Monthly Archives: March 2026

Taxes

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Progressive-Democrats’ limiting factors for Evil Rich’s fair share and for how high to raise taxes are converging to: all of it. Pay everything you have.

Here’s an enumeration of what they’re demanding currently, courtesy of the WSJ‘s editors:

  • California: Service Employees International Union affiliate is seeking to qualify a referendum for the November ballot to impose a 5% wealth tax on residents with more than $1 billion in net worth. This includes stocks, illiquid stakes in private companies, artwork, patents, and family trusts.
    The tax would even be levied on illusory assets. Silicon Valley investors who own super-voting shares in a company would be taxed on their voting rights, rather than the value of their shares. A startup founder could be required to pay tax on the 25% of voting rights he controls even if he only owns 5% of shares.
  • Washington: Democrats have passed a 9.9% income tax on millionaires, despite a state constitutional ban on a graduated income tax.
    [I]n 2022…Democrats enacted a 7% tax on capital gains exceeding $250,000…[l]ast year they raised the rate to 9.9% on capital gains over $1 million. Now they’re extending the 9.9% tax to all forms of income.
  • New York: Albany…Assembly wants to raise the top state-and-local income-tax rate to 15.9% from 14.8%, and the Senate to 15.3%. Democrats also want to raise the state top corporate tax rate and let New York City raise its rate. That would make the top business tax rate nearly 20% in New York City.
    New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani…wants to increase the estate tax to 50% from 16% and impose a two percentage-point city tax surcharge on incomes over $1 million. That would raise the top individual rate in the city to 16.8%. If Democrats in Albany don’t deliver, he’s threatening an across-the-board 9.5% property tax hike.
  • Rhode Island: [Progressive-]Democratic Governor Dan McKee is pushing a 3% surtax on income over $1 million, which would raise the state’s top rate to 8.99%.
  • Virginia: One bill would impose a 3.8% tax on investment income of taxpayers making more than $500,000, which would raise the top rate to 9.55%. Another bill would create two new individual top tax brackets of 8% (starting at $600,000) and 10% (more than $1 million).
  • Congress: Maryland [Progressive-Democrat] Senator Chris Van Hollen wants to add three new tax brackets on high earners, which would raise the top federal rate by 12 percentage points to 49%. New Jersey [Progressive-Democrat] Senator Cory Booker is proposing to raise the current 35% tax bracket (starting at $256,226 for individuals) to 41% and the 37% bracket ($640,601) to 43%.
    …
    This [also] is a gigantic tax increase on small businesses that pay taxes at the individual rate—$1.01 trillion over 10 years for the Booker proposal, according to the Tax Foundation.

This, and much more—dangerously more—is what we can look forward to when the Progressive-Democrats resume their reign over our republic.

How Onerous

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Florida, in addition to requiring in-state unions to hold periodic recertification elections, is about to enact a bill that would require at least 50% of the members of government unions to show up in person to vote, with a majority of those voting “aye” to achieve recertification. I can hear the union squalls here in Texas.

South Florida [Progressive-]Democratic Senator Shevrin Jones said the bill would be “unions’ nail in the coffin.” American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said the bill is “designed to decimate our Florida locals and their contracts” because it “effectively forces” elections where “you have to turn out 50% of your entire bargaining unit or you lose your contract.”

50%! The horror. If it’s really that difficult to find that much union support—a quarter of the membership plus one—among its members, there’s a hint there regarding the utility of unions in the minds of their members.

Union managers should take this and run. The bills could have required a majority of union members to vote “aye” in a recertification election, rather than just that puny minority to get recertification.

Not that New

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Iran is using oil as a new weapon of war?

Iran’s move to choke off the Strait of Hormuz and turn crude oil into a weapon of war marks a new phase in the 21st-century competition for global power—one that will be defined by the control of critical raw materials and energy.

Not really. Oil as a war weapon may be new to the 21st century, but it’s an old weapon. The US and our allies, in the runup of our entry into the shooting war with Japan, used oil as a weapon of economic war with our embargo of oil sales and shipments to Japan. OPEC used oil as an economic war weapon with its embargo of oil sales to us over our support of Israel.

Oil as weapon isn’t really new to this century, either. Hungary’s Orban is using Russia’s attack on an oil pipeline that transits Ukraine from Russia to Hungary to accuse Ukraine of waging oil war on Hungary, even as he uses that oil blockage as his own weapon against Ukraine. Russia is using oil and other energy sources as weapons in its war on Ukraine by making that disruptive attack, along with other attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, in the first place. The US, and subsequently Europe, began using oil as a war weapon against Russia following that barbarian’s invasion of Ukraine with our and their refusal to buy Russian oil and subsequent sanctions against Russian oil more generally.

Iran’s blockage of the Strait isn’t new, it’s just taking advantage of a chokepoint for oil, and natural gas, shipping.

Voting is a Two Step Process

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Elections by ballot, whether by secret ballot, as in the US, or by candidate-coded ballots, often by color, as early on in the US and in sham-election nations, are a two step process: voters mark their ballots, indicating the candidates for whom they’re voting, and they then cast their ballots—put them into a ballot receptacle at a polling station approved by each State’s elections process agency—to be collected and counted.

Mail-in ballots complicate voting, and their arrival after Election Day while still being considered legitimately cast unnecessarily threaten our elections’ integrity. The question of whether mass-mailed late ballots should be counted has arrived on the Supreme Court docket.

Election Day is a nationally statutory date—a single day. Ballots arriving after that day are not cast on Election Day because they’ve not arrived to be cast. It’s bad enough that too many precincts on up to States, whether by dishonesty or incompetence, don’t (not can’t) finish counting the ballots cast by the end of the day, without allowing those not yet cast by Election Day to be counted.

Mississippi law says absentee ballots that are postmarked on time are valid even if officials don’t receive them from the mailman until a week later. Other states have similar rules. The question for the Justices: does accepting tardy mail votes violate the federal law that sets a uniform Election Day?

Mississippi’s argument:

Mississippi suggests that once the US Postal Service takes custody of any outstanding ballots, then the election’s winner is already determined, however long it takes the mail to arrive and the result to become clear. “An election occurs when the voters have cast their ballots,” the state says. “The voters have then chosen and their choice is conclusive: the election is over. An election thus does not depend on when ballots are received.”

That’s the fallacy of the State’s argument. The USPS has never taken custody of a voter’s ballot; it only accepts custody. The responsibility to actually cast that ballot remains the voter’s, and his ballot is not cast until it makes it into the ballot box. His election, therefore, has not occurred until after Election Day if the USPS fails its custody acceptance by delivering the ballot after Election Day has ended and the polls have closed.

It seems straightforward: if the ballots aren’t received until after Election Day, then they weren’t cast by Election Day, and so they cannot be valid. Even if a voter chooses not to cast his ballot himself, instead trusting to a third party, even one as nominally trustworthy as the US Postal Service, the failure to get those ballots into the ballot box remains that voter’s, not the delivering party—even the USPS.

As Joseph Stalin said, it is extremely important who will count the votes and how. It’s imperative for our elections’ integrity that the counting be strictly controlled, especially including limiting the counting to the period beginning after voting precincts close in the State and ending as soon as possible after that, ideally by midnight of Election Day.

Tradeoffs

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Wisconsin’s Republican Senator Ron Johnson wants the present Republican-majority Senate to do away with the filibuster altogether on the argument that the Democrats (read: Progressive-Democrats) are going to do that anyway when they return to power. On the latter part, Johnson is correct, and when the Progressive-Democrats do that, it’ll be the death of our republican democracy and the birth of the tyranny of popular democracy.

Johnson made this argument, though, and on this he is wrong.

I’ll admit that the 60-vote cloture threshold has prevented many bad bills from becoming law, and that without it bad bills would become law more easily. But it also prevents good bills from getting passed.

That’s an excellent tradeoff, Johnson’s worries notwithstanding. Passing bad bills is far more destructive to our nation’s economy and to our national security than is not passing good bills. The latter can be tried again in politically short order; the former will take years just to undo the damage.

A legislature that gets nothing at all done is a far more successful legislature than one that passes even one bad statute. As a man said earlier in our national history, that government is best which governs least.

Contra Johnson, the Senate should eschew abusing us with bad laws because Senators think they have to pass something—anything—in order to earn their pay votes. Keep the filibuster.