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NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

These Discounts Are a Personal Finance Goldmine Hiding in Plain Sight

Individuals who ignore savings opportunities from businesses such as GoodRx and Jewel-Osco do so at their peril.

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @HOWARDTULLMAN1

MAR 3, 2026

Photo: Getty Images

Before the pandemic, my visits to our neighborhood grocery stores were few and far between. Much like most of our Presidents over the last 30 years or so, I couldn’t tell you the price of anything in the store, including the CPG items that I consumed daily.  When I was forced on occasion to venture into one of these arcades of consumption, clutter and confusion, I didn’t have a clue as to where various items might be or which of the dozens of brands, sizes, and flavors I was supposed to buy.

These days, every trip to my nearby Jewel-Osco store is an adventure and contest to see how much I can save by using my Jewel phone app, as well as by scrutinizing all the deals plastered all over the store. While I must look like a phone-obsessed teenager as I wonder through the aisles with my nose stuck in my cell, the truth is I’m scanning and selecting and saving money with every click. Honestly, I feel bad for the people who don’t take advantage of this free app.

My savings from each session are displayed at the bottom of my receipt, and it’s clear that this simple process will save me more on an annual basis than the $1,200 that Trump’s costly tariffs are costing me and millions of other Americans every year. You might ask yourself why the store can afford to sell me a product at half the price that others are paying at the same time for the identical item. Are the “retail” prices just so artificially inflated that they make up their margins by ripping off all the folks who don’t use the app and take advantage of the discounts?

Speaking of discounts and being ripped off, have you filled a prescription lately for just about any drug and had the sinking feeling that the experience was very similar to playing a slot machine, where you had no idea what numbers might be coming up when the spinning stopped? Big pharma has paid doctors for decades through various incentives to push their particular premium-priced drugs. The “usual and customary” cash price you’re asked to pay at the counter (without insurance) for a drug is typically an inflated number compared to what insurance companies or the pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) pay for the same drug.

There’s no practical end in sight for the average consumer regardless of what new lies we might hear made by our president—price reductions of 800 percent and 900 percent are his latest absurd claims—but much like the story in the grocery stores, there turns out to be some relief which seems almost magical in its application and once again demonstrates the shameless price gouging of the uninformed and disconnected consumers that goes on every day. GoodRx is basically an information middleman which contracts with large PBMs like CVS and OptumRx to provide its members with free coupons that permit them to receive the same discounted drug prices that are typically negotiated by insurers and large employers.

You can check the GoodRx price on any drug right on your phone using their free app and it will immediately tell you (for almost any typical prescription) which nearby pharmacies have the drug and will honor the discounted price for it. Here again, the discounts are simply amazing. You’ll often see the price of a given drug cut by half or more. How any rational human being isn’t taking advantage of this program is beyond me. And amazingly, in most cases it’s even more beneficial for uninsured folks who don’t have to deal with deductibles. How and why does it work?

(1) Retail prices for drugs are a sick joke – very much like the MSRP used to be for many years on automobiles – which no intelligent person should expect to pay.

(2) Pharmacies are willing to participate because they assume most of their customers will have insurance anyway which reduces the price and they are happy to have additional customers, more recurring traffic and ancillary sales.

(3) Drug prices in the U.S. (as a result of paid-for politicians) are not regulated in most cases and the entire pricing scheme is opaque at best so no one knows what a realistic and fair price should be.

Bottom line: whatever you do at the grocery store, don’t wait another minute before you sign up (for free) for the GoodRx program because, while money doesn’t really care who makes it, it makes much more sense for it to end up staying in your wallet than watching it be wasted paying inflated and pretend prices at the pharmacy. The money’s always there, but the pockets can change. As Kevin O’Leary says: “It’s a sin to kill money.”

 

The Graveyard of Regime Change The Applied Libertarian Mar 3 On February 26, 2026, the United States and Iran concluded their third round of nuclear negotiations in Geneva. Iran’s foreign minister described them as the “most intense so far.” Oman’s mediating foreign minister announced “significant progress.” Technical talks were scheduled to continue in Vienna the following week. A senior US official called the discussions “positive.” Iran had agreed in principle to forgo stockpiling enriched uranium under a negotiated framework. Two days later, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury — a massive coordinated strike that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, approximately 40 senior military commanders, and an unknown number of civilians, including 148 people at a girls’ elementary school in Minab. The nuclear programme, we should recall, had already been significantly degraded during the twelve-day war in June 2025. Two intelligence sources told CNN that the claim Iran was close to a missile capable of hitting the United States was not backed by intelligence. So here we are again. An American administration has decided, without public trial, without congressional declaration of war, without any transparent presentation of evidence to the people footing the bill, that the correct response to a country actively negotiating with you is to assassinate its head of state. I hold no affection for the Iranian theocracy and would welcome a freer and more peaceful Iran. The regime’s massacre of thousands of its own protesting citizens in January 2026 was a moral abomination. Its support for proxy militias across the Middle East has been well-documented. But the question we should be asking is not whether the Iranian regime is bad — it is whether assassination and bombing during active diplomacy makes us safer, freer, or more just. The Scorecard Nobody Wants to Read Let us walk through what actually happens when powerful states decide to remove foreign leaders by force. The most bitterly ironic place to start is Iran itself. In 1953, the CIA (under its codename Operation Ajax) and MI6 (under Operation Boot) overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh after he nationalised Iran’s oil industry. The Shah was installed as an absolute monarch. The CIA’s own internal history of the operation — written by coup planner Donald Wilber in 1954 and declassified when it was leaked to the New York Times in 2000 — acknowledged that the agency had transformed a turbulent constitutional monarchy into an absolutist kingship and induced a succession of unintended consequences. The most consequential of those unintended consequences was the 1979 Islamic Revolution that created the very theocratic regime the US just bombed. The coup eliminated the moderate, secular element of Iranian politics and enabled radical Islamists to emerge as the key opposition. The CIA coined the term “blowback” in its 1954 internal lessons-learned report on this very operation, warning that “possibilities of blowback against the United States should always be in the back of the minds of all CIA officers involved in this type of operation” (CIA internal report on Operation Ajax, 1954; first reported by The Intercept, citing declassified CIA documents). In 2013, the CIA publicly acknowledged for the first time that the coup was carried out “under CIA direction” as US foreign policy, and described the intervention as undemocratic (PBS, October 2023, reporting on CIA’s “Langley Files” podcast). Iraq in 2003 needs little elaboration. Saddam removed, the state dissolved, trillions spent, thousands of American lives lost, and from the vacuum emerged ISIS — arguably a greater threat to regional stability than Saddam ever was. The discriminatory policies of the post-invasion governments pushed marginalised communities toward exactly the radicalism the intervention was meant to prevent. Afghanistan, 2001–2021. Two decades, $2.3 trillion, thousands of American and allied lives, and the Taliban walked back into Kabul anyway. Guatemala, 1954. The CIA overthrew a democratically elected president and installed the first of a line of right-wing dictators. Decades of turmoil followed, including the murder of the first American ambassador killed on duty. Chile, 1973. The US backed Pinochet’s coup against the democratically elected Allende. Years of brutal military dictatorship followed. Kosovo, 1999 — often cited as the “success story” of air power. Instead of breaking Milosevic, NATO bombing led Serbian forces to accelerate ethnic cleansing, expelling nearly one million Kosovar Albanians within weeks. The Independent International Commission on Kosovo (Oxford University Press, 2000) concluded that NATO’s bombing campaign accelerated the very atrocities it was meant to prevent. Libya in 2011. Gaddafi killed with US-led air support. The country has been a failed state ever since — competing warlord factions, a major corridor for human trafficking into Europe, and a staging ground for regional terrorism. Perhaps the most telling lesson is North Korea’s. After watching Gaddafi — who had voluntarily surrendered his nuclear programme — get killed by Western-backed forces, Pyongyang concluded that only nuclear weapons can prevent regime change. North Korea’s foreign ministry described Libya’s disarmament deal as “an invasion tactic to disarm the country” (Columbia Journal of International Affairs). Kim Jong-un himself stated he had learned “a lesson from the Middle Eastern countries” in developing North Korea’s nuclear programme (Wilson Center). Former US Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats was even more blunt: “The lessons that we learned out of Libya giving up its nukes is, unfortunately: if you had nukes, never give them up. If you don’t have them, get them” (Aspen Security Forum, July 2017). Every regime change teaches the next regime the same lesson: negotiate less, conceal more, acquire deterrence faster. Where Are the Successes? Scholars have searched hard for cases where forcible regime change produced a stable, free society. The examples they land on are post-World War II Germany and Japan. But consider what “success” required: a global war that killed tens of millions, devastated entire continents, consumed years of the world’s productive capacity, and left scars that took decades to heal — followed by prolonged military occupation and massive reconstruction spending. If that is the best-case template, it is less a model to emulate than a warning about the true cost of the enterprise. And it is not remotely comparable to launching airstrikes and hoping a liberal democracy spontaneously emerges. Academic research by Alexander Downes — Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University, co-Director of the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies, and author of Catastrophic Success: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Goes Wrong (Cornell University Press, 2021) — examined every documented case of foreign-imposed regime change over the past two centuries and found that it increases the likelihood of civil war and violent leader removal in target states, fails to reduce the probability of conflict between intervening states and their targets, and does not increase democratisation unless accompanied by deep institutional change in countries already favourable to democracy. His peer-reviewed findings with Jonathan Monten, published in International Security (Spring 2013) under the title “Forced to Be Free? Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Rarely Leads to Democratization,” reinforced that forcible regime change succeeded in producing democracy only where preconditions — high wealth, low ethnic heterogeneity, and strong prior institutions — were already present. The Evidence We Never Saw The west has elaborate domestic legal systems built on the presumption of innocence, the right to a fair hearing, and the requirement that the state present evidence before depriving anyone of life or liberty. Yet when it comes to foreign policy, we apparently require none of these things. Was Iran still funding terrorist groups? Probably, to some extent — though its major proxies (Hezbollah, Hamas) had been significantly degraded by Israeli military action throughout 2024 and 2025. Was it pursuing nuclear weapons? It claimed otherwise, and it was actively negotiating limitations. Were its leaders engaged in criminal activity that warranted assassination? Perhaps — but who evaluated that evidence? Where was the public case? What court, what tribunal, what impartial body reviewed the intelligence and authorised the killing of a head of state during diplomatic negotiations? The answer is: none. What did take place was a closed-door briefing to eight members of Congress which amount to notification after the fact, delivered to people who cannot publicly challenge the intelligence, cannot call witnesses, and cannot vote on the action. It is the illusion of accountability. I am entirely comfortable with the principle that genuinely criminal actors — those directing terrorism, those ordering massacres — can be legitimate targets. But the principle only holds when there is transparency, when evidence is presented, when the public whose money and safety are at stake or their representatives can evaluate the case. Otherwise you are simply trusting that the same institutions that assured you Iraq had weapons of mass destruction are telling the truth this time. What Has Actually Happened Within hours of the strikes, Iran’s constitutional succession mechanisms activated exactly as designed. A temporary leadership council formed. An interim supreme leader was appointed. The IRGC issued statements not of surrender but of escalation. Iran launched retaliatory strikes against Israel, US bases, and Gulf Arab states that host American forces. Three US service members were killed. The Strait of Hormuz was closed. China halted rare earth exports to the United States. The regime did not collapse. It consolidated. Analysts at Chatham House — the Royal Institute of International Affairs, founded in 1920 and consistently ranked among the world’s most influential foreign policy think tanks — warned that Iran has more cohesive state institutions than Iraq did in 2003, and that the space between regime collapse and democratic consolidation is historically the most dangerous phase. The Question That Matters The question that matters is simple and pragmatic: does this work? Does forcible regime change produce the stability, security, and freedom its architects promise? The evidence from every documented case over two centuries says no. The evidence from Iran’s own history says no. The evidence from the 48 hours since the strikes — regime consolidation, retaliatory missiles, dead American service members, closed shipping lanes, severed supply chains — says no. The burden of proof lies with those who claim this time is different. History suggests otherwise.

 

The Regime Just Entered Its Most Dangerous Phase

Welcome to the Autocratic Flood Zone.

Christopher Armitage Mar 3

The United States is at war with Iran. A missile hit a school full of little girls and killed 165 of them. Three American service members are dead, and the president says there will likely be more. And while we process that, while every camera in the country points at the Middle East, ten other things are happening that would have each dominated a full news cycle in any previous administration. An agency gets gutted. A court order gets ignored. An inspector general gets fired. A database gets deleted. A thousand contracts get canceled. By the time the sun goes down, the war has swallowed all the oxygen, and everything else just happened in the dark. Tomorrow there will be ten more. A gish-gallop of horrible events have flooded our news feeds for over a year now.

We all know what this feels like. We live in it. But knowing what it feels like and understanding why it works are two very different things, and the difference matters right now more than it ever has, because the autocratic flood zone just entered a new phase.

The flood zone has always been a two-part machine. The blueprint comes from Viktor Orban. The delivery system comes from Steve Bannon. Understanding both parts, and how they interact, is how we understand what we are actually up against.

Orban’s Hungary is the template. CPAC brought him to Dallas as a keynote speaker in August 2022, where he told the crowd that Hungary is the place where conservatives “didn’t just talk about defeating the progressives and liberals and causing a conservative Christian political turn” but “actually did it.”¹ Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts was so taken with the model that he told Hungarian Conservative magazine Hungary was “not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model,” and the Heritage Foundation signed a formal cooperation agreement with the Danube Institute, a Hungarian think tank funded directly by Orban’s government.² When Princeton constitutional law scholar Kim Lane Scheppele read Project 2025, her first thought, before she even knew about the Danube Institute connection, was that it read like Orban’s playbook: concentrate executive power, weaponize the national budget to defund your opponents, strip the civil service and replace it with loyalists.³ The people who wrote Project 2025 did not hide where the ideas came from. They bragged about it.

Orban needed roughly a decade to dismantle Hungarian democracy, because he had to move carefully enough that each step looked semi-legitimate before he took the next one. He captured courts methodically. He rewrote election laws over years. He consolidated media slowly enough that each individual step could be rationalized. That patience was necessary in Hungary, a small country with an engaged European Union watching over its shoulder.

The American version has no such patience, because it has Steve Bannon’s delivery mechanism. In 2018, while watching Trump’s State of the Union address, Bannon told writer Michael Lewis, “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”⁴ As writer Sean Illing explained, the strategy is not about persuasion. It is about disorientation.⁵ If we saturate the information ecosystem with so much chaos that nobody can process any single event before ten more land, we break the public’s ability to hold anyone accountable for anything.

So the Orban blueprint tells them what to do. The Bannon strategy tells them how fast to do it. Together, they produce the speed run: a decade’s worth of democratic dismantlement compressed into months. That is what we have been living through.

But something changed.

During the first term, the flood zone was a media strategy. Bannon’s people did too many things for the press to cover, too many things for courts to adjudicate, too many things for Congress to investigate. But the system, slow and creaking, still functioned. Courts issued orders and the administration complied with them. Agencies pushed back and sometimes won. Inspectors general filed reports that mattered. The guardrails bent, but they held. The flood zone in those years was about speed: move fast enough that the damage becomes permanent before the system catches up.

This term dropped the guardrails on day one, because they spent the four years out of power doing the homework they never did the first time around. They built the personnel lists. They wrote the legal strategies. They produced a 900-page instruction manual and staffed every agency with people who had read it. They came in already ignoring courts, already gutting agencies, already firing anyone who might say no. A federal judge in California, Sunshine Sykes, accused the government of terrorizing immigrants and extending its violence to its own citizens, citing the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota.⁶ In the District of Minnesota, Judge Patrick Schiltz documented 96 violations of court orders in January 2026.⁷ In New Jersey, federal prosecutors admitted their own government had violated 72 court orders since December in cases of detained immigrants challenging their imprisonment.¹¹ Just Security found that immigration-related cases accounted for 24 of 42 instances where judges found officials had actively misled the courts.⁸ A DOJ whistleblower, Erez Reuveni, reported that a senior department official repeatedly told colleagues to ignore court orders. Reuveni was fired for telling the truth in a courtroom. The attorney general said he failed to “zealously advocate” the administration’s position, which is a polished way of saying he refused to lie to a judge.¹⁰

Those are the individual horrors. The systemic picture is worse. A Washington Post analysis of 337 lawsuits found the administration defied or frustrated court oversight in roughly 35 percent of rulings made against them.⁹ A ProPublica analysis found that more than 18,000 habeas corpus petitions were filed in the first 13 months of the second term, more people challenging their detention in court than under the last three administrations combined.¹⁸ Politico’s Kyle Cheney tracked the rulings in those cases and found roughly 2,600 where judges rejected the administration’s position, ordering bond hearings or outright freeing detainees. Three hundred and eighty-six federal judges ruled against the administration. Thirty-three sided with it.¹⁹ That is the judiciary speaking with near-unanimity, and it has changed nothing.

This is not an administration that occasionally pushes the boundaries of executive authority. This is an administration that treats court orders the way the rest of us treat spam email. And that was the baseline before the first bomb fell on Iran.

Now we enter the new phase. Because the war changes everything.

Every leader facing accountability has understood what a war provides. It is the oldest move in the history of power: when the walls close in, find an enemy abroad. A shooting war restructures the entire political landscape. Opposition becomes unpatriotic. Criticism becomes dangerous. Emergency powers that were already being stretched past recognition suddenly have the one justification that has historically silenced opposition in every democracy that ever fell: wartime necessity. And the emergency never ends, because ending it means facing consequences.

A wartime administration that was already stripping Clean Water Act protections from millions of acres of wetlands, already opening 40 million acres of national forest to logging and drilling, already letting coal plants dump toxic ash into groundwater, already withdrawing limits on forever chemicals in drinking water now does all of it behind a wall of smoke and patriotic obligation. “Support the troops” becomes the shield behind which everything else gets done. They are generating attacks on the constitutional order faster than any existing institution is processing them, and they know it. And the ten months between now and the midterms just became ten months of a wartime presidency operating without constraints, with a proven willingness to ignore the judiciary, and with every incentive to keep the emergency going as long as possible.

Everything that was predictable has happened. Everything we warned about has arrived. The Orban blueprint, executed at Bannon speed, now shielded by a war. And the official opposition response is still: let’s win enough seats in November.

So what do we do?

We use the ten months. Not to wait for the midterms. To build the capacity that makes us dangerous regardless of what happens in November.

The people of Minneapolis already showed us what this looks like. On January 23, 2026, in temperatures that dropped to twenty below zero, over fifty thousand people marched through downtown. Seven hundred businesses closed in solidarity. Unions, faith leaders, community organizations, and ordinary people who had simply had enough created the first general strike in the United States in nearly 80 years.¹² Solidarity actions spread to at least 300 cities.¹³ Polling afterward found roughly one in four Minnesota voters either participated directly or had a close family member who did.¹⁴ That did not happen overnight. It happened because people had been organizing, building networks, and showing up in smaller numbers for months before January 23. When the moment arrived, the capacity was already there.

That is the model. We do not build a general strike the week we need one. We build it now, in the months before whatever crisis comes next, so that when an election gets stolen or a court gets packed or an emergency declaration suspends something we thought could never be suspended, we already have fifty thousand people who know how to shut down a city because they have been practicing.

No Kings III is March 28, with the flagship event in Minneapolis.¹⁵ After that, May Day Strong and General Strike US are building toward May 1.¹⁶ The UAW is aligning contract expirations for May Day 2028.¹⁷ The infrastructure for sustained economic disruption is being built right now, and the only thing it needs is more people inside it.

The ask is simple enough that nobody gets to say they didn’t know what to do. Join one of these actions. Show up visibly. Bring one person who was not there last time. Then do it again the following month. Pick a public space, city hall or a park or a town square, and be there with signs and flyers and one more person than came last time. No committee meetings about committee meetings. Just people, in public, visible and growing, building the thing we will need when the next crisis hits. Because the next crisis will hit. And the one after that. And the one after that. The only variable is whether we have built something strong enough to meet it.

If the election is free and fair, we win it with organized power already standing behind the candidates. If it is not, we already have the infrastructure to make the country ungovernable for the people who stole it. Either way, we are stronger for having built it.

The people who are speed-running the Orban playbook are betting that the opposition peaks in marches and dissipates between them. Ten months is not a countdown. It is a window. Every person we bring in now is a person who is already standing when the next crisis hits.