Today was supposed to be the last Democratic Presidential primary. We’ve heard primarily from three candidates: Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren (though this article says that all of them are essentially just repeating things that Bernie Sanders said in 2016).
All of these Democrats have said that, through the magic of higher tax rates on the rich, the Federal government will be showered in tax revenue, breaking out of Hauser’s Law that found revenue to be limited to about 20 percent of GDP, independent of the headline rates (1945-2015). In the page pandering to Catholic voters, for example, Biden promises to “get rid of the capital gains loophole for multi-millionaires.” So a multi-millionaire would have to pay a 50% ordinary income tax rate, federal plus state, on capital gains but wouldn’t be able to move to Puerto Rico for 183 days/year and pay 4% instead under Act 22 (and that would be to Puerto Rico, so the Federal Government would get 0%).
I wonder if this kind of magical thinking about the possibilities of a high return on an investment of tax rates is partly due to the politicians’ age. They’re all senior citizens and senior citizens can be prone to mistaken estimates. One of the most famous examples of this is an investment group of women in their 70s known as the Beardstown Ladies, They believed that they’d achieved a 23 percent annual return on investment, beating the S&P 500. When younger people analyzed their returns, the conclusion was that the return had been 9 percent annually, underperforming the S&P 500.
[Some more fun stuff… All of the Democrats told us that immigration will make existing residents of the U.S. better off. It doesn’t matter how low the skill level of the immigrant nor how much in the way of government-provided services the immigrant needs. A 75-year-old migrant who does not speak English and who needs $2 million in health care will make every existing American slightly richer. Admitting several million elderly disabled non-English-speaking immigrants would make us crazy rich.
Joe Biden will deny that there is anything special about having been born with a physician-identified biological female sex at birth (“LGBTQ+ Equality”; what about LGBTQIA+?), but the rest of his policy pages refer to “women” as though it were a persistent well-defined category of humans.]
Readers: What do you think? Are the leading Democrats examples of the elderly being bad at arithmetic? Should we all make sure that we have a durable power of attorney set up for the day that we turn 70 and can’t trust ourselves to make a stock trade?
I think the primary difference between the Beardstown Ladies and the others you mention is that the Beardstown Ladies were probably sincere if not very good at arithmetic. Warren, Biden, etc. are insincere — they don’t care if the numbers make sense. Rather they just hope that by playing to envy they will get something for themselves. That might be a good strategy given that US math scores are among the lowest among the developed world so if numbers are involved there is a good chance it will go over most people’s heads. On the other hand even if the average American voter hasn’t much in the way of math ability he may have sufficient common sense to know that raising taxes on the wealthy means raising taxes on him. He may also have noticed the miserable performance of many government officials at the Federal, State, and municipal levels in creating and responding to the coronapanic and may decide that he would rather keep the money in his own wallet, thank you very much. We shall soon find out.
Biden has a hard time saying things coherently but the more he talks after he is elected, the more you’re going to swear you’re hearing a mashup of Sanders and Warren speaking. The math doesn’t matter. This is about finally retiring whatever is left of the moderate wing of the Democrat party and putting it into the grave.
People believe the dollar and America still exist?
Biden is an old, white, guilt-inflicted and befuddled geezer who is being nominated by the Democratic Party precisely because he is the Trojan horse who will carry Socialism to America while the center-left portion of his party is systematically dismantled. This country is finished.
Back in 1998-2001 and up until about 2004, I didn’t know how long it was going to take, I thought it could maybe be prevented, but it looks like that was a pipedream. All the writing was on the wall – literally! All of the things you are seeing today as “mainstream” movements were in development while I lived in Chicago, walking the hallways of an activist law school, traveling around the city, reading the posters, meeting the radical professors, listening to their classroom pedagogy, reading the Dean’s emails (which was part of my job) and watching as it all bootstrapped itself while Barack Obama was being prepared for his Presidency. And you can believe me when I tell you that I knew Barack Obama was going to defeat Hillary Clinton for the nomination before most people in this country even knew who he was, including Hillary Clinton. There was no way to warn anyone. Nobody would believe me at the time, I would have sounded like a crazy person!
“This guy, Barack Hussein Obama. He’s going to be the next President!” Off to the rubber room you go.
This is why Trump has made the Left so angry. He literally not supposed to happen. They were all horrified and enraged beyond belief that he won.
Until very recently nobody has realized just how thoroughly this nation has been ideologically subverted, but we’re about to find out in very real, stark terms, and there’s no going back. Historians might be able to piece it all together, assuming they’re all not purged before it’s over. The only question now is whether it’s going to be a velvet revolution or a bloody one.
The precise date I knew Barack Obama was going to be the next President of the United States was June 4, 2004. That was the day the Chicago Tribune reported that Jack Ryan’s (who was his opponent for U.S. Senate) divorce records file should **remain sealed.**
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2004-06-04-0406040134-story.html
Of course, I knew some people in Chicagoland legal academia at the time, so I asked one: “You think they’ll stay sealed?”
“No comment. [SMILE]”
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2004-06-04-0406040134-story.html
Of course, by the 26th, everyone in the world knew about Jack Ryan, Jeri Ryan ( https://www.digitalspy.com/tv/ustv/a797086/jeri-ryan-wont-rule-out-guest-starring-on-new-star-trek/ ), and all the sordid details as Ryan quit the race in humiliation. The gobsmacked Republicans even tried to recruit Mike Ditka to run in his place, but Ditka knows rigged game when he sees one and had the good sense to run as fast as he could in the other direction. Then poor Alan Keyes was shanghaied into the job for the coup de grâce. **That** was sad.
It was great fun at the time. I’m sure Biden and Obama have a good laugh over it every time June rolls around. But anyway, I really don’t think the numbers matter that much to Biden any more. Bernie and Liz will make them up as they go along, and everyone will nod in agreement, comrade!
Liberal women want the government to pay them for work that has no economic value. They want to be employed in government social welfare bureaucracies and academia, and in government-mandated private sector bureaucracies of human resources and diversity training. Many now want the government to flat-out pay them a monthly stipend to raise the kids they have without getting married. There’s a reason why the founding fathers didn’t believe in pure democracy. Many of our citizens have no business choosing who should govern. Of course, I would agree that suffrage was historically always given to powerful white men. But the revolution was mostly about freeing successful colonial entrepreneurs from their King and agreeing to governing themselves. But at least the chances were better that these men were educated (and I don’t mean simply having been in school, but having actual knowledge), had experience in commerce, etc.
In the 18th-century Thirteen Colonies, suffrage was restricted to white males with the following property qualifications (about 6% of the population):
Connecticut: an estate worth 40 shillings annually or £40 of personal property
Delaware: fifty acres of land (twelve under cultivation) or £40 of personal property
Georgia: fifty acres of land
Maryland: fifty acres of land and £40 personal property
Massachusetts Bay: an estate worth 40 shillings annually or £40 of personal property
New Hampshire: £50 of personal property
New Jersey: one-hundred acres of land, or real estate or personal property £50
New York: £40 of personal property or ownership of land
North Carolina: fifty acres of land
Pennsylvania: fifty acres of land or £50 of personal property
Rhode Island and Providence Plantations: personal property worth £40 or yielding 50 shillings annually
South Carolina: one-hundred acres of land on which taxes were paid; or a town house or lot worth £60 on which taxes were paid; or payment of 10 shillings in taxes
Virginia: fifty acres of vacant land, twenty-fives acres of cultivated land, and a house twelve feet by twelve feet; or a town lot and a house twelve feet by twelve