‘Public outrage at billionaire tax dodging is understandable’

Zachary Liscow at The New York Times

The U.S. is “seeing an increasing concentration of wealth,” and “for many Americans, taxing the rich more is an obvious move,” says Zachary Liscow. Ask “tax policy experts how to do this, and you will often hear novel proposals,” but Congress “has a simpler, tried-and-true tax policy to choose from: raising the rates.” The ultra-rich “mostly aren’t escaping the tax system through exotic loopholes,” so increasing rates “would generate hundreds of billions of dollars over a decade.”

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‘Aboriginal violence is Australia’s blind spot’

Julie Szego at UnHerd

An Aboriginal Australian girl’s murder has “reignited” the “fraught argument about Aboriginal disadvantage and collective guilt,” says Julie Szego. But it’s “apparently the hardest thing in the world to speak plainly about violence in Aboriginal communities — and how that violence too often endures under the cover of preserving Indigenous ‘culture.’” More “frustrating still is that these debates are increasingly engulfed in meta debates about the moral legitimacy of Australia — and indeed Western civilization more generally.”

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‘Why is it so hard to be ordinary?’

Joshua Rothman at The New Yorker

What is “true for Little League holds for the rest of life,” says Joshua Rothman. In “some contexts, at some times, we strive for excellence, pushing ourselves. Elsewhere, we shrug, accepting our own ordinariness or mediocrity.” The “excellent and the ordinary coexist, but have an uneasy relationship.” Society is “shaped by the relentless pursuit of excellence,” and “against the backdrop of constant progress, ordinariness feels like backsliding.” Without “improvement, we get nowhere; without excellence, we wallow.”

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‘India is being left to die in the heat’

Vidya Krishnan at Al Jazeera

India is “experiencing an extraordinary summer,” as extreme heat is “causing not just heart attacks, but also kidney injury, affecting sleep quality and exacerbating numerous chronic conditions,” says Vidya Krishnan. The “majority of heat-related deaths go unrecorded in India.” The heat is “reinforcing longstanding inequalities of caste, class and gender in poor and marginalized communities.” A “prime minister who does not believe in climate change will not be an ally in the fight against extreme weather events.”

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