Few countries have imposed more frequent and more stringent lockdown measures to combat Covid-19 than Australia. Their efforts have been so restrictive that the British Medical Journal likened them to a “health dictatorship.”

Other’s are less critical. A Forbes article published in March suggests, even while US cases were in steep decline, “there is still much we can learn from their [Australia’s] response.” Dr. Anthony Fauci specifically praised Australia for its “containment and management of emerging variants.”

These compliments may have been premature.

The U.S. Supreme Court has again upheld the Affordable Care Act (ACA), this time on the grounds that the plaintiff states lack standing to make the case, not on its constitutional merits or practical worthiness. That calls for some review of the way the ACA actually functioned. 

In California, the ACA created eligibility issues and the Covered California website, like its federal counterpart, was totally dysfunctional. Enrollees wound up terminated from their plans and owing money to the government. State health bosses blamed the problems on computers and escaped accountability. All told, as health journalist Emily Bazar reported, the system led to “widespread consumer misery.” Nobody in any state was pining for something like that. 

Visual Capitalist has created an interactive visualization of the publicly-held portion of the U.S. government’s public debt. It covers 150 years, combining historic data from 1900 through 2020 with CBO projections for the next 30 years. You’ll need to follow the link above to take advantage of the interactivity, but here’s the big picture they created:

A recent GoBankingRates survey found that over 50% of Americans want student-loan forgiveness for everyone with any student-loan debt. Considering Democratic lawmakers are hoping President Joe Biden will keep his promise to cancel $50,000 in student debt per person, this data could certainly be used for leverage. But while the number of Americans who now want to see all higher ed-related debt simply erased from the books is growing, it doesn’t mean that we should follow along.

Pandemic and lockdown-related unemployment coupled with a slow economic growth following the low reopening of most states have, indeed, made it difficult for countless Americans to pay off their debt. It is thus natural to see U.S. residents wanting to help those in difficult situations. However, blanket loan forgiveness isn’t a response to hardship. It isn’t even a response to the broken American higher education system. Instead, loan forgiveness will only remove our attention from the errors of subsidized higher education.

Despite politicians’ best efforts, there’s simply no bottomless pit of money anywhere. Taxpayers, and even the Federal Reserve, will eventually run dry. 

Thanks to Joe Biden, a unanimous U.S. Senate, and 415-14 vote in the House, we have a new federal holiday: Juneteenth. The holiday celebrates the day that the Union forces arrived in Galveston, Texas, and announced that the town’s slaves were free pursuant to the Emancipation Proclamation. Various groups on the Right are urging Americans to embrace the new holiday. For example: Kay C. James at the Heritage Foundation, Zuri Davis at Reason, and Dan McLaughlin at National Review. What could be wrong with celebrating freedom for those who were in bondage? Absolutely nothing. But celebrating the freedom of individuals to chart their own course and to enjoy equal rights under a color-blind Constitution is alien to the new holiday. Juneteenth became a holiday to focus Americans on so-called “systematic racism” and to use past injustices to encourage a progressive agenda. James, Davis, and McLaughlin are merely useful idiots for Leftists. They ignore the real purposes behind the holiday to our detriment.

We will probably never know how many votes Keiko Fujimori obtained in one of Peru’s most polarized presidential elections in recent history and whether her rival, Pedro Castillo, who seems close to being declared the winner by the country’s electoral body, would have obtained the most votes in the absence of irregularities that are the object of intense dispute. 

The third-time pro-business candidate, and daughter of jailed former strongman Alberto Fujimori, is running behind Pedro Castillo, the dark-horse candidate who admires Latin America’s socialist autocrats and was placed at the head of the ticket by the leader of a Marxist-Leninist organization who could not run himself for legal reasons, by a razor-thin margin in a vote count that has turned into high drama since the June 6 election.

As ABC News reports, California has selected the first 15 winners of a $50,000 grand prize as part of the state’s “Vax for the Win” program. The lottery is part of Gov. Newsom’s $116.5 million effort to persuade people to get vaccinated. Ten Californians who got at least one vaccination split a $15 million pot and vaccinated Californians will be automatically entered for chances to win $50,000. The first winners have yet to be identified, and some Californians have a problem with the lottery approach.

Professor Uri Gneezy of UC San Diego thinks the lottery sends the wrong message, that the vaccination might be risky. He would prefer gift cards for those getting vaccinated, which would promote spending at local businesses, “especially given the money comes from California’s taxpayers.” Professor Gneezy has a point, but the messaging problem has another side.

President Joe Biden is well known for having a choo choo fetish. It’s little surprise he wants to expand the already heavily subsidized Amtrak passenger rail service. If he’s successful, today’s toddlers will come to know why their grandparents came to reject the inconvenience of commuting between cities by rail.

Aside from the unique combination of extremely high infrastructure costs, extremely high operating costs, and extremely low demand by commuters that make passenger rail unattractive as an investment, today’s passenger trains are also slow. Joe Biden knows this, so he is promoting faster passenger rail service.

What we’re really doing is raising the bar on what we can imagine. Imagine a world where you and your family can travel coast to coast without a single tank of gas on a high-speed train close to as fast as you can go across the country in a plane.

President Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen have convinced the other G-7 countries to implement a 15% minimum global corporate tax rate. The argument in favor is that some countries (the linked article names Ireland) are establishing themselves as tax havens–lowering their tax rates to attract businesses from higher-tax countries.

Another way to view countries offering lower tax rates is that this is the result of intergovernmental competition. Countries want to attract businesses, and lower tax rates is one way to do this. Ireland’s low corporate tax rate is one of the policies that have produced the nation’s high rate of economic growth.

Normally, economists (and politicians) argue that competition is beneficial because it disciplines companies to provide good products to people at low prices. The exception is government, where they argue that competition is bad. They seem to like it when Wal-Mart offers customers everyday low prices, but when Ireland does the same for its taxpayers, it’s called a race to the bottom.

In early 2020, state governments across the country reacted to the arrival of the coronavirus epidemic by imposing lockdowns. By forcing businesses to close and ordering residents to stay at home, their aim was to “flatten the curve” and limit the spread of Covid infections. It was supposed to be for just 15 days, but turned into months.

It didn’t take long for the politicians’ lockdowns to crush the nation’s economy. As soon as lockdown measures were mandated by state governments, they threw their economies into deep recession. Millions of Americans lost their jobs. Millions of Americans needed unemployment benefits.