Tax Freedom Day Underestimates How Long You Work for the Government

Tax Freedom Day, calculated by the Tax Foundation, “represents how long Americans as a whole have to work in order to pay the nation’s tax burden.” It appears that they stopped publishing this in 2019, but others have picked up where they left off.

The idea is that the income earned by taxpayers over a certain proportion of the year goes to Uncle Sam. In 2025, that date was April 16th.

Rand Paul’s “Six Penny Plan” to Balance the Federal Budget in Five Years

US Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky has introduced a federal spending restraint bill, called the “Six Penny Plan” that may actually work. The basic concept is simple. Each year for the next five years Congress would reduce the federal budget by six percent from the previous year’s budget. In five years the annual budget would be in balance, and the total federal debt will be on a path to being paid off.

How Do CEOs Make Strategy?

Do high-performing firms win because they choose better strategies, or because they have better processes for making strategy in the first place?

If strategy is ultimately about managerial judgment under uncertainty, what role should structure and formal processes really play?

These questions were prompted by my reading of a new paper in Management Science by Mu-Jeung Yang, Michael Christensen, Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun and Jan Rivkin.

Milei’s Monetary Mistake

Argentina is better than it was before Milei’s victory. Argentina is better than it would be if either of the other two options had triumphed. The public spending cuts at the beginning of the Milei administration were larger than any other in history under similar circumstances. A crisis of unknowable magnitude was averted. Argentina is now on a path of growth.

Precious Metals Work

Over the last year, the precious metal markets have seen historic increases and then decreases in price. This, of course, is the result of the workings of supply and demand, but there have also been cries of market manipulation.

I have laid out the supply and demand conditions both in the pure free market and under current conditions in the real world on this podcast and in several interviews reproduced here.