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...

A lifelong family friend brought up the subject of government-funded science at a family cookout recently, and was surprised to hear my opposition to it.  “Well, I don’t think we should be taxing people to study the sex life of quails on cocaine,” I responded jokingly.  As best as I can remember, the conversation that followed with this brilliant woman in her 50s—who in younger days was just a dissertation away from a PhD in chemistry—went along these lines:  “That’s just the problem. You don’t know the incredible benefit of all this research. Even the quail study has a scientific basis that...