At the same time he [Walz] expanded myriad tax credits such as for rent, film production, dependent care and families. Minnesotans can even get a $150 refund for contributing to state political parties and candidates. Such tax credits shrink the tax base so much that Democrats have to keep rates high. Minnesota’s top rate is 9.85% not counting his one-percentage point surcharge—which sends the rich or retired out of state.
Households with roughly $5 billion in adjusted gross income left Minnesota between 2019 and 2022, according to the most recent IRS data. Minnesota in 2022 ranked eighth in income loss among states as a share of overall AGI, after Illinois, New York, California, New Jersey, Alaska, Maryland and Massachusetts.
Top destinations for Minnesota refugees include zero-income tax Florida, Texas and South Dakota. South Dakota’s rate of job growth has been more than four times higher than Minnesota’s since Mr. Walz took the helm. At least overtaxed and jobless Minnesotans can vote with their feet. If Ms. Harris wins, all Americans might have to live by California and Minnesota rules.
“Google has not achieved market dominance by happenstance. It has hired thousands of highly skilled engineers, innovated consistently, and made shrewd business decisions,” Judge Mehta writes. “The result is the industry’s highest quality search engine, which has earned Google the trust of hundreds of millions of daily users.”
So what’s the antitrust problem? The judge says Google’s advertising revenue-sharing payments to Apple, Mozilla and others for default placement have made it harder for potential startups and Microsoft to compete.
Yet users can switch to other search engines if they want. And Judge Mehta notes that Apple and Mozilla have “promotional deals” with other search engines. Microsoft pitched Apple “on making Bing the default multiple times.” Startup Duck Duck Go also “made a bid to be the default for private browsing mode searches on Safari,” but neither it nor Microsoft “succeeded in part due to their inferior quality.”
This makes for a very strange monopolist—one that does better by consumers because its search engine is superior. “Google’s partners value its quality, and they continue to select Google as the default because its search engine provides the best bet for monetizing queries,” the judge explains, adding that Google “has continued to innovate in search.”
The judge nonetheless holds this against Google by saying it has leveraged its search dominance to collect more data, which it uses to improve search quality and ad targeting. This “network effect” has entrenched its monopoly, the judge says.
No doubt this isn’t good for Google’s search competitors. But antitrust law isn’t intended to punish companies that win in the marketplace. The law is supposed to protect consumers from a monopolist that uses its power to raise prices or restrict choices.
Tirzah Duren correctly understands that the cronyist Robinson-Patman Act should be repealed.
Eric Boehm correctly criticizes Tim Walz’s misuse of covid funds.
Nevada might matter less for its six electoral votes, which Donald Trump has narrowly lost twice, than for its Senate choice, which could decide control of that chamber. It is one of five swing states (including Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania) with more-or-less competitive Senate contests. The incumbent, Democrat Jacky Rosen, 67, is seeking a second term. Her Republican opponent is Sam Brown, 40, a retired Army captain severely scarred by third-degree burns over a third of his body, including his face, from an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan. Their race epitomizes the uncertainties created by Joe Biden’s withdrawal, and the difficulty of taking Nevada’s political temperature.
If Congress and the administration decide to maintain the benefits and pay for them with borrowed funds, the U.S. Treasury will have to borrow $39 trillion over 30 years (on top of $77 trillion borrowed for Medicare). This, of course, will be in addition to the already large deficits and debt we have incurred. That shortfall will be even larger without taxes on benefits. It is worth remembering that insolvency is in fact the reason why these taxes were adopted in the first place. The decision to tax benefits didn’t happen until 1983, when the program was already in financial trouble. Additional taxes, and an increase in the payroll tax, were seen as necessary means to keep the program solvent.
Congress, however, should have reformed the program more fundamentally back then. The way the program was initially designed baked in eventual insolvency. But Congress took a more politically convenient, less responsible route. Today, we are paying the price for this political cowardice.
