Conservative: Murphy Should Talk to McGreevey on Taxes

Having just proposed a hike in New Jersey’s millionaire’s tax, Gov. Phil Murphy should have a chat with “the guy who invented it,” former Gov. and fellow Democrat Jim McGreevey, suggests the Star-Ledger’s Paul Mulshine. McGreevey pitched it as a solution to the state’s property-tax crisis and even got GOP support. It worked — for one year; now the rebate program barely exists. Murphy, meanwhile, isn’t even claiming that the money raised would go to direct property-tax relief. But “if history is any indication, that’s a big mistake.” Because even though his budget speech “was packed with references to what he was going to do for the middle class,” Murphy “offered little in the way of insight into how he’d help lower their property taxes, which are the highest in the nation.”

From the right: Ocasio-Cortez Believes Her Own Hype

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responded with what Christine Rosen at Commentary calls “childish Twitter sarcasm and victimology” to last week’s New York Post exposé of her extensive use of Uber and Lyft and penchant for flying. But the question of her hypocrisy is legitimate, especially given her “sanctimonious, hyper-personalized” style of politics. Fact is, most of those more-time-efficient travel choices probably were “perfectly reasonable.” But what she fails — or refuses — to comprehend is that “this kind of individual, free-market calculation is precisely what the Green New Deal would eliminate in the name of stopping the environmental apocalypse.” If AOC wants to lecture people about their choices, fine. But don’t complain when people point out that “her personal story clashes with her policy narrative.”

Political scribe: We’ll Soon Pay for Ride-Share Losses

The Washington Post’s Megan McArdle says she’s been wondering about the math behind Uber and Lyft ever since people started telling her they’re cheaper than owning a car. Ride-shares essentially are taxicabs — “better dispatched and more convenient, but, still, taxicabs.” And “unless you are a hermit or live in a dense urban core, a month of taking cabs costs more than a month of Corolla ownership.” They’re price-competitive outside of Manhattan only thanks to “heavy subsidies, from both the companies and the drivers themselves.” That’s why Lyft in 2018 lost more than $900 million; Uber, “not quite as much.” They’re selling “a physical service that’s pretty expensive to deliver,” and “at some point, we’re going to have to pay” what “those rides are actually worth.”

Historian: What Secrets Will Vatican Archives Reveal?

On Monday, Pope Francis announced that the archives of the controversial WWII pontiff Pius XII would be opened to scholars. This, notes David Kertzer at The Atlantic, after “more than half a century of pressure” and heated debate over Pius, “a hero of Catholic conservatives, who eagerly await his canonization as a saint” but “denounced by his ­detractors for failing to condemn the Nazis’ genocidal campaign against Europe’s Jews.” Yet “the most historically significant documents” may pertain to the immediate postwar period, when the Vatican “was consumed by fear” of communism taking over Italy in the wake of Mussolini’s downfall. Pius “played a major behind-the-scenes role in these fateful years in turning Italians against the Communists,” and we’re now “likely to learn how he went about it.”

Culture critic: America Is Now a Two-Faith Nation

Few things “symbolize the transformation of American politics more than the transformation of the religious-liberty dispute,” contends National Review’s David French. The US “changed from a largely single-faith culture to a two-faith nation — sacred and secular — and it will be a two-faith nation for the foreseeable future. That’s why religious liberties are so controversial,” and will “be a flashpoint in 2020 and in 2024.” As Ross Douthat has noted, “while Democrats are divided between left and center-left on a broad range of policies, when it comes to the culture war, there is no meaningful center-left.” Tolerance “is easy when tolerance doesn’t threaten your power,” says French. But “a nation torn by religious division” will “view each advance by a religious foe as a material defeat of religious friends.”

— Compiled by Eric Fettmann