Latest / Hoover Daily Report / Hoover Daily Report | September 9, 2026

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Hoover Daily Report | September 9, 2026 · Hoover Daily Report

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  Welcome to the Hoover Daily Report. "Ideas Advancing
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  Freedom." It's Wednesday, September 9th, twenty twenty six.
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  Today, the GoodFellows assess the risks posed to California’s economy by a
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  proposed new wealth tax. Steven Davis and Raghuram Rajan unpack recent US
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  interventions in bond markets and Fed Chair Kevin Warsh’s latest speech, and
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  Matthew Pottinger and Liza Tobin argue that, once again, China is swooping in to
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  steal US innovations when its AI firms distill closed US models to fuel the
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  development of their own.
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  California’s War on Wealth.
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  Is the progressive dream of wealth taxes soon to become a fiscal and economic
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  nightmare? Voters are poised to consider Proposition 40 and a one-time 5% tax on
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  the holdings of the Golden State’s billionaire class. Senior Fellow Joshua
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  D. Rauh joins GoodFellows to discuss his research on the likely impacts of the
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  proposed measure. Should California voters approve Prop 40 in November, Rauh
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  and his team say, the fiscal consequences for the state are not pretty.
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  The Hidden Cost of a Federal Wealth Tax.
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  In this week’s Grumpy Economist Weekly Rant, John Cochrane examines a proposed
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  permanent 5% federal tax on billionaires’ wealth. While supporters argue that the
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  tax would raise trillions of dollars in revenue, Cochrane points out that these
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  projections treat investment and behavior as fixed, leaving unanswered how the tax
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  would affect risk-taking, business formation, and future economic growth.
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  Billionaire wealth is not held primarily as cash; much of it remains invested in
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  companies. Cochrane argues that redirecting those resources toward
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  government spending would shift capital from investment to consumption, leaving
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  fewer resources for new businesses, productivity gains, wage growth, and job
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  creation. He also warns that a wealth tax would encourage costly avoidance
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  strategies and reorganize businesses around reducing tax liability rather than
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  generating value.
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  Can Central Banks Rescue Us from High Interest Rates and Rising Debt?
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  On the latest episode of Economics, Applied, Senior Fellow Raghuram Rajan,
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  former Reserve Bank of India governor, joins Hoover Research Director Steven J.
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  Davis at the Jackson Hole Symposium to offer his take on Fed Chair Kevin Warsh’s
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  speech there and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s recent intervention in bond
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  markets. Rajan explains why attempts to push down long-term yields can distort
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  important market signals, and why rising debt-servicing costs could ultimately
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  force policymakers to pay greater attention to addressing persistent
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  government deficits.
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  How Thomas Sowell Thankfully Made Me a Contrarian Educator.
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  Ian Rowe, founder of Vertex Partnership Academies and a senior fellow at the
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  American Enterprise Institute, examines Thomas Sowell’s challenge to conventional
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  wisdom on issues at the cross-section of race and education. Demonstrating
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  Sowell’s firm belief that academic standards should not conform to low
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  expectations around race, Rowe cites Sowell’s “Patterns of Black Excellence,”
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  in which he examines how Black students at Washington, DC’s Dunbar High School
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  achieved educational excellence despite the indignities and inadequacies imposed
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  by legal segregation. As Rowe notes from Sowell’s research, Dunbar sent a higher
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  percentage of its graduates to college than any White public high school in the
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  city and repeatedly equaled or exceeded national norms on standardized tests.
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  Adams and Jefferson: A Friendship that Transcended Politics.
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  The celebrated, late-in-life correspondence between John Adams and
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  Thomas Jefferson overflows not just with insight but with the shared understanding
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  that political differences and rivalries can be transcended, writes Distinguished
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  Policy Fellow Peter M. Robinson. The two giants of the American Revolution had
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  been estranged for more than a decade when Adams sent Jefferson a note—and the
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  two former presidents not only rekindled their mutual esteem but composed
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  political wisdom that still speaks to polarized Americans today. Their letters
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  embodied conservative (Adams) and progressive (Jefferson) strains of
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  thought, Robinson notes, while converging on such subjects as the “enigma” of
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  whether good government would lead to a citizenry corrupted by prosperity.
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  Robinson writes: “If Adams worried about the effects of prosperity in his day, how
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  much more worried should we be now, as AI promises prosperity at levels Adams could
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  never have imagined?”.
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  How China Is Stealing America’s AI.
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  In The Free Press, Distinguished Visiting Fellow Matthew Pottinger and Liza Tobin
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  of Garnaut Global and senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation argue that with
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  AI models, Beijing is following a pattern recognizable to anyone who has dealt with
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  the IP theft, import bans, domestic subsidies, and other measures the
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  People’s Republic of China has engaged in previously in industries such as solar
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  panels, phones, and even apparel. “The party-state steals IP, subsidizes
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  domestic producers, blocks foreign competitors from its own market, and then
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  floods global markets until their overseas competition drowns,” they write.
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  Through “distillation,” Chinese open-weight models can absorb the
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  abilities and knowledge of US models that cost billions to train, without China
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  having to spend similar amounts. They authors argue that the Commerce
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  Department should “restrict such models from American cloud platforms” if they
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  are found to have distilled US models in the course of their development.
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  Featured Hoover Publication.
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  The Troika: A Story of Three Families, Friendship, and the Cold War.
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  Hoover fellows Christian Ostermann and Katharina Friedla present The Troika, by
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  East German spymaster Markus Wolf, originally published in 1989 and now
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  translated into English for the first time. This book tells the story of three
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  friends from expatriate Communist families in Moscow who find their bonds
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  and beliefs tested as they face Stalin’s Great Terror, are scattered by World War
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  II, and confront the divides of the Cold War.
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  That’s your Hoover Daily Report for Wednesday, September 9th, twenty twenty
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  six.
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  Each weekday, we bring you research, analysis, and commentary focused on
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  public policy, national security, and the ideas shaping American society and
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  government.
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  The Hoover Institution at Stanford University is grounded in constitutional
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  principles with a commitment to sustaining the safeguards of the American
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  way of life.
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  Thank you for listening.
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  For links to all the articles and interviews mentioned today, visit
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  hoover.org slash, HDR.