Brothers Judd Blog

If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

June 2026

Neoconomics

ONLY TAX CONSUMPTION:

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:

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:

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.”

Energy

ECONOMICS TRUMPS IDEOLOGY:

The Victory Could Go to Clean Energy: Sunlight travels 93 million miles to reach the Earth, and none of it goes through the Strait of Hormuz. (Bill McKibben, 6/19/26, The Crucial Years)

As of now, with the Iran debacle receding and El Niño looming, we can say a few things with certainty:

The cheapest power on earth comes from the sun and wind, and everyone but us seems to have realized it


That clean power gives us some hope of dealing with the climate crisis that threatens our future, not to mention our insurance premiums

That clean power does not involve us in foreign wars

And the only important person on earth who does not agree with 1, 2, and 3 is Donald Trump, who is being daily proven wrong on exactly everything.

Identitarianism

WAIT, I CAN’T HATE MY NEIGHBOR?:

J. D. Vance’s Contemptuous Conversion Memoir (Jessica Winter, June 19, 2026, The New Yorker)

The invocation of “explicitly Christian arguments” is one of several instances in “Communion” when Vance’s approach to political campaigning and governance can seem borderline theocratic. One of his everyday challenges as Vice-President is to figure out “how to take an accepted moral principle and apply it in the real world as a Christian leader.” This conflation of public service with puffed-chest religious crusading is especially jarring when he writes, at length, about his 2025 visit to the Vatican, shortly before the death of Pope Francis, and his tense interactions with officials there, mainly over U.S. immigration policy. “Here I was, the most senior Catholic in the United States government,” Vance recalls, affronted, “and the Vatican seemed unwilling to move its moral guidance past the point of trite platitudes.” He goes on, “I’m one Christian statesman who would welcome an institutional faith less focused on platitudes and more focused on reality.”

It’s hard to imagine a reality-based conversation about the intersection of Catholic ethics and immigration policy with a man who campaigned for the Vice-Presidency by spreading calumnies about Haitian immigrants eating the pet cats and dogs of their neighbors in Ohio. Or who, after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed a mother of three during the agency’s siege of Minneapolis, condemned the victim as a “deranged leftist” whose death was a “tragedy of her own making.” Or whose career has been largely bankrolled by the co-founder of Palantir, which has a thirty-million-dollar contract with ICE to provide A.I. surveillance and data-mining technology for hunting and deporting immigrants. Or who uses Elon Musk, the tech trillionaire and former Department of Government Efficiency overseer whose cuts to public-health agencies and infrastructure are projected to cause hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide, as an exemplar of how “immigration can bring benefits to the host country in its own right. Just think of Elon Musk and the hundreds of thousands of jobs that trace directly to his decision to come to the United States.”

Anglospherics

BUT THEY DID FAIL TO TAKE ADVANTAGE…:

Brexit 10 Years Later: The Economic Collapse That Never Happened: Voters were warned that leaving the EU would trigger recession, mass unemployment, and lasting economic decline. Comparing Britain’s performance with its G7 peers suggests a more nuanced picture. (John Phelan, June 19, 2026, Daily Economy)

Why did Brexit fail to live down to the economic warnings?

First, the EU is an economic laggard. As Figure 3 shows, since 2011, the EU’s economy has grown by 20.6 percent while the US economy — the second biggest destination for British exports after the EU in 2016 — grew by 39.9 percent, nearly double the rate.


Second, Britain’s economy was one of the least reliant on its EU colleagues. As Figure 4 shows, in 2015, just 42.3 percent of British exports went to the EU, a share lower than in each of the 27 other members. This is partly because, as Luis Garicano, a former member of the European Parliament, noted recently, the “Single Market” is largely a myth.

…of the opportunity to massively deregulate business and expand free trade.

Health

ABOVE AVERAGE IS OVER:

Two AIs just matched or beat doctors on diagnosis. The catch: none of the patients were real. (Ana Maria Constantin, June 19, 2026, Next Web)


The first system, Mira, was built by academic researchers in Germany.

Given access to a simulated medical record, it can choose from more than 85,000 actions: tests, prescriptions, even hospital admissions. Across more than 500 emergency-department cases, it reached a diagnostic accuracy of about 87 per cent, against 78 per cent for a panel of six doctors. It was strongest on conditions with clear test results, such as pancreatitis and appendicitis.

The second, Amie, is Google’s, and runs on its Gemini model.

Tested against 21 UK GPs across 100 multi-visit cases, it matched them on clinical reasoning and produced treatment plans that stuck more closely to official guidelines. On a benchmark for tricky medication decisions, it came out ahead.

Soccer

IRISH NEED NOT APPLY:

Tartan Army winning hearts and influencing people across Boston: No Scotland, no party: skirling bagpipes and swirling kilts — and a formidable performance in the bars — are charming New Englanders (David Leask, June 17 2026, Times uk)

Boston bars have been allowed to stay open extra late under special licensing rules — hailed as the “Tartan Army Bill” — and have enjoyed roaring trade. One Irish pub said takings were triple that of St Patrick’s Day. Sam Adams Boston Taproom ran out of beer. Manager Billy DeCain told NBC Boston: “We’ve never seen anything like it.”

But it was one waitress who spelled out how much the business meant. Identifying herself as Kale, she took to TikTok to say she had earned nearly $1,000 in a single shift in which she was “absolutely whacked”. She was instantly converted by the Tartan Army. “I am rooting for them,” she said. “Let’s go Scotland.”

Soccer

IT’S A UNIPOLAR WORLD:

World Cup fans from around the globe share 1st US food experiences on social media (Kelly McCarthy, June 17, 2026, Good Morning America)

The diplomatic power of American food has become a breakout star of World Cup content on social media.

From massive trays of traditional Texas barbecue to late night orders at Waffle House, thousands of tourists who have flocked to the U.S. for the first time to attend 2026 FIFA World Cup matches are obsessing over their first taste of American food and dining culture.

World Cup visitors react to beloved American foods
Before international tourists even stepped foot in stadiums hosting the various World Cup matches this month, they had begun filling social media feeds with videos of themselves trying new favorite bites from fast food chains, discovering free refills on drinks, and deli sandwiches at regional grocery stores.

We are unimaginably affluent.

Malthusianism

PAR FOR THE MALTHUSIAN COURSE:

Over 100,000 Kids Have Died Due to Greenpeace Blocking Genetically Enhanced Rice, New Calculation Shows (Ronald Bailey | 6.17.2026, reason)


Greenpeace and its activists allies have blocked for more than two decades the adoption of Golden Rice, which is genetically enhanced to produce the vitamin A precursor beta-carotene. The result, according to new calculations by DC Abundance founder and research director at the Golden Gate Institute for AI Abi Olvera, is that “delay has killed about 106,000 children and left another 210,000 to 425,000 blind.”

Her conservative calculations of the deaths and disabilities caused by Greenpeace’s scientifically ridiculous opposition to Golden Rice are focused on 11 countries in which the consumption of rice makes up a significant proportion of their people’s diets.

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