The late, great essayist Joe Sobran once coined the sardonic idea of what I’ve come to call Sobran’s Law, which, if I may paraphrase it, states: “The U.S. Constitution poses no threat to our current system of government.” (The New York Times wrongly worries otherwise.) Sobran observed that “The U.S. Constitution serves the same function as the British royal family: it offers a comforting symbol of tradition and continuity, thereby masking a radical change in the actual system of power.” Whenever someone posits that the U.S. Constitution is a “living document,” they invariably mean it’s a...

Establishment Democrats have long whined that working people pay a higher rate of combined income and payroll taxes than billionaires. They’re not wrong. Income from labor is taxed three times (payroll taxes, income taxes, and inflation) while income from capital is taxed only once (capital gains). In America today, capital gains tax is capped at 20%, but labor’s floor is 15.3% with a payroll tax, plus the 3-8% inflation tax, both of which start at dollar one. Add the income tax, which tops out at 39%, and labor is generally taxed at twice the rate of capital. The billionaire who relies upon...

Is Medicare a good program, financially speaking, for ordinary working people?  Medicare Part A (the part that’s funded by payroll taxes) spent $394.6 billion in 2024 for the approximately sixty million of the over 65-years-of-age Americans on Medicare Part A (about 11.8% of the total recipients of the sixty-eight million people on Medicare are under 65 years old and generally not part of Medicare Part A). This means Medicare Part A paid out an average of $6,577 for each of its sixty million recipients in 2024. It’s important to stress that this analysis is designed to evaluate Medicare Part...

Everybody knows housing unaffordability and home sticker prices peaked at all-time highs in 2023, even higher than the peak of the 2007 real estate bubble in real terms. Both sticker prices and median mortgage payments for homes remain today at among the most unaffordable levels in U.S. history.  The free market has failed American homebuyers by not building enough homes Americans are willing and eager to buy, the official narrative goes. Vice President Kamala Harris told Stephen Colbert, “We don’t have enough housing. We have a housing shortage.” Harris has therefore promised to build three...

“The inflation tax, while largely ignored, hurts middle-class and low-income Americans the most,” Ron Paul wrote back in 2006, concluding that “Federal spending, deficits, and Federal Reserve mischief hurt the poor while transferring wealth to the already rich.” A friend of mine from Venezuela told me an extreme example of how inflation transfers wealth, which I’ve told before. This Venezuelan saved up a down payment and bought a home for about 300,000 Bolivars in 2007 (roughly $25,000). After five years of payments, he still owed far more than half the principal, but his monthly payments...