Category: Politics

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?

My gun enthusiast friends are excited by “Canada bans assault-style weapons after its worst ever mass murder” (CNN):

“You don’t need an AR-15 to bring down a deer,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said at a news conference in Ottawa. “So, effective immediately, it is no longer permitted to buy, sell, transport, import or use military-grade assault weapons in this country.”

“These weapons were designed for one purpose, and one purpose only, to kill the largest number of people in the shortest amount of time. There is no use and no place for such weapons in Canada,” Trudeau said.

Commonsense gun control, certainly. Canadians don’t want anyone to be shot and killed, so the weapons will be melted down and turned into shovels to dig up oil sands that can be turned into crude oil (after emitting tons of CO2 for processing), right? Maybe not:

The ban is effective immediately but disposal of the weapons will be subject to a two-year amnesty period. Trudeau said some form of compensation would also be put in place but the firearms can also be exported and sold after a proper export license is obtained.

So there is “no use and no place for such weapons in Canada”, but maybe, in Justin Trudeau’s opinion, people in Detroit need them for blasting coronavirus out of the air?

[Update, inspired by a comment below: Human life is priceless, which is why we need to shut down our economy for 50 years, if necessary, to prevent even one needless death from Covid-19. Assault rifles are dangerous and put human life, which is priceless, at risk. Why wait two years to collect them? Shouldn’t the weapons be collected no later than Monday at 5 pm?]

Bernie Sanders, my personal favorite candidate among the Democrats, has dropped out of the primary race. I wonder if this will actually hurt the Democrats. If there is no contest at all, who will pay attention to the anything that Biden does or says between now and Labor Day? How many people tune into a one-person boxing match?

[Why do I love Bernie? He is the only one willing to say “this is dumb” with respect to spending 17 percent of GDP on health care and not covering everyone (I proposed a universal coverage system back in 2009, it has some similarities with Germany’s). Bernie is the political example of zero-based budgeting. Congress sets the budget, so all that Bernie or any other president can do is suggest. It is not that I am fond of most of Bernie’s specific policy ideas so much as it would be nice to have someone in D.C. who pushes a zero-based budgeting idea. Ronald Reagan might have been the last president to do this (Congress ignored him).

Biden’s political philosophy on what Americans should get for the 35-40% percent of the GDP that is government is based solely on the assumption that whatever the government was doing/spending in the past was optimum (maybe not the last three years of the criminal Trump dictatorship, of course, but certainly in 2016). So Biden proposes slight tweaks to government programs from 2016, perhaps adjusting for inflation or maybe adding a mask and ventilator budget for the next respiratory disease epidemic.

Bernie, on the other hand, asks “You’re working 1 day out of 5 to pay for health care. What do you want the system to do for you?” and “Housing is a fundamental right. How much do we need to budget to put everyone in a house without a waiting list?”

Biden’s approach is comparable to the way that big dumb corporations did things in the 1960s. We spent $X on marketing last year so let’s spend $X*1.07 this year. Nobody in Dumb Co. asks “What would be the optimum and/or necessary amount to spend on marketing?” The U.S. has built the world’s second largest welfare state, as a percentage of GDP, without anyone, since the mid-1960s, asking “What do we want our welfare state to provide and to whom?”]

Readers: Was it a strategic error by the Democrats if they didn’t beg Bernie to keep campaigning, even if it isn’t fun to campaign from one of your Vermont mansions via webcam?

Separately, how are my Facebook friends reacting? A West Coaster:

His friends respond:

Which rapist do you want? Biden or Trump?

Stand up and work for the platform. The platform is more important than any one person. The ideas. FDR’s ideas!

(Which of FDR’s ideas does she like? Interning anyone who might be considered likely to wage domestic jihad or to be infected with coronavirus? See Korematsu v. United States.)

The Biden Believers don’t seem too worried. Here’s an April 9, 2020 meme that got 1,700 shares within the first 5 hours: