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In November 2008, California voters approved a ballot measure to build a bullet train from San Francisco to Los Angeles. It was supposed to be fast enough to make the journey in under three hours. And passengers could hop on by 2020, for a total cost of $33 billion. Eighteen years later, there
Several days ago, just as America’s national debt topped $40 trillion for the first time, China’s official propaganda outlets took the opportunity to mock the United States over this ominous milestone. Xinhua is the Chinese government’s official news agency, and they published a scathing commentary comparing the US national debt to Frankenstein and
King Hammurabi of Babylon had a simple rule for home builders: if the house you built collapsed and killed its owner, you were put to death. That was law #229, carved in stone almost 4,000 years ago. And some version of this rule has existed for most of human history. Even to this
In 2012, a 76-year-old Vietnam veteran named Jerry Meekins bought a $197 Spirit Airlines ticket to Atlantic City to visit his daughter. Then his doctor told him two things: he had terminal cancer, and he could not fly. Meekins asked for his money back. Spirit said no. He offered a letter from his
In June of 1944, American soldiers were storming the beaches of Normandy, leading the fight to defeat the Nazis. Back home, Americans gave everything they had. Some 85 million bought war bonds. The top income tax rate hit 94%, the highest in US history. Even ordinary people paid more and more income tax
If you were to head to Bloomberg, CNBC, or Yahoo Finance this morning and see virtually all green across the board in US markets, you wouldn’t think it’s a sad day for America. And yet, despite stocks being up and investors positively effervescent, it is indeed a sad day, because today marks the
Four years ago this month, Washington passed a law and named it, with a straight face, the Inflation Reduction Act. Bizarrely, their plan to ‘reduce inflation’, which had been caused by excessive government spending, was for the government to spend even more money. It’s genius! Among its various provisions, part of the legislation
When Walmart founder Sam Walton passed away in 1992, his family fortune made him the wealthiest person on the planet… by far. His Walton Family Enterprises was worth $23.8 billion— nearly four times as much as Bill Gates at the time. And if he were still alive today, Walton would be the second-richest
Arguably the most famous man on the planet throughout the 1700s was the famed writer Francois-Marie Arouet, known to history as Voltaire. He wasn’t just a celebrity writer and philosopher, however; Voltaire was also a wealthy capitalist and nobleman who almost single-handedly turned the impoverished region of Ferney into a highly productive watchmaking
In 2023, Jason Arday became the youngest black professor in Cambridge University’s history. His story, as told in a decade of glowing profiles, was the stuff of Hollywood. Arday was autistic and nonverbal until age 11, and could not read or write until 18. He was epileptic, yet ran 30 marathons in 35
[Editor’s note: This letter was written by Schiff Sovereign’s CEO, Viktorija, who was born and raised in Lithuania and is now based between Mexico City and Panama.] It’s been about 15 years since I moved away from the tiny village in rural Lithuania where I grew up… and back then it still felt
In the year 711, a Berber commander named Tar-iq ibn Ziyad crossed from North Africa with a reported 7,000 men and landed at the base of the mountain that still carries his name: Jabal Tar-iq (Tar-iq’s Mountain). The name eventually became Jabal-tar, or Gibraltar. Tar-iq’s army was the western tip of a new
Government at every level had a productive week: threats were identified, action was taken, and press releases went out. Just kidding. It was another ridiculous week of mind-numbing incompetence and waste. The Senate’s answer to childhood diabetes: ban Tony the Tiger Senator Bernie Sanders— himself quite a wealthy man— has spent his career
“Press is going wild with me,” Dr. Anthony Fauci wrote in his diary on March 22, 2020, days after he had helped pressure the country into shutting down in the name of COVID. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee just released 1,141 pages of his near-daily entries from the COVID era,
The Department of Transportation’s headquarters campus in Washington spans two complexes covering 1.8 million square feet across 11-acre of prime DC real estate. In the private sector, such a trophy office property would fetch north of $1 billion per year in rental income. Yet for the federal government, two-thirds of the space sits