“Gasoline prices have skyrocketed. The Iran War is to blame, but the President has not been able to bring it to an end. Still, he has offered a small fix. A federal gas tax suspension! In its favor, this temporary measure would offer some relief. In addition, the federal government shouldn’t be attaching an excise to fuel sales anyway. The states already burden our fuel bills with their own taxes. … Cutting off a source of revenue would increase the deficit, of course. But there is a simple solution to that: spend less.” (05/14/26)
“The president has actually opened the door to rethinking ties with Beijing, but partisan politics are preventing some lawmakers from walking on through.” (05/14/26)
Source: Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
by David Volodzko
“This year, the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary. To commemorate the occasion, FIRE is proud to present the limited series ‘Figures of Speech,’ looking at the heroes and villains of free speech in American history. We begin with Joseph McCarthy, the senator who became our censor-in-chief and gave us a new term for political oppression: McCarthyism.” (05/14/26)
“To be clear, China has many significant problems of its own. It faces a demographic crisis: Its working age population has been shrinking for more than a decade. Its economy is deeply unbalanced, relying on unsustainable trade surpluses and unproductive investment to make up for inadequate consumer spending. Its economic growth is slowing. It suffers from high youth unemployment. Discontent is rising, held in check by autocratic, police-state measures. But despite China’s domestic troubles, in geopolitical terms China is on the ascendant. Trump’s visit to Beijing is a field trip by a failing, flailing would-be autocrat pleading with a real strongman, who leads a much more serious country, to bail him out of the mess he’s made.” (05/14/26)
“AIs excel at pattern recognition, correlation spotting, and out-of-sample prediction from vast datasets; they do not deduce the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism, the coordinative power of market prices under private property, or why fiat results in boom-bust cycles or all manner of unproductive financialization schemes.” (05/14/26)
