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Tuesday, 25 August 2026
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Written by Dan DeBruler
“What’s it about, Danny?”
The question came during the drive from a country home near Wamego, Kansas, to a small family farm about thirty minutes away. The ride had become routine. If I dozed off, the sound of gravel popping beneath the tires as we left I-70 and headed south on Snokomo Road was sure to wake me.
For a 13-year-old city kid, farm chores still felt like an adventure. My cousin Memory, a schoolteacher, had invited me to spend the summer with her and her husband, Tom, a Vietnam veteran who had returned to the quiet of his family’s farm south of Paxico.
Memory and I had met only a few months earlier. I have a complicated family history, so much of that summer was spent getting to know one another. The conversation that day began with a simple question.
“What kind of music do you like?”
Easy enough. I told her I liked rock music.
But in true schoolteacher fashion, she wanted me to think a little deeper.
“What do you consider rock music? Which bands do you like? Name one song. What are some of the lyrics?”
Then came the question that changed things:
“What’s it about, Danny?”
I had chosen a song widely considered an antiwar protest anthem. The trouble was, I had never considered what that—or any other song—was actually about. I could sing along, recite the lyrics, and air-guitar through the inevitable solo. But I had never stopped to consider the meaning of the words.
I didn’t know it then, but her question would shape the way I listen, choose, and regard the power of music to motivate, encourage, unite, or console.
I also learned that songs aren’t always as simple as they first appear. The same lyrics may be understood differently depending on the listener, sometimes even by the artists who wrote and recorded them.
But Memory’s question still matters. What’s it about?
That is a good question to ask about more than music. It belongs in our conversations, entertainment, ambitions, and habits. What is this saying? Where is it leading me? What is it teaching me to admire, excuse, fear, or desire?
We often believe we are merely listening, watching, or passing the time. But what we repeatedly welcome into our minds shapes how we see the world, and eventually, how we live within it.
Scripture tells us to guard our hearts because everything we do flows from them. That doesn’t mean fearing every message around us. It means becoming discerning.
Years later, I remain grateful that my cousin didn’t simply tell me what to think. She cared enough to teach me how to listen.
Perhaps that is part of our responsibility to one another, especially to those coming behind us. We can give them rules, or help them ask better questions. We can tell them what to avoid, or patiently teach them to recognize what is true, beautiful, and pleasing to God.
Sometimes one thoughtful question, asked with genuine care, can continue doing its work for a lifetime.
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Tuesday, 25 August 2026
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Written by John Hood
Earlier this month, the voters of Missouri decisively defeated a constitutional amendment authorizing an end to the state’s income tax. It was an overwhelming defeat — 17% for, 83% against — for a ballot measure that failed in urban, suburban, and rural counties alike.
Did this event just set off a progressive counteroffensive against 15 years of state-level tax reform across the country? That’s no academic question in North Carolina, a leader in the tax-reform movement. Through legislation, not referendum, the General Assembly has slashed tax rates on personal and corporate income while broadening the tax base, broadening and reducing the sales tax, and reforming other taxes. Our use of revenue triggers to phase in tax changes has become a national model. And lawmakers have placed a constitutional amendment on the North Carolina ballot that will have the effect of limiting future property-tax increases.
Does the vote in the Show Me State portend a similar result in the Tar Heel State? Nah. I expect the property-tax amendment to pass, albeit not by a comparably overwhelming margin.
Missouri voters don’t love taxes generally or the income tax specifically. But on fiscal matters, they are conservative with a small “c,” as are our own voters. Capping future increases in property tax is a very different ask than abolishing an entire form of taxation, especially when voters are being asked to do so without a clearly laid out plan to fund core public services some other way.
There was a plan, to be sure, and in broad outlines it conformed with prudent reform principles. The purpose of taxation is to finance public services, not to engineer economic or social outcomes. It is best accomplished by applying a single marginal rate to a properly defined tax base. To do otherwise is to create disincentives to work, save, and invest, and to violate the principle of proportionality; if you are, say, three times better off than I, you ought to pay three times as much tax.
Although total income might seem like the proper tax base, it is not. If you tax the principal of an investment, the money used to buy equities or build factories, then you have already reduced the future stream of income by that percentage. To tax the resulting dividends or capital gains is artificially to make consumption more attractive than investment.
In Missouri, the plan was to phase out the income tax in favor of a sales tax more broadly applied to all goods and services sold at retail. Okay, but to accomplish that would require taxing medical care, legal representation, banking, and other services sold by powerful interest groups that will fight tooth-and-nail against it. That’s why broad-based sales taxes are extremely rare. When Missourians were told that, in practice, their sales tax might shoot up north of 10%, they got antsy. What if some future governor and legislature reintroduced an income tax on top of a skewed and costly sales tax? Or a failed sales-tax reform led to budget deficits and fiscal chaos?
In other words, “grand bargain” strategies for tax reform are risky. They contain lots of moving parts, some easier than others to sell or maintain. They change established systems and practices that may not comport with abstract principle but around which households and businesses have long structured their daily operations. Ideological opponents can readily identify these risks, exaggerate them into guaranteed calamities, and then partner with spending lobbies and special-interest groups to destroy the grand bargain, as just happened in Missouri.
There are alternatives. Regarding North Carolina’s tax code, my John Locke Foundation colleagues recommend that the General Assembly index the standard deduction to inflation, remove long-term capital gains from the tax base, and attempt to expand the sales tax to other retail services only after fully exempting business-to-business transactions (which are not, of course, retail sales).
Tax reform succeeds to the extent it is sustainable and retains public confidence. North Carolina has the right approach.
Editor’s Note: John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books Mountain Folk, Forest Folk, and Water Folk combine epic fantasy with American history (FolkloreCycle.com).
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