2 entries tagged antitrust. All writing.
SEPTEMBER 25, 2026 Ninety Percent of Nothing A tax idea keeps making the rounds: abolish federal and state income taxes for every US citizen, tax the profits of big public companies at 90% instead, keep taxing non-citizens, and break up monopolies in the process. It's easy to see why it appeals, since it hits a real nerve. I ran the arithmetic and followed what companies would actually do the morning after. The honest answer is that a 90% rate on corporate profit mostly teaches companies to stop reporting profit. After that I go through six alternatives that aim at the same targets, with what each one really costs. SEPTEMBER 23, 2026 The Family That Now Owns Your Childhood Paramount Skydance's roughly $110 billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery cleared its last legal obstacle this week, and the list of what one company now controls is almost absurd to read in one sentence: CBS and CNN, HBO and MTV, SpongeBob and Bugs Bunny, Harry Potter and Transformers. The federal government approved the deal in June with zero conditions attached. It took twelve state attorneys general suing on their own, separately, to get any guardrails at all — and even then, nobody broke anything up. I built the org chart and read the settlement so you don't have to.