“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: The American Prospect
by Whitney Curry Wimbish
“Executives from Amazon, Walmart, and scores of other anti-worker, anti-regulation corporations are paying millions to influence elected officials through the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), researchers and former lawmakers who have attended the meetings told the Prospect. In exchange for donating to the NCSL Foundation, the NCSL allows executives to set conference agendas and put their preferred speakers on panel discussions about policymaking, they said. The arrangement is giving corporate interests significant power to shape how lawmakers think about issues, especially those in which they have little or no expertise, these critics say. The benefits go well beyond those that the NCSL Foundation says on its website come with the annual sponsorship fees at various price levels, such as invitations to meetings.” (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)
“Taiwan’s elected officials were not given a seat at this week’s summit in Beijing between the American and Chinese leaders. Yet the Taiwanese people – or, rather, their resolve to run a free country by respecting individual sovereignty – were very much there. So much so that China’s overall stated goal for the summit was to gain the United States’ help in breaking Taiwan’s democratic spirit. The specific requests by Chinese leader Xi Jinping are that U.S. President Donald Trump oppose any attempt by Taiwan to officially declare independence and that he end U.S. military sales to the second-freest nation in Asia. Whether Mr. Trump acts on those requests is almost secondary to the fact that Mr. Xi indirectly admits he is failing to break Taiwan’s civic identity of individual freedom and inherent rights.” (05/13/26)
