Champion of Truth
Trump’s latest push to steal a Nebraska electoral vote appears to have flopped
https://www.vox.com/politics/2024/4/3/24119984/nebraska-electoral-college-vote-trump-biden-kirk
“A diplomatic solution, perhaps one in which Hezbollah agrees to remove its positions close to Lebanon’s southern border, is certainly possible. That would allow Israelis to move back to their homes in the north. Whatever the outcome, however, Israel will likely not be able to eliminate Hezbollah, just as it has failed at eliminating Hamas. And continued aggression could lead to more extreme outcomes in the future.”
https://www.vox.com/israel/373428/lebanon-hezbollah-israel-hamas-gaza
“”Homicides Are Skyrocketing in American Cities Under Kamala Harris,” Donald Trump’s campaign avers in a statement issued on Monday. Like Trump’s assertion that “our crime rate is going up,” this claim is completely at odds with reality.
According to FBI data, the homicide rate jumped by more than 27 percent in 2020, when Trump was president; rose slightly in 2021, the first year of the Biden administration; and fell by 7 percent in 2022. Preliminary FBI numbers show bigger drops in 2023 (about 13 percent) and this year (26 percent for the first quarter). So far this year, according to data from 277 cities, homicides are down by about 17 percent.”
https://reason.com/2024/08/13/trump-falsely-claims-that-homicides-are-skyrocketing-an-imaginary-trend-he-blames-on-kamala-harris/
“The rankings suggest that occupational licensing doesn’t follow common assumptions that red states are market-friendly and blue states are not. That may apply when it comes to taxes and other regulations, but licensing restrictions and reforms seem to cross partisan boundaries.”
https://reason.com/2024/08/14/does-your-state-let-you-work-without-government-permission/
“Economists understand that tariffs ultimately raise the prices of goods they are applied to. Tariffs are a tax on imported goods. This tax is paid by consumers. Americans must shoulder the additional cost for the same imported goods or pay higher prices for domestically made substitutes (whose quality might also deteriorate because their producers are shielded from foreign competition).”
https://reason.com/2024/08/15/americans-support-for-tariffs-plummets-when-they-see-prices-rise/
“exempting tips from income taxes would increase the deficit, create some weird economic incentives, and unfairly cut taxes for a small subset of workers while not doing much to help the majority of Americans or grow the economy.”
…
“Alex Muresianu, a senior policy analyst at The Tax Foundation, spells out in detail why that’s the case. He compares two hypothetical low-income service sector workers: a cashier and a waitress, both of whom earn $34,000 annually. Under the current tax code, both have the same baseline tax liability (roughly $2,000) even though about half of the waitress’s earnings are via tips.
If those tips are exempted from income taxes, the cashier still owes that $2,000. The waitress, meanwhile, owes just $600.
Harris should have to explain why she thinks it’s fair to ask some low-income workers to pay tax bills that will be two or three times higher than other workers who earn the same amount—because that’s what she is proposing here.”
https://reason.com/2024/08/15/carving-out-a-tax-cut-just-for-tips-doesnt-make-more-sense-when-kamala-harris-does-it/
“Those laws create a black market in which the composition and potency of drugs is uncertain and highly variable. They also push traffickers toward highly potent drugs such as fentanyl, which are easier to conceal and smuggle. As a result, drug users like Gentili typically don’t know exactly what they are consuming, which magnifies the risk of a fatal mistake. The “poisoning” that Peace and Caban decried therefore is a consequence of the policies they were proudly enforcing in this very case.”
https://reason.com/2024/08/17/blaming-dealers-for-drug-deaths-misses-another-culprit/
“Kroger is the fourth-largest grocery store chain in America—behind Walmart, Amazon, and Costco—and Albertsons is the fifth-largest. Once merged, the combined company would rise to third on the list. On the surface, this may seem to provide some support for the FTC’s position, but American shoppers would be wise to read the fine print.
In truth, if the deal were to proceed, a merged version of Kroger and Albertsons would still only make up 9 percent of overall grocery sales. To put this in further perspective, consider that Walmart—the nation’s largest grocery provider—would continue to operate more stores (including its Sam’s Club outlets) than a Kroger-Albertson combo and maintain grocery revenue that is more than twice that of the merged company.”
https://reason.com/2024/08/17/harris-joins-the-ftcs-food-fight-against-kroger-albertsons-merger/
“As a direct result of one-party misrule (there are zero Republicans on the 50-seat City Council), Chicago’s tax base is decreasing, not increasing. The population has declined for nine consecutive years, is shrinking by an annual rate of 1 percent, and is at its lowest point in more than a century.
Illinois, where Democrats control the governorship and a two-thirds majority of the legislature, lost “an estimated $3.6 billion in income tax revenue in 2022 alone, a year the net loss of 87,000 residents subtracted $9.8 billion in adjusted gross income,” syndicated columnist and Illinois native George Will observed last week. “In the past six years, $47.5 billion [adjusted gross income] has left….Illinois leads the nation in net losses of households making 200,000 or more.”
None of these or other grisly Windy City stats—including the murders and the pension liabilities—are obscure. As Illinois Policy Institute Vice President Austin Berg put it Saturday night at a live taping of the Fifth Column podcast, “I believe Chicago is the greatest American city, and the worst-governed American city.””
https://reason.com/2024/08/19/democrats-unburdened-by-what-they-have-done-to-chicago/
“A few years back, the organization accrued a $2,543 property tax debt on its community center. So in 2018, the city sold that lien for $5,115 to a California-based investor, who then foreclosed on and sold the ECO’s building for $139,500. In return, the ECO got a check for the difference between its debt and the lien purchase price: $2,572.
In other words, all told, the organization paid six figures to compensate for the $2,543 it owed the government, in what a new federal lawsuit alleges is a pervasive practice in Baltimore that illegally deprives people of their equity in violation of the Fifth Amendment’s Taking Clause as the city attempts to satisfy modest tax debts.
Every spring, Baltimore bureaucrats conduct a mass auction online to sell off liens like the ECO’s. Sometimes the unlucky debtors have fallen just hundreds of dollars behind on their taxes.”
https://reason.com/2024/08/19/baltimores-tax-sales-are-robbing-people-of-their-equity/