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

Iconoclast: The Times Is Now IlliberalThe 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 DinersNew 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 CostsThe 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 — in...