Category: Politics

Kissimmee’s Monument of States

by philg

I spent Election Day-1 in Kissimmee, Florida, home to the Monument of States, which includes (I think) a rock from every state:

A closer look at some of the components:

If you’re going to watch election returns on TV and say to your friends, “A lot of these states are sending in a nominee who is as dumb as a rock” then this monument shows you the end result of each state sending a rock!

The definition of “state” seems flexible:

The folks who placed a time capsule here in 1993 for opening in 2043 didn’t factor in Science according to Democrats in the Northeast and California who say that all of Florida will be under water by then.

The city is officially at an elevation of 72′ above sea level so if the time capsule can’t be readily accessed there will be a lot of problems in Boston, New York City, and Washington, D.C. as well. It would be a shame if these murals were inundated:

The trip to Kissimmee was for aircraft maintenance and, therefore, I spent the whole day interacting with line guys, front desk gals, aircraft mechanics, and waitstaff. I sussed out that nearly all of these working class folks were Trump supporters. They believed that their standard of living had been reduced by Bidenflation and they didn’t want to compete for wages and apartment rent with another 10 million migrants. Democrats’ “tax the rich” promises did not appeal to them, despite the fact that they actually live the inequality that others only talk about. A line guy making $20/hour may be pumping Jet A into a $70 million Gulfstream. Why wouldn’t they be excited about a bigger government funded by taking stuff away from people whom they’ve met and who plainly don’t need it? It’s because they don’t expect to get any money or benefits from the government. Most of these folks earn too little to afford to have kids while maintaining what they consider to be a reasonably comfortable existence and, thus, they’re excluded from many of the most expensive government programs, such as public school and the various child tax credits. At the same time, they earn too much to qualify for the free housing, health care, food, and smartphone packages that recent migrants enjoy.

(The Census Bureau says that 32 percent of the people who live in Kissimmee are foreign-born and that over 70 percent of the residents are “Hispanic”.)

Returning to the election theme, it is understandable that an American might be passionate about who will spend nearly half of our GDP and who will decide whether teenagers get gender affirming surgery. But we shouldn’t let this interfere with our emotional connections to friends and family. I was sad to hear that a nonbinary progressive Democrat resident of Brooklyn found out that his conservative parents in an Upstate New York district voted Trump-Vance. He/she/ze/they said that he/she/ze/they is going to stop visiting their graves.

(Alternative from the same region: The cost of hosting migrants in New Jersey has been so high under the Biden-Harris administration that the Mafia had to lay off three judges.)

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American voters dislike white people

by philg

Barack Obama says that each of us should vote for a politician who shares our racial identify, e.g., Blacks for Blacks and whites for whites (video): “Kenyan raised by white mother in Hawaii urges Chicago’s [B]lack men to vote for Indian woman raised in Canada”.

It seems, however, that many of us aren’t willing to heed the advice of this Nobel Peace laureate. Here’s some potentially troublesome data for Donald “white guy” Trump:

The underlying source has a front page showing the same information over time:

With the American population overall, whites have dropped from 85 to 69 between 1964-2020 while Blacks have gone from 64 to 72. In other words, Americans overall prefer Blacks to whites and Donald Trump isn’t the Presidential candidate who identifies as “Black”.

(Why don’t Americans in general have a “warm” feeling about Asian-Americans? Why aren’t they the most-loved group by all subgroups within the U.S. and by Americans overall? What’s not to love about a neighbor who is unlikely to commit a crime and very likely to pay taxes? One can see from the above data that Kamala Harris is wise to identify as “Black” rather than “Indian” or “Asian”!)

From the same source, as government has grown to consume a larger fraction of the economy the percentage of Americans who “care a good deal” about who becomes president has increased:

And the democratic process is guaranteed to make our government larger, as a percentage of GDP. Roughly twice as many Americans want a larger government as want a smaller government:

Among Democrats, its a roughly 17:1 ratio of people who want a larger government to those who’d like to see a larger role for private enterprise and private spending:

It’s not just Maskachusetts… Americans in general have grown to hate those who vote for the opposing party:

“Importance of American Identity” is interesting. There was a dramatic decline from 2012-2020 in the percentage of Americans who thought that being “American” was important. The shift for Democrats has been particularly dramatic so it makes sense that they’d support giving higher priority to the interests of migrants than to the interests of the native-born working class.

Loosely related… the New York Times reminds us that there is one class of Americans that is even better than the merely Black:

Speaking of the New York Times, a white reporter lists all of the reasons “Why Is Trump Gaining With Black and Hispanic Voters?” and fails to consider the possibility that Black and Hispanic voters might be capable of rational thought and, therefore, might have concluded that Donald Trump would do a better job at running the U.S. government than his opponent would. The reporter and his/her/zir/their editors posit that Black voters might like Trump because he is entertaining or that they are filled with “resentment” about “woke cultural norms”. It’s an interesting window into the mind of the white Democratic elite!

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Why traditional small-government conservatism is dead in the U.S.

by philg

“High Taxes, Big Spending, Low Unemployment: Tim Walz’s Economic Record” (Wall Street Journal, a purportedly conservative newspaper, August 2024):

[Walz] also pushed through a $2.6 billion infrastructure bill—the largest in state history—that will benefit residents and businesses.

This is a news article, not opinion. So the Wall Street Journal reports it as an established fact that taking $2.6 billion from individuals who would have invested it or spent it privately and giving it to government contractors “WILL benefit” residents. In other words, the WSJ is certain that the government will spend this money better than individuals would have. Therefore, a Reagan-style appeal to shrink government should be rejected by essentially all American voters (readers of Democrat-affiliated media, such as the NYT, certainly aren’t going to argue that limiting government spending is beneficial).

Separately, how will the $2.6 billion in Minnesota taxpayer funds be spent? A press release says that “Black, Brown, and Native communities” will benefit more than second-rate white people:

I think this is why sharp-penciled guys such as Paul Ryan have been sidelined or forced out of government and why Congress will never stop borrowing and spending (which also dooms us to at least moderate inflation, I think). If tax-and-spend is great then borrow-and-spend is at least good.

Readers: Are there any candidates running for election this week on your ballot who seriously advocate for a smaller government?

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The mind of the American credentialed class, as revealed by the bookstore shelves

by philg

Given the upcoming election this week, I thought it would be a good time to look at how the credentialed class perceives the world. These are the folks who determine what appears in our media and, ultimately, what policies get implemented in Washington, D.C. Where can we find the folks who’ve bubbled to the top of our meritocracy? At the bookstore! The pictures below are from the Barnes & Noble in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, August 4, 2024 (folks in Florida, of course, are not at the heart of national policymaking, but I think this Barnes & Noble is representative of what bookstores nationwide offer to the righteous).

First, a few happy images:

(The Wealth of Refugees (Oxford University Press) is my favorite. There has never been a situation in which Country A has offered to pay Country B for some refugees. Canada doesn’t offer to pay the U.S. for a share of the flow across our southern border, for example. In fact, there are countries that are willing to pay fines to the EU rather than accept refugees, thus suggesting that refugees have a negative value. At market prices, in other words, our four-year-old minivan is worth more than all of the world’s refugees put together. The author (“Alexander Betts is Professor of Forced Migration and International Affairs, and William Golding Senior Fellow in Politics at Brasenose College, at the University of Oxford.”), who no doubt hasn’t been willing to pay to get a refugee in his/her/zir/their own household, apparently has a much more sophisticated way of establishing value than the market.)

Then some delicious schadenfreude about how badly Republicans are doing:

But the core of the political book section is mostly about fear. If we can’t get abortion care at any stage of a pregnant person’s pregnancy on every street corner in every state, that’s a “new [and bad] America”:

American democracy is under “threat” and/or very nearly already replaced by fascism or National Socialism (“Nazi”).

One thing that might help save democracy is making sure that peasants get all of their information from sources approved by the elites:

We also need to get rid of a frightening and dangerous religion, especially if practiced without supervision from city-dwelling Democrats, that threatens our national well-being:

The news isn’t all terrible because some brave souls are fighting back:

A restatement of Joe Biden’s wisdom, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black”:

Harvard professors share their wisdom at a $400,000 discount from list price and without the need to reside in a pro-Hamas encampment. From the Amazon page about this book:

They draw on a wealth of examples—from 1930s France to present-day Thailand—to explain why and how political parties turn against democracy. They then show how our Constitution makes us uniquely vulnerable to attacks from within: It is a pernicious enabler of minority rule, allowing partisan minorities to consistently thwart and even rule over popular majorities. Most modern democracies—from Germany and Sweden to Argentina and New Zealand—have eliminated outdated institutions like elite upper chambers, indirect elections, and lifetime tenure for judges. The United States lags dangerously behind.

The only way to preserve our democracy, in other words, is to eliminate most of its institutions because they’re “outdated”. (I guess the nomination of Kamala Harris, for whom nobody voted in a primary, is a decent first step.)

If a peasant were to vote for a conservative this coming week, it is because he/she/ze/they is a fool who has been taken in by a transparent grift:

My take-away is that fear seems to be the best way to motivate someone to buy a book or cast a vote. Peasants are promised almost nothing in exchange for a correct vote, but are threatened with catastrophe if they vote incorrectly.

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Why is Kamala Harris still raising money?

by philg

Email received just now:

Suppose that I do send in the requested $60. Kamala Harris has thus far raised $1.4 billion from her billionaire supporters. Will the $60 additional actually change what they can do over the next four days? How? Or is there some other reason for trying to convert me into a financial supporter at the peasant level?

The above email came two hours after a request for $47:

We need everyone, honestly. This is an all-hands-on-deck moment for an expensive final push.

$47 to help get voters to the polls — voters we need to win.

$47 to make sure Trump never returns to the White House.

$47 one last time before the election. For Vice President Harris. For our democracy.

(They say “honestly”. Does that mean that previous statements from Harris and/or Walz were dishonest? Also, “our democracy” is at stake. Is that a message for the truly passionate anti-Trumpers to spend $47 on ammunition?)

At 5:23 pm today:

“our very democracy is at stake”! Where is a Latter-day Thomas Matthew Crooks to save our very democracy?

There were quite a few more today. My favorite has a subject line of “Your neighbors in Cambridge are counting on you!” (the direct mail hucksters have figured out that we moved to Florida; why couldn’t the political machines?)

At 12:14 pm, the price of virtue had fallen to just $1: “That is the donation we’re asking you to make directly to Kamala Harris’s campaign for president today. Yes, we’re lowering our ask to just $1 in the hopes you’ll chip in for the first time.”

So… with just a few days to go before what used to be considered the “big day” (before mail-in ballots and early voting) why does a $1 donation help? Why does a $60 donation help? Is the idea to build habitual donors so that money can be spent on the 2026 election?

(I can’t show any comparable examples from the Trump-Vance campaign because either they aren’t emailing out similar appeals or their computers agree with Harris-Walz’s that I am a Massachusetts progressive Democrat.)

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Are Democrats preparing evacuation flights for the faithful?

by philg

Four years ago I wondered why Democrat billionaires didn’t set up transportation for oppressed Americans: Why can’t Michael Bloomberg run a fleet of abortion buses?

This year we are informed that freedom dies on January 20, 2025 if the Nakba of a Trump victory occurs. Polls show that such a victory is at least possible. Here’s an Obama/Biden appointee and member of the “Harris for President National Finance Committee”:

The “Jewish community” (not to be confused with “Jews”) won’t be safe if Trump is elected (for which Doug Emhoff “slams” Trump; not to be confused with “slaps Trump”). Also remember that Andrew Weinstein’s presence on the Harris for President National Finance Committee disproves the right-wing conspiracy theory that rich Jews control American politics…

Here’s The Jewish Democratic Council of America, reminding us of the “direct threat”:

Abortion care can be obtained merely by hopping on a Bloomberg Bus to a state, such as Maskachusetts, where abortion care for pregnant people is available at all stages of a pregnant person’s pregnancy. But the Trump Death Camps (TM) won’t be escapable via an interstate trip because they will be established on a federal basis.

Are the elites who warn of dire consequences from a second Trump presidency making a contingency plan in case the unthinkable occurs? Shouldn’t they have aircraft charters and visas set up for Americans to escape between November 6 and January 19? Evacuating the millions (or tens of millions?) who are “directly” threatened by Trump might not be doable without some advance planning, particularly because most countries defend their borders and won’t allow the undocumented to merely stroll across. Israel is plainly out as a destination for Jewish Democrats due to the country’s refusal to surrender to the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”), the Party of Allah (“Hezbollah”), UNRWA, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Finding a country that wants to receive oppressed Americans could be a significant challenge.

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End-stage civil rights movement: replace Black Americans with immigrants and their children

by philg

Here’s a meme that’s popular among Democrats:

Black Americans Rosa Parks and Ruby Bridges took actions in 1955 and 1960 so that Kamala Harris, who apparently identifies as “Black”, could take an action in 2024. (Minor point: If we do want to ascribe a broad social trend to an individual, it was primarily Dwight Eisenhower, whose racial ID is unknown, who engineered the desegregation of the U.S. (via Supreme Court appointments and executive orders).)

I’m struggling to see how Kamala Harris’s ascendance to the Presidency is an example of continuity. Harvard economists find that a percentage of Black Americans lose their jobs and their freedom with every batch of low-skill immigrants who come across the border (see “Effects of Immigration on African-American Employment and Incarceration” (NBER 2007); note that these same immigrants provide a $500 billion/year (in pre-Biden dollars at pre-Biden immigration levels) wealth boost to the elite, e.g., those who own apartment buildings or pay wages to low-skill workers).

Isn’t the installation of a child of two immigrants in the White House an example of discontinuity, not continuity? Or maybe we can say that the natural end stage of the civil rights movement is for Black Americans to accept bit parts in a script written by immigrants and their kids?

As a thought experiment, let’s suppose that every position of power in the U.S. were taken by a dark-skinned immigrant or the child of dark-skinned immigrants. Would that be recognizable as the achievement of goals set forth by 1950s and 1960s civil rights movement leaders? If not, why would Kamala Harris taking over the #1 position of power in the U.S. be considered a civil rights movement achievement, as the above meme implies?

Related:

  • “Immigration restrictions helped lead to Martin Luther King’s success”: There is much to suggest that the 1924 immigration restrictions started processes that were an important contributor to the success of Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders in the ending of legalized segregation. … the lower immigration and tightened labor markets brought about economic changes that steadily increased the economic and political power of Black Americans and convinced more and more business leaders to shun segregation. The most visible result of reducing immigration was that northern industrialists could no longer fill all their extra jobs with new immigrants and had to finally open them up to the descendants of slavery in the South.
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How do Asian Americans process the elites’ selection of Kamala Harris?

by philg

Here’s Kamala Harris using the word “hypothesis” in a sentence:

I’m wondering how Asian Americans with IQs of 150 and long track records of achievement process the phenomenon of Kamala Harris having been selected by Democrat elites. If Harris had been elected via primaries, the intelligent Asian American could understand Harris’s victory by reflecting that “non-Asian American voters are, on average, stupid.” But after their coup against Joe Biden, the Democrats could have selected anyone as their candidate.

Let’s consider Lisa Su, for example. She’s 54 years old, has a Ph.D. in engineering, and has successfully managed a 26,000-employee company in a competitive environment (Intel on one side and Nvidia on the other). When she was elevated to CEO in 2014, revenue at AMD was about $6 billion/year. Today it is 23 billion Bidies per year (i.e., roughly double if we adjust for inflation in the cost of stuff that investors in AMD might want to buy). How does Lisa Su watch the above video, and similar, and make sense of the selection of Kamala Harris, out of pool of more than 200 million, by what we are told is the Party of Science?

Here’s the politician whom Republican primary voters rejected delivering, without notes, a 150-year history of Florida weather, complete with the barometric pressure of various major hurricanes. (This is not to say that I endorse any particular point of view about climate change, though “Changes in Atlantic major hurricane frequency since the late-19th century” (Nature 2021) suggests that DeSantis is correct that recent hurricanes aren’t evidence of significant climate change.)

Related:

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The Biden-Harris administration reminds young people of the horrible consequences of a vote for Donald Trump

by philg

An official U.S. Department of Education email received by a nephew who just finished college highlights the advantages of being an incumbent (his email and name redacted):

So.. a cabinet secretary in the incumbent administration can email all federal student loan borrowers and tell them they’ll have to pay way more if they don’t vote properly in November. Here’s some more of the email:

In addition to implementing these provisions of the SAVE Plan and vigorously defending the plan in court, the Biden-Harris Administration will also continue our work alleviating the burden of student debt for millions of Americans. That includes canceling student debt for borrowers under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program and making fixes to other income-driven repayment plans that were riddled with administrative errors long before our Administration. We are also continuing to pursue proposals for broader student debt relief through separate rulemaking that could benefit tens of millions of borrowers in the future.

While we disagree with the Republican elected officials’ efforts here to side with special interests and block borrowers from getting breathing room on their student loans, President Biden and our Administration will not stop fighting to make sure Americans have affordable access to the lifechanging opportunities a higher education can provide. We will continue to put the needs of students and borrowers first, help borrowers access the support and resources they need, and make the promise of higher education a reality for more American families.

We’ll keep fighting for you!

I would have thought that there was a rule against this, but apparently not!

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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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