Many readers will be aware that President Biden has proposed new taxes on the rich to help fund his expenditure plans. As this article explains, a big part of his tax proposal is to tax the unrealized capital gains of people who have assets exceeding $1 billion, which is about 700 people.

Despite objections from both Democrats and Republicans, two things that can help promote the proposal are that (1) it would only tax a very few people, and (2) the rich are not all that popular, as a group, among most Americans. Working against the proposal is that “money talks” and the people who would be subject to those new taxes have money.

The Interim National Security Strategic Guidance (INSSF) report will not ring a bell with many Americans. The current version, issued by the Biden White House in March, may create some to some confusion as to what national security is all about.

“The simple truth is, America cannot afford to be absent anNay longer on the world stage,” claims Joe Biden. In the wake of Afghanistan, Syria, and alliances such as NATO, the simple truth is that American remains a major presence on the world stage. Much of the report focuses on challenges from within the United States. These challenges come from “corruption, inequality, polarization, populism, and illiberal threats to the rule of law,” and also “nationalist and nativist trends” that leave us “less prosperous and less safe.”

The U.S. government rang up another $669 billion in the national debt from January 20, 2021 through the end of its 2021 fiscal year. That’s how much extra money the federal government has had to borrow to support its excessive spending during President Joe Biden’s tenure in office.

Much of that additional debt is because of new spending President Biden approved. Political Calculations describes how the national debt has grown and who’s willing to loan money to the Biden-Harris administration:

When Joe Biden was sworn in as President of the United States on 20 January 2021, the U.S. national debt had reached $27.8 trillion. Through the end of the U.S. government’s fiscal year on 30 September 2021, the total public debt outstanding increased to $28.4 trillion.

Many readers of The Beacon will know that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has issued an executive order prohibiting governments in Florida from mandating that people wear masks. Meanwhile, many local government officials, including my local school board and superintendent, have defied that order and issued mask mandates.

In response, the governor and state commissioner of education have said they will withhold the salaries of those local officials who issue mask mandates. This article explains that even though the local school board has weakened its mask mandates, the governor and commissioner still find the board in violation of the governor’s order and are withholding the salaries of board members.

California State Auditor Elaine Howle will retire at the end of 2021. For more than 20 years, Howle was relentless at tracking down waste, fraud and abuse in state government. 

In 2017, the state auditor revealed that University of California president Janet Napolitano, maintained a hidden slush fund of $175 million, at a time when the UC was raising tuition and demanding more money from the state. As Howle wondered, “why did we need to increase tuition if the Office of the President has $175 million in reserve that nobody knew about?” 

Fred Foldvary (1946-2021)

I met Fred in the 1990s, through a shared interest in the voluntary provision of collective goods. In 1996 I joined the faculty at Santa Clara University, and soon thereafter worked with Fred, Henry Demmert, Larry Iannaccone, David Friedman, and Bob Finocchio in a campus institute. Fred was a great friend, colleague, and campus partner during my years at Santa Clara. For decades he was immersed in Bay Area free-market, libertarian, and Georgist circles, teaching at SCU, San Jose State, Cal State-East Bay, and elsewhere. He was also a good friend of the Independent Institute in Oakland. He lived in Berkeley.

Fred and I co-edited the book The Half-Life of Policy Rationales: How New Technology Affects Old Policy Issues, about how technological progress often dissolves the rationale put forward for government intervention. The rationale grows flimsier than ever, but the intervention persists, and textbook rationales die hard.

What costs $0 according to President Biden, but is so costly it has to be cut?

The answer to that question is the $3.5 trillion Build Back Better bill, which is all but dead in the U.S. Congress. President Biden acknowledged the bill is bloated with so much spending that it can’t pass.

“My message to the Chinese government is free Tibet. Tibet belongs to Tibetans, I am here to add my voice and speak out against what is happening in Tibet under the Chinese government’s brutal rule. Shame on the Chinese government. The Chinese dictatorship is erasing Tibetan identity and culture” and “Under the Chinese government’s brutal rule, Tibetan people’s basic rights and freedoms are non-existent.”

That may sound like something from a speech to the UN or a statement from Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International. It was actually Enes Kanter, a center for the Boston Celtics of the National Basketball Association, in a video posted on social media. Kanter, who hails from Turkey, also called Xi Jinping a “brutal dictator” and wore “FREE TIBET” on his sneakers. For Kanter, who has also denounced the Turkish regime of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, it was a bold move.

We tend to think of coup d’états as military overthrows of civilian government, but that is only one variant of the destruction of constitutional government. The destruction of constitutional government by the legitimate authorities themselves has been a major threat to liberty for some time.

The thought comes to mind as I see Nicaragua heading to the fourth consecutive mandate of that country’s tyrant, Daniel Ortega, who has jailed most of his electoral opponents in the run-up to the November 7th presidential elections, as well as activists, journalists and business people, and unleashed unspeakable violence on anyone standing in his way.

He did not come to power by a classic coup d’état. He won a free election in 2006 in which he obtained 38 percent of the vote and therefore an outright victory in the first round (he needed 35 percent and a five-point margin over his immediate follower). He then started to erode the institutions of liberal democracy, becoming one of the modern times’ most repugnant dictators.

The Consumer Price Index was up again in September. The annual rate of inflation, from September to September was 5.4%, and is likely to go higher by year-end. The Federal Reserve claims to have an inflation target of 2%, but seems to be in no hurry to enact policies to slow the rise in prices. Has anyone noticed?

In the past, an inflation rate of 5% would have caused alarm, but there has been a lot going on lately, with controversies related to various COVID policies, the chaotic withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, President Biden’s big-spending plans, negotiations on the debt ceiling, and hearings on the events of January 6, to mention a few things. Do all these things crowd out concerns about inflation?