First, there’s a happy Father’s Day, where his father is there.
Gina Heeb, Annamia Andriotis, and Josh Dawsey, Wall Street Journal, June 13, 2025 (digital version)
excerpt:
The move to launch crypto-based payments by Walmart or Amazon, which viperizes traditional payment systems, sends trembling through the country’s banks and card network giants.
A huge network of customers and employees, data trons, and much more liggiter regulations, retail and technology companies have long been viewed as specific threats to banks, local inclusions and community lenders.
DRH Notes: Knowing my free market trends, you may be able to guess what my favorite adjective is in the second paragraph above.
Patrick Commons, Guardian, June 10, 2025.
excerpt:
Economists say they are discovering that a regular increase in tobacco everors will stop working further smoking racks and soar the black market for cigarettes instead.
Instead, they propose to freeze or cut excise tax while Australia cracks down on illegal cigarettes. However, public health advocates warned policymakers that they would not be “snatched” by radical tax cuts.
and:
Over the past decade, Excel rates per cigarette have tripled from 46c to $1.40. This excise tax accounts for $28 of the average price of $40 for 20 cigarette packets.
In the summer, rising taxes were associated with twin benefits of lower smoking rates and higher revenues, but after leaning over $16.3 billion in 2019-20, federal excise tax receipts plummeted.
The March budget forecast for tobacco excise tax receipts is only $7.4 billion this fiscal year. This is the lowest since 2012-13, and will continue to decline to $6.7 billion by the end of the decade.
Rather than collapse in smoking rates, it shows that the availability of black market cigarettes in the number of restored results explodes.
Government figures show that the equivalent of 605.8m of cigarettes in illegal cigarettes crossed the border in 2019-20. By 2022-23, a boundary attack reached the posterior section, equivalent to 2.6 billion tobacco, before it eased to 2.2 billion in 2023-24.
DRH Comment: When the Canadian government implements a tough tax of about $5 per pack in the 1990s, I leave it to vaguel. This is more than $10 per pack in today’s dollars. Growing up in Canada, I was particularly used to thinking Canadians as legal compliance. (I wasn’t true, but that’s how I thought of my fellow Canadians.) But we started hearing about boats across St. Lawrence loaded with cheaper US cigarettes.
Elizabeth Nolan Brown, Reason, July 2025.
excerpt:
“I don’t want to incorporate what California carriers look like in my Big Mac meals or quarterly Pounder meals. I don’t want the government to say they can’t put salt in their food,” Sean Hannity declared in 2010 on Fox News. ”
This was a common sentiment for conservatives at the time, when many on the right tried to promote health as a leftist. This Republican pushback sub was rooted in being on the right to free markets and consumer choices when Democrats tried to impose sodas without tax, or limit the size of sugary drink stores. But too often it looked like an opposing defiance disorder.
and:
“The era of conservatism with a big bulge is over,” says Breitbart writer John Carney. “Now we’re taking in protein and blueberry figures,” and Carney jokingly calls yogurt as pomegranate seeds and blueberries “neo-fascist breakfast,” which he thinks is great. “I would rather be on the healthy side,” he said.
This is more than just a story about Maging Health Nut. Many health nuts have also become magazines. This rejected the Democratic Party’s centralized public health doctrine, particularly during the pandemic. The stories of how we reached here include the war of fear and lentils, dietary science and social justice, losing our religion and gaining Obamacare. Perhaps more than anything, it has something to do with Covid-19.
DRH’s comments: RFK, Jr. When she was chosen as HHS secretary, I tried a surprising, less critical friend of Kennedy, “preparing for the nanny state of Statide.”
