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This article is read by Eunice Wong, a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible's list of Best Women Narrators. Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actor

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Text originally published Jan. 12, 2025

A coalition of commercial pornographers, styling themselves as the “Free Speech Coalition,” is asserting that Texas is threatening their First Amendment liberties by making them legally responsible for verifying the age of viewers who use their websites.

Anyone operating with a vestige of a moral compass, however, should sense something farcical in the pornographers’ preening efforts to claim the moral high ground. Yet given the state of precedent, they have reason to expect the Supreme Court to side with them and prevent Texas from enforcing a law to stop porn from flooding into children’s minds.

The process by which the nation’s highest court came to abet the industrial scale of pornography distribution might be fairly described as diabolical. And no, that’s not hyperbole. I use “diabolical” in the etymological sense espoused by Professor D.C. Schindler, in which a division (dia-ballo means “to divide”) is made between reality and appearance, and appearance is made to substitute for reality in a way that is simultaneously appealing but self-defeating.

Pornography generally, and the digital porn industry specifically, is diabolical both in its puerile appeals to consumers and the legalistic appeals it makes to the courts.

On this episode of Dollars & Sense, Greg and Elinor discuss the December quarter inflation figures, the political battle over the economy, and Dutton’s appointment of Jacinta Nampijinpa Price to an Elon Musk-style ‘government efficiency’ position.

This discussion was recorded on Thursday 30 January 2025 and things may have changed since recording.

In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14.

Order What’s the Big Idea? 32 Big Ideas for a Better Australia now, via the Australia Institute website.

Host: Greg Jericho, Chief Economist, the Australia Institute and Centre for Future Work // @grogsgamut

Host: Elinor Johnston-Leek, Senior Content Producer, the Australia Institute // @elinorjohnstonleek

Show notes:

‘No more excuses: the time has come for the RBA to cut interest rates’ by Greg Jericho, Guardian Australia (January 2025)

National housing campaign Everybody’s Home is calling for greater financial support for renters on the lowest incomes, as new figures reveal that more than two in five rent assistance recipients remain in rental stress despite rises to the payment.

The latest Productivity Commission’s Report on Government Services shows nearly 42 per cent of low-income households that received Commonwealth Rent Assistance (CRA) were still paying more than 30 per cent of their income on rent in 2023-24.

Everybody’s Home spokesperson Maiy Azize emphasised that the figures highlight the urgent need to reform CRA, and increase the rate of Centrelink payments, to better support renters who’re doing it tough.

“The fact that more than two in five people who receive rent assistance are still in rental stress highlights the extreme cost of rents and the low rate of JobSeeker,” Ms Azize said.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Cruel Kids and Theater Kids | The Roundtable Ep. 252

The uphill battle to restore common sense continues with Trump’s executive orders against gender ideology and transition for minors. Meanwhile, a rebellion against the liberal establishment takes joyous shape among normalcy-craving youth. Pinehill Capital president and We the People podcast host Gates Garcia joins the guys to discuss these vibe shifts and the extremely hinged reaction from the Left as they struggle to meet the positivity, branding, and hype of the Right.

Recommended reading:

The Cruel Kids’ Table

President Trump’s recent executive order, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” denies that the 14th Amendment grants automatic citizenship to children of illegal aliens born on U.S. soil. Furthermore, it directs the U.S. Department of State and federal agencies not to recognize those children as citizens nor grant them such privileges of citizenship such as being issued U.S. passports.

Numerous scholars have weighed in against the arguments presented in Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order. They claim that a plain reading of the 14th Amendment, along with its historical context and the practice of citizenship both before and after its passage, and the Supreme Court’s decision in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) are incontrovertible proof that birthright citizenship is an absolute right under the Constitution.

It might surprise most Australians to know that Australia’s Vice-Chancellors – the ‘CEOs’ of the today’s corporatised university sector – are among the highest paid in the world.

This was not always the case. In 1985, Vice-Chancellors were already paid quite generously, over $300,000 per year in today’s terms (all salary figures are adjusted for inflation to 2024 dollars). At this time remuneration for Vice-Chancellors was partially regulated through the Academic Salaries Tribunal. In the late 1980s, the Hawke government implemented the ‘Dawkins Revolution’, a range of reforms to the higher education system which included replacement of free university education with HECS and the deregulation of Vice-Chancellor salaries. By 1995, remuneration for Vice-Chancellors in the Group of Eight (Go8) universities had more than doubled, to about $660,000.

By 2023, generosity had become absurdity, and remuneration for Go8 Vice-Chancellors reached nearly $1.3 million per year, more than quadrupling since 1985.

This exorbitant remuneration for Vice-Chancellors is not however improving the learning experience of students. There is no strong relationship between Vice-Chancellor pay and student satisfaction – and if anything those universities with higher paid vice-chancellors are more likely to have lower student satisfaction.

When I arrived in Arizona last October to participate in nearly a month of get-out-the-vote efforts, I knew the state would be one of the most fiercely contested battlegrounds in the 2024 presidential election. Joe Biden had won by fewer than 11,000 votes in 2020, making Arizona a potential game-changer for the GOP. Talking to dozens of Grand Canyon State voters—especially younger ones—I became convinced that Donald Trump had tapped into something special. He had connected with the “normies” in a way that leads me to believe Arizona will remain Republican for years to come.

In Arizona, the youth vote—defined as voters between the ages of 19 and 30—proved decisive in Trump’s 2024 election victory. While Trump didn’t win the demographic outright, he made significant inroads, pulling 2% of support away from Kamala Harris and the Democrats. That shift helped him secure the state by a 5.5% margin.

One of many executive orders issued by Trump in the first week of his second term is facing litigatory pushback for allegedly violating two amendments to the constitution by sending trans women to men’s prison facilities and denying them access to necessary medication.

As Australia enters a new school year, a submission from The Australia Institute highlights the growing disparity between public and private school funding, revealing that taxpayers are helping fund lavish private school facilities and the high salaries of private school principals.

In a submission to a New South Wales inquiry into private school profits, the Institute reveals that tax-deductible donations to private school building funds cost the Australian government millions of dollars annually in lost revenue. These funds often go toward extravagant facilities that only benefit wealthy school communities. Examples include:

• Cranbrook School in Sydney, which spent $125 million on a five-story sandstone building featuring an Olympic-sized pool and 267-seat theatre.
• The Scots College, which spent $29 million to renovate its library into a Scottish Baronial-style castle.
• The King’s School paid $15 million for land near Lane Cove National Park for staff and student camps.

The report also exposes the massive pay gap between public and private school principals. While public school principals in NSW earn between $140,000 and $216,000, elite private school principals in Sydney can earn an average of $687,000 annually.

Key Recommendations:

Allison Chapman helps decode the Trump executive orders and their legal ramifications.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

The year 2008 signaled to many the weak foundations of modern capitalism in the hands of the greedy, untethered financial sector—the “vampire squid” investment banks as journalist Matt Taibbi called them. Rising from the ashes of the crash, these banks used government money—”socialism for the bankers”—to enrich themselves and Big Business. This money never got to the masses. Instead shares were bought back in traditional capitalist industries and an emerging powerful bloc—the Jeff Bezos’s, the Microsoft’s, the Google’s of the world—invested in what guest Yanis Varoufakis calls, “cloud capital.”

Read my full toast below:

Ruba, when we met for our first class, gave me a taste of what I would soon discover to be her unique version of a charm offensive. "My friends," she told me, "say you are famous. But I've never heard of you." And there it was, her characteristic brutal honestly, whether I wanted it or not. This was followed by unsolicited fashion advice consisting of letting me know that my baggy Brooks Brothers suits made me look fat on the screen and Ruba's peculiar system of classroom incentivization. When I am distracted or unprepared she admonishes me by saying "If you don't focus, I'm not going to charge you."

Today’s inflation figures revealed the official CPI is well within the Reserve Bank’s target range of 2% to 3% and underlying inflation is coming down at a solid pace. These figures will have Australians looking forward to a rate cut, but the RBA is making them wait longer than they should.

Every other year before now, the Reserve Bank board would have been meeting next week on the first Tuesday of February. For some apparent reason that has not been shared with the public, the RBA board will only meet in 3 weeks time on the 17th and 18th of February. This will mean that the RBA board will not have met for 2 months since its last meeting – crucially at a time when inflation has been falling and households are dealing with interest rates set at levels that were put in place when inflation was 4.1%, not the current level of 2.4%.

The December quarter inflation figures reveal just how behind the times is the RBA. In the final three months of 2024, overall prices grew just 0.2% – that would annualise to just 0.8%! We are at a point where prices are rising slower than the Reserve Bank aims for them to rise.

Australia’s inflation has also fallen faster than in the USA. This is mostly because Australia’s inflation problem has been helped by government policy.

While some conservative economists have attempted to argue that government spending has fuelled inflation, today’s figures show government policy has directly led to inflation falling.