I had two columns this week for subscribers to The Athletic – a ranking of the top 30 prospects for this year’s draft, and a scouting notebook on Oregon State, Auburn, and high school shortstop Kayson Cunningham.
I’m on the run, so let’s get to the links…
- The New York Times looks at the rising tide of the working homeless – people who work critical but low-wage jobs in wealthy areas where they can’t afford housing.
- Elon Musk is pouring money into an Wisconsin Supreme Court election, and the Republican candidate he’s backing said just this week that women are too emotional to rule on abortion cases.
- Musk’s goons disbanded the technology office known as 18F, which existed to develop projects designed to improve government efficiency. Some of the former employees have set up a site to explain and defend their work.
- The Texas A&M Board of Regents voted to ban all drag shows at the entire campus network, a pretty clear First Amendment violation. FIRE has sued to block the ban.
- Our genius President referred to Lesotho as a country “nobody has ever heard of,” so the BBC published a story with nine facts about the tiny African country, which is entirely surrounded by South Africa.
- Phoenix Children’s Hospital – where my daughter received care multiple times in the two-plus years we lived out there – has put a halt to gender-affirming care in obeisance to Trump’s (probably unconstitutional) executive orders. Absolute cowardice.
- More obedience in advance – the University of Virginia voted to dissolve its office of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
- Lindsey Boylan, the first woman to come forward to report on Andrew Cuomo’s history of sexual harassment, wrote a piece in Vanity Fair decrying the disgraced ex-Governor’s intended candidacy for mayor of New York City. Cuomo and his legal team have spent years hounding Boylan and his other accusers to try to discredit them.
- Louisiana’s Department of Health is ending its mass vaccination programs and banning promotion of seasonal vaccines like the one against the flu. That measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico has already killed at least three people with over 200 confirmed cases, by the way.
- I don’t do a lot of feel-good stories here, but this one is exceptional: The owner of the last video-rental store in Pocatello, Idaho, closed down his shop, but preserved a little bit of it in the corner of his convenience store especially for one customer, a woman with Down syndrome who’s been renting from him for 15 years.
- The Seattle Times explains why coffee has gotten much more expensive lately, and is likely to continue to get even more so.
- Fox News anchors are suddenly panicking about the “weakening” economy under Trump, as if this is any sort of surprise.
- People who voted for Trump are now losing their government jobs. I really find it hard to muster any sympathy for these folks; if they claim they didn’t know what they were voting for, they weren’t paying enough attention before they went to the booth.
- A Mississippi State alumna writes about the Trump Administration’s attempts to threaten universities into historical denialism, including her own alma mater’s shameful history of racial discrimination.
- A cop in Vermont who struck and killed a cyclist was watching a right-wing Youtube video while driving.
- Some ongoing board game Kickstarters: Point City & Propolis is still going for three more weeks, and there’s another for a 10th anniversary edition of Champions of Midgard with about the same time left.
That Lesotho thing– it amazes me that people can be so proud of their own ignorance. It reminds me of when Arcade Fire won the Grammy for Album of the Year and Rosie O’Donnell tweeted out something to effect of “never heard of them,” not realizing that this reflected poorly on her, not on the band.
Keep in mind that in the same speech, he showed that he didn’t know the difference between transgender and transgenic and still hasn’t corrected the mistake. The ignorance is a feature.
“Corrected the mistake”! Ha! Thanks for the laugh– as if Trump would ever acknowledge error. Your point about the ignorance being a feature is well-stated. We live in an upside-down world where the fact that I can name the eastern provinces of Ukraine that are under Russian occupation makes me an elite not to be trusted (because I read the “biased” newspaper), whereas people who can’t name a single one of them and perhaps couldn’t even locate Ukraine on a map, consider themselves the real experts. (I have actually had an interaction along these lines.)
I mean, this is the guy who still pretty clearly thinks political asylum seekers come from insane asylums, so I’m not shocked he can’t tell the difference between two different things with the word “trans” in them.
I think you meant “but this”, not “butt his”.
I imagine an overriding sense in the Trump voters that lost their jobs is they voted for him under the premise that other people would be negatively affected. But now they’re the ones negatively affected, and that’s just not fair.
It’s rather baffling that federal employees voted for someone who clearly stated an intent to significantly decrease the number of government programs and jobs. What were they expecting? It’s difficult to have sympathy for them. They should have voted for a different candidate.
I think it’s a case where they actually think the only truly essential federal government job is theirs I agree that I have very little sympathy for them. However I will add that as someone who lives in an area that is about to get wrecked economically that it’s very little consolation.
Agreed, and that is where it gets tricky. I think most people would agree we do not need such a bloated bureaucratic federal government. How many federal employees are there? 5 Million? (I’ll look it up). Approximately 3 million. I thought I read somewhere that it was 5 million; I was wrong. Or the source was.
Is 3 million a lot? That’s less than 1% of the population. How does that compare to other countries? (I’ll look it up).
A not-very-helpful search says, “typically this ratio is less than 2%.” That’s no help.
Regardless, the problem is, no two people are likely to agree on WHICH of those 3 million jobs are unnecessary. Personally, I would start with military and “defense”, since no one is attacking us, and we have friendly neighbors north and south and vast oceans East and west. Other people would choose entirely different sectors to cut.
Either way, I am not sure It is sustainable for the government to continue operating above its budget as the debt grows to … 38 trillion? I’ll look it up. 36.2 trillion. TRILLION. If we confiscated the wealth of all billionaires in the US, that would be 5.7 trillion (I looked that up too!).
So, between 1/6 and 1/7 of the national debt, and also, no more amazon to buy cheap things and have them arrive at our doorstep, no more chips or AI technology from Nvidia, no more amazingly fast computers at affordable prices, etc. Because, believe it or not, the companies run by those billionaires actually do provide services and goods that we need and want. A company cannot make money unless it exchanges goods that we want for money that we are willing to pay.
I’d rather see the government get rid of the insanely regressive payroll taxes on lower and middle class earners than confiscate money from billionaires. (I’m pretty sure that the vast majority of income taxes are paid by the wealthy.) Taxes on investment gains, or worse, on unrealized gains? What? Don’t we want to encourage lower and middle class earners to save and invest? Don’t penalize it! The invested money was already what remained after income and payroll taxes. And how would taxing unrealized gains work exactly?
Stocks can swing wildly from one day to the next. We do not know if the stock will actually yield a profit until it is sold. Property taxes can be brutal. Some people work hard to eventually own their own home, but then the land appraisal doubles, and now they can barely afford to pay the rent on the house they already own.
A “wealth tax” though? So, “You have managed to save and accumulate some wealth for you and your kids and your grandkids to give them a better life. You have done this even though every dollar you have has been taxed 6 different ways. But now you have too much, so we’re just going to tax THAT too. Give us some of it back.”
Keep in mind, some of the politicians calling for such things are themselves multimillionaires with multiple homes, who have a staggering net worth while making a 250,000 a year salary. Hmm. Insider trading, perhaps?
Anyway, before anyone jumps to any conclusions, I am very much lower class in terms of income. I have a parent living on a fixed income who is struggling with the doubling of the cost of goods and services in a short time span. So, I am not writing any of this for self-serving purposes.
@Frank, a couple things:
1. The national debt is not “real” in a few ways. One, it represents the price we pay (largely in defense spending) to remain the global hegemon, which is worth far more than the accumulated debt. Two, who is going to call in the debt? Who has the power to make us pay it? Three, money itself is not “real,” which renders the debt figure more of an accounting figure than a real obligation. More generally, panic about the national debt is just a right-wing canard to try to sell austerity measures to the masses…don’t believe their lies.
2. You’ve got most of your commentary on taxes backwards. Billionaires and other extremely rich people effectively do not pay taxes. Most efforts at tax reform are aimed at that fundamental fact. Unrealized gains is a large part of how the rich accumulate their wealth…any plan to address that will pull >99% of its additional revenue from that class. In the same way, all wealth tax proposals have a floor that will exempt >99% of people (for example, Bernie Sanders’ plan exempted everyone with less than $32M in wealth: https://berniesanders.com/issues/tax-extreme-wealth/). All meaningful efforts at tax reform are explicitly an attack on this billionaire class. People with a fraction of that wealth, who DO indeed pay taxes, should welcome such a political project.
@Mike
“…renders the debt figure more of an accounting figure than a real obligation…”
“…panic about the national debt is just a right-wing canard to try to sell austerity measures to the masses…don’t believe their lies.”
While pretending resource constraints don’t exist and regurgitating MMT claptrap as justification might make you feel clever, to the point of feeling “red-pilled” as if you’ve discovered secrets that defy the laws of economics, I can assure you that’s not how it works in the real world.
Money isn’t just an arbitrary data point. It’s a signal wrapped in an incentive structure and only makes sense in the context of millions of other data points that are moving constantly and simultaneously and require some measure of transparency and equilibrium to work properly and efficiently (i.e., without creating major market distortions, surpluses and shortages, etc.)
There’s a reason that MMT is derisively dismissed in serious economic circles as the Magic Money Tree philosophy and little more than a fairy tale.
You actually start off in the ballpark of the correct answer by referencing the US’ status as global hegemon, but you go completely off the rails from there. Being the global hegemon is what affords us reserve currency status, and that is what gives the *appearance* to some, like yourself, that money and resources are not constrained by the laws of supply and demand. It’s a privilege that we have abused over and over again, and I can assure you that, as the rest of the world moves away from the dollar in response to that abuse, you’ll quickly discover that resource constraints exist, (national) debt matters, and so much more.
@Roger
While I am flattered that the ghost of Friedrich Hayek has taken corporeal form in order to reply to my blog post comment, I am pretty sure we are entering the 55th year of money being whatever the issuer wants it to be.
@Mike
It sounds like we might be largely in agreement about the root causes of how we’ve gotten to this point with money, debt, etc., however, we also seem to be drawing drastically different conclusions about how to respond to that reality. No matter the pretensions of the money issuers or delusions of the statist/social contract types who see unlimited money creation and (equitable, of course) distribution as a panacea for all of society’s ills, the current monetary system is unequivocally unsustainable and will eventually be forced to give way to something else that respects the laws of supply and demand.
@Roger
I think the disconnect between us is that I don’t see the national debt as something that needs to be “responded to.” It is not a problem because it is not real. Is the existence of the national debt downstream of “all of society’s ills”? In some ways yes and in some ways no. But the debt itself is an artifice that no one reading this blog should care about.
@Mike,
It’s only true that the debt is “not real” and is “an artifice that no one reading this blog should care about” insofar as there will never be an individual or group representing the government – notwithstanding theatrical and performative tweaks to the tax code by the United States Congress – going around knocking on doors and demanding you or anyone else hand over money at gunpoint to contribute to “paying off” this supposed debt. However, the debt itself is a proxy for the legitimacy of our currency and, by extension, our entire economic system. It may be difficult, if not impossible, to see the connection, but that debt figure is loosely correlated to whether a loaf of bread might cost $0.30, $3, $30, or $3,000,000 and the timeline that we might oscillate between any of those three options. To say the national debt does not matter is to say that money itself and prices do not matter, and that is unequivocally false. Those who believe the national debt is “not real” must, by extension, believe that government spending in excess of revenues collected does not matter and/or makes no difference, which implies a belief we can either spend our way to prosperity or at least more equitable outcomes, and I am saying that is pure fantasy. In fact, decoupling money/debt from productive economic activity as we’ve done over the past five decades, with the seeds planted much further back, has actually been the primary driver of income and wealth inequality in this country. What you fail to recognize is that taking debt seriously and applying austerity measures would close the gap between the haves and have-nots.
@Roger
Don’t feel like responding to everything here, but can’t let one specific thing go: Saying that a I don’t care about spending/revenues is very funny given that my first post in this thread explicitly advocates for increasing government revenues. More pointedly, the idea that a concern for efficiency in government spending requires austerity is obvious bullshit. To cite a notable example, universal healthcare would save trillions of dollars if implemented (https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2018/07/30/mercatus-study-finds-medicare-for-all-saves-2-trillion/).
@Mike,
I’m not sure how to debate or even respond to someone who explicitly states that money and debt are not “real” and and therefore merely accounting figures but turns around and suggests what we actually need is a much more progressive (or outright confiscatory) tax structure. Why the need to bring in more tax revenue if money/debt aren’t “real” and/or don’t matter? Is it simply to restrain wealth inequality? Or perhaps a tacit acknowledgement that money/debt DO indeed matter? Or a sincere belief that taxing the rich more will bring in sufficient revenue to cover our obligations (even though you assured us they’re not “real” obligations, just an accounting figure)? Or some combination of all the above?
As for believing that we can just tax the rich more without implementing more austere measures around spending is more fantasy. There is ample research showing that you could confiscate practically 100% of the wealth from every single billionaire , and it would hardly put a dent in the accumulated national debt. You’d have to confiscate the overwhelming majority of wealth from not only millionaires and billionaires but most of the upper-middle class to obtain enough wealth to pay off the debt, but by that point, you would have also liquidated most of the economy in the process. And liquidating that much wealth all at once wouldn’t yield anywhere near the full market value of all assets, because it would be like when there’s something that triggers a selling panic, if the number of sellers vastly exceeds the number of willing and especially able (in this case) buyers, the market value plummets.
With all due respect, I just don’t consider your opinions as remotely serious on these topics because of the inconsistencies already exposed.
@ Roger
You are conflating the obvious need to collect enough revenue to run a country (a real thing) with the fictitious need to pay off the national debt (a fake thing). It’s perfectly reasonable to say we need to increase taxation to do the former without saying we need to do the latter.
@Frank. It’s a hard problem that DOGE doesn’t truly want to solve (they just want to harm federal programs they don’t believe in). Federal employees make up ~5% of the federal budget, and large-scale RIFs have generally led to hiring contractors to fill in gaps, often more than offsetting gains. I’m not necessarily opposed if it’s done right (carefully identify programs or positions to phase out, and be humane about it by having attrition occur through retirements and reassignment).
The majority of our budget is mandatory spending (mostly Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid). Those are hard to reform without cutting benefits in some way, which many Republicans would love to do, but they would probably get crushed at the polls in doing so. Social Security’s solvency problems could be mostly fixed by eliminating the wage cap, but there are no easy tax fixes for Medicare and Medicaid.
That said, Republicans constantly claim that we’re on the right side of the Laffer curve, but each of the tax cuts by Reagan, W., and Trump have resulted in less federal revenue. If they truly cared about debt, they would consider tax increases and spending decreases instead of additional tax cuts.
Generalized response from someone with a degree in economics:
WHAT THE F ????
I am not going to bother trying to respond the nonsense in the back-and-forth exchange above. I’ll just say that I often tell my friends,” I have a degree in economics with a 4.0 GPA, and I still cannot make any sense of the economic c policies I see in the real world.
SO, truly, I do not know whether the world is off-kilter, or whether I am, or anything in between. I give up.