So with all the news about Trump trying to make the $100k H-1B fee permanent (first attempt got thrown out by a judge, now they're pushing it as an official rule at $103,265 per petition), I keep thinking back to this old Michio Kaku clip I've always found interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK0Y9j_CGgM&t=5s

He calls the H-1B America's "secret weapon." His whole argument is that US schools are so bad that without foreign talent the entire science establishment would collapse. He says like half of PhD candidates in the US are foreign born, and at his school it was literally all of them. No H-1B, no Silicon Valley. And the people leaving are the reason tech hubs are popping up in India and China.

Watching it now hits different with everything going on. Forbes has a piece on where all this is heading: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2026/01/06/the-outlook-on-h-1b-visas-and-immigration-in-2026/

And honestly I go back and forth on this.

Part of me thinks Kaku is right. You kill the visa, you kill the pipeline, and some other country gets the next Silicon Valley. The real problem is the schools, not immigration.

But the other part is like... most H-1Bs aren't genius physicists lol. A lot of them are regular IT jobs going through outsourcing firms, and meanwhile new grads can't get hired anywhere. Maybe a huge fee is just a way to force companies to prove the person is actually irreplaceable.

Idk. Is this protecting American workers or just shooting ourselves in the foot? Curious what people here think.

The 2008 financial crisis raised an important question: When an industry is considered essential to the functioning of the country, how far should the federal government go to prevent its collapse?

The federal government ultimately disbursed $443.5 billion through TARP. Treasury says the program was intended to stabilize a collapsing financial system and prevent the economic damage from becoming even worse. After repayments, sales, dividends, interest and other income, the program’s lifetime net cost was approximately $31.1 billion.
U.S. Department of the Treasury

Agriculture also receives substantial federal assistance. GAO found that USDA provided $161 billion in financial assistance to agricultural producers from FY2019–2023, with Texas receiving the most of any state at $18.1 billion. ([GAO](https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-25-107174?utm_source=chatgpt.com))

USDA currently forecasts $44.3 billion in direct government farm payments for 2026, including an estimated $23.9 billion in supplemental and ad hoc disaster assistance. ([Economic Research Service](https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-sector-income-finances/farm-sector-income-forecast?_hsmi=273107332&utm_source=chatgpt.com))

So I’m not suggesting that farmers or ranchers receive *no* federal assistance. They clearly do.

What I’m wondering is whether we should think about this differently:

**If the financial system was considered too important to fail because its collapse could affect the entire country, should America’s food-production system receive a similar level of extraordinary protection when independent farmers and ranchers are at risk of disappearing?**

Is there a meaningful difference between protecting the financial infrastructure that keeps money and credit moving and protecting the agricultural infrastructure that keeps food being produced?
And if there is a difference, **where should the government draw that line?**

The original purpose of the Davis Act was to maintain the American shipbuilding industry as a whole.

The actual effect has been to slowly reduce the number of American businesses that make large ships to just two.

This duopoly makes very few ships a year 3 to 10, and the ships cost far more than equivalent ships from those made elsewhere.

In between 1939 and 1945 we build 40 million gross tons of merchant shipping.

What can be done to restore our nation's shipbuilding industry to it's glorious past?

Several countries are trying to broaden their economic and strategic relationships without necessarily abandoning their existing alliances.

Canada is seeking to expand trade beyond the United States. Mexico remains deeply integrated with the US economy while attracting manufacturing investment from the US, Europe and Asia. Brazil trades extensively with China while gaining greater access to Europe through the EU-Mercosur agreement. European countries are also pursuing greater autonomy in areas such as defense, energy, technology and critical supply chains.

These strategies do not necessarily indicate the formation of new geopolitical blocs. They may instead reflect an effort to reduce the risks of excessive dependence on any single market, supplier or strategic partner.

How much political leverage can economic diversification actually provide?

Does having credible alternative markets and partners make countries less vulnerable to pressure from larger powers, or does diversification mostly replace one form of dependence with another?

And if more middle powers pursue this strategy simultaneously, could it meaningfully change the balance of power between them and the world's largest economies?

Reading the actual text of Initiative 109 (which is available on the Secretary of State's website), there are a few significant implementation problems that I think deserve attention regardless of where you land on the underlying policy question:

1. The enforcement mechanism is undefined.
   The bill delegates enforcement to the Commissioner of Education, who has discretion to determine "appropriate remedial action." There's no specification of what that means, no due process protections, no appeal mechanism. For a measure that affects every K-12 and college sports program in the state, that's a significant design problem.

2. Verification is undefined.
   The bill requires teams to be designated by sex assigned at birth, but the text doesn't specify how sex is to be verified. Genetic testing? Birth certificate inspection? Physical exam? Self-report? This was raised explicitly by One Colorado's executive director — "who decides who gets questioned, who gets inspected, and which kids are going to be singled out?" — and remains unanswered in the text.

3. The bill is unfunded.
   There's no appropriation in the measure for implementation. Schools are being asked to develop and enforce new policies with no budget for compliance staff, training, or any verification apparatus that might be required.

4. The downstream effects on cis girls are unaddressed.
   If verification is based on appearance or stereotype (which is what vague enforcement usually produces in practice), cis girls who don't look stereotypically feminine — tall, broad-shouldered, athletic, short hair — become vulnerable to being questioned or excluded.

The Daily Camera op-ed from One Colorado and Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains lays out several of these concerns. Their main argument is specifically about implementation and unintended consequences, not the underlying policy debate. That's a framing I think most evidence-driven folks can engage with.

Link: [https://www.dailycamera.com/2026/05/21/colorado-election-transgender-rights-measure-109-110-opinion/\](https://www.dailycamera.com/2026/05/21/colorado-election-transgender-rights-measure-109-110-opinion/)