This past week, Dolly Parton once again did the unimaginable: just when we thought bi-partisanship was dead and buried, both CNN and Fox led their evening news commentaries with glowing accounts of her uniquely American story.

Of course we all have our own connection to Dolly and, I’m sorry to say, mine can be filed under “Childhood stereotypes it takes too long to outgrow”. Of course, ignorance is both bliss and also loves company, and in my case that’s certainly true. One of my favorite clips now making the rounds is the interview where Barbara Walters asked, “Dolly, where I come from would I have called you a hillbilly?”

To which Dolly answered: “If you had of, it would have been something very natural, but I would have probably kicked your shins or something. We’re the ones you would consider the Li’l Abner people, Daisy Mae, and that sort of thing – they took that from people like us. But we were a proud people, people with a lot of class. It was country class, but it was a great deal of class. And most of my people were not that educated, but they are very, very intelligent. Good common sense – horse sense, we called it.”

Ms. Walter’s question may have been condescending, or maybe it was just a brilliant interviewer giving her subject an opportunity to reveal her true self. Either way, faster than you can spell Tennessee, Dolly managed to shatter the stereotype while deftly deflecting the insult and showing the grit and determination it took to climb out of the limitations of her childhood. All while also letting everyone back home know that, even after making it big, she was still one of them and proud of it!

Imagine a young Applachian child watching the interview.

One moment you’re nothin’ but a low down hillbilly …the next you’ve got a special brand of country class that’s all your own. And maybe, like Dolly, your Daddy can’t read; but that doesn’t mean he’s dumb. Just the opposite: he’s got a kind of special intelligence even the over educated hot shots don’t have – which maybe helps explain why they’re so mean in the first place!

In other words, Dolly taught her fans that if you don’t believe in yourself, neither will anyone else. Her favorite book was The Little Engine that Could – as in “I think I can, I think I can”. And after she did, she bought and distributed over 200 million books to children to help inspire them.

Of course Dolly had a pretty face and an amazing voice, but she also had to figure out how to magnify the attention her natural talents brought by creating an overblown caricature of what people expected from a female country star of her era (bouffant wig, blown up boobs and enough rhinestones to halt a mule in its tracks). But she also knew how to bring the larger than life persona she had created back down to a relatable level, as she once put it, “Hey, it costs a lot of money to look this cheap!”

And at the core of it all, she showed how critical hard work is to realizing our dreams. She started off writing songs for others …and went on to write 3,000 of them, 2,000 of which ended up getting recorded!

Of course, there will always be only one Dolly, and very few will ever come anywhere near her accomplishments. But we all have aspirations, and Dolly’s life and success provide an inspirational model for pursuing our own version of the American Dream. Initially, her message may have echoed primarily through the misty mountains of her youth, but over time the reverberations would spread well beyond the boundaries of her childhood.

A couple weeks before Dolly passed I came across a review of a new album by a young musician I hadn’t heard of. As with Dolly, the story behind the record was as good as the music itself.

In the early 1990’s, a hard working farmer from Nigeria came to the United States to expand his life’s possibilities. Working menial jobs he put himself through college in Texas before later working and, eventually, buying property in Virginia. In 1995 his wife gave birth to a young boy they named Collins Obinna Chibueze.

Collin’s father came to love old westerns that showed hard working people overcoming great challenges, and he also fell in love with American country music, especially the songs of, you guessed it, Dolly Parton.

In high school, Collin’s football coach kept mispronouncing his name. Instead of being resentful, the young man later decided to turn the mispronunciation into his stage name: Shaboozey. Shaboozey’s early albums had a heavy hip-hop influence, but one that also incorporated acoustic guitars, banjos and Western themes. He told one interviewer that he liked pointing out how similar the gangster culture of hip-hop is to the outlaws in the old Western’s his dad came to love.

As time went on, Shaboozey moved closer and closer to those themes. In fact, his latest album, The Outlaw Cherie Lee & Other Western Tales is a fantastic homage to the music and movies he grew up on. It begins with Jamie Foxx doing a western themed voice over and continues with songs like “Lone Survivor” that harken back to the Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns.

While Shaboozey often mentions his dad’s love of Country music in general and Dolly Parton in particular, I didn’t find any indication that Dolly was aware of her influence on their family. Nevertheless, the young artist has also demonstrated more than a trace of Dolly’s grace and humility. At the 2026 Grammy Awards he dedicated his award to “those who came to this country in search of better opportunities, to be part of a nation that promised freedom for all and equal opportunity to everyone willing to work for it.”

In Dolly’s passing and Shaboozey’s rise to fame and fortune we are once again reminded of the beauty, dignity, and grace of those individuals who have had the opportunity to pursue a dream that is so uniquely American. It’s a dream built on Western values that lifted both an illiterate Tennessee sharecropper’s daughter and a Nigerian farmer’s son from the most humble of circumstances to the most unimaginable of heights. And it’s a reminder that those values that must be preserved if we are to continue passing that dream on to future generations.

Today we face important challenges, but none that are greater than those we have overcome time and again throughout our storied history. Here’s to hoping your day is as bright as America’s future.

- Todd, August 30, 2026

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What a difference a year makes!

As 2025 dawned, the Democratic Party had just lost (again) to its arch nemesis, was struggling with all time low approval ratings and, other than intense hatred for its opponent, lacked any sense of direction. In fact, they seemed a bit like a TDS-infected Donkey flailing itself ever deeper into a morass of political quicksand.

But then, a funny thing happened.

A young NYC socialist figured out how turn Biden’s affordability nightmare into Trump’s political problem. As I’ve noted before, the last two centuries have shown that Marx was disastrously wrong on economics but brilliant about the political power of class warfare. Apparently, if you’re trying to pull a Donkey out of the quicksand, you’ll grab for any rope available.

So here we are: a young electorate long conditioned by progressives to blame capitalism for everything is now ferrying a series of socialist barnstormers across America. Every bandwagon needs its own rallying cry and, over the past couple of weeks, the one we seem to be hearing over and over again is “ Medicare for all”. Which is pretty clever – seniors like Medicare and only a cold-hearted, exploitative capitalist could possibly oppose providing what seems to be a functioning health care program to everyone, right?

All of which keeps coming up in interviews that go roughly as follows:

Interviewer: So, yes or no, do you support Medicare for all?

Politician: Yes.

Interviewer: And do you believe in taxing billionaires to pay for it?

Politician: Yes, I do.

Interviewer: But hasn’t socialism failed everywhere its been tried!

Politician: Hey, I don’t believe in the crazy parts of Woke 1.0, but if wanting to make sure people have access to healthcare makes me a socialist, then I’m a socialist. Look, at least we have a plan …what’s the Republican plan?

Interviewer: Well, alrighty then!

Conversations like this help explain why young socialists are winning elections and a recently triumphant Elephant now seems to be the one tiptoeing around the quicksand. But if we just dig beneath the surface, there’s much less than meets the eye here. Let’s consider three big issues that keep getting left out of these conversations.

1. A spending plan without a payment plan is not a plan.

2. Quality of care will suffer.

3. Medical innovation will be hindered.

A spending plan without a payment plan is NOT a plan.

After analyzing multiple studies, the Committee for a Responsible Budget pegs the cost of Medicare for all at around $3 trillion a year, or around 9% of total GDP.

Even if socialists could confiscate all the billionaires’ income, they won’t come close to paying for this program. In fact, they would have to roughly triple taxes for everyone making over $187,000 a year (which includes the billionaires) to cover the cost.

Let’s look at it another way. Last week I noted that average Federal revenues as a share of GDP during the past six Democratic administrations was about 17.4%, barely above Republicans (17.2%). This tells us NO Democratic president – from JFK to Bill Clinton to Barrack Obama – has ever tried to impose a tax increase of this magnitude, and for good reason: it would tank the economy and shrink the tax base, which would only make things even worse.

Stated simply: no matter how they try and fudge it, the socialists will not pay for their proposal through increased taxes. Just as we saw with the failed spending blowouts from Obama and Biden, the increased spending will lead to significant deficits, which will be paid for through another dangerous run up in debt and/or inflation, which is how we got into these affordability problems in the first place.

I mean, I get it: the Dem’s just want to get back on offense again, but doing so by promising to spend their way out of a spending problem makes for a dangerous game plan.

Quality of care will suffer.

If the socialists actually implement Medicare for all, these fiscal realities will push government to uses its monopoly power over the health care system to squeeze costs wherever possible, including on care givers who are the most important part of our system. In the United Kingdom, a newly minted General Practitioner makes a little more than 1/3 of what one makes in the United States. For nurses it’s not quite as bad, but their pay is also well below what nurses make here.

There is simply no way around it: when compensation gets squeezed like this, care suffers. Don’t believe me? - The next time you have an important medical condition to discuss, try starting the conversation with, “Hey Doc, I’m planning to cut your pay by 2/3 …now, about the pain in my chest.”

Medical innovation will be hindered.

We currently have about 4% of the world’s population, but account for over 50% of new pharmaceutical development. Similar to what will happen with care givers, the cost of Medicare for all will put enormous pressure on drug prices, which will lower pharmaceutical company revenues, which will then depress what they have to spend on research and development. The drug industry is a popular political punching bag, but not so much for those who have used Merck’s cancer immunotherapy to fight melanoma or breast cancer, or Gilead’s Hepatitis C treatments that turned liver infection into a curable disease, or Lilly’s improvements in GLP-1 treatments that have helped so many get weight and body issues under control.

Of course, Democrats have long tried to pitch government health care by noting that nearly all other developed countries – think Canada, Europe, and Japan - have such systems. Yes, and they all have stagnating economies that struggle to provide upward mobility for their young people, pay for their metastasizing welfare programs, and defend their citizens from foreign threats.

Which brings to mind the story about the barfly who, after a couple drinks, stares forlornly at the hand he once mangled in a brawl. Looking up, he beseeches God to ‘please make my hand like the other one’ …only to look back down and find both hands now mangled!

In other words: Medicare for all is a plan to get elected …and not much else.

Today we face important challenges, but none that are greater than those we have overcome time and again throughout our storied history. Here’s to hoping your day is as bright as America’s future.

- Todd, August 23, 2026

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This past week a burrito became a symbol of why even young Republicans are considering socialism. In case you missed it: a spokesperson for Turning Point U.S.A. - which, ironically, was founded in part to help teach our youth about the dangers of socialism – posted : “One of our TPUSA college students gave me his take on affordability: ‘A burrito shouldn’t cost $20.’”

I mean, as symbolic sayings go, it isn’t exactly up there with “let them eat cake, “no taxation without representation” or “remember the Alamo!” - but hey, to each generation their own, right?

Some Republicans responded by chastising what they see as coddled college students thinking they are somehow entitled to premium burritos. Whatever merit these arguments might have, they are unlikely to change anyone’s opinion.

Others, such as J.D. Vance, acknowledged affordability issues are real and need to be taken seriously. I agree but, as we recently discussed, on economic issues the Republican VP sounds more like California Democrat Gavin Newsom than Ronald Reagan. If, as Reagan liked to say, government isn’t the solution, it’s the problem - then the Vance / Newsom “more government” prescription is a bit like recommending heroin to cure an alcohol addiction.

Of course, no one has made more political hay out of our affordability issues than the long-festering but rapidly ascendant socialist wing of the Democratic Party, which has proffered a simple prescription: make everything free!

So, how do we help America’s frustrated and miseducated youth understand what’s really going on here?

There’s no such thing as a free burrito

First, we need to understand that the affordability problem came from the Biden administration’s misguided government spending blowout. This binge occurred after the economy had already recovered from the Covid downturn and gave us the largest peacetime deficits in our history. Biden’s approach was essentially a replay of the Obama playbook after the Great Financial Crisis.

But both the Obama and Biden deficits failed to deliver ramped up economic growth. All we got instead was a near doubling of federal debt under Obama and the worst inflation since the 1970s under Biden. This was a real world repudiation of so-called Keynesian theories that have long fueled Democrat’s spending aspirations. Which brings to mind the old line about the economist who says, “hey, it may have failed in practice, but in theory …!”

It’s also important to understand that these recent failures are nothing new. In fact, all of economic history reveals that government deficit spending inevitably leads to dangerous debts (ala Obama) and inflationary central bank policies (ala Biden). All of which is to say that a vote for the socialists is a vote for what has already failed time and again.

Or, to twist an old phrase: there’s no such thing as a free burrito!

“Taxing the rich” is a lie the Democrats have gotten away with for far too long.

But what about promises to pay for all the freebies by taxing the rich? In fact, this is a political lie the Democrats have gotten away with for far too long.

With roughly 1/3 of all households already paying no federal income taxes and the top 10% of earners paying roughly 70% of such taxes, we already have one of the most progressive systems in the world.

In addition, for all the high-minded rhetoric about soaking the rich, in the past high nominal tax rates have always been mitigated through deductions that significantly lower effective rates. The best way to see this is to look at federal revenues as a percent of GDP (Gross Domestic Product), which averaged 17.3% from 1962 to 2024. During 6 Republican administrations collections averaged 17.2%. During the 6 Democratic administrations, the average was 17.4%.

And, just in case you’re wondering, even as AOC and the Progressives pushed the Biden spending blowout, they only managed to collect 17.5% of GDP in taxes (Obama’s average was even lower). This means that Democratic spending promises will, at most, be funded by nominally higher tax collections with – you guessed it – increasing debt and inflation left to pay for the rest.

In other words, Democrats have been lying about robbing Peter to pay for Paul’s “free” burrito for far too long! In practice, as the Obama / Biden examples demonstrate, their spending inevitably leads to bigger deficits, more debt and higher inflation.

Even if they could get away with it, soaking the rich is a bad idea.

Once an affordability problem is created, it takes time to solve it and the only attractive solution is to grow our way out of the problem. As we’ve seen above, contrary to Democratic theory, the only way to accomplish sustainable economic growth is through private investment.

Think of it this way: the national economy is a bit like a much larger version of an investor’s portfolio. The higher the rates of return on investment, the faster the portfolio grows. As you would expect, all of economy history shows that politicians are nowhere near as good at allocating and managing capital as successful capitalists are. While AOC likes to chastise billionaires for allegedly making their fortune through exploitation, the reality is very different – their success is in fact the result of brilliant capital allocation and management.

So, if it was your investment portfolio, would you want AOC, Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden to manage it; or would you prefer to put it in the hands of the worlds greatest capital allocators?

In other words, taxing successful capitalists and giving their money to politicians is a bit like an NBA basketball coach taking playing time away from his starters and giving it to people who never played the game - if it were a Saturday Night Live skit, it might be hilarious; but when it affects real world jobs, upward mobility and affordability, it’s tragic.

The persistence of disastrous ideas

So then, how do we explain the persistence of disastrous ideas like socialism among America’s youth? Unfortunately, no matter how appealing the outside wrapper might seem, when you package political greed with an educational monopoly, this is what you get.

Today we face important challenges, but none that are greater than those we have overcome time and again throughout our storied history. Here’s to hoping your day is as bright as America’s future.

- Todd, August 16, 2026

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To purchase a copy of my book, 2008: What Really Happened, please go to Amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, Bookshop.org, or encounterbooks.com.

The turtles seeking warmth
As they sleep on the beach
Know the sun the never sets
On the dreams that we seek…

…will be back to our regular posts
starting next week!

Take care, Todd
August 9, 2026

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On a recent episode of his podcast, Ben Shapiro pointed out how JD Vance’s economic policies are inconsistent with free market principles. In a particularly revealing segment, he showed an interview where Mr. Vance alleges that we know capitalism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be because we went down the path of shipping all of our manufacturing jobs offshore - to disastrous consequence. In an apt comparison, Mr. Shapiro then showed California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom wagging his finger at an audience as he too claims we know from recent history that capitalism doesn’t work as advertised.

These bipartisan presidential frontrunners share a common viewpoint - free market capitalism has failed, which then leads to the same solution - more government intervention to correct the alleged failures. As I’ll show in a moment, both of these political leaders are wrong about why our economy has underperformed, which makes it nearly impossible to get the corrective polices right.

Or, put another way: the only thing worse than a doctor who misdiagnoses a disease and thinks they are right is one who misdiagnoses and “knows” they are right.

To see where both Vance and Newsom are wrong, we need to go back a bit.

In the mid-1960s, Lyndon Johnson’s blowout spending on his failed wars on poverty and Viet Nam pushed us into the high inflation and anemic growth of the 1970s. The resulting affordability problems made many feel like our economy simply wasn’t working any more and neither Republicans (Richard Nixon) nor Democrats (Jimmy Carter) had the answer.

Then, in the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan’s free market reforms jump-started a two-decade economic boom and restored our faith in the future. Further, Reagan’s use of our economic strength to win the Cold War over the Soviet Union seemed to end the great debate of the 20^th century over whether economies should be steered by politicians or by markets.

As the new millennium dawned, the bright blue seas ahead teemed with optimism: we had a booming economy that, combined with Bill Clinton’s fiscal discipline, produced a balanced budget and safe levels of government debt. But there were two giant predators – one domestic and one international - lurking beneath the surface of these seemingly pristine waters.

Let’s begin with the international issues.

In retrospect, we vastly underestimated the cost of dealing with the collapse of China’s government-directed economy. In 1990, over ten years after China abandoned Mao’s communism for a more market oriented reforms, GDP per capita was still less than $1 a day, or about 1/75 the level in the U.S. Needless to say, when we gave China full access to our markets, the low wages of their impoverished work force gave them an enormous advantage in labor costs, which they then parlayed into an economic resurgence – at the cost of our own working class.

But GDP per capital is only part of the story. At the time, China’s population (1.1 billion) was also roughly 4.5 times our own – in biblical terms: it was almost as if God had summoned an American Jonah to swallow China’s dying economic whale, instead of the other way around! While it may not salve American workers’ wounds, it’s actually quite remarkable that our free market system was able to help lift a country of China’s relative girth out of poverty without causing an outright collapse here at home.

The key point here is that it was not our free market system that failed, in fact just the opposite: it was the utter failure of China’s massive government-directed economy that weighed so heavily on American workers.

But this isn’t the only thing that Vance and Newsom get wrong. Even as we went about trying to salvage the Chinese people from impoverishment, we also started moving away from the free market reforms that had re-invigorated our economy in the first place. There were three developments that magnified our economic misery; all were mistakes of government, and each compounded our problems.

The Debt Crises

In the mid to late 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union and Clinton’s enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement led to borrowing and lending binges in Mexico, Asia and then Russia. When the inability to service their expanded borrowings threatened a collapse in loan values, the Federal Reserve stepped in to bailout American lenders from potential losses.

Under true free market operations, the lenders and their shareholders should have been forced to bear the costs of their lending mistakes. If the realized losses then led to a market panic that threatened otherwise healthy institutions, then it would have been the Fed’s job to step in and provide the liquidity needed to prevent the panic from spreading. In other words, it was not the Fed’s job to preemptively bail out lenders that had made bad loans.

But Alan Greenspan at the Fed and the Clinton administration chose to violate these principles for political reasons – they were afraid that allowing the system to work as intended could impair the economic boom, which in turn would weigh heavily on their legacies. And so Greenspan and the administration engineered a series of preemptive bailouts that, as I have shown previously, drove the dot.com bubble in tech stocks first to dangerous heights and then to collapse.

The Housing Bubble

As I show in my book, the housing bubble was triggered in the late 1990s when the Clinton administration gave Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, whose government-granted privileges turned them into the 800 lb. gorillas of housing finance, the authorization to double their growth rates. Then, when the tech stock bubble collapsed in 2000, Greenspan lowered short-term rates to historic lows, which was like pouring kerosene on a housing market that was already on fire; it led to the explosion in adjustable rate mortgage financings that ultimately caused the housing bubble to collapse, thereby leading us into the Great Financial Crisis.

Misdiagnosing the Problems

The Obama administration, and many on the right as well, mistakenly blamed the housing bubble on a lack of regulation. But this makes no sense: it was both inconsistent with actual regulatory changes during the period and it was inconsistent with our prior history. If periods of reduced regulation were the culprit, then why didn’t national housing bubbles develop intermittently over the previous century?

The critical changes in a previously well functioning housing market were not regulatory; but were rather the emergence of the government sponsored enterprises as the 800 lb. gorillas of housing finance, the Clinton administration’s mistake of green lighting the doubling of their growth rates, and the Fed’s mistake in unwittingly pushing short term mortgage rates below the elevated rate of housing appreciation.

Adding Injury to Injury

Blaming the problem on private markets instead of failed housing and Federal Reserve policies led to massive new regulations, which weighed on economic growth. This mistake was then compounded by misguided spending blowouts during the Obama and Biden administrations; both of which were supposed to reignite growth but failed to deliver. What we got instead was a dangerous run up in debt (from less than 40% of GDP to over 75%) under Obama and the worst inflation since the 1970s under Biden. Combined with the anemic job growth resulting from China’s economic failure and misguided government interventions at home, this created the affordability problems we have today.

Once again, none of this was due to a failure of the private market system. There’s an old joke about investment bankers being often wrong but never in doubt; when it comes to recent economic history, it also applies to political leaders like Vance and Newsom. Unfortunately, we will all continue to bear the burden of bad policy if their unacknowledged ignorance goes unchallenged.

As noted above, two wrongs may not make a right, but they can make disastrous policy.

Today we face important challenges, but none that are greater than those we have overcome time and again throughout our storied history. Here’s to hoping your day is as bright as America’s future.

- Todd, July 26, 2026

If you found this helpful, please recommend it to at least one other person.

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On June 21, this column asked the following regarding the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Iran: “why would a president who has long been a strident ally of Israel and who has repeatedly taken calculated military risks enter into a preliminary agreement that seems so one-sided in Iran’s favor?”

After noting the possibility that Trump just wanted out, my earlier column went on to observe: “While potentially far-fetched, there is also another explanation that is entirely consistent with the Trumpian character: i.e. that he was willing to give Iran what it wanted in order to get the Strait opened, with the intention of then dragging out negotiations until after the midterms before returning to a much harder line with respect to any final, legally binding, agreement; or, if needed, a return to more forceful action.”

Referencing the old line “the opera ain’t over ‘til the fat lady sings”, the post ended: “but stay tuned, it wouldn’t be the first time Trump’s critics wrote him off before the fat lady finished her warm-ups.” Given the recent re-escalation of attacks on Iran, we can safely say the fat lady is now back in her dressing room still awaiting her final aria.

All of which begs the question: if the MOU was so heavily weighted in Iran’s favor (which it was), then why did they violate it?

A number of commentators, including those at The New York Times’ The Daily podcast, averred that Iran’s recent strikes result from a lack of diplomatic finesse in drafting the MOU. But are we really to believe that more artfully crafted language in a preliminary agreement would have stopped a regime that has violated nearly every binding agreement it has made over the past fifty years? The NYT’s argument is a bit like an operatic diva feigning shock over finding that her long philandering husband has, once again for the umpteenth time, been unfaithful.

Suffice to say, we are not back at war because the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps suddenly bewildered the world by breaking its word. So then, why did a financially fragile Iran choose to forgo billions of dollars in renewed oil sales and unfrozen assets by attacking ships in the Strait?

The answer lies in the potential impact of the MOU on the upcoming U.S. mid-term elections.

Given the events of the past week, we now know that Trump’s motivation with the MOU was not that he simply wanted out at any cost – if this had been the case, he would not have re-escalated the conflict. Eliminating this possibility tells us that, for Trump, the MOU was about opening the Strait to bring down oil prices prior to the upcoming elections. Knowing this, the benefit of the MOU to Trump (and, correspondingly, the cost to Iran) can effectively be measured by how far oil prices fell in response to the MOU.

In other words: for Iran, the problem was not in the wording of the MOU, but in its effect on global markets. Almost all observers were shocked at how quickly oil fell from over $90 / bbl to under $70 (roughly the pre-war level) after the MOU was signed. This post-MOU collapse carried the potential to simultaneously ease U.S. voter antipathy regarding the war and to jumpstart an already buoyant economy.

All of which is to say: if anything, Trump was getting even more of a boost than he had bargained for. Which, from Tehran’s perspective, means the MOU’s cost (as measured by it’s political impact in the U.S.) was likely much higher than they anticipated. This explains why they started firing on cargo ships so quickly, which then caused oil to spike back above $80, thereby diminishing the benefits to Trump.

By pushing the price of oil back up, Iran was effectively trying to reengage its most important allies which, in this case, are not China and Russia.

For nearly fifty years, the Iranian regime has been ruthlessly consistent in the use of lies and deception as it fanned religious fanaticism, pursued nuclear arms, funded terrorist attacks, and played the Strait of Hormuz as a bargaining chip - all with the objective of solidifying its control at home and expanding its influence in the region. For most of this time, there was bi-partisan clarity in the United States about both the related geopolitical dangers of allowing a hostile regime to amass too much control over the region, and the importance of our alliance with Israel in helping the Middle East seek a more peaceful and prosperous way forward.

Unfortunately, even as much of the Middle East has now recognized the destructiveness of Iran’s ways and seeks to build a bridge with Israel and the United States toward a better future, the once bipartisan opera glasses through which we perceive the region have become dangerously blurred. The left lens is obscured by anti-Westerners who have aligned themselves with Iran’s anti-American terrorism; while the right lens is marred by isolationists who fail to acknowledge Iran’s geopolitical significance - indeed, just imagine the risk posed by a nuclear Iran that closes the Strait of Hormuz to assist a Chinese attack on Taiwan.

This past week, we saw this bipartisan myopia at work when over 100 House Democrats voted against renewed support for Israel while the isolationist Republican Vice President J.D. Vance went on a national podcast to blame Israel for his own mistakes with respect to the failed MOU.

Regrettably, Iran’s best allies in the current war are located right here in America, which is why it was willing to forgo billions in needed funds to prevent the ceasefire from benefitting Trump in the mid-terms. But, one way or another, we are eventually going to have to deal with the hostile aggressions of a regime located in one of the most geopolitically important regions of the world. Ideally, our own allies around the world would also wake up to this reality; but for now it is largely up to President Trump to determine whether our corpulent diva finally emerges from her dressing room to bemoan the tragedy of an Iranian triumph …or to sing the glory of a better future for the Middle East, the United States, and the free world.

As I’ve said before, stay tuned!

Today we face important challenges, but none that are greater than those we have overcome time and again throughout our storied history. Here’s to hoping your day is as bright as America’s future.

- Todd, July 19, 2026

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These posts are now available in a podcast format as well, just search my name and On Wealth and Progress on major platforms.

If you’d like to learn more, visit my website: toddsheetswriter.com

To purchase a copy of my book, 2008: What Really Happened, please go to Amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, Bookshop.org, or encounterbooks.com.

Okay like, I get it, you’re thinking: that title is some kind of gimmicky come on, right?

And: how can anyone possibly introduce one of the biggest bands in history over 60 years after they first exploded onto the world’s consciousness? Not to mention: what the hell does this have to do with economics, politics, war and all the other inspiring things we normally talk about?

The thing is, it was always my intention to go beyond the dismal science of economics, the dirty business of politics, and what the Brits might call the bloody hell of war in these posts. After all, there’s far more to Wealth and Progress than what we’ve covered so far.

And, as I can now attest, nothing quite pulls you out of the hobgoblins of Nazi tattoos, (un)reflecting ponds, and the Strait of Hormuz like the birth of your first grandchild! There is nothing quite like sharing the things that have captivated, inspired, and soothed us with yet another generation who will one day inherit the world we leave behind. So, after working on a playlist of Beatles ballads for my beautiful new granddaughter, I’m writing this on my way out to hold her for the first time and help introduce her to …The BEATLES.

All of which led me to think about how, at some future point, I’d answer if she asked the question that many friends have asked over the years: “What was it that made their music so much better than everyone else’s?”

One intriguing answer to this question was provided by Malcolm Gladwell who, in Outliers, posited that their brilliance was a result of what he called the 10,000-hour rule. (It turns out the research he was referring to never really referenced such a thing but, hey, it was a catchy idea for everyone who wanted to believe that, if they had only had the opportunity, they too could have become the ever-elusive “fifth” Beatle). In support of his theory, Gladwell noted that the early Beatles were just another band vying to make it in the local Liverpool music scene. And, as Paul McCartney himself once noted, they often entered “battle of the bands” contests in their early years …but never won. According to Gladwell, the turning point came when – still in their late teens - they went off to Germany and played 6-8 hour sets a day for months on end, which helped the band gel in a way that simply hadn’t happened before.

But this theory begs the question: why didn’t other bands that played together for years come anywhere near the artistry of the mop tops? I mean, U2’s a great rock band, but they’re not The Beatles. Clearly there was something else at play, something unique to the Fab Four.

To understand what, in my opinion, really made the Beatles The BEATLES we need to first explore the unique musical creature that rock and roll elevated into preeminence: the singer-songwriter-musician. Early superstars of popular music like Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald achieved fame because of their vocal talents, stage presence and charisma, but they sang songs that were written by professional song writers. And even though Elvis helped launch rock and roll’s takeover of popular music, even he sang tunes penned by others.

Needless-to-say, the professional songwriter model was a bit limiting: if you couldn’t croon like Old Blue Eyes, scat like Lady Ella, or gyrate your hips like the King, how in the world were you going to get access to the best output from a relatively small pool of top songwriters? But the advent of the singer-songwriter-musician changed all this. As it turned out: even an unconventional warbler like Bob Dylan, with the ability to write and deliver Blowing in the Wind with emotional intensity amidst the ‘60s cultural revolution could become the voice of a generation (and one day win a Nobel Prize).

As rock and roll launched an unprecedented variety of voices, singer-songwriter-musicians became the driving force behind nearly every successful band. If Mick and Keith hadn’t leaned to bemoan their lack of “Satisfaction”, the Rolling Stones probably wouldn’t have made it to Memphis to meet the gin-soaked bar room queen of “Honkey Tonk Women”. But even Mick and Keith effectively acted as a single singer songwriter, with Mick penning the lyrics and Keith scripting the musical accompaniment. This “two musicians working as one songwriter” happened in many of musics top acts - Bono and The Edge at U2, Elton John (and lyricist Bernie Taupin) and the Red Hot Chili Peppers to name just a few.

Which brings us to what really separated The BEATLES from everyone else. In a standard, four-person rock band, they had THREE of the greatest singer-songwriter musicians who ever lived, each capable of crafting complete songs entirely on their own. John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison all wrote lyrics, created chord progressions, and played and sang their songs. In effect, this was like have 6 pairs of artists working together in the Rolling Stones mode. Add in their willingness to take artistic risks in leading and expanding rock’s boundaries and the their classically trained producer George Martin (in my opinion, the real fifth Beatle), and you end up with what is generally considered the most important musical act of the 20^th century.

In addition to the opportunity to collaborate on each other’s songs, there were also unique competitive dynamics that resulted from this rare abundance of songwriting talent. At one level, there was Lennon and McCartney, collaborating (at least in the early years) even as they competed to outdo each other. In addition, the egos of and intense competition between John and Paul made it difficult for George to even get his songs on the group’s albums. In fact, many of George’s unreleased tunes ended up on his post-Beatles album, All Things Must Pass, which is widely thought of as the best solo effort from any in the group.

This unique competitive dynamic also helps explain why, other than George’s masterpiece, nearly all the other solo albums were largely disappointing. To be sure, there are some great individual songs on some of these records - John’s “Imagine” and Paul’s “Maybe I’m Amazed”, for example - but the post-Beatles albums as a whole sound more like what you hear from other rock greats: one or two good to great songs accompanied by an array of mediocre album fillers. Put simply, it was much easier to create a masterpiece when John, Paul and George were competing to get their best ideas onto a ten-song recording than it was when, like most other bands, they had to individually carry that weight for an entire album.

In a future post, we’ll return to take a tour of some of the songs that elevated their music to a magical mystical level. But for now, I’m going to lay my head back on the plane seat, close my eyes to the orchestral “Goodnight” and then look forward to the sound of the airplane wheels touching down at the end of “Back in the USSR” as I scurry off to help introduce my granddaughter to ….The BEATLES!

Today we face important challenges, but none that are greater than those we have overcome time and again throughout our storied history. Here’s to hoping your day is as bright as America’s future.

- Todd, July 10, 2026

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These posts are now available in a podcast format as well, just search my name and On Wealth and Progress on major platforms.

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To purchase a copy of my book,2008: What Really Happened,please go to Amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, Bookshop.org, or encounterbooks.com.

Note - in honor of our 250th, I’m repeating my first Substack post, which feels even more relevant today than when it was first written. Hope you all have a great weekend as we build on what we have in common to celebrate our past, learn from our mistakes, and look forward to our exceptional future.

The Fabric of America

So fight your battles, young and old

Knowing your stories may be freely told

But as you raise your verbal spears

Hold close the fortune that you do so here

For to cast our gaze around the globe

Is to reveal the riches within in our own robes

And to set our sights on history’s mirror

Is to gather strength from those who led us here

Atop the current or against the tide

Retain your grit and restrain your pride

For soon the storms in the night will hide

And we’ll stand again on the sunlit side

- Todd Sheets

See below for the story behind the story

The story behind the story

It was early November, and there was a bracing quality to the afternoon sunshine. I hadn’t been to Washington D.C. for many years, decades even, and what a time to return. I was in town for an event put on by the publisher of my book, 2008: What Really Happened – Understanding the Great Financial Crisis. Not surprisingly, given the recent election, the city seemed uncharacteristically unsure of itself. Perhaps a bit like a one-term administration now being unceremoniously ushered out of town.

Walking past leafless trees sketching harsh outlines on the autumnal twilight, it was a bit shocking how quickly the afternoon sunshine ceded territory to a gradually chilling darkness. I sensed that many of those passing by felt, as some of my friends and family did, more than a bit disquieted by the election, as if they had gone to sleep in a home they had worked years to make warm and welcoming …only to wake up feeling entrapped by cold and imposing walls.

But then again, leaving the quivering limbs and growing shadows behind for a cozy little coffee shop on a busy street corner, there were also faces which, like others of my family and friends, seemed abuzz with hope and optimism. In spite of their newfound energy, however, I couldn’t help but feel that, until recently, they too had harbored their own dark fears of the future.

Waking up the next morning, I had time to spare before the publisher’s dinner and, still feeling these crosscurrents, decided to take a long walk around the National Mall. I had seen one or two of the great monuments before, but only in passing, crammed between meetings or before rushing to the airport to get home to my family, maybe in time to read a bedtime story to my young children. Now taking it all in on this sunny November day, I couldn’t help but wish that, when my children were younger, I had brought them to experience this with me; to have walked hand in hand amidst the vastness of our history; feeling the power, the substance, and the durability of the journey we all share.

Walking toward the columned rotunda of the Jefferson Memorial framed in front by rippling waters and in back by a bristling blue sky is indeed a sight to behold. Climbing the marbled stairs, one is greeted by a towering bronze statue of the great man himself, perched atop a granite pedestal, a cloak draped ceremoniously over his shoulders, one hand clasping a copy of the Declaration of Independence. Remarkably, at just thirty three years of age, Jefferson penned the ideas that would guide us forever forward: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness - That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

As with the Jefferson Memorial, the statue of Lincoln also casts its gaze toward the Washington Monument, as if drawing optimism for the future from the strength of the past in even the gravest of times. Faced with a nation more divided than at any other time before or since, Lincoln drew inspiration from our founding ideals, “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Over 600,000 brave men and women gave their lives for this proposition; adjusted for today’s population, the equivalent death toll would approach 7 million.

Like Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was also a great admirer of Jefferson; long before his own memorial was completed, FDR laid the cornerstone for and later dedicated the Jefferson Memorial. One is gradually drawn into and through the various red granite, open-air, “rooms” of the FDR Memorial. For me the maze-like structure elicited the feeling of being pulled into the puzzling array of issues that challenged FDR’s presidency. When he was first elected, the unemployment rate was almost 25% (today, it is about 4%). But Roosevelt’s determined optimism endeared him to the nation, in his first inaugural address he told his fellow Americans, “This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself...” Less than a decade later, during World War II, that same mix of steely determination and buoyant optimism would lead the free world in defeat of perhaps the greatest threat democracy has ever encountered.

Like the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials, Martin Luther King’s statue towers over his surroundings. King’s courageous presence emerges out of what is called the “Stone of Hope”, which itself has been drawn forward from two giant boulders known as the “Mountain of Despair.” Just as Lincoln held us together in the 1860s, Dr. King’s famous dream led us into and through the 1960s, a decade ravaged by assassinations, riots, and protest movements, all of which ripped at the fabric of our deepest beliefs about our past, present and our future. Even amidst recurrent death threats, King reminded us: “Let us not wallow in the valley of despair ….So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

That evening, I went to sleep with a mind at peace. Surely, a nation founded on these timeless ideals, one that has gone to war with itself to preserve and advance them, that has crossed oceans to defend them, that has withered assassinations and cataclysmic social revolt to fulfill them; surely such a nation will awaken again to endure and triumph over whatever challenges tomorrow might bring.

When I woke the next morning, the seeds of the poem set forth above came to mind.

- Todd

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The big news in this weeks primary elections was aptly captured by The Wall Street Journal : “Mamdani Deepens His Influence – and the Divide – in the Democratic Party – New York City mayor strengthens party sway nationwide by backing three primary winners in Congressional races.” The article went on to quote a Democratic strategist: “Mayor Mamdani didn’t just pick winners. He made winners.”

The greatest danger to America today is not China, Russia, or Iran (although all pose important threats), but rather what has become the full-fledged socialist takeover of the Democratic Party by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Mamdani, AOC, and others. Remarkably, even as Tuesday’s elections anointed Mamdani as a new Kingmaker, I had a chance encounter with someone who has actually experienced the realities of socialism first hand.

The day after the elections, I stopped by the grocery store to pick up a couple of items. Walking in, a stocky man with a heavy accent gently teased me about my LA Dodgers baseball cap. After explaining that my daughter lives in LA, I asked where he was from. “Havana”, he replied, before going on to tell me he had escaped Cuba 36 years ago. When asked if he still had family there and if things were as bad as we hear, he responded, “Yes, and they’re worse! 23 hours a day of no electricity. No jobs, no money – I try and send money and food, but have a hard time reaching them on the phone to see if it’s even getting through.”

As our brief encounter came to a close I patted him on the shoulder, told him how happy I was that he had made it out and is now here, and wished him and his family the best. Walking away, much like Florida’s summer humidity weighs on unprepared visitors, the tragic irony of the circumstances sapped my spirits: even as the real world consequences of Marxist ideology play out just off our southern border, Mamdani has marshaled the same blend of revolutionary zeal and utopian promises that once elevated Fidel Castro to power. Perhaps most distressing of all, American voters are falling prey to it!

To understand the modern origins of how this happened, we need to go back to when Castro’s revolutionary spirit also took root in America.

As young campus radicals fought for free speech, civil rights and women’s rights during the 1960s, they actually helped push America into a much better version of itself. Looking back, a unifying theme of much of the ‘60s activism was the belief in the preeminence of the individual over the repressive power of the state, as captured so beautifully by Martin Luther King, Jr.: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

This was not a call to tear down America, but rather a call for us to live up to Thomas Jefferson’s founding vision, as King’s speech revealed: “It is a dream deeply rooted in the American Dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal.”

From the early fights for Civil and women’s rights through similar efforts on behalf of gay Americans, the ‘60s revolutionaries continued to lead us in a better direction. But as time went on the far left transmogrified into a very different version of the early ideals expressed by Dr. King; instead of fighting for free speech they imposed cancel culture on dissenting voices; they replaced King’s dream of racial equality with political privilege based not on the content of individual character but rather on the color of our skin; and they turned what was once a movement for sexual freedom into an effort to preempt individual parent’s rights over issues as important as child sexuality.

As the radical left aged and gradually took control of our educational system, traditional media, and the Democratic party, they created narratives of colonialism, supremacy, and exploitation that made it clear their true intention was no longer (if it ever had been) to help America fulfill the Western ideals that first lifted the great masses up from the ash heap of history. Instead, it became more and more clear their agenda had evolved into overthrowing Western values in pursuit of an empowered state that is little more than a thinly veiled return to the pre-enlightenment systems of political privilege that hoisted humanity onto an ash heap in the first place.

In addition to this gross disfiguration of the principles that at least seemed to guide their early activism, the young radical left was disastrously wrong about economics from the very beginning. In the mid-1960s, Lyndon Banes Johnson’s (LBJ) Great Society Programs were an attempt to push the country in a more socialist direction. These programs failed miserably in their stated mission to eradicate poverty. In addition, the vast increase in spending, combined with LBJ’s escalation of the Viet Nam War, led to deficits that the Federal Reserve financed with loose monetary policies. This gave rise to the Stagflation (anemic economic growth combined with high inflation) that turned the 1970s into the worst economic period since the Great Depression.

Fortunately, Ronald Reagan’s free market reforms in the early 1980s kicked off an economic boom that, aided by Bill Clinton’s fiscal prudence in the ‘90s, extended for nearly two decades. Nevertheless, even as Reagan’s free market success pushed socialism into the dark alleys of Democratic politics, the far left remained active in filling the halls of academia with their narratives of supremacy, exploitation, and class warfare.

Beginning in the late ‘90s, housing policy mistakes initiated by Clinton and continued by George W. Bush, along with the Federal Reserve’s misguided efforts to steer the economy, created the housing bubble that led to the financial crisis (see my book for a more complete explanation). Just as had previously happened with the Great Depression of the ‘30s and the Great Inflation of the ‘70s, the far left failed to acknowledge that the real underlying cause of the Great Financial Crisis was government failure. In fact, they used the crisis to dress up and reintroduce their latent socialism to a public long blinded by misleading educational narratives, thereby enabling the rise of the socialist wing of the Democratic Party.

And so, even as Cuba lies trapped in the abysmal reality of socialism, a young Marxist-inspired revolutionary - blinded by political greed to the realities of his empty promises - follows in Castro’s footsteps as he tries to lead America down a well documented, if conveniently ignored, road to ruin.

Today we face important challenges, but none that are greater than those we have overcome time and again throughout our storied history. Here’s to hoping your day is as bright as America’s future.

- Todd, June 28, 2026

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If you’d like to learn more, visit my website: toddsheetswriter.com

To purchase a copy of my book, 2008: What Really Happened, please go to Amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, Bookshop.org, or encounterbooks.com.

This past week, the Trump administration signed and released its Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to end the War with Iran.

Ironically, despite the War’s dominance of the news cycle over the past few months, the greatest threat we face today comes not from abroad – where politically-directed economies like Iran’s have failed miserably, but rather from the rise of the socialist left here in America. If the peace agreement makes a meaningful contribution to turning back this socialist tide, it may offset legitimate concerns (more in a moment) with the MOU.

With respect to the agreements current benefits, initial signs are encouraging. Oil prices plummeted to around $75 a barrel on the news, well below the post-war peak and within striking distance of pre-war levels. If sustained, this should help bring inflation back down, which will provide a further boost to an economy finally exhibiting signs of vitality after decades of subpar growth. Indeed, these considerations and the upcoming midterms were obviously motivating forces behind the MOU.

These developments notwithstanding, however, the agreement presents a puzzling conundrum: why would a president who has long been a strident ally of Israel and who has repeatedly taken calculated military risks enter into a preliminary agreement that seems so one-sided in Iran’s favor?

Of course, one answer is that Trump just wants out and is willing to pay a heavy exit fee. But it’s also possible there is some method to the madness; or, even lacking method, that events will lead to an outcome that is dramatically different from what the preliminary terms of the MOU suggest. So, to mix theatrical metaphors: before the fat lady starts singing, let’s first look at the troubling aspects of the MOU itself and then we’ll return to the possibility that there may be more here than appears to the critical eye.

The Strait as a Bargaining Chip

In the early 2010s, the Obama administration responded to Iran’s nuclear buildup by imposing harsh sanctions. When Iran then threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz, Obama’s team entered secret negotiations that ultimately led to ending sanctions and the release of previously frozen Iranian assets.

In his first term, Trump pulled us out of the Obama deal and reimposed sanctions on Iran, which ultimately brought the country to the cusp of economic meltdown. But the current MOU curtails those sanctions, which effectively rewards Iran for shutting the Straight, much as Obama’s deal rewarded them for threatening to do so. Twice rewarded, Iran won’t be shy about using the Strait as a future bargaining chip.

Regardless of how the current negotiations go, we and our allies need to promote further energy independence both at home and abroad. Trump’s highly successful blockade is the best approach for limiting risks while dealing with Iran’s control over the Strait. But we must be prepared to absorb the extended costs associated with future shutdowns if we are going to have the will to deal with a potentially re-emboldened Iran going forward.

The Strait as a Revenue Generator

Paragraph 5 of the current MOU commits Iran to provide for the safe passage of commercial ships without charges for a period of 60 days; but then goes on to say Iran will work with Oman to define future administration of the Strait in conjunction with other Gulf States and applicable international law. Supporters of this arrangement claim that other Gulf States will not allow Iran to charge fees going forward and that international law makes such charges illegal. But it is in no way clear that other Gulf countries will be willing to stand up to a re-armed Iran should it decide to impose fees for passage.

In addition, Paragraph 14 of the MOU states that “The final deal will be endorsed by a binding resolution of the UN Security Council.” The council’s permanent members include Russia and China, both allies of Iran; and France and the United Kingdom, neither of which has the political fortitude to confront Iran and risk another closing of the Strait. If the Council blesses a deal that includes future tolls, this may well provide all the legal endorsement Iran needs to proceed with such a scheme.

It is hard to imagine the Trump administration would allow a final agreement that sets a precedent for hostile nations to charge tolls on critical waterways. Nevertheless, the language in the MOU is concerning.

Nuclear Weapons

Paragraph 8 explicitly states that Iran “reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons” in exchange for our commitment to “terminate all types of sanctions”. While this sounds favorable, it leaves the details of dealing with enriched materials to be worked out. Additionally, even if we assume a satisfactory resolution of this matter, we are back to a basic problem with the Obama deal: why would we believe a terrorist regime with a long history of lying about its nuclear intentions?

These concerns are only exacerbated by Paragraph 6, which commits the United States to work with regional partners to provide $300 billion in reconstruction and development funds. Some in the administration have tried to sidestep related concerns by claiming Iran won’t receive a dime of American money for such purposes. But it hardly matters to the regime where the money comes from – the risk is in what they will do with it. J.D. Vance has claimed that no such funds will be released unless Iran abides by acceptable limitations. We can only hope that this is the case.

A Method to the Madness?

Suffice to say, the Memorandum of Understanding is troubling. But also keep in mind, this is little more than an agreement to negotiate. I noted earlier that one explanation for the MOU is that Trump wants out of Iran so badly he is willing to live with otherwise unacceptable terms. While potentially far-fetched, there is also another plausible explanation that is entirely consistent with the Trumpian character: i.e. that he was willing to give Iran what it wanted in order to get the Strait opened, with the intention of then dragging out negotiations until after the midterms before returning to a much harder line with respect to any final, legally binding, agreement; or, if needed, a return to more forceful action.

Only time will reveal whether there is method in the preliminary madness of this evolving drama – but stay tuned, it wouldn’t be the first time Trump’s critics wrote him off before the fat lady finished her warmups.

Today we face important challenges, but none that are greater than those we have overcome time and again throughout our storied history. Here’s to hoping your day is as bright as America’s future.

- Todd, June 21, 2026

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To purchase a copy of my book, 2008: What Really Happened, please go to Amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, Bookshop.org, or encounterbooks.com.

Last week, The Wall Street Journal ran an article titled, “Inflation is picking investors pockets.” Then, when the May inflation report came in “hot” at 4.2% the markets took a hit, falling by 1.5%- 2.0% depending on which index you focus on. Not coincidentally, bond yields have also risen over the past few months. All of which has led some to predict that we are returning to the kind of stagflation (stagnant growth combined with rapidly rising prices) that turned the1970s into the worst decade for real (inflation adjusted) stock market returns in the twentieth century.

So, are the dire predictions correct? Or are they just a modern version of Chicken Little clucking, “The stagflation sky is falling! The stagflation sky is falling!”

Everyone who has stopped at a filing station lately knows that recent price increases are largely the result of the war’s impact on oil. And, because petrochemicals are so widely used throughout the economy, rising energy prices also affect the cost of many other good and services. Nevertheless, while recent war-related price increases may continue for a while, the effect on inflation is likely to be transitory.

Think of it this way: if oil prices go up by, say, 50% (i.e. from $60 to $90 a barrel), prices at the gas pump will go up almost immediately and, over time, other prices will increase as well, but by lesser amounts. Unless oil prices also go up another 50% next year (to around $135 per barrel), however, inflation will then begin to stabilize, probably around the pre-war level of 2-3%. Further, depending on the outcome of the war and other factors (such as rising production in Venezuela) there is a chance post-war oil prices will actually drop below pre-war levels, which could help bring inflation down even further.

Which is to say that the recent run up in inflation is unlikely to weigh on the stock market absent other monetary mistakes like those of the of 1970s.

As noted economist Milton Friedman taught us, persistent inflation is always and everywhere a monetary problem. In other words, it occurs when central banks print too much money, a problem that has existed throughout history whenever governments run deficits. While there were oil shocks in the 1970s, the real driving force behind that era’s continuous and rising inflation was loose monetary policy resulting from Lyndon Baines Johnson’s (LBJ) guns and butter deficit spending on the Viet Nam war and Great Society social welfare programs.

More recently, outgoing Fed chair Jerome Powell made a similar mistake (though not for as long) when Biden blew out Federal spending in a misguided attempt to stimulate the post-Covid economy, which had already turned the corner before Biden took office. While current Democratic politicians won’t admit it, the increased prices resulting from these mistakes created the affordability problems that make today’s more moderate levels of inflation so painful.

Fortunately, incoming Fed chair Kevin Warsh is well aware of all of this, which is one reason I’m optimistic that, once the war ends, price increases will settle back down into the 2-3% range, though it could take a little while for this to happen.

Returning to the 1970s: to fully appreciate the decade’s moribund stock market returns, we also need to consider the economic stagnation caused by LBJ’s expansion of government spending and over regulation. Short-term stock prices can be influenced by many factors, which is what investment guru Ben Graham was getting at when he talked about “Mr. Market’s” (a character Graham created to personify investment markets) unpredictable swings between fear and greed. In the long-term, however, share prices tend to reflect underlying economic values, which are driven by both company specific factors - such as earnings predictability, profitability and growth prospects - and broader “macro” factors such as long-term interest rates and overall economic growth (which effects sustainable corporate growth rates).

If we skip all the nerdy details and get right to the bottom line, the way all this works out mathematically is that high interest rates (which result from high inflation) and low growth prospects are the worst of all possible worlds for stock market valuations. This is why stocks traded at such low price to earnings (P/E) multiples in the 1970s. Today however, growth prospects actually seem quite bright. In fact, given last year’s tariff uncertainty, the government shutdown and then the war, the economy has shown remarkable resilience and appears poised for a meaningful pick-up in growth, as evidenced by both recent GDP and jobs reports.

Which brings us back to the moral of our story: current prophesies of stagflation probably reveal more about the political biases of today’s Chicken Littles than they do about the economy and investments.

Today we face important challenges, but none that are greater than those we have overcome time and again throughout our storied history. Here’s to hoping your day is as bright as America’s future.

Todd, June, 14 2026

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To purchase a copy of my book, 2008: What Really Happened, please go to Amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, Bookshop.org, or encounterbooks.com.

Disclaimer: The preceding content is for informational purposes only based on information available when created. It is not an offer or solicitation nor is it tax or legal advice. It does not consider your financial circumstances and objectives and may not be suitable to you. Readers and listeners are encouraged to consult with a financial advisor who can consider your individual circumstances before making any investment decisions

On a recent episode of The Daily podcast, The New York Times (NYT) managed to subtlety twist the IPO (Initial Public Offering) for SpaceX into something of a morality play. As if the whole thing were a dystopian attempt by some kind of Billionaire Darth Vader to take over the universe, with everything from the world’s financial system to your grandmother’s IRA hanging in the balance.

So, is the largest IPO in history really just Billionaire Vader trying to convince us to fund his Evil Empire? Or is this a story of American-style capitalism attracting the best and brightest from around the world to unleash the infinite possibilities of human ingenuity?

And, while we’re at it, should grandma really be losing sleep over all this?

With all these intergalactic possibilities rattling around the ole noggin, let’s dig a little deeper.

The Take at The Times

While they didn’t exactly put it in so many words, the NYT’s take more or less boiled down to: SpaceX has identified a total addressable market for it’s products of $26 trillion, which is nearly the size of the entire U.S. economy. And, to justify the gargantuan valuation Musk is seeking for his business, he’s basically going to have to monopolize the whole shebang, (which, according to this worldview, is pretty much the definition of a billionaire anyway, right?) So, in order for this thing to work, Darth Musk has to take over the universe.

I mean, like, yikes!

And, just in case you still haven’t crawled under the mattress you’re now thinking of stashing your hard earned savings into, Lord Musk has super voting control, which means neither his Board of Directors nor the shareholders can get rid of him; sort of a Darth Vader for life agreement, if you will.

But wait, just when you thought it couldn’t get any scarier: to help get all the moola he needs, Mr. Vader convinced the index mutual funds (which buy large diversified baskets of stocks on behalf of their investors) to bend a few rules so they can get in on the launch pad for his venture. So, even if you’re not really into funding madcap schemes, you don’t really have a choice, it’s likely to end up in your IRA or your 401-K or your ICH (I’m Confused as Hell about all these acronyms) anyway!

So, you’re basically damned if he does (monopolize the universe) and damned if he doesn’t (because your financial house of acronyms will go down with the starship if he fails). I mean, what’s a humble earthling to do, right?

Of course, what they didn’t say is that even the biggest company in America last year (Amazon) had sales equal to only about 2% of the U.S. economy - so maybe there’s not quite as much to the whole monopoly thing as they’d like to make it seem. (But hey, what ideology-promoting journalistic enterprise ever let facts get in the way of a good story?)

And they also didn’t say that, if grandma has, say, 5% of her assets in an index fund which has, maybe 1 or 2% of its investments in SpaceX then …well, let’s just say she can still plan on waking up to that warm bowl of oatmeal no matter how it all works out.

With respect to the super voting control shares, does anybody anywhere actually think anyone other than Elon Musk has a snowball’s chance in a solar panel field of pulling this whole thing off? Imagine the Board does fires him. What’s the job posting gonna say: “Wanted: New CEO with a demonstrated history of Thomas Edison’s inventiveness, Henry Ford’s manufacturing genius, and P.T. Barnum’s salesmanship – all others need not apply”?

An Alternative Perspective

Suffice to say, I’ve read my fair share prospectuses. And even though SpaceX isn’t my kind of investment (more on this in a moment), this one reads like an investment banker’s version of Fifty Shades of Grey. Along with a bunch of color pictures of rocket ships in space that are more or less centerfold-like material for the nerds that read these things, it starts out by noting, “Our mission is to build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.”

I mean, it almost makes you feel guilty for just hoping you can make a buck or two off the damn thing, right?

At another point, the prospectus goes on: “We believe AI infrastructure in space can utilize the virtually limitless power of the Sun and thereby enable the use of AI as a transformative force for understanding the universe and improving the daily lives of all humans.”

Wow, just imagine how the NYT would react if that came from a dewy-eyed socialist in a blue tie promising to tax the hell out of everyone else and then hire the guys & gals in charge of California’s bullet train to nowhere to build it!

Which brings us to a key point here. Musk’s accomplishments and vision are genuinely inspiring. And how cool is it that people investing either their own money, or money they have a fiduciary responsibility for, are voluntarily funding SpaceX’s audacious aspirations? Where else could a kid from another country born outside of political privilege go to try and make science fiction dreams come true?

In other words, if you don’t think American-style capitalism is exceptional, you might want to take a moment to scan through the SpaceX prospectus.

A Venture Capital Style Investment

Earlier I noted that, in spite of all the inspirational possibilities here, this isn’t my cup of investing tea. My preference is to focus on mature, consistently profitable companies with good growth prospects whose stocks can be acquired at attractive prices. SpaceX is more like a venture capital investment, where you’re betting on the founder, their track record, and their vision. But, no matter how good it all sounds, you accept that it’s still hard to tell how big the market will be, what share the company will command, what the financial and operating characteristics of the business will ultimately be, and so on.

In this respect, it’s helpful to keep in mind that experienced investors typically allocate only a portion of their portfolio to venture capital, and that portion usually gets spread over a number of venture funds. And each of those funds diversifies it’s portfolio to protect against the inherent nature of venture investing, which is that you know a large percentage of your investments will fail, but you’re hoping for one or two moon shots to make up for all the loses.

In other words, no matter how inspiring or exciting you find these kinds of things; think hard before you bet grandma’s oat farm on it.

Today we face important challenges, but none that are greater than those we have overcome time and again throughout our storied history. Here’s to hoping your day is as bright as America’s future.

- Todd, June 7, 2026

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Disclaimer: The preceding content is for informational purposes only based on information available when created. It is not an offer or solicitation nor is it tax or legal advice. It does not consider your financial circumstances and objectives and may not be suitable to you. Readers and listeners are encouraged to consult with a financial advisor who can consider your individual circumstances before making any investment decisions

While details have been sparse, the Trump administration announced this week that it is close to reaching an agreement with Iran to extend the ceasefire for another 60 days and begin more formal negotiations to end the war.

On The Daily podcast, liberal critics at The New York Times criticized the war for handing Iran the Strait of Hormuz as a new geopolitical weapon and claimed that, even if negotiations lead to a re-opening of the Strait, we will be no better off than we were before the war.

Hawkish conservatives, like former Army General and current Fox News analyst Jack Keane, who have advocated for seizing strategic Iranian territory have expressed disappointment the president failed to take more forceful action in pursuit of a more decisive outcome.

My own view is that each of these viewpoints is flawed. So, let’s dig a bit deeper with the goal of developing a more balanced perspective.

The Critics at the New York Times

In the early 2010s, the Obama administration reacted to Iran’s rapidly developing nuclear program by imposing harsh sanctions. Iran responded by threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz. After organizing an international flotilla as a demonstration of strength, Obama then sent a team to the Middle East to engage in covert negotiations with Iran. When news of the backdoor talks leaked out, the administration provided misleading information about the timing of their secret talks and then claimed that dangerous advances in Iran’s nuclear program were the sole trigger for the negotiations.

Later, however, it emerged that the original talking points for the secret meetings included the Strait of Hormuz. Furthermore, the idea that sudden nuclear developments were the sole factor forcing the negotiations made no sense: dangerous advancements in Iran’s nuclear program were the very reason Obama imposed harsh sanctions in the first place. And, if it were only about the nukes, why did the administration try and hide their negotiations and then, when word leaked, fudge facts about the timing and sequence of events?

Obviously: the critics at The New York Times are wrong to claim that Trump’s war has somehow handed Iran a new geopolitical weapon. Rather, Iran has long known the Strait is one of its primary tactical weapons in any geopolitical confrontation, which is why it mined the Strait during the so-called “Tanker War” of the 1980s; why it threatened to do so in three separate nuclear-related diplomatic crises (2008, 2010, and in 2019); and why it reacted to Epic Fury by doing so.

Further, The Times claim that, at best, Trump’s current negotiations will reopen the Strait and merely put us back in the same position we were in before the war ignores the enormous damage the war has done to their military capabilities. In short, the war has severely crippled Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons, to project power, and to defend itself. Even if current negotiations “only” accomplish the re-opening of the Strait, this alone hardly represents a return to pre-war conditions.

The Hawks at Fox News

I share the view that the Middle East is ripe for change and that a decisive victory in Iran could reset the regional and geopolitical tables for decades to come. Trump’s growing history of military intervention, including Operation Epic Fury, demonstrates he is not afraid of taking measured action to make the world a safer place for America and our allies. Nevertheless, we have now been in a ceasefire for longer than we were at war, which tells us the president clearly believes a diplomatic solution – if acceptable terms can be negotiated – presents a better risk/reward tradeoff than an invasion. Given the history of the Middle East, it is hard to find fault with this view.

Part of this hawkish viewpoint derives from the conventional wisdom that historic victories are unattainable without putting boots on the ground. But what about Ronald Reagan’s victory in the Cold War, which was achieved by exploiting the inherent weaknesses of the Soviet’s politically-controlled economy? My preference would be for us to continue to enforce the blockade with the objective of accelerating the financial meltdown that Iran’s politically-controlled economy was already experiencing before the war. There are economic costs associated with this approach, but given the regime’s horrific history, the magnitude of the regional and geopolitical opportunities, and the importance of minimizing causalities, these costs seem both manageable and worthwhile.

A More Balanced Perspective

Depending on how negotiations proceed, we could still end up with an extended blockade, perhaps combined with further targeted air strikes. But, recent posturing aside, Trump seems eager to achieve a negotiated settlement that will reopen the Strait, reinvigorate the global economy, and allow us to bring our troops home. Furthermore, only the president and his team are in a position to fully evaluate the effect of the on-going war on our own military resources and on other risks such as Taiwan and Ukraine. And, finally, like it or not, the president has to take domestic politics into account – if he loses too much support, his ambitious agenda will be threatened.

I’ve previously paraphrased Warren Buffett’s mentor (Ben Graham), by noting that short-term perceptions of war are like a voting machine but longer-term opinions are more like a weighing machine. At this point, both politically driven condemnations and declarations of decisive victory are still premature. In the end, Americans will evaluate Operation Epic Fury through what we might call the rough logic of a simple question: did it make America, the Middle East, and the world a safer place at an acceptable cost? Given the war’s remarkable military accomplishments, there is clearly room for continued optimism; but the weight of history’s final judgment will dependent on what exactly Trump is willing to concede to reopen the Strait and further degrade Iran’s nuclear capacity.

Stay tuned.

Today we face important challenges, but none that are greater than those we have overcome time and again throughout our storied history. Here’s to hoping your day is as bright as America’s future.

- Todd, May 31, 2026

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In Colorado a couple of months ago I came across a street post bearing a sticker that read: “ELIMINATE BILLIONAIRE$ - SAVE THE WORLD”.

A few weeks ago, on the It’s Open with Ilana Glazer podcast, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the leading contenders to become the Democratic Party’s next presidential candidate, said, “You can’t earn a billion dollars; you just can’t. …You can break rules. You can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws. You can pay people less than what they’re worth. But you can’t earn that, right? And so you have to create a myth… You have to create a myth of earning it.”

This week, CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin opened a wide ranging and hotly debated interview with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos by asking him about the source of all this hostility. Bezos replied that it’s a function of recent economic conditions where some people have done very well while others struggle.

In fact, this explanation has become so widespread that it has a name: the “K-shaped economy”, with the upward and downward angled lines on the “K” representing these divergent outcomes. While I admire Mr. Bezos and much of what he said in the CNBC interview, I disagree with his diagnosis of why billionaires are being demonized by so much of the political class. If Bezos’s perspective was correct, then this hostility would be a recent phenomenon, but history reveals that the issues here are much deeper and more intractable.

In the mid-1800s Karl Marx and Frederick Engels published The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, in which they made three basic arguments: 1) the history of mankind is one of class warfare between oppressors and the oppressed, 2) capitalism, which they saw as the contemporary version of this never ending struggle, was doomed to collapse as a result of its own tendency toward excess and self destruction, and 3) post-capitalist society would emerge into communism, characterized by the abolition of private property in pursuit of a utopian vision of collective ownership and politically distributed rewards.

As stirring as all this may sound to some, history has delivered a crushing verdict on Marxist economics. Communism collectively destroyed hundreds of millions of working class lives in countries large (the Soviet Union and China) and small (Cuba) that spanned the globe from Eastern Europe to Asia to Latin America. In addition, countries that embraced less extreme, socialist, versions of collectivism have vastly underperformed capitalist countries. And finally, the United States did far more to improve working class lives when it operated under the limited government model than it has under the growing government model of the past century.

In its first iteration, American-style capitalism flourished in a manner unseen anywhere else in history. Prior to capitalism, world GDP grew at around 0.3% per year for the three-plus centuries from 1500-1820. Then, limited government capitalism unleashed U.S. growth of a little over 4% annually (over inflation) from 1820 until World War I (1913).

To put this in perspective, a hypothetical family with annual income of $100,000 growing at 0.3% for roughly 4 generations will see its earnings rise to about $135,000 after 100 years.

But if a similar family’s income grows by 4.0%, it will increase to over $5,000,000 annually!

Now, imagine which family will live in a safer and more secure neighborhood. Which one will have access to better schools and medical care? Which one will have more time to spend with friends and family, and more opportunities to enjoy the arts and entertainment, and to pursue careers in these fields? Which one will be able to do more to help the less fortunate?

So then, given the widespread failure of Marxist ideas and the extraordinary success of limited government capitalism, how do we explain the persistence of Marx’s failed theories?

The answer is simple: political greed - while Marx was a disaster on economic issues, he was brilliant in foreseeing how class warfare narratives could be used to build political movements and coalitions.

The role of politicians and their advisors in directing economic outcomes was vastly curtailed by free market capitalism. But with the rise of progressivism in the early 20^th century, the political class struck back with Marxist-like charges of inequality, exploitation and oppression. Progressives have long worked to embed these narratives into our history books, culture, media and politics - to the point where even many of today’s billionaires (Buffett, Gates, Bezos and others) occasionally fall into the trap of accepting Marxist assumptions as the starting point for policy discussions about how to build a better society.

Ideally, instead of relying on politically motivated anecdotes about the so-called progressive era, we would be able to take a poll of contemporary people on their feelings about limited government capitalism. Fortunately, we can do even better: rather than merely asking what they thought, we can follow they actually did.

Migration and population patterns reveal how people as a whole really felt about early American style capitalism. Domestically, millions voluntarily flocked from the farms to rapidly emerging urban areas to work in the factories that built the great industrial cities of the Midwest and Northeast. Internationally, people braved extraordinary hardship to escape politically-controlled economies around the world in order to pursue a better life in America. All of which is why, from 1820-1920, our population soared over tenfold, from 10 to 106 million.

If on the whole, as progressives allege, the working class had been ruthlessly exploited, they would have promptly packed up their bags and moved back to the farms or their countries of origin. But they stayed and worked hard to bring other family members to join them in what the Jewish community came to call the Goldene Medina, or golden land.

This went on for generation …after generation …after generation, until progressives turned the Great Depression into a narrative of private market failure that seemed to fulfill Marx’s most dire predictions about capitalism. We now know, however, that the Depression was caused by unprecedented failures of government both abroad (the collapse of the international monetary and financial systems under the weight of blowout deficit spending on WWI) and at home (the failure of the recently created Federal Reserve to provide the liquidity needed to protect our banking system from deposit runs).

And yet today, we still hear cries us to eliminate the billionaires, and the Democratic Party has turned to leaders that proudly identify as socialists while vilifying people like Jeff Bezos, whose own working class father fled Cuba as a penniless teenager for the opportunity to work tirelessly so his children could pursue a dream that is, because of free market capitalism, uniquely American.

To paraphrase Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby): And so we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past because of misleading narratives of capitalist greed that disguise the fact that all of human history reveals political greed as the real impediment to genuine progress.

Today we face important challenges, but none that are greater than those we have overcome time and again throughout our storied history. Here’s to hoping your day is as bright as America’s future.

- Todd, May 24, 2026

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In 1939, Frank Capra directed Mr. Smith goes to Washington, which won an Oscar for Best Original Story. In the film, Jimmy Stewart played Jefferson Smith, a political outsider suddenly sent to the nation’s capital to fill a senate vacancy. Initially awed by the city and the politicians he admired, Mr. Smith soon finds out that one of the senators he idolized is involved in a scheme to defraud a pork barrel spending project. The corrupt senator and his cohorts initially try to intimidate Smith, but when he refuses to back down the political machine shifts gears and tries and frame him (Smith) for the graft they (the senators) were committing. Smith still refuses to buckle and eventually breaks the corrupt senator’s resolve, all of which simultaneously reveals Washington’s crooked self interest while also restoring confidence that, at least in America, good ultimately prevails over the forces of political greed aligned against it.

Just this past week, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer delivered a speech on the senate floor where he criticized President Trump’s trip to China, “There’s an old saying that ‘only Nixon could go to China’, but soon they’ll say: ‘only Trump could sell out to China. …Donald Trump wants a deal with China so badly he could sell out America on manufacturing, he could sell out on chips, he could sell out on Taiwan…just so he can get the satisfaction of saying he made a deal.”

These allegations were the height of irony.

Mr. Schumer was first elected to the senate in 1998. Thereafter he and the presidents he served under sat idly by as China cleaned our clock in trade negotiations. In 2000, Bill Clinton granted China Permanent Normal Trade Relations status, which meant that the U.S. charged tariffs on Chinese goods of only around 3.0%. Tariffs remained at this level throughout the Bush and Obama administrations, even as it became increasingly clear that China was engaging in intellectual property theft and other unfair trade practices. Bush, Obama and Schumer’s senate were afraid of standing up to China for fear that it could start a trade war that would push us into a recession, which would tarnish their political ambitions.

Adding insult to injury, China used their trade windfall to undertake one of the largest military build-ups in history, which it then used to strengthen the Chinese Communist Party at the expense of its own people and to become our most dangerous global adversary. But then, contrary to Schumer’s twisted criticisms, things finally began to change when, during his first term in office, President Trump had the courage to both expose what was happening and do something about it. By the end of 2019, Trump had pushed the average tariff on Chinese goods up by over 6 times the level of the Clinton – Bush – Obama (and Schumer) years, to around 20%.

Early last year, at the beginning of his second term, Trump proposed even higher tariffs on China. When Xi Jinping countered with increased levies of his own, Trump pushed up the tariffs up to nearly 150%. This was consistent with Trump’s negotiatng style, which is to start big and then negotiate down. Further, because of the mistakes made by his predecessors, our supply chains had previously become so dependent on China that it was impossible to play hardball and keep tariffs at this level. Nevertheless, when Trump ultimately (and predictably) reached a deal to bring the tariffs back down, the anti-Trump crowd began to yell TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out).

These false charges not only ignored the fact that Trump was the only one with the fortitude to take on these issues in the first place, they also ignored the end result of our president’s beautifully orchestrated negotiating strategy. By the time all was said and done, Trump had made Xi feel as if he won an important victory in front of a global audience even as Trump roughly doubled the tariff rates from his first term.

Let’s be clear: our trade relationship with China is a bipartisan issue; everyone should hope that the president strikes the best deal possible for America. And yet, just as we discussed last week with respect to Iran, what we see in last weeks China summit are people like Chuck Schumer actually trying to spin an upcoming summit with our most dangerous rival in our opponents favor!

But by the time Air Force One was on its way back home, it was abundantly clear that Mr. Schumer’s shriveling criticisms said far more about the senator and the Democratic Party than they did about the president: there was no sell out on manufacturing, no sell out on chips, and no sell out on Taiwan (although there are tricky considerations here, given that the president doesn’t want to needlessly provoke China while we are still at war in Iran). Also contrary to Schumer’s attempt to politicize the trip, Trump came away without any grand deal to announce.

So, what was the point of going?

The fact is, Trump dominates the global stage in a way we haven’t seen since the presidencies of Ronald Reagan (1980s) and Franklin D. Roosevelt (1930s and ‘40s) in the last century. Trump derangement syndrome itself is evidence of how much political mindshare he has cornered. This is the dominating role that Xi fancies for himself. But, as we’ve seen, Trump’s tariff policy has already dealt a harsh blow to China’s aspirations, as have the Trump-driven turn of events in Panama, Venezuela and (soon) Cuba. And while there is still work to be done in Iran, Trump’s initiatives there have the potential to significantly curtail China’s ability to exploit the Middle East.

Suffice to say, the hidden reality is that, compared to Trump and the U.S., Xi and China are a shrinking violet on the very stage where they desperately want to be seen as an ascendant power. As noted earlier, if Schumer et al hadn’t failed so miserably in preventing our dependence on China in the first place, we could take a much harder stance. But, given his predecessors failures, Trump has no choice but to dance a delicate diplomatic tight rope as he works to decouple us from a relationship we are still dependent on.

At the risk of mixing one too many metaphors: what we saw this week was a bit like the epic tale of The Trojan Horse meets the fable of The Emperor’s New Clothes, where the established world leader (Trump) disguises himself as a deferential tailor who is welcomed into a would-be rival’s encampment on the pre-text of fitting him for a new robe, only for the crafty “tailor” to then waltz out with his now disrobed competitor’s entire wardrobe in tow.

In other words, we should all be glad that it was Mr. Trump – and not Mr. Schumer, Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama, or Mr. Biden – who went to China last week.

Today we face important challenges, but none that are greater than those we have overcome time and again throughout our storied history. Here’s to hoping your day is as bright as America’s future.

- Todd, May 17, 2026

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To purchase a copy of my book, 2008: What Really Happened, please go to Amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, Bookshop.org, or encounterbooks.com.

In a recent CNN interview, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman acknowledged what many of his fellow Democrats won’t admit: that their opposition to the war in Iran is largely political: “I really want to see Iran defeated militarily because this regime is a terrible regime for its people and the region …So I’m all for that. …On the other hand…I don’t want to see Bibi Netanyahu or Donald Trump politically strengthened by this war because they are two awful human beings.”

Deep down, Mr. Friedman understands the differences between this and past conflicts like Vietnam.

In the early 1960s, Viet Nam was a small country that played a minor role in the world’s economy. It was nowhere near the acquisition of a nuclear weapon. Other than the widely accepted (but later disproved) “Domino Theory” that we needed to fight the spread of communism across the globe to win the Cold War, Vietnam was insignificant geopolitically. Nevertheless, Lyndon B. Johnson massively escalated the war, pushing troop deployments up from around 16,000 in 1963 to over 500,000 in 1968.

Today, Iran is a country of over 90 million with oil and gas resources that are among the most valuable in the world. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC) has exploited these assets to enrich itself at the expense of its countrymen, to build one of the most powerful militias in one of the most economically critical regions in the world, to fund regional terrorism, to pursue nuclear weapons, and to bolster its alliance with China and Russia in what has become something of a Cold War 2.0.

Each of the last three Democratic presidents also recognized that Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons is an existential threat:

Former President Bill Clinton (2006): “… this is an unacceptable path that they must stop or action will have to be taken … there’s not going to be any alternative but to deny them a nuclear weapons program.”

Then President Barack Obama (2015): “Iran is pursuing its nuclear ambitions and sponsoring violent extremists across the globe...our policy is prevention, not containment.”

Then Vice President and later President Joe Biden (2015): “I want to be clear: Iran will never get a nuclear weapon on my watch.”

And yet, Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders (and many in his party and on the isolationist right) have alleged that President Trump has entangled us in a new quagmire: “The American people were lied to about Vietnam, with tragic consequences. The American people were lied to about Iraq, with tragic consequences. The American people are being lied to again today. We cannot allow history to repeat.”

But this is little more than false equivalency in pursuit of political expediency.

Viet Nam lasted 14 years, resulted in 58,000 U.S. fatalities, and in 300,000 U.S. casualties.

Iraq dragged on for 8 years, caused over 4,000 U.S. fatalities and 32,000 casualties.

Epic Fury lasted less than 2 months, and has resulted in 15 U.S. fatalities and a little over 500 casualties.

As a hard-core believer in free speech, I don’t question the right of Mr. Friedman or Mr. Sanders to express their beliefs. But when leaders put their political interests ahead of American interests in something as important as this war, they sow division that plays into enemy hands. In a recent article titled “How Iran is Gaining Ground in the Information War”, The Wall Street Journal described Iran’s new PR tactics,“ The narrative they aim to promote is simple: Trump is Israel First, not America First, and Americans are paying the price for a war started to distract attention from the Epstein files.”

In other words: Iran’s new PR program plays off of and reinforces what has become standard fare for the domestic anti-Trump crowd.

In effect, many Democrats and isolationist Republicans are pushing for President Trump to withdraw too soon under the weight of public opinion. In so doing, they are empowering an otherwise decimated enemy whose only remaining chance for survival lies in their conviction that we will give in before they do. This only emboldens Iran to perpetuate the hostilities, putting additional lives at risk.

Once again: our leaders have the right to express their opinions. And we have the right to decide who we vote for and listen to.

Today we face important challenges, but none that are greater than those we have overcome time and again throughout our storied history. Here’s to hoping your day is as bright as America’s future.

- Todd, May 10, 2026

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As the old saying goes: history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

In 1981, a recently elected Ronald Reagan was in the midst of initiating: a) the free market reforms that reinvigorated our long dormant economy, and b) the defense build up that would eventually win the Cold War. On a dark and gloomy afternoon in late March, Reagan emerged from a speech at the Washington Hilton only to encounter a young assassin who, in a span of a few seconds, fired off 6 rounds from a handgun, one of which ricocheted off the president’s black limousine before striking his rib cage and lodging in his lung. By the time Reagan reached the George Washington University Hospital, our commander and chief was perilously close to death. As he was rushed into the emergency room, the irrepressible Reagan looked up from the operating table and said, “I hope you are all Republicans.” To which one of his surgeons famously replied, “Today, Mr. President, we are all Republicans.”

This past weekend history rhymed once again when a young assassin attempted to charge the ballroom at the Washington Hilton where President Trump was preparing to give a speech. Like Reagan, Trump is in the early phases of trying to turn our economy around while also fighting a new Cold War against China and its allies. Fortunately he avoided being shot but, given today’s politics, there is little chance he would have heard encouraging words of solidarity if he had been hit.

So, why have Trump’s opponents become so discordant as to preclude them from expressing support for the president on any and everything? Why, in the short term, are calls for greater unity likely to fail? And will things ever return to a sense of normalcy?

The answer to these questions lies with the far left.

The modern arc of progressivism began in the 1960s with the rise of the young radical left fighting various combinations of establishment Democrats and Republicans on everything from Civil Rights to Free Speech and the Viet Nam War. At this early point, the young radicals were a positive force in trying to move America closer to the classical liberal ideas that inspired our founding by elevating the preeminence of the individual over the brute force of the politically empowered state. Nowhere was this more evident that in Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous vision: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

In spite of their early successes, however, the progressives were still young and not yet in control of their party. At the time of the assassination attempt on Reagan, the Democratic Party was still largely under the control of an “old guard” that shared a bi-partisan view of America as a country that, in spite of it’s flaws, was a great and exceptional nation. One that: finally brought slavery (which had existed in America for over 150 years prior to our founding) to an end, saved Europe from self-destruction in the two World Wars, and embraced ideas of meritocracy that, along with free market economic principles, created the middle class. The two-decade boom kicked off by Reagan’s free market reforms, his dramatic victory in the Cold War, and then (Democrat) Bill Clinton’s continuation of Reaganomics - laced with a healthy dose of Clinton’s fiscal responsibility - more or less persevered this bi-partisan view of America through the 1990s.

But as time went on, and especially as the successes of the ‘80s and ‘90s gave way to the failures of the 2000s, what had once been the young radical left matured into the leadership of many of our most important institutions, including the traditional media, the educational system, and the Democratic Party. As they rose to power, what we found was a regime no longer focused on helping America become more aligned with the Western values that first lifted the masses up from the ash heap of history, but rather a regime driven to overthrow those ideals in pursuit of a new system of government-directed collectivism and political privilege.

When they encountered resistance, the newly empowered far-left turned to canceling the free speech rights (for others) that they had originally fought for (for themselves). Unsure and afraid of how to respond, Republicans largely succumbed to the new rules of the road …until Donald Trump emerged on the political scene. Unafraid and undeterred by the left’s self-serving political correctness, Trump represented a challenge to the newly entrenched power structure that was not unlike the role originally played by the young radicals back in the 1960s.

The newly ascendant Democratic regime responded by trying to cancel Trump’s political agenda including, among many other attacks, by trying to brand him as Hitler and as an existential threat to democracy. As their verbal vehemence grew in force and outrage, it inevitably came to justify actions of violence reminiscent of the various attacks on the liberal leaders of the1960s. Hakeem Jefferies, House minority leader and leader of the House Democratic Caucus, succinctly described this attitude when he recently stated, “We are in an era of maximum warfare everywhere, all the time.” What he and his regime have effectively said is: we will stop at nothing in our mission to topple the Western values our country was founded on and replace them with our own vision for the nation.

Obviously, this is no formula for bi-partisanship, which is why the modern Democratic Party can’t even bring itself to support a war that many (ala New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman) actually agree with. And it is why so many in the party (ala Jimmy Kimmel) can’t even bring themselves to directly condemn an assassination attempt on the president’s life.

So, will this ever end?

I believe it will, but only after America decides (at the ballot box) if it wants to pursue a better version of itself by working to continue extending the ideals of classical liberalism throughout our society; or if we are going to re-embrace the types of government imposed collectivism and systems of political privilege that created the ash heap of history in the first place.

Today we face important challenges, but none that are greater than those we have overcome time and again throughout our storied history. Here’s to hoping your day is as bright as America’s future.

- Todd, May 3, 2026

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President Trump originally estimated Operation Epic Fury would last around 4-6 weeks. But in spite of the extraordinary military success achieved within this time frame, the end of the conflict is not yet in sight. So, let’s begin with why we are (still) in Iran and then look at where things currently stand.

In short, the war continues because the historic opportunity to make the world a substantially safer and more prosperous place still exists and the winds of war have revealed that our original mission is even more important than we previously realized.

THE HISTORIC OPPORTUNITY

Early this year, strategic, situational, and tactical elements all came together in a manner that President Trump recognized and acted on.

The Strategic Opportunity rested on the recognition of three critical issues.

First, Trump understood that Iran, and not Israel, is the primary source of violence and instability in the Middle East.

Second, the president recognized that this is no longer our father’s Middle East. Fifty years ago, the Ayatollah and others convinced Iran and the region that the path to a better life included rejecting the United States and its Western values and embracing government imposed collectivism. Much like what happened in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba and Venezuela, the people of the Middle East have since learned hard lesson about hollow collectivist promises. Today, the region is ready to embrace and align with the U.S. and Israel, but Iran still stands in the way of peace and progress.

Third, the president recognized that toppling Iran would also deal a crippling blow to China’s geopolitical ambitions.

The Situational Opportunity

For over a century stretching from the Civil War to the World Wars and then the Cold War, America saw itself as a force for good in the world. But then the failures of Viet Nam, Iraq and Afghanistan began to weigh on this view. More recently, however, a series of remarkably successful operations engineered by President Trump and his team have combined to reestablish the confidence needed to pursue the historic opportunity now at hand.

The Tactical Opportunity

By early this year, Israel’s successful campaigns against Iran and its proxies, Operation Midnight Hammer, and the president’s sanctions had pushed the regime to the brink of collapse. Israeli intelligence then revealed the opportunity to simultaneously decapitate much of the regime and degrade its military.

Recognizing all of this, Trump authorized Operation Epic Fury.

THE WINDS OF WAR

In spite of Epic Fury’s overwhelming success, the Iranian regime has so far refused to buckle. With their conventional military largely destroyed, they have resorted to terrorist tactics in closing the Strait of Hormuz. It is important to understand that this is not a new tactical weapon that arose because of Epic Fury, in fact far from it.

During its war with Iraq, Iran mined the Strait in the early 1980s, which led the U.S. into our largest commitment of naval resources since World War II to help reopen it. In the early 2010s, Iran responded to sanctions by threatening that “not a drop” of oil would pass through the Strait and conducted large-scale naval drills to back up the threat - causing the price of oil to surge to $120 per barrel. In 2019, Iran mined a portion of the Strait and seized a British tanker.

Obviously Epic Fury did not hand Iran a new geopolitical weapon, but it did expose just how dangerous this tactic can be, which highlights the importance of taking on the regime while it is still weak and of preventing them from also adding nuclear weapons to their arsenal.

STALEMATE IN THE STRAIT?

Much of the media asserts that the conflict is now at a standoff, but this hardly describes the overall condition of the war and its combatants. On one side, Iran’s military industrial complex has been decimated and our naval blockade is further tightening the economic noose around a country already on the brink of collapse. On the other side, America is relatively insulated from the economic impact of the war and our military has experienced remarkably small losses given their accomplishments.

At this point, two key things stand in the way of transformational change. The first is the willingness of the IRGC to destroy their country and sacrifice their people as they desperately cling to power. And the second is the regime’s belief that, consistent with our history, Trump will ultimately throw in the towel if they can only hold out long enough.

Unfortunately, many of the war’s critics are pressuring the president to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Some have understandable concerns, but too much of what we hear is driven by an anti-Western /socialist agenda that sees the U.S. and Israel as the core problem. Others have been so disoriented by Trump Derangement Syndrome they find it nearly impossible to support anything the president does. And still others have been so blinded by isolationism that they have failed to recognize just how dangerous the world became during our retreat from the global stage. But the winds of public opinion will ultimately shift from the spin doctored by those seeking political advantage to the weight of the War’s accomplishments.

Let’s all hope that President Trump can find a way to seize the historic opportunity to accelerate the collapse of this terrorist regime, unleash a new era of peace and prosperity in the Middle East and, in the process, checkmate China, all of which would favorably shift the arc of world history.

Today we face important challenges, but none that are greater than those we have overcome time and again throughout our storied history. Here’s to hoping your day is as bright as America’s future.

- Todd, April 26, 2026

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Last week we discussed the politically bi-polar response to President Trump’s threat to bomb Iranian infrastructure. His critics initially claimed the threats were evidence he is a crazed warmonger who is unfit to serve. But then, after Trump successfully avoided escalation and brought Iran to the negotiating table, they shifted to crying TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out). To turn an old phrase, Trump’s critics were twice wrong but never shy.

Trump’s over-the-top threats were simply part of a unique negotiating style he has employed throughout his life, as evidenced by the following quotes from his 1987 book, The Art of the Deal:

One thing I’ve learned about the press is that they’re always hungry for a good story, and the more sensational the better …The point is that if you are a little different, or a little outrageous, or if you do things that are bold or controversial, the press is going to write about you. I’ve always done things a little differently, I don’t mind controversy, and my deals tend to be somewhat ambitious.

…The final way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.

I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration – and a very effective form of promotion.

Along with all the theatrics, Trump also recognizes that none of it will amount to much if you can’t deliver and don’t also consider the costs: I believe in spending what you have to. But I also believe in not spending more than you should …The point is you can dream great dreams, but they’ll never amount to much if you can’t turn them into reality at a reasonable cost.

Obviously, the TACO charge made no sense – if it did, then who authorized Operation Epic Fury in the first place? So, maybe we need a new acronym, which is where Tea-BAG comes in: the president Talks Big, but Acts Guardedly (as in, from Dictionary.com: cautious, careful, prudent).

Which brings us back to last weekend’s negotiations. When it became clear Iran wasn’t prepared to meet Trump’s demands or even bargain in good faith, his team withdrew from the negotiating table but, contrary to the histrionics from his critics, he also maintained the truce. This created a bit of a dilemma: how do you keep the negotiating door open while building pressure on Iran to do something, all without breaking the ceasefire?

Trump’s answer was a naval blockade; a gutsy but brilliant tactic that simultaneously: shut off Iran’s oil sales and imports (which creates an enormous incentive for them to come back to the bargaining table), shifted control of the Strait of Hormuz from our enemy to us, and left open the potential to strike back against Iranian infrastructure (as Trump originally threatened to do) if Iran attacks the blockade or the ceasefire comes to an end.

So far, Iran has not attacked the blockade. This could be a sign that, in spite of all their bluster, they know Epic Fury has effectively toasted their capabilities; or that they are just biding their time before taking action. Only time will tell the ultimate fate of the Strait, which brings us to NATO; or, perhaps more appropriately: NETO (the Non-Existent Treaty Organization). The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported this week that European leaders were busy setting up meetings to “Free Up Hormuz”, but only “after the fighting has ended, which officials say could be some time away.”

All of which is a bit like if FDR had declared war on Germany during WW II …contingent on Europe first defeating Hitler and the Nazis.

Another WSJ article this week blared the headline, “Iran’s Regime Has Changed – for the Worse”; a sentiment expressed by many of Trump’s critics. But we have to ask: do we really believe the new regime will be worse than the prior one that killed hundreds of Americans, thousands of Israelis, and tens of thousands of their own citizens? Worse than the regime behind the horrific October 7 attack on Israel? Worse than the regime that has long stood as the primary impediment to a more peaceful and prosperous Middle East, and that continuously violated prior commitments as they surreptitiously pursued nuclear weapons?

And, even if a harder line of leadership really has somehow emerged, are we really to believe that after sinking their navy, destroying their air force, degrading their missile capacity and leveling their military industrial-complex, this new regime is somehow more dangerous than the one that had all these assets at their disposal?

As I mentioned last week, it is still too early to call victory here. But the Trump hyperbole that brought Iran to the negotiating table and the naval blockade that has put further economic pressure on Iran and shifted control over the Persian Gulf were sound tactical moves, and entirely consistent with the notion that our president Talks Big, but Acts Guardedly in the pursuit of noble causes.

Today we face important challenges, but none that are greater than those we have overcome time and again throughout our storied history. Here’s to hoping your day is as bright as America’s future.

- Todd, April 16, 2026

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This past Easter Sunday, with tension building toward a looming Tuesday deadline, President Trump posted an expletive-laced tweet threatening to destroy power plants and bridges if the Iranian regime refused to open the Strait of Hormuz. On Tuesday, he followed up by threatening that “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” if Iran continued to defy these demands.

In an interview on The Daily podcast, New York Times National Security correspondent David Sanger read the text of Trump’s quotes but then jumped to the conclusion that the president had threatened to wipe out 90 million Iranian civilians. Others making this same logical leap included not just those who have long tried to brand the president as Hitler, but also isolationists and others in the Republican Party. Many went so far as to admonish Republicans to invoke the 25^th amendment and remove Trump from power – all based on their interpretation of his comments.

Other observers, however, saw the controversial remarks as typical Trump hyperbole elevated to meet the gravity of the moment and designed to bring a recalcitrant regime to the negotiating table. Support for this view included the negotiating style that Trump wrote about nearly 40 years ago in The Art of the Deal, his employment of that style throughout his career and while in office – most recently with respect to Greenland, and the context for his remarks, which were framed by the prior comments about taking out bridges and electricity sources.

With respect to these latter items, critics also alleged that destroying such infrastructure is a violation of international law; but this actually depends on a series of complicated interpretations regarding the military importance of such infrastructure and the affect on the civilian population. Which raises the question, how is this to be judged if the purpose is to destroy infrastructure that enables a regime that recently killed over 30,000 of its civilians and really is something of a reincarnation of Hitler and the Nazis? Would anyone really suggest that, if the opportunity had presented itself, destroying Nazi infrastructure to prevent later aggressions would have been a bad thing to do? The harsh reality is that the brutal choices presented by untrustworthy and hostile regimes often don’t fit so neatly into legal frameworks that assume everyone is playing by the rules.

Returning to the incendiary posts that ignited this firestorm in the first place: fortunately, we don’t have to debate whether the Trump as Hitler or the Trump as master negotiator narrative more accurately captured the moment. If Trump really were a deranged madman, he would have proceeded with attacks to recklessly destroy Iran and its people. But this is not what happened. Rather, Trump’s tactics proved at least temporarily successful in averting escalation and in bringing about a ceasefire and face-to-face negotiations.

After choosing diplomacy over escalation, many of those who had accused him of being hell bent on killing innocent people then shifted to their TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) narrative. But this makes no more sense than the madman accusations. After all: Trump wasn’t too chicken to take us out of the disastrous Obama deal that funded Iran’s hostile ambitions; he wasn’t afraid of imposing harsh sanctions on Iran; he wasn’t afraid of taking out Soleimani, Maduro, or the Ayatollah; and he wasn’t afraid of initiating Operation Midnight Hammer and Epic Fury.

These accomplishments not withstanding, none of this is meant to say that the war is already a great victory, as the administration and many of its supporters have claimed. True, we have significantly decapitated the regime and set back its ability to project power. But its persistence and control over the Strait of Hormuz, remaining nuclear materials, and the oil reserves that fund its aggressions are all important setbacks.

So then, setting both the Hitler/TACO talks and premature victory claims aside, what are we to make of Trump’s recent string of on-again / off-again negotiations?

The reality is that he is weighing a very difficult decision about how to bring the war to an optimal conclusion. On one hand we have the extraordinary opportunity to take out one of the (along with China and Russia) three most dangerous threats to peace and stability in the world. On the other hand, there is the risk of getting trapped in boots-on-the-ground missions (to open the Strait, remove the nuclear materials, or secure the oil) where the costs of engagement could quickly begin to overwhelm the benefits. Far from acting like either a deranged warmonger or the cowering TACO chip his critics have tried to portray him as, Trump’s history of courageous and successful interventions and his recent efforts to seek a negotiated settlement in Iran are all evidence of someone who is carefully balancing both the opportunities and risks involved.

In short, only Trump and his advisors have a complete picture of the options (and related risks) available to bring this war to its best possible conclusion. Contrary to all of the spin, he has earned our confidence and support in making that decision. In the end, the success or failure of Operation Epic Fury won’t be determined by the spin-doctors. Rather, success or failure will be a function of whether this operation adds to (or subtracts from) all of the steps Trump has already taken to enhance future peace and prosperity at an acceptable cost. At this point, there are still too many unresolved factors to jump to a meaningful and objective opinion in this regard, but we will likely know more soon as these historic events continue to unfold before our eyes.

Today we face important challenges, but none that are greater than those we have overcome time and again throughout our storied history. Here’s to hoping your day is as bright as America’s future.

- Todd, April 12, 2026

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