security, there were enough young workers to tax to cover the cost of sending checks to old people.

But now, since we live longer, there aren't enough young workers to fund our payments.

Social Security's costs exceed its income by billions of dollars.

"There is a plan out there to save it, but it requires some tough choices," says the Cato Institute's Romina Boccia. "Commonsense tweaks we can make."

Those include raising the retirement age, capping checks to the affluent, and letting young people opt out of Social Security. Reforms like that require tradeoffs. But ignoring the problem doesn't make it disappear.

We need to act, says Boccia, because Social Security is like the Titanic—gradually heading for disaster.

"Make reforms now," she says, "we can avoid the iceberg. [But] if we wait until the iceberg is in front of our noses and try to turn the ship, we're going to run right into it."

Medicare will hit its iceberg in 2033; then benefits will automatically be reduced. Social Security will hit it the year before.

At that point, incoming taxes will cover only about 78 percent of promised retirement benefits.

Yet irresponsible Democrats say: Spend even more.

"Human wants and needs are unlimited," replies Boccia. "There's always another program that needs more funding."

Sanders says, pay for it by taxing the rich more.

"There isn't enough money even that the rich would have, to pay for the…unfunded liabilities," Boccia points out.

If only politicians had listened years ago, when Cato and the Heritage Foundation proposed letting workers put some of their Social Security money into personal retirement accounts. Instead of relying on future taxpayers, workers could accumulate real assets that grow over time.

Personal accounts give workers something Social Security doesn't: assets we own.

"Even a conservative portfolio of stocks and bonds that got you a 5 percent annual return would have made you many times more [than Social Security]," says Boccia.

Private accounts helped Chile rise from one of the poorest countries in Latin America to one of the richest. Yet leftists still object to capitalists getting a cut of the pie.

"We lack gratitude for what the free market provides," says Boccia.

We should adjust these programs now.

The longer politicians wait, the worse the choices become.

But today's politicians will probably be gone by then.

Our children get the bill.

COPYRIGHT 2026 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.

The post Social Security Is Like a Ponzi Scheme. How Do We Fix It? appeared first on Reason Magazine.

With little more than two weeks to go until the midterm elections, it seems increasingly possible that the Democrats, already a big favorite to win control of the House of Representatives, will also take charge of the planet's most elite nursing home, the United States Senate, where the median age is 64 years old. RealClearPolitics' poll aggregator has moved control of "the world's greatest deliberative body" (as its members are grandiosely wont to call it) to "toss up," status and prediction markets are now breaking big toward a blue wave. As of this writing, Kalshi has its Senate odds at 63 percent for the Dems vs. 37 percent for the GOP; Polymarket is at 62 percent vs. 39 percent.

As gratifying as it might be to see unprincipled Trump enablers reduced to minority status after signing off on economy-wrecking tariffs, inhumane immigration detentions, and wars of choice, there's at least one good reason to dread a Democratic majority too: Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts progressive who is spending the run-up to the midterms freaking out over possible consolidation in the condiments business and accusing private equity firms of gutting such shopping-mall favorites as Claire's and Toys R Us. There's every reason to believe that a Senate run by Warren and other economic interventionists will waste time, money, and resources trying to prevent a world in which, per the X wag Iowahawkblog, "a panopticon conglomerate owns two brands of hot sauce."

On October 13, Warren posted this dire warning to X:

Hellmann's mayo
McCormick spices
Cholula hot sauce
Frank's RedHot

What do these products have in common? One company could soon control them all.

I have concerns that McCormick and Unilever's $45 billion merger could increase YOUR grocery prices.

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) October 13, 2026

It's hard to think of a more competitive and varied market than the one for hot sauces, which is expected to more than double over the next decade. The barriers to entry are generally low, as are the key ingredients, and new entrants can easily market and sell online, avoiding the costs of buying shelf space in conventional supermarkets. Yet Warren is urging regulators at the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission to halt mergers of both product makers like McCormick and Unilever and grocery stores like Kroger and Giant Eagle.

The latter complaint is particularly picayune. Kroger is one of the country's largest supermarket chains, operating around 2,800 stores under its own name as well as Harris Teeter, Ralph's, and others. Giant Eagle operates about 170 stores. This merger is no more the stuff of nightmares than a single company producing both Cholula and Frank's RedHot. If Warren gains more clout from being in the majority, expect her to butt in more and more on such mergers.

Making it harder for businesses to adapt is not a recipe for making goods and services more affordable. But Warren is keen to blame economic creative destruction not on "new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates" (as Joseph Schumpeter would have it), but on pure greed. In a TikTok released earlier this month, she shows a poster board with corporate logos from once-thriving companies that she says have been "gutted" by "private equity" firms.

"Here's your local mall," she piously intones. "Now, private equity wants you to believe that Red Lobster went bankrupt because of their endless shrimp….They want you to believe that Claire's went bankrupt because teens stopped shopping at the mall." In Warren's telling, private equity firms magically take over thriving businesses and then strip them bare. The typical pattern is that private equity enters the picture after a business is failing.

Virtually all accounts of the decline of, for example, Red Lobster, note that the chain had been spiraling for several reasons before the private equity firm Golden Gate Capital got involved in 2014. As this CNN article notes, the chain, which started in 1968, had seen drops in sales as customer desires changed. Management compounded the difficulties with a series of bad decisions, including continuing various all-you-can-eat menu specials, before coming out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year.

Similarly, it's true that some teens still go to malls and get their ears pierced at Claire's. But anyone who has spent time in retail America over the past few decades knows that malls are no longer the destination that they once were. As CapitalOne Shopping Research documents, "in 1986, there were 25,000 malls, large and small, nationwide." By 2023, that number had shrunk to just 1,200. While some malls are coming back, most are not, and for reasons that have nothing to do with private equity. Online retails plays a role (though a smaller one than usually imagined, with e-commerce accounting for less than 20 percent of all retail sales). But mostly, it's that people today tend to want a different sort of retail environment. Anchor stores—think Macy's and J.C. Penney—are shadows of themselves, and younger people have less unstructured time in which to prowl food courts and arcades.

For politicians like Elizabeth Warren, though, there can be no financial gains or losses that aren't the result of shadowy, conspiratorial forces. If her party takes control of the Senate, her words will carry more weight. But it will be American consumers that ultimately shoulder the burden of an even-more-regulated economy. The market for hot sauces will almost certainly stay spicy, but many other parts will surely suffer.

The post Be Prepared for Elizabeth Warren's Reign of Economic Error appeared first on Reason Magazine.

In recent years, one of the predominant policy initiatives of the progressive left has been raising the minimum wage in locales around the country. At the same time, left-leaning politicians have sought the elimination of what's known as the tip credit, which allows employers to pay restaurant servers and other tipped employees a lower hourly base wage that they then bolster with gratuities.

Just a few years into this experiment, however, policymakers are showing signs of an about-face on the tip credit's abolition as they grapple with the unfortunate, and predictable, economic results.

In 2022, Washington, D.C., made news headlines when voters passed Initiative 82. As originally designed, it would have repealed the tip credit and required servers to be paid the District's full statutory minimum wage by 2027. (D.C.'s minimum wage was $16.10 per hour in 2022, but has since risen to $18.40 due to inflation indexation.) Prior to Initiative 82, D.C. servers could be paid a $5.35 tipped wage, so long as they earned enough tips to make up the difference between the lower tipped wage and the higher traditional minimum wage.

D.C.'s Initiative 82 was just the beginning. One Fair Wage, a progressive group that lobbies against subminimum wages, quarterbacked an all-out push to eliminate the tip credit in jurisdictions across America. Chicago became the second prominent city to follow suit. States like New York, Connecticut, and Illinois also quickly saw legislation introduced to eliminate the tip credit at a statewide level. (Apart from this recent wave, a small handful of American states—including California, Oregon, and Alaska—have long operated without a tip credit).

But just when it seemed like momentum against the tip credit had reached its apex, progressive politicians started to see the writing on the wall. In the aftermath of the tip credit's repeal, D.C. saw a close to 5 percent decline in full-service restaurant jobs. Tipped worker earnings also dropped by just under $12 million—likely a result, at least in part, of restaurants reducing hours for staff in the face of higher labor costs. At the same time, many D.C. restaurants began implementing service fees or so-called auto-gratuity policies that added mandatory 10-20 percent charges onto customers' bills.

Mugged by this economic reality, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser called for the full repeal of Initiative 82. Ultimately, the D.C. Council settled for a partial repeal in 2025, maintaining at least some semblance of a tipped wage that sits below the traditional minimum wage into the years ahead (although the tipped wage eventually rises to 75 percent of the traditional wage by 2034). This was a familiar story: The council had previously repealed Initiative 77, a near-identical attempt to abolish the tipped wage that voters passed in 2018.

After Chicago moved to eliminate the tip credit, the Illinois Restaurant Association found that 89 percent of Windy City restaurants raised menu prices; another 79 percent responded by reducing worker hours. Again bowing to economic reality, the progressive Chicago City Council voted to freeze the tip credit's planned elimination, only to see the effort vetoed by Mayor Brandon Johnson. Eventually, a compromise was brokered to at least pause the tip credit at its current level for two years—which punts the issue until after Johnson stands for election again, allowing a potential successor to endorse a more lasting reversal.

In Michigan, a 2024 state supreme court ruling set the tip credit on the path toward elimination by 2030. But state lawmakers intervened last year, deciding to maintain a 50 percent tip credit in perpetuity after 2031. Notably, Michigan is currently governed by a Democratic trifecta in the governorship and both houses of the Legislature. The tip credit's revival garnered key support from Republican lawmakers to pass in a bipartisan fashion, before being signed into law by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

While progressive efforts to eliminate the tip credit may be motivated by an earnest desire to ensure waiters are paid more, the math isn't that simple. Requiring a server to be paid a $16 traditional minimum wage—up from a $5 tipped wage—might appear to raise their pay on paper. But this fails to consider several important factors.

Under our "No Taxes on Tips" new normal, raising the minimum wage for servers could lead to a partial reduction in tips, which under certain scenarios can result in less take-home pay for waiters once the taxman takes his cut. If more server earnings come in the form of "auto-gratuity" policies—which are treated as taxed wages under the law—then the tax repercussions may grow even grimmer.

But more broadly, these laws attempt to subvert basic economics. As of 2025, Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that D.C. restaurants shed over 1,600 jobs in aftermath of Initiative 82; meanwhile, between 2022 and 2025, restaurant job growth in the District declined by more than 8 percent. This is just one example. The fallout is the inevitable result of restaurants responding to labor costs that suddenly skyrocket, forcing establishments to cut worker hours and sometimes transition to quick-service models that require less hourly staff. And that's to say nothing of the diners who bear the cost with higher prices and new service fees.

"We're watching a beloved bar back, a beloved busser, a dishwasher have their jobs taken away," D.C. restaurant worker Valerie Graham told Reason in 2024. "Not because our owner-operator is an evil billionaire but because they're an independent business owner who had to make some business decisions and there's a callousness with which our industry is talked about."

To be sure, the tip credit has only survived in modified and reduced form in D.C., Chicago, and Michigan—and in the case of Chicago, the about-face is only temporary. But the partial reversals show the tip credit's elimination is not a foregone conclusion. Economic reality continues to rear its head.

The post Some Progressives Tried To Abolish the Tipped Minimum Wage. Now They're Backtracking. appeared first on Reason Magazine.