It appears that retirement isn’t exactly suiting leftist billionaire George Soros, as America’s most notorious political kingmaker was revealed to have dropped another massive fortune ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. The Soros group, Fund for Policy Reform, pumped a whopping $50 million into his political cash guzzler Democracy PAC January 13, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Despite officially handing the reins of his $25 billion Open Society Foundations to his more unhinged acolyte son Alex, the elder Soros is signaling that he has no intention of abandoning his years-long obsession with buying control of the U.S. government for Democrats and politically handicapping his nemesis President Donald Trump. As Forbes magazine contextualized April 16, Soros has once again positioned himself as the largest midterm election donor so far.  Soros unleashed over $170 million into the 2022 midterms to make himself top dog in the political donor class that year, with the majority of it fueling his Democracy PAC. Old habits die hard?  Buying political outcomes has been synonymous with the Soros brand for decades. As Soros concluded himself in Soros on Soros: Staying Ahead of the Curve (1995): “Of course, what I do could be called meddling, because I want to promote an open society. An open society transcends national sovereignty.” And if the $32 billion Soros poured into his empire over the years is any indication, it’s that money isn’t an object when it comes to ensuring that his dark open society worldview becomes reality. The Soros regime had already come under enormous political and legal fire for funneling $80 million into pro-terrorism groups in the U.S. and abroad, but this hasn’t appeared to have been enough to force it underground. In fact, one of Soros’ pet projects, fake news outfit Courier Newsroom, made headlines in February by being a co-host of a radical boycott of Trump’s State of the Union Address that was packed with a full lineup of insufferable Hollywood and uber lefty journos as guest speakers. Names on the list included the TDS-afflicted actor Robert De Niro and former CNN anchor Jim Acosta. Soros had poured $20 million into Courier between 2021 and 2023 alone.  Americans should be alert: Soros may have taken on emeritus status within his organization, but he’s still as dedicated as ever to bending the “arc of history” towards his New World Order-ish utopia.

The central principle of the “Land Value Tax” which makes it different from normal Property Taxes, is that it would be the land only – so, for example, someone who kept land as a nature reserve, would pay the same tax as someone who built a factory on the land.

In the United Kingdom, since 1929, farmland has not been subject to Property Tax (called “Rates” here – a form of taxation that goes all the way back to Tudor times, first introduced to fund the Poor Law – most of Scotland did not have such a system till 1845, France did not have Poor Law style benefits till well into the 20th century), farmers, if they owned the land, would have to pay the Land Value Tax – thus turning farmers into tenants of the state. Although, of course, much would depend on how high the tax is – what really matters about taxation is not the exact form of it, but how high it is. There is no such thing as a “good tax” – all taxation is harmful, but how harmful taxation will be is determined by how heavy the burden of taxation is.

For example, property taxes in Alabama do much less harm than property taxes in New Jersey – but this is NOT because property taxes are structured fundamentally differently in New Jersey than they are in Alabama – it is just that they are much HIGHER in New Jersey, and, therefore, do more harm.

That is why, for example, the present obsession of the Tax Foundation with the exact way taxes are designed, rather than with the overall burden of taxation in American States (there has not been a State and Local Tax Burden report from the Tax Foundation since April 9th 2022) and European countries, is so disheartening – the Tax Foundation seems to have lost its way and is no longer really doing what it was created to do.

That discussion with supporters of the Land Value Tax is pointless can be seen from the Wikipedia article on the matter – the article is almost entirely a “puff piece” (any real criticism is quickly edited out – so much for “anyone can edit”) of both the Land Value Tax and the economic (the false economics of David Ricardo and others), philosophical, and even theological, theories behind it.

In the West one example of the theological thinking behind the Land Value Tax is the idea, to be found in John Locke and others, that God gave the world to humanity in-common and that, therefore, private ownership has to be justified – either by “as much and as good left for others” or by some form of financial payment (to be collected by the state – for some reason).

Logically a supporter of the idea should be against population increase, for example against immigration, as the more people who came into an area – the more landless people there will be, so the less money each landless person would get (in various benefits and services) from the Land Value Tax.

Henry George reflected this – with his opposition to people going to California, even opposing the building of railways as this would make it less difficult for people to go to California. Even the “Christian Socialist” John Rawls (once very popular in academia) seems to have rejected the idea of a world tax – holding that American taxes should go to Americans in terms of welfare state programs – of course if one “imports the Third World” (the policy of many in the Democratic Party since 1965 – especially during the Biden Administration of 2021 to 2025) then government spending does go on the poor of the world – as they have come to the nation (the same is true in Britain and other nations). Claims, by the CATO Institute and others, that Third World immigrants are “net taxpayers” (that they provide more in taxes than they take in benefits and services) are false. Ideologically motivated deceptions.

For those people who reject the theological basis of the Land Value Tax (and its real basis is theological, see above, rather than in the false economics of David Ricardo and others), the matter is of little interest – if one holds, with Hugo Grotius and others, that God did NOT give all land to humanity in-common – then no “justification” of private ownership is needed, either by “as much and as good left for others” or by some form of financial payment.

One of the most persistent and misleading fallacies in politics is that successive presidents represent a clear and decisive change in the direction of the country, especially when they are from different parties. Republican Richard Nixon barely squeaking into office in a tight three-way race meant that Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson and "the New Deal Coalition that had dominated presidential politics for 36 years" were as beaten down as hippies at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, right? And when Ronald Reagan glided to a surprising landslide in 1980 over Jimmy Carter, it meant that the forces of free-spending, socially liberal Big Government had been kicked to the curb by the Second Coming of Calvin Coolidge.

Such clichéd interpretations flatter the newly ascendant group in power (we won because we're new and vibrant!) while comforting the losers (we only tanked because the times changed). But the reality is always less stark. Far from breaking with or ending LBJ's free-spending and expansive vision of government mucking around in more and more of everyday life, Nixon instead completed the regulatory agenda of the Great Society by creating new and mostly terrible agencies such as the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF), and many others that extended the reach of the federal government into everyday life. His  "Vietnamization" push in Southeast Asia was a continuation of existing policy, not a break from it. (Interestingly, all three major presidential candidates in 1968 campaigned on some variation of a "swift and honorable peace" to that problematic and undeclared war.)

However highly regarded as an ex-president, Jimmy Carter's four years in the Oval Office are typically dismissed as an abject failure by a Democrat who was "liberal, a high spender, or dovish." Carter was none of those things, really, and he of course was, in the words of Nobel laureate economist Vernon Smith, "the great deregulator" who oversaw the liberation of airline ticket pricing and interstate trucking. He was a penny-pincher who obsessed, however ultimately ineffectively, about rising budget deficits and national debt and was, in the opinion of Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.), "better on the budget than Ronald Reagan." With even a little bit of distance and hindsight, there's a surprisingly strong case for "the important policy linkages between Jimmy Carter, the deregulating architect of the anti-Soviet proxy war in Afghanistan, and Ronald Reagan, the bumbler behind the 'Reagan recession' and the disastrous mission in Lebanon."

The differences between presidents matter, of course. It is hard to imagine the rebirth of optimism that occurred under the sunny Reagan taking place under the dour Carter. But on a profound level there is always more continuity than disruption in presidential switchovers. That's certainly true so far in this awful century. When Barack Obama succeeded George W. Bush, he not only kept his predecessor's various expansive bailout programs but also most of his secret surveillance programs, too (at least until Edward Snowden called him out). When it comes to spending, continuity is king. Each president in the 21st century has left office spending more in nominal dollars than they started with. If Milton Friedman is correct that the ultimate measure of government is spending, the most remarkable thing about presidents is that they all want more and more of the government they control, however temporarily. They may call themselves Democrats or Republicans and act as if that signals important differences, but this is like experiencing the difference between French vanilla ice cream and vanilla ice cream.

But what about Donald Trump and Joe Biden? Surely, here is a major rupture! If nothing else, it's widely assumed that the return of Trump to a second, nonconsecutive term augured a "vibe shift" that either saved America or destroyed it, depending on your partisan affiliation. But even here, I'd argue, there's more continuity than not.

Consider mental acuity. Going back to 2020, when they first squared off against each other at the relatively tender ages of 77 (Biden) and 74 (Trump), they were recognized as pushing our gerontocracy into uncharted and potentially dangerous territory. Biden's disastrous performance during the June 2024 presidential debate—when he declared "we finally beat Medicare" at one point and contended "a lot of young women are being raped by their in-laws" during a question about abortion—led to him being pushed out of the race. Even the most die-hard Trump supporter must suspect that the Republican incumbent is losing at least some of his marbles lately. His apocalyptic statements warning that "a whole civilization will die" due to his Iran war policies don't suggest he's in great mental shape; neither does his insistence that he stopped a nonexistent war between Cambodia and Armenia. His odd defense of posting an image to Truth Social of himself as a very Jesus-like character ministering to a sick man didn't help anything. In explaining his goal in sharing the since-deleted and much meme-ified picture, he said, "I thought it was me as a doctor." He's either lying (which is not good) or really, really out of touch (even worse). It's not comforting to recall that fully 61 percent of respondents to a Reuters/Ipsos poll back in February agreed with the statement that Trump has "become erratic with age." After all, he's still got almost three years left to serve.

But the more striking continuity between Trump and Biden isn't muddled thinking or flights of fancy. It's spending. Biden ramped up spending, especially on his way out the door. Trump is doing more of the same. Yes, he's pushing to cut certain types of spending, but in the aggregate, it's just more and more red ink as far as the eye can see, a tendency that was true of him during his first term, both before and after the pandemic. In fact, federal spending under Trump increased $1,441 per person before COVID fully opened the spigot. Of the $7.8 trillion in new debt he signed off on in his first term, less than half was related to COVID relief. And by every indication—including his recent budget proposal, which calls for a record-high defense budget of $1.5 trillion—Trump aims to sign off on ever-increasing amounts of spending until his term expires in 2029.

Leaving aside partisan evaluations, Joe Biden's single term as president was not a good one, partly because he continued various Trump policies related to things like tariffs and COVID. Even partisans will acknowledge that his (or his handlers') attempts to have him stand for reelection regardless of his capacity undermined trust and confidence not just in the Democratic party but in politics broadly (just 15 percent of us trust the federal government to do what's right "most of the time"). Reason's Brian Doherty made a strong case earlier this year that Trump's return to power has been a specifically "libertarian nightmare" and we will see over the next few years whether his awfulness will increase or be hemmed in by the likely change of power in Congress after the midterms.

This much seems certain: Republican and Democratic presidents come and go, but they always leave bigger and bigger budgets as their shared legacy. And our future burden.

The post One Thing Every Modern President Has in Common: They All Spent More Than the Last Guy appeared first on Reason.com.

THE REMARKS WERE PREPARED TWO WEEKS AGO, AND WERE IN CAMEROON WHERE I HEAR THROUGH MY CONTACTS, HIS APPEARANCE IS THOUGHT TO HAVE DONE A LOT OF GOOD:  Pope Leo says remarks about world being ‘ravaged by a ​handful of tyrants’ were not aimed at Trump: report. Vice President Vance later thanked the pope for clearing the record.