America and Israel’s ongoing war against Iran has sunk the global economy so deeply in the mire that economists are now seemingly throwing down their pencils in frustration. On Thursday, for the first time since the start of the conflict, analysts at JPMorgan said they don’t have a baseline view of oil markets. 

“We simply don’t know how to model the endgame,” Natasha Kaneva, head of the company’s global commodities strategy, said in a note. According to CNBC, analysts at JPMorgan assumed there were some economic red lines the U.S. simply would not cross in the conflict, and that President Donald Trump would eventually be forced to reach a deal with Iran. But close to seven months after the war began, most of those red lines — including oil hitting more than $100 a barrel, gasoline nearing $5 a gallon at the pump or 10-year Treasury yields rising above 5% — have already been crossed, and “the exit strategy is less clear, not more,” in Kaneva’s words.

Earlier this month, diesel prices climbed above $6 per gallon in the U.S. for the first time ever, and continues to climb. Costs are expected to rise as winter approaches, a season of peak demand for the fuel. Meanwhile, oil stockpiles continue dropping toward record lows, as highlighted by a new analysis from the S&P Global Energy Fuels and Refining team, which warned “winter is coming for diesel markets.”

Karim Fawaz, executive director at S&P Global Energy, warned in the analysis that “Inventories are low, spare refining capacity is scarce, and seasonal demand is about to strengthen at exactly the wrong moment.” 

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Maybe it’s bad news when even the economists have quit pretending that everything will be fine. The Iran war continues to be a disaster, yet Trump has refused to stop bombing the Islamic Republic. On Thursday he indicated he might even double down, telling Axios, “I have a big decision coming up. Do I want to go in and annihilate them [the Iranian regime] or do I not? It’s a big decision. Anything could happen with me.”  

Anything but peace, I imagine. The previous day, the president recycled an old line, claiming that the Iranians “want to make a deal.” Given how many times we’ve heard that one before, I’m just not convinced. Economic forecasts for the coming months continue to be grim as fighting in the Middle East intensifies. A drone attack that heavily damaged one of Saudi Arabia’s pipelines is expected to cause crude oil exports to fall by 400,000 barrels per day this month alone. That’s just one of countless reasons why energy prices are predicted to keep spiking. Although more war clearly isn’t helping, Trump is now promising to sell 48 F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia. Just what everyone needs.

Earlier this week, the Pentagon told Congress that the cost of the war has climbed to $42 billion, a bit over the most recent estimates of $38 billion from the Congressional Budget Office. Some experts have estimated the cost to be even higher, such as Linda J. Bilmes, the Daniel Patrick Moynihan senior lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, who told The Hill it could be as much as $100 billion — and that was back in July.

But honestly, who cares about gas prices and grocery bills? The most severe cost in war is always human, and Trump’s aggression in the Middle East has resulted in an estimated 1,800 to 3,800 civilian deaths. The Washington Post reported Friday that the Pentagon is also not disclosing the true number of U.S. soldiers who have died in the war. The Pentagon’s public database cites 18 servicemember deaths, but officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the figures, said the true number could be as high as 23, plus three U.S. contractors based in the region have died since Feb. 28. Meanwhile, Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels have attracted significant attention for their attacks along the Red Sea coast, threatening Saudi Arabia’s oil exports, but less attention is being paid to the more than 100,000 people who have fled the renewed fighting.

On Thursday, the U.N.’s top human rights body reported “reasonable grounds” to believe that the U.S. has committed war crimes in Iran, citing two strikes, including one on a school in the southern city of Minab that killed 150 people, including 120 children. A White House spokesperson responded that the human rights body has “accomplished nothing for human rights while spouting unserious nonsense for decades.” While the focus on bottom lines and costs at the pump is understandable, I don’t need baffled economists to know that Trump’s war is born of absolute insanity.

The post Trump’s Iran war has economists aghast appeared first on Salon.com.

If there is one thing Democratic politicians can agree on right now it’s this: Rich people should pay more in taxes.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has made it a centerpiece of his agenda. Texas Senate candidate James Talarico is bringing it up on the stump. And Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff’s riff on the “Epstein class” of rich guys staffing the Trump administration is one of his signature applause lines.

But only in California is a billionaire tax actually on the ballot.

This November, voters in the Golden State will decide whether to levy a first-of-its-kind, onetime tax on the roughly 250 billionaires who live in the state, equal to 5 percent of their total assets. Many of the state’s billionaires are furious — and a few have already moved away.

The tax is supported by labor unions and some populist lawmakers like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), but it’s less popular with moderate Democrats.

Some experts, like Cornell University sociology professor Cristobal Young, are leery too. 

“It’s a onetime tax, but this is not a onetime problem,” Young, who also wrote the 2017 book The Myth of Millionaire Tax Flight: How Place Still Matters for the Rich, told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram. “So why are we talking about a onetime sort of Band-Aid over this?”

Sean spoke with Young about what Young’s research shows about whether the wealthy move away from higher taxes, why this tax proposal may be different, and the right way to tax the very rich.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Are you open to taxing the billionaires?

Yeah, certainly. There’s a fundamental loophole in the tax system. Every paycheck, I’m paying taxes straight out of that, and so are all your listeners. But if you make your money from holding corporate stock that’s appreciating in value dramatically over time, you don’t pay any tax on that until you sell it. That leads to a situation where people are accumulating vast fortunes essentially without paying any tax on it at all. It’s a huge inequality in the tax system and it’s especially apparent at the very top. I think it’s just a question of what we are going to do about it.

“This is an ongoing problem, year in and year out. Why are we talking about a onetime Band-Aid?”

I’ve been studying the policies currently in place. There are states today that have taxes on millionaire incomes and we have a really good sense of the impacts of that. They raise a lot of revenue, and they don’t have very much effect on migration. Maybe a few people move, but generally not. My research contribution to this is tracking where millionaires live before and after these tax increases. I found between no to very little tax migration in response.

One of the biggest arguments against this billionaire tax in California is that you’re going to chase all the billionaires away. Sergey Brin has already left, but you’re saying the research doesn’t show that effect?

That’s right. But the important point I want to make is that none of these previous tax proposals have suggested that a small number of people would get tax bills up to $10, $12, or $13 billion. We’ve been talking about significantly smaller tax policies. 

I’ve always been cautious and clear about what the research has shown to date: Our experience with taxing millionaires at the state level has been very successful. Many states over the years have adopted it after watching their neighbors to see how it plays out. How it plays out is you get extra revenue and people aren’t really moving away.

But this tax proposal is a completely different tax instrument. Firstly, it’s a onetime tax, but this is not a onetime problem. This is an ongoing problem, year in and year out. Why are we talking about a onetime Band-Aid? 

There are good proposals for an ongoing solution that wouldn’t be this large. For the people that are affected, this is going to be an unprecedented tax bill. I don’t want to say “poor them, they can’t pay it,” but we’re talking about enormous amounts of money.

I believe you have a different proposal on how to [institute a wealth tax], and it has to do with unrealized capital gains. Can you help people who don’t have unrealized capital gains understand what those are?

For sure. Say you hold stock in Google, and over the years, the value of that stock has appreciated enormously, such that you’re now one of the richest people in the world. But none of that was ever paid out as a paycheck. It’s essentially sitting in a capital account and therefore it doesn’t trigger a tax bill unless it gets sold. It rarely gets sold, so effectively it just goes untaxed, potentially forever.

In the meantime, it’s not like these folks are living in a monastery somewhere. They’re living like they’re the richest people in the world. They do this by borrowing against their assets. Borrowing doesn’t trigger a tax liability because borrowing is not income in the tax code.

There are existing proposals at the federal level, which have been worked out in great detail, like the Billionaires Income Tax Act. It’s not a tax on all billionaire wealth; it’s a tax on year-to-year increments in billionaire fortunes. 

If you have $200 billion in Google stock and the next year it’s worth $220 billion, you owe taxes on the $20 billion, not the $220 billion. It’s just on the increment year-to-year and not everything that’s ever happened in the past. That switches it from being a wealth tax to being an income tax. A lot of things count as income, and increases in billionaire fortunes should be treated and taxed as income.

California’s billionaire wealth tax proposal is flawed in many ways, but it is raising a very important conversation about how we are going to address deep loopholes in our tax system. This is a conversation we need to be having.

If the midterms were a referendum on whether trans athletes should be barred from women’s sports, or the White House ballroom should be gorgeously renovated, or God should be identified as “nonbinary,” then Republicans would have a clear and confident closing message.

Unfortunately for the GOP, voters are less concerned with the Christian deity’s preferred pronouns than with their own cost of living. Which is understandable: Diesel fuel prices just hit a record high, mortgage rates are climbing, and groceries keep getting more expensive. 

Due partly to these trends, Republicans are poorly positioned to win an argument about inflation — and are only growing more so, as Election Day nears. This was apparent before President Donald Trump convened the first-ever Republican midterm convention in Dallas this week. But the festivities underscored the GOP’s predicament and the many ways that Trump is personally exacerbating it.

Many Republican speakers did address the subject of affordability in Dallas. And the party’s broad narrative is straightforward enough: Democrats created the cost-of-living crisis, Republicans alleviated it by cutting your taxes.

But this is a tough line to sell. Americans might still disdain President Joe Biden’s economic management. Yet they’re far more likely to blame high prices on the current president than the previous one, according to polls. 

And not without reason. After all, it was Trump — not Biden — who engineered an oil shock and global trade war. Tellingly, on Wednesday night, all four battleground state Senate candidates — Ken Paxton, Jon Husted, Michael Whatley, and Mike Collins — made no mention of the Iran war or of Trump’s tariffs.

If Republican frontliners are clear-eyed about their party’s liabilities, Trump seems largely indifferent to them. Historically, presidents have often made an effort to limit election-year price increases — and/or, to reduce the salience of their party’s worst issues. Yet Trump has been doing the very opposite. 

In recent weeks, the president has escalated his conflict with Iran and his trade war with US allies, driving up Americans’ costs in the process. And he’s been remarkably frank about his refusal to prioritize affordability. 

In his remarks to the convention Wednesday, Trump impersonated a disaffected constituent, saying, “You know, I wish you didn’t do the war in Iran. Gasoline’s up, ba ba ba” — before explaining to this critic that preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon took precedence over their energy costs. 

Republicans may still weather a midterm backlash. The party remains narrowly favored to retain the Senate, while gerrymandered maps should limit its losses in the House. But if this year’s “blue wave” proves less than tidal, it will be in spite of Trump’s efforts, not because of them.

The GOP’s very simple problem

The Republican Party’s fundamental problem is simple: Voters’ top concern is the cost of living — and American purchasing power has fallen sharply in 2026, as a direct result of the president’s policies.

In virtually every poll, a plurality of voters name “inflation,” “the cost of living,” or “affordability” as their most important issue. And they are not impressed with Trump’s record on that front. In a recent Ipsos survey, 74 percent of respondents said that their cost of living is “off on the wrong track.” Meanwhile, in Nate Silver’s poll tracker, more than 70 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of inflation, up from just 41 percent when he took office. 

During his first year in office, Trump could have reasonably argued that voters were giving him a bad rap on the economy. After all, real wages — how much Americans earn per hour, adjusted for inflation — actually rose in 2025, even as disapproval of the president’s economic record surged.

But in February 2026, Trump brought nearly three years of real wage growth to a screeching halt: By launching a war with Iran — and thus, triggering its closure of the Strait of Hormuz — Trump triggered the first sustained decline in Americans’ purchasing power since 2022.

According to an estimate from Brown’s Watson School, the Iran war has cost the average US household more than $780 through elevated energy prices. 

Politically, this seems to have made a real difference. At the beginning of March, Trump’s net approval rating on inflation was -28, according to Nate Silver’s polling average; as of this writing, it is -45.9.

At this point, there may be little Trump can do to gain broad public trust on the cost of living. But political science research suggests that economic trends in the runup to Election Day can shift votes at the margin. And precisely because this year’s price spike is largely self-inflicted, Trump has an unusual amount of power to increase affordability before Americans head to the polls. All he’d need to do is reach a ceasefire (or, ideally, peace deal) with Iran.

We know Trump could bring down energy costs by pursuing peace because he already has. Throughout 2026, oil prices have consistently fallen whenever the US-Iran war has cooled off  — and risen whenever it has intensified. 

When Trump signaled an imminent ceasefire deal in early June, the price of an oil barrel swiftly fell, dropping below $75. Once that ceasefire broke down early the next month, oil prices resumed their climb, until Trump paused US strikes on July 25.

Hostilities resumed over the ensuing months. But Tehran appeared to offer Trump a preelection off-ramp on September 1, when Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said that his country would be willing to restore June’s memorandum of understanding — a deal that had temporarily eased restrictions on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.

The Iranian regime’s good faith cannot be assumed. And peace negotiations are doubtlessly complex. At the very least, however, Trump had an opportunity to try to reduce fuel prices ahead of November’s elections earlier this month. Embracing a ceasefire would not have prevented the US from resuming attacks after Election Day (Trump is manifestly comfortable with reneging on agreements with Iran). Nevertheless, Trump opted instead to launch a new round of strikes against Iranian military targets and oil tankers, sending crude prices hurtling past $100 a barrel.

Americans have paid a price for Trump’s trade war

The Iran war has been by far the biggest drag on American living standards since Trump took office. But his trade policies certainly haven’t helped.

Back in May, the Dallas Federal Reserve released an analysis of how Trump’s tariffs had impacted consumer prices. In its report, the bank compared America’s core inflation rate to what that rate would have been, if the US charged no tariffs. The two lines diverged sharply after “Liberation Day,” when Trump imposed large tariffs on nearly all of America’s trade partners.

Of course, Trump backed off his most gargantuan Liberation Day tariffs. And in February, the Supreme Court gave Trump a chance to abandon much of his inflationary trade agenda by ruling that the bulk of his tariffs were unconstitutionally enacted. At that point, he could have insisted that his overturned import taxes had been brilliant, but that the courts had left him no choice but to withdraw them (thereby easing price pressures in an election year). Instead, Trump immediately enacted temporary 10 percent across-the-board tariffs with alternative legal authorities. Then, when those were set to expire in late July, he replaced them with nearly identical levies, now legally justified as a means of combatting forced labor abroad.  

More recently, Trump escalated commercial tensions with Canada into an all-out trade war. In late August, Trump imposed a 50 percent tariff on $20 billion worth of Canadian imports, declared that Lake Ontario was now “Lake America,” and threatened to extend that levy to Canadian trucks, cars, and auto parts in the new year. Ottawa hit back with up to 50 percent tariffs on $20 billion in US goods. This week, Trump upped the ante again, announcing outright import bans on some Canadian alcohol, dairy, and motorcycle products. 

On Wednesday night, Trump signaled that he’s in no rush to reach a compromise with our neighbors to the north, saying that Canada was “dying to make a deal.”

The trade war with Canada is unlikely to have a huge impact on the American economy nationally. But it will be felt in regions heavily integrated with the Canadian economy, including much of Maine, where Republican Sen. Susan Collins is fighting to hold onto her seat.

And the political costs of Trump’s trade actions may be as much optical as economic. When Trump deliberately increases the price of various imported goods by 50 percent, he sends voters a clear message: The GOP’s leader simply does not care very much about lowering the cost of living.

The connection between tariffs and prices is not lost on voters. In a Guardian poll taken earlier this year, seven in 10 Americans said that the Trump’s tariffs had forced them to pay higher prices. 

And even Trump understands that his trade agenda is bad for affordability. While he has been enacting new trade restrictions willy-nilly for months, he did pause plans to dramatically raise ground beef tariffs last month, in order to ease meat costs for consumers. Still, Trump has refused to apply the logic of his hamburger policy to broader realms of international commerce.  

Crass pandering has its upsides

On one level, Trump’s deprioritization of his party’s short-term political interests might seem noble. As a general matter, we want presidents to put America’s long-term well-being above immediate electoral considerations. If seeking a ceasefire with Tehran would jeopardize American national security — or if allowing imports of Crown Royal whiskey would condemn our grandchildren to Canadian economic tyranny — then it would be bad for Trump to do those things, just to help Susan Collins.

In reality, however, Trump’s war with Iran doesn’t seem to be furthering any of America’s geopolitical goals. Nor has his trade war been a boon to US industry. Whatever Trump is prioritizing over Americans’ purchasing power and Republicans’ midterm odds, it doesn’t seem to be a robust theory of foreign policy or international economics.

To be sure, Trump has not wholly forsworn pandering to voters’ pocketbook concerns. On Wednesday night, the president promised to deliver a $5,000 check to every American adult, if Republicans retain control of Congress in November. But Trump’s audacious giveaway boasts little support on Capitol Hill, in part because high deficits are already putting upward pressure on inflation and interest rates — yet another cost-of-living issue his own policies have exacerbated.

For now, ordinary shoppers are bearing the brunt of Trump’s eccentric and counterproductive priorities. But come November, Republican battleground candidates may also find themselves paying the price.

The national debt hasn’t been a major issue in the 2026 midterms. But perhaps it should be. As of last month, the United States is in debt to the tune of $40 trillion. That’s 12 zeros, which averages out to about $116,000 per American. 

It’s enough that even economists like Jared Bernstein, the chair of the US Council of Economic Advisers under President Joe Biden, is starting to worry. Bernstein has long argued that the national debt is nothing to worry about too seriously as long as servicing it — that is, paying the interest on it — remains manageable. 

Bernstein has since changed his tune. He told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram after last month’s debt milestone that while the number itself is “a big distraction,” two factors have him worried: Congress’s inaction and rising interest rates. But is it well and truly time to panic? Are we in a moment of no return? 

Below is an excerpt of Sean’s conversation with Bernstein, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Have you now or ever been wrong about the national debt?

Yes. Who hasn’t?

Tell me what your position was and why you think it maybe was wrong.

A lot of the economic work on the national debt involves forecasting, predicting where things are going. And nobody can really forecast things like interest rates or when there’s going to be another recession or a war or a pandemic, so nobody could honestly answer that question with, “I’ve been right about everything.” 

But I feel good in the sense of being intellectually honest about how I’ve thought about this. When the numbers were pointing to a level of calmness about our fiscal outlook, even though lots of people had their hair on fire, I didn’t go there. I was pretty adamant that there wasn’t anything to be overly worried about at this point, for reasons that we can get into. 

When the numbers changed, and the outlook changed, and the politics changed, I changed.

Let’s start with why you thought it was okay to carry loads of debt in the first place, because that was your position for some time, right?

Correct. When you say loads of debt, the important thing is not just this load of debt or the stock of debt. Think of the debt as the water in the bathtub and think of the flow. Every year, you get a deficit or a surplus. That’s the water coming into the bathtub. 

If you have a large stock of debt or loads of debt, as you say, which we were carrying, what you really want to look at is: What’s the rate of interest? How much debt service do you have to pay to your creditors on that stock of debt? And as long as the interest rate stays pretty low and the country’s ability to service its debt is manageable, there’s no obvious reason to break out a sweat, even if there’s a lot of water in the bathtub. 

As long as you’re growing faster than your interest rate payments, as long as you’re not adding too much to the debt every year, underlying economic growth can allow you to service that debt without breaking a big economic sweat. And that’s where we were for a bunch of years. So that was the calm part.

Would you say you were part of an economic consensus in this country?

I would say yes, with an asterisk that maybe it was 50-50. Half of us who were watching it had hair that wasn’t burning up and the others had smoke coming out of their hats. 

By the way, there’s an interesting strain here that we shouldn’t miss because it becomes more and more relevant over time. Of the hair-on-fire group, there were two classes. One was genuinely freaked out, incorrectly in my view, and the other was a bunch of politicians who pretended to have their hair on fire, but really didn’t. 

“Don’t get hung up on the big, round number. It’s okay if your debt grows. It’s just not okay if your debt grows faster than your economy.”

These were — I used to call them chicken hawks. They were budget hawks, but they didn’t really want to do anything about it. And in fact, they consistently pushed in the wrong direction, which turned out to be kind of an important component of my apotheosis in this space.

Now, the big moment. Something happens at some point during this Trump administration that changes your mind. Tell us about it.

It wasn’t like at 2:37 pm on a particular day, just to be clear. I saw a number of things eroding and it wasn’t just during the Trump administration. 

Something flipped in my head a little bit because any kind of what we call a reaction function by Congress, to react to these unsustainable forecasts, looked dead to me. And then I started seeing some academic work that actually measured this and showed, lo and behold, Congress was no longer reacting to the budget outlook. That was part one. 

Part two is I started to see interest rates drift up. And if you’ll recall earlier, as I think you put it, interest rates found their way into the conversation. 

[Part three], we saw budget deficits that in normal times — the budget deficit, which again, that’s the water flowing into the tub — should be negative 2 to 3 percent. They’re 4, 5, and 6 percent. That’s almost a recessionary-level deficit. So you put those three things together and my head broke.

Do you think this congressional inaction or indifference to the debt was somehow seeded by decades of economists like yourself, saying, “This is okay”?

Let me flip that on you, because I don’t want to hold myself or my colleagues unaccountable, but I actually think the other side may be even more to blame or equally to blame in the sense of, they were saying the economy is about to explode for 30 years. And it didn’t. 

Now it is true that those of us — speaking for myself, I was saying, “We really ought to get our fiscal house in order, but we don’t need to worry about an immediate crisis. We have time to fix this.”

I was trying to be nuanced, but American politics doesn’t do nuance, so you can blame me for that.

Is the economy about to explode?

No. We still have time to fix this and the sooner we start, the better. 

When I talk about debt unsustainability and the potential for a debt spiral, I’m talking about over the next decade. I’m not talking about next week. The good news, Sean, is that there are ways to start repairing the damage. We can’t fill up the hole, but we can stop digging the hole. 

There are ways to stop digging the hole that are both good politics and good policy, and it has to do with reversing a bunch of tax cuts on the upper end of the income and wealth scale.

So what do we do? Do we just wait for a different administration?

That’s the answer for almost any good thing you want to do economically. I’m not saying this as a partisan: It’s very clear that this administration has caused all kinds of economic problems, but when you talk about the debt and deficit, I’ve tried to be pretty balanced in this conversation. 

It’s not just the [Republicans]. They’ve definitely made the biggest contribution to the unsustainable path through their relentless tax-cutting. But there was a time when I was in the Obama administration that we basically made permanent 80 percent of the Bush tax cuts. Republicans have been the lead flank in taking us to this unsustainable place, but too often the Democrats have not reversed those measures and in fact have, in some cases, endorsed them. 

And you seem to think that this is within reach, that we’re just a few steps away from making $40 trillion look more like $30 trillion or $20 trillion?

That’s an interesting question, because it’s probably making $40 trillion look more like $41 or $42 [trillion] rather than $44 or $45 trillion. 

But again, Sean, don’t get hung up on the big, round number. It’s okay if your debt grows. It’s just not okay if your debt grows faster than your economy. 

As long as the economy’s growing faster than the debt, which used to be the case, then that ratio’s going to come down. So it’s okay if the debt accumulates a little bit more. What’s not okay is if it just keeps spiraling and the growth rate decelerates.

So let’s keep it around $40 trillion. That’s the takeaway.

No, that’s not the takeaway. Sorry. I think $40 trillion is a big distraction. I’m not glad we’re there, but at least we’re talking about it. 

I think the key thing is the debt ratio, the debt relative to the economy. I think we can get back on a path where debt to GDP doesn’t just keep growing in good times and bad. It stabilizes in good times, maybe even comes down a little bit in good times because the economy’s growing faster than the debt — the denominator’s growing faster than the numerator, if you will. 

I think it’s plausible, but it would mean very different people, a very different composition of people in Congress and the White House.

My new takeaway is, “Keep the debt in check.”

Love it.

The Republican Party is once again asking the Supreme Court to change the rules governing US elections in order to make it easier for GOP candidates to prevail in future elections. And this Court, with its 6-3 Republican majority, will likely give the GOP what it is asking for.

National Republican Congressional Committee v. Brown concerns a federal statute that requires broadcast television and radio stations to allow candidates to buy campaign ads at a highly discounted rate. 

The question in Brown is whether political party committees such as the DNC or the RNC are also entitled to this discounted rate. A federal appeals court determined that they are not, as the relevant statute only extends this rate to “a legally qualified candidate for any public office,” and not to that candidate’s political party. The GOP now wants the justices to give its party committees this discounted rate anyway. If the justices agree, that would give Republicans an advantage in future elections, because the GOP tends to raise more money through its party organizations than Democrats do.

While individual Democratic candidates often outraise their Republican opponents, Republican donors tend to be much more generous to party committees than their Democratic counterparts. As of late June, for example, the RNC had nearly $130 million in cash, while the DNC was in debt.

A Republican victory in the case would also increase the significance of another win the Supreme Court handed the GOP in June 2025, in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC (2026). Federal law previously placed strict limits on a party organization’s ability to coordinate with candidates on messaging, ad placement, and similar tactical decisions. NRSC abolished many of those limits, thus making money raised by party committees more potent because those committees may now work closely with candidates to plan how that money is spent.

Brown, meanwhile, could make any dollar that a party committee spends on ads stretch much further than it otherwise would.

The GOP’s argument that federal law allows party committees to buy ads at a discount is not persuasive. Again, the relevant federal statute gives a discount to candidates and not to parties. 

But that’s unlikely to matter because the GOP’s brief to the Court does make a plausible procedural argument that would allow the justices to wipe away the lower court decision ruling against the Republican Party. If that happens, it would leave the question of whether parties may buy ads at a discount to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which Republicans control.

It will be fairly easy, in other words, for the Court’s Republican majority to rule in favor of their political party in Brown, in the likely event that those six justices are inclined to do so. And that means that the RNC’s money advantage over Democratic groups is about to matter a whole lot more.

A GOP victory in Brown would augment the party’s recent victory in NRSC

Brown is part of a broader Republican Party legal strategy, which seeks to make money donated to the party itself as fungible as possible with money given to individual Republican candidates. The GOP’s recent victory in NRSC is also part of this strategy.

Federal law limits the amount of money donors may give directly to candidates — the cap on these donations is currently $3,500. It also restricts how much money donors may give to party committees such as the DNC or the RNC, but that cap is much higher. It is $44,300 per donor per year in the current election cycle.

Campaign finance law also used to prevent party committees from coordinating their political spending with individual campaigns — the idea was to prevent big donors from laundering donations that exceed the $3,500 cap on donations to candidates through party committees like the RNC. But, in NRSC, the Republican justices repealed most of the restrictions on coordination between party committees and individual candidates. 

So the upshot of that decision is that party organizations may still seek donations from wealthy donors that are an order of magnitude larger than what candidates may raise from those same donors. But now, there are far fewer restrictions on these party organizations’ ability to work with candidates to devise a joint strategy for spending their combined funds.

But, because party organizations are not themselves candidates, the language of the statute at issue in Brown indicates that these organizations must pay significantly higher rates to run these ads than the campaigns the party hopes to coordinate with. 

This statute essentially requires broadcast stations to charge their lowest ad rate to candidates. Often, major advertisers buy ads in bulk, and receive a significant discount for doing so. By law, broadcast stations must give the same discount to candidates for public office that they give to advertisers who buy ads at the cheapest rate offered by that station. So, if a local TV station allows Budweiser to buy ads at a 50 percent discount because the beer maker runs hundreds of ads on that station, then it must give this same 50 percent discount to political candidates, even if those candidates only run a handful of ads.

The legal term for this discounted rate is the “lowest unit charge” or “LUC rate,” and these discounts can be quite substantial. A somewhat dated report by the Congressional Research Service estimates that bulk ad discounts are as high as 30 percent, while a more recent news article by the congressional newspaper Roll Call estimates that occasional ad buyers may pay “two or three times” as much per ad as an advertiser who secures the best discount.

So, the Supreme Court has already given the GOP greater ability to coordinate strategy and tactics with individual campaigns. And now it wants the much-larger donations that party committees can raise from wealthy donors to go even further than they already do.

Republicans want Trump’s FCC, and not the courts, to decide who gets the discounted rate

The Republican Party’s primary argument in Brown is that two procedural quirks in this case work together to prevent federal courts from enforcing the statute as it is written (although the GOP does also argue that the statute gives party committees the same discounted rate as candidates).

Last March, while NRSC was still pending before the justices, Trump’s FCC issued a “Public Notice” declaring that political parties are, in fact, entitled to the discounted ad rates that federal law guarantees to candidates. Four Democratic candidates, including US Senate candidates Sherrod Brown, Roy Cooper, and Jon Ossoff formally asked the FCC to reverse that policy in April, but the FCC sat on their request without acting on it.

With the 2026 election looming and no action from the FCC, these candidates then asked the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit to intervene in late June, and, in a late August decision, the Fourth Circuit agreed with the Democratic candidates that the FCC’s interpretation of the law governing ad rates is wrong.

Republicans, meanwhile, argue that the Fourth Circuit decided this case prematurely. If the Supreme Court agrees with the GOP’s argument, that would mean that the FCC’s interpretation of the statute would go back into effect — and party committees would be allowed to buy ads at a discount, at least during the 2026 election.

The Republican Party’s jurisdictional argument is plausible, but far from airtight. While a federal law does permit the Fourth Circuit to review the FCC’s “final orders,” the GOP argues that the FCC’s Public Notice does not count as a final order, and the Fourth Circuit cannot hear this case until after the FCC rules on the Democratic candidates’ April request to reverse the policy announced in that notice.

There is some legal support for the Republican Party’s position. Among other things, a different federal appeals court, the DC Circuit, said in a 2013 opinion that a federal agency’s “statements of policy” that do not go through the rigorous rulemaking process that agencies must conduct before they issue a new regulation are typically not subject to judicial review. So that decision cuts in favor of the Republican Party’s position, even though a DC Circuit decision is not binding on the Supreme Court.

The Fourth Circuit’s decision in Brown, meanwhile, offers a strong rebuttal to this argument. It points to the FCC’s failure to act on the Democratic candidates’ April request, and it cites a different DC Circuit decision establishing that, “when administrative inaction has precisely the same impact on the rights of the parties as denial of relief,” then a federal court is allowed to intervene.

If this rule did not exist, then the GOP-led FCC could effectively prevent courts from hearing Brown forever, simply by refusing to take any action at all on the Democratic candidates’ April filing.

In any event, it is safe to say that the question of whether these Democratic candidates must wait until the FCC acts before they can seek relief in federal court is not definitively resolved by prior precedents. Both the Republican Party and the Democratic candidates can cite court decisions that favor their position, and that means that the justices can choose whichever outcome they prefer.

The Supreme Court’s Republican majority, moreover, often hands down dubious jurisdictional rulings that benefit Republicans or other conservative causes. Just this week, for example, five of the Republican justices ruled that Trump may build his White House ballroom — even though a federal statute prohibits Trump from doing so. They reached this result by claiming, on far-fetched legal grounds, that federal courts lacked jurisdiction to hear the challenge to Trump’s ballroom in the first place.

The Republican Party’s jurisdictional argument in Brown is hardly a slam dunk, but it is much stronger than the argument the Court just used to deny jurisdiction in the ballroom case. So, if the Court’s Republican majority wants to let Republican organizations buy ads at a discounted rate, they’ll probably find it easy to write an opinion that reaches their preferred outcome.