Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Nevertheless, he persisted.

eta: Or you could say he bluffed.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

And not to be jerky but she controls who can come in? How? Like could the R speaker in 2013 have told President Obama no speech? I’m glad people fuck with him but not real cool on any more basic aspects of the country being ruined.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

For someone to be invited to a joint session of Congress, the Senate and the House both have to agree. It's not Pelosi's choice personally, but he could try to call her bluff again and see if Democrats aren't behind her.

I don't like seeing norms trampeled, but I'm really tired of the Republicans using the federal government as a hostage.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I'm flying tomorrow, to get home, so i do blame people, and by people I mean a particular subhuman. But hasn't there been brinksmanship on the budget forever when the congress (either side) and white house are split? Difference is, until now no one had the disregard to let this happen.

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Depends who you ask. Hoyer and Pelosi seemed to have different interpretations of the letter. It seemed designed to look strong to those who want to to strength, but reasonable to those seeking compromise.

This stand off is characterized by both sides playing to the rabid and more moderate members of their respective parties at the same time.

The problem for Trump is, the rabid base and the more moderate wing of the GOP are bitterly opposed to one another. A moderate R hates the wall and thinks this shutdown is mindlessly fucking with an already skittish economy. A member of the base thinks Trump standing up to the libruls is great.

Contrast this with the Ds, where moderates and the base are fairly well aligned. Moderates would throw Trump a bone to get the govt open, but agree with the base that building a wall is idiotic and a waste of money. Pelosi can satisfy both of these groups.

Trump's a king on the run with no bishops, knights, or rooks, and a queen on his tail.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I'm flying saturday. Is it slow because of TSA? I thought they were still on the job.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Lots of no show TSA. If Philly has Clear get it.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

What you're trying to say is that the shutdown is being driven by rabid conservatives who understand that they have to do things like take hostages and causes crises in order to get their way, because their ideas are not only unpopular generally, but also often within their own party.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I think you're crediting the GOP's rabid base with more rational thinking than it deserves. The base is more emotional, more lizard brain, than that. Particularly on this issue. It knows the wall is a bullshit policy that infuriates both moderate Rs and Ds. It wants to flex its muscles against both groups.

I just watched Brexit on HBO. It's highly entertaining and explains a lot of what's happening with the wall. The rabid GOP base wants respect (areas of the country in which it is strongest tend to still have "honor culture"). It wants to be heard and have an ongoing voice. Like the blue collar Brexit voters (as opposed to the well-off conservative ones which formed the other half of Brexit voters), its chief message is: We're Here, and You'll be Dealing With Us.

I think you're seeing rational thought with a policy goal where the reality is more emotional outburst and demand to be heard and made part of policy negotiation.

ETA: For the last near thirty or so years, if you'd paid attention to the news and data, you could see that the middle and lower classes were increasingly falling behind. Occasionally, it'd lead one to this thought: Where do these people go? I'd normally answer that internal question with, Oh, they'll just soak into the economic/social fabric in some way I can't imagine... a bunch of them will die. But apparently, that blase attitude, one I think many of us shared and perhaps still share, was way off. A lot of these people went into a form of hibernation. They survived somehow and social media provided a means to spark them to action. And I think, and the movie highlights this, their chief grievance is having been ignored. The neat takeaway from the Brexit movie, its sole revelatory message, is that these "deplorables" can be neutralized, and all it takes is letting them have a voice. They probably can't and won't win on any policy issues, but if you know who they are, if they feel they have representation, you can better understand, counter, and control them. Ignoring them and thinking they'd go away, OTOH, was a really lazy and foolish approach.

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Sure. The whole idea of building a wall is a marketing ploy. The fact remains, it is something that a minority of the country wants. If there were majority support for it, a shutdown wouldn't be necessary.

I don't buy that your hibernating lizards are the key here. In the US and in the UK, nationalist conservatives have taken over one of the main political parties. Brexit is different from the wall because it gets Labour support too, and in particular Labour is led by someone who is more interested in using a Brexit train wreck to become PM than in stopping it.

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Or fly out of SFO, whereat Covenant Aviation Security, a private company under contract with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), provides the passenger and baggage screening.

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I wonder how long contractors like that one can continue to pay their employees but not get paid by the federal government, and what happens at airports like SFO when that dog no longer hunts.

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LGA was shut down today. I suspect others will shut down too. https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/loca...504861791.html

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Hey Sebby, this thread from Paul Krugman has an interesting angle on something you talk about. It's about the way that less populated areas are hit by changes from international trade. Because they are less populated, and because trade increasingly drives specialization, changes in the economy that have small aggregate effects can have huge effects in particular places. If you have a small town with a single factory and that factory closes, the town gets totally whacked, even if the aggregate effects on its state or the country are small and/or generally positive. And in the background, you have a steady, long-term decline in jobs from farming.

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Trump caves. Will the right-wing echo chamber defend him?

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Ann Coulter says no: "Good news for George Herbert Walker Bush: As of today, he is no longer the biggest wimp ever to serve as President of the United States."

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She is scheduled to be on Bill Maher tonight.

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I called a contact in the White House. That’s how I roll.

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Her personality is naturally that of a raging cokehead. If she took uppers you’d need slow motion filming to follow her ramblings.

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I agree this phenomenon is taking place. But I’m not sure it’s a counter to the broader wage stagnation we’re facing as labor arbitrage and automation work on la macro level. Which is I think where he is ultimately going.

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It's not a counter, it's an explanation of why an aggregate effect that seems pretty mild really hits some places hard.

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I wish I'd seen this earlier. What an opportunity to just lock up the studio and never let either of them out again.

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The aggregate effect isn’t mild. By asserting it is, Krugman assumes something contrary to reality. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/18/few-...emergency.html

https://money.cnn.com/2018/05/22/pf/...ces/index.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...-shame/476415/

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...k-robert-reich

There are a lot of reasons for this, including a lot of Americans making unwise financial decisions. But the overwhelming majority of it stems from policy decisions and changes in the labor market. This is not “mild” in any regard.

The notion it’s mild is undone by the admissions at Davos this very year. The Brahmin of global capitalism even admitted that the old neoliberal system is losing (or has lost) its grip because there are too many angry and forgotten people to control. Christ, look at the crazy confiscatory tax Warren just proposed. This political upheaval, these admissions from the “elites” themselves, do not describe problems in the global economy one would call mild. They are extreme reactions to an acute and significant group of problems.

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I don't think you understand Davos. Most of those planes come from MENA, Russia, and the Autocracies of Asia.

You think a 2% wealth tax on wealth over $50M is confiscatory? Really? What are your property taxes? Here in Mass, median home and mortgage are about $400K and $300K, respectively, and average retirement savings are around $200. With a 2 1/2%+ property tax (prop. taxes are limited by law to 2.5$ unless the town votes to "override" the limits), most people are paying more than 2% in wealth taxes each year (the wealthy aren't - they have more wealth in assets that aren't part of the tax and less leveraged homes).

We can debate the merits, but calling it confiscatory is just moronic and out of touch. Get a clue.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I think you misread him. This is from that chain:

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

That's an interesting way of looking at it, one I hadn't considered. Maybe the way to sell this to expand property taxes to include other kinds of wealth.

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The biggest problem with wealth taxes is that they can lead to capital flight when the asset involved is intangible or mobile (including assets in corporate solution). It's easy to levy wealth taxes on real estate because you can't take your skyscraper and leave the country. So set your wealth tax too high, and your wealthy all relocate to somewhere else. Florida had a wealth tax on stock for many years, made possible because people wanted to have their stock in Florida to avoid higher income taxes elsewhere, but the tax ultimately became filled with so many loopholes it was silly.

There is a theory that if the wall is big enough, in the form of expatriation taxes, the capital drain can be minimized, but there is probably not a wall that solid or that large.

I don't know where the break point is on a wealth tax before you get too much capital flight; it may well be in the vicinity of that 2% number. But it might make sense to replace the estate tax with a wealth tax. The estate tax has a lot of irrationality to it, it is a big but occasional hit, where a smaller and more predictable wealth tax might get more total revenue with less economic dislocation.

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I don't think many people see property taxes as a subset of wealth taxes, but it is true that for the middle class, their home is often their biggest investment.

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Really? I find that surprising - it's the quintessential wealth tax. What do other folks think?

If we're looking to reform the current system, simply making the existing wealth taxes less regressive would be good - include all forms of wealth and all types of taxpayers and allow the gross to be reduced by debt (because the banks will pay the wealth tax on the value of the debt anyways).

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I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying you're pointing out something which is true but very much underappreciated.

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Interesting to think about alternatives to holding one's wealth in the world's only reserve currency, but I suppose one can speculate in international real estate or something.

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It's possible to hold US securities without being taxed in the US.

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I actually really like that concept. The problem is fighting the argument that the policy punishes saving. You’d have to build in carve outs for the non-crazy rich savers who accrue significant wealth by simply spending less than they earn and investing wisely. That’s doable, but would be a complex calculation.

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I understand that comparison. I agree with it. My disagreement was based on an assumption of where he was going. I read into his points, perhaps unfairly, a setup for an argument that the US economy was fine, but we assume otherwise based on negative outliers, such as the furniture industry’s impact on a town in NC.

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Just exclude 401ks and you'll cover most middle class savers. But really there doesn't need to be an exception for people investing reasonably, they can still pay their fair share.

There are also a lot of investment incentives you could undo as both costing revenue and distorting the economy. Just delete the oil and gas and insurance subsections of the Tax Code. And get rid of capital gains / ordinary income differentials. You will have a similar effect as the wealth tax - you'll make investing more sector-neutral and less tax driven, while taking revenue from the broadest possible tax base.

Traditionally, there was also a class coming up by their bootstrap who invested in two-flats or farmland, but the farmland investors are now only of historical interest and the two flatters are becoming rarer and rarer.

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I understand.

Having begun practice as a tax lawyer, my blinders make it hard for me to comprehend that most people haven't fully internalized the basics of the major schools of tax theory. It's interesting to me to see what smart, well educated people without that immersion think or are aware of in the area.

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I rarely agree with you entirely on anything, but this is an exception. This should be a Democratic candidate’s tax policy. Wall St would have a complete freak out about something like this, but their opposition would be a benefit to a candidate.

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I don’t think people see them as a wealth tax because they are washed by two things:

1. The more you pay of them, usually, the better your school district, which protects and often increases home value;
2. Until Trump’s bizarre tax bill of last year, whatever you paid in those taxes was repaid to you in the form of a fed tax deduction.

I wonder what effect the SALT limitations of Trump’s bill will have on school districts in states with high property taxes. I suspect a lot of school board members are going to really wish they hadn’t run. Can’t imagine it will be easy to raise property taxes anymore. On the positive side, it’ll probably cause boards to examine budgets more closely and spend with more of an eye toward value. As opposed to just building massive new facilities (subsidies for their builder and engineer constituents) and doing little to attract and keep talented teachers and upgrade courses.

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Property taxes are a terrible, inequitable and, ultimately, racist way to fund schools so if it causes a move to different forms of funding, that might be a silver lining in otherwise bad policy.

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What you're looking at in my view is really pretty close to what Bill Clinton pushed on income taxes with a dash of the current progressive thinking on wealth taxes.

Bill equalized cap gains and ordinary income, and he pared back investment incentives for the most part (though he had his favorites). And it really worked for the economy.

But, glad you agree. And, congratulations, you are now a Liz Warren fan!

I'm unlikely to support Liz, but she is very smart on this stuff and needs to be listened to.