Capping Credit Card Fees Threatens To Hurt Consumers and Small Businesses
Source: Reason
by JD Tuccille
“Lawmakers can’t change the fact that expenses must be offset somewhere.” (06/24/26)
Category: Opinion
Is Warsh His Own Man?
Source: The American Conservative
by David Brady
“The Fed chair’s first meeting was largely uneventful but laid the groundwork of challenges for his tenure.” (06/24/26)
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/is-warsh-his-own-man/
Why Much of Manhattan Would Be Illegal to Build Today
Source: The Daily Economy
by Raymond C Niles
“Zoning laws drive up housing costs and freeze cities in the past. New York City is a clear example.” (06/24/26)
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/why-much-of-manhattan-would-be-illegal-to-build-today/
Industrial Policies: Even Modest Intervention Creates Market Distortions
Source: Cato Institute
by Jeffrey Miron
“Industrial policy — government efforts to favor certain sectors, technologies, or firms — has a long history. Far from a fringe idea, politicians across the spectrum have promoted such policies for centuries. But the results are far more problematic than its current popularity suggests.” (06/23/26)
How Steve Hilton Can Become California’s Next Governor
Source: Town Hall
by Edward Ring
“A very successful businessman (and a major contributor to Democratic Party candidates and causes) once explained to me why he talked, acted, and thought like a Republican but never considered supporting any Republican candidate, ever. ‘We’ve already got the Republicans’, he told me. This is the transactional essence behind corporate support for Democrats in California, the one-party state. Republicans have no political power, and whenever the Democrats in the state legislature are surprisingly split on a matter of concern to business interests, the handful of Republican politicians will invariably cast pro-business votes. This has been going on for a long time. Democrats have controlled both houses of the state legislature since 1997 and the governorship since 2011. A signature moment came in 2010 when Jerry Brown defeated the hapless billionaire Republican Meg Whitman to begin his second two-term stint as governor.” (06/24/26)
https://amgreatness.com/2026/06/24/how-steve-hilton-can-become-californias-next-governor/
Out of war, new alliances for stability
Source: Christian Science Monitor
by staff
“The off-again, on-again hostilities and opening of the Strait of Hormuz are prompting more creative and proactive thinking about global diplomacy and global markets. Governments are using the lulls to rev up stalled economic activities. And the key fossil fuel-producing nations of the Gulf are working quickly to establish alternative infrastructures of cooperation – as well as of concrete and steel. Already, Iraq – which has had tense relations with Syria for years – has been exporting its oil overland via tanker trucks to Syrian ports. And many Gulf states have pivoted to importing tons of timber, cement, and agricultural and consumer goods through those same ports. There are efforts to collaborate on new pipelines, storage facilities, and even a multicountry rail project. As the Monitor reported last week, these moves are ‘already reshaping regional trade and cementing new Mideast alliances’ among countries such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, and Syria.” (06/23/26)
Why the Trump Administration Is Telling Us So Much About UFOs
Source: The Bulwark
by Yaniv Regev
“From the self-proclaimed ‘most transparent administration in American history,’ the transparency offensive, ranging across the UAP files and the John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. records, has been celebrated by boosters as a long-overdue reckoning with governmental secrecy. And to be sure, the argument is democratically intuitive: the government hides too much; a more transparent government is a more trustworthy one; an informed citizenry is an empowered one. It’s a tidy thesis, and one I think many people would endorse. Except it’s being weaponized—and the Trump administration’s information avalanche is the clearest proof.” (06/24/26)
Mindless Middleness Was Keir Starmer’s Undoing
Source: The UnPopulist
by Berny Belvedere
“Rather than govern on the strength of his supermajority in Parliament, Starmer governed as though he had something to fear, spending his majority appeasing not the Conservatives he had beaten but a Reform he chased rightward as it climbed. Starmer had room to govern boldly. Instead, he governed in a crouch. … The bet was that the right’s goods in gentler packaging would deny the right its market. It failed twice over. The voters he hoped to hold by sounding tougher did not stay; they went to the people who meant it. The voters he might have inspired got nothing to be inspired by. He alienated the left without satisfying the right.” (06/23/26)
https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/mindless-middleness-was-keir-starmers
The Memorandum of Understanding With Iran Reeks of Capitulation
Source: Exiled Policy
by Jason Pye
“As unhappy as Israel may be about it, there appears to be a ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ (MOU) between the United States and Iran. The MOU isn’t a final deal. It really only functions as a framework. Of course, it’s fragile. The durability of the MOU remains uncertain given broader regional tensions, including Israeli operations in Lebanon. Negotiations for a formal agreement are underway in Switzerland, and progress has been reported. The elephant in the room is what the MOU says, specifically regarding reconstruction, economic development, and sanctions relief.” (06/23/26)
https://exiledpolicy.substack.com/p/the-memorandum-of-understanding-with
What If You Eliminated Personal Property Taxes and Nobody Noticed?
Source: Show-Me Institute
by David Stokes
“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)