A thread for Democrats Only by THGRRI

Sad. I can smell the desperation coming off of you from my computer screen.

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, August 13, 2022 7:35 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

House passes $700B bill that cuts costs for Medicare, targets tax cheats, boosts green energy

The U.S. House on Friday passed a sweeping spending package aimed at juicing green energy and reining in health care costs, sending the bill to the White House and delivering a major victory for Democrats just months before the midterms.

The roughly $700 billion package empowers Medicare to negotiate drug prices, extends funding for the Affordable Care Act for three years and includes close to $370 billion in federal funding to expand tax credits for electric vehicles and boost wind and solar power.

The Medicare changes will impact nearly 4.5 million Texans, limiting their out-of-pocket costs and capping the cost of insulin at $35 a month.

The so-called Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 also tweaks the tax code to target major corporations and tax cheats, which Democrats say will more than cover the costs of the legislation, driving down the federal deficit over the next decade.

It passed the House on a party line vote, with Democrats cheering it as a win for working people. Republicans called the legislation reckless.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20220813113108/https://www.houstonchronicl
e.com/politics/texas/article/House-passes-700B-bill-that-cuts-costs-for-17370533.php

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, August 14, 2022 6:15 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

I taught my kids about democracy by letting them vote on which movie to watch and pizza to order.

And then I picked the movie and pizza I wanted because I'm the one with the money.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, August 14, 2022 8:10 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
I taught my kids about democracy by letting them vote on which movie to watch and pizza to order.

And then I picked the movie and pizza I wanted because I'm the one with the money.

I have to wonder ... why do you even bother to virtue-signal?

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, August 14, 2022 8:15 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
I taught my kids about democracy by letting them vote on which movie to watch and pizza to order.

And then I picked the movie and pizza I wanted because I'm the one with the money.

I have to wonder ... why do you even bother to virtue-signal?

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

Especially when he doesn't have any kids with his fake wife.

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, August 14, 2022 8:23 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
House passes $700B bill that cuts costs for Medicare, targets tax cheats, boosts green energy

It does none of those things.

You'll see.

Oh... P.S.

There's not a single coal burning car on the market today that will be subsidized by taxing poor people that qualifies for the subsidy.

https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/auto-loans/ev-tax-credits

Not a single coal burning car on the road in the world would qualify. I can't wait to see the backlash from all the stupid rich white Democrats that believe everything the media tells them, since they never change the channel from CNN or MSNBC and they don't get the credit they were told to think that they'd get.

Oh...

And about that tax credit.

Even though it doesn't qualify, Ford raised the prices on it's coal burning F-150 Lightning by, you guessed it, an average of $7,500 per vehicle on August 9th.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/09/ford-raises-f-150-lightning-prices-a
cross-the-board/

There goes the subsidy anyhow.

Now poor people can help you pay Ford a subsidy every time you buy a coal burning vehicle from them.

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, August 14, 2022 4:33 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
I taught my kids about democracy by letting them vote on which movie to watch and pizza to order.

And then I picked the movie and pizza I wanted because I'm the one with the money.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Just wanted to pop this up again so THUGR and CAPN see what SECOND thinks of democracy. (This is, btw, a well-known joke.) In case, yanno, they think he's some sort of patriot.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, August 15, 2022 4:16 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

I have to wonder ... why do you even bother to virtue-signal?

What are you signalling when you misunderstand the simplest ideas? When you show the world you are an ignoramus? For example, see Republican Senator Ron Johnson from Wisconsin signaling today that Social Security and Medicare could be "improved" by his ideas about fiscal efficiency and annual budgeting. There is something else going on here, something the Republican Senator is not explaining. What is that something? Killing Social Security and Medicare without mentioning killing. Even the writer of the story almost, but not quite, missed that point, once somebody pointed it out:

Published: Aug. 15, 2022 at 2:37 p.m. ET

Should Social Security be eliminated as a federal entitlement program? Or would that ‘end the program as you know it’?

Republican Sen. Ron Johnson wants to ‘turn everything into discretionary spending’

Social Security and Medicare are two of the government’s mandatory spending programs — and popular ones at that — but one senator has suggested changing that label, making them vulnerable to annual budget cuts every year.

Under the current structure, Social Security and Medicare budgets are automatically approved and paid out, but under Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson’s plan, Congress would have the chance to review and edit these programs’ budgets every year.

Johnson did not respond to MarketWatch’s request for comment by deadline.

But critics say Johnson’s proposal could be detrimental to Social Security and Medicare, giving politicians an opportunity to cut spending for beneficiaries.

“It’s another way of saying let’s end the program as you know it,” said Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, which advocates for expanding the program. Workers contribute to the program throughout their careers and expect to receive a benefit when they retire, she said, switching the program from a mandatory spending budget line to a discretionary one would leave those benefits “to the whims of Congress.”

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20220815194342/https://www.marketwatch.com
/story/should-social-security-be-eliminated-as-a-federal-entitlement-program-or-would-that-end-the-program-as-you-know-it-11660588622

Wouldn’t it be nice if Social Security and Medicare stopped paying, or shutdown, every single time the Federal Government was shutdown by Republican Senators wishing to make a statement about the Federal budget? There have been many shutdowns:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_shutdowns_in_the_United_State
s#List_of_federal_shutdowns

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, August 15, 2022 4:45 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

SECOND, what are you accomplishing when you tag me with statements I haven't made? Aside from looking like a dick, that is.

Do I defend ALL Republicans? No.
Do I attack ALL government programs? No.
I just think that if our politicians (both parties) spent more time defending the interests of their constituents instead of promoting the interests of their wealthy contributors we, the people, would be a lot farther ahead

Remember, pity (and many government programs) would be no more (or not so big) if someone were not MAKING someone poor. FDR wasn't supporting "the people" with his government programs, he was trying to save "capitalism" (such as it was) from itself (and the huge wealth inequality it had built up.)

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, August 15, 2022 5:03 PM

JAYNEZTOWN

Was piratenews Responsible for 'Pizzagate'?

maybe there is nothing to that conspiracy yet maybe there is something

or does the old senile guy just look weird and grabby in photos

NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, August 17, 2022 6:08 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:

Remember, pity (and many government programs) would be no more (or not so big) if someone were not MAKING someone poor. FDR wasn't supporting "the people" with his government programs, he was trying to save "capitalism" (such as it was) from itself (and the huge wealth inequality it had built up.)

Signym, do you even follow American politics? All of FDR's best legislation got zero votes from Republicans. Republicans are still giving zero votes for worthy programs:

A Climate Bill becomes law despite no Republicans in either House of Congress voting for it
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/inflation-reductio
n-act-passes-house-1396429/

Three and a half years ago, an open letter that more than 3,600 economists eventually signed declared that “climate change is a serious problem calling for immediate national action.” The signatories included 15 former chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers, more than half of whom served under Republican presidents — a display of bipartisanship that contrasts sharply with the lock-step opposition of Republicans in Congress to the national action we’re finally taking in the form of the Inflation Reduction Act (I.R.A. which, despite its name, is mainly a climate bill) that President Biden is expected to sign today.

While we’re getting action, however, that action isn’t taking the form called for in the letter. That huge array of economists agreed that climate change mitigation should take the form of a carbon tax — a fee levied on businesses and individuals who emit greenhouse gases. This, the letter argued, was the remedy recommended by “sound economic principles.” But the I.R.A. doesn’t include a carbon tax, nor does it introduce a system of tradable emissions permits, which would provide similar incentives.

Instead, the act relies almost entirely on subsidies intended to promote clean energy, offering tax credits for renewable energy, aid to keep nuclear plants operating, incentives to buy electric vehicles and make homes more energy efficient and more.

So what happened to the carbon tax idea? Biden administration officials are well aware of the Econ 101 case for emission taxes. Indeed, Janet Yellen, the Treasury secretary, and Cecilia Rouse, the current C.E.A. chair, were among the letter’s signatories. I also understand that logic — in fact, the introductory economics textbook I wrote with Robin Wells makes that argument in some detail. But a few months after the letter was released I made the case in a Twitter thread against being a “carbon tax purist,” arguing that an exclusive focus on carbon taxes was “dubious economics and bad political economy.”

And in practice Democrats ignored the carbon tax route. Why?

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20220817011402/https://www.nytimes.com/202
2/08/16/opinion/carbon-tax.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, August 17, 2022 6:17 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Brian Schatz @brianschatz
I feel like the media is having a hard time metabolizing the fact that this congress has been historically productive. And acknowledging the size of these accomplishments, and the degree of difficultly, - it’s just hard to do accurately without sounding a bit left leaning.

Like, Postal Reform was such a standing, seemingly unsolvable issue for every congress for a decade it seemed not doable. Done.

We all know the difficulty of passing an infrastructure bill, which while popular and necessary, proved elusive for W and Obama and Trump. Done.

The taking care of veterans who have had toxic exposure, especially burn pits, was also something being pushed for many years with no success. Done.

Violence Against Women Act reauthorization with new provisions for Indian Country. Biggest investment in native communities ever. Done.

We all now know what’s in IRA, and CHIPS, but when you add all of this up, it’s not just a lot of bills. Each one of these was thorny, complicated, difficulty, and ambitious.

4:12 PM · Aug 16, 2022·Twitter for iPhone
https://twitter.com/brianschatz/status/1559649238220300289

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, August 17, 2022 9:04 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
it’s just hard to do accurately without sounding a bit left leaning.

Understatement of the year.

Get fucked, Brian. You'll never see Democrats in charge again in your life.

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, August 18, 2022 8:16 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Get fucked, Brian. You'll never see Democrats in charge again in your life.

How would you know, unless you had a violent plan that involved controlling how the votes are counted? But there is a violent plan! ‘It’s going to be an army’: Tapes reveal GOP plan to contest elections
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/01/gop-contest-elections-tapes-0
0035758

The Republican party is increasingly unwilling to accept defeat and, in fact, is "prepared to win by sacrificing the essential elements of democracy."
https://www.npr.org/2021/12/09/1062683521/journalist-says-republicans-
now-have-more-reliable-ways-to-overturn-election-res

For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220817132701/https://www.theatlantic.com
/magazine/archive/2022/01/january-6-insurrection-trump-coup-2024-election/620843/

6ix, at least on paper, it looks like the Republican Party has stolen control over who gets elected.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, August 18, 2022 8:19 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

How dangerous is today’s Republican Party? Very, ex-CIA Director Michael Hayden believes

Published: Aug. 17, 2022 at 9:25 p.m. ET at MarketWatch.com

Hayden and other former military leaders warned last month that American democracy ‘is in real peril’

Retired Gen. Michael Hayden, the former director of both the CIA and NSA, has called out the Republican Party as extremist and dangerous, on an unprecedented level.

Hayden, a retired Air Force general who was named director of the National Security Agency under the Clinton administration and CIA director by former President George W. Bush, was among five former top military officials who penned a USA Today op-ed last month warning that American democracy “is in real peril” following the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection and the way the Republican party has embraced conspiracy theorists, 2020 election deniers and extremist elements.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/contributors/2022/06/22/america
n-democracy-former-cia-director/7685947001/

“For those of us focused on domestic security, the forces of autocracy now trump traditional foreign threats, hands down,” they wrote, citing an alarming study earlier this year that found one in three Americans believe violence against the government could be justified.

A number of prominent Republicans have joined Hayden in decrying the state of the Republican Party and Donald Trump’s degree of influence in it.

Former Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday pleaded with fellow Republicans to tone down their rhetoric against the FBI following last week’s search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home.

Law enforcement officials have warned in recent days that angry words from Trump and his allies are putting agents, officers and federal employees at risk of violence. Violent rhetoric may have contributed to at least two deadly encounters with law enforcement over the past week.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20220818014944/https://www.marketwatch.com
/story/how-dangerous-is-todays-republican-party-very-ex-cia-director-michael-hayden-believes-11660785930

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, August 19, 2022 6:17 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

What every single Republican in the House and Senate opposed.

They don’t want seniors’ out-of-pocket prescription drug costs capped at $2,000 a year — not if it means Amazon has to pay a 15% tax on its profits. They don’t want us to join the world in confronting climate change — not if, to pay for it, the IRS will be given the resources to assure greater compliance by corporations and the wealthy. They don’t want the deficit reduced — not if it means a 1% excise tax on corporate stock buy-backs.

Republicans rejected it all, unanimously.

But we won.

What Biden Has — and Hasn’t — Done
Aug. 18, 2022, 7:00 p.m. ET

At this point Biden is arguably benefiting from the soft bigotry of low expectations. His policy achievements are big by modern standards, but they wouldn’t have seemed astounding in an earlier era — the era before the radicalization of the Republican Party made it almost impossible to pursue real solutions to real problems.

So, what has Biden accomplished?

As I see it, he came into office with three main domestic policy goals: investing in America’s fraying infrastructure, taking serious action against climate change and expanding the social safety net, especially for families with children. He got most of two and a bit of the third.

Last year’s infrastructure bill gets remarkably little media attention; only about a quarter of voters even know that it passed. But we should remember that Barack Obama wanted to invest in infrastructure but couldn’t; Donald Trump promised to do it but didn’t (and “It’s infrastructure week!” became a running joke); then Biden got it done.

By contrast, the Inflation Reduction Act, which is mainly a climate law, has received a lot of attention, and deservedly so. America is finally taking action against the biggest existential threat of our times. Energy experts believe that it will have large direct effects in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

These are significant achievements, and a big contrast with the last administration, whose only major domestic policy change was a tax cut that had almost no visible positive effects.

But when I see news reports describe these laws as “massive” or huge, I wonder whether the writers have done the math. The infrastructure law will add roughly $500 billion in spending over the next decade. The Inflation Reduction Act will increase spending by roughly an additional half trillion. A law to promote U.S. semiconductor production will add around $50 billion more. Overall, then, we’re talking about a bit more than $1 trillion in public investment over 10 years.

To put this in perspective, the Congressional Budget Office expects cumulative gross domestic product to be more than $300 trillion over the next decade. So the Biden agenda will amount to around one-third of one percent of G.D.P. Massive it isn’t.

True, some of what Biden has done may have effects much bigger than the dollar sums might suggest. There are reasons to hope that the climate law will have a sort of catalytic effect in promoting a transition to clean energy. And some economists believe that boosting the budget of the resource-starved Internal Revenue Service will greatly reduce tax evasion and hence increase revenue.

And can we say a word about foreign policy? Biden got immense flak over the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, although the critics offered few suggestions about what he should have done differently. But the narrative on foreign affairs has changed, too; I’m no expert, but it looks to me as if the Biden administration has done a remarkable job assembling and holding together a coalition to help Ukraine resist Russian aggression.

OK, I can already hear people yelling in response to any citation of Biden’s achievements, what about inflation? Indeed, the Biden administration failed to appreciate the risks of an inflation surge. However, so did many others, including the Federal Reserve (and yours truly). And it does seem worth pointing out that other countries, notably Britain, are also suffering from high inflation, even though they didn’t follow anything like Biden-style policies. In fact, Britain’s inflation problem looks worse than ours, on multiple dimensions.

And both the public and financial markets expect inflation to be brought under control. So it doesn’t look as if this admittedly big misstep will do enduring damage.

Again, I don’t want to sound Trumpian and claim that Biden is doing an awesome job, a perfect job, the best job anyone has ever seen. What he has done — and was doing even before the media narrative turned — is deal, reasonably effectively, with the real problems America is facing.

The thing is, what we’re getting from Biden should be routine in a wealthy, sophisticated nation; indeed, it was routine before the G.O.P. took its hard right turn. At this point, however, competent, reality-based government comes as a shock.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220818231034/https://www.nytimes.com/202
2/08/18/opinion/joe-biden-achievements-president.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, August 19, 2022 9:15 AM

Fuck your Newsspeak. Only Democrat voters are dumb enough to believe anything in that wall of text you wrote above.

Good thing for Americans that Democrats will never be in power again once November rolls around.

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, August 19, 2022 9:37 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Fuck your Newsspeak. Only Democrat voters are dumb enough to believe anything in that wall of text you wrote above.

Good thing for Americans that Democrats will never be in power again once November rolls around.

Back in Texas, Trumptards make all kinds of optimistic predictions about the future of Trump and the Republican party. But when the predictions fail, they claim "Fake News" and that Democrats cheated Republicans out of their winnings. That is pretty much why the Democrats I know are at least twice as rich as the Trumptards. Trumptards accusing Democrats of stealing what Trumptards think is theirs is why Trumptards aren't rich. You Trumptards never understand that your relative poverty compared to white Democrats is because Trumptards are stupid, lazy, obnoxious, drunken, poor white trash.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, August 19, 2022 1:05 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Fuck your Newsspeak. Only Democrat voters are dumb enough to believe anything in that wall of text you wrote above.

Good thing for Americans that Democrats will never be in power again once November rolls around.
Back in Texas, Trumptards make all kinds of optimistic predictions about the future of Trump and the Republican party. But when the predictions fail, they claim "Fake News" and that Democrats cheated Republicans out of their winnings. That is pretty much why the Democrats I know are at least twice as rich as the Trumptards. Trumptards accusing Democrats of stealing what Trumptards think is theirs is why Trumptards aren't rich. You Trumptards never understand that your relative poverty compared to white Democrats is because Trumptards are stupid, lazy, obnoxious, drunken, poor white trash.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Ah, the old strawman- ad hominem "Trumptards believe" shtick.

Really, SECOND, be the best troll you can be.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, August 19, 2022 10:25 PM

SECOND: Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump.

*yawn*

Get a life, loser.

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, August 20, 2022 8:26 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Untold History of the Biden Family

(The final sentences in this long story, from Biden’s cousins: “They ended up in the White House. We ended up in the trailer park.” Other choice quotes from Biden’s poor white trash relatives: “I used to stop and think a lot, What in the world ever happened to all the money? And there was never anybody to explain it to me.” and “I’m so glad that Bill died of pancreatic cancer and not alcoholism. I feel like the chain was broken.” )

Relatively little has been known about the President’s father, whose story reveals a family’s fraught relationship with money, class, and alcohol.

By Adam Entous
August 15, 2022

Joe Biden, Sr., revealed little about his tumultuous personal and business dealings with his cousin Bill Sheene, Jr.

In 2019, I wrote a piece for this magazine about Hunter Biden, the younger son of the current President, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. Hunter, describing his childhood in Wilmington, Delaware, told me that after church his father would sometimes drive him and his brother, Beau, through wealthy neighborhoods, where they would sneak onto empty estates that were either abandoned or on the market. If the front door was locked, the boys’ father would hoist them through a second-floor window, and they would run downstairs and let him in. If a real-estate agent arrived when they were there, Biden, who at this point was a senator, would charm the agent into giving them a tour.

Hunter insisted that he grew up middle class, but his family lived on an estate of their own—a ten-thousand-square-foot mansion with a ballroom. (His father, on a tight budget, would close off large sections with drywall to save on heating costs.) “Even as a kid in high school I’d been seduced by real estate,” Biden wrote in his 2007 memoir, “Promises to Keep.” The fixation seemed anomalous, almost self-defeating, for someone who wanted to be known as Middle-Class Joe.

One of Biden’s skills as a politician is his ability to connect with working-class and middle-class Americans. In speeches, he often emphasizes his modest upbringing. “I grew up in a family where, if the price of food went up, you felt it,” he said in his 2022 State of the Union address.“I remember when my dad had to leave our home in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to find work.” And yet the anecdotes I heard about Biden’s father, Joseph Robinette Biden, Sr., told a different story. He was working at a car dealership when his son was elected to the Senate, in 1972, but according to Jimmy Biden, one of the President’s younger brothers, his father’s idea of casual attire was a sport coat and an ascot. Biden, in his memoir, wrote about opening a closet and finding his father’s polo mallet, equestrian boots, riding breeches, and hunting pinks—items that suggested a past life of privilege. At one point, Biden, Sr., had a lot of money, but he lost it all, for reasons that went mostly unexplained. “I never asked him much about his life, and he didn’t offer,” Biden wrote.

On top of the family’s fraught relationship with class is a tragic history with alcohol. Hunter has had issues with drinking and substance abuse, which, along with his controversial business dealings, have been weaponized by his father’s political opponents. If Republicans take over the House of Representatives in November, they plan to hold more hearings focussed on Hunter.

The President considers alcoholism a kind of family curse. After growing up around hard-drinking relatives, he chose to abstain from alcohol. He also urged his siblings, and, later, his children, not to drink, although all of them eventually did—some in moderation, others to the point of addiction.

Relatively little has been written about the life of Biden, Sr., or about the Biden family’s history. The earliest and most detailed study is in Richard Ben Cramer’s 1992 book, “What It Takes,” a lengthy, character-driven account of the 1988 Presidential campaign. But Biden, Sr., wouldn’t speak with Cramer, and the journalist relied mostly on interviews with Jimmy Biden—who shared family stories he’d heard—and with Jean Biden, the President’s mother. When Joe Biden published “Promises to Keep,” he repeated many of the stories from Cramer’s book, some of them almost verbatim, with similar gaps.

Biden’s parents are no longer alive, and the President declined to speak with me for this article. I talked with his siblings, but they didn’t have much to share about the family’s past beyond what had already been published. “Dad wasn’t a big talker,” the President’s sister, Valerie, told me. When I asked Jimmy why their father hadn’t been more forthcoming, he said, “I think it’s akin to somebody who served in World War Two or Korea, and then came back and saw the atrocities. He was embarrassed.”

Cramer and Biden wrote that Biden, Sr., was close to a cousin—a man on his mother’s side of the family—who is identified in both books as Bill Sheen, Jr. The cousins were the best men at each other’s weddings, and they were in business together during the Second World War. I tried to track down the Sheens but was unsuccessful. I finally understood why after I visited Loudon Park Funeral Home and Cemetery, in Baltimore, to see the graves of the President’s grandparents Joseph Harry and Mary Elizabeth Biden. At the family plot, I noticed a grave marker: “William E. Sheene, Jr., 1914-1969.” Cramer and Biden had both misspelled the Sheene family’s last name, and subsequent authors had repeated the mistake. Using the correct spelling, I was able to find Bill Sheene III, Sheene, Jr.,’s son, who was living at an R.V. park in Fort Myers, Florida. He told me that I was the first reporter to contact him about the Bidens.

“I can visualize everything,” he said in the fall of 2020, describing his father’s Long Island mansion, where Biden’s parents were a constant presence. He provided details that helped me piece together a more complete story of the Bidens’ financial rise and collapse. He said that his parents had hinted at business improprieties—his mother would make references to the family’s wartime “blood money,” and his father was paranoid about being followed by the I.R.S. He also talked about his father and grandfather’s mobbed-up business partner, Arthur Briscoe, who worked closely with Biden, Sr.

With the help of genealogists, I found more information in documents stored at various institutions, including state and federal archives, courthouses, universities, and a mental hospital. Ultimately, I discovered that the story the Bidens had told the public was woefully incomplete, possibly because Biden, Sr., had never shared the full version with his children. “They just want to forget everything,” Sheene III told me. “New chapter.”

Joseph Robinette Biden, Sr., was born in Baltimore in 1915. As a child, he contracted Sydenham’s chorea, a neurological disorder that causes muscle spasms, which kept him out of school for many months. His father, Joseph Harry Biden, unwilling to leave his son at home, began taking him to work every day, and the two became very close. Joseph Harry worked at the American Oil Company, which later became known as Amoco. He was one of the first three employees hired by Amoco’s founder, Louis Blaustein. In its early days, the company delivered kerosene, transporting it in a steel tank that was mounted on a horse-drawn wagon. Joseph Harry was photographed next to the wagon, and Amoco used the image in its advertisements. Internally, employees would reference the “Joe Biden tank wagon,” and Joseph Harry became Amoco’s poster child. After starting out as a low-paid plant clerk, he moved to a sales job, and in the nineteen-twenties he was tapped to manage a new branch in Wilmington. Amoco’s in-house magazine touted him as a model employee: “Mr. Biden’s record of seventeen years offers a perfect example of a man who has grown with his company.”

In 1930, when Biden, Sr., was fourteen, his father was at the peak of his career. After receiving another promotion, Joseph Harry bought a duplex, the Biden family’s first house. But he soon fell into debt: in 1934, after he failed to keep up with tax payments, the house was sold at a public auction. That same year, he was demoted and sent to a branch in Scranton.

“My father used to have an expression,” Joe Biden said at an event earlier this year. “He’d say, ‘Joey, a job is a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity. It’s about your place in your community.’ ” In Scranton, the President’s grandfather went from being Amoco’s poster child to feeling like he was unwanted at the company. According to Amoco’s internal memos, one of Joseph Harry’s bosses told him that the Scranton branch “would never amount to anything,” and another complained that he was overpaid. According to a colleague, Joseph Harry felt like “his check is always handed to him in a way that makes [him] feel he is stealing it.” He was in “constant worry” of being relocated again or getting fired altogether.

In the thirties, Amoco’s magazine published a photograph of Joseph Harry. He is wearing a straw-brimmed hat, which casts a shadow over his eyes, and his face is gaunt, his lips narrow. He looks a lot like his great-grandson Hunter, when Hunter was in the throes of his addictions. (I showed the photograph to Hunter, who had never seen a picture of Joseph Harry, and he was taken aback by the resemblance.) According to Jimmy, who recounted stories that he’d heard from Biden, Sr., Joseph Harry began drinking heavily after his career took a turn for the worse. When Biden, Sr., was a teen-ager, his mother, Mary, would send him to the local gin mill to retrieve his intoxicated father. I couldn’t find concrete evidence of Joseph Harry having a drinking problem, but divorce records describe his father, George T. Biden, drunkenly abusing Joseph Harry’s mother and sister before walking out on them, in 1912.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20220819040053/https://www.newyorker.com/m
agazine/2022/08/22/the-untold-history-of-the-biden-family

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, August 20, 2022 8:59 AM

What, are you Joe*'s fluffer now?

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, August 20, 2022 9:34 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
What, are you Joe*'s fluffer now?

The amusing part of that Biden story was that Biden's relatives are angry poor white trash. They are angry because they believe America owes them a better life, but alcohol and being obnoxious got in the way of them rising in America. If only they weren't addicted to many common substances, they would be President, too.

The final sentences in this long story, from Biden’s cousins: “They ended up in the White House. We ended up in the trailer park.” Other choice quotes from Biden’s poor white trash relatives: “I used to stop and think a lot, What in the world ever happened to all the money? And there was never anybody to explain it to me.” and “I’m so glad that Bill died of pancreatic cancer and not alcoholism. I feel like the chain was broken.”

https://web.archive.org/web/20220819040053/https://www.newyorker.com/m
agazine/2022/08/22/the-untold-history-of-the-biden-family

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, August 20, 2022 10:14 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

President Biden @POTUS tweeted:

It's now law that big corporations pay a minimum 15% tax on the profits they report to their shareholders, instead of getting away with paying zero dollars in federal income taxes.

6:00 PM · Aug 18, 2022·The White House
https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1560401151941611528

Joe Biden stated on April 7, 2021 in remarks at the White House:

“A new, independent study put out last week found that at least 55 of our largest corporations used various loopholes to pay zero federal income tax in 2020.”

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/apr/12/joe-biden/fact-check
ing-joe-biden-corporation-taxes/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, August 20, 2022 11:35 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
President Biden @POTUS tweeted:

It's now law that big corporations pay a minimum 15% tax on the profits they report to their shareholders, instead of getting away with paying zero dollars in federal income taxes.

6:00 PM · Aug 18, 2022·The White House
https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1560401151941611528

Joe Biden stated on April 7, 2021 in remarks at the White House:

“A new, independent study put out last week found that at least 55 of our largest corporations used various loopholes to pay zero federal income tax in 2020.”

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/apr/12/joe-biden/fact-check
ing-joe-biden-corporation-taxes/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Joe Biden* didn't tweet shit. Joe Biden* doesn't even know what a computer is.

Maybe he should have Hunter give him lessons. Hunter knows a lot about computers except for security.

Oh... and P.S.

The corporations won't be paying shit either.

You and I are going to foot that bill. We'll just call it yet another example of Joe Biden* lying to Americans when he said that anyone making under $400k per year wouldn't pay any more taxes under his administration. There's a lot of examples of that already. This is just another to add to the list.
--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, August 22, 2022 5:21 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Last Straw for people with marginal incomes (Versus the Plentiful Life of a Capitalist)

The first to suffer the consequences of the most recent round of inflation were those who had been subsisting on marginal incomes. This was a lot of Americans. Before inflation, they were barely making ends meet because too much of their too little income was going towards housing. In a more balanced economy, housing would cost about one-third of one’s income. Today, it is often one-half and more. Fair to say that too many Americans are not being paid enough; that their wages need to go up substantially. Also fair to say that, even if the minimum wage was doubled, housing would still be too high for many working class Americans. Fair to say that too many retired Americans are paying twice as much and more for rent than they can afford.

‘Supply and demand’ is the explanation usually given for how the housing market works. Given today’s disparity between incomes and rents, for many renters, obviously, neither ‘supply and demand’, nor the ‘market, are ‘working’. ‘Supply and demand’, as per usual, at best, describes the after-the-fact; not the cause. The term itself implies a market solution is at hand when there is little evidence of markets ever being the solution to housing. If they were, it was by happenstance, and then, usually too late. There is a lot more evidence that housing is a necessity, and thus shouldn’t be a commodity. That housing is one of those basic necessities which an economy should provide.

Of late, the role of markets in rental housing is a highly manipulative one being manipulated by financialists like Stephen Schwarzman, et al, who buy up rental units (gain control of supply), then raise rents. For these financialists, the applicable market is one of getting the most for rentals. Hardly a market at all, it is more a game in which they, the financialists hold all the cards. They have no interest in providing renters a fair shake. There being no shortage of renters; they tell the renter; if you want to rent, you rent from me at my price. For the financialists, it is all about squeezing the last drop of blood from the turnips. Let’s don’t even call it a market; it isn’t. The buyer doesn’t get to choose between suppliers. First your money, then your clothes; first your housing, then your job. Many of America’s homeless are so because of this manipulation of the rental housing ‘market’ by very wealthy financialists.

This financialization of rental housing combined with the feudalistic economic model of the south that has now spread across the Nation has created a modern version of sharecropping. A combination that has become a nightmare for so many American workers. They were imprisoned in this endless cycle of poverty. Then, along came inflation. Exorbitantly high rents and low wages/incomes were the reason so many Americans are marginalized; the reason for their being so vulnerable to this round of inflation.

The financialization model for rental housing is now in the U.K., Ireland, Portugal, …. In these countries, as in America, millions of seniors are being evicted because they can’t afford the ‘new’ rents.

For many of America’s marginalized, this most recent round of inflation was the straw that broke their backs. Only in America would it be OK for the Oil Companies to rake in record profits while so many working people couldn’t afford gasoline for their cars so that they could get to work. Only in America would it be OK for the price of groceries to double, suppliers’ profits to soar, while people go without food because they can’t afford to eat after paying the rent. Only in America would it be OK for pharmaceuticals to rake in record profits while so many must decide between their prescription medicines, paying rent, and feeding their families. Only in America would it be OK for financialists like Stephen Schwarzman to make $billions off people who are struggling to make ends meet. Only in America could these things be happening and the media would only talk about inflation.

Hey media! What happened to both-sidism?

https://angrybearblog.com/2022/08/the-last-straw

https://www.npr.org/2021/07/14/1016230724/rents-are-out-of-reach-for-m
ost-americans-earning-minimum-wage-a-study-says

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, August 22, 2022 8:49 AM

Oh. Rents are high?

I didn't notice.

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, August 22, 2022 9:24 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Oh. Rents are high?

I didn't notice.

You would be able to experience what it feels like to be a true Capitalist if you were a landlord. Twelve month leases with an automatic increase of 20% in rent when renewing would give you the experience of seeing desperation in the faces of your tenants confronted with the choice of either moving out or going hungry.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, August 22, 2022 9:31 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Oh. Rents are high?

I didn't notice.
You would be able to experience what it feels like to be a true Capitalist if you were a landlord. Twelve month leases with an automatic increase of 20% in rent when renewing would give you the experience of seeing desperation in the faces of your tenants confronted with the choice of either moving out or going hungry.

Don't pretend to care now. I'm making fun of YOU here.

I've been talking about rent prices along with all the other ways Americans are being financially fucked all year long.

You're only finally piping up about it because your Legacy Media Masters have conceded that it is a problem and they finally put together a list of apologistic propaganda for idiots like you to parrot.

I figured out all of this was coming decades ago. I didn't know when, but I knew it would. One might argue that I did too good in preparation, giving me a means to destroy myself for 5 years without being thrown out on my own ass without a nickel to my name.

But I woke up earlier than most. I'm hoping now that a lot of others are finally waking up they don't go right back to sleep whenever (and if ever) a more competent governing body comes along to fix what the current regime broke.

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, August 22, 2022 9:34 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Don't pretend to care now. I'm making fun of YOU here.

Capitalism is NOT about caring for people. By the way, if you are the the landlord, never give back the security deposit. Your tenants will use that money to pay for moving out, but you want their next move to be as painful as possible so that they will stay and pay you 20% more than they were paying last month. Capitalism is a beautiful system if you are a landlord (or landlady).

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, August 22, 2022 9:40 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Don't pretend to care now. I'm making fun of YOU here.
Capitalism is NOT about caring for people. By the way, if you are the the landlord, never give back the security deposit. Your tenants will use that money to pay for moving out, but you want their next move to be as painful as possible so that they will stay and pay you 20% more than they were paying last month. Capitalism is a beautiful system if you are a landlord (or landlady).

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

We know dude. You hate Capitalism.

So what is your alternative suggestion then?

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, August 22, 2022 9:44 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

I've been talking about rent prices along with all the other ways Americans are being financially fucked all year long.

You're only finally piping up about it because your Legacy Media Masters have conceded that it is a problem and they finally put together a list of apologistic propaganda for idiots like you to parrot.

I figured out all of this was coming decades ago. I didn't know when, but I knew it would. One might argue that I did too good in preparation, giving me a means to destroy myself for 5 years without being thrown out on my own ass without a nickel to my name.

But I woke up earlier than most. I'm hoping now that a lot of others are finally waking up they don't go right back to sleep whenever (and if ever) a more competent governing body comes along to fix what the current regime broke.

I don't think you will ever correctly understand this, but the elected governments in the states of the USA have almost zero control over the Capitalists who actual run the economies of their states. Governments change hands but your vote every other year will change almost nothing because the Capitalists are really in charge, not the government.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, August 22, 2022 9:49 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Don't pretend to care now. I'm making fun of YOU here.
Capitalism is NOT about caring for people. By the way, if you are the the landlord, never give back the security deposit. Your tenants will use that money to pay for moving out, but you want their next move to be as painful as possible so that they will stay and pay you 20% more than they were paying last month. Capitalism is a beautiful system if you are a landlord (or landlady).

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

We know dude. You hate Capitalism.

So what is your alternative suggestion then?

Why change to an alternative when the system is not broken for Capitalists? But it might be nicer if Capitalists were forced to pay all their income taxes. (About $1 trillion per year in taxes are not collected.) For now the richest people only pay whatever they feel like paying. They aren't being audited to discover how much they actually owe.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, August 22, 2022 10:16 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

I've been talking about rent prices along with all the other ways Americans are being financially fucked all year long.

You're only finally piping up about it because your Legacy Media Masters have conceded that it is a problem and they finally put together a list of apologistic propaganda for idiots like you to parrot.

I figured out all of this was coming decades ago. I didn't know when, but I knew it would. One might argue that I did too good in preparation, giving me a means to destroy myself for 5 years without being thrown out on my own ass without a nickel to my name.

But I woke up earlier than most. I'm hoping now that a lot of others are finally waking up they don't go right back to sleep whenever (and if ever) a more competent governing body comes along to fix what the current regime broke.
I don't think you will ever correctly understand this, but the elected governments in the states of the USA have almost zero control over the Capitalists who actual run the economies of their states. Governments change hands but your vote every other year will change almost nothing because the Capitalists are really in charge, not the government.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

"Capitalist" is such a vague term. The way you use it implies some intangible bogey man.

You want to fix Capitalism? Spoiler Alert: You're not going to do it by hiring 87,000 more IRS agents.

The root of the problem is that most of our government is bought and paid for. It's not just the Biden* family and Nancy Pelosi or the entire Democratic party that commits insider trading right before our very eyes, but it's politicians that get rich while in office on both sides of the aisle.

They need to be purged. They need to be imprisoned. They need to have their ill-gotten assets frozen and re-distributed to the taxpayers who they've swindled.

We need people in office who represent the people. Not life-long seats held by people who don't give a fuck about America or Americans and get rich off of us while allowing the Corps to get away with murder.

Capitalism is the best system we've got. The problem now is that we're in a mutated system of Predatory Capitalism, and the regulations and taxes that have been imposed on normal people make it almost insurmountable to start up any potential competition for the big boys because after operating costs, compliance with regulations and the extremely heavy burden for running a small business, there's usually nothing left to make it a worthwhile venture. And that's just for the lucky ones that don't immediately find themselves under water after they made all that money for the Government to spend on dumb shit and/or shit that most Americans don't want any money being spent on.

Come on, man! Do you really believe that these pigs would have voted for all that IRS money to take down the Corporations that feed them? There's not a chance in hell that OUR money they're going to spend on that is going to force their masters to pay more in taxes.

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, August 22, 2022 10:42 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Capitalism is the best system we've got. The problem now is that we're in a mutated system of Predatory Capitalism, and the regulations and taxes that have been imposed on normal people make it almost insurmountable to start up any potential competition for the big boys because after operating costs, compliance with regulations and the extremely heavy burden for running a small business, there's usually nothing left to make it a worthwhile venture. And that's just for the lucky ones that don't immediately find themselves under water after they made all that money for the Government to spend on dumb shit and/or shit that most Americans don't want any money being spent on.

Have you heard of these companies?
Apple Inc. (AAPL) Index Weighting: 7.1% ...
Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) Index Weighting: 6.0% ...
Amazon.com, Inc. ( AMZN) Index Weighting: 3.7% ...
Tesla, Inc. (TSLA) Index Weighting: 2.4% ...
Alphabet Inc. Class A (GOOGL) ... It is Google
Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) ...
Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK.B)

https://www.investopedia.com/top-10-s-and-p-500-stocks-by-index-weight
-4843111

Each has a founder (or two) who was NOT rich when he founded the company. Most of the founders have written books or given lectures or tweeted to explain how they got rich. I don't know a single Trumptard who every read these guys or knows how Capitalism actually works. The Trumptard's version of Capitalism matches perfectly with how Trump got rich: by cheating people who rent from him, by selling them fake diplomats from Trump University, by cheating on his taxes, by going bankrupt to avoid repayment, etc.

Trumptards completely misunderstand how successful Capitalists got rich, but it is not like how Trump did it. Trump is "Predatory Capitalism" personified. But since you don't understand that about Trump, what can you understand about how Capitalism works? From my experience, most people cannot understand what is happening out in the open, all around them, all the time. And they certainly cannot join the Capitalist Game because they cannot understand how it is played by the most competent people. Trump is NOT one of those competent people.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Tuesday, August 23, 2022 12:03 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

It's so annoying when people use terms they don't understand and couldn't define if challenged: Nazi, fascism, democracy, liberal, freedom, man, woman, racism ... capitalism...

Words don't mean whatever you "want" them to mean. Unless there are commonly accepted definitions, communication is impossible.

Your examples of "real" capitalism lack the one thing that makes capitalism work better than feudalism or socialism (at least in theory): competition. Bc your "real" capitalists have done all they can to eliminate the competition as much as possible.

Some of them produce nothing of value, like Buffet (who got wealthy simply by buying stuff) and Gates (ditto. Gates BTW started out with a million dollars and his mom's contacts into IBM).

They could be variously described as monopolists and/or financialists, and - since our government bends over backwards to promote these monopolists, our entire system might be described as fascist or oligarchy, but "capitalism" isn't the word to use.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Tuesday, August 23, 2022 1:22 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
It's so annoying when people use terms they don't understand and couldn't define if challenged: Nazi, fascism, democracy, liberal, freedom, man, woman, racism ... capitalism...

Words don't mean whatever you "want" them to mean. Unless there are commonly accepted definitions, communication is impossible.

Your examples of "real" capitalism lack the one thing that makes capitalism work better than feudalism or socialism (at least in theory): competition. Bc your "real" capitalists have done all they can to eliminate the competition as much as possible.

Some of them produce nothing of value, like Buffet (who got wealthy simply by buying stuff) and Gates (ditto. Gates BTW started out with a million dollars and his mom's contacts into IBM).

They could be variously described as monopolists and/or financialists, and - since our government bends over backwards to promote these monopolists, our entire system might be described as fascist or oligarchy, but "capitalism" isn't the word to use.

I'll give you some examples of real Capitalism in action. The first is from a news story this week:

Two cases of Predatory Capitalism, but unless some external force intervenes, all Capitalism becomes Predatory.

1) In the first case of Predatory Capitalism, the law allowed Ford to sell a dangerous vehicle. America is Capitalistic, therefore Ford sold the dangerous vehicle because, you know, that is where the money is made, at least until the loss of money encouraged Ford to stop selling dangerous vehicles:

Ford hit with $1.7 billion verdict for F-series pickup roof collapse that killed couple

For years the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration had exempted heavy-duty trucks like the F-250 from the same safety standards as passenger cars and trucks. It wasn't a change in the NHTSA standard, but potential pickup buyers doing research on the vehicle's safety record that finally prompted Ford to put a stronger roof on both the F-150 and F-250.

The punitive damages were awarded because Ford knew well in advance of the 2014 crash that it had a problem with the roof, Butler said. He said Ford's engineers had already designed a safer roof, but the automaker did not move immediately to install it on the trucks.

"Long before the Hills were killed, Ford was on notice from their own engineers, own crash tests and dozens of accidents that people were being killed, and it did nothing," Butler said.

Ford would not comment on Butler's statement that the older F-150's and F-250's have similar roofs at danger of collapse. It did say it intends to appeal the huge verdict.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/22/business/ford-1-7-billion-dollar-verdic
t/index.html

2) Payday loans, which tend to have 400% or higher annual interest rates, were illegal, as they should be, but then the Texas legislature made them legal. Because America is Capitalistic, loan companies will make 400% interest rate payday loans because, you know, Capitalism is all about money. Why be satisfied with a mere 29% when you can charge 400%? 400% is Capitalism at its best:

The History of Payday Loans in Texas

The 1990s – Early in the 90s payday loan practices were illegal in Texas.
2001 – The Texas Legislature adopted payday lending standards under the authority of the Texas Office of Consumer Credit Commissioner (OCCC). However, lenders in Texas found ways to circumvent state limits: a usury cap of 10% interest and a maximum 136% APR rate for a 2-week, $300 loan. Payday lenders managed to find a loophole where they became “Credit Services Organizations” (CSOs). They did so by claiming regulation under the Texas Credit Services Organizations (CSO) Act (passed in 1987). Thus, they went on charging excessive fees to loans.
https://www.ustatesloans.org/law/tx/

3) to Infinity:

There are many examples of Predatory Capitalism. Every price increase is a Capitalist probing the wallet of a consumer to discover how much money is available to the Capitalist. If the consumer doesn’t buy, the Capitalist knows he set the price too high. Lower the price slightly to see if that new price convinces the consumer to buy. That price was NOT lowered to better serve the customer, but to serve the Capitalist.

In general the relationship of removing all the consumer’s money will precede most smoothly for the Capitalist if there are steady and small increases in prices so that the consumer is not alerted to what the Capitalist’s true intentions are. An outraged consumer is never good for the Capitalist’s plan to take all the consumer’s money.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Tuesday, August 23, 2022 2:56 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

This is Capitalism at its finest, doing what it was designed to do -- concentrate wealth.

Profits and the pandemic: As shareholder wealth soared, workers were left behind

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Pandemic_Profits_
report.pdf

Company shareholders grew $1.5 trillion richer, while workers got less than 2% of that benefit
Far from curbing inequality, the modest gains to workers were dwarfed by the gains to already wealthy shareholders, including executives and billionaires.

• In the first 22 months of the pandemic, the companies generated $1.5 trillion in wealth gains for shareholders-nearly triple the wealth generated in the previous 22-month period. In comparison, 7 million workers at these companies earned about $27 billion in additional pay (raises, profit sharing, and Covid-specific pay)-or just 2% of shareholders’ wealth gains.

• More than 70% of the wealth generated for U.S. shareholders (over $800 billion) benefitted the richest 5% percent of Americans, or 6 million families. Only 1 % ($12 billion) accrued to the bottom half of all American families-the category that likely includes nearly all of these frontline workers.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Tuesday, August 23, 2022 3:09 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Capitalists are stingy to employees and generous to themselves and stockholders because that is what successful Capitalists were meant to be.

Lowe's pays a median of $24,600.

In the pandemic it has made $12.6 billion in profit and put $13 billion into stock buybacks and dividends.

If it had given the money to employees, they would make $61,100.

Overall, companies have spent 5x more on shareholders than employees.

https://twitter.com/DanPriceSeattle/status/1556733332502839296

Home Depot pays a median of $27,400.

In the pandemic it made $23.7 billion in profit and put $10.3 billion into stock buybacks.

If it had given that money to employees, they would make $48,000.

https://twitter.com/DanPriceSeattle/status/1556735388752007169

Target pays a median of $24,500.

In the pandemic it made $9.6 billion in profit and put $5 billion into stock buybacks.

It it had given that money to employees, they would make $36,800.

https://twitter.com/DanPriceSeattle/status/1556737743635578881

Best Buy pays a median of $30,500.

In the pandemic it made $3.8 billion in profit and put $2 billion into stock buybacks.

If it had given that money to employees, they would have made $50,000.

https://twitter.com/DanPriceSeattle/status/1556751310803898370

Dollar General pays its workers a median of $16,700.

In the pandemic it made a $3.8 billion profit and spent $4.5 billion on stock buybacks.

If that money went to workers, they would have made $35,400.

https://twitter.com/DanPriceSeattle/status/1556785862716936193

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Tuesday, August 23, 2022 5:56 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
It's so annoying when people use terms they don't understand and couldn't define if challenged: Nazi, fascism, democracy, liberal, freedom, man, woman, racism ... capitalism...

Words don't mean whatever you "want" them to mean. Unless there are commonly accepted definitions, communication is impossible.

Your examples of "real" capitalism lack the one thing that makes capitalism work better than feudalism or socialism (at least in theory): competition. Bc your "real" capitalists have done all they can to eliminate the competition as much as possible.

Some of them produce nothing of value, like Buffet (who got wealthy simply by buying stuff) and Gates (ditto. Gates BTW started out with a million dollars and his mom's contacts into IBM).

They could be variously described as monopolists and/or financialists, and - since our government bends over backwards to promote these monopolists, our entire system might be described as fascist or oligarchy, but "capitalism" isn't the word to use.
I'll give you some examples of real Capitalism in action. The first is from a news story this week:

Two cases of Predatory Capitalism, but unless some external force intervenes, all Capitalism becomes Predatory.

Why, you Marxist/Leninist, you!

You have just removed all justification for capitalism. And libertarianism, BTW.

I've posted... many times... that money and power behave gravitationally (that is,the more they accumulate the more they accumulate). There's no such thing as "trickle down" or "market forces" leading to a happy ending for most people.
Thank you for providing stellar examples.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, August 24, 2022 8:02 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
Why, you Marxist/Leninist, you!

You have just removed all justification for capitalism. And libertarianism, BTW.

I've posted... many times... that money and power behave gravitationally (that is,the more they accumulate the more they accumulate). There's no such thing as "trickle down" or "market forces" leading to a happy ending for most people.
Thank you for providing stellar examples.

Capitalism is no different than electricity: useful and dangerous. Double A batteries are useful and hardly at all dangerous, unless you swallow the battery. But as the voltage increases, electricity gets more dangerous in the hands of fools. I know one person that was partially blinded by a 12 volt car battery. I know a guy who died because he bypassed a safety interlock on 120 volts. He habitually bypassed and eventually his risky behavior killed him. Now there are power lines operating at over a million volts. Those certainly should not be operated by fools. What is the connection to Capitalism? Some very high tech, very high voltage Capitalistic systems have been built, but the safety interlocks are being bypassed by fools. People are being blinded or even killed by Capitalism. It should not be happening, but it is. People who imagine themselves to be Capitalists, but are really only enormous fools, should not be operating the machinery of Capitalism while they are drunk with delusions of power or under the influence of myths about their competence to handle dangerous technology.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, August 24, 2022 8:05 AM

Since we're talking about free money, Joe* is about to give a bunch of college loans away.

Maybe you get that youth back that is pissed off at all of your lies so far, but you're going to lose even more of the blacks and Mexicans than you've already lost, as well as everyone who paid off their college loans.

This is a tax break for the most upwardly mobile white youth in the country.

Now inflation is going up even higher to pay for this.

And if you thought college was expensive before, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Democrats are cancer.

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, August 24, 2022 8:15 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Since we're talking about free money, Joe* is about to give a bunch of college loans away.

Maybe you get that youth back that is pissed off at all of your lies so far, but you're going to lose even more of the blacks and Mexicans than you've already lost, as well as everyone who paid off their college loans.

This is a tax break for the most upwardly mobile white youth in the country.

Now inflation is going up even higher to pay for this.

And if you thought college was expensive before, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Democrats are cancer.

If Biden forgives all college loans to people who already graduated, what does he do for people who are still in college? Their loans don't get forgiven? How about people who are still in high school? Will their loans be forgiven when they go to college? If Biden cancels a few loans, he needs a program that pays for all college for everyone, forever. Biden won't be going to that place where education is free for everyone. It is as politically crazy as giving every descendant of slaves 40 acres and a mule as compensation for slavery. What Biden should be talking about, rather than cancelling loans, is:

“For years Republicans told us that they opposed abortion, and many people, frankly, did not believe them. But then the Supreme Court overturned Roe, and now Republicans are outlawing abortion even when a woman’s life is at risk, or when a child has been raped. They are prosecuting women and doctors.

For years senior Republicans have been telling us they want to cut, privatize, or eliminate Social Security. We should believe them. This is not a joke.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, August 24, 2022 11:55 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
Why, you Marxist/Leninist, you!

You have just removed all justification for capitalism. And libertarianism, BTW.

I've posted... many times... that money and power behave gravitationally (that is,the more they accumulate the more they accumulate). There's no such thing as "trickle down" or "market forces" leading to a happy ending for most people.
Thank you for providing stellar examples

SECOND: Capitalism is no different than electricity:

You're misusing the term capitalism again. Capitalism, like all systems, evolve. What starts out as capitalism turns into something else. Monopolism. Imperialism. Financialism. Fascism. Not capitalism.

If "capitalism" stayed at the level of small businesses competing against each other there would be no need to guard against it.

Unlike "capitalism", which is a self-evolving complex system, electricity doesn't evolve (altho its technical uses do). That's a really bad analogy. Even voltage is static (pardon the pun) characteristic.

Whatever capitalism evolves into, its most negative characteristic is NOT the concentration of wealth, because that can be imitigated by redistribution. The most pernicious and damaging economic effects have to do with the loss of resiliency and ruggedness, the most damaging political effect is the loss of agency by the many and the concentration of power/influence in the hands of the few, the most damaging social effect is progressive atomization, and the most damaging environmental effect is rampant consumerism.

Taxes are not the answer.

Here lies a fallen god.
His fall was not a small one.
We did but build his pedestal
A narrow and a tall one

BTW, MOST human "isms" seem to behave gravitationally and concentrate/integrate, borg-like. Feudalism evolves from chiefdoms to lords to kings. Kingdoms to empires. Mercantilists to monopolies. Money-lenders to globalist financiers. Local newspapers to social media. And at some point, either social inequity or environmental catastrophe steps in and it ll comes crashing down.

That's not Marx, that's me. The problem of greater integration is a slippier problem to define and guard against, especially since it also has apparent benefits at the same time. I think if we were to disentangle the benefits related to technology ... which allows for greater production with less work through the greater use of energy sources outside of human labor ... the apparent benefits of concentration/integration might disappear, or at least diminish considerably.

Well, that's an interesting line of thought to pursue.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, August 24, 2022 10:39 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
If "capitalism" stayed at the level of small businesses competing against each other there would be no need to guard against it.

THIS.

And if our Government did ONE OF THE FEW JOBS IT WAS SUPPOSED TO DO which is to shut down monopolies, we wouldn't be in the situation we are in now.

But it's too busy making sure there are gender neutral toy aisles in WalMart and that white males faces are stomped into the ground every day until their backs break and they live with their face at the right height to kiss the jackboots.

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, August 25, 2022 2:56 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

I suppse back in the days of feudalism we actually had a more divided government. The military (knights) were under control of lords who controlled the land, the Church controlled "the media' (they controlled history, morality and how the natural and spiritual world were viewed) and merchants (such as the merchant-princes of Venice) and money-lenders controlled coin. It wsan't entirely separate: the Church had a fair bit of wealth and the Knights Templar actually did the precursor to international banking since they protected wealthy pilgrims (and their money) during their trips to the Holy Land (long story*). Even so, there was a pretty significant division of power.

But today, everything - the military-industrial complex, the government, the media, morality and our view of society - is all controlled by money. At least, in the west.

One legitimate function of government COULD be to limit the growth of monopolies/ oligopolies but once money owns government, the media and the church it's like snowball rolling downhill.

* Instead of taking their portable wealth with them, pilgrims would take scrip with them, issued by the Knights Templar and based on their at-home wealth, and the Knights would extend credit to the pilgrims and deduct it from their scrip. Of course, they would take a cut, and they got pretty wealthy, until one of the French kings rounded up most of the Knights, stole their wealth and had them put to death. On Fiday 13th, no less. https://worldhistory.us/medieval-history/the-destruction-of-the-knight
s-templar-the-guilty-french-king-and-the-scapegoat-pope.php

There were, they say, a considerable number of Knights who escaped with their wealth, and finding that treasure has occupied movies including the da Vinci Code and National Treasure. But the story that makes most sense to me is that the remaining Knights took their treasure to Switzerland and transformed that region from primitive goat-herding into banking.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, August 25, 2022 6:53 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Funding the tax police is very good

Republicans need to stop coddling criminals

By Matthew Yglesias

In April of 2021, I argued that boosting IRS funding would have two major benefits: it would more than pay for itself through increased tax revenue, allowing the government to do useful things without raising tax rates, and it would allow the IRS to invest in customer service, better serving the average taxpayer. https://www.slowboring.com/p/irs-budget

Now that this funding increase has come to pass as part the Inflation Reduction Act, Republicans have made it the focus of their complaints about the law.

And I think it’s worth diving into because on the merits, this is probably their least valid complaint, but by the polling, it’s their politically strongest argument. If you think that spending a few hundred billion subsidizing zero-carbon energy production is a bad idea, then that’s fine. But the government collecting the tax revenue it’s owed is unambiguously good, and the Republican Party’s opposition to it is telling and disturbing.

After all, they wrote a tax reform bill in 2017, and even though their bill cut taxes on net, it did raise a bunch of revenue (most famously from curbing the SALT deduction) to partially offset the cost of the tax cut. The GOP could have increased tax enforcement as another offset, and instead of letting Democrats spend the revenue, they could have used it to make the cuts in the Trump tax bill even bigger.

But they didn’t. Because separate from the party’s overall view on the desirable level of taxation, they’ve developed a peculiar soft spot for tax cheats.

Don’t be like Italy

Because taxes are levied on broad macroeconomic categories, it’s possible to predict, in a top-down kind of way, how much taxes should theoretically be coming in. And in every country I’ve seen data for, actual revenue received is less than this top-down analysis predicts.

A lot of that is fairly banal — people getting paid in cash transactions that aren’t recorded or reported — but most of it stems from the complexities of small business taxation.

The good news, as this Tax Foundation report shows, is that the American tax gap is on the lower side.
https://taxfoundation.org/tax-gap/

I think Republican Party elected officials and their non-specialist allies in the conservative movement are underrating how bad it would be for the United States to migrate closer to the top of that list. The countries with huge tax gaps are not dynamic, business-friendly free market societies — they tend to be stuck in a dysfunctional paradigm in which businesses struggle to grow or adopt professionalized management because so much money hinges on their ability to keep two different sets of books. Italy and Greece are dominated by small, closely held businesses with family-centric management that are reaping huge economic gains by cheating on their taxes. Even the best-run of those companies tend not to expand or professionalize because to do so successfully, they’d have to actually pay what they owe.

If you believe that taxes should be low, the goal is to be like Ireland or New Zealand, where taxes are low but compliance is very high. Or you could be like Denmark, where tax compliance is very high and the taxes are high. But you don’t want to be like Italy where everyone is cheating on their taxes. As I wrote in “What’s Not Wrong With Italy,” there’s actually a bunch of good stuff happening in Italian public policy. But it’s swamped by this trap of bad government and small, badly managed companies.

On another recent trip to visit my in-laws in the Texas Hill Country, I met a lawyer from Dallas. He was there vacationing with his family at his country house, or at least that is what we in the northeast call a second home owned by a rich person and used as a family vacation destination. He called it his “ranch” because he keeps cattle on the property, not so much to make money but so as to create a situation in which a lot of the money spent on the upkeep of the property can count as business expenses.

One can get into a lot of metaphysical disputes about who is and is not rich. My guess is that the Dallas lawyer with a ranch considers himself a middle-class person, even though his household income is far above the national median.

And Republicans would like you to think that increased IRS enforcement means a big burden on roughly average, middle-class people. That is not the case. Average people who derive their income from wages and salaries or pensions and Social Security are already paying what they owe.

As a small business owner myself, I want to emphasize that we are not inherently dishonest. The fundamentals of the situation are just that while Stripe reports a clear and unambiguous revenue figure for Slow Boring to the IRS, calculating our income requires deducting our expenses. And that’s appropriate — if you didn’t let businesses deduct legitimate expenses, you’d kneecap the economy. But all kinds of things could be a legitimate business expense. An unethical person needs to consider the financial upside of claiming bogus expenses versus the odds of detection versus the severity of penalty. And without enough audits, you get lots of non-compliance.

I find that a lot of conservatives arguing against this point seem to have fully taken on the logic of police abolitionists. They’ll say that getting audited is annoying and sometimes people need to suffer through audits when they’ve done nothing wrong or committed only minor violations. Both of those things are true. But just as in the general policing case, if your only solution is to have no enforcement at all, you’re going to be in trouble.

Tax enforcement could raise a lot of revenue

The Congressional Budget Office thinks that an $80 billion investment in the IRS will generate a bit over $200 billion in increased tax revenue. That net gain of $120 billion somewhat understates the upside to tax enforcement because about a quarter of the $80 billion for the IRS is going to customer service rather than enforcement functions.

The point that I do think is clearly convincing and politically relevant is that the vast majority of unpaid taxes are coming from rich people. So you can be as cynical about the IRS and its agents’ motives as you like, but unless they are being specifically pressured by congressional Republicans to focus their audits on the poor (which they do tend to do), the place to get more money is rich people.

Culture matters

After running a small business for a while and also thinking about the tax gap issue, I’ve developed a greater appreciation for the role of norms.

I’m sure that I know people who’ve committed lots of different kinds of crimes, but they overwhelmingly haven’t bragged to me about it. But affluent people are very open about discussing tax shenanigans with casual acquaintances. There’s a real attitude of “if you can get away with it, it’s not really wrong,” an attitude that I think those exact same people would, in other situations, say is at the root of some of the entrenched social problems in poor neighborhoods. People are less likely to engage in anti-social behavior if they believe the people around them will strongly disapprove of that behavior. And people are more likely to believe the people around them strongly disapprove if they observe them following the rules and if they see rule-breakers getting punished.

Italy and Greece are in a tax equilibrium where for a huge share of the population, if you pay what you owe, you’re a sucker, not a solid citizen.

The United States isn’t there. The vast majority of people have simple taxes with their wages and salaries well-reported to the IRS, and they pay what they owe. And while there are certainly plenty of controversies about the operation of the corporate income tax, these are policy disputes about whether various credits and deductions are a good idea — the underlying facts are rigorously reported, and companies mostly pay what they owe. The “passthrough business owner pulling shenanigans” phenomenon is real and genuinely costly but also fairly non-mainstream at this point.

We ought to try to keep it that way, and increasing our enforcement efforts is a good way to do that. People who of their own accord try to report their revenue and expenses correctly should be made to feel like we are prudent, not like we are suckers.

Obviously, Republicans aren’t going to stop criticizing the Inflation Reduction Act, both for partisan reasons and because it does plenty of stuff like spending money on health care and clean energy and curing pharmaceutical prices that they genuinely oppose. But I sincerely hope that whenever the right is in power again and starts making policy changes, they will reconsider some of the things they’ve been saying this August about the IRS. If you want to reduce federal revenue, then make the tax rates lower — don’t undermine the rule of law by coddling tax cheats.

More at https://www.slowboring.com/p/funding-the-tax-police-is-very-good

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, August 25, 2022 2:45 PM

Looks like now the insane and mentally challenged ultra-Leftists aren't just swatting online personalities they don't like and they're targeting politicians.

Hopefully now legislation is introduced that makes such behavior a mandatory life sentence in prison for attempted murder.

That will stop this behavior immediately.

Make it retroactive and throw every single one of them who did it in a cell and throw away the key and we wouldn't even have to wait for the next eventual brain damaged Lefty to do it again.

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, August 25, 2022 2:48 PM