UPDATE 2024/01/04: This post originally appeared on my Civility and Truth Substack newsletter. I’ve moved it to my main site in an effort to collect all of my writing in one place.
I’ve set an informal goal for myself of sending out something to this mailing list each and every week, and Wednesday by default seems to have become the day I do that. This week work and home responsibilities have prevented me from doing a full post.
However, I did want to recommend a Niskanen Center blog post from last year by Joshua McCabe: “How the SALT Deduction Subsidizes Opportunity Hoarding” (“SALT” = “state and local taxes”). When you combine McCabe’s argument with an argument I previously made in my post about Judith Rich Harris, “How do schools and parents matter?,” I think it provides what (as an ex-physics major) I’d call a “unified theory” regarding the problem of housing affordability in Howard County. Hopefully I’ll have time to sketch that overall argument out in next week’s post.