Source: Bet On It
by Bryan Caplan

“Three months after 9/11, ‘Shoe Bomber’ Richard Reid tried to blow up an airplane with his footware. Soon afterwards, TSA started ‘recommending’ shoe removal during screenings, though as far as I recall the ‘recommendation’ was universally mandatory from the get-go. Since 2006, shoe removal has been required both de jure and de facto. Now, without a government apology — or even an official explanation — TSA is ending this innumerate security policy. … The average number of air travelers in the US over this period is about 700M per year, implying the destruction of roughly 15 billion minutes of time in the U.S. alone. That’s almost 30,000 years of life. If you figure the average American has about 30 more years to live, that’s 1000 lives destroyed. The cost? One lifetime in prison for Richard Reid. 1000:1. That dwarfs the immediate kill ratio of the 9/11 bombers, which was about 160:1.” (07/08/25)

https://www.betonit.ai/p/americas-most-successful-terrorist

Source: Semafor
by David Weigel

“The GOP is clearly betting that it can run a Biden-era campaign in Virginia this year. Led by [Glenn] Youngkin in 2021, the party swept every statewide office and flipped the House of Delegates with a simple formula: Compete in racially diverse suburbs, drive up turnout with rural conservatives, and watch Democrats struggle to defend their record on crime and gender. But this year, Democrats doubt that the issues that bedeviled them four years ago — like post-pandemic learning loss, public school gender policies, or higher crime that got blamed on criminal justice reform — will be on the ballot again. They see Virginia as a proving ground for their post-Biden campaign strategies. And they see a backlash coming against elements of President Donald Trump’s second-term agenda that have hit the state especially hard, starting with his sweeping federal workforce cuts.” (07/08/25)

https://www.semafor.com/article/07/08/2025/republicans-try-a-novel-pitch-make-virginia-2021-again

Source: Public Substack
by Michael Shellenberger & Alex Gutentag

“The idea that America is ruled by a secret government of deep state intelligence agencies like the CIA and FBI is a right-wing conspiracy theory, the media has said for the last decade. Journalists at outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and NPR have portrayed claims about a ‘deep state’ as paranoid fabrications pushed by Donald Trump and his supporters to discredit legitimate government institutions. They insisted that accusations of political bias or covert influence by agencies like the CIA or FBI had no basis in fact and served only to inflame public distrust. And yet over the same period, investigative reporting, including by the two of us, and official disclosures revealed that these agencies interfered in domestic politics in ways that aligned with that very narrative.” (07/07/25)

https://www.public.news/p/this-is-a-total-fucking-disaster

Source: Paul Krugman
by Paul Krugman

“The infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 pushed the average tariff rate to about 20 percent. So far every country that has received a letter will be facing rates higher than that. Another way to look at it to ask how much we would expect these tariffs to reduce trade. The key number is the elasticity of substitution in world trade — the percent fall in imports caused by a one percent rise in import prices. The median estimate from many studies is 3.8, which implies that in the long run 25 percent tariffs will reduce trans-Pacific trade by almost 60 percent. That’s a lot. … These tariffs are going to hurt South Korea and Japan, although they’ll hurt U.S. consumers even more. So why didn’t Korean and Japanese negotiators make big enough concessions to satisfy Trump? Because there was nothing for them to concede.” (07/08/25)

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-tariff-beatings-will-continue

Source: The Daily Economy
by John Phelan

“Economists find state income tax rates impact the performance of professional sports teams. Athletes, like many Americans, relocate with tax liability in mind.” (07/08/25)

https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/do-low-tax-states-win-more-stanley-cups/

Source: TomDispatch
by Andrea Mazzarino

“War kills in so many ways. These days, Americans are bombarded with images from Gaza and elsewhere of people or broken bodies being ferried on stretchers from the rubble of homes and hospitals, by rescue workers whose thin bodies and stricken faces suggest they are barely better off than those they’re helping. Social media and journalists make us eyewitnesses to emaciated children too weak to cry. And yet, compared with air raids that crush and bloody instantaneously, a slower disaster, more difficult to capture (especially given our made-for-TikTok attention spans), consists of the hours that many people in war zones spend wasting away from infectious diseases of one sort or another. … Between 2003 and 2007, half of Iraq’s 18,000 doctors left the country due to the deteriorating security situation (with few intending to return).” (07/08/25)

https://tomdispatch.com/illness-and-endless-wars/