Tag: hit&run

Police in London used public order laws to block a planned U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) march through Tower Hamlets because they were worried the demonstration—which was framed around immigration and deportations—could lead to serious violence from residents in the mostly Bangladeshi community. Officials claimed they were not banning the march because it could take place in other parts of the city.

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A new Cato Institute study provides a comprehensive overview of the fiscal impact of immigration to the United States over thirty years, and finds that immigrants have reduced budget deficits by a massive $14.5 trillion from 1994 to 2023. Here is the authors’ summary of the results:

• Every year from 1994 to 2023, immigrants have paid more in taxes than they received in benefits.

• Immigrants generated nearly $10.6 trillion more in federal, state, and local taxes than they induced in total government spending.

• Accounting for savings on interest payments on the national debt, immigrants saved $14.5 trillion in debt over this 30-year period.

• Immigrants cut US budget deficits by about a third from 1994 to 2023, and fiscal savings grew to $878 billion in 2023 (Figure 1).

• Noncitizens accounted for $6.3 trillion of the $14.5 trillion debt savings.

• College graduate immigrants accounted for $11.7 trillion in savings, while non–college graduates accounted for $2.8 trillion.

• The cohort of immigrants entering from 1990 to 1993, just before data collection began in 1994, was fiscally positive $1.7 trillion, and was still positive after 30 years in 2022–2023 (Table 1).

• Even including the second generation (see Box 1 for definitions), who are mostly still children who will become taxpayers soon, the fiscal effect of immigration was positive every year.

• Immigrants in all categories of educational attainment, including high school dropouts, lowered the ratio of deficit to gross domestic product (GDP) during the 30-year period.

• Without the contributions of immigrants, public debt at all levels would already be above 200 percent of US GDP—nearly twice the 2023 level and a threshold some analysts believe would trigger a debt crisis.

My Cato colleague David Bier (one of the coauthors of the study) provides further analysis of the results here. There are previous studies on this topic, such as the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis in 2024. But the new Cato study is notable for its comprehensive nature, covering effects on all three levels of government, and separately considering many different types of immigrants, including both legal and illegal, immigrants with different education and skill levels, and more.

The overwhelming nature of the evidence here should all but bury the fiscal case for immigration restrictions, though I expect restrictionists to keep making the argument, regardless. I made some additional points against the fiscal argument for restrictionism in this post, and in greater detail in Chapter 6 of my book Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom.

Obviously, there are many other rationales for immigration restriction, such as claims that immigration increases crime, spreads harmful cultural values, damages political institutions, and more. Restrictionists also argue that governments have a general right to exclude migrants for any reason they want, either because governments are analogous to homeowners, or because a particular ethnic or racial group are the true owners of a given country,  and thereby have a “self-determination” right to exclude members of other groups. I critique these arguments and others in Chapters 5 and 6 of Free to Move and in various other publications, such as this one.

By the same token, I do not believe that the positive fiscal impact is the best rationale for ending or reducing immigration restrictions. In my view, it is far less significant than the immense negative impact of immigration restrictions on liberty and human welfare, including that of receiving-country natives, as well as that of would-be migrants.

But the fiscal case for restrictionism has special significance for some types of libertarians and conservatives who cannot otherwise rationalize the massive restrictions on liberty imposed by immigration restrictions, and therefore love to quote Milton Friedman’s misleading line that “[y]ou cannot simultaneously have a welfare state and free immigration.” It turns out you can, and immigration actually eases the fiscal burden of welfare spending.

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The Watergate Special Prosecution Force (WSPF) did not terminate after President Nixon resigned August 8, 1974. Indeed, the prosecutors continued to investigate many facets of the Nixon presidency for some time. Some of these actions are stunning. Geoff Sheppard posted a memo that has to be seen to be believed: In September 1974, Phillip Lacovara suggested to Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski that Ford’s pardon of Nixon violated WSPF regulations, and was thus invalid. While the President usually has the absolute power to grant pardons of federal offenses, President Ford constrained his own powers by agreeing to the WPSF regulations. You wonder where Jack Smith and Robert Mueller got the idea that everything the President does is obstruction of justice?

Speaking of obstruction, there is a fascinating article in the New York Times Magazine by James Rosen, titled “The Secret History of the Deep State.” He reveals seven pages of never-before-seen grand jury testimony from 1975 between former-President Nixon and WSPF prosecutors. The story is very long, and I cannot do justice to it in a single post.

The biggest takeaway is that an Air Force officer, Yeoman Radford, who worked in the White House, was a mole. No, not for the Soviets, but for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He would routinely make copies of documents from Nixon administration officials and share them with people in the Pentagon. Radford would pilfer documents from Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig and make copies of them.

Selected to accompany General Haig, Kissinger’s deputy, on trips to Vietnam and Cambodia, Radford deployed all his gifts for theft, including raiding the general’s briefcase. According to “Silent Coup,” Radford turned over “a huge government envelope overflowing with hundreds of pages of documents.” . . .

In June 1971, having received superlative reviews from General Haig, Radford was chosen to accompany Kissinger on a tour of Asian capitals. On a stopover in Pakistan, the accompanying press were told falsely that Kissinger had fallen ill; in fact, he flew secretly to Beijing to finalize Nixon’s trip. “Don’t get caught,” warned Radford’s direct supervisor, Adm. Robert Welander, ahead of his departure. Once again, the yeoman snatched every document within reach, including rifling Kissinger’s briefcase. Radford collected so much material that he enlisted a contact at the embassy in New Delhi to ship it back to the Pentagon via secure diplomatic pouch.

The purpose of this espionage was to check the incumbent president from taking actions that the deep state opposed. You have to read through a lot of background to get to this shocking takeaway. Here is the key excerpt, where Nixon reveals to the prosecutors about the deep state “can of worms”:

That’s when Nixon warned the prosecutors not to open “that can of worms,” adding, “There is even more, because [Radford] not only ——”

Ruth, the lead prosecutor, interjected: “We are not opening it up.”

“Yeoman Radford was not only there,” the ex-president persisted, “but he was a direct channel to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

There it was, finally — the secret Nixon had sought to keep under wraps: It was not the far left that most actively sought to sabotage the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy but the hard right, not lowly pencil-pushers in the civil service but the most senior commanders at the Pentagon.

The prosecutors had heard enough. They did not want Nixon to elaborate. Jay Horowitz, the last questioner, cut in.

“Sir, if I might take us back now to ——”

Nixon would not be deterred.

“This indicates to the members of the grand jury, if I might address them for a moment, why it is that” the Radford project “had to be top secret.” He added: “Particularly, I didn’t want the Joint Chiefs of Staff involved.”

Nixon had no intention of exposing the affair’s full depths; even here, he wished not to join in vilification of the services, something that was pervasive when Vietnam veterans were often jeered on return to U.S. soil as “baby killers.”

After some additional questioning on other subjects, Horowitz consulted the grand jurors, then declared, “No further questions.”

Ten minutes later, with the grand jurors and the stenographer hustled from the room, Ruth and Davis conducted a final interview with the witness. The prosecutors’ memos, previously unpublished, show that they interrogated Nixon on four additional topics, including proposals, captured on the tapes but never enacted, to hire thugs to attack antiwar demonstrators.

Do you see what happened? Nixon was fully aware that there was a deep state in his own administration. He employed the “Plumbers” to plug those leaks. But he would only reveal the depth of the deep state before a secret grand jury investigation. The Watergate Prosecutors, who were part of the DOJ deep state, did not want Nixon to talk about the Pentagon deep state. And for five decades, this testimony was sealed, until Rosen reported on it.

The Deep State was real in Nixon’s time:

Publication of the classified segment of the ex-president’s grand jury testimony represents a major addition to the historical record of the era of Vietnam and Watergate. Its significance extends to the current day.

The issues that animated the “deep state” against Nixon and Kissinger were rooted in the Cold War. But the frictions inherent in the making of national security policy, most acute in times of war, are perennial. Moorer-Radford exposed a hidden feature of the American political system that endures: When excluded from their spheres of interest, entrenched bureaucratic forces will, almost as a biological reflex, respond aggressively.

The Joint Chiefs’ spying formed only one prong of the campaign against Nixon, the most spied-on president in modern times. Declassified documents and scholarship published since 1974 have established that the F.B.I., under its director, J. Edgar Hoover, spied on Mitchell, the attorney general, and that the C.I.A. detailed its personnel to various units associated with Nixon, including the Watergate burglary team and “components intimately associated with the office of the president,” as the agency admitted in 1975.

Rosen closes his piece by drawing the obvious parallels to the present day:

Mr. Trump has long expressed admiration for Nixon. As early as 1982, the rising tycoon told the disgraced ex-president, “I think you are one of this country’s great men.” Not many prominent people in that era expressed such a sentiment. Both men achieved success at young ages. Both men, at once craving and scorning the approval of the elites, remained resentful of the establishment that they came to lead.

They differ in two crucial respects. Mr. Trump’s purge of the federal government since returning to the presidency has displayed a ruthlessness toward the perceived “enemy within” that Nixon, despite similar inclinations, could never conjure — even when faced with criminal insubordination.

Mr. Trump also appears on track to complete his second term.

In my recent Civitas column, I explained how Trump is finishing Nixon’s aborted second term. The same sort of forces in the government trying to subvert a President who won 49 states are trying to subvert Trump. But Trump is fighting back in ways Reagan would not to tame the bureaucracy. If nothing else, I think Trump has pierced the veil of the so-called neutral civil service. I don’t think anyone actually believes that fiction anymore. Those who work for the executive branch should be accountable to the head of the executive branch, and not their own agendas.

I’ll close with one other observation from Rosen’s article. He explains how Nixon worried that his own foreign policy agenda might be construed as obstruction of justice:

Next came a double-barreled blast that only Richard Nixon could fire off: He admitted breaking the law and, in practically the same breath, shared something that Chairman Mao had told him.

“I suppose that it could be said that I obstructed justice by not immediately calling up [the Justice Department] and saying, ‘Prosecute him [Radford], and, in this case, Anderson,'” Nixon said. “The reason that we couldn’t prosecute and wouldn’t was that, if we did,” he added, Radford “could expose these highly confidential exchanges we were having to bring the war in Vietnam to a conclusion, and particularly the exchange in China.

“I remember when I saw Mao,” Nixon continued. Mao called himself the “most famous or infamous communist in the world” and Nixon “the most famous or infamous capitalist in the world.” What brought the two men together? Nixon recalled Mao asking. “History brings us together in our interests,” Mao said. Nixon persuaded Mao to accept a defense alliance between the United States and Japan.

“Yeoman Radford had all of this information and if he had been prosecuted, it was my opinion that there was a very great risk, because of his obvious emotional instability, that he would blow the whole thing. … The war in Vietnam would have continued for a while longer. … I had to make a decision.” At this point, the CLASSIFIED section ended. Seeking a final flourish, the old politician wanted the audience to know that except for the most infamous wiretapping of all, at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex, the Plumbers’ work had involved vital national security interests.

Long before Trump v. United States, Presidents understood how the obstruction of justice statute should not be read to control the President’s Article II powers. I made this point in a 2017 article for Lawfare, with a direct connection to Nixon. Even today, people would indict the President for exercising his powers if he has the wrong motivations.

At some point, I plan to write an article titled The Irrepressible Myth of Nixon v. United States. I want to walk through every facet of that decision–including the indefensible jurisdictional analysis–and all the chaos it caused. A followup might be The Irrepressible Myths of Robert Mueller and Jack Smith.

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Donald Trump’s recent calls for Republicans to “national elections” have led UCLA law Prof. Rick Hasen – one of the nations leading election law scholars – to reconsider his longstanding support for such nationalization. In an insightful recent article in Slate, Hasen explains the reasons for this change of heart:

If you look around the world at advanced democracies from Australia to Canada, they have an independent governmental body in charge [of] all national elections. The body imposes uniform standards for registration, ballot access, voting machinery, and much more….

In The Voting Wars [a 2012 book], I argued that by joining other advanced democracies we could decrease the amount of partisan fighting and litigation over election rules, increase the competence of election administration, and assure we have a system run with integrity and fair access to voting….

Donald Trump has caused me to abandon this argument. As I wrote in the New York Times last summer, when the president tried to impose his authority over various aspects of American elections via an executive order: “What I had not factored into my thinking was that centralizing power over elections within the federal government could be dangerous in the hands of a president not committed to democratic principles.” At this point, American democracy is too weak and fragile to have centralized power over elections in the hands of a federal government that could be coerced or coopted by a president hell-bent, like Trump, on election subversion. Courts have ruled that parts of Trump’s executive order are unconstitutional because the president has no role to play in the administration of elections.

Trump’s comments on nationalizing elections ironically prove the point that we should not nationalize elections. He apparently wants to target the administration at blue states, doing who-knows-what to make it harder for people to vote for Democrats. He desperately fears a Congress controlled by Democrats that could check his and his administration’s power…..

Hasen adds that the Supreme Court’s turn towards unitary executive theory magnifies these risks:

The Supreme Court provides another reason for not nationalizing our elections. The court could soon fully embrace that “unitary executive” theory that there can be no exercise of executive power by the federal government that ultimately does not report to the president. (It’s an argument with an exception likely to be applied to the United States Federal Reserve, in order to protect the value of the justices’ 401(k)s.) The unitary executive theory, if adopted, would mean that presidential control over an election body might be constitutionally required. The Trump experience shows why that would be far too risky.

If, as is likely, the Supreme Court makes an exception for the Federal Reserve, I think the main motive for that will be maintaining the integrity and independence of the monetary system, not just protecting the justices’ retirement accounts. That said, Hasen is right that unitary executive theory magnifies the risks of nationalizing elections.

I myself am a longtime advocate of decentralizing most functions of government as much as possible, primarily because it  increases opportunities for people to “vote with their feet,” enhances and protects diversity, and reduces the dangers of political polarization. I have never been as enthusiastic about decentralization of election administration as about most other policies, because I think few if any people engage in foot voting based on the former. Many people decide what jurisdiction to live in based on such factors as taxes, job opportunities (heavily influenced by government policy), crime, education, and housing policy. Very few move because State A is better at election administration and vote counting than State B. Also, like Hasen, I recognize that some other federal democracies, such as Canada, do reasonably well with centralized election administration.

That said, as Hasen now recognizes, there are serious dangers to election centralization in our system, ones having little to do with foot voting. For these types of reasons, I have never been a supporter of election centralization, though I wasn’t as strongly opposed to it as I am on many other issues. Hasen is right to note that Trump’s actions make the dangers of centralization greater and more obvious than they might have been in the past. Thus, it is clear that I, too, underrated the benefits of electoral decentralization, albeit perhaps not as much as Hasen did.

As Hasen notes, Article 1, Section 4 of the Constitution the Constitution gives states primary responsibility for election administration, subject to override by congressional legislation. It is unlikely that Congress will enact any significant legislation along those lines anytime soon, and any such effort should be opposed. Unless and until Congress does act, courts should  strike down Trump’s efforts to nationalize elections by executive fiat, as several have already done in response to his attempts to change voter ID rules by executive order  and gain access to state voter rolls.

Finally, kudos to Hasen for his willingness to publicly reverse a position he had prominently advocated in the past, when the evidence warrants doing so. Many academics and other public intellectuals either stick to their guns no matter what the evidence indicates, or shift without ever acknowledging that they previously held the opposite view.

I myself have shifted a few positions over the years, but none of these reversals were on issues as central to my work or my worldview as nationalizing election administration was for Hasen.  For example, it wasn’t hard for me to change my view on unitary executive theory, because UET was never a central commitment for me to begin with. Other academics and intellectuals can learn from Hasen’s example.

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Earlier today, I wrote a post about whether a minor typo in a clerkship application should disqualify the candidate. Fittingly, my post had typos. I think I’ve fixed them, but maybe there are others.

I thought it might be useful to give my own thoughts on proofreading. Blogging is for me a form of release. I have lots of thoughts in my head, and writing them down helps me to make sense of things. My primary audience when I write is not you (sorry) but is me. Longtime readers may recall that while clerking for Judge Boggs, I was not allowed to blog. So I made my blog private, and continued writing blog posts that no one would see. (Well, a few friends had the password, but the site was not for public consumption.) When my clerkship finished, all of the posts were made public. To be sure, some posts I write are intended to influence public discourse, but most of my blogging is introspective.

To that end, typos don’t bother me. I want to make sure my writing is clear and understandable, but my goal is not perfection. Each subsequent round of review takes time that I could be using to do something else. If I were to ensure that each post was flawless, I would end up writing far less. That is not a tradeoff I find worthwhile.

There is another aspect of my writing process that may not be obvious. I often have very discrete blocks of time to write, and I do not wish the project to extend beyond that block. Maybe I have 30 minutes before class starts to pump something out. Or it is late at night, I’m getting tired, and I need to wrap up a post before I call it a night. Today, for example, I had about 30 minutes on the elliptical, in which I conceived, wrote, and published the clerkship post. (I keep my laptop on a music stand adjacent to the elliptical so I can type while working out.)

You might ask, why don’t I just pause the project when the time block finishes, and resume later. I’m sure I could fix errors after some sleep. But that wait is agonizing for me. My goal is to sort through my thoughts as quickly as possible, and move onto the next topic. To leave a post unpublished would make me keep coming back to it over and over again. I doubt I would be able to fall asleep if a project was still not fully developed. Once I hit the “Publish” button I can sign off and move on to the next project.

There are a few regular readers who email me typos. I will usually fix these promptly. I promise, I will respond pleasantly. Comments about typos will not be read.

For those curious, I wrote this post in a single five-minute block, after having thought about it for the past hour or so. I proof-read it once.

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One of my most important roles is advising my students on clerkships. This process has changed significantly since I clerked from 2009-12. (I wrote about my story here.) Back in the day, under the hiring plan, law students would apply to clerkships over the summer after 2L. Judges were only allowed to contact applicants on a particular day in early September. And all interviews would be conducted over the the following week. Of course judges cheated then. Indeed, these “off plan” hires led to the implosion of the plan.

Today, we live in a free-for-all. I am reliably informed that at top-ranked schools, judges interview students and make offers before the first semester of grades are released. Some judges will hire students after they graduate college before they begin law school. Soon enough, high school students will start lining up judicial clerkships. Why wait?

At most other law schools, the clerkship process begins in earnest after two semesters of grades are released. By the time three semesters of grades are released, students are already interviewing for positions and accepting offers. Students can then apply for a second clerkship (the trend) with their fourth semester of grades. Most 3Ls in the clerkship game already have their careers planned out for several years.

As they say, don’t hate the player, hate the game. I work closely with my students at South Texas. I would submit that our clerk placement rate rivals schools that have been in the game for far longer. You can see our clerk roster here. But these efforts take a lot of work at very early junctures. Invariably, students have to target specific judges based on a range of factors, and hope the process works out. If they are dinged for unexpected reasons, it may become too late to rally for other judges.

One of the most difficult aspects of this process is the application screen. Imagine a student submits an application with a superlative package. They are top of their class, have glowing references from professors who got to know them personally, thrived on journal and moot court, plus had relevant legal experience. The student has done everything right since they stepped foot on campus. But there is a glitch in the resume or the cover letter or the writing sample. Mind you, these materials have been reviewed by the student countless times, and also screened by professors and career service staff. Yet, something slipped through.

Should the application automatically be nixed? I can see both sides of the equation.

On the one hand, judges need to be able to implicitly rely on a clerk. That relationship requires that the student to have an exceptional attention to detail. Any error that leaves chambers ultimately falls to the judge, not the clerk. As the argument goes, if a student can submit a clerkship application with an error, that shows a lack of judgment that will infect the entire clerkship. How can this student be trusted? Application rejected. And for what it’s worth, when a clerk application is rejected, the applicant will seldom figure out why. After years of excellent work, a stray hyphen or a margin error can quietly disqualify the candidate from a career-altering clerkship.

On the other hand, a clerkship application must be viewed as a whole. The resume is the sort of document that is reviewed so many times that errors become invisible. I think most professors have experienced this sort of fatigue when reviewing the same law review article through multiple rounds. Litigators have similar experience with briefs. The usual remedy is to have a fresh set of eyes to look over the materials–whether research assistants, student editors, or fellow associates. But doesn’t that fresh look defeat a primary purpose of the application: to determine the applicant’s attention to detail. Thus, there is a paradox. Applicants who try to play by the rules, and do not seek outside help, are more likely to include disqualifying errors. Applicants who skirt the rules, and seek outside help, are less likely to include disqualifying errors, and the judge will never know it. And now with AI, I have very little trust that the work students submit is actually their work. The importance of the written application becomes far less than the value of the references.

As regular readers of my posts can guess, I am not one to disqualify people for small errors–especially when the application is otherwise excellent. We should never judge a person by their worst moment, especially when every other aspect of the application is golden. Are typos and errors a problem for courts? You bet they are. Don’t believe me? The Supreme Court has an errata page for all of the corrections to opinions. Mind you, these are opinions reviewed by some of the smartest law school graduates around and double-checked a full staff of editors at the Court who scan citations. Errors will always slip through. It’s okay. I think most parties would rather have a timely opinion that gets the law right than an absolutely flawless opinion that takes far longer.

Still, I warn all of my students that failure to strictly scrutinize their clerkship applications could lead to a summary rejection, and they will never know it. It can’t be my job to find these errors, so the burden falls on them.

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2/8/1941: Justice Willis Van Devanter dies.

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In a 1995 episode of The Simpsons, teachers at the dilapidated Springfield Elementary School make an impassioned plea for more school funding at a PTA meeting, telling parents, “It’s for your children’s future.” Principal Skinner easily changes their minds by simply rubbing his fingers together. “Oh yeah, the taxes, the finger thing means the taxes,” exclaim the disgruntled parents, who then reject any funding that requires a tax increase.

There are several parallels between that episode and the real-life property tax revolts sweeping Florida and Ohio. In both states, spiking property values have led to rising property taxes and growing anti-tax sentiment among homeowners. Lawmakers and activists are responding with proposals to cap, cut, or even eliminate property taxes altogether.

Florida lawmakers have unveiled not one, not two, but seven different proposed constitutional amendments that would pare back property taxes. The two most far-reaching would eliminate nonschool homestead property taxes on owner-occupied primary residences. One would go into effect immediately, while the other would be phased in over 10 years.

In Ohio, petitioners are gathering signatures for a constitutional amendment that would eliminate all taxes on real property.

Taxation is theft, the libertarian adage goes. Therefore, one could be forgiven for giving unqualified support for these efforts to eliminate property taxes. Unfortunately, both Ohio and Florida’s property tax critics have the same contradictory attitude toward local government budgets as the fictional Springfield parents. They don’t like property taxes but they are also not eager to cut the government services they fund.

When The Columbus Dispatch interviewed voters headed to the polls in November 2025, almost all said they liked the idea of property tax abolition but didn’t want to see the quality of local services degrade.

None of Florida’s proposed property tax reforms include any plan to offset the lost revenue. The two measures that would eliminate homestead property taxes also include clauses forbidding local governments from cutting law enforcement funding.

The Ohio nonprofit Citizens for Property Tax Reform notably does not call for offsetting spending cuts. Instead, it suggests increases to sales taxes and local school district income taxes.

Neither state is likely to adopt the novel revenue solution Springfield Elementary settles on: charging the prison system to stash prisoners in spare coatrooms.

Making up for the revenue lost from property tax cuts would be a tall order. The Tax Foundation estimates that Florida’s combined local and state average sales tax rate would have to rise from 7 percent to 15 percent in order to make up for lost property tax revenues. In Ohio, that rate would have to rise from 4.2 percent to 12.6 percent.

Property taxes pay for nearly 30 percent of local government services in both Ohio and Florida. States trying to replace every dollar of property tax revenue with sales or income tax revenue would ultimately reduce overall economic efficiency as well.

Milton Friedman called the property tax (and particularly the tax on the value of unimproved land) the “least bad tax” because it discouraged less economic activity than sales and income taxes.

Property taxes are also less distortionary. People and firms can move to places where they are less heavily taxed to avoid local sales and income taxes. Real estate, in contrast, generally has to stay put.

There’s a political reason to prefer property taxes, too.

In most states, property taxes are levied by local governments on local residents to pay for local services. Ohio’s localities depend on property taxes for 65 percent of their revenues. Some 73 percent of Florida counties’ tax revenues come from property taxes.

That creates a measure of democratic accountability. People can discern a pretty clear relationship between the costs and benefits of their local government and vote accordingly.

For the same reason, property taxes are often more akin to a user fee paid by the consumers of government services for the benefits they receive than a true tax.

Homeowners’ associations notably raise funds via their own private property fees.

This is not to say that property tax cuts are a bad idea. Far from it. But the piper—and the school district—need to be paid somehow.

If property tax cuts are financed by spending cuts and service privatization, that’s good. But Florida and Ohio’s plans to simply shift the tax burden from property owners to wage earners or consumers would be cartoonishly inefficient.

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