In the 2006 Mike Judge movie Idiocracy, the dumbed-down human population five-hundred years into the future have replaced water in drinking fountains with the salty sports drink “Brawndo,” and have even begun to water farm crops with Brawndo. Facing a nationwide famine as a result of repeatedly salting the crop fields, time-traveling twenty-first century slacker Joe Bauers suggests that the future-world dimwits use water for the crops rather than Brawndo. “But Brawndo’s got what plants crave,” the dimwitted White House advisors reply, echoing the official corporate marketing line repeatedly,...

The same cohort of Democrats who championed the slogan “save democracy” this past year, fresh from having their national party tank the process of "fair" primaries for the third presidential election in a row, are now in a snit over Donald Trump trying to impair the “independence” of the Federal Reserve Bank.  Federal Reserve “independence” has these days taken on an almost religious fervor in some sectors, as if creating an unconstitutional fourth branch of government immune from the voters and the officials they elect was a mandate of heaven. A lot of this is driven by zombie partisan...

Everyone who has heard a Democratic politician speak in the last decade has heard the mantra, “We can balance the budget (or fund a pet new social program) if we just make the billionaires pay their fair share of taxes.”  So let’s see what it would look like. Let’s balance the budget―not even taking the extreme of creating and paying for any new social programs―with higher taxes on billionaires. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) baseline budget predicts a deficit of nearly $1.851 trillion in fiscal year 2026 (which begins October 1, 2025)―without President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful...