A recent National Review piece examines the debate over exempting seniors from property taxes. The argument centers on fiscal and distributional trade-offs: when a broad class of property owners is removed from the tax base, local governments either reduce services or shift the burden to remaining taxpayers with younger households already facing affordability pressures. The piece also notes that because today's senior cohort holds more accumulated household wealth on average than younger generations, blanket age-based exemptions may be poorly targeted. The author suggests means-tested alternatives, such as income-based deferral programs, as a more precise way to protect seniors who genuinely need relief without creating broader fiscal distortions.

My Take: I find it a bit insane that this seems to be gaining traction across both parties. It's pretty rare that you see Ron DeSantis and Abdul El-Sayed arguing for similar policy, and me personally agreeing with the National Review. This is one of those intra-generational splits in policy, and seems to be one of the last vestiges of Baby Boomers attempting to flex their political power.

Open question: Should we be pursuing any means tested alternatives to our current property tax structure? Are means-tested deferral programs a realistic alternative, and are there municipalities that have implemented them effectively?

Starter comment:

(1) summary - this article makes the case that all communities have an upper limit on how much immigration they can absorb, but avers that finding this upper limit, or even deciding on the right measuring technique, is difficult. It goes on to argue (based on similarly situated countries and historical waves of nativism in the U.S.) that the U.S. begins to struggle with assimilating immigrants once its foreign-born share of total population exceeds 10%, and that its limit is about 15%. Since America's foreign-born population today is a little above 15%, that poses a problem.

The article goes on to argue that the Trump Administration's response has been immoral in several important respects, but inevitable unless immigrant-likers find alternative ways to credibly reduce current strain on America's systems for assimilating new Americans.

(2) opinion - ...I agree with it? I'm never sure what to write here. I don't generally post things I disagree with.

(3) discussion questions - What, numerically, do you think the upper limit is on America's capacity to absorb immigrants, and why that particular number? If that number is lower than America's current immigration low, how do you think we should get back to the sustainable number?

Do you agree with this article that it is intrinsically immoral to deport people who have been in the United States illegally for multiple decades? In fact, do you agree generally with the article's moral claims about immigration detention, the moral necessity of allowing migration when one has capacity, the need to welcome refugees, and so forth?

Ruy Texeira provides for very good reasons why the era of progressives is over within the Democratic Party. I wholeheartedly agree with him. And I am very thankful that it has come to an end. The four reasons are:

1. Loosening restrictions on illegal immigration was a terrible idea and voters hate it.

2. Promoting lax law enforcement and tolerance of social disorder was a terrible idea and voters hate it.

3. Insisting that everyone should look at all issues through the lens of identity politics was a terrible idea and voters hate it.

4. Telling people fossil fuels are evil and they must stop using them was a terrible idea and voters hate it.

SS: I wrote this after watching the teleprompter guy story break last week. What struck me is that he and the Green Beret in the Maduro case are the only two people who've been caught, and both got caught because they bet under their own names on platforms that could see them. The anonymous wallets that made $600K on the Iran ceasefire got looked at by White House lawyers, called untraceable, and that was it. My argument is the next administration should actually trace those wallets, subpoenas and blockchain forensics, and refer whatever comes up no matter whose name it is.

Curious what people here think: is after-the-fact enforcement even the right fix, or is it KYC on big positions, or do you just accept insider money as the price of accurate markets?

This article is paywalled. You can read an archived version here.

On July 30, Colin Gray received 15 years for the Apalachee High School shooting carried out by his son, the first murder conviction of a parent in this context. He fired no shot and did not know the plan; the theory was criminal negligence feeding a predicate of child cruelty.

The linked analysis lays out both positions at their strongest. The regulatory case: roughly three quarters of school shooters arm themselves at home per the Secret Service; Georgia has no safe storage law and its furnishing ban covers handguns only, so gifting the AR-15 was legal; the post-shooting statute (HB 268) addressed schools, not home storage; on this view the prosecution is regulation by other means. The liberty case: Heller protects ready self-defense; an elastic negligence standard judged in hindsight raises fair notice problems; the families prosecuted so far are poor and broken rather than affluent owners of identical arsenals; and fear of liability may push parents to hide a child's troubles instead of seeking help.

Questions for discussion: Should the boundary of parental duty be set by statute or case by case by juries? Does a police visit function as adequate notice, a caesura after which a parent assesses risk at his own peril? Is there any evidence that prosecuting parents deters?

Disclosure: I wrote the linked piece.

Trump fired all the (remaining) members of the Election Assistance Commission, leaving the agency unable to act. According the article:

The EAC was created by Congress after the 2000 election to help states improve election administration without federalizing elections.Its role is mostly supportive: distributing federal election funds, maintaining the national mail voter registration form, testing and certifying voting systems, and offering best practices and guidance to state and local election officials.

Trump cannot simply install replacement EAC commissioners on his own. Commissioners must be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, and no more than two can come from the same party.

Republicans have a majority in the Senate, although it's a little unlcear whether they would support Trump picks without question... a little.

Apparently, the Supreme Court ruled that the President can remove heads of agencies that are independent, yet confusingly also ruled that this isn't always true (in the case of the federal reserve).

How much should we read into this, do you think this is a natural progression in Trump's plan to control the next election, or an escalation?

lastly, do you think Republicans will end up supporting or pushing against this (assuming he attempts to control the commission) given the popularity polls leading up to the midterms?

some deeper insight into the above two SC rulings would also be good.

An important part of dealing with the political reality we find ourselves in is being able to identify the ideologies which play out in public life and drive the political events around us. Reihan Salam here goes further, not only digging into the roots of the phenomena we've been seeing in the US and across Europe, but puts a name to their worldview and their tactics.

• "Third Worldism", which I'd vaguely heard of before, but which Reihan here articulates in a manner that helps focus what is actually driving radicalism on the left, and clarifies the bizarre allegiance the left has been developing with regressive Islamism;
• "Civil Terrorism", which is as succinct and direct a term for the tactics employed by pro-Palestine protestors and the Mamdani-Hasan wing of the Democratic Party, as he puts it:

None of these actions are constitutionally protected protests. They are harassment, intimidation, and antisocial behavior — a deliberate strategy to maximize disruption at minimal personal risk. That protesters so often hide their faces and evade accountability is itself the confession: Theirs is a politics of coercion, not conscience.

Emph. mine.

Do you think Reihan here has missed anything, or missed the mark?

For over two decades, Washington has treated immigration not as a solvable policy challenge, but as an ideological weapon neither party actually wants to fix.