A standing page on the US minimum wage, refreshed as the numbers move. The 1938 law's 25 cents is about $5.92 in today's money, yet it was roughly 40% of the average factory wage while $7.25 is about 19% of average pay now. As of October 7, 2026, California's fast-food floor is $20 and its general f
The FTC's monopoly case against Amazon is heard in Seattle, but Washington's attorney general isn't one of the 17 states that sued alongside the agency. The October 13 trial date in this week's headlines is also out of date — the bench trial is now set for March 29, 2027.
A tax idea keeps making the rounds: abolish federal and state income taxes for every US citizen, tax the profits of big public companies at 90% instead, keep taxing non-citizens, and break up monopolies in the process. It's easy to see why it appeals, since it hits a real nerve. I ran the arithmetic
On September 17, 2026, a divided Washington Supreme Court ruled Initiative 2066 — the natural gas measure two million Washingtonians approved in 2024 — unconstitutional in its entirety. What the ruling actually says, what I-2066 actually did, what the dissent argued, and which justices from the ruli
The same morning the SEC gave tokenized stocks a five-year exemption, the CFTC's staff quietly did something with a longer shelf life and a smaller signature: a seven-page letter saying any app that routes orders to a registered exchange, holds none of the money, and takes a cut of every trade doesn
A friend forwarded me a tweet the morning after the CLARITY Act's cloture vote failed — a former CFTC chairman saying the current SEC and CFTC chiefs will build crypto rules with or without Congress. It reads like a hypothetical. It isn't. Both agencies have been building exactly that framework in p
The Senate held a cloture vote today on the CLARITY Act, the bill meant to finally tell crypto exchanges which regulator they answer to. Forty-nine senators voted yes, fifty voted no, and the rule requires sixty. Bitcoin slid through the session as the vote failed. Here is what the bill would have d