• North Carolina legislators have introduced a bill to impose a high income tax rate on millionaires
• Such “tax the rich” schemes have failed elsewhere because wealthy people can easily move
• What would happen once the tax base eroded but the recurring spending commitments continued?

Some people refuse to learn from their mistakes or the mistakes of others.

Several Democrats in the North Carolina General Assembly have introduced a bill that would levy a new, 7 percent tax on personal income that exceeds one million dollars. The revenue from the tax would be directed to North Carolina’s public schools, and supporters claim it would provide an extra $1 billion in annual revenue.

Other states have recently gone down the “tax the rich” path, and it has ended poorly.

For instance, New York implemented a higher tax rate for millionaires in 2021. New York Governor Kathy Hochul recently admitted that her state’s tax base had been eroded and was begging for high-net-worth individuals who moved to Florida to return.

“I need people who are high-net-worth to support the generous social programs that we want to have in our state,” said Hochul.

Indeed, analysis by the Empire Center found that the state of New York’s population “was down by 238,000 residents or 1.2 percent over the four-year stretch [from 2020 to 2024], even as the U.S. population rose by 2.6 percent.”

Similarly, in response to a proposed wealth tax on billionaires in California, high-net-worth individuals such as PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and filmmaker Steven Spielberg have already left the state, taking an estimated $536 billion in wealth with them.

This capital flight, according to researchers at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, will decrease California’s expected revenue from the tax by 60 percent.

Turns out that high-income and wealthy people are not stationary targets. If your state punishes them severely enough with high taxes, they have the resources to leave, especially in today’s online, work-from-home economy.

A 2025 analysis of migration patterns by the Tax Foundation found that low-tax states are the clear winners, while higher-tax states consistently lost residents, leaving them with a smaller tax base. Such patterns represent a massive wealth transfer from higher-tax to lower-tax states.

According to State Controller data, there are about 51,000 North Carolinians who would be affected by this tax (2023 data, the latest available). North Carolina currently has a flat rate of 3.99 percent on income over the standard deductions, with further rate reductions planned in coming years. The proposed 7 percent top marginal rate would rank 12^th highest nationally, leaving plenty of options for high-income North Carolinians to flee elsewhere for tax relief.

Supporters of the proposed tax claim it is necessary due to “years of underinvestment in schools.”

“Underinvestment” is of course a highly subjective term, but what are the trends?

Since 2010, per-pupil state spending increased by 56 percent, easily outpacing the roughly 47.6 percent inflation during that time. And we can’t forget the growing influx of federal dollars to our public schools. It has increased by 90 percent in the past 20 years, well ahead of inflation, which grew by 65 percent. These increases don’t quite strike one as “years of underinvestment.”

Rather than digging deeper into taxpayers’ pockets, we could look to other government expenditures that are competing for budget dollars. In that regard, Medicaid poses the biggest threat to education funding.

State spending on Medicaid has increased 63 percent in just four years, thanks largely to expansion. Medicaid spending was 11 percent of the state General Fund budget 30 years ago. Fifteen years ago it was 13 percent. Now it’s 20 percent.

Out of a state with more than 11 million people, about 51,000 income-earners is a very narrow tax base from which to extract $1 billion of revenue. What would happen if, as we’ve seen in other states, a not-insignificant portion of that small tax base left the state or otherwise shielded their income from this new tax?

The revenue from the tax would be smaller than expected, but the recurring spending commitment based on that expected $1 billion would continue. Who do you think legislators would tax next?

Capital goes where it is welcome and stays where it is treated well. North Carolina should not make the same mistake of other states and view “the rich” as a stationary target only good for extracting money from for state government. They’re not. They are vital pieces of our economy, generating commerce and creating jobs for the people in our communities, and they have the resources to go elsewhere easily if treated poorly.

Imposing one of the highest tax rates in the nation would fail to raise the promised revenue and would risk expanding the punitive tax to the middle class to support the recurring spending commitments. The tax would also deter future in-migration of investment and job creators.

North Carolina has made tremendous strides in the last 15 years in tax reform, becoming the best state in the country to do business. Imposing this “millionaires’ tax” would be a big step back.

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Sasha Gong writes for American Greatness about President Donald Trump’s upcoming meeting with China’s Xi Jinping.

As Donald Trump prepares for another high-stakes meeting with Xi Jinping, conventional wisdom in Washington and the international press insists that the American president is entering negotiations from a position of weakness. Xi, after all, rules China as a near-absolute leader with no election to fear, no opposition party to challenge him, and a state apparatus capable of moving swiftly and decisively. Trump, by contrast, faces elections, court challenges, media scrutiny, and political resistance at every turn. As Sen. Jack Reed, a leading Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in an interview with Shannon Bream on Fox News Sunday, “President Trump is going into this meeting terribly weakened.”

But conventional wisdom is often wrong.

The dominant narrative assumes Trump desperately needs China on three fronts: Iran, Taiwan, and trade. The conflict involving Iran threatens global oil markets and gasoline prices that could politically hurt Republicans before the midterms. Taiwan remains the most dangerous flashpoint in Asia. And after legal setbacks to his tariff policies in American courts, Trump appears to have less leverage in a trade confrontation than he did several years ago.

Meanwhile, many observers continue to portray China as an unstoppable superpower—the center of global manufacturing, the future leader in artificial intelligence, and a country whose supply-chain dominance leaves America dependent and vulnerable.

Yet this picture ignores a more important reality: authoritarian systems are often far weaker and more unstable than they appear from the outside. One need only look at the former Eastern Bloc.

Western analysts frequently mistake dictatorship for strength. In truth, dictatorship is often the most unpredictable form of government because nobody truly knows what is happening inside the black box.

Xi Jinping’s recent purge of top military officials should have served as a warning sign to the world.

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John Daniel Davidson writes for the Federalist about the lesson Americans should learn from Great Britain’s latest elections.

Last week in Britain the ruling Labour Party suffered historic losses in local elections held across the country, while the right populist Reform UK won an astounding 1,400 seats. Reform leader Nigel Farage called it a “truly historic shift in British politics.” Labour, led by the increasingly unpopular Prime Minister Kier Starmer, lost 1,300 councilors, triggering calls for Starmer’s resignation from Labour MPs and unions. In Scotland and Wales, pro-independence nationalist parties made gains at the expense of both Labour and Conservatives. …

… It would be easy to look at these results and conclude that they amount to a resounding rebuke of globalist left-wing politics embodied by leaders like Starmer and other fixtures of the European establishment, and that a populist victory by Farage and Reform will rescue Britain and pull her out of what seems to be the impending collapse of civil society.

But that’s the wrong lesson to take away. What’s happening in Britain is the political expression of a loss of social cohesion and the first signs of brewing civil conflict along ethnic nationalist and post-nationalist lines. Broadly speaking, the rejection of the establishment parties by British voters signals a deeper loss of confidence in the political process in Britain and the legitimacy of the British political elite. …

… In elevating Reform, voters are shattering the old right-left political divide in much the same way that Trump’s winning coalition has in the United States. But Britain is a smaller and less ethnically diverse society than the U.S., and so the breakdown of traditional right-left politics represents a volatility that points beyond mere political realignment and toward something darker: the real possibility of civil war. …

… What Britain is facing, in other words, is the dissolution of its establishment parties and the traditional right-left politics they represented, and the emergence of a politics based explicitly on ethnic and religious identity.

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Adam Kredo writes for the Washington Free Beacon about the latest case of journalistic malfeasance from one of the worst characters in the legacy media.

Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times‘s famously credulous columnist, may finally be facing his Waterloo after he published a 3,500-word column on Monday making lurid and bizarre allegations of “widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women and even children.”

The exposé—which readers began picking apart within moments of publication—recalls other Kristof follies over the last 25 years, including botched reporting on the 2001 anthrax attacks and child sex trafficking (which have led to Kristof apologizing and correcting himself). Through thick and thin, as many other columnists cycled in and out of the Times—even after an abortive attempt to run for governor of Oregon while living primarily in New York City—Kristof has persisted.

Experts and analysts say that Kristof’s new opus—which accuses the Israelis of violating Palestinian detainees with carrots and having a trained dog somehow rape men—makes little effort to verify claims that relied heavily on a Hamas-tied advocacy group and a former Palestinian prisoner who has publicly celebrated terrorism against Israel and has shifted his story multiple times.

Kristof—who famously penned a lengthy mea culpa in 2014 after his articles about a Cambodian activist who was trafficked in brothels as a child turned out to be fictitious—has a history of embracing dubious narratives from his perch at the Times‘s opinion pages, which are edited separately from the news pages, though most readers will not realize the distinction. The two-time Pulitzer-winning author’s Monday column claimed that Israel has “built a security apparatus where sexual violence” is encouraged, and contains the kind of sensational details that are hallmarks of Kristof’s much-contested reporting on sex trafficking and other sex crimes over the years.

The column—and subsequent fallout from those challenging Kristof’s narrative as a “blood libel” against Jews—will likely raise new questions about the credibility of the Times‘s reporting on Israel, and the generally anti-Israel stance of its opinion desk.

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Editors at National Review Online critique the president’s plan for funding his proposed White House ballroom.

The plan by President Trump to add a ballroom to the White House never should have been made into a scandal. The space is replacing a few outdated offices. Trump has been accused of grandiosity in this effort. But previous presidents have altered the White House to suit their hobbies or need for exercise, whether it was Dwight Eisenhower’s putting green on the South Lawn or Theodore Roosevelt’s tennis court. What Trump proposes is not just personal but practical for the country. The White House regularly ends up hosting events, including state dinners, under a makeshift tent. Like the resort host that he is, the president has a better experience in mind. The proposed space, designed by a traditional architect of great accomplishment, is fit for the purpose.

In short, it shouldn’t be controversial to meet the need for a dignified space to host events and dinners in which the White House can effectively control security. Hijacking part of the congressional budget to fund this project, though, is a different matter.

The Senate Homeland Security Committee is currently considering the text of the Senate’s next budget reconciliation bill, which will fund immigration-enforcement operations. Included in the bill is $1 billion for the Secret Service to provide security enhancements to the new White House ballroom. The matter may get kicked over to the judiciary committee before it gets to the Senate floor, where dissident Republican Thom Tillis says “a lot of questions [have] to be answered” before he can approve the funding. Those questions are appropriate.

While Congress has typically funded major renovations to the White House where it concerns the main structure and its basic operation, when it comes to decorating the White House or making additions, private donors have increasingly stepped in. …

… Republicans don’t want to face election-year ads in which gas prices are rising and voters are reporting tightened budgets, but taxpayer funds are being used to make the White House a little more like Mar-a-Lago.

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Noah Rothman of National Review Online tackles one of the latest silly pronouncements from one of the most misguided and counterproductive members of Congress. New York’s AOC continues to demonstrate her lack of comprehension of basic economic facts.

Progressive darling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, during a recent podcast appearance, said she doesn’t think billionaires should exist — and called out companies like Airbnb for having political power. Noah Rothman, on today’s edition of The Editors, says he loves “it when she explains what she means by this is to take away options from you.”

“Californians,” Noah reminds listeners, “were presented with this in the form of efforts to unionize ride-sharing companies by virtue of a constitutional amendment. . . . And it was repealed by the voters, because once they had experience with the suboptimal condition, it was not like they experienced a better set of economic circumstances. They ended up having to pay more, and they had fewer choices for which they were paying more.”

“That’s what happens when you implement this sort of policy, and it’s hard to call it a policy because it’s not really policy. It’s envy,” says Noah.

Noah points out that AOC and her ilk “bring this sort of turn-of-the-century parlor socialist outlook to the debate where you can kind of deduce that the caricature that they’re envisioning is not . . . Taylor Swift or Michael Jordan or Jay Z or Steven Spielberg. It’s like a Jay Gould or a James Fisk . . . this ancient caricature of either a robber baron or somebody who’s manipulating the system for their benefit.”

“They don’t reckon with the billionaires as they are in our current economic system, but they don’t reckon with economic activity either,” says Noah.

“I can’t see anything other than ignorance about how the economy works in this assessment.”

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Victor Davis Hanson writes for American Greatness about key factors contributing to antisemitism today.

Few predicted that blaming Israel and the Jews who support it would flare up in the early 21st century—and in America of all places, where there are nearly as many Jews as there are in Israel.

After all, Israel is the only consensual society in the Middle East. It holds regular elections and maintains tripartite judicial, executive, and legislative checks and balances.

Free speech is found in the Middle East only in Israel, where religious apostasy, criticism of one’s own country, gender equity, and tolerance of gays are guaranteed in marked contrast to all its neighbors. …

… So why and how did millions of Americans begin to express hatred for Israel and, albeit more subtly, the Jews who support it?

There are four converging fronts in this perfect storm.

First, in demographic terms, the US Muslim population is expanding exponentially, due almost entirely to recent immigration and higher birth rates than the American norm (e.g., 2.5–8 versus 1.6–1.7).

There are now nearly five million Muslim Americans. These numbers are anticipated by 2030 to surpass the Jewish American population. …

… The DEI binary fuels both anti-Israel and anti-Jewish animus. In this Marxist moral schema, the world abroad—and within the United States—is divided into “white oppressors” and “nonwhite victims,” despite the fact that people commonly classified as white comprise only a small minority of the global population. …

… Third, Israel is no longer the Israel of 1947, 1956, 1967, or 1973, nor the Israel mired in the various Lebanon and Intifada quagmires that followed. …

… Hating Israel—and, by association, Jews—was voiced not merely by DEI or the radical new wing of the Democratic Party. Anti-Israelism instead merged into a broader leftist potpourri of open borders, illegal immigration, anti-ICE violence, Green New Deal-style wokism, and Trump Derangement Syndrome.

These causes came to be viewed as an inseparable package whose elements were interconnected and tolerated no apostasy from any of them.

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M.D. Kittle writes for the Federalist about a new approach toward reparations.

Reparations have become quite popular among the “white guilt” liberal set who insist the rest of us pay for crimes 21st century Americans did not commit. The redistribution of wealth schemes driven by identity politics are popping up in leftist-led cities across the country. They seem to be making critical race theory charlatans and professional race-baiters a lot of money while sowing more division and discrimination.

How about reparations for taxpayers forced to pay unjust reparations?

Take Evanston, Illinois, for example. The Chicago suburb teeming with self-loathing, wealthy white liberals and misplaced Big 10 football and basketball teams in 2019 became the first U.S. city to launch a reparations program. The city of some 75,000 souls has committed $20 million to the cause of assuaging its guilt for past transgressions of segregating and redlining black residents. 

The money is supposed to compensate today’s black residents for past racial injustice. The recipients were not enslaved nor are they necessarily victims of discrimination. But they get a hefty check, regardless. 

In its latest round of redistribution with one-sided representation, Evanston announced in February that it will be issuing $25,000 individual payments to 44 people, according to the city’s Reparations Committee. The money, Fox News reported, comes from $276,588 in Evanston’s real estate transfer tax, a collection from the sale of property in the college town. The city also levies a tax on cannabis sales, although that revenue stream reportedly hasn’t been sufficient to meet the reparations wish list.

City leaders would also like to strap a tax on Delta-8 THC products —  weed lite, if you will — to keep the reparations train rolling. 

Last June, the Reparations Committee announced it had doled out a total of $6.36 million “to ancestors and direct descendants of the Black Evanston community,” the Evanston Roundtable reported.

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Editors at the Washington Free Beacon deliver a harsh assessment of Virginia’s new governor.

Has there ever been a more overhyped politician than Virginia governor Abigail Spanberger?

Flash back a few months, when the “moderate” pol, boosted by endless media profiles describing her competence and pragmatic leadership, swept into office vowing she would “focus relentlessly on what matters most: lowering costs, keeping our communities safe, and strengthening our economy for every Virginian.”

Politico told us her victory reinforced “the belief among some within the [Democratic] party that the strategy to regaining power consists of running moderate Democrats like her who are narrowly focused on economic issues.” The New York Times lauded her “strikingly bipartisan tone” and “maverick image.” The Washington Post noted she set a “theme of unity” in her Inaugural Address.

That was then. Five months into her term, Spanberger’s first big move as governor was a nakedly unconstitutional, highly partisan, and shockingly incompetent gerrymandering effort that was struck down on Friday by the Virginia Supreme Court in an opinion written by Justice D. Arthur Kelsey, an appointee of that crazy right-wing Republican … Mark Warner. That came, of course, after the straight-talkin’ governor told voters on the campaign trail she had “no plans to redistrict Virginia.”

The Trump White House and most state lawmakers, Republicans and Democrats alike, have been explicit about the partisan aims of their redistricting efforts—on the Republican side, in Texas and elsewhere, to protect the GOP majority in the House of Representatives, and on the Democratic side, in California, to increase Democratic chances of capturing the majority. All of those efforts were constitutional and by the book.

Then there was Virginia. Led by Spanberger, Senate president Louise Lucas (D.), and former president Barack Obama, they bullshitted voters with talk of saving democracy, trampled the constitution, and counted on the court to cower in the face of a referendum. …

… The justices laughed them out of court, declaring that their position “finds no support from the text” of the constitution “or the historical meaning of the term ‘election.'”

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Jeffrey Blehar writes for National Review Online about an unlikely development in the Los Angeles mayor’s race.

It was difficult at first to take Spencer Pratt’s outsider candidacy for mayor of Los Angeles seriously, and I think for somewhat obvious reasons. Pratt is a former star of a reality TV show — remember that baby-faced bad boy on MTV’s The Hills, kids? In fact, remember MTV? — and he’s now running for mayor against incumbent incompetent Karen Bass and city councilwoman Nithya Raman. In other words, in an overwhelmingly Democratic city, he is standing as an independent against both the city’s establishment and its far-left activist flank — a heavy lift, to say the least. If the modern era has taught me any one thing, it’s to be skeptical of television celebrity candidates, and that informed my initial approach to Pratt: The city is in desperate trouble and needs reform, but only serious people need apply, please.

That was until I heard him speak. I watched last week’s mayoral debate, and I am now convinced of two things in equal measure: (1) Spencer Pratt is a serious candidate; (2) Spencer Pratt is the only serious candidate in this race, and the only one telling the truth about how dangerous and degraded Los Angeles has become. He is also witty, charmingly frank, and speaks with the deep feeling of a lifelong Californian desperate to save a sinking city. Los Angelenos have the chance to set partisanship aside and vote for sanity on the ballot this June with Pratt, and they should take it.

When we talk about the basket case that California has turned into over the last quarter century, we typically focus on San Francisco. It’s a better “story” for national headlines, certainly a more viscerally resonant one. But Los Angeles has been creaking along with the same tale of decline — on a larger scale and geographical footprint — for decades now. Even as San Francisco has seen a mild rebound in safety and policing under its new mayor, the City of Angels continues its slide downward under Karen Bass.

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