Healey hopes to give ‘hope for the future’ but only modest policies are expected with important decisions deferred
John Healey has acknowledged the UK faces a “difficult moment” but insisted he would put the country on a better path as he delivers his first budget on Wednesday against a turbulent global economic backdrop.
But despite the international uncertainty, the chancellor will signal “fresh hope for the future” as he attempts to sound a more optimistic note, by providing households with breathing space from rising cost of living pressures.
The European Union has approved the mobilisation of approximately €4.9 billion under the European Peace Facility (EPF), implementing a significant part of an earlier agreement intended to resolve disagreements over military assistance to Ukraine.
The eight decisions, adopted by the Council on 26th October, allocate €4.7 billion towards partial reimbursement of military equipment already supplied by member states and €230 million towards the EU Military Assistance Mission in support of Ukraine.
Although the announcement represents an important step in restoring the operation of an established financing mechanism, most of the money does not correspond to fresh deliveries of military equipment.
That distinction is important as European governments attempt to reconcile continued support for Kyiv with growing pressure on national defence budgets and the need to replenish their own military inventories.
From political agreement to financial implementation
The decisions implement part of the €6.6 billion agreement reached by EU governments on 25th September, which ended a prolonged dispute over the allocation of European Peace Facility resources.
Under the original arrangement, €4.7 billion was earmarked for reimbursements, €1 billion for new joint procurement and approximately €900 million for training-related expenditure.
Monday’s decisions authorise most of the reimbursement component alongside a further allocation for training. They do not, by themselves, demonstrate that the separately planned €1 billion in new military equipment has been purchased or delivered.
The distinction reflects the unusual structure of the European Peace Facility.
Established in March 2021, the EPF operates outside the EU’s regular budget and finances security and defence assistance, including military equipment supplied by member states to partner countries.
Governments can provide weapons from their national stocks and subsequently seek partial reimbursement. This enables the EU to share some of the costs, although actual deliveries remain dependent on national decisions, industrial capacity and available equipment.
Reimbursements therefore strengthen the financial position of contributing governments without necessarily increasing Ukraine’s immediate stock of weapons.
Nevertheless, by reducing the financial burden of earlier donations, the mechanism can help governments preserve the capacity to make further contributions.
Military training becomes a longer-term commitment
The additional €230 million for the EU Military Assistance Mission also reflects the increasingly institutional character of European military support.
Established in November 2022, EUMAM Ukraine provides training for Ukrainian personnel through facilities and instructors made available by participating countries.
The EU has agreed to extend the mission for another two years, moving military training beyond a series of short-term emergency measures.
Training programmes can be adapted to battlefield requirements, including the operation of Western equipment, command procedures, engineering and specialised military functions.
However, the usefulness of training also depends on the availability of appropriate weapons, ammunition and replacement equipment once personnel return to Ukraine.
The Council says the latest decisions bring overall support under the European Peace Facility to approximately €10.8 billion, comprising €9.9 billion associated with military assistance reimbursements and €950 million for training.
Frozen Russian assets and the defence industry
A separate financing mechanism is increasingly relevant to European support for Ukraine.
The Council reports that €3.5 billion in extraordinary revenues generated by immobilised Russian sovereign assets has already been channelled through the EPF to finance ammunition, air defence and drones.
More than €1.5 billion of the resulting procurement has been directed towards Ukraine’s own defence industry.
This creates a different relationship between European financing and Ukrainian military production.
Rather than relying exclusively on weapons taken from European stockpiles, the arrangement allows part of the support to be translated into orders for equipment manufactured inside Ukraine.
The approach may also reduce certain transport and procurement constraints, although production remains vulnerable to Russian attacks, component shortages and interruptions to electricity supplies.
The legal and political questions surrounding Russian-asset revenues remain significant. As EU Today previously examined, disputes over how European institutions approve funding measures have generated legal challenges.
The next test for European governments
At their 15–16 October summit, EU leaders welcomed the EPF agreement and continuing disbursements under the separate €90 billion Ukraine support loan covering 2026 and 2027.
The two instruments serve different purposes. The loan supports wider Ukrainian financial and defence requirements, while the EPF provides a mechanism for sharing the costs of military assistance.
For Kyiv, the central question is how rapidly European financial commitments can be converted into deliverable military capabilities.
For EU governments, the challenge is whether reimbursement mechanisms, national procurement and Ukrainian industrial production can operate together on a predictable basis.
The release of €4.9 billion resolves an important financing issue. It does not eliminate the continuing requirement for new equipment, ammunition and sustained production.
Campaigns and their allies are making their closing arguments, and they've spent more than the annual budgets of a handful of states doing it. Much of that money is aimed at voters' wallets, but the attacks are also getting more personal and more artificial. Lisa Desjardins explains.
The first state to be ruled by Al Qaeda might not be in Afghanistan or the Arab world—and its ruler might be a former whiskey-drinking rock star. In April, the Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims ("JNIM" in Arabic) led an uprising in the African nation of Mali, killing Defense Minister Sadio Camara, breaking open a prison holding thousands of inmates, and besieging Bamako, the capital. The fighting was still underway as of August.
Mali is not the only place threatened by a JNIM takeover. The West African branch of Al Qaeda is active in a belt of countries known as the Sahel. Its leader, Iyad Ag Ghali, was the former percussionist for the rock band Tinariwen. He now leads a campaign to stamp out the "music of Satan." Perhaps the one saving grace for Sahelian metalheads is that puritans can't get along with each other: The JNIM is locked in a war with the rival Islamic State Sahel Province.
The Sahelian civil wars are a testament to the failure of the global war on terror. Despite spending $355 billion on African counterterrorism from 2001 to 2021, the U.S. government has been unable to stop Al Qaeda or related Islamist groups from taking root across the continent. A study by the Pentagon's Africa Center for Strategic Studies found a 101,300 percent increase in terrorism fatalities from 2002 to 2022, mostly concentrated in the Sahel and Somalia.
These wars demonstrate that the solution to terrorism isn't maximum violence. President Donald Trump launched four times as many airstrikes against Somalia in his first 18 months of his second term as the U.S. did over the past four years combined. U.S. military aid has flowed to repressive governments across Africa with little respect for their citizens' rights. Since 2020, there have been coups d'etat across the Sahel by military men promising that they can do the dirty work that civilian leaders are afraid of. Many of them were trained by the U.S. government. The new regimes have imported Russian mercenaries with a reputation for brutality and no real restraints on their activities.
"People need to forget about the question of democracy," Ibrahim Traoré, leader of Burkina Faso, declared in April.
Instead of restoring order, these heavy-handed tactics have caused more chaos. The military juntas in the Sahel are plainly losing to the JNIM. While the Russian fighters have no difficulties massacring civilians or mutilating prisoners, they have found it much harder to face people who can actually shoot back, facing repeated battlefield humiliations. Meanwhile, the U.S.-led campaign against al-Shabab, the Somali branch of Al Qaeda, has stalled out despite the heavier use of airpower.
The African war on terror began shortly after the U.S. campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. To some extent, the U.S. created the very threats that it is trying to fight in Africa. Somalia had been at civil war since the fall of socialism, and in the early 2000s, the CIA began funding Somali warlords to stop the rise of Islamist revolutionaries. The (relatively moderate) Islamic Courts Union took over anyway in 2006—uniting Somalia for the first time in more than a decade—and the U.S. encouraged neighboring Ethiopia to invade. When al-Shabab emerged to fight the Ethiopian invaders, the U.S. tapped a former leader of the Islamic Courts Union to lead a new Somali government.
Soon after the Ethiopian-Somali war, President George W. Bush created the Pentagon's Africa Command, and Congress budgeted $500 million in aid to militaries in the Sahara Desert and the Sahel. At the time, the main Islamist threat to that region was a mostly defeated insurgency in Algeria.
But the Libyan civil war in 2011 created terrible new monsters. Soon after President Barack Obama intervened in support of the Libyan revolution, weapons and hardened fighters from Libya flooded the ethnic Tuareg region of Mali, which declared independence a few months later. Soon after, Al Qaeda and its affiliates took over the Tuareg rebellion. With the Malian government coming close to collapse, France intervened in January 2013 and made many of the same mistakes that the U.S. did in its own war on terror.
Ag Ghali, the current leader of the JNIM, got his start as a Tuareg nationalist. A leaked U.S. embassy cable from 2008 called him a "proverbial bad penny" who enjoyed "playing both sides" and had ties to Islamist and secular nationalist rebels. By the time of the French intervention, he was fully committed to Islamic theocracy. In 2017, he united Islamist rebels across the Sahel under the banner of Al Qaeda. That same year, four U.S. Special Forces troops were killed in Niger by the Islamic State group, which was busy uniting Ag Ghali's rivals.
Despite the failures of the Sahelian governments to stop Ag Ghali—and their willingness to ally with Russia—the Trump administration is eager to double down on supporting them. The U.S. government increased intelligence sharing with Mali in 2025, and as of July it was considering a direct military intervention against the JNIM, according to The Washington Post. But every American escalation on the continent has produced the enemy that the next one had to fight.
One of the world's largest investment firms isn't bullish on AI.
Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Only tech companies are seeing growth from the AI boom, Apollo Global Management says.
Apollo says that though some big companies are spending big on AI, they may soon pull back.
Corporate America is starting to see AI spending not as a source of growth, but as a cost center.
One of the world's largest investment firms says that only tech companies are getting a share of the AI pie.
In an economic analysis published on Saturday, Apollo Global Management said that while the Magnificent Seven — a group of established tech companies that includes Nvidia and Meta — are seeing revenue growth during the AI boom, this growth isn't being shared by other industries.
"Mainstream corporate America is pulling back and starting to view token spending not as a source of growth but as a cost center that weighs on margins," Torsten Slok, a partner and chief economist at Apollo, said in the report. "The technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech."
In a series of graphs, Slok measured three main metrics that have boomed for tech companies but not for regular companies: revenue per worker, profit margins, and productivity growth.
Since 2022, revenue per employee figures have skyrocketed for tech companies — rising from $550,000 to nearly $800,000 today. Meanwhile, that figure hasn't changed much for everyone else in the S&P 500, lingering around $550,000 for the last seven years.
Similarly, while profit margins soared among tech companies since 2022, they've stagnated at about 10% for everyone else.
And across the economy, AI hasn't yet dramatically increased productivity growth as some AI optimists have predicted.
Apollo's research portends a dark shadow over a US economy throwing massive amounts of dough toward AI tools and companies, whose leaders have promised that an "age of abundance," where people won't have to work as much, will soon be upon us.
"The question looking ahead is whether, even as models become commoditized, mainstream corporate America can turn increasingly cheap intelligence into higher revenue growth and higher profit margins," Slok said.
There are clear parallels between the AI boom and the dot-com bubble, tech investor Paul Wick says.
But solid demand, strong earnings, and less mania make for a "healthier" backdrop, Wick said.
Seligman's chief investor brushed off Michael Burry's worries but flagged some trends to watch.
The AI boom has shades of the dot-com bubble, but fears of an imminent crash and mass unemployment are overblown, a veteran tech investor says.
At the turn of this century, there was an explosion in dot-com startups being formed, and a huge infrastructure buildout with telecoms "aggressively" spending on wired and wireless networks, Paul Wick told Business Insider in an interview this week.
The chief investor of Seligman Investments — a group within Columbia Threadneedle Investments that manages over $40 billion of assets and comprises a hedge fund, a mutual fund, and a venture capital arm — said there were clear parallels between that period and the current boom in AI startups and data-center spending. He also noted that energy prices and interest rates jumped then as they've done this year.
But Wick noted there isn't the same IPO frenzy now, or the same "frenetic environment" where stocks soar fivefold or tenfold in a day. He also said that by late 2000, a slowdown in IT spending was being forecasted for 2001, whereas enterprise spending on AI remains strong and recent tech earnings have been robust.
Simply put, the situation seems "healthier" now than in 2000, he said.
Business Insider asked Wick about Michael Burry's warnings this year around AI. "The Big Short" investor has called out aggressive accounting, circular financing, hidden debt, and overinvestment in depreciating assets like microchips as reasons to be skeptical that the boom has legs.
Wick said that Burry, known for predicting and profiting from the collapse of the mid-2000s housing bubble, has been "early or downright wrong on many other things."
Burry has previously defended his track record, citing his correct predictions and sharing charts showing the timing of his market calls.
As for concerns about Nvidia's efforts to grow the AI ecosystem by investing in data center developers and software companies, Wick emphasized that the chipmaker is "extraordinarily profitable."
He cast doubt on whether Nvidia should spend its spare cash only on buybacks, rather than bolstering its customers, especially as several of the industry's biggest players are working to develop their own AI chips to reduce their reliance on Nvidia.
But he also flagged some industry trends to watch, including enterprise clients opting to use older models or build their own, and token pricing coming under pressure as users embrace open-source models, raising questions over the size of the market opportunity for the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic.
"It used to be that a degree in computer science was a ticket to success," he said.
A better option today might be to learn a trade, as there's "booming demand" for workers such as electricians and HVAC technicians, and they can make an "incredibly good living" without having to go to a four-year college, Wick said.
He also took aim at the "doom-and-gloom notion that AI is going to eviscerate demand" for human labor. He described that worry as a "little premature" as nobody knows for sure how AI will affect entry-level roles in the future, unemployment is yet to soar, and there's always inertia when it comes to businesses and consumers changing their behavior.
PM insists threatening economic outlook is result of developments that don't have to do with Israel, but rivals say his government's policies are to blame
Today's guest is Ted Brown, the Libertarian Party candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas. Brown is facing off against Republican Ken Paxton and Democrat James Talarico in a closely contested race. Brown received more than 267,000 votes in his 2024 Senate campaign and is now challenging both major parties on their commitment to individual liberty. He argues that Republicans have abandoned limited government while Democrats increasingly embrace economic policies that undermine the free market.
Nick Gillespie talks with Brown about Paxton's corruption scandals, Talarico's hostility toward billionaires, and why Texas ranks poorly on personal freedom despite its business-friendly reputation. Brown makes the case for returning to an Ellis Island–style immigration system, cutting federal spending to confront the $40 trillion national debt, and ending America's military involvement in the Middle East. They also discuss abortion rights, government surveillance, online age-verification laws, and how regulations drive up the cost of healthcare. Brown explains what it will take to rebuild the Libertarian Party and why he believes a senator could accomplish more by stopping bad legislation than by passing new laws.
Andy Burnham's doomsday prepping campaign descended into farce today as he was forced to play down Angela Rayner's joke about stockpiling wine amid questions of why a Government skimping on defence is lecturing the public.
Companies that sell paper cups, plates, delivery containers, and similar packaging to restaurants say that they're seeing less demand from US businesses.
Essity, a Swedish company that sells paper towels and cleaning supplies to businesses, including restaurants, said on Thursday that the dining pullback in the US was affecting sales. The company's sales volumes and prices in the US fell during its third quarter, it said.
"Consumers are not going out to restaurants as much as they do in Europe," CEO Ulrika Kolsrud told Reuters on Thursday.
Finland-based Huhtamaki Oyj, which makes disposable cups and takeout containers for fast-food restaurants, said that second-quarter sales in North America decreased.
Analysts at Jefferies wrote that results in the region, which accounts for about one-third of Huhtamaki Oyj's sales, will likely be hurt by lower consumer spending at fast-food chains in the US.
Higher prices at some chains, and many consumers still working from home, "have impacted sales volumes, and ultimately packaging demand," the analysts wrote earlier this month.
With wages stagnant and the lingering effects of inflation, many diners are eating out less. Those who are still spending tend to look for good deals — a trend that has tested value menus at fast-food chains like McDonald's and benefited others, such as Chili's, which offered deals that got consumers ordering.
That doesn't necessarily mean Americans have stopped spending on restaurant food altogether. Many diners are still willing to pay for food delivery, a trend that has bolstered results at DoorDash and Uber.
French economist Gabriel Zucman has come to California bearing a familiar French solution to a fiscal problem: another tax.
Once based at the University of California, Berkeley, Zucman is back and campaigning for Proposition 40, which would impose an allegedly one-time 5 percent tax on the net worth of Californians worth more than $1 billion. Zucman, who coauthored the proposition, estimates that the tax could raise about $100 billion and claims that 90 percent of the proceeds would go to health care.
The California Legislative Analyst's office is far more cautious, saying it would raise only "tens of billions" and could cause a long-term loss of income-tax revenue as wealthy people leave the state with the companies they created.
I've written plenty about why wealth taxes are economically destructive, administratively nightmarish, and unlikely to achieve anything close to what their advocates promise. But Zucman's prescription is wrong for a more fundamental reason, as his (and my) native country shows: Raising taxes to fuel ever-larger demands for government spending is a recipe for disaster.
Unless you've been living in a remote cave recently, you've likely seen all the protests and destruction in France. But do you know why it's happening?
As another economist, Paul Krugman, rightly noted back in 2017, "France offers a social safety net beyond the wildest dreams of U.S. progressives: guaranteed high-quality health care for all, generous paid leave for new parents, universal pre-K, and much more."
For decades, France has answered any perceived desire with government spending, then responded to the resulting fiscal problem by seeking new revenue sources. Today, French government spending consumes roughly 58 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).
Krugman gloated that France wasn't suffering social collapse and speculated that it was due to all the spending. He certainly can't say that anymore. In fact, he is now worried that France may be on the precipice of a debt crisis. The truth is that France hasn't done well for some time, even when Krugman cheered its spending.
One of the groups in the street today, young people, has faced widespread unemployment for a long time. The youth unemployment rate in France (ages 15-24) has hovered between 17 percent and 27 percent since 2000. In the second quarter of 2026, it was 21.6 percent, against 14.8 percent in the Eurozone and 9.9 percent in the U.S.
French people also pay some of the highest taxes in the developed world, and they're not happy with the return. The government already takes more than 52 percent of the country's output in revenue, runs deficits exceeding 5 percent of GDP, and has accumulated debt approaching 120 percent of GDP. Nonetheless, French students complain that the government is shortchanging schools, while everyone sees that it is shortchanging its army and police.
The students aren't wrong to feel left out. At The Two Cents Substack, Hoover Institution scholar Hanno Lustig calculates that, between 1995 and 2024, spending on social protection and health (most of which benefits older people) rose from 53.1 percent to 58.7 percent of all French government spending. The share devoted to education, defense, and public order fell from 15.2 percent to 13.7 percent. Transportation fell from 5.3 percent to 3.8 percent.
In other words, France has built an enormous welfare state, much of it devoted to older citizens, while letting other state capacities and basic services fall apart. As transfers of wealth swallow a larger share of the budget, everything else gets squeezed.
That is the fiscal ratchet Californians should worry about when Zucman tells them Proposition 40 is necessary to "save" health care. Proponents claim Washington "cut" Medicaid, but that language is misleading. California's deficit started long before any Washington spending reductions. Besides, federal Medicaid spending isn't falling—not even close. The Congressional Budget Office estimates it will reach $708 billion in 2026, 8 percent more than in 2025. What Washington did in the 2025 budget reconciliation law was reduce Medicaid's future growth relative to previous projections, partly by changing eligibility and enrollment rules and financing arrangements.
This is how the ratchet works. Once the government projects a spending increase, anything less becomes a cut. And once Washington fails to finance the entire projected increase, Californians are told that Sacramento must backfill the missing money. And how should it do that? Conveniently, by creating an entirely new tax.
France has run this experiment for decades. It has an incredibly generous welfare state paid for with very high taxes; it's even tried a wealth tax and has a value-added tax, yet somehow it's never enough. Its welfare state has not eliminated scarcity. It has merely transferred the job of rationing scarce resources to politicians.
Zucman looks at California and sees hundreds of billions of dollars of private wealth waiting to solve a public finance problem. Californians should look across the Atlantic and ask a different question: What happens after politicians decide that every spending adjustment can be delayed until tomorrow by finding another pot of private wealth?
France should not be sending California tax advice. It should be sending a warning.
One month after Washington, D.C., celebrated America's 250th anniversary, it marked a more ignominious milestone: a full year since President Donald Trump deployed thousands of National Guard soldiers to the capital.
The approximately 4,600 National Guard members have been an unavoidable presence in D.C., wandering the National Mall and downtown streets in groups of three or four, or standing idly in Metro stations chatting. Occasionally, they're tasked with picking up trash at parks. Tourists take selfies with them by the now-fenced-off Lafayette Square in front of the White House.
They're not going anywhere. The Trump administration is moving forward with plans to acquire up to 2,000 housing units to support long-term National Guard deployments. The Department of Defense has estimated that extending the mission from October 2026 through to the end of the Trump administration in January 2029 will cost about $1.4 billion.
According to the Trump administration, all of this has been necessary to transform D.C. "from a crime-ridden city into a safe and beautiful haven for residents and visitors alike."
Crime in D.C. is down 20 percent from 2025, according to the Metropolitan Police Department, but an August Reuters investigation found National Guard soldiers were involved in only a tiny fraction of arrests in the safer parts of the city, mostly for minor offenses such as shoplifting and turnstile jumping. Crime has been dropping nationwide, a trend that started before Trump took office and includes cities that aren't occupied by federal law enforcement and soldiers.
Even if the Guard presence has contributed to a drop in crime, it's a civil liberties nightmare. It puts untrained military in the role of policing civilians. It usurps local police departments that are ostensibly answerable to the communities they police, and it normalizes the deployment of military forces domestically—a red line for a free society.
"There's a deep irony that here we are in the capital of the free world, and our president is treating it like a police state," Scott Michelman, legal director of the ACLU of the District of Columbia, told PBS in August. "D.C. residents have lived with our National Guard troops in our neighborhoods for about a year, despite the absence of any genuine emergency and really any reason for them to be here."
Last November, a federal court preliminarily ruled that the deployment was illegal. However, an appeals court allowed the Trump administration to keep troops deployed in D.C. while it considers the administration's appeal of that ruling.
The appeals court decision is absurd. The appellate panel is fully aware that every day the case drags on is another day that D.C. residents are being subjected to a potentially illegal military occupation, and another day that taxpayers will foot the bill for a wasteful fit of presidential hubris.
The damages are compounding. The first anniversary of Trump's deployment of National Guard soldiers to D.C. should be the last.
Kemi Badenoch has said a "red warning light" is flashing on the economy as Britain's debt tops £3 trillion for the first time and inflation surges to 3.5% ahead of the Budget next week.
If you have to pay a regular fee to maintain control and use of a home or other parcel of property, do you really own it? Or are you just renting it from whoever collects the money? That's the question behind a growing movement against property taxes, which is winning support across the country and may see its next big test in the form of a proposed constitutional amendment on the Florida ballot that would significantly trim taxes on owner-occupied homes.
'Property Is the Foundation of Liberty'—and a Big Source of Tax Revenue
Advocates of reform understandably champion the inviolability of private property, which is threatened by continuously rising levies. Opponents predictably include people who fear reduced government revenues, but also those who worry that cutting property taxes will shift power to state governments at the cost of local autonomy.
"Property is the foundation of liberty," argues economist Vance Ginn. "It represents the right to the product of voluntary exchange, investment, and saving—not a privilege granted by government. To tax property again every year after it has been bought with after-tax income is to deny genuine ownership. Property taxes operate like an annual wealth tax or unrealized capital-gains tax, applied regardless of income or ability to pay."
Opposing Ginn's argument in the debate is the Tax Foundation's Jared Walczak, who is not so much a fan of property taxes as a believer that they suck less than the alternatives.
"Spending restraint can reduce property tax burdens," argues Walczak. "But with property taxes accounting for 70 percent of local tax collections nationwide and upwards of 90 percent in some states, any discussion of property tax elimination must grapple with revenue alternatives."
"It is axiomatic that whatever you tax, you get less of," he adds. "Taxing income means less income-producing labor and investment, for instance. But because land is an immobile asset, taxing property does less to distort market decisions than taxing income or even sales."
Walczak also points out that while property taxes are usually imposed by local governments, most alternatives to property taxes come at the state level. That would move power further up the political food chain, away from the property owners worrying about their tax bills.
To this, Ginn responds that governments at all levels cost more than they should and that "the moral and fiscal failure of property taxes lies not only in how the money is raised, but also in how much government spends."
That means the debate over property taxes isn't just a struggle between those who want to trim the state's take and those who prefer larger government, but also between anti-tax activists and their frequent allies among advocates of local power. In a piece this week on the groundswell against property taxes, Politico's Liam Dillon notes that "the uprising's most pitched battles are being fought in Red States where the issue has emerged as yet another dividing line on the right."
Localities Are Dependent on Taxing Property
The debate over property taxes is fierce partially because governments have come to rely so heavily on them. "In fiscal year 2023, property taxes comprised 28.9 percent of total state and local tax collections in the United States, more than any other source of tax revenue, despite being levied almost exclusively at the local (not state) level," Janelle Fritts wrote for the Tax Foundation.
Property taxes in the U.S. range from roughly half a percent to just under 2 percent of assessed home value. States that rely most heavily on them, like New Hampshire (1.5 percent in 2024) and Texas (1.4 percent in 2024), also tend to leave a lot of government responsibility in local hands that might be exercised at the state level elsewhere. It's worth noting that Cato's Freedom in the 50 States ranks New Hampshire as having the second least burdensome tax regime among states, with Texas in fourth place.
The lowest taxed states in property terms are Alabama (0.37 percent in 2024), Arizona (0.48 percent), Hawaii (0.29 percent), and Utah (0.48 percent). Some states, such as Illinois (1.88 percent in 2024) and New Jersey (also 1.88 percent), tax the hell out of many things to support large and intrusive governments. Hawaii, despite low property taxes, is ranked as the most tax-burdened state by Cato.
As mentioned above, economists tend to like property taxes because they are efficient, minimally distort economic decisions, and empower localities relative to state and federal authorities. But as Politico's Dillon emphasizes, "everyone who is not an economist seems to hate property taxes."
Homeowners Don't Like the Insecurity That Comes With Property Tax Bills
Property taxes rise with assessed property valuations that homeowners have no control over, as the market shifts with supply and demand. They require what feels an awful lot like an annual rent payment to keep a roof over people's heads many already paid for. That reduces the sense of security that owners feel in their homes, since their habitation remains conditional on meeting local authorities' demands. The bite of sales taxes can be reduced by buying less, and income taxes are dependent on earning paychecks, but property taxes (with some local exceptions) come due no matter what.
Soaring property valuations in recent years drove property tax bills higher for Americans who did nothing but remain at their established addresses, though localities can and sometimes do adjust tax rates to offset rising values. USA Todayreported that "between 2019 and 2023, the median value of annual property taxes increased nearly 25%." That has energized the movement to cut or abolish the taxes.
Efforts to reform property taxes have been effective in more than a dozen states, according to Governing. Most of these efforts involved reducing taxes, though eyes are currently on Florida where Amendment 3, a proposed change to the state constitution, would incrementally raise the homestead exemption to $250,000. It also would require "the Legislature to prescribe a uniform procedure for counties and municipalities, for their respective levies, to increase the homestead exemption up to full assessed value," effectively abolishing property taxes on owner-occupied dwellings.
As a constitutional amendment, the measure requires 60 percent of votes to pass. Polling shows more support than opposition, but not necessarily at the supermajority level necessary for victory.
According to the Tax Foundation, in Florida, "the statewide average sales tax rate would have to rise from 7.02 to 15.34 percent to replace the property tax" with equivalent revenue. Rates could widely vary if localities implemented sales taxes instead of leaving them to the state.
Of course, that assumes state and local governments continue spending and providing services at the same level. But as economist Ginn points out, the problem lies not only in how property taxes raise money "but also in how much government spends." If the property tax revolt represents revulsion not just at the tax, but at the expense of large government, that may require less revenue to fund a smaller Leviathan.
Social Security is racing towards insolvency because the program pays out more in benefits to retirees than it collects in taxes from working Americans.
Handing out even more generous benefits will make that situation worse. Yet that is exactly what the trustees who run Social Security are planning to do: Retirees will get a 3.6 percent cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) next year. That increase is 0.8 percentage points higher than last year's, and it is 0.9 percentage points higher than what Social Security was expecting to pay.
The Social Security trustees are doing what the law requires during a time of high inflation. That's why Congress ought to intervene here.
It should cancel the COLA.
No, this isn't a demand that lawmakers stick it to America's retirees. It's an appeal for some fiscal common sense. There are three good reasons to cancel this year's COLA.
First: Handing out higher benefits to wealthy retirees simply doesn't make sense when Social Security is trending towards insolvency.
As the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget notes, the announced COLA would be a $900 increase in benefits for the average retired household—but some retirees could receive as much as $3,600 more.
Paying generous benefits to wealthy households is the main reason Social Security is facing insolvency in the first place. A program originally intended to keep seniors from falling into poverty has become a huge wealth-transfer scheme that overwhelmingly benefits those who don't need the handouts. The COLA doubles down on this flaw.
Second: What about the workers who are paying for those lavish benefits? Wages have risen by 3 percent, on average, over the past year. Those pay increases have already been outpaced by inflation, which is up 3.7 percent in the past 12 months.
You'll often hear retirees talk about how they are living on a "fixed income," but the math simply doesn't bear this out. Social Security beneficiaries will get a COLA that is larger than the average pay increase for the workers who are funding the COLA. Retirees are protected from the impact of inflation while younger Americans must deal with inflation and finance that protection for the elderly. That's crazy.
Third: Cutting the COLA could kick-start a conversation about how to solve Social Security's looming insolvency. The Social Security trustees estimate that an across-the-board cut of about 22 percent will be necessary in 2032. Eliminating COLAs won't meaningfully change that arithmetic, but it would change the conversation—which has for too long been dominated by politicians promising seniors that nothing needs to change. That's wrong—and the sooner that becomes apparent, the better off the political system will be.
If eliminating the COLA is too radical a change, Congress should instead change how the trustees calculate the annual increase.
Currently, the COLA is based on one particular measure of inflation: the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers, otherwise known as CPI-W. This is a relatively narrow index that reflects the spending habits of only about one-third of all Americans, as Romina Boccia points out in her newletter, The Debt Dispatch.
Instead, Boccia suggests using the Chained Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers, or C-CPI-U, which covers about 93 percent of all Americans and is generally regarded as a better measure of the rising cost of living. Other parts of the federal government already use C-CPI-U to update such things as tax brackets.
If Congress simply changed how Social Security's COLA was calculated, it could close 12 percent of the program's long-term shortfall. And while some retirees would see smaller COLAs as a result, the result would more closely match those increases to inflation.
Social Security's COLA reflects many of the fundamental flaws with America's old-age entitlement program. Like Social Security as a whole, it is too generous to the rich, too costly to the taxpayers, and too unfair to younger, poorer workers.
Is this really about cost of living? Over the weekend, the civil unrest that had been at a simmer boiled over in cities all over France. Over 1,000 police officers were injured, with seven seriously injured. More than 2,400 people were arrested.
"Rioters…attacked city halls from Lille in northern France to Marseille in the south, where they broke into the local government headquarters and tipped over a bust of Marianne, a symbol of the French Republic," reportsThe New York Times. "A fire destroyed a tourist office in Lyon, and 1,500 shops were damaged or looted nationwide, according to Alexandre Bompard, head of the French federation of commerce and distribution, who estimated that the cost of repairs could run into hundreds of millions of dollars."
"They came prepared," claimed the French journalist Paul Amar on CNews. "They had the addresses of town halls. They had addresses of Jewish shop owners. In a street in Marseille, all businesses owned by Jews were set on fire. Businesses run by Muslims weren't." The Jewish Community Protection Service has disputed such claims.
Reason's Matt Welch has a good write-up of how the violence and destruction have altered Lyon, Paris, Marseille, and Limoges, where the city hall was burned and collapsed.
Ces images doivent faire le tour du monde. Nos voisins doivent savoir.
Lyon l'une des plus grandes villes de France le 17 octobre est l'une des villes les plus touchées.
A Lyon, aucun commerce n'a été épargné, oui aucun commerce n'a aucun épargné vous avez bien lu. Toutes les… pic.twitter.com/15dG6QB5lK
What was nominally about cost of living and budget issues appears to have expanded far beyond those. ("Free Palestine" and "ACAB" graffiti have been seen everywhere.) President Emmanuel Macron has blamed far-left protesters, saying they have taken advantage of the situation. Far-right leader Marine Le Pen has blamed the "Macronist administration that is out of steam, exhausted, and disoriented."
It's not clear to me how the possibility of that retirement age needs to be raised will in any way be changed by, say, donning black balaclavas and breaking into the Louis Vuitton store:
French rioters loot Louis Vuitton store located just 2 KM away from the Élysée. pic.twitter.com/cnb5aWczcN
Here's how it all started: Since September 18, lycée (or secondary-school) students have held demonstrations, starting in the Paris suburb, Créteil. The students said the Education Ministry had neglected them—not enough resources, not enough teachers, and overcrowded classes. (The original demands were met and that strike ended, but not before sparking a wider movement.) This was all happening concurrently as the government was deciding its budget, and public-sector strikes were beginning. High social-program spending, an aging population, and high debt-to-GDP, plus an ever-increasing cost-of-living is resulting in a math problem that politicians have no real way out of except by raising the retirement age. Over the last few years, the French have had several hissy fits over the possibility of that happening.
Lawmakers from left-wing party La France Insoumise were at the first blockade on September 21, which has sparked questions about whether the party helped fuel the protests ahead of April's presidential election. I take all this—the disparate movements, the sheer volume of violence, the political-party involvement, the elections coming up—to mean that what started as an education-quality/cost-of-living protest has been used to lodge all kinds of grievances, and is attracting allies with an unquenchable thirst for violence and destruction.
Scenes from New York: "Darrel Rodriguez, 26, was shot on Saturday in the 7th Avenue Station on 53rd Street, a few blocks from Times Square, the police said. An unidentified man approached Mr. Rodriguez on the northbound E train platform, drew a gun and shot him once in the chest, they said," reportsThe New York Times. The man who shot Rodriguez was wearing a full balaclava-style face covering, and has not been found by the cops.
Philadelphia enacted a ban on such masks back in 2023. Just anecdotally, I've seen a lot of them in New York, but not by people trying to stay warm in the cold—these types of masks are used by people hopping turnstiles, stealing from bodegas, and more. Some bodega owners have started posting signs on their doors saying masks aren't allowed, since it's become such a problem.
"As of Oct. 11, there have been 1,697 crimes in the transit system since the start of the year, 27 more than the same period in 2025," reportsThe New York Times, citing Police Department figures.
In Texas, Ken Paxton appears to have lost the support of suburban women, according to The Washington Post.
"Jewish life in the Emirates has grown quieter and less visible," notesThe New York Times. "Religious symbols have disappeared, and gatherings have moved into private. Many have become more guarded about their online presence and their willingness to speak to the media. Some are reconsidering how openly to identify themselves as Israeli or Jewish, while others weigh whether they can still build a life in a nation they once considered a haven."
Can you really see everything?
YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING is doing a public service if it gets the general population to question why, precisely, folks lend so much credence to documentaries as vehicles of truth. https://t.co/n7CHwkmDmrpic.twitter.com/IHUvEbKECl
"I recently attended a meeting of the Democratic Socialists of America, where I officially enrolled as a member. Though I was new to the party, I put forth a number of proposals, many of which were met with considerable enthusiasm and, I'm happy to report, have now been incorporated into their manifesto," writes Larry David in a satirical essay for Airmail. "We contend that the only way anyone can be rehabilitated is through the simple act of love. When the D.S.A. takes over, it will be our policy to close the jails and release all prisoners. Once released, the former prisoners will continue to walk around in their orange jumpsuits, the easier to spot them. People will be encouraged to give them a pat on the back, offer some words of encouragement, and maybe even get them to open up about their crimes. Imagine how upsetting it must be to know you've taken a life! To err is human, to forgive, divine. With empathy and compassion, it's easy to see a day when these former convicts will be contributing to society in a very meaningful way." It's not that funny of an essay, but I think it's great for more people to be talking about how asinine DSA ideas are.
Ontario government inspectors checked several career colleges that had experienced "concerning" growth in applications for the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP), a government financial aid program that helps eligible students pay for post-secondary education. The investigators found problems that raised "serious concerns" at three Academy of Learning institutions, like signs that other people might have been doing students' schoolwork for them—for example, some students finished whole courses in a single day, or even just minutes. A few students could not even name their school or program of study. The inspectors also found shared computer logins from many different locations and said the schools could not prove that OSAP-funded students were really taking the classes they claimed to be enrolled in. These three locations took in more than $219 million in student aid money for about 14,800 students in one year, so the province decided to stop letting new students use that aid at the schools. The colleges deny most of the claims and are fighting the decision in court.
As the Trump administration's short-lived Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project implemented its plan to downsize the federal workforce, there was much wailing from the liberal institutions in Washington, D.C.
Federal employee unions filed lawsuits to block the effort. NPR ran profiles of federal workers who, for the first time, faced the prospect of potentially not having absolute job security forever. The Brookings Institution wondered how many jobs the federal government could shed before it crashes.
The answer: plenty. The Trump administration has cut more than 10 percent of the federal workforce, and the government hasn't crashed. Indeed, it hasn't even shrunk—if you're counting by dollars spent instead of people employed.
In a new article for City Journal, Manhattan Institute senior fellow Judge Glock highlights the tremendous gap between the dire predictions about DOGE's cuts and the reality that has emerged, more than a year after DOGE was shut down. Despite having only a modest impact on spending, Glock writes, DOGE "had a massive impact on the federal civil service."
This is true—to a point, more on that in a moment—and notable. Aside from a modest downsizing in the 1990s, the number of people employed by the federal government has been steadily growing for decades. Reversing that trend is one of the few genuinely libertarian accomplishments by the Trump administration.
The cuts to the federal workforce prove that "DOGE worked," argues Glock.
Well, hold on.
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (who departed the DOGE project before Trump's inauguration and is now running for governor of Ohio) set some very ambitious goals after being appointed DOGE co-chairs in late 2024. In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal in November 2024 where they promised "we won't just write reports or cut ribbons. We'll cut costs."
Yes, Musk and Ramaswamy also said they would reduce the federal workforce. But that was presented as a natural consequence of cutting spending, not as the primary goal.
Think about it like this. If I spent months promising my friends and family that I would lose 50 pounds on a new diet, and then didn't lose any weight, would it be fair to say the diet worked?
What if I reduced the number of donuts I eat every day, but still didn't lose any weight? Sure, that might be good for my health in some way—just like reducing unnecessary workers in the federal government is good for America's fiscal health—but it certainly wouldn't mean I had achieved the goal of losing weight.
Finally, even the claim that DOGE cut the federal workforce requires an asterisk. As Glock also notes in his report, the decline in federal workers has been offset by an increase in federal contractors.
It's not a one-for-one trade, of course. The new contractors are overwhelmingly concentrated in places like the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon, while the cuts mostly targeted other areas, like the Department of Health and Human Services.
"Most of that increase came from the buildup in homeland-security and defense contracting, including purchases such as surveillance aircraft and tanks, rather than substitutes for government workers," Glock writes. "DOGE achieved real contract savings, but these were more than offset by higher spending elsewhere, reflecting a shift in priorities rather than an overall reduction in contracting."
So, the government is eating fewer donuts but more pizza.
There might be libertarian reasons to prefer contractors over government employees. They are less likely to hold those jobs for life, for one. But there's nothing inherently good about a government policy that cuts jobs in some areas just to create more room in the budget for poorly trained immigration enforcement agents and defense contractors. That may even be a negative outcome for liberty.
In the end, the DOGE project looks less like a meaningful attempt at cutting government spending or employment levels and more like a way to purge parts of the federal workforce likely to get in Trump's way during his second term. "As long as [Trump's] larger commitment is to extending his power rather than rolling back power itself, you shouldn't expect the government to stop growing," as Reason's Jesse Walker wrote last year in comparing DOGE to President Richard Nixon's attempted purge of the civil service.
Did DOGE work? Only if you grade it on a pretty dramatic curve.
Yes, it proved that a president can slash bureaucratic jobs—particularly the bloated managerial and administrative types—without doing much damage to the government's core responsibilities. That's a lesson future administrations should remember.
Maybe, someday, a president will try applying the same logic to government spending too.
Endless illegal immigration, unaffordable energy, draconian speech policing – we're being conditioned to accept outrageous things as normal, says Nick Rendell. Now add to that economic crashes.
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