This article originally appeared in The Detroit News February 3, 2026.
Football fans have enjoyed great games during the recent playoff season, at both the college and professional levels. Turn on any of those games and you were bombarded with prescription drug commercials.
Have you noticed that pharmaceuticals come with side effects that sound worse than the underlying malady?
For example, a currently popular drug warns users that they may experience the following side effects: nausea, vomiting, stomach pain, constipation, possible thyroid tumors, inflammation of the pancreas, changes in vision, low blood sugar, dehydration leading to kidney problems, gallbladder problems and serious allergic reactions.
Disclosure of potential side effects is a good thing; doctors and their patients are armed with information to weigh the tradeoffs of a particular course of treatment.
What if we tried that in the public policy arena? Imagine if government officials had to publish a list of side effects for the policies they champion.
Too often policies that are adopted only offer short-term benefits to a small group of people. A better approach is to consider the long-term effects of a policy. If taxpayer dollars are limited, which they are, it’s sensible to fund core functions of government before funding vanity projects, earmarks or non-core functions.
A full consideration of any policy idea analyzes the downsides, tradeoffs and risks.
Take, for example, President Donald Trump’s proposal to cap credit card interest rates at 10%. The motivation behind Trump’s proposal may be understandable — some credit card holders get walloped with high interest rates, which make it hard to escape a sinkhole of debt.
But Trump’s proposal won’t hurt the big banks, says Yael Ossowski, deputy director at the Consumer Choice Center. It will limit access to credit for many Americans.
“For tens of millions of Americans,” wrote Ossowski in The Hill, “credit cards help cover emergency expenses, smooth out income volatility, and build credit history that unlocks future financing opportunities.”
If lawmakers cap how much financial institutions can charge, those institutions will simply lend less to higher-risk borrowers.
Credit card offers can certainly serve consumers better if they show all the relevant terms and conditions. But an artificial cap will distort the market and hurt the very people the policy is intended to help.
Here’s another example of unintended consequences: States and municipalities like to impose high excise taxes on tobacco products. High prices will deter smokers, goes the thinking, and will raise more tax dollars.
But there’s the catch: When cigarette taxes go up, so do rates of smuggling. My colleague Michael D. LaFaive has studied this phenomenon for years. His research demonstrates that states with high excise taxes — California, New York, Massachusetts — also have high rates of smuggling. California tops the list as the state with the highest rate of inbound smuggling, with 53% of the state’s cigarette consumption coming from smuggled smokes. High smuggling rates mean a loss of revenue from smuggling as well as increased enforcement costs.
Predicting the negative effects of legislation isn’t always possible, even when serious lawmakers investigate as best they can. But taxpayers should at least know the cost. Washington state develops fiscal impact statements for bills moving through the Legislature, giving lawmakers and constituents a price tag when reviewing proposed legislation.
Every new law has tradeoffs and unintended consequences. Before your representative votes for a policy, ask, “What are the side effects?” You can opt out of taking a prescription drug. But it’s harder to opt out of bad policy decisions.
