I thought this might be a slow news week, with the upcoming holiday and all, but I should have known better. In today’s newsletter we have a bunch of new economic data and updates out of Washington, including an emerging frontrunner to lead the Fed and a surprising bit of Hollywood dealmaking.

First though, let’s check in on the Affordable Care Act. The White House is reportedly working to address expiring subsidies, but enrollees should expect to pay more regardless. — Tony Wagner, newsletter editor

This year, Kelly Williams and her husband have been paying about $2,000 a month, without subsidies, for health insurance through the marketplace for them and their two kids.

Next year, that same bronze plan will cost them about $3,300 a month, or $40,000 for the year.

“So, I'm a little bit paralyzed because, obviously, I really don't want to spend $40,000 on health insurance, but I also don't want to choose a bad plan or choose the wrong plan,” Williams said.

Any day, the White House is expected to release an announcement detailing how it plans to deal with high health care costs and expiring government subsidies for insurance. Without those subsidies, which are set to expire at the end of this year, many people who buy Affordable Care Act medical plans would see their premiums double, triple, or quadruple come January.

But even people who haven't historically relied on tax credits for health insurance are seeing their premiums for ACA coverage go up next year — about 26%, on average.

Williams is one of those consumers who’s seeing eye-popping increases to her premiums. She and her husband own a commercial printing business in rural Oklahoma, and their kids are in college. They don’t go to the doctor much or take many prescriptions, but she said that going without insurance doesn’t feel like an option.

“With kids, you worry most about accidents, and you're like, ‘What if somebody's in a horrible car wreck, and you have just a half-million-dollar hospital bill or something?’” Williams said.

She knew going into open enrollment this year that her family’s premium would probably be going up. “Once the news came that there were going to be the cuts to Medicaid and the cuts to the subsidies, I knew that you could not take that much money out of the health care market and not have it affect everybody.”

She’s right. That’s one of the main reasons premiums are going up, according to Sabrina Corlette, co-director of Georgetown’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms. If the enhanced subsidies do expire, lots of young, healthy people are likely to drop coverage because it’s too expensive.

“And when insurance companies anticipate a smaller, sicker pool of people that they're going to have to cover, they will increase their premiums,” Corlette said.

The average increase for marketplace plans for next year is about 26%. That’s big, said Matthew Fiedler, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution — especially after several years of premiums being relatively stable.

Americans don’t often have a direct say in how their tax dollars get spent. Some places have engaged in “participatory budgeting,” wherein residents propose taxpayer-funded improvements like speed bumps, or musical instruments for a library, and then vote for which projects win public funding.

President Trump has reportedly encouraged Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison to revive “Rush Hour,” the buddy-cop series starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker that last hit theaters in 2007.

Some important context here: The “Rush Hour” films were directed by Brett Ratner, whose latest film is a documentary about First Lady Melania Trump, and produced by a Warner Bros. subsidiary. Paramount has been trying to buy what is today called Warner Bros. Discovery, and the Trump administration would have to approve that merger. The White House appears likely to approve of a Paramount bid over others because Ellison’s father, Larry Ellison, is a billionaire MAGA supporter.