The White House created a “scorecard” that rates hundreds of companies and trade associations on how well they supported Trump’s recent tax and spending legislation.
Right-wing Maoism. A decade ago it was progressives who wanted to be "China for a day," in the words of Tom Friedman. Now, the Right wants to be China.
Our corporate masters: "Ladies and gentlemen, our course is clear. The time has come to knuckle under. To get down on all fours and really lick boot. Give MAGA whatever they want a--"
My proposal for the Alaska Summit: Russia enacts an immediate ceasefire and return to 2022 boarders. US cedes to Russia the Colorado 4th and Georgia 14th Congressional Districts. Allow for Ukraine and California admittance into the European Union.
The Na-Dene language family has roots in Siberia. We should actually use postmodernist and critical theory mumbo-jumbo to claim that Siberia is rightfully America's.
With the benefit of hindsight, one of America's greatest mistakes was settling for peace in fall 1918, instead of sacking Berlin in the spring and then marching on to Moscow.
You may find "Churchill's Secret War With Lenin: British and Commonwealth Military Intervention in the Russian Civil War, 1918-20" by Damien Wright relevant to your interests if you haven't already read it. (I've got lots more recommendations too, if you'd like.)
It was a very powerful, very strong nothing. Joe Biden just did little nothings, very sad and small. This was a huge, large nothing, many people say they had never seen such a big nothing.
What an utter shame today was in our nation’s history. Just like our British friends, we have now literally rolled out the red carpet for a murderous dictator.
I'm holding in criticism until at least the meetings are over. If nothing comes of it, or worse Trump entertains Putin's demands, then you're absolutely right, Anchorage 2025 belongs on the list with Munich 1938.
But if literal red carpets can prevent dead civilians in Ukraine, the distaste can be swallowed. Optimism isn't warranted, but if Putin would rather back out of his war through conversation with the Americans, we should take what we can get.
I don’t mean this as a dunk, but I do sincerely hope that the obvious Chamberlainian comparison — and by extension a really easy way to mock your open mindedness here — is proven wrong.
I have this delusion that if I keep an open mind and let the facts of events present themselves before being hasty with criticism, my Trump supporting relatives will feel some pang of reciprocity and will themselves offer the same generosity to Democrats. More insane, my brain thinks that acting in good faith should be a reason for them to open their ears and consider my criticisms, based on the full accounting, of Trumps behavior and actions being bad, actually.
As I said, there is a hopefully not too deep circle of hell reserved for fools like me.
You’ve been unemployed? Sorry to hear about (assuming you’re not exactly pleased with it)! And good luck with whatever you’ve been cooking up.
My latest hobby project has been designing an airsoft (IE plastic BBs) derivative replica of the new Army AR. Almost done with the hardest part here, it’s gonna be kinda smooth sailing from here!
No I'm not unemployed lol. I just found this video and thought it was hilarious. I'm actually self-employed, which is a whole different can of worms.... But no I have too much work if anything.
Do you actually shoot the airsofts, or just design them? I've been meaning to get into a shooting sport like that or paintball
Oh yes, although my recent ACL surgery means I’m banned from going out until next winter!
This one’s a personal project, but I also intend to turn it into a side hustle doing 3d printed custom jobs for people. Already got some decent respect for my first couple builds at the field back in May, but this one’s gonna kinda be my “prestige” piece.
I've been trying to practice drawing when I have time at work, rather than just scrolling my phone. I'm not particularly good, but I do feel better about the time spent.
Something that irks me is the chatter among Salon / Slate / etc types about how blue states pay the most taxes to the federal government and get the least for it — particularly the suggestion it gives blue states leverage. It does not, because California doesn’t pay taxes to the federal government; Californians pay taxes to the IRS, and that’s a huge distinction. There is way too much “how to fight back” talk assuming facts not in existence.
You also have to look at how the folks making such claims are doing the math. One trick is saying a good deal of the federal spending is on military bases that, for a variety of reasons, are in so called red states. That spending is counted a a benefit to only those red states. It's a nonsense argument because the benefit of that spending, namely national defense, is shared by all states.
No, he was a pirate, who later founded the town in the late 1790s/early 18 Aughts after he and group of brave pioneers left Maryland after misinterpreting a passage in the Bible.
Here's what most people get wrong about Jebediah Springfield, it's true that Hans Sprungfeld was a highly dubious and morally dislikeable person, but the legend, the ideal, the belief in "Jebediah Springfield" the myth can mean so much, if only to make such a broken and dysfunctional society like Springfield somewhat better. As political scientist Seth Masket wrote about the massively overrated JFK:
"Pretty much any time I interview a Democratic political activist or officeholder over the age of 60 and ask them why they got into politics, they mention Kennedy and his call to service. The Peace Corps, the space program, his speeches, and more are frequently mentioned as inspiring a generation of young people to get involved in politics and see government as a noble calling.
This sort of inspirational quality is rare among presidents—or anyone, really—and is difficult to quantify. But it shouldn’t be dismissed. Kennedy’s rhetoric and approach inspired people and continues to do so today. We could dismiss all this as just an exercise in branding, but it’s very good branding. And if it’s used to encourage people to try to improve the world in some way, that’s hardly wasted effort.
No dude, more educated states have drifted left and less educated states have drifted right. It not like Colorado and Virginia have the most amazing schools in the country, or that the quality of their schools has changed drastically since 2004, they're just more educated states, and in a time of education polarization, that pushes them to the left.
What does this even mean? Do you think Republicans pay more or less than Democrats in federal taxes? Are you talking about the realignment of some of Silicon Valley towards Republicans, or the realignment of some of Wall Street towards MAGA, or the realignment of Hispanics or young people? Or something else?
The last time Pew surveyed partisanship by income level, Democrats were slightly overrepresented among upper and lower income families but barely underrepresented among upper-middle, but the divide is almost 50-50 across the board. The parties just aren't that divided by class; I'm not sure why you would expect a large gap in tax burden.
I'm not sure this is true though. I know that Democrats are overrepresented among the upper middle class, but the top 1% pay over 40% of Federal income taxes and I'm not sure Republicans are underrepresented there.
"Red States (31): The total population of the 31 Red states is approximately 180.8 million. Within this group, there are approximately 37.8 million Medicare beneficiaries. This results in a population-weighted average per capita Medicare enrollment of 20.9%.
Blue States (19 + D.C.): The total population of the 19 Blue states and the District of Columbia is approximately 159.3 million. This group contains about 30.6 million Medicare beneficiaries, yielding a population-weighted average per capita Medicare enrollment of 19.2%.
The analysis reveals a "Medicare gap" of 1.7 percentage points between the two blocs. This means that, on a per capita basis, the Red state bloc has a Medicare population that is nearly 9% larger than that of the Blue state bloc. While a 1.7-point difference may seem modest in isolation, when applied to populations of this magnitude, it represents millions of individuals and translates into tens of billions of dollars in annual federal healthcare expenditures. "
I didn’t get on the thread in time to comment on it and not get buried this morning, but Matt’s “if tariffs cut growth, interest rates will just come down and revive it” analysis is off. This is because if they’re not accompanied by significant damage to aggregate demand, tariffs are likely to be *inflationary*. If you structurally raise the cost of goods, both businesses and individuals will do whatever they can to pass on rather than eat those costs, and so on, and the entities they pass those costs on to will try to pass on their own cost increases, and so on and so forth— a Galbraithian wage-price spiral. We avoid this in scenarios where demand takes a big enough initial hit to blunt various types of pass-through. But if we try to stimulate our way out of the problem with rate cuts, its inflationary effects will intensify, and if the Fed does stimulative monetary policy into rising inflation (especially accompanied by increasing budget deficits), we’re likely to get both very high inflation *and* a blow-out expansion of the term premium that raises long-dated interest rates and chokes growth. (This is what happened during the 1970s; we started getting into something similar when we stimulated ourselves out of the COVID supply shock, but in that case we at least got both an easing of the shock itself AND a hard monetary policy pivot to constrain inflation, and it’s worth remembering that even with relatively clean execution that averted the worst outcomes and the president not publicly pressuring the Fed chief, the public still hated the whole thing.)
Kind of interesting the White House and other senior admin officials are more concerned about an ICE official hit by a sandwich than the CDC after someone shot 500 rounds at it. Wonder what the difference could be. Check out your tax dollars at work:
Reminder that for many voters it really is Party Over Everything and your weak attempts to use logic or argument are futile: https://x.com/YAppelbaum/status/1956460168041959725 (this is another good example of why Deliveryism doesn't work)
Bernie/Warren/AOC: we need Starlink public option!
Everything Baglers: We must spend 10 billion dollars on creating a tent form of broadband that meet the follow 281 conditions and are done under the concept of shared governance and community control...
Abundencer/Neolibs/Matt: Let 1000 wireless networks bloom! Oh and just give people phone cards or something
I really like this roundup. When I go on vacation I fully abstain from news, when I get back it can be hard to figure out what happened.
(The million dollar idea I'm giving out for free is a headline aggregating news site that has a slider you can drag around to past days/timeframe to examine what the big stories were, bonus points if the headlines are sized based on how big the story was, going from small to big and then small as the news cycle does its infinite turn.)
"The Democratic Party, in short, is caught between two groups of postliberal idiots: one that doesn’t care enough about tyranny and another that doesn’t care enough about disorder. Whatever its leaders end up doing will probably backfire."
"'Anarchy wins unless Trump can deploy the Marines to Beverly Hills' is a pitch-perfect summary of the sophistication with which the great and good American people now approach serious problems."
"This is why I say Trump deserves only partial credit for engineering these lose-lose situations Democrats find themselves in. They don’t just make it easy for him; they do most of the engineering themselves."
"how Schumer’s party squandered trust on safety issues ranging from immigration to shoplifting rings to homelessness and public drug use to violent crime. Really, we can boil it down to three steps: Ignore the problem until Republicans take it up, then minimize it, then encourage Americans to get used to it as a nothing-to-be-done inevitability of modern life."
And the suggestion: "The obvious move for Schumer is to meet Trump halfway on crime while trying to turn the public’s skepticism of the president’s tactics to his advantage. If I were him, I’d invite Republicans to name a dollar amount that they think is needed to improve law enforcement’s ability to fight crime nationally, beginning in D.C., and then I’d offer to double it. But in return, I’d demand their cooperation on reforms to limit the president’s powers to deploy the military on U.S. soil. The solution to crime is not monarchy."
Some rhetorical shit, more like. Brokering this deal (if it's even on the table) would ease public concerns about Trump's executive overreach and almost certainly hurt Dem performance in the midterms. So it really only makes sense to do something like this as a last-ditch effort to prevent imminent authoritarian takeover. But if Catoggio thinks such existentialism is warranted, why isn't he and all these secretly anti-Trump Republican legislators willing to offer something substantial as an olive branch? Like at least throw in a national ban on gerrymandering or something.
I'll tell you what it looks like, it looks like a conservative trying to pull a fast one on anxious liberals.
Seems like a dude who thinks he's top shit because he reads news sources from "both sides". I have no idea how you can believe we're on the verge of violent anarchy unless you unthinkingly consume conservative outrage. Even during the covid peak, crime was still down relative to the 90s.
Municipal grocery stores are much more operationally viable than most people here think.
This is largely because they have a few major cost structure advantages over most small grocers: lower cost of capital and no income taxes (so you need lower EBIT margins to get to breakeven), economies of scale from expanded access to bulk wholesale procurement (so you have baseline higher gross margins), potentially better theft security (since the city owns the property anyway, you could make the store a local base for policing activities), which also helps with margins, and more resilience to temporary rough periods. And because you’re only operating a single player in a broader ecosystem rather than trying to build the entire supply and distribution chain yourself, you can still use a full set of market-based price signals to inform your business behavior. (The lack of these is the biggest problem by far for SOEs in countries whose economies are throughly centrally planned).
Now, some of these benefits would probably be offset by political constraints on the stores’ operations (eg: some of the EBIT edge would be offset by higher labor costs, because grocery store staffers would likely be public sector union members), and they probably wouldn’t be a significant improvement high-end stores with already-optimized capital and cost structures (Trader Joe’s is the best NYC example). However, in less well-served neighborhoods, it’s quite possible that they’ll provide a superior alternative to Gristedes and various shittier bodegas.
I’m not sure if this is actually a good idea— especially because if the municipal stores get too big relative to the rest of the grocery ecosystem, they could get pretty distortionary. But it also seems like they might be much less of an obvious disaster than a lot of people here think.
I find it virtually impossible to imagine that municipal grocery stores will have anything even approximating the procedural and managerial efficiencies of commercial grocery stores. Why haggled with suppliers when you're spending other people's money on their goods and services (and as a public sector union member you may not face any credible threats of discipline for screwing up.)
I think this take is far too cynical about public sector employees? In my personal observation, government workers aren’t meaningfully less conscientious than their analogous-qualification private sector counterparts (and indeed, often are more so because they have a stronger sense of mission.)
The budget for this is a rounding error, and likewise any effects good or bad.
The bigger criticism, I think, and this applies to other candidates for other offices, but since we are talking NYC here we can narrow our focus.
There's a quote from President Clinton from around 2008, in the context of presidential races, but the idea applies more widely.
"I think that any candidate for president has a three-fold responsibility. Number one, you have a responsibility to demonstrate that you have the capacity to be president... Number two, you have a responsibility to lay out for the American people what you believe the great challenges and great opportunities are. And number three, you have to tell them specifically what you're going to do about it."
See the second and third in particular.
And later "Because people, when they tune in, they have a limited amount of time. And what they want to know is, is this person strong enough to be president? Does this person see the world I'm living in? And does this person have some answers that I think will work?"
This is the key: have you identified the big issues, and do you use the limited bandwidth that voters have to get that across?
"Food deserts" are not in the top 100 most important issues or opportunities. Voters tell us what the issues are. There is detailed survey and analytic data.
And what are these issues?
Public safety, in particular subway safety at night (80% report feeling unsafe)
Housing affordability (75% residents say this is the #1 reason they consider leaving the city)
High commercial real estate vacancies
A good public servant would be laser focused on these. Particularly city officials and mayors. It is not a job for proving ideology or having a grand vision for how society ought to work.
Bloomberg rezoned 40% of NYC, got Cornell to setup a campus here, historic low crime, school reform. That is the scale at which the Mayor needs to operate. Municipal grocery stores and stronger rent control show the poverty of ideas.
If he wins, I wish him well and hope he focuses on issues that matter.
To be fair, the grocery stores thing is much higher salience in what Mamdani’s detractors say about him than it is in his own messaging,which is very heavily focused on the housing issue (with a general-public messaging track focused on the easy to understand and popular if economically questionable stabilized unit rent freeze, and a high-information actor messaging track focused on permitting reform and rezoning for higher density— the latter set of policies will do all of the actual work on long-term affordability, of course, but the former was probably necessary to build the sort of coalition that can tell the homevoters to get fucked and enact it.)
Or maybe a rent freeze is his long-term solution and permitting reform and higher zoning density are things he had to pretend to care about to build a big enough coalition for the primary.
Holding charisma and ability to get press coverage constant, he could have gotten the buzz from big important problems. We can't be sure about counterfactuals, and I'm not a candidate or political consultant, but just as a voter in NYC I want the mayor candidates to demonstrate they know what the big challenges are.
We can't know the counterfactuals, but Mamdani is a random state assemblyman who came out of nowhere to win handily in a crowded field. We can't know the counterfactuals if the Kansas City Chiefs didn't trade up for Patrick Mahomes but uhhhh my hunch is that they made the right call.
The problem with Mandami's city-owned grocery stores is they will be hives of addicts, schizophrenics, and kleptomaniacs because employees won't be allowed to kick anyone out and police won't be allowed to intervene.
This all seems predicated on stealing a base with the assumption that private grocers are small. It wouldn't shock me if Target (with their cute little neighborhood-size stores that they at least started testing a decade ago) has a larger operating budget than New York City government.
Does this argument potentially torpedo the family-owned corner bodega? Sure, but I don't give two hoots about the family corner bodega.
I'll admit to mixed feelings about Trump's Washington, DC law enforcement theatrics...
My son just started a job in DC, and I was there last week helping him move into his new place, a rented house shared with several other new grads in Columbia Heights, a neighborhood that struck me as borderline sketchy, but gentrifying. Troops on the streets has a scary, authoritarian vibe, but if they clear out some of the creepy people (including the homeless guy sleeping in front of my son's house) from the area, I won't be too unhappy.
I can't remember who said it, but a few months ago I saw someone comment that David Frum's dictum about fascism and immigration applied to homelessness and other urban "social disorder" phenomena too.
If we could just send everyone in city government (or determining city related policies) to Europe to meet with their peers for a week the US would be in much better shape soon.
Just gotta make sure they don't talk to them about anything related to business or regulation.
Kudos to Halina on really goosing the engagement numbers this week. [ed: Her first full week!]
No offense to Ben, blessed be his memory, but Matt *can’t* be paying you enough. Ask for a raise, we’ll have your back!
I am beyond horrified by this:
The White House created a “scorecard” that rates hundreds of companies and trade associations on how well they supported Trump’s recent tax and spending legislation.
I know MattY encourages calm affect, etc. but then Trump does CCP-level autocracy shit
Right-wing Maoism. A decade ago it was progressives who wanted to be "China for a day," in the words of Tom Friedman. Now, the Right wants to be China.
Our corporate masters: "Ladies and gentlemen, our course is clear. The time has come to knuckle under. To get down on all fours and really lick boot. Give MAGA whatever they want a--"
My proposal for the Alaska Summit: Russia enacts an immediate ceasefire and return to 2022 boarders. US cedes to Russia the Colorado 4th and Georgia 14th Congressional Districts. Allow for Ukraine and California admittance into the European Union.
I'm just assuming Putin somehow is walking out with Alaska back.
The Na-Dene language family has roots in Siberia. We should actually use postmodernist and critical theory mumbo-jumbo to claim that Siberia is rightfully America's.
Could we also add something about the American Expeditionary Force in Siberia? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Expeditionary_Force,_Siberia
With the benefit of hindsight, one of America's greatest mistakes was settling for peace in fall 1918, instead of sacking Berlin in the spring and then marching on to Moscow.
You may find "Churchill's Secret War With Lenin: British and Commonwealth Military Intervention in the Russian Civil War, 1918-20" by Damien Wright relevant to your interests if you haven't already read it. (I've got lots more recommendations too, if you'd like.)
I have not read that book
Trump's Folly!
That'll teach Murkowski to step out of line!
Trump's going to show it to him and he's just going to put it in his pocket and walk off like with Bob Kraft.
It appears nothing happened.
It was a very powerful, very strong nothing. Joe Biden just did little nothings, very sad and small. This was a huge, large nothing, many people say they had never seen such a big nothing.
So we won, basically...
My hope is that Trump trades Alaska for Ukraine sovereignty and doesn't realize he just blew the GOP Senate majority until after the handshake
But I don't want to be Russian...
This did not go where I thought it was going to go after the first sentence!
What an utter shame today was in our nation’s history. Just like our British friends, we have now literally rolled out the red carpet for a murderous dictator.
I'm holding in criticism until at least the meetings are over. If nothing comes of it, or worse Trump entertains Putin's demands, then you're absolutely right, Anchorage 2025 belongs on the list with Munich 1938.
But if literal red carpets can prevent dead civilians in Ukraine, the distaste can be swallowed. Optimism isn't warranted, but if Putin would rather back out of his war through conversation with the Americans, we should take what we can get.
I don’t mean this as a dunk, but I do sincerely hope that the obvious Chamberlainian comparison — and by extension a really easy way to mock your open mindedness here — is proven wrong.
It would be a better timeline.
I just don’t think it’ll happen.
To be clear I don't think it'll happen either. I'm just keeping my powder dry.
Fair!
I have this delusion that if I keep an open mind and let the facts of events present themselves before being hasty with criticism, my Trump supporting relatives will feel some pang of reciprocity and will themselves offer the same generosity to Democrats. More insane, my brain thinks that acting in good faith should be a reason for them to open their ears and consider my criticisms, based on the full accounting, of Trumps behavior and actions being bad, actually.
As I said, there is a hopefully not too deep circle of hell reserved for fools like me.
Aww honey… bless your heart.
Yea but didn’t we scare him with that B2 flyover?
I'll tell you it scared the shit out of me, ~500' above my office two miles from the base!
Wasn’t until I watched Warfare that I really understood how loud a fighter jet is just off the deck…
What chance of peace is worth the slight humiliation of a red carpet reception?
Them: Lost Future, hear you've been uh working on something big?
Me: https://x.com/MadsPosting/status/1954902983440814323
You’ve been unemployed? Sorry to hear about (assuming you’re not exactly pleased with it)! And good luck with whatever you’ve been cooking up.
My latest hobby project has been designing an airsoft (IE plastic BBs) derivative replica of the new Army AR. Almost done with the hardest part here, it’s gonna be kinda smooth sailing from here!
No I'm not unemployed lol. I just found this video and thought it was hilarious. I'm actually self-employed, which is a whole different can of worms.... But no I have too much work if anything.
Do you actually shoot the airsofts, or just design them? I've been meaning to get into a shooting sport like that or paintball
Oh yes, although my recent ACL surgery means I’m banned from going out until next winter!
This one’s a personal project, but I also intend to turn it into a side hustle doing 3d printed custom jobs for people. Already got some decent respect for my first couple builds at the field back in May, but this one’s gonna kinda be my “prestige” piece.
I would like a Kalashnikov, please.
I've been trying to practice drawing when I have time at work, rather than just scrolling my phone. I'm not particularly good, but I do feel better about the time spent.
Something that irks me is the chatter among Salon / Slate / etc types about how blue states pay the most taxes to the federal government and get the least for it — particularly the suggestion it gives blue states leverage. It does not, because California doesn’t pay taxes to the federal government; Californians pay taxes to the IRS, and that’s a huge distinction. There is way too much “how to fight back” talk assuming facts not in existence.
A lot those one sentence zingers about blue/red state differences aren't very well thought through.
You also have to look at how the folks making such claims are doing the math. One trick is saying a good deal of the federal spending is on military bases that, for a variety of reasons, are in so called red states. That spending is counted a a benefit to only those red states. It's a nonsense argument because the benefit of that spending, namely national defense, is shared by all states.
I can assure you military bases are a major source of employment for civilians and military spending can be a major economic engine locally (as usual Classic Simpsons explains it all https://www.reddit.com/r/TheSimpsons/comments/13hn4q0/the_economic_slump_began_last_spring_when_the/)
Was Springfield a Confederate general?
No, he was a pirate, who later founded the town in the late 1790s/early 18 Aughts after he and group of brave pioneers left Maryland after misinterpreting a passage in the Bible.
Thank you.
Here's what most people get wrong about Jebediah Springfield, it's true that Hans Sprungfeld was a highly dubious and morally dislikeable person, but the legend, the ideal, the belief in "Jebediah Springfield" the myth can mean so much, if only to make such a broken and dysfunctional society like Springfield somewhat better. As political scientist Seth Masket wrote about the massively overrated JFK:
"Pretty much any time I interview a Democratic political activist or officeholder over the age of 60 and ask them why they got into politics, they mention Kennedy and his call to service. The Peace Corps, the space program, his speeches, and more are frequently mentioned as inspiring a generation of young people to get involved in politics and see government as a noble calling.
This sort of inspirational quality is rare among presidents—or anyone, really—and is difficult to quantify. But it shouldn’t be dismissed. Kennedy’s rhetoric and approach inspired people and continues to do so today. We could dismiss all this as just an exercise in branding, but it’s very good branding. And if it’s used to encourage people to try to improve the world in some way, that’s hardly wasted effort.
So as we look back on a century of Kennedy, it’s worth parsing the man from the myth, but also to recognize the value that the myth serves." https://psmag.com/news/revisiting-john-f-kennedys-legacy-100-years-after-his-birth/
Hmm congressional reps fight for this spending because… why?
Presumably because DoD wants it and it looks good in the local news.
I think you might be ignoring something.
Oh? What's that?
Blue states pay a lot of taxes because blue state policy results in people having more income.
Other way around. More educated people make more money AND are more likely to be liberal.
Policy is how you get more educated people.
No dude, more educated states have drifted left and less educated states have drifted right. It not like Colorado and Virginia have the most amazing schools in the country, or that the quality of their schools has changed drastically since 2004, they're just more educated states, and in a time of education polarization, that pushes them to the left.
You also have to figure out the age differences in the states - social security and Medicare will be a large government transfer to some states.
Once you get down to the individual level, Democrats and Republicans pay similar amounts in taxes, too
That seems unlikely given recent political realignment.
What does this even mean? Do you think Republicans pay more or less than Democrats in federal taxes? Are you talking about the realignment of some of Silicon Valley towards Republicans, or the realignment of some of Wall Street towards MAGA, or the realignment of Hispanics or young people? Or something else?
The last time Pew surveyed partisanship by income level, Democrats were slightly overrepresented among upper and lower income families but barely underrepresented among upper-middle, but the divide is almost 50-50 across the board. The parties just aren't that divided by class; I'm not sure why you would expect a large gap in tax burden.
Most likely Democrats pay more in taxes right now because they're overrepresented among the upper middle class.
I'm not sure this is true though. I know that Democrats are overrepresented among the upper middle class, but the top 1% pay over 40% of Federal income taxes and I'm not sure Republicans are underrepresented there.
Gemini Deep Research so YMMV:
"Red States (31): The total population of the 31 Red states is approximately 180.8 million. Within this group, there are approximately 37.8 million Medicare beneficiaries. This results in a population-weighted average per capita Medicare enrollment of 20.9%.
Blue States (19 + D.C.): The total population of the 19 Blue states and the District of Columbia is approximately 159.3 million. This group contains about 30.6 million Medicare beneficiaries, yielding a population-weighted average per capita Medicare enrollment of 19.2%.
The analysis reveals a "Medicare gap" of 1.7 percentage points between the two blocs. This means that, on a per capita basis, the Red state bloc has a Medicare population that is nearly 9% larger than that of the Blue state bloc. While a 1.7-point difference may seem modest in isolation, when applied to populations of this magnitude, it represents millions of individuals and translates into tens of billions of dollars in annual federal healthcare expenditures. "
I didn’t get on the thread in time to comment on it and not get buried this morning, but Matt’s “if tariffs cut growth, interest rates will just come down and revive it” analysis is off. This is because if they’re not accompanied by significant damage to aggregate demand, tariffs are likely to be *inflationary*. If you structurally raise the cost of goods, both businesses and individuals will do whatever they can to pass on rather than eat those costs, and so on, and the entities they pass those costs on to will try to pass on their own cost increases, and so on and so forth— a Galbraithian wage-price spiral. We avoid this in scenarios where demand takes a big enough initial hit to blunt various types of pass-through. But if we try to stimulate our way out of the problem with rate cuts, its inflationary effects will intensify, and if the Fed does stimulative monetary policy into rising inflation (especially accompanied by increasing budget deficits), we’re likely to get both very high inflation *and* a blow-out expansion of the term premium that raises long-dated interest rates and chokes growth. (This is what happened during the 1970s; we started getting into something similar when we stimulated ourselves out of the COVID supply shock, but in that case we at least got both an easing of the shock itself AND a hard monetary policy pivot to constrain inflation, and it’s worth remembering that even with relatively clean execution that averted the worst outcomes and the president not publicly pressuring the Fed chief, the public still hated the whole thing.)
What an uplifting week in review. Blessed to live in such tranquil, peaceful, prosperous times.
Kind of interesting the White House and other senior admin officials are more concerned about an ICE official hit by a sandwich than the CDC after someone shot 500 rounds at it. Wonder what the difference could be. Check out your tax dollars at work:
https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/1956114803295953325
Reminder that for many voters it really is Party Over Everything and your weak attempts to use logic or argument are futile: https://x.com/YAppelbaum/status/1956460168041959725 (this is another good example of why Deliveryism doesn't work)
Pretty sure he'll flip on the third tent seizure.
We need a policy of highspeed broadband to tents!
That's called Starlink
The Dem factions:
Bernie/Warren/AOC: we need Starlink public option!
Everything Baglers: We must spend 10 billion dollars on creating a tent form of broadband that meet the follow 281 conditions and are done under the concept of shared governance and community control...
Abundencer/Neolibs/Matt: Let 1000 wireless networks bloom! Oh and just give people phone cards or something
DSA/Talib/(maybe Mamdani?): Nationalize all ISPs!
I really like this roundup. When I go on vacation I fully abstain from news, when I get back it can be hard to figure out what happened.
(The million dollar idea I'm giving out for free is a headline aggregating news site that has a slider you can drag around to past days/timeframe to examine what the big stories were, bonus points if the headlines are sized based on how big the story was, going from small to big and then small as the news cycle does its infinite turn.)
Some rhetorical gems and a suggestion from Nick Catoggio: https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/boilingfrogs/democrats-dc-crime-dilemma-trump/.
"The Democratic Party, in short, is caught between two groups of postliberal idiots: one that doesn’t care enough about tyranny and another that doesn’t care enough about disorder. Whatever its leaders end up doing will probably backfire."
"'Anarchy wins unless Trump can deploy the Marines to Beverly Hills' is a pitch-perfect summary of the sophistication with which the great and good American people now approach serious problems."
"This is why I say Trump deserves only partial credit for engineering these lose-lose situations Democrats find themselves in. They don’t just make it easy for him; they do most of the engineering themselves."
"how Schumer’s party squandered trust on safety issues ranging from immigration to shoplifting rings to homelessness and public drug use to violent crime. Really, we can boil it down to three steps: Ignore the problem until Republicans take it up, then minimize it, then encourage Americans to get used to it as a nothing-to-be-done inevitability of modern life."
And the suggestion: "The obvious move for Schumer is to meet Trump halfway on crime while trying to turn the public’s skepticism of the president’s tactics to his advantage. If I were him, I’d invite Republicans to name a dollar amount that they think is needed to improve law enforcement’s ability to fight crime nationally, beginning in D.C., and then I’d offer to double it. But in return, I’d demand their cooperation on reforms to limit the president’s powers to deploy the military on U.S. soil. The solution to crime is not monarchy."
Some rhetorical shit, more like. Brokering this deal (if it's even on the table) would ease public concerns about Trump's executive overreach and almost certainly hurt Dem performance in the midterms. So it really only makes sense to do something like this as a last-ditch effort to prevent imminent authoritarian takeover. But if Catoggio thinks such existentialism is warranted, why isn't he and all these secretly anti-Trump Republican legislators willing to offer something substantial as an olive branch? Like at least throw in a national ban on gerrymandering or something.
I'll tell you what it looks like, it looks like a conservative trying to pull a fast one on anxious liberals.
Having read Eeyore for the past several months he basically thinks we're all fucked no matter what happens.
Seems like a dude who thinks he's top shit because he reads news sources from "both sides". I have no idea how you can believe we're on the verge of violent anarchy unless you unthinkingly consume conservative outrage. Even during the covid peak, crime was still down relative to the 90s.
Trump has agreed to swap the Donbas for the Dumbass Steven Seagal since both are similar in size.
Also, a provocative/devil’s advocate-y argument:
Municipal grocery stores are much more operationally viable than most people here think.
This is largely because they have a few major cost structure advantages over most small grocers: lower cost of capital and no income taxes (so you need lower EBIT margins to get to breakeven), economies of scale from expanded access to bulk wholesale procurement (so you have baseline higher gross margins), potentially better theft security (since the city owns the property anyway, you could make the store a local base for policing activities), which also helps with margins, and more resilience to temporary rough periods. And because you’re only operating a single player in a broader ecosystem rather than trying to build the entire supply and distribution chain yourself, you can still use a full set of market-based price signals to inform your business behavior. (The lack of these is the biggest problem by far for SOEs in countries whose economies are throughly centrally planned).
Now, some of these benefits would probably be offset by political constraints on the stores’ operations (eg: some of the EBIT edge would be offset by higher labor costs, because grocery store staffers would likely be public sector union members), and they probably wouldn’t be a significant improvement high-end stores with already-optimized capital and cost structures (Trader Joe’s is the best NYC example). However, in less well-served neighborhoods, it’s quite possible that they’ll provide a superior alternative to Gristedes and various shittier bodegas.
I’m not sure if this is actually a good idea— especially because if the municipal stores get too big relative to the rest of the grocery ecosystem, they could get pretty distortionary. But it also seems like they might be much less of an obvious disaster than a lot of people here think.
I find it virtually impossible to imagine that municipal grocery stores will have anything even approximating the procedural and managerial efficiencies of commercial grocery stores. Why haggled with suppliers when you're spending other people's money on their goods and services (and as a public sector union member you may not face any credible threats of discipline for screwing up.)
I think this take is far too cynical about public sector employees? In my personal observation, government workers aren’t meaningfully less conscientious than their analogous-qualification private sector counterparts (and indeed, often are more so because they have a stronger sense of mission.)
"...it’s quite possible that they’ll provide a superior alternative to Gristedes and various shittier bodegas...."
Why does Mamdani hate minority-owned businesses? I always knew that he was a Neo-liberal shill underneath.
The budget for this is a rounding error, and likewise any effects good or bad.
The bigger criticism, I think, and this applies to other candidates for other offices, but since we are talking NYC here we can narrow our focus.
There's a quote from President Clinton from around 2008, in the context of presidential races, but the idea applies more widely.
"I think that any candidate for president has a three-fold responsibility. Number one, you have a responsibility to demonstrate that you have the capacity to be president... Number two, you have a responsibility to lay out for the American people what you believe the great challenges and great opportunities are. And number three, you have to tell them specifically what you're going to do about it."
See the second and third in particular.
And later "Because people, when they tune in, they have a limited amount of time. And what they want to know is, is this person strong enough to be president? Does this person see the world I'm living in? And does this person have some answers that I think will work?"
This is the key: have you identified the big issues, and do you use the limited bandwidth that voters have to get that across?
"Food deserts" are not in the top 100 most important issues or opportunities. Voters tell us what the issues are. There is detailed survey and analytic data.
And what are these issues?
Public safety, in particular subway safety at night (80% report feeling unsafe)
Housing affordability (75% residents say this is the #1 reason they consider leaving the city)
High commercial real estate vacancies
A good public servant would be laser focused on these. Particularly city officials and mayors. It is not a job for proving ideology or having a grand vision for how society ought to work.
Bloomberg rezoned 40% of NYC, got Cornell to setup a campus here, historic low crime, school reform. That is the scale at which the Mayor needs to operate. Municipal grocery stores and stronger rent control show the poverty of ideas.
If he wins, I wish him well and hope he focuses on issues that matter.
To be fair, the grocery stores thing is much higher salience in what Mamdani’s detractors say about him than it is in his own messaging,which is very heavily focused on the housing issue (with a general-public messaging track focused on the easy to understand and popular if economically questionable stabilized unit rent freeze, and a high-information actor messaging track focused on permitting reform and rezoning for higher density— the latter set of policies will do all of the actual work on long-term affordability, of course, but the former was probably necessary to build the sort of coalition that can tell the homevoters to get fucked and enact it.)
Or maybe a rent freeze is his long-term solution and permitting reform and higher zoning density are things he had to pretend to care about to build a big enough coalition for the primary.
> economically questionable
Questionable is not a great adjective to describe a policy about which there really aren't any actual questions about whether or not it's a good idea.
This is an odd remark considering this policy stunt clearly earned Mamdani a lot of buzz.
Holding charisma and ability to get press coverage constant, he could have gotten the buzz from big important problems. We can't be sure about counterfactuals, and I'm not a candidate or political consultant, but just as a voter in NYC I want the mayor candidates to demonstrate they know what the big challenges are.
We can't know the counterfactuals, but Mamdani is a random state assemblyman who came out of nowhere to win handily in a crowded field. We can't know the counterfactuals if the Kansas City Chiefs didn't trade up for Patrick Mahomes but uhhhh my hunch is that they made the right call.
Isn't the cost savings from no income tax effectively just transferring the lost state and federal tax revenue to the city budget?
That’s certainly a fair point.
The problem with Mandami's city-owned grocery stores is they will be hives of addicts, schizophrenics, and kleptomaniacs because employees won't be allowed to kick anyone out and police won't be allowed to intervene.
I recommend reading some stuff about Mamdani’s actual position on public safety issues before just very confidently making stuff up.
I think you took a wrong turn and wound up at the Mos Eisley spaceport.
This all seems predicated on stealing a base with the assumption that private grocers are small. It wouldn't shock me if Target (with their cute little neighborhood-size stores that they at least started testing a decade ago) has a larger operating budget than New York City government.
Does this argument potentially torpedo the family-owned corner bodega? Sure, but I don't give two hoots about the family corner bodega.
In NYC, a lot of the private grocers are in fact relatively small firms or local chains. (Unusual business environment.)
Okay? So bring in Target or whoever, an organization that has a proven track record of competently running stores.
NYC municipal is not the only large organization out there, but it's definitely one of the more dysfunctional!
That’s honestly not really true; a lot of city government-run things (eg: the library system, the DMV, the police force, CUNY) work pretty well.
Isn't the main criticism of them that they would operate at a substantial loss because Mamdani said that the stores would sell products at cost? (The quote from him here is, "They will buy and sell at wholesale prices . . . ." https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jul/25/mamdani-nyc-public-grocery-stores )
I interpreted that in a “take seriously, not literally way” to mean operating at cost; literally operating at a large loss would definitely be bad.
It's really funny* that Trump just kind of sucks at closing deals.
*or perhaps as Ralph would say "Funny, but not haha funny"
I'll admit to mixed feelings about Trump's Washington, DC law enforcement theatrics...
My son just started a job in DC, and I was there last week helping him move into his new place, a rented house shared with several other new grads in Columbia Heights, a neighborhood that struck me as borderline sketchy, but gentrifying. Troops on the streets has a scary, authoritarian vibe, but if they clear out some of the creepy people (including the homeless guy sleeping in front of my son's house) from the area, I won't be too unhappy.
I can't remember who said it, but a few months ago I saw someone comment that David Frum's dictum about fascism and immigration applied to homelessness and other urban "social disorder" phenomena too.
Yep.
If we could just send everyone in city government (or determining city related policies) to Europe to meet with their peers for a week the US would be in much better shape soon.
Just gotta make sure they don't talk to them about anything related to business or regulation.