Daily Business Report: May 26, 2026
Sacramento Report: ICE Detention Goods Could Get a Discount
by Nadia Lathan| Voice of San Diego
Nine dollars for an eight-ounce jar of coffee. Single bars of Irish soap for $1.50.
These are some of the prices detainees in immigration detention centers face at the commissaries inside, where prices can be as much as 50 percent higher than in grocery stores.
A bill backed by criminal justice advocates and a sheriffs’ association seeks to change that.
San Diego Politics Show: The vacant homes tax on the June ballot
By Andrew Keatts | Times of San Diego
Amid a fight over how to close the city’s $120 million structural budget deficit, San Diego voters in June will decide whether to create a new revenue source for City Hall.
In this week’s episode of the San Diego Politics Show, we outlined the debate over Measure A, which would tax vacant second homes in the city, in a bid to either rase money for the cash-strapped city, or push property owners to rent or sell their homes to evade the tax.
Our guest this week was Shane Harris, the spokesperson for the No on Measure A campaign, who primarily argued the measure would empower the city to identify homeowners it thinks are subject to the fine, then put the burden on them to prove they aren’t.
America Is Not Caught in a ‘Thucydides Trap!’
By Victor Davis Hansen | Blade of Perseus
The distinguished political scientist Graham Allison, author of the 2015 Atlantic article “The Thucydides Trap,” argued that often in history an established power will stage a preventive war against an ascendant adversary—for fear that otherwise it will soon lose its primacy.
His title derives from two passages in the first book of the ancient Greek historian Thucydides (460–400/395? BC), author of The Peloponnesian War.
Thucydides, on these two occasions, felt that the most likely cause of the Spartan-Athenian war (431–404) was Spartan fear of an increasingly powerful rival Athenian empire. That anxiety supposedly prompted a Spartan preventive invasion before, so Sparta believed it would be insidiously eclipsed by its more dynamic Athenian competitor.
