When we were polarized in the past, there were arguments and (sometimes not so civil) debates over a major public policy issue. What are the major public policy issues that are dividing us today? I suggest that there aren’t any. What is driving a wedge between us today is tribalism – not government policy. More.
When we think of conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, we think of the wars following the Protestant Reformation in Europe in the 1500s and 1600s. The United States, we assume, has followed a policy of free expression of religion, as promised in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Sad to say, that is not true. I would like to share with you (briefly) the story of the “Philadelphia Riots of 1844.”
A new study lays out the toll of lifelong high inflation on consumers. It estimates that permanent 5% inflation would lower household lifetime spending by 3.62%. Permanent 10% inflation would lower lifetime household spending by 6.82%. Even if inflation ran permanently at the Fed’s 2% target, consumers would still feel a pinch, with a 1.5% reduction in lifetime household spending. More.
With 10% inflation, the average family can expect to lose 7% of its lifetime income to government.
This is the startling conclusion of a first-ever study by Laurance Kotlikoff and Alan Auerbach and their colleagues. The sources of the loss: (1) large parts of the tax code are not inflation indexed, (2) those parts that are indexed are indexed with a lag, and (3) Social Security benefits and other entitlements are also indexed with a lag. Our fiscal system is so incredibly complex that it has been impossible to measure the overall effects of inflation before now. Given the 20 largest federal/state entitlements, all administered differently by 50 states, that gives us 1,000 fiscal systems– to say nothing of all the different tax regimes. Hats off to the economists who spent several years developing the model that could give us a reliable answer. See John Goodman’s explanation of the study at Forbes.
Social Security sends out more than 2 million clawback letters every year. Why so many clawbacks? Simple. Social Security doesn’t have the data it needs to correctly calculate benefits for tens of millions of us. Or it has the information on day 1, but doesn’t process it. Or it inputs the wrong information. Or it mixes up your earnings record with someone else’s. Or it makes the wrong benefit calculations. I’ve seen all of this and more. More
A recent scholarly paper perused two newspapers (the New York Times and the Richmond Daily Dispatch) for duels reported between 1861 and 1865. They found 130 duels (over just five years!). Of these 130 duels, they write, “71 involve prominent figures, which we define as politicians, military officers with rank of at least colonel (Army) or captain (Navy), and other well-known private citizens.”[2]
Read the original article (and view the notes) on janetakesonhistory.org
The year 1901 was not a promising time for Charlotte Hawkins Brown, a young black woman, to return to her native North Carolina and teach in a mission school. White supremacists had overthrown North Carolina’s Fusionist government in 1900. The new governor was proud of the amendment to the state constitution that had “the deliberate purpose of depriving the negro of the right to vote, and of allowing every white man to retain that right.” Schools were separate and unequal in spite of the 1896 Supreme Court decision that said they could be separate if they were equal.
In the early 20th century, they called themselves “progressives.” Then, they were “liberals.” Now they are “progressives” again. Early on, they embraced racism and endorsed eugenics. Then they became advocates for civil rights. Now they endorse racism of a different sort – wokeness. If you had to the describe the distinguishing characteristic of modern liberalism, what would your answer be? John Goodman gives a novel answer. More
To get seniors to support Social Security reform, there are additional abuses that need correcting. These include: stopping the double taxation of senior income through the Social Security benefits tax, no longer forcing seniors to dissave, abolishing the Social Security earnings penalty, and ending taxation by inflation. More