Kevin Frazier will join the Crump College of Law at St. Thomas University as an Assistant Professor starting this Fall. He currently is a clerk on the Montana Supreme Court.
My fiancé and I were exhausted when the movers told us that, upon further review, it would actually cost twice their initial estimate to move our stuff from Helena to Miami.
The number shocked us and our bank accounts. But we were captive customers. The moving crew had already sealed, wrapped, and trapped everything we counted on joining us in Florida. With those pieces of our lives held hostage, we lacked any option other than to acquiesce.
This expense, though unwelcome and undergoing a challenge (I’m a lawyer, after all), caught us off guard but didn’t sink our finances.
Others wouldn’t be so lucky. These sorts of financial tsunamis can appear out of nowhere and unmoor the 22 percent of Americans with no emergency savings—detaching them from whatever had previously provided stability in their lives. Unexpected financial swells don’t just disturb those furthest from the shore. About 30 percent of Americans might be able to withstand the first waves of financial instability, but only have enough savings to stay afloat for three months, according to a June survey by Bankrate.
More Americans need access to the financial anchor required to survive a calamity. Specifically, every American undergoing a period of financial instability should have access to a one-time, no-questions-asked grant of $5,000—to be deducted from any future Social Security earnings or donated by an individual with more financial stability (more on this in a second). The cruel irony is that though some would denounce this as a politically unacceptable “gift,” a one-time grant would actually save society money and act as an investment in those most in need of a heavier anchor.
When individuals become financially adrift, society pays a hefty and, at least in some cases, avoidable cost of trying to bring them back to shore. For example, according to the Urban Institute, the Miami community collectively paid $6 million to $14 million in 2019 as a result of the costs incurred by residents with unstable finances being evicted, and failing to pay their property taxes and utility bills.
Consider that in some cases a few hundred dollars would have allowed individuals to stay in their homes and retain all of the security, stability, and opportunity that comes with it. That’s precisely why Miami created the Eviction Prevention Program. Qualifying residents could receive up to $7,000 (one-time) towards the rental arrears. Established in response to COVID-19, the program demonstrated the community’s interest in preventing any resident from getting too far from the shores of financial stability as well as the value of early and low-cost interventions. Funding for the program has since dried up, though the need for financial assistance remains.
Now’s the time for the community to fill the gap left by governments that, due to crass politics or leaky budgets, refuse to lend the bootstraps folks need to regain their financial footing. For the Warren Buffets of the world—those who claim that they’d welcome paying higher taxes—the creation of a No Questions Asked (NQA) fund is akin to getting into pickleball because it would require little work and only a basic understanding of the rules.
Emergency relief funds such as the NQA fund succeed because they don’t get mired in the costly, biased, and bureaucratized process of trying to decide who is worthy of relief. Eligibility for such funds should hinge on two factors: any demonstration of financial instability and evidence that the recipient experienced an unexpected financial calamity.
Think back to a time when you felt the surge of panic brought on by a swell of financial instability—did it seem like you could wait for relief? Did you consider drastic and potentially dangerous ways to rebuild your financial foundation? Did the panic and anxiety impact your mental and physical health? My hunch is that the answer is yes to each of those questions. My expectation is that if such a fund existed then people would donate—as the tangibility of an “ask” goes up, so does the willingness of someone to give. There are few asks more tangible than helping a family stay in their apartment, a parent cover their child’s medical expenses, or a neighbor recovering from being duped by a deceptive company.
I know that versions of No Questions Asked funds exist around the country. If you know of one, tell me about it and let’s spread the word. Few things are more fundamental to the American ethos than encouraging people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but let’s not forget that sometimes even bootstraps are unaffordable—that’s a problem we can collectively solve.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.