The graph above illustrates the year-on-year changes in Affordable Care Act marketplace premiums over the last ten years. The increases from 2023 through 2025 could reasonably be described as cost-of-living adjustments. It’s considerably harder to make that case for 2026 and 2027.

These increases reflect two interacting problems: the persistently rising cost of healthcare itself and the peculiar dynamics of health insurance, in which higher premiums can drive healthier customers out of the market, raising costs for those who remain.

This reinforces a point I have made before. Healthcare experiences structural pressures that produce persistent cost escalation, although economists disagree about whether these constitute a wage-price spiral in the conventional sense. Whatever we call it, healthcare has been a major source of upward pressure on Americans’ cost of living for decades.

I don’t do this very often. I’m going to quote in full the Wall Street Journal after-election editorial:

Democrats won an historic midterm election victory Tuesday, and congratulations on again having real legislative power. The question now is what lessons Democrats will take from their triumph, and whether they’ll return to the same mistakes of the Biden era that cost them so dearly in 2024.

The first essential lesson is that voters are handing Democrats power because they wanted to rebuke President Trump. They think he failed to deliver on his promise to lower prices, and they don’t like his excesses on the rule of law, tariffs, mass deportation, and crony cashing in.

Voters weren’t endorsing the Democratic Party, which stands at 29% approval in the latest NBC poll, below even the 38% for the Republican Party. Voters also weren’t embracing a Democratic policy agenda, since the party didn’t offer one. Candidates chanted “Trump” like an incantation and then talked about costs and corruption. They offered little specificity about how to reduce costs.

One Democratic priority is sure to be investigating the executive branch and the Trump family businesses, and some oversight is warranted. Mr. Trump’s misuse of the pardon power, his cryptocurrency plays, and Don Jr.’s investments in firms that do business with the government are all worthy subjects. Ditto for the government loans to or investment in private firms, especially those in which Trump family companies have stakes.

More scrutiny on policy matters could also be usefully informative. Who really throttled Ukraine’s Starshield satellite access? And let’s learn more about the U.S. agreement with Alejandro Betancourt, the Administration’s politically connected partner in its preferential deal to exploit Venezuelan oil resources.

The political danger is that Democrats won’t be able to control themselves. They didn’t in Mr. Trump’s first term, and it cost them politically. One key test will be whether they can resist the calls to impeach him again. Nancy Pelosi didn’t, and her efforts merely solidified the President’s Republican support. Unless Democrats uncover something serious enough to get Republican Senators to convict after a House impeachment, they would be wise to settle for oversight and informing the voters.

Legislatively the next two years will feature the frustrations of divided government. Unfortunately for the country, given the $40 trillion debt and last year’s $2 trillion deficit, Congress typically papers over disagreements by spending even more.

Did Democrats learn a lesson from Mr. Biden’s spending binge, which fueled the inflation that cost him re-election? As workers worry about energy prices, will the party go straight back to climate mandates and subsidies for expensive electric cars?

Ditto for other ideological excesses from Mr. Biden’s time. Democrats pushed hard for H.R.1, their bill to nationalize election rules on California’s model, including overriding state laws against ballot harvesting. Will that reappear? Likely new House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries has called for “dramatic Supreme Court reform,” which won’t get Mr. Trump’s signature. But if Mr. Jeffries keeps talking that way, it will be a serious reason for voters not to trust his party with total power in 2029.

If he and likely Senate leader Chuck Schumer want a better path, they could seek compromise with Republicans to benefit the country. Permitting reform is one example. Another might be immigration.

Mr. Trump has sometimes spoken of wanting to help “Dreamers” brought to the U.S. as children. Democrats, meantime, have castigated the President for killing the border bill negotiated in 2024 by Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford, which would have codified a stricter legal standard for asylum. Such a change to the statute is worth Mr. Trump’s support, since it would outlast him and make it harder for the next President to reopen the southern border.

One difficulty for Democrats will be the radicals in their ranks. The House “squad” will double in size, and the socialist left will feel empowered. New York Rep.-elect Darializa Avila Chevalier has argued that it’s immoral to deport even violent criminals. Sen.-elect Abdul El-Sayed wants to purge Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. John Fetterman, for the offense of believing Israel has a right to defend itself. Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, has floated a Supreme Court with 13 Justices.

None of that will improve the party’s approval rating. It could also lead voters to conclude in 2028 that the post-Trump Republican Party doesn’t look so bad after all.

I sincerely wish that both parties will learn the lessons this election taught. I think it’s far more likely they’ll continue to promote what their more extreme supporters want on the shaky assumption that will get them re-elected.

The results of the 2026 midterm elections aren’t fully in yet but my predictions about them appear to have been directionally right with Democrats winning majorities in both houses of Congress. As of this writing I may have underestimated the anger across the country at Trump since the Democratic majorities in each house appears to be somewhat larger than I predicted. It does, indeed, appear to have been a “wave election”.

Here in Chicago I am gratified That Jessica Biggs won her election as president of the Chicago School Board over the candidate preferred by Mayor Brandon Johnson.

So far the best comment I have found about the elections was from WSJ columnist Joseph Sternberg at about 11:30pm last night:

As the dominoes keep falling for Democrats, there’s a lot of talk tonight about the end of President Trump’s policy-political project, to the extent there was a coherent one, and fair enough. Republicans are getting punished because Mr. Trump keeps tripping over himself on the economy (tariffs, anyone?) and struggles to explain himself even when he’s right (Iran).

But the Ohio governor’s race marks a rebuke for the Trump political method, too. Vivek Ramaswamy’s loss can be attributed in part to that late campaign ad — yes, that one. Many voters appear to have ruled it out of bounds. While politics have gotten coarser in the Trump era, maybe there are still some limits after all.

With the elections over the question before us will be what will the Democrats do with their majorities? As I said in the post linked above I think that investigations and possibly impeachments of President Trump and his cabinet officers will prove irresistible to the new Congress. We will see.

In the morning newsletter I received from Axios this morning there was a sentence I wanted to react to: “There’s a difference between a blowout and a mandate.” Yes. Nowadays a “mandate” means you won the election. Anyone who wins an election regardless of why or by how many votes will claim a mandate.

I’m preparing to go to the polls to cast my vote. I’m old enough that there’s an “election day” rather than an election season.

I look forward to it with some foreboding. Given my track record my casting a vote for a candidate is practically proof positive that they’ll lose.

The elections I look forward to casting my votes for are for the president of the school board and the board member for our subdistrict. For Chicago that’s a first. There are three candidates running for board president, one endorsed by the mayor and the other two opposed to property tax increases and short term high interest rate loans. I think it’s actually an open question which candidate will win and I’ll be casting my vote for the non-Johnson candidate I think is most likely to win. My concern is that the two non-Johnson candidates will split the anti-Johnson vote and give the election to the candidate the mayor endorsed.

Update

I neglected to mention that I will be voting in the mayoral primary, too. The difficulty in that election is deciding among the several notables running who is the best and is not Brandon Johnson.

We did not have a single trick-or-treater last night. Not one. I think we can reasonably declare the practice officially over, at least in Chicago, at least in our neighborhood.

“Trick-or-treating”, i.e. wearing costumes and going door-to-door receiving candy, is a custom roughly 100 years old. Some attribute it to British or Scottish customs. Perhaps. It might be interesting to know the actual history of the custom.

In the 1930s there was an organized movement to promote it as an alternative to property damage and mischief. After a decline in the 1940s, it revived and I would say had its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s. Amusingly, when my late father-in-law would take my wife trick-or-treating he’d bring a martini glass with him, holding it out and saying “Trick or Treat!” with the kids. In a charming way he was a big kid himself.

But, as I say, the custom has gone out of fashion, at least here. Next year I won’t turn on my lights and I won’t buy candy to hand out.

At The New Republic via MSN Alex Shephard echoes a point I have been making for some time:

But that’s the problem. Trump has made billions of dollars during his presidency. He has worked to obscure his ties to Epstein, his late friend. He is mismanaging one ruinous war while appearing to help Russia fight another one. Those are just a few of the things that Democrats could pursue. It is fair to describe all of them as potentially impeachable. Indeed, any investigation into Trump’s conduct in office—whatever that conduct is—would likely produce impeachable offenses.

Harris’s idea that the party can simply run these investigations, uncover damaging evidence, and then—presumably—move on to other scandals is simply not plausible. The party’s base is fed up and insistent that Democrats “do something” about Trump and his cronies, which is to say that people want to see them stopped and punished. It’s hard to imagine that investigations alone will be enough to satisfy this bloodlust, even if Democratic voters know that there is no chance of convicting and removing Trump.

and concludes:

The squeamishness from establishment figures like Harris is understandable. It may even be reasonable. But it’s not plausible—the party’s base will not tolerate it, and the evidence the Democrats in Congress uncover will demand it. The fact that many Democratic leaders haven’t faced this reality yet suggests they still don’t understand the political dynamics of the moment. But it will dawn on them soon enough, and the likely result is that the only U.S. president to be impeached multiple times will see his record padded.

I don’t know what’s happening in states other than Illinois (and for two days, Alaska) but the political ads being run by Democrats not just for federal office but for local offices as well are primarily attack ads against Trump. How will newly-elected members of Congress, after running on opposition to Trump, avoid investigating and attempting to impeach Trump? I simply don’t see it.

At his Substack Ruy Teixeira makes the same point by asking Democrats eleven questions:

1. Do Democrats understand how much of their victory will be attributable to thermostatic reaction against the Trump administration rather than any confidence in the Democrats?
2. Are Democrats willing to stand up to the progressive/DSA left after the election?
3. Can Democrats effectively address “affordability”?
4. Can Democrats embrace bipartisanship and the permitting bill (BAAJA)?
5. Can Democrats find their way back to economic growth?
6. Can Democrats advance a coherent policy toward AI?
7. Can Democrats transition away from the energy transition?
8. Can Democrats articulate a viable immigration policy?
9. Will Democrats try to bring back DEI and affirmative action?
10. Will Democrats be able to move toward the center on trans issues?
11. Can Democrats embrace cultural positions that resonate with the working class?

Judging by the campaigns they’re running, the answers to all of those questions is “no”, as I presume Mr. Teixeira is aware.

My practice is to avoid commenting about countries or states of the Union in which I’ve never lived and about which I know little. My philosophy is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.

In that light I think the best comment of the day is from Glenn Greenwald at X:

There are a bunch of ignorant American liberal pundits pontificating this week about Brazil even though they don’t know the first thing about any of the relevant facts or dynamics (Naomi Klein with Mehdi Hasan was so confused as to be comical).

Mr. Greenwald has lived in Brazil for the last ten years.

I don’t know enough about Brazilian politics to comment intelligently.

I also think it’s at least incautious to side with a “left-wing” or “right-wing” political party in another country because you, yourself, consider yourself “left-wing” or “right-wing”. Those labels don’t travel well. I’m reminded of the line from the satirical sketch comedy Beyond the Fringe comparing British and American politics:

Well, let’s see, you have the Republican Party, you see, which is the equivalent of our Conservative party. And then you have the Democratic Party which is the equivalent of our Conservative Party.

When I was out and about my errands this afternoon I saw a car I didn’t recognize. It looked like a Tesla but wasn’t identical. It had a Texas Manufacturer’s plate. No insignia or brand. Its rear window was opaque or, at least, you couldn’t see into the car from behind. It had no side mirrors. When we stopped at a red light, I asked the driver what kind of car it was.

“Tesla Cybercab”, he replied.