Say this for Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s probable next mayor: At least the young socialist Democrat is candid about his intention to hike taxes. Not so the state’s other Democratic leaders, who for years have paid lip service to making New York more hospitable for the wealthy and businesses while they do the opposite.
“I don’t want to lose any more people to Palm Beach,” Gov. Kathy Hochul said in June, one month after extending a tax hike on the state’s top earners. “We’ve lost enough.” Yes, New York has.
A report by the nonprofit Citizens Budget Commission this summer found that New York’s share of the nation’s millionaires fell 31% between 2010 and 2022. The state and city would have collected some $13 billion more in personal income-tax revenue in 2022 had the share of millionaires kept pace with other states.
In 2019 Gov. Andrew Cuomo jeered in response to calls by progressives to raise taxes on the wealthy: “ ‘Tax the rich! Tax the rich! Tax the rich!’ We did. Now, God forbid, the rich leave.” Two years later, Mr. Cuomo signed a law hiking taxes on the rich, increasing the combined state-and-city top rate to 14.8% from 12.7%. God forbid, more rich left.
The former governor, running for mayor as an independent, recently defended the tax increase to the Journal editorial board. It was a “temporary Covid tax increase because we were broke. We closed the whole economy,” he said. “There was nothing to trim and we had no revenue.” Really?
State tax revenue had increased 9% between 2018 and 2020. When Mr. Cuomo signed the tax increase in 2021, Democrats in Washington had just enacted a $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill that included $19 billion in direct aid for New York City and state, plus tens of billions more for mass transit, healthcare and schools. And whose fault was it that the economy shut down?
Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle writes wisely about higher education in America. Two slices:
The argument for viewpoint diversity, which this column has made many times, was pithily summarized by physicist Richard Feynman in Caltech’s 1974 commencement address: “The first principle [of science] is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.” Humans are experts at seeing what we expect to see, especially when we really really want something to be true, so it takes strenuous effort — and, often, an outsider with a different viewpoint — to keep us from making fools of ourselves.
…..
Academics tend to recoil from such a crass and mercenary idea, and fair enough, but the world is a crass and mercenary place. We talk about pursuing truth for its own sake, but most academics are pursuing it in exchange for money they can use to satisfy their many less elevated needs. The people who provide that money want something in return. Many will not be content to know that somewhere the global stock of Truth is increasing. Especially if one of the Truths you insist on is that they are dim-witted bigots.
This harsh reality has been hidden from academics because the 20th century gave them a sweetheart deal. (No shade intended: It gave one to journalists, too.) As a complexifying industrial society demanded more scientific research and knowledge workers, federal funds flowed into labs and tuition subsidies, while families paid more and more for that increasingly valuable ticket to a middle-class job. Few were inclined to poke too hard into the inner workings of the goose that laid the golden eggs, lest she stop depositing the goodies.
We write as scholars of academic freedom to respond to the proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” We are politically diverse and do not share common views about the wisdom of particular proposals contained in the compact. Nor do we agree on the extent or substance of the reforms needed in American higher education today. We are, however, united in our concern about key features of the proposed compact.
The compact’s demands that universities and colleges eschew foreign students with “anti-American values” and that they impose a politically determined diversity within departments and other institutional units are incompatible with the self-determination that colleges and universities must enjoy if they are to pursue their mission as truth-seeking institutions. So also is the compact’s demand that universities and colleges select their students only on the basis of “objective” and “standardized” criteria. Colleges may of course voluntarily elect exclusively to deploy objective criteria (such as standardized-test scores and high-school or college grade-point averages), but these standards should not be imposed on institutions which, operating within the law, wish to include consideration of nonquantifiable criteria in selecting students.
Much of the blame for capitalism’s unpopularity has been placed on a university system that many feel leans too far left, and on a younger generation of college students and 20-somethings who never knew socialism, who aren’t being educated about the past catastrophes of centralized markets and means of production, and instead are being taught the evils of capitalistic economies. Is it really the students’ fault? After all, it’s the universities that build curricula that fail to provide a balanced viewpoint.
Nick Gillespie reports on what he saw at the No Kings rally in New York City.
Pierre Lemieux asks: “Will unsustainable protectionism be sustained?”
Congress might at least exercise some control over how tariff revenues are spent. (HT Scott Lincicome)
Bob Graboyes celebrates the creative destruction unleashed by AI-generated art. A slice:
Before AI, my challenge was to find artwork with some vague connection to the written subject matter—or to settle for a pleasant-looking piece of art with no connection to the written material. AI allows me to precision-fit the artwork to the essay’s theme. Here are nine recent examples. (27 more are shown below). My essay of September 2 was: “Tariffs are to Economic Growth What a Bacon-Cheeseburger Is to Weight Loss: You can lose weight IN SPITE OF a mega-cheeseburger-a-day habit, but you’ll never lose weight BECAUSE OF that habit.” With around 15 minutes of work (interspersed by coffee-sipping), I was able to produce the burger-toting-Wimpy-on-a-treadmill pic to provide a visually metaphor for the theme. Another essay asked whether the United States had ever considered kamikaze attacks on Japanese ships, and I created the pic with U.S. Army planes diving toward Japanese ships. [1] No off-the-shelf art by “real artists” was available for those precise themes; [2] It would have been logistically impossible for me to coordinate production in timely fashion with any real artist; and [3] Even if logistics were not a problem, I couldn’t afford to pay a real artist. … Also, tasteful, intelligent readers often write to tell me they like my AI art, so there’s that, too.
