Category: Biden/Harris

Return on investment in political donations

by philg

In Europe, the UK, and the US, the natural response to “economy isn’t productive enough to support the government that we want/deserve” is “tax the rich”. Does a climate change alarmist like Bill Gates actually need four business jets or could he get by with three? If the answer is “the Gulfstream G650 and two more jets should be enough” then it is natural to conclude that Mr. Gates isn’t paying his fair share to support our collective spending dreams.

(How big are our dreams? Singapore’s government spends about 19 percent of GDP (Heritage). The U.S. government spends over 41 percent (Heritage; though since “private” health care is essentially part of the government I think the real number is over 50 percent).)

“Donors Quietly Push Harris to Drop Tax on Ultrawealthy” (New York Times, August 29, 2024) is a look inside the process of investing in political donations to make sure that the tax burden from expanded government falls on someone else.

Ms. Harris’s campaign last week said she supported the tax increases included in President Biden’s latest White House budget proposal. One of those plans would require Americans worth at least $100 million to pay taxes on investment gains even if they have not sold the stocks, bonds or other assets that have appreciated.

Under the plan, those Americans would owe a 25 percent tax on a combination of their regular income, like wages, and so-called unrealized gains. The so-called billionaire minimum income tax could create hefty tax bills for wealthy individuals who derive much of their wealth from the stocks and other assets they own.

The proposal has hit a nerve with some of the donors who have flocked to supporting Ms. Harris after Mr. Biden dropped out of the presidential race, according to seven people familiar with the conversations.

Still, some donors close to Ms. Harris do not believe she is that committed to the idea. “In my interactions with them, the key is she focuses on her values and is not an ideologue about any particular program,” Mark Cuban, a billionaire and the former principal owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, said in an interview. “From what I’ve been told, everything is on the table, nothing’s been decided yet.”

It looks like the donors will get tax treatment that isn’t available to others:

The pushback comes amid growing optimism among lobbyists and donors that Ms. Harris is adopting a friendlier approach to business concerns than Mr. Biden. Some have said privately that they feel that Ms. Harris’s policy positions are less set in stone than Mr. Biden’s were, allowing for outside pressure to be more effective.

In her speech at the Democratic National Convention last week, Ms. Harris said she would create an “opportunity economy” and provide support to entrepreneurs and “founders,” a word in a carefully constructed speech that some attendees saw as targeted toward assuaging wealthy business leaders in Silicon Valley.

So the people who control what opinions can be widely shared, e.g., via social media, are on track to get a deal that won’t be available to non-donors.

The VCs for Kamala group — which includes Reid Hoffman, a founder of LinkedIn; Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures; Ron Conway, a well-known investor; and the billionaire Chris Sacca — surveyed its members about various public policy issues. Roughly 75 percent of respondents agreed with the statement “taxing unrealized capital gains will stifle innovation,” according to a document viewed by The New York Times. The survey otherwise showed support for Ms. Harris’s agenda.

The ambitious tax proposal would face an uphill climb on Capitol Hill, where Republicans and some Democrats are skeptical of changing how capital gains are taxed. That dynamic has helped ease some of the concerns on Wall Street about the idea, said Charles Myers, a fund-raiser for Ms. Harris and the chairman and founder of Signum Global Advisors.

“In my world, yes, I do hear about it and there is concern,” he said. “I think almost every person who would raise it as a concern understands that it would never pass Congress even if it’s a Democratic sweep.”

Part of the idea seems to be is that Kamala Harris can tell peasant voters that government will expand to meet all of their needs, paid for by these new taxes on the rich, and then Congress will instead raise taxes on the upper-income peasants. The article quotes one Democrat who says that’s the explicit plan:

Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, who studies corporate leadership at the Yale School of Management, said he had raised issues about taxing unrealized capital gains with members of Ms. Harris’s campaign team. He said the campaign did not want to publicly distance itself from the idea. “They don’t want to antagonize the populist support they need to get through the elections and make a big issue of it,” he said.

“Forget Stocks Or Bonds, Invest In A Lobbyist” (state-sponsored NPR, 2012):

In a recent study, researchers Raquel Alexander and Susan Scholz calculated the total amount the corporations saved from the lower tax rate. They compared the taxes saved to the amount the firms spent lobbying for the law. Their research showed the return on lobbying for those multinational corporations was 22,000 percent. That means for every dollar spent on lobbying, the companies got $220 in tax benefits.

If Kamala Harris is elected and the promised new/higher taxes on the rich aren’t implemented as promised and/or have carve-outs craft just for venture capitalists and they companies they fund, I wonder what the ROI on these Silicon Valley billionaires’ donations will turn out to be.

Related:

  • “Unite calls for 1% wealth tax on super-rich to fund UK public sector pay rises” (Guardian, August 24, 2024), which shows the broad cross-cultural appeal that the idea has, despite its complete unworkability in the UK, which lacks a US-style exit tax and doesn’t tax UK citizens who move abroad (a US citizen, by contrast, is taxed even if he/she/ze/they hasn’t lived in the US for decades). Thus, any UK billionaire who wants to escape UK taxation can simply move to a tax-free or low-tax country, such as Monaco, Italy, or Switzerland. See, for example, Jim Ratcliffe: “In May 2018, Ratcliffe was the richest person in the UK, with a net worth of £21.05 billion. … In September 2020, Ratcliffe officially changed his tax residence from Hampshire to Monaco, a move that it is estimated will save him £4 billion in tax.”
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Young Americans see Kamala Harris as the “candidate of change”

by philg

“Poll Finds Harris Rising as She Challenges Trump on Change” (NYT):

A national Times/Siena poll found Kamala Harris with a slim lead over Donald J. Trump. Voters were more likely to see her, not Mr. Trump, as a break from the status quo.

Ms. Harris, who is 59, was seen by a wide margin, 61 percent to 29 percent, as the change candidate among voters who are not white. Younger voters see her as the change candidate by a lopsided margin: 58 percent to 34 percent.

Is this the first time in history that an incumbent has been able to persuade American voters that he/she/ze/they is the “change candidate”?

On the other hand, maybe the perception is legitimate. Let’s try to figure out what might change. First, if Kamala Harris has a good idea right now, what is stopping her from implementing it? Is Joe Biden the obstacle? The person who is actually running the U.S. is the obstacle? Why is this person obstructing productive change from a member of his/her/zir/their own party?

For the sake of this post, though, let’s assume that Harris-Walz do have big new ideas and somehow they are being prevented from implementing them.

The principal passion for Democrats is abortion care so let’s look at that first… Kamala Harris is promising a federal law that would legalize abortion care for pregnant people at all stages of a pregnant person’s pregnancy. That would be a change, at least in stages that outlaw abortion care after a certain number of weeks of a pregnant person’s pregnancy. But Joe Biden has also promised this kind of legislation so we’re left with two questions: (a) is expanding abortion care at the federal level an example of “change”, and (b) why hasn’t the Biden-Harris administration done it?

A close second to abortion care is a passion for open borders. But Kamala Harris was Joe Biden’s “Border Czar” so we shouldn’t expect any change in this area.

At least among young Democrats, Queers for Palestine is just as important as open borders. Perhaps this is an example of real change. It looks as though Harris-Walz are promising to force Israel to surrender to the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”). “Walz, Appealing to Muslim Voters, Says War in Gaza ‘Must End Now’” (NYT, 10/3/2024):

Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, on Thursday made a direct appeal to Muslim voters, decrying “staggering and devastating” destruction in Gaza and saying that the war between Israel and Hamas should be brought to an immediate end.

“This war must end, and it must end now,” Mr. Walz said in a three-minute video address to the virtual “Million Muslim Votes: A Way Forward” event, which was hosted by the group Emgage Action.

As Hamas was elected by Palestinians on a platform of military conquest and has promised to defeat Israel militarily, the only possible “immediate ends” for the Gaza fighting are (1) Israel switches to US-/UK-style destruction of the enemy population until the Palestinians surrender unconditionally as the Japanese and Germans were forced to, or (2) Israel surrenders to Hamas. I don’t think (1) is what Mx. Walz had in mind, despite his/her/zir/their background as a combat hero. That leaves us with (2), in which the U.S. uses its own military power to destroy Israel, including its Muslim citizens, unless Israel surrenders. The Biden-Harris administration hasn’t done that yet.

Kamala Harris has promised to make housing more affordable. But that’s not change because it was also the Biden-Harris plan, according to whitehouse.gov in September 2021:

(the cost of buying a house, factoring in purchase price and interest rate, has roughly doubled since the Biden-Harris administration implemented its plan)

Kamala Harris promises to give first-time homebuyers (“fresh idiots”?) $25,000. I guess that would be change, but if it is a good idea why hasn’t it been done?

Circling back to the original theme… can the Harris-Walz campaign be credited with an unprecedented achievement in the area of voter psychology/propaganda? Or, given that older voters aren’t as likely to be persuaded that the incumbent represents “change”, can we attribute their success to the declining IQ here in the U.S.? Note that U.S. IQ remains higher than in places that have been in the news lately (source):

Loosely related… A reminder that the war (not the recent battles) in Gaza started well for the “Arab” side (the term “Palestinians” hadn’t yet come into use) back in 1948. I guess one could argue that, after 76 years, the war is still going well for the forces opposing Israel in that they’ve enjoyed tremendous population growth and increasing political support worldwide. The original military objective of destroying Israel hasn’t been achieved yet (maybe Harris-Walz can make it happen?), but the forces opposing Israel managed to create a group of approximately 6 million Arabs who are entitled to unlimited food, health care, education, etc. funded by taxpayers in the US and EU. On balance, though, I think the Arab war on Israel shows that Helmuth von Moltke was correct in saying “No plan survives first contact with the enemy”. Who would have predicted that the professional militaries of Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria couldn’t defeat Jewish civilians? And who would have predicted that the Democratic Party here in the U.S. would become the primary financial sponsor and military ally of Islamic government in the region?

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Why does Kamala Harris laugh so often?

by philg

Here’s a video of Kamala Harris saying that she’ll agree to spend $trillions (debt that will eventually be paid back at least partially by taxes on Chinese immigrants? What role did they play in this drama?) in reparations to Americans who identify as descendants of former slaves:

The question for today is why she laughs after making this pledge. Slavery isn’t, I hope, a laughing matter, even though it ended more than 159 years ago here in the U.S. (it does continue in some countries, supposedly) Spending $trillions of money that will have to be earned via the sweat of others isn’t, one would think, a laughing matter. Forcing immigrants from China, Haiti, and Venezuela to pay extra taxes and receive fewer government services isn’t obviously a laughing matter.

Here’s one where she starts laughing at about 4:10 while discussing the policy with the most transformative effects on American society:

Here she is apparently laughing about the U.S. being defeated in Afghanistan:

(The Taliban could reasonably laugh about the inability of the U.S. to accomplish any of its goals after 20 years, but why the U.S. VP?)

This is the “joy” that Americans are being sold by the Democrats and their media allies? But what is joyful about U.S. politics? We have an economy that is less than half the size it needs to be for Americans to achieve their government spending goals (free unlimited health care for all, pimped-out housing as a human right, open borders and a cradle-to-grave multi-generational welfare state, etc.). So government is inevitably about saying “No, we can’t afford that right now,” even for Democrats. What child ever experienced joy at hearing a parent say “No, we can’t afford that trip to Disney World”?

Closing this out with Kamala Harris laughing about laughing…

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Attempt to preserve democracy #3

by philg

October 12, 2024, roughly 8 pm Eastern Time: “Man arrested near Trump Coachella rally intended to kill former president, sheriff says” (Fox 11). By my account, that’s the third attempt by an American patriot to preserve our democracy (assuming that we accept Democrats’ characterization of Donald Trump and what will happen to us if he becomes president again).

October 13, 2024, 11:10 am Eastern Time, Kamala Harris warns of Donald Trump’s “dangerous agenda”:

Separately, has anyone seen anything from a leader within the Party of Science congratulating Elon Musk on what seems like a tremendous step forward for actual science? (I disagree with Mr. Musk regarding the merits of humans living on Mars, but it is valuable to be able to send heavy robot payloads into space and the Starship makes NASA’s ($40 billion in 2024 dollars?) SLS look pathetic.) If Democrats love to Follow the Science why aren’t they more jazzed up about Starship today than about Donald Trump’s agenda (the above tweet from Kamala Harris was sent just a few hours after the Starship booster was caught).

And from a guy that the U.S. government would really like to get hold of…

…. also from the Tesla fanboys:

(While trying to avoid extradition, Kim Dotcom manages to tweet his support for Hamas: regarding the “Gaza genocide” (exacerbated by simultaneous rapid population growth); accusing Israel of “indiscriminate mass murder”; a confident “proof” that Israel “Netanyahu can’t defeat Hamas in a ground battle” (Nov 19, 2023; maybe he was correct since Palestinians remain enthusiastic about continuing their war against Israel).)

Circling back to NASA (my first employer!)…

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Did Doug Emhoff hit a woman with Hunter Biden’s laptop?

by philg

I don’t know if we’ll be without power and Internet due to Hurricane Milton so I’m scheduling this non-hurricane-related post in advance in order to deliver on my “posting every day” promise/threat.

A Deplorable posted “Kamala Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff ‘forcefully slapped ex-girlfriend for flirting with another man’ in booze-fueled assault after date to star-studded gala” (Daily Mail) on Facebook with the comment “Another post election day story for the Times.” In fact, a Google search restricted to “site:nytimes.com” shows that the Newspaper of Record (TM) hasn’t seen fit to cover the story of this Democratic National Convention featured speaker slapping anyone.

In a separate discussion about this story, a Big Law partner (closeted Republican) wrote that all members of the Party of Independent Thought would transition from “Kamala is so brat because look at Doug” to “Doug has nothing to do with this election; he’s not running for anything”. Just a few hours later, his prophecy was confirmed when a Minneapolis Democrat in a discussion about the above story posted “Who is this guy? Is he running for something?”

New York Times, about 1.5 months ago:

Speaking of husbands, “Kamala Harris and the Influence of an Estranged Father Just Two Miles Away” (NYT):

Friends of both say the estrangement, set in motion by her parents’ split when Ms. Harris was a child, may have as much to do with traits father and daughter share as it does their decades of differences. … It upset Ms. Harris that her father did not attend Shyamala Harris’s funeral in 2009. … Dr. Harris’s spectral presence in Ms. Harris’s life began when he and her mother separated in 1969, when Ms. Harris was 5. The couple divorced in 1972 after he lost a bitter custody battle that brought his closeness to Ms. Harris and her younger sister “to an abrupt halt,” Dr. Harris wrote in a 2018 essay. The sealed divorce settlement, he said, was “based on the false assumption by the State of California that fathers cannot handle parenting.”

Note that the New York Times covers a lawsuit with a plaintiff and a defendant as a mutual activity (“her parents’ split”). Reading between the lines, it looked like Kamala’s mom sued Kamala’s dad and won the winner-take-all fight that the California Family Court set up. And then Kamala was upset that her dad didn’t want to go to his plaintiff’s funeral. (We know a guy in Maskachusetts whose plaintiff died of cancer after winning the house, the kids, the cash, most of his income going forward, etc. On hearing the news, he was ready to throw a huge party to celebrate her death and the return of his kids not shed crocodile tears at the successful litigant’s funeral.

Addendum: We never did lose power thanks to the heroic engineering efforts of Florida Power and Light as well as the grid-hardening initiative approved by Ron DeSantis in 2019 over the objections of Democrats (see Tough questions from reporters for Ron DeSantis). In other hurricane news, combat veteran Tim Walz tells Floridians to evacuate at 6:32 pm, roughly two hours before landfall. This is apparently not the kind of “misinformation” that Democrats seek to outlaw and suppress, though it contradicts government advice to “shelter in place” once winds exceed 45-50 mph. The “mandatory” evacuation orders on the Florida west coast generally required evacuation by 9:00 am on Wednesday and officials told people who hadn’t evacuated to “shelter in place” after the winds picked up. From the war hero now fighting misinformation:

From the National Weather Service, 4.5 hours earlier (“It’s time to shelter-in-place”):

From Sarasota County, where Hurricane Milton hit:

An hour before Tim Walz suggested evacuation, the county was saying “shelter in place”:

The above tweets, combined, are good examples of the motivation for Why not a simple web site or phone app to determine whether one must evacuate?

Related:

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Kamala Harris threatens and La Quinta responds

by philg

As Hurricane Milton “barreled” (the obligatory verb for an object moving at 5-10 mph) into Sarasota, Kamala Harris threatened merchants:

About 12 hours later, Orbitz is showing hotel rooms in Orlando for a stay beginning tonight at $122/nights. If you’re willing to stay at the La Quinta… $72/night. For those who want to be ready for Disney World’s reopening tomorrow, the on-property Swan hotel is $252/night. Perhaps Jussie Smollett reported having been overcharged?

What about a hotel in Miami, which was never forecast to be “barreled into”?

I won’t be staying in a hotel tonight because I need to get back up on a ladder. Like Jeffrey Epstein, these hurricane screens didn’t hang themselves and I fear that they won’t unhang themselves either. (The previous owners of our house invested in impact glass doors and windows, but the front door is an unusual shape and they left the original door in place. The wide Armor Screen covers an outdoor dining area that has a bug screen whose frame is hurricane-proof (supposedly) but whose screen material is sacrificial. My thought on the hurricane screen for that area was that we could use it to store all of our outdoor items in the event of a truly bad storm.)

It was mostly peaceful yesterday here in Jupiter (Palm Beach County). The schoolteachers were enjoying the start of their two-day taxpayer-funded holiday while everyone else worked (health care, retail, expert witness, etc.). There was a bit of rain and the wind picked up around 9 pm. There were a handful of tornadoes in SE Florida caused by Hurricane Milton, but none came into Jupiter itself (one was in Jupiter Farms, to our west, one in western Palm Beach Gardens in Avenir, and a sad one for aviators in Fort Pierce that deposited some airplanes outside the airport fence).

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Does Kamala Harris propose “Socialism” or “Xboxism”?

by philg

My response to an X user who wrote “Usually it’s an exaggeration to claim that the other side is lunatic socialism. With Kamala 2024 that’s become a reality we face.”:

I don’t think that it is fair to call Democrats “socialists”. Under Socialism, e.g., in the Soviet Union, able-bodied citizens were required to work or be guilty of the crime of “Parasitism”. There were no undocumented immigrants. Certainly, a Soviet family couldn’t spend four generations living in public housing, getting free health care via Medicaid, shopping for food with EBT, and chatting on an Obamaphone. Kamala Harris and friends propose a system in which half of a country works/commutes 60 hours/week so that the other half can relax and play Xbox. That’s not a political system contemplated by Marx or Lenin. Maybe it should be called Xboxism?

Note that the above idea isn’t original. “Transferism, Not Socialism, Is the Drug Americans Are Hooked On” (Foundation for Economic Education):

Transferism is a system in which one group of people forces a second group to pay for things that the people believe they, or some third group, should have. Transferism isn’t about controlling the means of production. It is about the forced redistribution of what’s produced.

I think Xboxism is an easier term to understand, though, because it captures what government policy enables. And now that we have open borders we need a term that covers a migrant family that arrives to take up the Maskachusetts offer of guaranteed shelter forever even if nobody ever tries to work but instead enjoys a life of permanent leisure.

Related:

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Fifth anniversary of Kamala Harris defending freedom of speech

by philg

Five years ago, today:

In case the above is memory-holed, an image version:

(Professor Saad corrected his typo (“FREE societies”) in a follow-up, so this also reminds me that it has been two years since Elon Musk acquired Twitter. Where’s the Edit button for replies?)

Some other comments from fall 2019:

  • You running for President of China?
  • Sorry you don’t like the constitution. Maybe you should run for leader of a different country.
  • Thank god this hysterical candidate who tramples on the constitution will never be President.
  • Democrats want to ban all speech they disagree with. Bunch of fascists. Good luck keeping the 1st amendment if Dems ever get full power.
  • So you are against the 1st amendment?
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Can Kamala Harris shoot someone who breaks into her house?

by philg

“Harris tells Oprah any intruder to her home is ‘getting shot'” (Reuters):

Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday issued a warning to any potential home intruder: “If somebody breaks in my house, they’re getting shot.”
The Democratic presidential candidate and gun owner made the seemingly unguarded comment in an interview with Oprah Winfrey before a live studio audience when the conversation turned to gun laws.
“I probably should not have said that. But my staff will deal with that later,” Harris said, laughing.

(The intruder doesn’t have to be a “threat to democracy” for gun violence to be justified? Also, if she owns a gun and is planning to use it in a crowded domestic situation, what kind of recurrent training does she receive? I’ve never heard of our future president going to the range. Dirty Harry used his gun regularly to shoot perpetrators, but he also was shown going to the range in at least one documentary film.)

I decided to post this question to a vast panel of gun owners… i.e., a friend who owns a vast panel of guns, (Maskachusetts is officially gun-free, at least when it comes to peasants owning serious firepower, but it turns out that there are exceptions…).

[Massachusetts] has a duty to retreat in general but in a house you have some more leeway I think. In any case I don’t talk like that. I would never presume to shoot someone in my house. 90% chance I can just hold them for the police.

For those who say that it is unrealistic that an intruder might get through Kamala Harris’s Secret Service protection, let me remind readers that a criminal mastermind managed to get a rifle, ladder, rangefinder, ammo, etc. past the Secret Service in Pennsylvania recently.

Also in our chat group, the one Android user marveled at the devotion of the faithful:

Three of the guys i message with are at Apple stores now getting the 16. Apple users are hilarious.

He linked to “Apple Fans Flock to Stores for iPhone Despite Delayed AI Rollout” (Bloomberg via Yahoo):

Apple Inc. fans lined up at stores around the world for the new iPhone 16, shrugging off the fact that the device’s signature feature — a new suite of AI tools — won’t arrive until later.

My response:

they’re as loyal as Hezbollah and Hamas members

From the Deplorables:

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Will Kamala Harris and fellow Democrats have to make Puerto Rico a state before implementing their new taxes?

by philg

Kamala Harris has big dreams for what rich people can do for the U.S. Treasury via new taxes and higher tax rates (see The Harris unrealized capital gains tax and Bidenflation and Unrealized capital gains are already taxed by the federal government… for example).

The typical American of means, however, can already escape federal taxation by moving to Puerto Rico. “How Puerto Rico Became the Newest Tax Haven for the Super Rich” (GQ):

In 2012, Puerto Rico had passed two laws intended to make the island a “global investment destination.” Act 20 allows corporations that export services from the island to pay only 4 percent tax. Act 22 goes much further: It makes Puerto Rico the only place on U.S. soil where personal income from capital gains, interest, and dividends are untaxed.

The last big tweak to U.S. taxation was in 2018. Plainly, the rates were low enough that most rich Americans refrained from making the move to the Ritz-Carlton Dorado. But what if Kamala Harris and fellow Democrats are able to deliver on their promise to soak the rich? Wouldn’t there be a lot more rich people who would make the move for 183 days per year in order to avoid losing a big percentage of their wealth? If so, the only way to stop the erosion of expected tax base would be to eliminate Puerto Rico’s ability to offer Act 22 treatment and the only way that I know to strip Puerto Rico of its tax sovereignty is to make Puerto Rico a state.

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