Political Expediency The White House and Congressional Democrats are considering a tax holiday on gasoline to appease voters that are angry about high gas prices. Tax holidays are laws that exempt specific goods and services from taxation for a limited time. They aren’t new—17 states had sales tax holidays last year. Legislators like tax holidays because they think it’s an easy way to influence voters. Unfortunately, it also serves to distract legislators from profound tax reform.

Re-weighted Methods Are Suboptimal In a post I made in November 2020, I argued for a multi-winner variation of range voting called re-weighted range voting. I’ve since rescinded this view—closer analysis showed me that all re-weighted variants of range and approval voting are more vulnerable to tactical voting. I shall demonstrate this with an example. A voter loves the Plaid Party, but thinks some representatives from the Checkered Party aren’t awful.

Inflation is Through the Roof! The January Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) numbers showed a 7.1% seasonally-adjusted year-over-year increase from December 2020 to December 2021. But what does that actually mean? The United States government measures inflation by measuring changes in a metric called the Consumer Price Index (CPI). It aggregates household consumption data across the United States and sorts consumption into expenditure categories. The CPI represents an average person’s consumption bundle.