The Times is now illiberal, wrong way to save diners and other commentary

Iconoclast: The Times Is Now Illiberal

The New York Times’ own Diversity and Inclusion Reports “divide all employees into two crude categories — ‘people of color’ (good) and ‘whites and unspecified’ (meh). And the goal was an explicit jump in the proportion of the good non-whites versus the white meh,” marvels the Weekly Dish’s Andrew Sullivan, as a 2021 management Call To Action boasts of the surge in non-white hirings and promotions. The Times elsewhere insists it doesn’t discriminate — which translates to: “Even though every year we congratulated ourselves on lowering the proportion of whites and cis men on our staff, we never thought of their race or sex.” Bottom line: The “Times, in how it treats employees, is an illiberal institution pretending to be a liberal one.”

Garden State diary: Wrong Way To Save Diners

New Jersey calls itself the “diner capital of the world,” but as 100 have “shuttered in the past decade” state lawmakers offer a bill that “provides up to a $25,000 tax credit for eligible diners and exempts them from having to charge state sales tax (of around 7 percent) on prepared foods,” reports C. Jarrett Dieterle at Reason. But this is “bad tax policy, pushing targeted carveouts over fundamental reforms to the New Jersey tax code. And the Garden State is badly in need of real tax reform.” Its heavy corporate, property and income taxes leave it “ranked as the fifth-worst state in the country for small businesses in WalletHub’s 2026 report.” “Diners — and New Jerseyans — deserve more than a Band-Aid fix.”

Health beat: Hospitals Drive High Costs

The public is “boiling” mad at insurers, but hospital prices are “most responsible for high costs and economic pain” in health care, argues Zack Cooper at The New York Times. A key reason US health-care costs have grown “three times as fast as inflation” since 2000 is “hospitals’ accumulation of market power,” thanks to mergers — including 1,300 these past 25 years alone, since lack of competition drives up prices. Unless we pair other reforms “with a focus on addressing hospitals’ rising prices,” we risk driving up health spending, slowing economic growth and spurring “job losses among low-wage workers.”

Eye on DC: Restoring Trust in Gov’t Science

The New York Times and The Washington Post would have readers believe that the “bureaucrats who run the FDA, from Commissioner Marty Makary on down,” are blocking publication of studies showing “the Covid vaccine is perfectly safe,” gripe The Free Press’ editors. That ignores “another explanation for blocking the studies”: the onslaught of skewed research on “politicized subjects like climate change have been more the result of wishful thinking than rigorous science.” The Times and WaPo championed “shoddy science” that told Americans to “stand six feet apart,” and that “the vaccine would stop the spread of the virus” as would “masking.” Makary and his team  “are trying to make sure that the work produced — and published — by the government’s health agencies is work we can once again trust.”

Union watch: A Big Win for Sunlight

Despite turmoil at the top, the Trump Labor Department “has done remarkable work advancing transparency when it comes to how $11 billion per year in union dues are spent — especially on political activities,” cheers Brigette Herbst at The Hill. The key is a new visualization tool that “provides union members and the public alike with a simple way to see how union dues are spent,” since the LM-2 forms that declare that info can run “hundreds of pages” and “are complicated and overly technical for most union members and the general public to read.” Surely the 2 million members of the Service Employees International Union should know the SEIU in 2023 “spent nearly as much on partisan political activities as it did on protecting workers.” Polls show 85% of Americans want clear disclosure on how dues are spent; “the new Department of Labor dashboard does just that.” 

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board