• In Virginia, Democratic lawmakers want to use their newly gained control of the governorship to wallop high earners. One bill would impose a 3.8% tax on investment income of taxpayers making more than $500,000, which would raise the top rate to 9.55%. Another bill would create two new individual top tax brackets of 8% (starting at $600,000) and 10% (more than $1 million). Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger campaigned last year as a moderate, but will she buck the leftists in her legislature?
Judge Glock argues that “ending property taxes would be a mistake.” A slice:
Homeowners thus have legitimate reason to complain. But ending property taxes would be a cure worse than the disease.
First: there are no good local alternatives to property taxes, which provide about three-quarters of all local tax revenue. A Tax Foundation study found that repealing property taxes in Florida would make it necessary to raise sales taxes to between 10 percent and 33 percent per purchase, depending on the county. In practice, sustaining these different tax rates would be nearly impossible, since people could easily drive across borders to buy cheaper goods.
The likely alternative—centralization of taxes at the state level, especially through higher income and sales taxes—would undermine growth. That’s because local governments are more favorable to growth when they can absorb its fiscal benefits through property taxes. A study in the Journal of Housing Economics found that countries with centralized finances tended to restrict housing growth. Countries that allowed local governments to keep more revenue, by contrast, permitted more development.
The Editorial Board of the Washington Post applauds the freeing of Poland’s economy. A slice:
You don’t have to credit communism for “breaking down old social barriers.” The truth is the opposite: Poland excelled by firmly embracing free markets and welcoming newcomers.
Taking control of their own destiny, Poles embraced market liberalization, abandoned price controls and scaled back state power. Warsaw joined the European Union’s single market in 2004, further embracing free trade.
Despite [Stephen] Miller’s claims, Poland operated one of the more liberal immigration systems in Europe until recently. Many came from other European countries. That’s no surprise: as a country embraces freedom, it grows more prosperous, and more outsiders want to move in. This is the virtuous cycle of human flourishing.
James Lileks is not amused by the late Paul Ehrlich’s wrong predictions. A slice:
It seemed perfectly likely that Africa and Asia would be overrun with people because there were just so many of them already. Then America would teem as well, just like in the movie Soylent Green, a vision of the future where everyone’s so hungry that they have to eat Edward G. Robinson (who was actually snack-sized and pretty gristly). How could you not worry about this? Ehrlich appeared on The Dick Cavett Show with warnings, and Cavett nodded gravely!
The subhead of Ehrlich’s New York Times obituary was amusing: “His best-selling 1968 book, which forecast global famines, made him a leader of the environmental movement. But he faced criticism when his predictions proved premature.” Premature. As in, “It’ll surely happen eventually, and we hope so because people are a pestilence and Mother Earth weeps every time a baby is born.” Optimism, of course, is for fools who just don’t know how bad things are — and who can actually close their eyes at night without thinking about microplastics.
The best parts of this very good @60Minutes segment have gotta be when @cpgrabow tells @LesleyRStahl a few basic Jones Act absurdities, and she repeatedly gasps “NO!” in disbelief – truly shocked that a century-old US law could be so dumb and counterproductive.
Sadly, yes.
GMU Econ alum Romina Boccia says that “Congress knows it has a spending problem, but won’t fix it.”
Arnold Kling reflects on his time at UATX. A slice:
Also, I was happy with the results of “practice exams.” In both the Public Choice class and the Political Psychology class, I made up exams that tested students’ knowledge of the important concepts in the course. I gave them as take-home exams, told the students that they would get full credit for completion, and I gave them a prompt to give to an AI to grade the exams. They turned in by email their answers and the AI evaluations. I was very happy with the results. I could tell that the students wrote the answers themselves, and most of the AI evaluations of the answers were justifiably good. Students understood concepts like rent-seeking (in Public Choice) and moral dyad theory (in Political Psychology).
Robert Woodson looks back on Jesse Jackson. A slice:
At his best, Jackson confronted not only injustice from without, but the moral failures within our own communities. He spoke of responsibility and self-determination and challenged wounded people not to surrender to victimhood. Many of us respected him for that. I certainly did.
After he entered the partisan machinery, his prophetic voice gradually gave way to the language of grievance, compromise and self-preservation. He no longer spoke primarily as a reformer, but as a performer on the political stage—a power broker. His focus strayed from rebuilding the moral and social foundations of struggling communities toward mobilizing their resentments.
That decline wasn’t merely the problem of Jesse Jackson. It reflected a broader shift in America itself. The early civil-rights movement was grounded in discipline, sacrifice and character. Its strongest leaders spoke not only about the sins of segregation but also about the responsibilities of freedom, understanding that justice without moral renewal would leave communities politically visible but internally broken.
It was therefore telling that in 2008, when Sen. Barack Obama challenged young men to be responsible fathers, Jackson accused him of “speaking down to black people”—even though Jackson had delivered the same message to Mr. Obama’s generation in Ebony 30 years earlier.
