9/29: Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson School [eR][tbR]
- About
The Costs of War project publishes public-facing research about the broad consequences of U.S. military operations and spending, including their domestic effects, and the ongoing costs of the U.S. post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond.
- The Costs of Militarized Rivalry with China: A First Estimate
by Jennifer Kavanagh on 3/3/2026
The U.S. has spent at least $3.4 trillion countering China militarily since 2012
EC: Mentioned to her in July, the "The Price of Liberty" by Robert D. Hormats and the need to tax capital to pay for wars.
9/28: Recommended Online Event
-
Previewing the Supreme Court's 2026-2027 Term -- Online
6:30-7:30 pm at the National Constitution Center with:
- Masha Hansford, partner at Davis Polk & Wardwell
- Amy Howe, co-founder of SCOTUSblog
- Greg Stohr, Supreme Court reporter for Bloomberg News
- Thomas Donnelly, lead scholar at the National Constitution Center, moderates.
9/24: Recommened Videos on C-Span and Youtube [er]
- Senate Minority Leader Schumer Holds News Conference on Trump Admin. and Fossil Fuel Industry Ties
- One on One with Ambassador Rahm Emanuel
Rahm Emanuel speaks at the 2026 Texas Tribune Festival
Former Obama White House Chief of Staff, Mayor of Chicago, and Ambassador to Japan on his Political Career and Democratic Party
21:49 - His Five Point Government Ethics Reform.
39:30 - His opposition to Netanyahu and support for Israel.
40:10 - In June, at Tel Aviv University, Rahm "said ... that Israel, basically under this prime minister has become a pariah state."
40:50 - "In 2009 when i was President Obama's chief of staff, I told the prime minister to his face that what your doing on the housing policies on the West Bank will lead to the political isolation of the state of Isael and perpetual conflict."
EC advice to Democrats: Support Israel but oppose Netanyahu, his Likud Party, and the West Bank settlements.
9/24: Peterson Institute for International Economics [tbr]
9/22: What is the political philosophy and bias of ElectoralCollege.Org?
- Political Philosophy: Democratic Capitalist
- Bias: Generaly Left-Center
9/21 Ask AI: How does OBBBA and the FCC affect who owns the airways?
9/21 Ask AI: How does the current tax system affect our K-shaped economy?
9/10 Ask AI: What are examples of Trump's targeted temporary tax proposals to buy elections? [ec][tbr]
- 3: How did Trump's targeted temporary tax proposals in the 2017 TCJA affect the federal deficit, the 2025 OBBBA, and the national debt?
- 5: What is the political motivation for these tax cuts to expire in the presidential election year of 2028?
- 7: Compare who got the permanent tax cuts to those who got the temporary tax cuts in the 2025 OBBBA?
- 8: What is the 2026 mid-term election motivation of Trump's $5,000 tariff dividend?
- 9: Under the current plan, who will ultimately pay for post-2000 Democrat and Republican tax cuts, taxes on labor or taxes on capital?
- Under the current statutory plan, the ultimate financing burden is tilted toward labor/ordinary-income households and program beneficiaries, not primarily toward capital.
- The 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts strongly favored reductions in taxes on dividends, capital gains, estates, and upper-bracket income.
9/9: Recommended Books re: We Need to Tax Capital to Insure Democracy [ec][tbr]
8/30: Now on Recommended Sites
- BB's WSW: Wall Street Week | Debt & Consequences, Defying Fiscal Gravity, Hollywood Gets Democratized (8/28)
On bloomberg.com
& youtube.com
[1:05-13:15] Chrystia Freeland, former financer of Canada, talks with the former finance ministers of the Netherlands and Germany about what it takes to bring spending under control.
- The debt of $40 trillion is about 120% of GDP.
- EC: Is it time to also consider the debt-to-wealth and the debt-to-change-in-wealth ratios?
[13:25] Defying Fiscal Gravity: The U.S. is too big to fail even with a 6% deficit.
[24:29] We revisit the story of Jackson Hole, the wealthiest place in America.
- EC: John D. Rockefeller Jr. and later his son Laurance fundamentally reshaped Jackson Hole's land pattern, conservation regime, tourism economy, and elite real-estate market.
- BB Law: Meta, Trump Outruns Courts & Officer Charged (8/29)
- NPR's OTM: The Finance Bros Are Coming for the Public Airwaves (8/28)
This week we share an episode of The Divided Dial, which first aired last year. Reporter Katie Thornton asks: What do we lose when we give up our public airwaves?
- PBS' FL: Interview with Marjorie Taylor Greene (8/28)
pbs.org & youtube.com
- PBS' WW: Canada dispute & Allies watching (8/28)
On pbs.org &
youtube.com
- RNRH: Shooting Wars & Trade Wars (8/29)
- Ralph speaks with Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff for Colin Powell, about the fall of the American Empire and self-proclaimed Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth
- Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson: "I've watched my country go to hell right in front of my face… And the billionaires who want all of this to happen, they do not want a democracy. A democracy is fallible. ... They want a technocracy that is run by them, armed by them, technical revolution by them."
- Then we welcome the CEO and co-founder of the Canadian-based organization Corporate Knights, Toby Heap, to break down Trump's unprecedented trade war with our closest ally.
- Fareed Zakaria
- CNN GPS: Special Report: The Imperial Presidency (8/30)
- CNN GPS: Transcript
8/19: American Democracy After Trump
8/14: Social Security Smackdown: Concord Action Virtual Town Hall
-
On Zoom at 11 am with Romina Boccia of The Cato Institute and Wendell Primus of The Brookings Institution.
-
EC Note: The founder of this website revised the AICPA's course on Pension and Profit-Sharing Plans for ERISA in 1975. He worked closely with Sidney Kess on all of his courses and the first AICPA cassette on the Individual Retirement Account. After these efforts, the founder began to research a course on what the CPA should know about Social Security (SS). He never wrote this course because he left the AICPA to become head of National Tax Training at Coopers & Lybrand. He has definite ideas on funding Social Security by taxing capital and reducing intergenerational transfers from current workers.
7/25: An Important Announcement
- Details of "Now on Recommended Sites" will not be updated for at least four weeks.
- Instead, we will highlight and comment on these and other sites and issues.
- How can Democrats support Capitalism?
- Capitalism and Socialism exist in the Nordic countries with high taxes and happiness.
- The problem in the U.S. is corruption. Capitalists distort the election process and write the tax laws.
- Why should capital/property/assets primarily be taxed to support the military and wars?
- How was income from capital and labor taxed in 1987?
- TaxReform.AI will present a fair, simple, and transparent way to tax capital.
7/24: Now on Recommended Sites
7/12: Now on Recommended Sites
- BB's WSW: The World's First Trillionaire, Governance Meets Growth, Menopause Market Boom (7/10)
On bloomberg.com
& youtube.com
- Executives and investors gathered in Sun Valley to discuss consolidation in the media sector. (1:00-11:01)
- SpaceX's historic IPO has turned an entrepreneur into a trillionaire, giving rise to a new era in capitalism and widening the wealth gap.
(11:25-23:37)
-- On the creation of wealth and political power and its affect on democracy and tax revenue.
-- Why we need to tax wealth with Paul Krugman, Yale Budget Lab co-founder Natasha Sarin, and Bloomberg reporter Ben Steverman.
-- Some billionaires have supported a minimum basic income financed primarily by income taxes on earned income and not capital.
-- TaxReform.AI plans to propose a practical way to tax capital based on an historical review and some new principles.
- Does SpaceX's governance structure protect the company's futuristic vision, or give CEO Elon Musk too much unchecked authority? {23:37-34:15)
-- The first dual class stock was in 1956 by Ford.
-- ln 1980 less than 1% of IPO's had dual class stocks. In 2025, 47% of 2025 IPO's had a dual class
-- A Danish CIO Ander Schelde's three principles of good governance:
--- (1) One share, one vote.
--- (2) We have the separation of power between CEO and chairman of the board.
--- (3) We want an independent board.
- Menopause care is becoming a major business opportunity after decades of medical neglect, stigma, and underinvestment in women’s health.
- BB Law: Birthright Citizenship Again & 'Justice in Motion' Tour (7/11)
- NPR's OTM: The FCC's Pressure Campaign to Reshape Broadcast TV (7/10)
- PBS' FL: Eva Moskowitz--CEO of Success Academy, a public charter school network that outperforms nearly every district in New York. (7/10)
On
pbs.org & youtube.com
- PBS' WW: Platner out & Ceasefire trouble (7/10)
On pbs.org &
youtube.com
- Can Democrats salvage the Maine Senate race after Platner's exit?
- Will the Iran conflict spin out of control after Trump says ceasefire is over?
- RNRH: Israel: What Went Wrong? (7/11)
- Ralph speaks to historian Omer Bartov about his new book "Israel: What Went Wrong?" with special guest, international law expert Bruce Fein.
- Omer Bartov is the Dean's Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University.
- Fareed Zakaria
- Columns: The U.S. will miss the old NATO when it's gone. (7/10)
- CNN GPS: Transcripts are expected to be available by 2 pm. (7/12)
7/7: National Constitution Center Event
7/5: Now on Recommended Sites
- BB's WSW: AI-era Internet, Spaceport Investment, Bolivia's Investability (6/5)
On bloomberg.com
& youtube.com
- Interview with Ken Rogoff on the value of the dollar.
-- Risk is long-term because of our national debt.
- Interview on Zero-Click Search with author Rand Fishkin, Liz Reid of Google Search, author Caitln Petre, and Neil Vogel of People Inc.
-- EC: Content creators are critical to AI.
-- Further reading: All the News That's Fit to Click: How Metrics Are Transforming the Work of Journalists by Caitln Petre!
- BB WE Law: Presidential Power, Birthright Citizenship & Campaign Finance (7/3)
- Constitutional law expert Gillian Metzger, a professor at Columbia Law School, discusses the Supreme Court's decision expanding presidential power.
- Then constitutional law expert David Super, a professor at Georgetown Law, discusses the Supreme Court upholding birthright citizenship.
- And Andrew Schapiro, a partner in the appellate practice at Quinn Emanuel and the former US Ambassador to the Czech Republic, discusses the court once again eliminating campaign finance restrictions
-- EC opinion: The partisan SCOTUS has increased the power of the president and money in electing the president and members of Congress. The effect is to make this mid-term more critical in determining the future of the United States.
- NPR's OTM: A Newspaper Raid and a Small Town Whodunnit (7/3)
- Find out who was behind the raid in August of 2023 in rural Kansas and what the saga reveals about the plight of local journalism today.
- PBS' FL: Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jon Meacham reflects on 250 years of American triumphs and tragedies.
On
pbs.org & youtube.com (2/20/26)
- PBS' WW: America 250 & Founding principles (7/3)
On pbs.org &
youtube.com
- RNRH: MAGA Inc. (7/4)
- Pratap Chatterjee, executive director of CorpWatch, joins us to discuss their latest report, MAGA Inc., which identifies the Crypto Czars, the Tech Titans and the Prison Profiteers who have bankrolled and benefited the most from Donald Trump's corrupt regime.
- Ralph welcomes Elliot Negin, executive editor of Money Trail to talk about how Donald Trump is trying to turn Washington DC into a monument to himself.
- Fareed Zakaria at the Aspen Ideas Festival:
- Columns: currently not available (7/4)
- CNN GPS: Transcripts are now available. (7/5)
- Interview with Ken Burns about what we can learn from the ideas of the American Revolution 250 years later.
- Interview with Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock on U.S. politics and the economy.
-- FZ: What is your solution to tackling the deficit?
-- LF: Grow the economy by three percent. ,,, And I could tell that to every politician who wants to raise taxes. We have to empower private capital to invest.
-- EC opinion: Economic growth primarily benefits the owners of capital and not workers. Federal tax revenue is primarily derived from taxes on earned income and not by taxes on income from capital. The primary objective of wealth management is to increase wealth while minimizing taxable income. This is possible under the existing Internal Revenue Code as modified by the 2017 TCJA and the 2025 OBBBA.
---------------------------------------------
-- LF: one of the great examples of how bifurcated our country has become ... [is Biden's] IRA bill, ... -- I think it was voted 90-10 or 95-5, Dems versus Republicans. ... about 80 percent [of the money went to] red states. And they [the Republicans] didn't vote for it.
-- EC opinion: The Democrats need to get their act together to pass laws that help blue states. Progressive Democrats support a higher Federal minimum wage that would only help workers in red states. Workers in blue states should already have minimum wages that exceed the Federal minimum wage.
---------------------------------------------
-- LF: if we could grow our economy ... we're going to narrow the gap between the wealthy and the middle class.
-- EC opinion: Recent economic growth has created a K-shaped economy that primarily benefits the wealthiest Americans.
-- TaxReform.AI is currently developing a proposal for a Federal Tax on Capital to Support Social Secuity, Fully Fund the Military, and Incease Housing Affordability
- Interview with three of the sharpest voices on Iran, Israel and the Gulf Arabs.
7/4: Celebrating the 250th Anniversary of the Founding of America in 1776
|
