Around the US this November, voters will decide a number of tax questions. In California, it’s “wealth tax” on billionaires. In Florida, it’s an increase in the “homestead exemption,” the amount of home value excluded from property taxes. In your neck of the woods, it might be a sales tax for road maintenance of emergency services.

One thing  I keep noticing about these kinds of questions is abuse of the words “cost” and “lose” by proponents of tax increases and opponents of tax cuts.

Passing a tax cut, or failure to pass a tax increase, they tell us, will “cost” government — at whatever level, from local to federal — money. Government will “lose” that money.

Normally when we speak of “losing” something or “costing” something, it’s in terms of already having that thing. You lose $50 on a bet, or a steak dinner costs you $50.

Using the definition preferred by supporters of ever-increasing government revenue, though, I “lost” thousands of dollars yesterday when I walked past a bank instead of walking in, waving a gun at the tellers, and taking all the cash from their drawers. It “cost” me thousands of dollars. And committing to not robbing every bank I happen to walk past in the future  “costs” me too. I’m “losing” all that money! Oh, the humanity!

Under the Florida tax cut proposal, I’m told, my county would “lose” millions of dollars that it doesn’t actually have, just by not taking quite as much of it in the future.

I’ve even seen people shill for the brand new California tax on the basis that if it fails state government healthcare organizations will be “losing” the money they’ve got big plans for. It’s not just money they don’t have, it’s money from a particular source they’ve never received money from before.

As a libertarian, I agree with the slogan “taxation is theft.” It’s usually by extortion: “Nice house/business ya got here. Be a shame if someone stole it and auctioned it off because ya didn’t send us a check.”

But even if one supports taxation for the purpose of funding government operations, it’s beyond dishonest to claim that cutting, or just not raising, taxes is a “cost” or a “loss” to government.

Taxes are always a “cost” and a “loss” — for tax payers, not for tax collectors and tax spenders.

Why, I wonder, do tax proponents lie about that so loudly?

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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“The congressional town hall is becoming an endangered species,” Kate Santaliz writes at Axios. As the Congress goes into its late summer recess,  only 11 of its 535  members show such events on their August schedules.

Coming less than three months before all 435 members of the House and 35 members of the Senate are up for election or re-election, the recess seems like a fortuitous, perhaps even urgent, time for the candidates to seek face time with voters. But they don’t wanna. Why?

Part of it, I suspect, has to do with technology.

Social media keeps politicians in seemingly closer touch with their constituents, or at least their biggest supporters and detractors, than “town halls” could back in their heyday.

It’s become cheaper and easier to produce and widely distribute campaign ads of both “short commercial” and “long faux-news coverage” types than ever before.

Some politicians, including “my” “representative,” even do “town halls” by phone. They’re able to carefully curate both the audience (by only robocalling the people they want to reach) and the questions they have to answer (you record your question and staff selects it for inclusion or exclusion).

The purpose of political events these days isn’t so much retail public engagement as it is the production of sound bites for campaign use that’s more controlled and enjoys more reach than a huddle with a few citizens at a high school auditorium.

But the main reason for real, physical, local “town hall aversion” is the possibility of embarrassing confrontations with the angry sector of the public in question. And there’s ALWAYS an angry sector of the public, no matter which party the politician in question affiliates with or what policy positions that politician takes.

We’ve all seen it on TV. In fact, it’s generally the only part of a “town hall” event we ever DO see on TV outside of actual campaign ads.

Not the congresscritter getting applause for a new bridge in the district or a program that provides prosthetics to amputee cats or whatever.

Rather, the congresscritter getting an embarrassing question, on a controversial position or act, from one of THOSE people, followed by boos from the crowd, sometimes followed in turn by unfriendly physical interactions and/or the politician fleeing in terror.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but that kind of thing can be worth many thousands of votes … for the poor, bedraggled, harassed politician’s opponent.

The same technology that’s more effective than town halls for positive “outreach” is also more effective for negative “outreach” — getting an opponent’s public discomfiture in front of many eyeballs.

So you can see why “town halls” are quickly becoming, as software people like to say, “deprecated.”

And, honestly, I think it’s a good thing for the public as well.

I grew up in an age when the “town hall” and “candidate forum” were just as carefully orchestrated, but far more effectively than now.

I attended many such events, and was even occasionally one of THOSE people. I once caught a US Senator into an outright lie, and another time flustered a US Representative into giving two wildly inconsistent answers to the same question, with press present.

Alas, Twitter and YouTube didn’t exist back then. Heck, camcorders were high-price-tag items back then. Now they do exist, and one misstep can tank a politician’s whole hoped-for results if someone presses “record” or “go live” at the right … wrong? … moment.

High technology combined with uncontrolled public interaction unmasks politics for what it is — a bunch of crooks lying TO you to get power OVER you. No wonder they’re running away from that.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Turning Point USA’s Andrew Kolvet got people talking with an early August tweet in which he relates a student activist’s take on the “affordability” issue. “A burrito,” the student told him, “shouldn’t cost $20.”

On the putative political “right,” responses range between two endpoints.

At one end, various “burrito index” projects demonstrate that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to find a $20 burrito in America unless it’s delivered or from a  restaurant with a big-name chef that charges $200 a plate for things cooked with weird “reductions” and served covered in even weirder “aolis,” if you can even get a reservation without first showing your Oscar trophy or mega-millions net worth to establish cred.

At the other end, soon-to-be-former Texas congressman Dan Crenshaw’s “stop whining, get a job, eat Ramen like the rest of us did in college, on a budget with 4 roommates” tweet.

Before going further down the $20 burrito rabbit hole, I think it’s important to let Kolvet rescue himself from the notion that he’s a $20 burrito complaint radical himself.  He ratchets the situation down to the more obvious real problem:

“Yeah, a lot of this is a hangover from Covid and Biden-era inflation,” he writes, because of course a Republican will always shift as much blame as possible to a Democrat, “but the lived experience is the same: It just feels like basic things cost too much.”

Fact check: Yes, that’s true.

I did a little “burrito index” type checking in my own neck of the woods, and the most expensive burrito I could find cost $16.95.

The “El Dueno,” on offer at my favorite local Tex-Mex place, Los Avina in Archer, Florida, is “stuffed with steak strips, topped with white cheese dip, sautéed onions, bell peppers, grilled chicken and shrimp,” and is served with a side of rice (all diners get “bottomless” chips and salsa there, too). With a drink, call it $20 plus tip for a full meal, of which the incredibly robust burrito is only part.

So yeah, the “$20 burrito” complaint is wildly overblown.

But back to “the lived experience.” Yes, things cost more than they used to. That’s always the case, but it’s been MORE the case over the last few years. While there are various reasons for that, the biggest one is taxes, and the most pernicious, if not always the largest annual, tax is inflation.

People tend to think of inflation as just another word for “price increases,” and mainstream media use of the word encourages that.

But, as the late economist Milton Friedman explained, “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.”

To unpack that a little: Inflation occurs when there’s more “money” chasing after the same amount of goods, and that’s caused when “money” is created by a central authority (the Federal Reserve) which can just magically create more any time its partner (the US government) wants to borrow  a bunch.

In theory, the Fed tries to keep inflation at an annual rate of about 2%. In 2026, it’s running at about 3.5%, after hitting a high of 8% in 2022.

When a restaurant’s costs — ingredients, rent, electricity, labor, etc. — go up by 2% or 8%, its prices are going to go up as well. The restaurateur isn’t going to lose money for the privilege of serving you the El Dueno, and who can blame him?

If inflation is at “only” 2%, you’re paying $1 in taxes for every $50 you spend from savings, above and beyond income taxes, sales taxes, etc. Inflation is as real as those other taxes, just not as immediately obvious.

The Burrito Liberation Front’s mission is to  stop the Fed from creating, and the government from borrowing, so much money.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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