Month: May 2026

Gas Taxes??

The US/Israel attack on Iran and resulting closing of the Straights of Hormuz has reduced the world’s oil supply. As a result, gasoline prices are increasing. Is that good or bad? Should the federal and state government suspend gasoline taxes until normal supply is restored?

When the supply of something is artificially reduced, its price increases to equate the new supply and demand. For gasoline, the impact of the supply shock can be moderated by releasing oil from the reserve the US and most countries maintain for such shocks. Thus the fall in gasoline supply would be kept smaller than it would other wise be. But how long will the supply shock last and how large is the reserve.?

The natural price increase in the face of a supply shock has several helpful effects. Those who need it most can still get it. Some non essential travel is reduced. President Nixon’s wage and price freeze in the early 1970s when confronted with the 1973 Arab oil embargo produced long lines of cars at gas stations that still had some gasoline. Price rationing is better than waiting in long lines

President Trump has proposed temporarily suspending government taxes on gasoline. This is a very bad idea not only because of the Nixon shock effect of non-price rationing but because it will reduce government revenue when its debt and deficits are already dangerously large. In the May 11 Washington Post Mitch Daniels provides an excellent account of that danger. “US national debt disaster looms-ai cant-stop it”   If you click on his link to a Cato Institute article on MMT you will be able to enjoy my article on that subject. “Modern Monetary Theory-critique”

SCOTUS – Louisiana v. Callais

“The Supreme Court’s invalidation of Louisiana’s congressional map has triggered a swirling debate about just how fundamentally the justices altered the Voting Rights Act landscape.” This and following quotes are from The Hill article: the hill – regulating voting-rights-act-supreme-court – SCOTUS-Decision  

The court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais was adopted by 6 – 3 of the judges.

I am quite amazed how dramatically differently some people have characterized the decision’s result.

“Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 [as Amended in 1982] has enabled groups to force states to draw additional majority-minority districts for decades,” despite the 15th Amendment to US constitution in 1870, which prohibited the federal and state governments from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen’s “race, color, or previous condition of servitude”, effectively protecting the voting rights of Blacks.

Section 2 “bars voting maps that give a racial minority ‘less opportunity than other members of the electorate’ to elect their preferred candidate.”

In Thornburg v. Gingles (1986), the Supreme Court ruled that multi-member legislative districts in North Carolina violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by diluting Black voting power. The landmark ruling established a critical three-part legal test to determine if an electoral map illegally discriminates against minority voters.

To prove a violation of Section 2, plaintiffs must satisfy the following three preconditions:

  1. Numerosity and Compactness: The minority group must be sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a voting majority in a single-member district.
  2. Political Cohesion: The minority group must show that it is politically cohesive, meaning they largely vote for the same candidates.
  3. Majority Bloc Voting: The plaintiffs must prove that the white majority votes sufficiently as a bloc to usually defeat the minority group’s preferred candidates

After Thornburg v. Gingles, plaintiffs could prove vote dilution by showing that a minority group was large and compact enough to form a majority in a reasonably drawn district, was politically cohesive, and faced bloc voting by the majority that usually defeated its preferred candidates.

That framework gave civil-rights groups a litigation template: draw an “illustrative” majority-minority district, show polarized voting, and argue that the state had cracked or packed minority voters so they could not elect their preferred candidate. If they won their case, the remedy often required the state to create an additional majority-minority district, even though Section 2 formally says it does not create a right to proportional representation.

In its recent Louisiana v. Callais ruling the Court held that Louisiana’s second majority-Black congressional district was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander and that Section 2 did not require Louisiana to draw it. The Court majority said that Voting Rights Act compliance can be a compelling interest only when Section 2 is properly construed, and it tightened the Gingles test by requiring race-neutral illustrative maps, closer adherence to state districting goals such as compactness, incumbency protection, and partisan objectives, and evidence separating racial bloc voting from ordinary partisan voting.

The practical effect is that plaintiffs can no longer easily say, “Here is a compact majority-minority district; therefore, the state must draw it.” After Callais, they must show that the alternative map satisfies the state’s nonracial redistricting criteria, that the voting polarization is racial rather than merely partisan, and that the totality of circumstances points to present-day legally relevant discrimination rather than mainly historical disadvantage.

A “majority-minority district” is one in which a racial minority (blacks, Asian, Hispanics, etc.) constitute a majority of the voters. The presumption seems to be that, for example, only (or mostly) blacks will vote for a black candidate. That is clearly a racist view. Barack Obama, for example, was elected President of the United States by a majority of white voters.

I am really shocked at how overtly racist the opposition to the court’s decision is. “’Unfortunately, we are talking about rolling back to an era of Jim Crow, and I don’t believe I’m overstating that,’ Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s voting rights project, But Jim Crow laws were used to segregate blacks and whites. Majority-minority districts move in the same direction. The court’s weakening of the arguments for such districts is the opposite of a Jim Crow law. Voters are motivated by many things, but I have more confidence than does Ms. Lakin in voters choosing the candidate they think best and most effectively supports the policies they support, whether the voter is black, white, or yellow whatever the color of the candidate.

“House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said the law was ‘largely gone,’ telling reporters the decision was ‘designed to undermine the ability of communities of color all across this country to elect their candidate of choice.’” Good grief.

Here is an excellent discussion of this issue: “The supreme court’s vote ruling empowers minorities”

Homeland – Final

We have now completed all eight seasons of Homeland. After my review of the first two seasons my old U of Chicago friend and fellow libertarian, Joe Cobb, said that we would like the rest of it as well. He was correct. The story continued to confront the main characters with excruciating choices with more plot twists than I could keep track of. Would you take steps to save the life of a friend that could result in the deaths of several thousand—or the reverse.

But what I want to share with you here is how eerily like today the early 2000s were. We were fighting with Iran, then Iraq. Forever wars our current President promised to end (remember that?). Not only did the struggles being portrayed seem like today but reviewing my email and news flashes during our breaks between episodes seemed like a continuation of the TV series. It was really weird. Homeland moves into my list of all-time favorite series, which includes The Wire, The Jewel in the Crown, and Breaking Bad.