Anthropic’s Claude Mythos leak is not a surprise. It was an inevitability. And it teaches us something important about how power actually works in the information age — and why the entire edifice o...
The Performance of Planning In my worst depressive episodes, making plans felt like church youth group theatre. I was performing. The audience was a small cast: authority figures who needed to be...
Florida’s Growth-Funded Model Florida has no personal income tax and sustains itself on a combination of sales taxes, property taxes, documentary stamp taxes on real estate transactions, and the e...
New York’s Fiscal Complexity New York is both a state and a city in a way that complicates most fiscal analysis. New York City’s budget is larger than most states. The fiscal fortunes of the state...
California’s Singular Scale California’s economy is roughly the size of the United Kingdom’s. Its state government collects more revenue than most countries. Its fiscal decisions ripple through na...
Texas’s Fiscal Model Texas is the most influential fiscal model in American state government—a large, fast-growing state that has maintained no personal income tax, attracted enormous business inv...
Ohio’s Fiscal Middle Ground Ohio is the Midwest’s great median case—large enough to matter, diverse enough to reflect the full range of regional tensions, and fiscally positioned neither at the cr...
Illinois’s Fiscal Crisis in Context Illinois is the cautionary tale of American state finance—a large, productive economy with a world-class city at its center that has nonetheless accumulated one...
Indiana’s Fiscal Identity Indiana has cultivated a reputation for conservative, stable fiscal management that is largely deserved. Among the Great Lakes states, it stands out for maintaining a bal...
The Fiscal Character of the West The West is America’s most fiscally diverse region—home to California’s singular economic scale, the extractive-industry booms and busts of the Mountain states, an...