1) Federal Revenues Are Starting to Surge

This X post caught our attention and shows marked improvement in the CBO tally of federal revenue collections in June 2025 (up 13%) and the budget deficit far below the average over the past five years.

Here's the CBO table:

CBO reports tariff revenues were up $18 billion (or 279%) in June 2025 versus June 2024, and collections of income and payroll taxes rose by $55 billion (or 15%), "reflecting higher wages and salaries."

Tax collections have been strong for the past three months.  This is the opposite story that Washington is telling us, which is that the deficit is worse under Trump. Not true.

When the economy booms, tax collections improve. Our prediction now that the Big Beautiful Bill is law: Expect more fiscal progress in the months and years ahead.

We are hopeful that more spending cuts are to come, now that we are in budget season.

House Budget Chairman Jodey Arrington did a fantastic job shepherding the One Big Beautiful Bill into law faster than almost everyone thought possible.  Now he wants a Round Two for real spending cuts:

"I think we will do one before the end of the year," Arrington said. "It's going to be a more targeted set of reforms."

The budget chairman said he sees the follow-on legislation as a chance to secure Medicare spending cuts he sought but couldn't win in the Trump tax and spending package. High among his goals, he said, is reducing reimbursements to hospitals through a site-neutral payment system that pays the same rate whether a procedure is done at a clinic or doctor's office...

Arrington said that he will also seek to cut the federal reimbursement rate to states for healthy, able-bodied adults added to Medicaid under President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act.

That's a great starting point. We would add some unfinished business on the tax side, too: a 15% corporate rate and inflation-indexing the basis for capital gains tax.

4) Confessions of a Climate Change Fanatic

Here's an instant classic from the far-left UK Guardian:

She wants you to know that even though she has an air conditioner, at least she feels guilty about it!

AC is quantifiably bad, but I think it's also philosophically problematic. Cooling offers comfort, making the unbearable bearable, at least for now. That happens at a community level (no one is really disputing we should keep the very old, the very young and the vulnerable cool), but also individually. When you can buy a personal bubble of coolness and not truly feel the heat, the screaming urgency to tackle the collective issue of a world on fire can recede slightly.

And this is where I have to fess up. I actually have AC - a little freestanding unit we use only in the evenings, maybe 10 times a year. We also have solar panels and a battery, which helps me sleep at night, but the cool helps more. If the government came for my AC, I wouldn't demand they "pry it out of my cold, dead hands", as one Republican said of his gas stove, but at times like these, I'm deeply, guiltily glad of it.

5) Can Chile Come Back As a Free Market Model

We've written several times about the tragedy of Chile. In the 1970s, Chilean students of Milton Friedman were running the show and created a vibrant economy, thanks to private property rights, privatization, a low flat tax, and personally owned pension plans.

Those reforms led to a quadrupling of Chile's per capita income over thirty years.

Then in  2021, former student radical Gabriel Boric won the presidency and formed a government that included the Communist Party. The free market reforms were flushed, and so was the Chilean economy.  

In this year's presidential race, term limits bar Boric from running, and last month his coalition nominated Jeannette Jara, of the Communist Party.  An election in November will see one of two conservatives, Jose Antonio Kast or Evelyn Matthei, win the right to oppose Jara in a December runoff.  

Here's hoping that we see a return to the free-market principles that made Chile the jewel of South America.

6) Is New York the Next Slow Burn Victim?

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