Thinks it’s scored like golf.

Going to be a beautiful, sunny day here. Nothing better to do than go hang out with some like minded humans.

That’s income, though, not net worth. Imagine you’ve got $250k in your 401k and you spent $250.

I mean, if you’re starting from the view that we have too many poor people for the number of billionaires, then killing off a bunch of plebs in a massive economic depression is definitely one way to balance the field. Just seems a little psychopathic to me, is all.

It’s definitely a MAGA theme, though: let bird flu run wild and all the survivors will be immune; crash the economy and all the survivors will be better off; throw out all the immigrants and every that remains will be comfortably English-speaking; jail all the protesters and everyone that remains will agree.

I think, for ‘lefties,’ the trouble is that Trump is replacing progressive income tax with regressive consumption tax. Not that US tax structure was particularly progressive, but it at least pretended. Now, the low end of the income scale, living paycheck-to-paycheck, spending everything on goods & services it going to have to spend an extra 15%, straight to federal coffers, ,while corps get a 25% tax cut and billionaires get elimination of the estate tax.

It’s schadenfreude to see billionaires lose 10 or 20% of their wealth, but they still own all the factories. They’re still going to make money, and they will make up for production reductions by reducing workforce and eliminating 100% of many worker incomes. That is why all the economists are crying recession: consumption taxes reduce consumption, reduced consumption reduces employment, unemployment reduces consumption.

I’m surprised the rest of the world hasn’t tried Russia-like sanctions on Trump. When Russia invaded Ukraine, all the countries got together to target sanctions on specific Russian oligarchs, on the theory they’d undermine political will without hurting uninvolved Russian civilians. So now, I’m imagining embargoes on Ivanka Trump’s fashion bullshit, a massive property tax rider on Trump’s Scottish golf resort; freezing the assets of Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners.

Even if there’s a coherent policy goal behind the tariffs, which I doubt, achieving that goal with punitive taxes on undesirable goods means that the greatest burden falls on people with the lowest income. Reaching the same goal with promotional tax incentives means the burden is paid through our normal, slightly progressive tax system and falls more on the wealthy. Tariffs and sales taxes are the worst kind of taxes.

Your articles seem to say that congress has periodically rearranged and eliminated “Article III courts,” recently avoiding the Constitutional crisis of not paying judges of the eliminated courts by posting them elsewhere. But I’m no lawyer, so maybe I’m misinterpreting “In 1891, Congress enacted legislation creating new intermediate appellate courts and eliminating the then-existing federal circuit courts.” and “In 1982, Congress enacted legislation abolishing the Article III Court of Claims and U.S. Court of Customs and Patent Appeals”

I mean, he’s technically correct: the constitution gives congress the power “to constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court.” The only court the US technically has to have is SCOTUS, although it’s hard to imagine them hearing every single federal case.

Interestingly, Congress does not have the power to fire or reduce any judge’s salary, except by impeachment.

Nevermind including a reporter in the group chat. Can we talk about why these people are using a commercial service to hold classified discussions in the first place? Like, isn’t bombing another country SCIF-type stuff? Isn’t that stuff subject to the Federal Records Act?

Wait, really? You know what Israelis do with pagers, right?

Yup. Just going by the indexes, the stock market is down all the way to last summer. It’s been a precipitous and steady drop, but if you’re a true believer, it would be easy to say it’s just giving up a little bit of Trump bubble, hope it’s almost over, and relax. After all, they’ve still got their job or most of the stock market gains collected over the last 20 years, so their immediate personal conditions look great.

Apparently, one of the things that becomes really difficult as IQ drops even a little bit below 100 is hypothetical-conditionals. Like, “How would you feel if you hadn’t eaten breakfast?” becomes, “But I did eat breakfast, and I feel fine.” So, looking at the economic disruption Trump’s causing, imagining that it could continue or get worse, and what that might mean for their personal situation can be a real, does-not-compute struggle.

His district was 65-35, so not very purple.

Yup.

Listen, I understand that numbers are scary, but the difference between ‘ordinary rich’ and ‘problematic rich’ is entirely in the numbers. I’ve probably got 10x as much cash in bank as you, but I’m not rich. My grandma, retired with a paid-off house and a bit of 401k, probably - technically - a millionaire, but still not rich. Billionaire who gets stopped for speeding or DUI can drop $100,000 on lawyers, the way I might drop a penny in the Take-a-penny dish, not just fighting his ticket but investigating and suing the PD that stopped him. That billionaire can pay a politician $1M for special treatment the way I might buy lunch.

Your grandma with $1M ain’t problematic rich. Billionaire is problematic rich. The threshold is somewhere in between, and probably closer to $100M than $10M. Estate tax starts at $14M. Most of the proposals for wealth tax start somewhere around $50M.

$14M is almost exactly the top 1% of US households by wealth, around a million to million-and-a-half of them. There’s only 750 billionaires. The billionaires are less than 0.1% of the US 1%.

$14M is plenty to live very comfortably, but it’s little enough that you still have to consider costs of big purchases. You’re not going to own a jet. You can have multiple houses as long as you keep them normal-sized. $14M is rich, but it’s not Rich-rich.

Next they’ll come for Mr. Ms. and Mrs.

You know, I just noticed: there’s no “r” in missus, so abbreviating it “Mrs” doesn’t really make sense. Maybe it’s supposed to be a possessive, like Mr’s, rather than an actual gender signifier.

It’s a short walk from “Mexico is sending us their criminals” to “We should send our criminals to Mexico.”

It’ll push everyone to move their data centers and IT cores overseas.

Every function the government fails to provide is an opportunity for people to pay for a commercial alternative. Where functioning countries provide national healthcare, Americans can pay private companies. Shutting down FEMA is an opportunity for companies to offer new kinds of disaster insurance, an opportunity for Trump-branded temporary housing, Trump-branded search & rescue. The list goes on.

Much more practical to revoke her church’s tax exempt status.