On the contrary, I'd argue they are mostly good at their jobs.

Their job isn't to help the average American. Their job is to serve Capital. They get paid by the rich, not by average Americans.

They are doing a good job at that. Look at the stock market, it goes up while Main Street is in turmoil.

It's not often you see an image and immediately think "yep, that'll be in some history book in short order". Just utterly divorced and a sign of a _very_ healthy society...

If you can't see it: An image with "Dow's Best Week Since 1938" on a graphic while breaking news declares "More than 16 M Americans have lost jobs in 3 weeks"

For those that want a higher quality screenshot, I just took one: https://i.imgur.com/FzkO6W5.png

It's Jim Cramer's Mad Money on April 9th 2:00 in. (I do not recommend watching Cramer.)

Instead neo-liberalism serves us this distopian neo-feudal regime that requires all to 'work more/work longer' just to slow our decline into near poverty while a select few 'rulers' horde all the fruits of progress.

I've been struggling with working life, especially in the midst of wfh during this pandemic and the common question I keep arriving at is: "what's the point in all this?" I don't claim to have it hard (I am so fortunate to have a steady job that allows me to work from home) but there's just a level of mental exhaustion and constant low level burnout that everyone is experiencing (especially amongst my cohorts/generation/friend group since that's my sample size) and it's just like... okay we have another what 40+ years of this? all for what?

and that doesn't even apply to the people working those app jobs and doing physical labor, who no doubt have it worse than anyone else I know.

This, x1000. It's maddening. I work in a an understaffed military HQ that tries to do too many things, while suffering through 30-50% personnel turnover every summer. We plan exercises talking about "readiness" but it's like groundhog day...EVERY.DAMN.TIME. Nothing really changes, the organization is no better prepared to fight today than it was 3 years ago, and all it's doing is burning out the mid-career professionals we'll need to carry the force when the war eventually kicks off for real.

Across industries, across geographies...we are living in an oppressive cyberpunk dystopia.

Second, a great day means nothing if you look at how volatile the market has been lately. We are seeing large swings up and down on a regular basis.

Third, there is no indication that tens of millions unemployed (which we are still figuring out how much of that is actually temporary vs. permanent) would necessarily immediately affect the large cap stocks in the Dow. These are companies like 3M, Apple, Caterpillar, etc...

Lastly, just because the Dow is up significantly on a single day does not mean all the stocks in the Dow are doing great. We've been seeing handfuls of stocks carry indices upwards even though they also contain poor performers.

There are good sides and bad sides to this. Currently US politics is in a deadlock between fractured local interests (NIMBY/gentrification, preservation, but also we need low-income housing too; let's build a wall, but also allow cheap farm labor) and federal concerns (tariffs, fuck Obamacare, and everyone in general, but also let's help the economy, etc).

This kind of polarized chaos only helps those who are entrenched and are already playing dirty.

If not, who are these incumbent power brokers? And how does it benefit them to ban drugs, not build new housing, limit immigration, etc?

Sure, money is always involved, "political capital" is real, but accumulating more of it doesn't increase the capacity of global political system (as economic capital grows the economic capacity), it just consolidates and polarizes it. So fucks it up basically. And in that regard it's more like a market failure of politics. Too little political competition, too much outside influences and forcing factors. (Eg too much ideology. Or a kind of cross-financing props up one side - basically somewhere in the decision making hierarchy that small sector was conceded, sacrificed, so Intuit continues to make big profits, but something else happened instead, let's say some state got some subsidy.)

All in all, first-past-the-post voting entrenches the big power brokers. (Who might not be the elected officials, but quite usually of course are.) Then the emergent two-party system leads to polarization of other issues. Local issues also became party issues. This brings some uniformity and consistency, but obviously does cause a lot of inefficiencies too.

So, how does it benefit them to do X? Probably it makes them good party members. And that consistency makes the party viable long term. Thus even local changes can only happen if the whole country zeitgeist changes.

"All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well born, the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second, and as they cannot receive any advantage by a change, they therefore will ever maintain good government. Can a democratic assembly, who annually revolve in the mass of the people, be supposed steadily to pursue the public good?"

-Alexander Hamilton, Farrand's Records of the Federal Convention, v. 1, p. 299. (June 19, 1787)

I'd argue a true democratic republic isn't possible alongside capitalism. The rich will always have disproportionate power over elected officials. Whether it's through direct payments, or the ability to influence voters by manufacturing consent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent).

We could spend less money.

In Education we spend far more than the 80's and have less to show for it.

In healthcare we have astronomical costs that have not bought us more vitality, but an extended morbidity. Gone are the days of grandmothers with sinewy arms maintaining huge gardens. Obesity in the early 2000's was at "crisis" levels and it's gotten so much worse that we just stopped talking about it. But we can keep the numbers up a bit here and there.

In infrastructure we let car-first build-out destroy everything Jane Jacobs said we were going to lose. Valuable things that cost no money at all, but are too intangible for top-down planning to notice.

The failure of imagination isn't finding new people to juice. It's finding ways to be effective. I agree they are very bad at their jobs, but I don't think finding a new way to tax the rich is any more creative or sustainable. I think it's the same failure of imagination that you fear.

We could spend less money on healthcare by adopting Medicare4All or similar.

We could cut the military budget _dramatically_ without impacting our national security.

And yet both parties have done little but increase the extent to which our countries is beholden to banks.

If you think you can replicate the healthcare success of [pick your model country] without also replicating their obesity rates, doctors salaries, amount of testing and prescriptions, etc, you will find that who pays for it all is the least of your concerns. As Americans consider it, we probably have too much "healthcare", not too little.

Others have spent far more time than me on this if you're interested: https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2020/01/31/i-created-a-pr...

The stuff about pharmacy benefits and doctor salaries are artifacts of our weird way of paying for things. I'm not sure why you're portraying them as separate, isolated issues.

We just need to fix billing, end price fixing, and massively deregulate - certificates of need, bans on telemedicine, pay for procedure etc. This will actually fix it. Medicare and Medicaid are incredibly expensive and inefficient.

This appears to be, at the very least, debatable:

https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20110920.01339...

Even funnier is we can blame our covid 19 failures on being unhealthy: https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/17/politics/us-health-conditions...

Obviously this a bit of shift the blame (played by both parties), but we can see that reaching for this argument means we really have failed on the healthcare and preventative medicine side - covid19 just calls this out.

Let's see a source or even back-of-the napkin calculation on this

It’s a lot of money, but not enough for fundamental change. It would of been enough collectively to pay for the stimulus we are doing now though.

0 - https://www.marketwatch.com/story/sp-500-companies-spent-7-t...

I'm not sure why you'd need additional taxes at all, when it seems that deflationary pressure is so great that you can summon up trillions with little inflationary consequence. $35 billion/year seems like nothing compared to this.

A fiscal stimulus of that size would almost certainly drive demand (during a pandemic that has caused a negative supply shock) and therefore increase inflation.

If you want to tax profits, then tax profits. If you want to have cheesy loophole tax avoidance, stock buy-backs might be more your style.

What you want to do is create an artificial incentive for not returning the capital, which will lead to its suboptimal allocation. Companies will either sit on their cash, or they will be putting it into projects they would otherwise not be doing.

That’s called a “dividend”. A dividend is taxed, however. I’ll leave the rest as an exercise for the reader.

What you want to do is create an artificial incentive for not returning the capital, which will lead to its suboptimal allocation.

I truly don’t know what to make of this comment. On the one hand, we are all being mansplained on how stock buy-backs works, yet not one mention of the word “dividend”.

You know what else is taxed? When a company buys back stock, reducing the number of shares outstanding so that each share represents more of the ongoing business, thus sending its stock price higher. The tax on this is called a "capital gains tax," perhaps you've heard of it?

I mean, I can understand why rich people would be against this idea. The whole thing about being rich is that you can take a few dollars from everybody and get rich. But the reverse could be quite painful. Take a whole whack of dollars and give a few dollars to everybody. It appears to break the "get rich" thing... Until you realise that poor people will spend that money (i.e. give it back to the rich people). Ford hired private investigators to make sure the people he was paying minimum wage to were going to spend it. Ford was a smart guy (Nice guy?? No idea, but definitely smart).

I really think that if you want fly the idea of rich people funding the improvement of society, you need to link it back to them getting richer. Otherwise, without a revolution, I don't think you're going to get anywhere. They can spend quite a few dollars lobbying government before they get anywhere close to spending what they would need to spend to improve society.

What the article says is that upper middle class feel that their potential income earned is stagnating RELATIVE to the super rich whose income is still increasing.

The middle and poor classes are already beaten into a silence that their standard of living will always remain stagnant and they will not enjoy the advances in the economy (since around 40 years ago).

It corroborates your point about why rich (in my definition, upper middle class) people would be against the idea of UBI. A lawyer making around 200-300k/yr has had his wages increasing around 5 times slower than a CEO / ibanker making around $2m a year. Instead of thinking, "hey I have a ton of money that poorer people could really use right now", they are instead thinking, "hey, how come THOSE rich people are growing their money soo much faster and I still have to slave away for 20 years before I can pay off my house?"

The term "rich" isn't good enough as a classification nowadays because there's a huge difference between the top 400 individuals in the US, the top 1%, and the top 25%, and they're all considered rich by the old definition.

I'll submit the opposite: they are very good at their jobs, it's just you just aren't who they work for. Lots of wealthy people are doing juuuussst fine.

They don't pay taxes. So, fine, issue stock to the government. The government can hold or sell the stock when it makes sense.

There isn't plenty of money in fact. Your 5% tax would get you $30 to $50 billion depending on the year. You're not rebuilding much with that. You can build a few miles of NYC subway with that, and maybe a quarter of a high-speed rail line in part of California.

You need to fill in the trillion dollar budget deficit first of all, which overwhelmingly consists of rapidly expanding entitlement spending deficits where we're not bringing in enough tax revenue. There is only one way to mathematically accomplish that in reality: raise income taxes dramatically on the top 1/3.

That only gets you back to break-even. It doesn't pay down the federal debt ($600b per year in interest) and it doesn't provide any expansion for spending programs new or old.

The US is already spending as much on its total government system (Federal + State + Local) as what advanced welfare states in Western Europe spend in total on their government systems. And we're getting a horrible return on that money almost across the board. The first thing we should do is improve the effectiveness of the money we're already spending while we attempt to bring down the deficits. For what we're already spending, the whole of the US should look like Denmark or Sweden. Why doesn't it?

Everyone likes to say one thing first in response: military spending. Ok, slash $150 billion off of that to bring it down to 2.5-3% of GDP type levels (and freeze it for a decade). Next you need another $850b to $1.2t minimum each year in new tax revenue just to balance the budget this decade. It will require immense income taxation increases. There are no other sources that can come close to filling that epic hole.

I live in a high-tax city in a high-tax state and don't do anything aggressive to reduce my tax burden. But if my landlord screws me, I can move. Universities charge an arm and a leg, but there are alternatives, from community colleges to state and foreign schools. Taxes are unavoidable.

It's not that you magically can find some other landlord that's doesn't offer something with 3x rent compared to western-Europe.

You're asking to understand a different perspective. I'm trying to offer that perspective.

> most people can't "just move" and just "pick another uni"

No, but they can weigh the cost of living in e.g. Manhattan versus Queens versus upstate. And they can weigh the cost ex ante of a private university versus community college.

Housing and education have high lock-in. But there is a degree of competition and choice with respect to incurring their costs. That doesn't exist with taxes, which makes some people more cautious about them.

In 2018, there were a total of $800 billion of stock buybacks, and this was an utterly exceptional moment when corporations were essentially forced to make them due to tax advantage. So even if your theoretical tax didn't impact buyback behavior at all (it would) and buyback rates returned to 2018 levels (they won't), you would raise $40 billion per year. It would raise federal tax revenue around 1%. How do you envision spending that to completely rebuild society?

If these buyback didn't create extremely overvalued/frothy markets, would the bailouts need to be as big?

I think over leveraging is as toxic for markets as many intuitively expect.

Can someone explain to me the obsession with buybacks and not dividends?

Buybacks confer additional advantages as well. The gains can be deferred, which can be advantageous when saving for retirement because your marginal tax rate when retired will likely be lower (because less income). For foreign investors, buybacks aren't subject to withholding tax. For the executives, buybacks also benefit them because their compensation tend to be tied to shared price.

Even with a 5% tax, buybacks would still be better than dividends. The bigger problem is that dividends and buybacks are functionally the same (return money to shareholders), but they receive different tax treatments. Instead of trying to patch the differences with more taxes, we should make both have the same treatment when it comes to taxes.

Development fees are a one-off revenue stream, and could fit the Ponzi scheme assertion. But property taxes? These are recurring, and could be turned to sustainably fund a community's costs.

> we could tax something like 5% of stock buybacks

Within the scope of the author's argument, this would be worse than property taxes. It's an unpredictable revenue stream. And it's unrelated to the liability side of the equation.

I'm not suggesting violence, but that our forces responsible from protecting us against domestic threats do their job here, I think the idea that the optics of arresting a sitting president and members of congress is less worse than restoring a functioning legislative and executive branches.

What they failed to realize was how popular he was with the lower and middle classes. His reign had drastically improved their quality of life. His murder led to a string of civil wars and instability.

Think hard before disbanding populist figures.

[0] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/

There needs to be a multifaceted implementation of new policy.

Term limits in a vacuum are useless, but if we didn't have a government that was pretty much a proxy for large corporations we could do neat things that would make anyone engaging in that type of arrangement's life a lot harder.

I would also go so far as to say that members of congress should not be allowed to be active in the markets for some years (8?) after they leave office and their should also be limits on jobs they are allowed to take for some time after they leave office as well. I.e. they can't go sit on a board and get paid 7-figures right after giving up their seat.

I agree with that. I just don’t think term limits will make a difference in this effort.

And maybe it's time people stop treating the president as some kind of hero to get excited about and more someone with a job to do. This isn't partisan, either: Mitt Romney would be doing a far better job with COVID-19 than our current leadership.

[0]https://books.google.com/books?id=xK1NuzpAcH8C&pg=PA235#v=on...

It is still enough people that I wouldn’t want to see the corresponding headline.

I'm afraid it's wishful thinking to think most Americans are sick of Trump. Some are, for sure, but the data you posted isn't showing anything significant happened.

He will likely win again from what I'm seeing.

Color me skeptical.

Any examples of this in practice?

>What, then, is the missing piece? A major factor that has not received sufficient attention is the role of public policy. Throughout most of the country’s history, American government at all levels has pursued policies designed to preserve local control of businesses and to check the tendency of a few dominant cities to monopolize power over the rest of the country. These efforts moved to the federal level beginning in the late nineteenth century and reached a climax of enforcement in the 1960s and ’70s. Yet starting shortly thereafter, each of these policy levers were flipped, one after the other, in the opposite direction, usually in the guise of “deregulation.” Understanding this history, largely forgotten in our own time, is essential to turning the problem of inequality around.

...

>Sometimes referred to by its supporters as “the Magna Carta of Small Business,” Robinson-Patman prevented the formation of chain stores even remotely approaching the scale and power of today’s Walmart or Amazon by cracking down on such practices as selling items below cost (a practice known as “loss leading”). The legislation also prohibited the chains from using their market power to extract price concessions from their suppliers, Similarly, the Miller-Tydings Act, enacted by Congress in 1937, put a floor on retail discounting, thereby ensuring that large chains headquartered in distant cities didn’t come to dominate the economies of local communities. This did not prevent innovation in retailing, such as the emergence of brand-spanking-new supermarkets to replace small-scale butcher shops and green grocers. But into the 1960s, these and similar laws would ensure that no supermarket chain would control more than about 7 percent of any local market.

It's not only him, look at the entire GOP, and what forces are at play to keep these people in place.

The people currently in charge are there to protect historic interests/positions and they know they will lose them forever in a fair election. Because most of the country has moved on culturally.

The only thing that's changed is that people are pretending that it's new and unprecedented, as a way to garner more outrage.

Separately, opinion polls show that plenty of people support the current US president, so, regardless if their lives have been "improved" (whatever that means), those people will be upset if the president leaves.

And more from Oct 2019: https://www.heritage.org/markets-and-finance/commentary/midd...

Many of you live in San Francisco. Your House rep, Nancy Pelosi, with whom I am sure you are familiar, has a serious challenger in Shahid Buttar. He is pushing to debate her, which should be the bare minimum for electoral rivals, yet AFAIK no date has been set. No one in the media or in the political establishment is holding her feet to the fire.

We could start there.

I personally know friends who claim that they'd stop working if they keep receiving handouts. And I live in Canada, where handouts are MUCH easier to come by.

You claim 'broad public support'. Any source to back that up?

No, referring to coronavirus aid bills as "blue-state bailouts" and running the Senate as a party-state are unacceptable.

But that's just your opinion.

Frankly, they're both "lost causes" from the majority of possible vectors. I would wager equally so, forgetting ideology and just going off the momentum of incumbency. Unfortunately, the situation is so dire that any victory that's even remotely possible is crucial. Don't throw anything out, because we might need everything. We'll just have to throw our weight behind whatever we can until all our options are exhausted.

What is "appropriate" for "traitors"? Execution? Prison? Being stripped of their rights, including the right to participate in the democratic process?

You see, the irony is that alleging vague subversive activity from your political enemies and then dealing with the "traitors" like this subverts the republic, turning it into a new oligarchy. It's a very banana-republic suggestion.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2381

It's almost like our Constitution spells out how "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort." https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articleiii

It's almost like James Madison knew from experience there'd be someone who would float this type of proposal, and so codified a rebuke into the supreme law of the land, some 200 years in advance.

(Postscript. The obvious next step is for you to change your mind and stop saying these random members are committing oligarchycrimes and say instead that Trump himself is giving "aid and comfort" to our enemies in Russia. I'm sure there's some lovely jurisprudence to be had getting that laughed out of the courts and wish you the best of luck.)

However, it does seem likely to me that random citizens would be less capable of governing effectively in areas where actual knowledge of law, politics or some degree of domain knowledge is required.