“An income tax rate of over 100% would be hard for anyone to sustain. At a rate a smidge over 100%, our deepest pockets might be able to get by if they drew down their wealth or borrowed against it. But keeping up, year in and year out, with an income tax rate of over 1,000%, 10 times income? That seems, on its face, totally implausible. Yet the Washington, D.C.-based Tax Foundation would have us believe Warren Buffett did just that for at least five years running, all while enormously growing his own personal wealth. This conclusion about Buffett’s tax situation emerges inescapably out of the claims the Tax Foundation makes in a research paper published just after last year’s November election. The paper’s title (‘America’s Super Rich Pay Super Amounts of Taxes, New Treasury Report Finds’) could hardly lay out the Tax Foundation’s case more starkly.” (03/04/25)
“Mainstream history-of-thought texts usually mention Say only briefly, and then only in connection with his law of markets, thereby implicitly trivializing much of his work. One of the exceptions is A History of Economic Thought by Eric Roll. Roll treats Say with notable respect, but, unfortunately, partly because he misinterprets Say as an ancestor of modern general- equilibrium, positivistic, neoclassical economists. In all fairness, one could argue that this lack of both attention and appreciation might be traced, at least in part, to Say himself. After all, Say did explicitly represent his work as being mainly an elaboration and popularization of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations for the benefit of continental European readers. Taking Say at his word, many economists seem never to have bothered to investigate more closely.” (03/04/25)
“Whether the bizarre scene with Zelenskyy was planned or improvised, in its wake no one in Europe can believe that America can be counted on to support Ukraine militarily, financially or diplomatically. Whether European states respond by initiating a serious military buildup or by accommodating themselves to greater Russian influence on the continent remains to be seen (and these are not mutually exclusive options), just as it remains to be seen whether Ukraine continues to fight or sues for peace on terms that submit to Russian domination. Whatever plans they make, though, they will rationally have to be made on the assumption that America will not be helpful.” (03/04/25)
“JD Vance’s biggest applause line at this year’s March for Life wasn’t specifically about abortion. ‘I want more babies in the United States of America,’ the vice president declared. Vance is right to care about the U.S. birth rate, which has fallen to record lows …. Here’s one way to jump-start a fix: The federal government should let its employees work from home as much as possible. … If you want to really support working parents, the best thing you can do is give them flexibility on where and when they work. Yet the Trump administration is pushing in the opposite direction.” (03/04/25)
“On May 20, 2011, inside the Oval Office and before the cameras, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lectured President Barack Obama. The incident was the closest the two countries came to a total breakdown. I was then Israel’s ambassador to the United States and had a ringside seat to the clash. It left a deep impression on me, underscoring the importance of interpersonal relationships in the shaping of foreign policy. Those lessons proved especially applicable last week in the wake of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Oval Office meltdown with President Trump and Vice President JD Vance. By repeatedly interrupting and finally lecturing his hosts, the feisty Ukrainian leader supplied a textbook example of how not to handle a foreign leader of formidable pride and breakaway policies. To understand how he might get out of this mess, it’s worth going back to the Netanyahu-Obama collision.” (03/03/25)
“Donald Trump and Elon Musk keep claiming that their scorched-earth approach to remaking the federal government is made necessary by the prevalence of fraud and waste. Musk’s DOGE attack-squad tabulates its progress on a Wall of Receipts that currently purports to have saved Uncle Sam $65 billion. That number appears to have been plucked out of thin air. The savings for the 2,300 individual contracts listed on the site add up to only $9.6 billion, and even that amount is shaky. For example, the single biggest savings, $1.9 billion, is attached to a Treasury Department contract that is reported to have ended during the Biden Administration. DOGE gives no details of any fraud it may have found in the contracts. That is not surprising, since it is impossible to have done a careful examination of that many contracts in such a short amount of time.” (03/04/25)
“Punishing Iran was not on Donald Trump’s mind when he entered the White House in January. Rather, he had gone out of his way to declare his desire for a deal by avoiding insulting rhetoric, disavowing regime change and declaring nuclear weapons as his only red line. Similar signals came from Iran. Direct talks with Trump was Tehran’s new line. Yet this unique window of opportunity is closing fast, mainly because Trump isn’t paying attention. Iran policy is once again falling into the hands of the neocons who sabotaged Trump’s hope to reach a deal with Iran during his first term — with war lurking around the corner.” [editor’s note: Trump entered his first term with a deal — a really GOOD deal — and broke that deal for “maximum pressure.” That was him, not “the neocons” – TLK] (03/04/25)
“The efforts of the Trump administration to purge DEI (‘diversity, equity and inclusion’) programs from the federal government bureaucracy have revealed an enormous amount of confusion about what DEI actually is (or was). In part this is due to the way it was sold by its practitioners, who often presented it as a straightforward extension of the ideas and principles that animated the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In reality, many of their claims were a lot more controversial. If there is any hope for resisting the full-fledged assault that is taking place, it should begin with a re-examination of these claims, with an eye to producing a more defensible body of doctrine.” (03/04/25)
“Only one month in, the foreign policy moves of the Trump Administration in Europe, the Middle East, and North America indicate that radical, tumultuous change, marked most notably by major reversals in long-standing U.S. stances, could be the norm over at least the next four years. Following Trump’s threats to seize the Panama Canal and Greenland and absorb Canada, along with his apparent support for Russia over Ukraine and his bizarre offer to turn Gaza into the Riviera of the Middle East by removing the Palestinian population, one might ask what is in store for Asia, and China in particular. Thus far, Trump has said relatively little about the region other than to predictably threaten tariffs against China and others while offering the prospect of welcoming some forms of Chinese investment into the United States and dissing Taiwan. However, this is unlikely to remain the case.” (03/04/25)
