[tesla69]

Originally Posted by tw2113

I wonder how much Trump is actually enjoying this all, or if he's getting lost trying to count on his fingers how many days he could have left.

You just keep reading and believing the Deep State corporate press if it makes you feel good!

[tw2113]

Originally Posted by tesla69

You just keep reading and believing the Deep State corporate press if it makes you feel good!

no idea where to read that and I'm personally hoping he's miserable as fuck and can't wait to get out. However, I also know he has an ego regarding "winning" and will probably run again for re-election, much to our behest. Thus I settle on being apocalypse hopeful and praying that the end of the world comes soon and takes out humankind

[ilduclo]

Kjjerjjstejn :

"....the direct result of obvious draw factors: an immigration system that rewards parents for sending their children across the border alone, a system that prevents parents who bring their children on a dangerous and illegal journey from facing consequences for their actions, an asylum process that is not able to quickly help those who qualify for asylum, a system that encourages fraudulent claims, and a system that encourages bad actors to coach aliens into making frivolous claims"

[tesla69]

Originally Posted by tw2113

no idea where to read that and I'm personally hoping he's miserable as fuck and can't wait to get out. However, I also know he has an ego regarding "winning" and will probably run again for re-election, much to our behest. Thus I settle on being apocalypse hopeful and praying that the end of the world comes soon and takes out humankind

as examples of Deep State press

Washington Post
New York Times
CNN


" praying that the end of the world comes soon and takes out humankind"
UH-HUH. And I'm the crazy person. right.



You people should all move to fucking Guinea Bissau and you might realize what we are trying to protect here.

[h8kurdt]

Originally Posted by tesla69

You people should all move to fucking Guinea Bissau and you might realize what we are trying to protect here.

And what's that?

[choc e-Claire]

Now, now. Give Tesla credit. He at least knows Guinea-Bissau exists, which probably means he's one up on the President.

[tw2113]

Originally Posted by tesla69

as examples of Deep State press

Washington Post
New York Times
CNN


" praying that the end of the world comes soon and takes out humankind"
UH-HUH. And I'm the crazy person. right.



You people should all move to fucking Guinea Bissau and you might realize what we are trying to protect here.

Can't say I regularly read any of those.


I don't know if you're officially crazy or not. I just have my moments where I feel that humans are germs on earth, and the earth needs a vaccination to eradicate.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by tw2113

Can't say I regularly read any of those.


I don't know if you're officially crazy or not. I just have my moments where I feel that humans are germs on earth, and the earth needs a vaccination to eradicate.

the difference between you and tessie is that you take a metaphor as a metaphor whereas she takes everything literally and thus s.o.r.o.s.-I reptilian aliens is real

thus you have a poetic imagination whereas tessie... she cray!

[tw2113]

Sonic Musk?

[ilduclo]

how does one maintain power while not serving anyone except a small rich portion of the population?

Timothy Snyder Speaks, ep. 4: Sadopopulism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOjJtEkKMX4&t=55s

[ilduclo]

Dow Jones Industrial Average

22,724.43Price decrease621.81 (2.66%)


America hasn’t won this much since 1929, I tells ya. It was GREAT. A GREAT DEPRESSION. That’s what he promised, isn’t it? Making America Great Again? A smart fella should brush up on his hobo signs and learn to hop the rails.

 

[!@#$%!]

 

[!@#$%!]

strong december jobs report this morning (no, this is not a “thanks, trump” post)

brace for this rollercoaster

[ilduclo]

shunk in the trunk!

 

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Robert Schunk

You could've fooled me!

well, you’re easily fooled

[Skuj]

So, I was away from this thread for 2 weeks. Anything happen in Trumpworld?

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Skuj

So, I was away from this thread for 2 weeks. Anything happen in Trumpworld?

lmfao

[Skuj]

Wait.....I thought Mexico was paying? Did tesla/Bytor clarify that?

[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by ilduclo

 

Love this movie, love the original Steinbeck book, love Springsteen's The Ghost Of Tom Joad. Kinda feel a little bit guilty about it, considering what they're based on, but they're all great works.

[The Soup Nazi]

"It is unsurprising to me that Republicans would think having fun should be disqualifying or illegal." —Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

OK, I have to quote the following opinion piece in its entirety:

The Economics of Soaking the Rich
What does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez know about tax policy? A lot.
by Paul Krugman

I have no idea how well Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will perform as a member of Congress. But her election is already serving a valuable purpose. You see, the mere thought of having a young, articulate, telegenic nonwhite woman serve is driving many on the right mad — and in their madness they're inadvertently revealing their true selves.

Some of the revelations are cultural: The hysteria over a video of AOC dancing in college says volumes, not about her, but about the hysterics. But in some ways the more important revelations are intellectual: The right's denunciation of AOC's "insane" policy ideas serves as a very good reminder of who is actually insane.

The controversy of the moment involves AOC's advocacy of a tax rate of 70-80 percent on very high incomes, which is obviously crazy, right? I mean, who thinks that makes sense? Only ignorant people like … um, Peter Diamond, Nobel laureate in economics and arguably the world's leading expert on public finance. (Although Republicans blocked him from an appointment to the Federal Reserve Board with claims that he was unqualified. Really.) And it's a policy nobody has ever implemented, aside from … the United States, for 35 years after World War II — including the most successful period of economic growth in our history.

To be more specific, Diamond, in work with Emmanuel Sáez — one of our leading experts on inequality — estimated the optimal top tax rate to be 73 percent. Some put it higher: Christina Romer, top macroeconomist and former head of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, estimates it at more than 80 percent.

Where do these numbers come from? Underlying the Diamond-Sáez analysis are two propositions: Diminishing marginal utility and competitive markets.

Diminishing marginal utility is the common-sense notion that an extra dollar is worth a lot less in satisfaction to people with very high incomes than to those with low incomes. Give a family with an annual income of $20,000 an extra $1,000 and it will make a big difference to their lives. Give a guy who makes $1 million an extra thousand and he'll barely notice it.

What this implies for economic policy is that we shouldn't care what a policy does to the incomes of the very rich. A policy that makes the rich a bit poorer will affect only a handful of people, and will barely affect their life satisfaction, since they will still be able to buy whatever they want.

So why not tax them at 100 percent? The answer is that this would eliminate any incentive to do whatever it is they do to earn that much money, which would hurt the economy. In other words, tax policy toward the rich should have nothing to do with the interests of the rich, per se, but should only be concerned with how incentive effects change the behavior of the rich, and how this affects the rest of the population.

But here's where competitive markets come in. In a perfectly competitive economy, with no monopoly power or other distortions — which is the kind of economy conservatives want us to believe we have — everyone gets paid his or her marginal product. That is, if you get paid $1000 an hour, it's because each extra hour you work adds $1000 worth to the economy's output.

In that case, however, why do we care how hard the rich work? If a rich man works an extra hour, adding $1000 to the economy, but gets paid $1000 for his efforts, the combined income of everyone else doesn't change, does it? Ah, but it does — because he pays taxes on that extra $1000. So the social benefit from getting high-income individuals to work a bit harder is the tax revenue generated by that extra effort — and conversely the cost of their working less is the reduction in the taxes they pay.

Or to put it a bit more succinctly, when taxing the rich, all we should care about is how much revenue we raise. The optimal tax rate on people with very high incomes is the rate that raises the maximum possible revenue.

And that's something we can estimate, given evidence on how responsive the pre-tax income of the wealthy actually is to tax rates. As I said, Diamond and Sáez put the optimal rate at 73 percent, Romer at over 80 percent — which is consistent with what AOC said.

An aside: What if we take into account the reality that markets aren’t perfectly competitive, that there's a lot of monopoly power out there? The answer is that this almost surely makes the case for even higher tax rates, since high-income people presumably get a lot of those monopoly rents.

So AOC, far from showing her craziness, is fully in line with serious economic research. (I hear that she's been talking to some very good economists.) Her critics, on the other hand, do indeed have crazy policy ideas — and tax policy is at the heart of the crazy.

You see, Republicans almost universally advocate low taxes on the wealthy, based on the claim that tax cuts at the top will have huge beneficial effects on the economy. This claim rests on research by … well, nobody. There isn't any body of serious work supporting G.O.P. tax ideas, because the evidence is overwhelmingly against those ideas.

Look at the history of top marginal income tax rates (left) versus growth in real GDP per capita (right, measured over 10 years, to smooth out short-run fluctuations.):

 

What we see is that America used to have very high tax rates on the rich — higher even than those AOC is proposing — and did just fine. Since then tax rates have come way down, and if anything the economy has done less well.

Why do Republicans adhere to a tax theory that has no support from nonpartisan economists and is refuted by all available data? Well, ask who benefits from low taxes on the rich, and it's obvious.

And because the party's coffers demand adherence to nonsense economics, the party prefers "economists" who are obvious frauds and can't even fake their numbers effectively.

Which brings me back to AOC, and the constant effort to portray her as flaky and ignorant. Well, on the tax issue she's just saying what good economists say; and she definitely knows more economics than almost everyone in the G.O.P. caucus, not least because she doesn't "know" things that aren't true.