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This letter in tomorrow’s (April 3rd’s) print edition of the Wall Street Journal is brilliant [2]:

In “It’s Destructive and Unfair to Tax ‘Unrealized Capital Gains’ [3]” (op-ed, March 31), Richard McKenzie observes that President Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders would like “a levy on unrealized capital gains.” Their thinking would be OK if the future were known and the reasoning were consistent.

Consistency demands that taxpayers could take deductions for unrealized capital losses as well. Follow the logic further and reach unrealized deductions for future dependents. Pregnant women could even deduct for the life in utero, along with unrealized child-care and educational expenses.

For that matter, if older people are likely to become dependents, a deduction for them could be made by those who anticipate their future dependent status. And why not deduct unrealized but anticipated, i.e., future, costs of doing business? Maybe, on second thought, the unrealized future is better left out of tax policy.

Richard McGowan
Green Bay, Wis.

My Mercatus Center colleague Alden Abbott co-authored a nice piece at CAP X on the United Kingdom joining the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) [4].

GMU Econ alum Bryan Cutsinger makes the case for abolishing the FDIC [5].

Juliette Sellgren talks with Nico Perrino on individual rights and free expression [6].

Wall Street Journal columnist Allysia Finley warns of “the coming Biden bailout of blue states and cities.” [7] A slice:

Take San Francisco’s 1.7-mile Central Subway, which opened in January at a cost of $1.95 billion, three times as much as [8] initially estimated. The subway is drawing fewer than 3,000 [9] daily riders, no doubt because the design doesn’t make sense: Riders have to walk the equivalent of three football fields to connect to other transit lines and take three escalators to reach platforms 12 stories underground. That didn’t stop Rep. Nancy Pelosi, other San Francisco Democratic power brokers and their union friends from championing the project. When borrowing is dirt cheap, why not max out the taxpayer credit card?

TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid) [10].

Wow! Who’d a-thunk that Fauci lied?! [11]

Matt Ridley favorably tweets a statement from Washington Post columnist Josh Rogan [12]:

“A lot of my colleagues have totally failed because they got caught up in the narrative that Fauci is the good guy and Trump is the bad guy.”

MIT’s Retsef Levi tweets [13]: (HT Jay Bhattacharya [14])

Loneliness has dramatic negative impact on humans, especially young and old ones. One has to wonder how many people died of COVID in hospitals because they were isolated from supporting family and could not see human faces? How much the impact of COVID was worsened by lockdowns?

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