Janice Hayden

Is it selfish to choose not to have kids?

Languages die when families end. Recipes, stories, the specific way your grandmother pronounced a word: all of it lives in transmission, parent to child, and stops the day a line decides not to continue. My family fled a war with nothing but each other, and the fact that my kids speak my mother's language is a small miracle built on unglamorous persistence. When I hear childlessness framed as pure self-authorship, I hear someone who has never had to carry anything fragile across a border. Continuity is the only reason any of us exist to have opinions.

Should unrealized capital gains be taxed?

I pay taxes on every dollar I earn before I ever see it, and I am tired of being told the system cannot ask the same of people with more money than a hospital. Economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman found that in 2018 [the 400 richest families paid a lower total effective tax rate](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/06/opinion/income-tax-rate-wealthy.html) than the bottom half of earners, which flips the whole idea of progressive taxation upside down. Unrealized gains are real economic power: they buy yachts through loans, they buy companies, they buy elections, and the tax code pretends they do not exist until a sale the owner can delay forever. A minimum tax on the wealthiest households would not fix every inequity, but it would end the absurdity of a nurse paying a higher rate than a billionaire. If the code can track my overtime down to the penny, it can value a stock portfolio.

Feeling like a citizen is nice, but the studies on voting and recidivism show correlation, not proof. People who vote are already the ones getting jobs and staying clean; the ballot did not cause the turnaround. Let us not sell a feel-good story as crime policy.

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