“There is a lot of ongoing discussion about eliminating personal property taxes. There have been bills introduced to eliminate them. It’s a major topic of debate around the state, particularly in St. Charles County. Personal property taxes are the taxes levied on your car, boat, livestock, business equipment, farm equipment, and more. … if personal property taxes were eliminated, the Hancock Amendment would allow local governments to then raise real property taxes by the amount lost in personal property taxes. So, if the state eliminated all personal property taxes statewide, it would likely end up as a revenue-neutral switch where we taxed land and buildings slightly more and taxed mobile assets not at all while removing a tax that most people find particularly annoying. I think that would be a modestly beneficial switch; I just don’t want to sell it as a tax cut.” (06/23/26)
“Alan Greenspan’s obituary writers want to credit him with a single, flattering flaw: that he trusted markets too much. That charge is too generous, because Greenspan never left markets to run themselves. He used the power of the Fed to cultivate and reward financial innovation, making the financial system more fragile for it. Often misunderstood as an Ayn Rand acolyte, Greenspan was not a true libertarian. His creed was not ‘leave the market alone’ as much as it was to use the tools of the government to make the market faster and more inventive — and then stand by to catch it when it falls. Those actions fueled the soaring inequality and the economic crash of 2008. Greenspan was no bystander watching markets obey some ineffable logic. His obsession with financial innovation set the stage for the crisis.” (06/24/26)
“Last week, the Los Angeles City Council voted to place a charter amendment on the November 3 ballot to facilitate giving noncitizens a vote in city elections.” [editor’s note: Presumably “noncitizen” means “noncitizen of the US,” not “noncitizen of LA.” Sort of like how, as a US citizen, I get to vote in US elections whether I’m also a citizen of France or not – TLK] (06/23/26)
“This week marks the 21st anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling in Kelo v. City of New London. This landmark case allows local governments to take private properties by eminent domain, then transfer those properties to developers to promote economic development. Urban planners describe eminent domain, if used correctly, as a tool that can promote blight abatement, job creation, and tax base expansion. The Court did not express agreement with this in its ruling, but it said that as long as a local government’s plan for economic development was crafted through an open democratic process, then using eminent domain for economic development serves the public and is therefore legal. Taking homes and businesses by majority vote. If this strikes you as an idea ripe for unintended consequences, that’s because it is. Since Kelo, local governments across the country have advanced creative notions of public purpose.” (06/23/26)
“Matt Kroenig has wanted the U.S. to attack Iran for more than a decade. Now that he got the war he wanted and it failed, he is reduced to arguing this: ‘To be sure, the United States did not register a knockout punch against the Islamic Republic, but to continue the boxing metaphor, it did win on points.’ War isn’t a sport, and there is no winning on ‘points.’ The ghouls that cheered this war on treat war as if it were a video game where you get more ‘points’ with every person you kill or maim. How many ‘points’ did the U.S. get from massacring the innocent schoolgirls in Minab with missiles? If the U.S. won, as Kroenig insists, what did we win? What does the U.S. have now that it didn’t have before?” (06/23/26)
“Every time I get asked by a TV anchor what I think about the drama of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, my favorite ‘historical’ headline from the Onion comes to mind: ‘World’s Largest Metaphor Hits Ice-Berg’ And every time I do, I hear from defenders of the Trump administration complaining about the disproportionate media coverage of what should be a very minor story in the grand sweep of things. They have a point. … I can think of scores of stories that deserve more attention on the merits. But there are two problems with this complaint. First, it was Trump who invited extensive scrutiny of the effort. … Second, there’s the metaphor-on-the-Mall problem. The Reflecting Pool is a microcosm of nearly everything that vexes people about the second Trump term.” (06/23/26)
“Even if the framework agreement to end the U.S.-Israel-Iran War is successful, economic fallout from the conflict will persist at least through the end of the year. And the consequences for the global economic system — particularly the centrality of the U.S. dollar and its dominance of the oil trade — may be more far reaching. Analysts have suggested that the war may spell the end of the so-called petrodollar, or alternatively that it could bring about an era of renewed dollar dominance, or that really, the petrodollar ceased to be a meaningful driver of U.S. monetary hegemony decades ago. The latter vein of analysis is largely correct.” (06/23/26)
“One of my earliest memories growing up in Kalamazoo, Michigan, was a visit to the bakery at the A&P grocery store at 5800 Gull Road. It was one of a handful of places my parents could afford to shop at in the midst of the great stagflation of the 1970s. My mother made amazing birthday cakes for us as kids, and I presume she was there for some ideas. I had other things in mind. They gave away free ‘donut holes’ to kids who were presumably well-behaved, leading to my temporarily angelic behavior whenever we went there. Little did I know then, A&P was once regarded as a retail behemoth. A monopoly needing to be cut down to size. Their crime? Volume discounts. This allegedly nefarious practice was at the center of anti-chain-store sentiment that reached a fever pitch with the passage of the Robinson-Patman Act in 1936.” (06/23/26)
“The tentative ‘memorandum of understanding’ with Iran has caused glee on the Left and furor among many on the Right. The Left might welcome ‘peace,’ but surely not as much as it enjoys infighting on the Right over the details. If last week Democrats were calling Trump a fascist warmonger, now they deride his peace efforts as those of a Neville Chamberlain patsy. Within 24 hours, the Left’s talking points shifted from a mad bomber-style Curtis LeMay in the White House to an impotent appeaser. A week ago, some Republicans were arguing that not one of the prior seven presidents had dared to use force to stop Iran’s nuclear program. Now some of them are deriding him as an Iranian enabler.” [editor’s note: Poor Vic never seems to handle the failures of his approved schemes very well – TLK] (06/23/26)
“If there is one thing we have learned since 2020 it is the power of confirmation bias. The public health establishment has presented a mass of data and analysis to show that it was right all along about the Covid-19 pandemic and saved millions of lives. This finding has been accepted at face value and incorporated into policy, but rests on shaky foundations. We need to look at the big picture. Apologists for vaccination generally use point-to-point comparisons – they pick an arbitrary date near the peak of the epidemic curve and compare it to a later date to show that an intervention is correlated with a reduction in infections or mortality. This is open to case-counting window bias and immortal time bias – another selection of dates could yield an entirely different result.” (06/23/26)
