June 21, 2026

ONLY TAX CONSUMPTION:

June 21, 2026

A Progressive Consumption Tax (William Gale, Summer 2026, Democracy Journal)

Consumption taxes have a lot to offer. First, what may seem like a narrow factor currently could well become the biggest selling point in the next decade. The diffusion of artificial intelligence and automation technologies strengthens the case for adding a consumption tax. The U.S. federal tax system currently relies heavily on taxing labor income. Payroll taxes finance Social Security and Medicare, and the individual income tax derives a substantial portion of its revenue from wages and salaries. If AI and automation technologies hollow out the work force, revenues from labor income would fall, even if overall economic output continues to grow. Adding a consumption tax makes the tax system more resilient to change.

More generally, consumption represents the largest component of GDP, making it an attractive tax base for governments seeking to raise significant revenue. As the bank robber Willie Sutton reportedly said when asked why he robbed banks, “Because that’s where the money is.” Consumption is where the money is, especially given the already-heavy reliance on income taxes in the United States.

Consumption taxes can also be economically efficient. By taxing spending rather than income, they generally avoid discouraging saving and investment. Over time, this can promote capital formation, productivity growth, and higher living standards. In contrast, income taxes can impose additional tax burdens on saving because individuals are taxed both when they earn income and when they earn returns on saved income.

Consumption taxes have the potential to be much simpler than the current system, if they are designed with a broad base—that is, with no exemptions—and uniform rates. Consumption taxes also tend to be relatively stable sources of revenue over the business cycle, during which consumption typically fluctuates less than individuals’ income or corporate profits. This stability can enhance fiscal planning and reduce revenue volatility.

Don’t add it: replace all other forms of taxation.

Health

ALL DECENT PEOPLE HATE SUMMER:

June 21, 2026

The Surprising Truth About Seasonal Depression (Maggie Mertens, 3/13/23, The Atlantic)

The term seasonal affective disorder, or rather its catchy acronym SAD, is so popular that it’s used in casual conversation. Steve LoBello, a psychologist and researcher at Auburn University at Montgomery, set out to do his own assessment of the nationwide scale of SAD—annual depression that follows a strict seasonal cycle, typically occurring in fall and winter and receding in spring and summer. LoBello and his team analyzed data from the CDC’s behavioral risk-factor survey, which asks hundreds of thousands of Americans each year about their health and well-being, including a separate screening for depression and anxiety, to see whether major depression rates followed a seasonal trend. “We expected cases to increase in the wintertime and then for that to subside starting in early spring and so forth, and there was nothing like that in the data,” LoBello told me of the study they published in 2016. “It was just flat as a pancake all the way through the year.” They also found no correlation between major depression and the respondent’s latitude (or hours of daylight). A couple of years later, in 2018, LoBello published another paper that found no correlation between even mild depression and the seasons. Still, the idea that we are all more likely to be sad and depressed in winter has dominated, and LoBello argues that that view is more steeped in folklore than science.

Music

LEGEND:

June 21, 2026

The Rise of Satchmo: Louis Armstrong was a legend from the start. (Alan Pell Crawford, June 19, 2026, Modern Age)

The age-old slam on Armstrong among those who consider themselves sophisticates is that he might have been an admirable enough musician in his early days but in time succumbed to the temptations of showbiz and sold out to the squares. As Louie, not Louis, he mugged and shuffled and grinned, playing to his white audiences in a manner that was subservient, undignified, and degrading.

The fact is, he was mugging, shuffling, and grinning when he was a boy in the streets of New Orleans, busking for coins as a member of a vocal quartet. He would do little buck-and-wing dances to entertain the crowds, and long after he mastered the cornet and then the trumpet, he continued to amuse himself as well as his audiences with his exuberant capers. “They called it Tomming—it wasn’t Tomming!” the guitarist and singer Danny Barker explained. “He just loved people!”

Knowledgeable fans of pop music today seem to make a fine distinction between the black jazz musicians of Armstrong’s generation and what the cognoscenti see as their white imitators. But there is little evidence, at least from Riccardi’s exhaustive research, that the musicians themselves felt this way. Oliver, it turns out, mentored white musicians, and Armstrong followed his example. He befriended them too, and vice versa. Armstrong admired white musicians who are seen these days as corny and square. He was a fan of Paul Whiteman, “whose very name might have been chosen by a satirist to illustrate what black musicians were up against,” in Clive James’s words. He was a fan of Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians as well. “Everything they play is perfect,” Armstrong said. “They can play anything . . . a whole lot of things I did remind me of Guy Lombardo.”

Armstrong, who said he was always “trying to Cultivate Myself,” was that lifelong learner we hear so much about these days. He couldn’t read music or follow a basic arrangement until, at nineteen or so, he joined Fate Marable’s band on a riverboat. Before long, he was playing passages from Wagner’s Tannhauser, and of his 1926 solo on “Big Butter and Egg Man,” the late Gunther Schuller wrote, “no composer, not even a Mozart or Schubert, composed anything more natural or simply inspired.”

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