The solution to dynastic wealth is a well designed inheritance and gift tax.
Let the self-made billionaire allocate his capital his whole life — he’s good at it. Let him borrow against it to keep allocating. But borrowing should only defer the tax, never erase it. Taxes are only avoidable because of the step-up in basis at death. Heirs inherit the appreciated assets, the loans get repaid, a lifetime of gains is wiped clean. Kill the step-up. Tax the full lifetime appreciation at death with a progressive gift and bequest tax on top. The top rate could be 90% on fortunes over $500M and 98% over $5B. Anyone who complains about getting 12 or 13% of five billion by dint of birth is an asshole. Under this refund, the loan is just borrowing against a bill that always comes due.
And yes, that means the controlling interest largely gets sold off when he dies. That’s okay. The allocation skill was the founders and is only weakly heritable. If the son’s been running the operation and is good at it, the board keeps him on. He has a material slice of daddy’s equity, decades of relationships, this is like starting on third base. If he’s proven himself and has balls, he can take out more loans to pay daddy’s capital gains and estate taxes and keep the family voting interest intact. However, the modal case is that he’s a nepo baby and should be pensioned off with a small eight figure trust fund. No one should feel sorry for that person.
I might quibble at the rates and break-points, but I largely agree with you.
I do think this same thinking should be applied to Foundations like the hypothetical billion-dollar one bequeathed to Matt in today's mailbag. Those, too, should be strongly incentivized to distribute their money over a finite timeline.
First $750k (per decedent) is exempt, not part of taxable estate.
Rates:
Zero-$1M 15%
$1M-$3M 25%
$3M-$6M 35%
$6M-$10M 50%
$10-$50M 65%
$50M-$500M 80%
$500M-$5B 90%
$5B plus 98%
This would raise a lot of revenue. No one would be impoverished. A delicious amount of intra haute bourhoise compression would occur, the middle bourgeois is taxed only lightly but shows some solidarity with the workers!
Yes, sorta makes sense. This being Slow Boring, let's be clear about the unintended consequences--no billionaires will actually pay these rates, instead they'll set up foundations for their kids to run, or throw Bezos-style weddings or mega-vacations for all their grandchildren and their friends. It's not an injustice, and indeed shows some solidarity. Although part of me, based on the billion-$ heirs I've seen, is worried that giving them foundations or newspapers to run might do more damage than just letting them retire to Santa Monica. This might be the Progressive Activist Full Employment Act of 2027. Seems like death is distorting, and all you can do is move the distortions around.
Lot of takeaways but one is a favorite hobby horse of mine; don’t over romanticize the past. Colleges if anything were worse when it came to free thinking and were quite willing to sell out to administrations seeking to silence speech.
I really don't want to one of those people who says illiberal tendencies among far left students or faculty is somehow fake news. But its stuff like this (among many other reasons) why I think there is no higher delta in domestic politics between the actual importance of a thing and the amount of news coverage it gets.
Because these huge endowments are so clearly much more impactful as far as how universities and colleges operate. I remember when Bill Ackman first got involved with the campus culture wars a few years back and he started writing essay length tweets. I found it kind of astonishing that the take away wasn't "why does Bill Ackman have this much power and influence regarding faculty hiring at Harvard?!" Like it was astonishing to me how little this was remarked upon.
To bring it back to the topic at hand. I guess I should be happy this endowment isn't at least to freaking Harvard; much better to be provided to a major public university in my book. But yeah, hard not to look at this as a giant tax dodge. Also, add to the list of stuff where Trump is not as much an outlier sometimes as we might think; just way more obvious and oafish. What I'm getting at is, just how different is providing millions to a college to have your name attached to a bunch of buildings versus constructing giant statues of yourself? Yes, the money to the college is going to a better purpose for society, but let's be real, there is a big Venn Diagram overlap as far as ego motivations here.
Is the difference between a foundation and a nonprofit all in the funding?
The Savoy company in Philly does 2 weekends of a Gilbert and Sullivan opera each year and seems to be at least partially run on donations (and program ads by cast and local companies—you get a whole book when you sit down!). But they are 125 years old now. Comic opera (or the local trail organization or the Philly ballet) aren’t exactly feeding the hungry, but I do like that they exist and presumably stockpile some money for times when donations don’t fully cover costs.
IANAL, but I believe current rules require all nonprofits / foundations to distributed 5% of their assets annually (an average of 5%/year over 5 years), even the ones like you describe.
Increasing this to 15% or 20% would either force the foundation to distribute the majority of its assets over a 10-20 year period or find new funding sources. Both of which are better than seeing an initial bequeath fund a permanent foundation for perpetuity.
A lot of public sector funds flow to nonprofits, and for sure some of that is ill-advised, but a lot of it is fine. Most state universities and hospitals are set up as nonprofits, and I don’t think we would want to privilege for-profit institutions. I don’t have problems with money being distributed to food banks, either.
But wouldn’t that also encourage all that spend money to make money type of advertising?
Like I bought a consumer reports membership when I bought my house and needed a new washer/dryer/etc, but there was so much begging mail—rounds of car lottery tickets and letters requesting donations.
Or the constant SPCA commercials as a kid that were just all sad animals? Or the monthly Wikipedia banners asking for donations even though to my understanding the website itself is funded many times over? Or the huge packet Arbor Day foundation likes to send out?
If someone gives the local animal shelter 2million in their will and it’s funded for the next 40years, isn’t that a good thing that means it can focus on taking care of and placing animals instead of attracting donations?
Why not do both? Tax the borrowing collateralized by appreciated capital assets as income… and have that accrue basis to the collateralized asset when it comes time to figure inheritance, gift, or capital gains tax - without the step-up in basis upon death.
Speaking of capital gains tax, it’s underrated how a lower capital gains vs labor income tax is perverse value statement. Working needs as much incentive as collecting returns on previously acquired capital.
The recent research suggesting some part of shifts in income to return on capital vs labor is due to structuring to take advantage of tax rates suggest such preferential policy is rewarding those who have the scale and/or market opportunity to structure their income. Not exactly useful behavior.
Properly set individual or household exemption values make sure the incentive for enough people to accumulate capital remains.
It’s hard to defend policy loopholes - like borrow-spend-die / step-up in basis - that are only accessible at such extraordinary scale of income/wealth. Normies like myself are forced translate our labor into immediately taxable wage income because (a) we don’t have the negotiating power to translate our labor into appreciable assets and (b) no-one will lend us enough against small asset bases to live off.
"Speaking of capital gains tax, it’s underrated how a lower capital gains vs labor income tax is perverse value statement."
This is largely because we don't adjust basis for inflation. A worker gets paid reasonably quickly. But someone could buy a stock for $20 in 2000, sell it for $30 in 2026, pay capital gains on a $10 gain, but have a real loss after inflation.
This would lead to a number of "I lived with my parents and when they tragically died they forced me to sell my childhood home too" stories. Would be very unpopular.
I only ask because this sounds so dispassionate to the "heirs". My children are my family, and part of my work has been to build something that endures beyond me, that they can continue to grow & that my efforts to look out for my kin can extend beyond my own brief time in this physical world.
I have two kids and some serious ambitions of piling up $10M in real estate and equities for a nice early retirement.
I am completely fine with this proposal.
If we live off the proceeds of that $10M and don’t touch the principal, my kids would inherit $5M, pay $1.1M in inheritance taxes, and pay ~$300k in capital gains to liquidate enough to pay that tax bill, walking away with about $3.6M each.
If they raise a word of protest at the prospect of Uncle Sam taking his share in earshot before I die I’ll have failed as a parent and will give it all to charity.
You’re talking about inheriting humongous fortunes. I agree with David Abbott on this: if someone complains about inheriting *only* 50 million instead of 500 million, that someone is a greedy asshole.
My kids, young as they are, would also be better stewards of the US national intelligence establishment than Bill Pulte. But "my family should be personal dictators because they are smarter than most voters" is an idea with a long and bad track record.
I feel like these responses are fixated on the financial value and whether the number is impressive, and I find that a little disappointing.
Most significant wealth is not mere financial assets - think more of the art collection, the real estate, the family business, etc. To quote The Jerk: "I don't care about losing all the money. It's losing all the stuff."
I'm trying to suss out whether you are opposed to the dynastic impulse as a value. And to be clear, I find it quite a natural impulse, even if I have no expectation of hitting the numbers under discussion here. But I support being able to build something based on family, not trying to use tax policy to dissolve the entity and restart every generation from scratch.
And I prefer to, if not dissolve the entity, at least bleed it heavily every generation.
Why is your preference better?
It is *bad* to have an aristocracy and extremely fortunate that absent actual patents of nobility we have a demonstrated tendency to ruin ourselves within several generations.
Do we have a demonstrated tendency to ruin ourselves within several generations or is this cope based on anecdotal stories similar to the cope about lottery winners losing money, when actual studies (and common sense?) suggest that the majority of lottery winners retain their wealth and have better lives (https://time.com/5427275/lottery-winning-happiness-debunked/)
Like how hard is it to just stick the money in an index fund and withdraw a safe amount every year, generic you are telling me rich people can’t figure that out? I can’t believe it.
We’re turning over that list because new even larger fortunes are being made from the Internet and AI which we dominate. I’m not sure that’ll be the case going forward. It’s also much easier to keep fortunes growing now—if you just plop it in an index fund and withdraw 1% per year ($10m for a billion-dollar fortune) it’ll keep growing. A modest 7% annual return means your fortune grows 2^8=256x passively over an 80-year lifetime. It’s hard to see how anyone of even average intelligence could lose a big fortune unless they want to.
Competence doesn't breed true indefinitely, and eventually even professional management cannot overcome.
The US legal system being as stable as it has helps but even there by a couple generations out most famous rich families are a shadow of what they were, akin to broke British nobles renting out the family estate for weddings.
Most of them are still hella rich, maybe not Elon Musk level but most probably are still billionaires or centimillionaires living stealthily. Some are even still visible like the Mellon-Scaifes heirs are still billionaires funding right-wing caused with their Gilded Age fortunes today.
And it’s probably a lot easier to keep fortunes going forward giving smaller family sizes and a better legal/financial environment for this kind of thing.
Apologies for the personal question, but I find it useful to know who has "skin in the game" re intergenerational transfers. Honestly, having kids changed my feelings about inherited wealth. I think far less now from the receiver's side and far more from the giver's - one final gesture to your offspring at the end.
Yes, I have 2 kids. I’m already giving them absolutely massive advantages when I compare them to e.g. kids in Gaza and Lebanon or refugee kids you see. I don’t need to give them insurmountable ones.
I also grew up poor and am richer and am still kind of salty about that because I missed a lot of childhood/young adult stuff my peers had, and had to work much harder as a young adult, and am still bidding against likely heirs with much less stressful jobs for housing. I also really grok the power of compound interest now and understand how the same exponential growth that makes it easy to save for retirement, if unchecked over generations, means some people have self-perpetuating and insurmountable economic advantages over others. So yes part of the reason I think it is unfair that I was born poorer than other people probably is personal experience.
I’d much rather reset every generation and let everyone compete on a level playing field. Also just as a matter of fun and meaningfulness—if you had say a sports game where every team’s score was not just what they scored that game but all of what they’ve scored in their history, that would rapidly stop being interesting once some teams become the forever winners and people would stop watching.
The zero-sum thinking on display here is crushingly depressing.
Edit: to clarify, I have no problem with substantial inheritance/estate taxes. I just find the last paragraph horrifying.
To repeat what I wrote in the depths of this thread: lives are not lived for the amusement of spectators, individuals can have different win conditions, and my success has nearly zero bearing on yours.
Most folks here who are arrayed in opposition to you have kids.
My kids will know I loved them in my life, not at my death. If they don't need my money they'll get some of it at death and I'll give a good chunk to charity. If they need it, then they'll see more of it while I'm alive than when I die.
The thing is, progressives are often very nice people, but they have no base impulse towards tax optimization and so are fundamentally un-American. It’s very sad. (/s, mostly)
I don't agree with the confiscatory rates--why should gift giving be taxed at such a higher rate than other consumption--but it is absolute insanity that the step-up basis exception exists. I know of literally no-one who defends it on the merits.
We could have a "step-up debt" policy where all debt is zeroed out in the estate. Just kidding, but even voicing it makes it clear how crazy the step-up basis is.
I'm conceptually in agreement but practically skeptical. As sometimes pointed out (most often by Tran Hung Dao), this was tried 50 years ago and then repealed almost immediately because it was impractical. For stocks and other publicly traded assets, it would be easy now, but not always so for property, private businesses, etc. That's not to say it shouldn't be done then, but it's probably a lot harder than most assume.
I'd caveat that I'm cool with gifting while alive. My preference is eliminate the gift tax and raise the estate tax as high as the peak of the Laffer Curve. But this works too. I'm not dogmatic about it.
Why would a billionaire let a bunch of government yutzes have their money? This will just engender Euro style charitable foundations that have the company at the center and the family happens to control.
Why an inheritance tax and not an estate tax, which already exists? Taxing both the person passing away and the person inheriting seems excessive to me.
I think it’s actually fine to keep the step-up in basis as long as you design a tax on unrealized gains at inheritance that can’t be sidestepped or planned around. Doing both is distortive—over three generations you’ll double-tax the early gains. But yeah, you need at least one, and I think just killing the step-up in basis isn’t gonna cut it; the Walton heirs wouldn’t be *more* likely to realize capital gains and incur a big tax bill if they had a tax basis even closer to zero than it already is.
Edit: I guess it doesn’t matter if you’re talking about a 90% rate anyway, but realistically what a 90% rate will get you is a level of compliance on the order of Italy’s. People will start burying gold bars on cheap land, that sort of thing.
It seems like the folks strongly defending Platner during the last few months might end up looking like those who strongly defended Biden after The Debate.
I like Slow Boring because I'm interested in policy and governance questions (plus the best commenters), but don't really have the partisan bug. Those who are the most partisan get the opportunity to be on "the inside", but the requirement to defend everyone on the team must be a real intellectual compromise.
I'd call myself left of center but the Platner sex scandals in a normal world should be disqualifying. If someone is willing to break their vows made to their wife, why would I trust them to not break their oath to their voters?
An emotional part of me agrees with you. I find cheating to be a huge personal flaw.
But what we now know about the extra marital proclivities of many of our politicians says that empirically there is not a strong correlation between their oaths to voters and their marriage vows.
Trump famously lost his 2016 run after a long history of misogynistic comments was exposed, including one where he said he could "grab women by the pussy" -- which ultimately benefited his female rival.
You’re thinking Roy Moore in Alabama, who lost to Doug Jones after multiple revelations that he was really into teen girls, to the extent that he was banned from the mall for being a creep
He lost principled votes but picked up other ones that didn't seem to mind it as much in an elected official. I don't know that we can say that the "American voter" cares strongly about this sort of stuff.
No need to strongly defend him, just point to Senate math and the fake moderate's Trump 2 voting record. That said, wouldn't say no to someone better than Platner (Mills is not).
The sad fact is that despite his objectively bad candidacy, we'd be worse off if Platner hadn't run, because the "alternatives" are someone who demonstrably has no juice (Costello) and a dried-up husk (Mills). If Platner hadn't run we'd have just gotten Mills by default and then lost.
By contrast, at this point there are still some choices open to us. Someone is going to lose the gubernatorial nomination (several someones, actually) and if oppo keeps dropping about Platner, maybe he can be forced to resign in favor of one of them.
But the core problem here is that we never had a real competitive primary because all of the candidates who were any good were too big of cowards to run (and, more controversially, I think a lot of the moderate faction genuinely don't mind if Collins wins).
I don't really know what to tell you here. Moderates who both a. have some semblance of political acumen and b. genuinely want the Democratic Party to do well are almost a nonexistent species. This is why actually existing moderates in the 119th, 118th and 117th Congresses, respectively, keep doing things like "funding Donald Trump's government in exchange for nothing," "giving away lifetime circuit court judgeships to far-right lunatics rather than confirm totally normal Joe Biden appointees," and "refusing to pass legislation that would block Republicans from rigging elections at the state level."
It's not possible to explain this stuff as eleven-dimensional chess because it isn't; it's just straightforwardly harming Democratic political fortunes because that's what they want to do.
"This entire episode leaves me with three thoughts:
1. No matter how much they try, professional class Dems find even working class signaling coming from upper-middle class people distasteful. The dems are really fucked on this.
2. The progressives are overly credulous, unserious morons. I knew this from their policy stances but their incompetence at politics just confirms it.
3. The moderates have been sad sack, lazy, useless idiots for decades to get us to this point. Their uselessness played midwife to Trump and is now playing midwife to a vision of the Democratic Party that might get locked out of power for decades because of how incompetently out-of-touch it is."
But given the choice between "person who wants essentially the same things I want even if I don't necessarily line up 100 percent with their ideas on how to get there" and "person who will betray me for nothing," I am going to vote for the first one even assuming that the second one is hypothetically slightly more electable.
I think that's a reasonable approach. And of course, in this specific case, the traitor faction hasn't really even put up a candidate!
"But given the choice between "person who wants essentially the same things I want even if I don't necessarily line up 100 percent with their ideas on how to get there" and "person who will betray me for nothing," I am going to vote for the first one even assuming that the second one is hypothetically slightly more electable."
Thank you for articulating why I don't vote for progressives, lol.
I must be lucky because, even being on BlueSky, I haven't seen many Platner defenders. I see much more "Why did we pick this fool?" and have since before his opponent dropped out.
As ever, the majority of voters - even primary voters with a skewed percentage - have little to no engagement in the online debate and are not directly touched by the enthusiastic Platner fans. That said, now that he's national news, I suspect most people who do know about him know him as "Nazi tattoo guy" and I'm curious how those Dem primary voters who aren't caught in the online Discourse feel about that.
My hot take on Horseshoe political theory is that it's mostly the humdrum observation that whatever your positions, your adversaries are not generally homogenous. To YOU that looks like a horseshoe - but there is no one horseshoe; it's just an illusion caused by your own perspective.
Person A likes gambling and legal weed, and sees a horseshoe of nanny-state liberals and social conservative republicans. Person B is an elite neoliberal and sees a horseshoe of leftie socialists and right-wing populists. Person C is a MAGA populist and sees a horseshoe of elite liberals and country club republicans. Person D supports immigration and sees a horseshoe of left labor protections and right-wing ethnic nationalism. etc. Person E is a DSA communist and sees the corporate dems and corporate republicans working together... Etc...
But it's all just the totally routine observation that my adversaries are not homogenous.
One real part of the horseshoe is statism. Far left and far right types both like a more aggressive and intrusive government that folks in the mainstream do.
Well, but my point is that a statist can equally look out and sees things like the MAHA coalition, where the "far left" and "far right" are the horseshoe of people opposed to mandatory vaccination.
If you try to do British-style video surveillance in the US, you get opposition from a funky horseshoe coalition of "don't tread on me" Republicans and anti-Fascist Lefties - again anti-statist.
Almost no one pays attention when urban governments run huge public surveillance programs in house, but the second you attach a corporate name to it the lefties go nuts.
Which is probably how it should be, if governments want to do this they need to retain complete control over the data and be held to legal standards in employing it, including civil recourse and damages when it is leaked.
The average smaller government entity has extremely bad IT and security compared to reputable private tech companies. Even the federal courts got hacked (and now you have to 2FA into them). So if you’re concerned about cybersecurity this is not the right approach.
That is a solvable problem. Placing the data in private hands and actually regulating its use is, demonstrably, not a solvable problem.
Take Flock out behind the shed and shoot it, mandate footage be stored and processed, if any ML-based processing is taking place, entirely using on-premise hardware or private GovCloud environments, and put in place draconian civil penalties for governments that misplace or leak footage that isn't specifically being released to find suspects in criminal investigations, along with draconian criminal penalties for public sector workers who misuse footage to which they have access.
You’re going to have to massively increase the competence of government employees and probably pay them private sector tech industry level salaries for this to work. I was adjacent to government surveillance in a past job and saw some shockingly careless stuff around sharing data (never any maliciousness or misuse, just careless/incompetent). Non-tech private companies can be pretty bad about this too.
The most reliable form of data protection means data minimization. I actually don’t really care about security footage in public places where people don’t have an expectation of privacy anyway per se and of course stopping violent sort of street crime is very important. But we should prevent the government from getting private data and have simple policies that require data to be deleted after a certain fairly short time.
Why do you describe that as non-polarized when I would describe it as another of these infinite horseshoes?
To the hawks, there is a horseshoe of right-wing isolationists and left-wing peaceniks.
To the doves, there is a horseshoe of right-wing neocons and left-wing Liberal Hawk "global policeman" interventionists? (It's still an invasion, whether we are smashing our enemies or liberating the oppressed foreigners)
You can find plenty of centrist doves and extremist hawks. So there's no horseshoe. Just a distribution of minority views throughout the political spectrum.
A horseshoe happens when the views are collected on the extremes, which IS true about things like anti-free trade, conspiracy theories, police state views, etc. But isn't at all true about hawks and doves.
Hmm, I worry we might be bogged down in semantics.
But I do think your words here were the point I was trying to make when I said the horseshoe is an illusion: "So there's no horseshoe. Just a distribution of minority views throughout the political spectrum."
Not necessarily true, anarchists and libertarians are generally considered far-left or far-right but their whole thing is being against an aggressive government.
I agree that that part is key to the most common horseshoe, but to Miles's point, there can also be a less common inverted horseshoe where different ideological factions are seen as insufficiently enforcing certain laws or government actions.
But that doesn't explain why Rae Huang (the splitter socialist LA mayor candidate) and Spencer Pratt were being friendly on Twitter before the election.
I'm in New York so I don't know anything about this, but I asked ChatGPT and this reply seemed reasonable:
The key context is the top-two runoff math. L.A.’s mayoral race advances the top two candidates if nobody gets 50%, and late polling had Bass, Raman, and Pratt bunched together, while Huang was polling around 9%. That made Huang’s voters potentially decisive: votes for Huang were mostly votes not going to Nithya Raman, the progressive with a real shot at the runoff.
So Pratt had an obvious incentive to be “nice” to Huang: elevate the left candidate who could split Raman’s progressive lane. That does not require Pratt to like socialism; it only requires him to prefer a fragmented left. A social-media post praising Huang over Raman would function as a wedge: “leftists, vote for the purer left candidate,” which helps Pratt if it keeps Raman below him.
Huang’s incentive was different: her campaign was arguing against “viability” and “tactical voting,” explicitly framing those arguments as establishment gatekeeping. Her campaign site told voters not to wait until November and to “vote with your values,” which fits the decision to reject pressure to consolidate behind Raman.
Right, both candidates share a dislike for mainstream liberalism and prefer making alliances with people whose substantive views they hate rather than compromising with the electorate or anyone else.
This would be nice if it were true, but "the far left" and "the far right" are relatively objective features of American politics, and the observation "the far left and the far right have more in common with each other than the political center or the median American voter" is deeply offensive to both groups, so horseshoe theory resists collapse.
This is going to sound uncharitable, maybe more uncharitable than intended, but I tend to see the dynamic on the post Reagan right in question as coming down to increasing consolidation of low IQ, low human capital people into a single party. Or maybe a realization of that old saw about not all conservatives being stupid but most stupid people being conservative.
I say this as someone who more or less agrees with a lot of the criticisms, by say, an Andrew Sullivan, of institutionalized liberalism, and maybe more controversially here, sympathizes with a lot of the once far left now often seen as far right concern about the natsec state that would be associated with Glenn Greenwald types.
Among the (many) differences that keep me a liberal is that I don't think these things can be addressed by putting f*cking idiots in charge, who are constitutionally incapable of actually solving problems. Moreover I think the larger right is mired in an ecosystem of reactive grievance, where no matter what their own idiotic leaders do, they have conditioned themselves to jump to a litany of past provocations by their opponents to justify it. Ultimately its gotten them to the place where they are now, with total brain drain from their party, their institutions, and a lot of their candidates, to the point that they can't study their own past or govern effectively when given the chance.
It’s a real moral rot. I am relatively conservative but Republicans’ affinity for lazy and casual dishonesty, inconsistency, and nihilism makes them utterly repulsive to me.
One interesting thing about working in and around government as an economist is that many (most?) of us can’t be GOP because of the moral rot. However, the vicious inflexible stupidity of the democrats when they get in power, especially of those they choose to give power and appoint to agencies (Chopra being one, the crazy transportation kleptomaniac being another, I’m not even including Khan who I thought did pretty well towards the end) is truly dangerous and causes a lot of harm.
This means many serious people are left without a home.
You might want to rewrite this because your preceding and following statements are a bit disjoint. It’s early. Start a second sentence rather than comma conjunction.
Politics just seems to be getting dumber, their certainly human capital sorting, but leftist ideologues believe in complicated theories that require some level of verbal ability to understand, but have no evidence and fall apart if anyone questions them.
I am stumped by Marxists, they seem smart, but the basis is a guy in the mid 19th century making predictions that didn't come true and the whole idea is a specific teleology of human history, which is odd to believe for atheists. I don't think there are that many Marxists on the Left, far more are vaguely anarchist who see rule enforcement as oppressive and lots of obviously dumb and hypocritical identity politics theories. Far more common than any ideology is people who think there is an easy way for govery to get money accompanied by a refusal to do cost benefit analysis or investigate spending.
Also went to war with their own members. Contract with America and family friendly senate made being a congressperson or senator deeply unappealing. You see more turnover than I think you’d see otherwise, which is good and bad.
Is it that smart conservatives would rather own successful businesses than toil for the government? When they cross over, you would hope it would be a Romney or a Bloomberg, but instead we're getting a Trump (or a late-stage Musk)
That's reasonable but if there's a supply shortage of smart conservatives who want to be politicians, how would we know? Supply-demand works in an economic market, but the premise here is that the incentives are better in the actual market than in politics. Political "demand" can annoint a Trump, but if you'd rather not be a politician than a business leader, it can't offer you anything.
I dunno man. I think Mitt Romney would happily be president right now if he could, and after watching people I would've once thought of as arch conservatives run out of their own safe seats I'm not sure any of them with half a brain could win if they wanted to.
Smart conservatives have different politics than dumb ones. Romney and Bloomberg are technocrats who have more in common with Obama than Trump, even if the former has trouble realizing it. Ted Cruz and the Elon Musk "tech right" are rare exceptions.
Who would elect the head of an investment bank like Dimon or whoever runs Goldman if they were conservative and interested in running?
Hell, I just listened to an interview with Yannis Varoufakis and the Left isn’t interested in electing an intelligent guy who doesn’t try to sell magic and one weird trick solutions.
If we’re just constraining it to smart guys Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton are pretty damn smart. Joni Ernst. John Thune is very smart. I respect the hell out of Tim Scott’s institutional knowledge and staffers.
Deep red states I think tend to elect smart senators but I also note they might not survive a primary if it were held tomorrow.
I don't think this is it. It's that Trump has successfully been able to turn the GOP into a party of yes-men by going after anyone that stood up to him. And those people tended to by less principled who are now more interested in saying yes to Trump than pursuing a conservative agenda. That's not a GOP thing, it's a Trump thing, and I'm curious to see how it changes in a post-Trump world.
I think John Podhertz has a theory that the Republican Party is much more top down than the Democrats and generally just reflects the character of the top of the ticket in every cycle.
I'm sure that's true, but I don't think it explains the current level of submission.
Trump was uniquely popular in the party and willing to primary or threaten to primary congressmen and senators to get his way. Would Biden or Obama threaten to do the same with someone they disagreed with? Would they have even been able to?
And there were 4 years where he lost but managed to retain the leadership of the party, so we essentially went through 6 cycles ('18, '20, and '22) prior to his 2nd election where was able to mold the GOP in his image and remove any checks and balances.
This particular set of circumstances seems unlikely to repeat itself. Unless someone is able to take on the mantle of Trumpism. Trump could potentially keep it alive from the sidelines if he remains popular, but he's also old and declining rapidly. I could see him running off into the sunset (unless the State comes after his corruption, in which case he would remain involved to defend himself).
Maybe! But while nothing is forever I'd be surprised if the conservative intelligentsia is ready to reconstitute so quickly and after being done so dirty. Part of it is their own fault of course in light of the discrediting policy disasters of the W Bush administration but I'm a lot less certain anyone is waiting in the wings.
I don’t really get why people say they don’t do anything. There’s core Republican goals and they’ve accomplished all of them: stopping illegal immigration (done), not banning guns (done), cutting taxes for the rich (done), banning affirmative action (done), starting a war in the Middle East (done), making tax evasion easier (done)
They've had their wins in the courts but most of this is via EO and the lack of actual immigration legislation strikes me as a massive fail on their part. It's something they pretty clearly had a mandate to tighten up and that would be hard for Democrats go undo but they haven't even tried.
As a still Registered Ronald Reagan Republican, I am more than happy to talk about conservatives. There are none left in the Republican Party. There are reactionary, post liberal populists, but nary one conservative that I am aware of.
None of Trump’s policies are conservative, limited government, for example. In what world would a conservative government take ownership positions of private companies?
An organization that runs large scale randomized trials for common behaviors. Like let's actually identify the causal effect of dental cleanings or college admissions without the SAT.
I'd open a batting cage and charge a quarter for 20 pitches like the old days. All of the batting cages near by closed down, despite them being busy whenever I would go. I think they all got displaced by shiny, expensive private coaching facilities that cost an arm and a leg to get into.
Airplanes are certainly full of bogus emotional support animals, and this is despite a Trump and Biden initiative that now requires people to perjure themselves to do it. They commit the perjury because shipping a dog the right way, or boarding a dog (as I do) costs lots of money.
It seems to me you just have to put your middle finger up to the disability rights movement (which hates gatekeeping) and gatekeep. Make people disclose their disability, document it through a psychiatrist, and do periodic audits and pull the licenses of any psychiatrist who participates in a bogus certification.
This from Josh Barro is a good take on Graham Platner. I don't think he has done anything disqualifying and I don't think it is dignified or healthy to talk to exes or look into someone's marriage, but he is so obviously a terrible and irresponsible guy.
Why can't the party find a local doctor or vet 40-55 with no baggage and tempt them into every race where there is a lack of obvious political choice, every district must have lots to choose from?
There actually seems to be some political pull towards non-professional candidates like Dan Osborne in Nebraska or, to an extent Josh Turek in Iowa. But, one can find those candidates without someone as whatever as Platner is.
Dan Osborne was a good candidate, but the default should be to find a responsibile professional especially medics, they are the most likely to be smart, conscientious and responsible, they have been tested for at least 20 years by their job and schooling.
You are grossly overestimating the civic virtue of the professional class, lol.
The amount of malfeasance (miscoding, billing "errors," public benefits corruption) coming out of the medical sector is just astonishing.
There are plenty of good medical professionals but assuming that any single individual would be a better candidate than someone like a mechanic with an interest in policy that affects the working class is not justifiable IMO.
Yeah I get - though am annoyed that - political operators didn't want to take on Collins, but *someone* would, someone green and idealistic enough not to be spooked, someone who isn't an obvious jerk.
Moderate outsider Democrats tried that here with Ala Stanford; the machine candidate refused to drop out, it came out that her COVID-era "non-profit" paid her $400k a year that she wasn't reporting to the IRS, and the moron proggie coasted to victory over the divided moderate field with 44% of the vote.
Hopefully he makes enough of an ass of himself to get primaried but my guess given how Philly politics work is that he's got the office until he dies.
Republicans are definitely screenshotting lots of Dem defences of Platner for when they have a candidates who has problems with exes or dodgy Reddit posts.
How can I contribute to the Matthew Yglesias Nonprofit Movie Theater That Shows Cool Old Movies and Brings in Guest Speakers and Other Programming Foundation?
Is the SAT problem going away? UMass and UCs still don’t require them. You can’t even submit them at UCs.
Also, the math portion of the SAT seems slightly busted with savvy kids using Desmos regression to get the hard math questions right. Maybe good schools should require APs instead?
Horseshoe politics is just an inevitable byproduct of political dimorphism more generally and when that dimorphism is organized around a particularly arid and empty metaphor ("left" and "right" refer to what exactly?) then a number of worthwhile instances of accord are processed out of the system as extremist when they're not.
The example I keep coming back to was Romney's 2021 offer to Biden for a child tax credit. It was fiscally conservative because it consolidated existing programs and tidied up the bureaucracy. But it won the support of DSA types like Matt Breunig because this consolidation allowed the funds to be distributed more effectively by the SSA instead of the IRS and, even better, guaranteed they went people who desperately needed it, cutting child poverty in half in one stroke. That could have been a moment of bipartisan celebration were it not for ... liberals.
Liberals wanted to keep the existing patchwork because each patch in it was once something they had to fight for and each one required its own staff to track and enforce. The Romney plan had a narrow slice of families that would be slightly worse off, but nothing that couldn't be patched. And yet this narrow slice was held up as fatally worse than the status quo even though the status quo didn't come close to reducing as much child poverty! NPR and others didn't even debate the proposal, they just pretended it didn't exist.
All of which is to say "moderation" and "centrism" must be qualitative propositions and not some vague calculation of units-left and units-right or we're going to freeze out a lot of great ideas.
Thanks for answering my question. I am not quite sure what the answer is but lots of people with power make decisions with obvious negative effects, despite being told ahead, this was especially common in 2020 and are never held accountable.
Part of the answer is every organisation needs more accountability and a willingness to fire people. Probably also need to discipline the kind of people who said maths tests are racists etc they can't be conducive to a good academic atmosphere.
I'd like to see Matt reckon directly with treating him like a serious candidate days after and days before serious, er, quality issues came out about him. But I sympathize with the punt insofar as the story isn't over *yet* and he may as well let it cook for a little since obviously things will keep popping off.
Follow-up on Will’s question: In the American system, dividends and long-term capital gains are taxed at the same rate. That biases companies toward stock repurchases, since buybacks let each investor decide when to sell and realize taxes.
Should the American system be more pro-dividend? It seems healthier if companies returned to paying dividends, and rich founders would receive a steady income stream instead they could use instead of these stock collaterization schemes. It would also make revenues more predictable, which would help states like CA.
"Conservatives don’t seem very interested in what happens when they wield power and whether they are making choices that they are happy with."
I think this is substantially downstream of the obvious, demonstrated ineffectiveness of legal change at accomplishing (right-wing) Republican goals. This dynamic is what opened the door to Trump - if organizing, voting, and winning is irrelevant to government policy, then smashing the institutions that drive that irrelevance starts seeming like a good idea.
Five examples:
1) Gay marriage/public acceptance of homosexuality
2) Immigration - Reagan's amnesty was supposed to lead to ~no unauthorized immigration from the Third world.
3) The Quebec-Maine power line, built anyway after a referendum specifically rejecting it
4) Confederate statues
5) Abortion - the bureaucracy managed to end-run state disapproval (which was the result of 50 years of organizing and protesting) by allowing abortions via telemedicine
You could just as easily come up with areas they have been successful: affirmative action, funding police, gun laws, low taxes on the rich, right to work, school vouchers and phonics in education.
With the exception of gun laws, those all have supermajority support, last time I checked. So it isn't really fair to call them specifically Republican goals.
This comment is like the dictionary definition of a word salad, I have no idea what connects these 5 different policy issues or even what you're trying to say. Organizing, voting, and winning (I'd add persuasion) famously absolutely did lead to public acceptance of homosexuality......? I'd argue abortion rights too. The Quebec-Maine power line lead to Trump......? The median person in Maine opposed to the power line is a Kamala-voting leftist NIMBY. Confederate statues....... huh?
Back to the drawing board with this argument I think
The connection - these are all policy areas where more-conservative policy was supported by formal laws in place/won referenda, but actual public policy was left-leaning.
Did the 1980s write this comment? The liberal policy is what's more popular on both gay rights and abortion rights. If you're not aware of that, I think the most charitable explanation is that you're deluding yourself
The first two things and the last are not government policies. Conservatives have dominated government policy for decades but that doesn’t mean they could dictate people’s attitudes towards gays or where they choose to move or get abortions. If they still aren’t happy and want to control private decisions like 2 and 5 and even private thoughts like 1 then they are advocating for totalitarianism and that makes them extremely dangerous.
Sure, but your initial comment said “public acceptance of homosexuality”. If their concern is public acceptance of homosexuality, which I think is the real concern given that looking strictly at government policy such it’s clear conservatives are winning, while the areas liberals are winning in are more along the lines of “public acceptance of X”, then the solution is going to be totalitarianism.
I'm not sure where to place 3 at all, but as regards 1, 4, and 5, none of these things would have occurred if the conservative position in public opinion weren't incredibly weak. The Court, at best, sped up a trend that would probably have seen either the large majority of states or the federal government enact gay marriage legislatively. Confederate statues are in big southern cities and towns and their own electorates usually regard them as an embarrassment; when they were preserved it was by state preemption. And it turns out that first-trimester abortion access is ~70% popular and no one cares to actually try to legislate against it because it's a loser!
The only one of these with some merit is 2, and the enforcement side of that deal was scuppered by business-lobby Republicans at the time and remained so for 3 decades. It's only since the 2010's that the main constituency against immigration enforcement in Congress has shifted to become the left!
The solution to dynastic wealth is a well designed inheritance and gift tax.
Let the self-made billionaire allocate his capital his whole life — he’s good at it. Let him borrow against it to keep allocating. But borrowing should only defer the tax, never erase it. Taxes are only avoidable because of the step-up in basis at death. Heirs inherit the appreciated assets, the loans get repaid, a lifetime of gains is wiped clean. Kill the step-up. Tax the full lifetime appreciation at death with a progressive gift and bequest tax on top. The top rate could be 90% on fortunes over $500M and 98% over $5B. Anyone who complains about getting 12 or 13% of five billion by dint of birth is an asshole. Under this refund, the loan is just borrowing against a bill that always comes due.
And yes, that means the controlling interest largely gets sold off when he dies. That’s okay. The allocation skill was the founders and is only weakly heritable. If the son’s been running the operation and is good at it, the board keeps him on. He has a material slice of daddy’s equity, decades of relationships, this is like starting on third base. If he’s proven himself and has balls, he can take out more loans to pay daddy’s capital gains and estate taxes and keep the family voting interest intact. However, the modal case is that he’s a nepo baby and should be pensioned off with a small eight figure trust fund. No one should feel sorry for that person.
I might quibble at the rates and break-points, but I largely agree with you.
I do think this same thinking should be applied to Foundations like the hypothetical billion-dollar one bequeathed to Matt in today's mailbag. Those, too, should be strongly incentivized to distribute their money over a finite timeline.
My ideal scheme would be something like this.
First $750k (per decedent) is exempt, not part of taxable estate.
Rates:
Zero-$1M 15%
$1M-$3M 25%
$3M-$6M 35%
$6M-$10M 50%
$10-$50M 65%
$50M-$500M 80%
$500M-$5B 90%
$5B plus 98%
This would raise a lot of revenue. No one would be impoverished. A delicious amount of intra haute bourhoise compression would occur, the middle bourgeois is taxed only lightly but shows some solidarity with the workers!
Yes, sorta makes sense. This being Slow Boring, let's be clear about the unintended consequences--no billionaires will actually pay these rates, instead they'll set up foundations for their kids to run, or throw Bezos-style weddings or mega-vacations for all their grandchildren and their friends. It's not an injustice, and indeed shows some solidarity. Although part of me, based on the billion-$ heirs I've seen, is worried that giving them foundations or newspapers to run might do more damage than just letting them retire to Santa Monica. This might be the Progressive Activist Full Employment Act of 2027. Seems like death is distorting, and all you can do is move the distortions around.
I think you should add college endowments to the list.
Sort of related to this. I thought this article in The Ringer was excellent about the dynamics of higher education right now. https://www.theringer.com/2026/04/29/national-affairs/higher-education-trust-crisis-yale-report
Lot of takeaways but one is a favorite hobby horse of mine; don’t over romanticize the past. Colleges if anything were worse when it came to free thinking and were quite willing to sell out to administrations seeking to silence speech.
I was thinking about this when I read this story: https://news.utk.edu/2026/06/04/ut-receives-historic-130-million-investment-from-dee-and-jimmy-haslam-largest-in-university-history/
I really don't want to one of those people who says illiberal tendencies among far left students or faculty is somehow fake news. But its stuff like this (among many other reasons) why I think there is no higher delta in domestic politics between the actual importance of a thing and the amount of news coverage it gets.
Because these huge endowments are so clearly much more impactful as far as how universities and colleges operate. I remember when Bill Ackman first got involved with the campus culture wars a few years back and he started writing essay length tweets. I found it kind of astonishing that the take away wasn't "why does Bill Ackman have this much power and influence regarding faculty hiring at Harvard?!" Like it was astonishing to me how little this was remarked upon.
To bring it back to the topic at hand. I guess I should be happy this endowment isn't at least to freaking Harvard; much better to be provided to a major public university in my book. But yeah, hard not to look at this as a giant tax dodge. Also, add to the list of stuff where Trump is not as much an outlier sometimes as we might think; just way more obvious and oafish. What I'm getting at is, just how different is providing millions to a college to have your name attached to a bunch of buildings versus constructing giant statues of yourself? Yes, the money to the college is going to a better purpose for society, but let's be real, there is a big Venn Diagram overlap as far as ego motivations here.
Giving to UT is even worse than giving to Harvard, fuck the Vols and that stupid UT orange
Florida alum I presume? Or maybe LSU?
Going to guess not Texas given the aversion to orange.
College endowments are taxed!
Is the difference between a foundation and a nonprofit all in the funding?
The Savoy company in Philly does 2 weekends of a Gilbert and Sullivan opera each year and seems to be at least partially run on donations (and program ads by cast and local companies—you get a whole book when you sit down!). But they are 125 years old now. Comic opera (or the local trail organization or the Philly ballet) aren’t exactly feeding the hungry, but I do like that they exist and presumably stockpile some money for times when donations don’t fully cover costs.
IANAL, but I believe current rules require all nonprofits / foundations to distributed 5% of their assets annually (an average of 5%/year over 5 years), even the ones like you describe.
Increasing this to 15% or 20% would either force the foundation to distribute the majority of its assets over a 10-20 year period or find new funding sources. Both of which are better than seeing an initial bequeath fund a permanent foundation for perpetuity.
It'd ensure that the nonprofits which last are tethered to something that enables them to keep attracting donor funds across generations.
Also add a ban on public-sector funds going to non-profits, for the love of god.
A lot of public sector funds flow to nonprofits, and for sure some of that is ill-advised, but a lot of it is fine. Most state universities and hospitals are set up as nonprofits, and I don’t think we would want to privilege for-profit institutions. I don’t have problems with money being distributed to food banks, either.
But wouldn’t that also encourage all that spend money to make money type of advertising?
Like I bought a consumer reports membership when I bought my house and needed a new washer/dryer/etc, but there was so much begging mail—rounds of car lottery tickets and letters requesting donations.
Or the constant SPCA commercials as a kid that were just all sad animals? Or the monthly Wikipedia banners asking for donations even though to my understanding the website itself is funded many times over? Or the huge packet Arbor Day foundation likes to send out?
If someone gives the local animal shelter 2million in their will and it’s funded for the next 40years, isn’t that a good thing that means it can focus on taking care of and placing animals instead of attracting donations?
A foundation typically gives money, while a nonprofit typically spends money.
Why not do both? Tax the borrowing collateralized by appreciated capital assets as income… and have that accrue basis to the collateralized asset when it comes time to figure inheritance, gift, or capital gains tax - without the step-up in basis upon death.
Speaking of capital gains tax, it’s underrated how a lower capital gains vs labor income tax is perverse value statement. Working needs as much incentive as collecting returns on previously acquired capital.
The recent research suggesting some part of shifts in income to return on capital vs labor is due to structuring to take advantage of tax rates suggest such preferential policy is rewarding those who have the scale and/or market opportunity to structure their income. Not exactly useful behavior.
Properly set individual or household exemption values make sure the incentive for enough people to accumulate capital remains.
It’s hard to defend policy loopholes - like borrow-spend-die / step-up in basis - that are only accessible at such extraordinary scale of income/wealth. Normies like myself are forced translate our labor into immediately taxable wage income because (a) we don’t have the negotiating power to translate our labor into appreciable assets and (b) no-one will lend us enough against small asset bases to live off.
Because we should let allocators allocate or we will have French style growth.
The bargain should be clear- allocate well and live a life of luxury and prestige and give your kids small eight figures. Thats a very fair bargain.
"Speaking of capital gains tax, it’s underrated how a lower capital gains vs labor income tax is perverse value statement."
This is largely because we don't adjust basis for inflation. A worker gets paid reasonably quickly. But someone could buy a stock for $20 in 2000, sell it for $30 in 2026, pay capital gains on a $10 gain, but have a real loss after inflation.
I keep it simple: get rid of the step up basis and then just treat inheritance like any other income.
This would lead to a number of "I lived with my parents and when they tragically died they forced me to sell my childhood home too" stories. Would be very unpopular.
You can exempt $2M or something if that's a concern.
Genuine curiosity - do you have kids?
I only ask because this sounds so dispassionate to the "heirs". My children are my family, and part of my work has been to build something that endures beyond me, that they can continue to grow & that my efforts to look out for my kin can extend beyond my own brief time in this physical world.
I have two kids and some serious ambitions of piling up $10M in real estate and equities for a nice early retirement.
I am completely fine with this proposal.
If we live off the proceeds of that $10M and don’t touch the principal, my kids would inherit $5M, pay $1.1M in inheritance taxes, and pay ~$300k in capital gains to liquidate enough to pay that tax bill, walking away with about $3.6M each.
If they raise a word of protest at the prospect of Uncle Sam taking his share in earshot before I die I’ll have failed as a parent and will give it all to charity.
Seconded!
They’ll be good with 15% of 5B, I think.
You’re talking about inheriting humongous fortunes. I agree with David Abbott on this: if someone complains about inheriting *only* 50 million instead of 500 million, that someone is a greedy asshole.
My kids are very important to me. They do not need to inherit anything worth hundreds of millions of dollars, let alone much bigger fortunes.
Imagine thinking you’d rather have Gavin Newsom, Charlene DeBlasio, Trumptards or Lina Khan types direct your money instead of your kids.
That’s wild.
My kids, young as they are, would also be better stewards of the US national intelligence establishment than Bill Pulte. But "my family should be personal dictators because they are smarter than most voters" is an idea with a long and bad track record.
We have a word for what you're proposing, it's called an "aristocracy."
You could also spend it or give it to charity.
And your argument could apply to any tax. It’d be even stronger applied to income tax (imagine you want Trump to spend your money instead of you!)
I feel like these responses are fixated on the financial value and whether the number is impressive, and I find that a little disappointing.
Most significant wealth is not mere financial assets - think more of the art collection, the real estate, the family business, etc. To quote The Jerk: "I don't care about losing all the money. It's losing all the stuff."
I'm trying to suss out whether you are opposed to the dynastic impulse as a value. And to be clear, I find it quite a natural impulse, even if I have no expectation of hitting the numbers under discussion here. But I support being able to build something based on family, not trying to use tax policy to dissolve the entity and restart every generation from scratch.
And I prefer to, if not dissolve the entity, at least bleed it heavily every generation.
Why is your preference better?
It is *bad* to have an aristocracy and extremely fortunate that absent actual patents of nobility we have a demonstrated tendency to ruin ourselves within several generations.
Do we have a demonstrated tendency to ruin ourselves within several generations or is this cope based on anecdotal stories similar to the cope about lottery winners losing money, when actual studies (and common sense?) suggest that the majority of lottery winners retain their wealth and have better lives (https://time.com/5427275/lottery-winning-happiness-debunked/)
Like how hard is it to just stick the money in an index fund and withdraw a safe amount every year, generic you are telling me rich people can’t figure that out? I can’t believe it.
Most financial advisors think the 3 generation thing is true, and the survey evidence we have from those advisors suggests it’s true.
I haven’t seen anything that would pass peer review though. We DO turn over our richest 100 list much faster than Europe, especially France.
We’re turning over that list because new even larger fortunes are being made from the Internet and AI which we dominate. I’m not sure that’ll be the case going forward. It’s also much easier to keep fortunes growing now—if you just plop it in an index fund and withdraw 1% per year ($10m for a billion-dollar fortune) it’ll keep growing. A modest 7% annual return means your fortune grows 2^8=256x passively over an 80-year lifetime. It’s hard to see how anyone of even average intelligence could lose a big fortune unless they want to.
Ourselves in the sense of a family/clan.
Competence doesn't breed true indefinitely, and eventually even professional management cannot overcome.
The US legal system being as stable as it has helps but even there by a couple generations out most famous rich families are a shadow of what they were, akin to broke British nobles renting out the family estate for weddings.
Most of them are still hella rich, maybe not Elon Musk level but most probably are still billionaires or centimillionaires living stealthily. Some are even still visible like the Mellon-Scaifes heirs are still billionaires funding right-wing caused with their Gilded Age fortunes today.
And it’s probably a lot easier to keep fortunes going forward giving smaller family sizes and a better legal/financial environment for this kind of thing.
“restart every generation from scratch” come the bloody hell on dude
I know, it's like self-parody at this point. That's exactly how everyone below the 95th percentile of the US or 99th in Europe lives!
No, most wealth is financial assets, and kids usually don’t want random stuff.
I support every generation starting from scratch because otherwise your family dictates your life outcomes and that’s not very fair.
Nikuruga, also curious if you have kids?
Apologies for the personal question, but I find it useful to know who has "skin in the game" re intergenerational transfers. Honestly, having kids changed my feelings about inherited wealth. I think far less now from the receiver's side and far more from the giver's - one final gesture to your offspring at the end.
Yes, I have 2 kids. I’m already giving them absolutely massive advantages when I compare them to e.g. kids in Gaza and Lebanon or refugee kids you see. I don’t need to give them insurmountable ones.
I also grew up poor and am richer and am still kind of salty about that because I missed a lot of childhood/young adult stuff my peers had, and had to work much harder as a young adult, and am still bidding against likely heirs with much less stressful jobs for housing. I also really grok the power of compound interest now and understand how the same exponential growth that makes it easy to save for retirement, if unchecked over generations, means some people have self-perpetuating and insurmountable economic advantages over others. So yes part of the reason I think it is unfair that I was born poorer than other people probably is personal experience.
I’d much rather reset every generation and let everyone compete on a level playing field. Also just as a matter of fun and meaningfulness—if you had say a sports game where every team’s score was not just what they scored that game but all of what they’ve scored in their history, that would rapidly stop being interesting once some teams become the forever winners and people would stop watching.
The zero-sum thinking on display here is crushingly depressing.
Edit: to clarify, I have no problem with substantial inheritance/estate taxes. I just find the last paragraph horrifying.
To repeat what I wrote in the depths of this thread: lives are not lived for the amusement of spectators, individuals can have different win conditions, and my success has nearly zero bearing on yours.
I have kids and even better I know at least 3 people who have had to get rid of car and art collections. It’s just better to do it BEFORE your die.
Oh and one case where they didn’t have a plan and it turned into a massive boondoggle.
Most folks here who are arrayed in opposition to you have kids.
My kids will know I loved them in my life, not at my death. If they don't need my money they'll get some of it at death and I'll give a good chunk to charity. If they need it, then they'll see more of it while I'm alive than when I die.
The thing is, progressives are often very nice people, but they have no base impulse towards tax optimization and so are fundamentally un-American. It’s very sad. (/s, mostly)
I have a kid and I will never have $50 million, much less $500M.
I don't agree with the confiscatory rates--why should gift giving be taxed at such a higher rate than other consumption--but it is absolute insanity that the step-up basis exception exists. I know of literally no-one who defends it on the merits.
We could have a "step-up debt" policy where all debt is zeroed out in the estate. Just kidding, but even voicing it makes it clear how crazy the step-up basis is.
I'm conceptually in agreement but practically skeptical. As sometimes pointed out (most often by Tran Hung Dao), this was tried 50 years ago and then repealed almost immediately because it was impractical. For stocks and other publicly traded assets, it would be easy now, but not always so for property, private businesses, etc. That's not to say it shouldn't be done then, but it's probably a lot harder than most assume.
I'd caveat that I'm cool with gifting while alive. My preference is eliminate the gift tax and raise the estate tax as high as the peak of the Laffer Curve. But this works too. I'm not dogmatic about it.
I am very much against the inheritance tax.
I am okay with taxing the assets that are sold to pay for the loan.
But a much easier solution is just a broad based consumption tax may be offset with a prebate up to the poverty level
Why would a billionaire let a bunch of government yutzes have their money? This will just engender Euro style charitable foundations that have the company at the center and the family happens to control.
Why an inheritance tax and not an estate tax, which already exists? Taxing both the person passing away and the person inheriting seems excessive to me.
I think it’s actually fine to keep the step-up in basis as long as you design a tax on unrealized gains at inheritance that can’t be sidestepped or planned around. Doing both is distortive—over three generations you’ll double-tax the early gains. But yeah, you need at least one, and I think just killing the step-up in basis isn’t gonna cut it; the Walton heirs wouldn’t be *more* likely to realize capital gains and incur a big tax bill if they had a tax basis even closer to zero than it already is.
Edit: I guess it doesn’t matter if you’re talking about a 90% rate anyway, but realistically what a 90% rate will get you is a level of compliance on the order of Italy’s. People will start burying gold bars on cheap land, that sort of thing.
Fantastic proposal and very well said. There might be some debate on rates, but the point is spot on.
It seems like the folks strongly defending Platner during the last few months might end up looking like those who strongly defended Biden after The Debate.
I like Slow Boring because I'm interested in policy and governance questions (plus the best commenters), but don't really have the partisan bug. Those who are the most partisan get the opportunity to be on "the inside", but the requirement to defend everyone on the team must be a real intellectual compromise.
https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/2062720568646885490
I think it's the opposite as one of the main Biden non-defenders.
Platner is going to win because his "scandals" are unimportant to normal people and are an obsession of the weirdos who are political hobbyists.
Age related decline is a job qualification. This stuff isn't.
I'd call myself left of center but the Platner sex scandals in a normal world should be disqualifying. If someone is willing to break their vows made to their wife, why would I trust them to not break their oath to their voters?
An emotional part of me agrees with you. I find cheating to be a huge personal flaw.
But what we now know about the extra marital proclivities of many of our politicians says that empirically there is not a strong correlation between their oaths to voters and their marriage vows.
We’ll see what polls say over the next couple of weeks and if more stuff comes out.
Collins shouldn’t be underestimated and she regularly over-performs polls.
And the fact of the matter is that Platner’s problems only lose votes and make this contest more difficult than it otherwise would be.
I think American voters are wrong and it should be more French, but sexting and misogynistic comments do cut through to ordinary voters.
Trump famously lost his 2016 run after a long history of misogynistic comments was exposed, including one where he said he could "grab women by the pussy" -- which ultimately benefited his female rival.
I think if those comments came out during the primary instead of the general election, trump probably would have lost.
But when fear at the general election, partisan brain takes over.
Accept in some very extreme instances. I believe there are republican senate candidate that lost a couple years ago.I forgot who it was
You’re thinking Roy Moore in Alabama, who lost to Doug Jones after multiple revelations that he was really into teen girls, to the extent that he was banned from the mall for being a creep
Not the Louisiana prostitute guy.
And his support fell heavily and many GOP elites unendorsed him.
He lost principled votes but picked up other ones that didn't seem to mind it as much in an elected official. I don't know that we can say that the "American voter" cares strongly about this sort of stuff.
Nope. Political hobbyists think they do and want them to, but they don't.
Platner has the power to fix this problem. He will just be like Biden and draw it out and foist the consequences on others.
Correct and booooooo.
For a summary of the situation so far, Elizabeth Bruenig has this at The Atlantic. Free article attached:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/graham-platner-maine-populism-elections/687429/?gift=JMxeazBxkbnELEmOxw7TqTRehCgLH1Oy7s3hmV6swEE&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
It seems like the general Maine population is much more into Platner than the American people were into Biden.
No need to strongly defend him, just point to Senate math and the fake moderate's Trump 2 voting record. That said, wouldn't say no to someone better than Platner (Mills is not).
The sad fact is that despite his objectively bad candidacy, we'd be worse off if Platner hadn't run, because the "alternatives" are someone who demonstrably has no juice (Costello) and a dried-up husk (Mills). If Platner hadn't run we'd have just gotten Mills by default and then lost.
By contrast, at this point there are still some choices open to us. Someone is going to lose the gubernatorial nomination (several someones, actually) and if oppo keeps dropping about Platner, maybe he can be forced to resign in favor of one of them.
But the core problem here is that we never had a real competitive primary because all of the candidates who were any good were too big of cowards to run (and, more controversially, I think a lot of the moderate faction genuinely don't mind if Collins wins).
I’m more moderate than you and I *very much* mind if Collins wins.
I’m a moderate Democrat, not a “moderate” Republican.
I also cannot wait for Trump to *finally* drag down Fitzpatrick.
I don't really know what to tell you here. Moderates who both a. have some semblance of political acumen and b. genuinely want the Democratic Party to do well are almost a nonexistent species. This is why actually existing moderates in the 119th, 118th and 117th Congresses, respectively, keep doing things like "funding Donald Trump's government in exchange for nothing," "giving away lifetime circuit court judgeships to far-right lunatics rather than confirm totally normal Joe Biden appointees," and "refusing to pass legislation that would block Republicans from rigging elections at the state level."
It's not possible to explain this stuff as eleven-dimensional chess because it isn't; it's just straightforwardly harming Democratic political fortunes because that's what they want to do.
Sure, mostly agreed.
From my comment to "17 Thoughts..." article:
"This entire episode leaves me with three thoughts:
1. No matter how much they try, professional class Dems find even working class signaling coming from upper-middle class people distasteful. The dems are really fucked on this.
2. The progressives are overly credulous, unserious morons. I knew this from their policy stances but their incompetence at politics just confirms it.
3. The moderates have been sad sack, lazy, useless idiots for decades to get us to this point. Their uselessness played midwife to Trump and is now playing midwife to a vision of the Democratic Party that might get locked out of power for decades because of how incompetently out-of-touch it is."
But given the choice between "person who wants essentially the same things I want even if I don't necessarily line up 100 percent with their ideas on how to get there" and "person who will betray me for nothing," I am going to vote for the first one even assuming that the second one is hypothetically slightly more electable.
I think that's a reasonable approach. And of course, in this specific case, the traitor faction hasn't really even put up a candidate!
"But given the choice between "person who wants essentially the same things I want even if I don't necessarily line up 100 percent with their ideas on how to get there" and "person who will betray me for nothing," I am going to vote for the first one even assuming that the second one is hypothetically slightly more electable."
Thank you for articulating why I don't vote for progressives, lol.
I must be lucky because, even being on BlueSky, I haven't seen many Platner defenders. I see much more "Why did we pick this fool?" and have since before his opponent dropped out.
The typical Blueskyer have been among the earliest Platner haters.
As ever, the majority of voters - even primary voters with a skewed percentage - have little to no engagement in the online debate and are not directly touched by the enthusiastic Platner fans. That said, now that he's national news, I suspect most people who do know about him know him as "Nazi tattoo guy" and I'm curious how those Dem primary voters who aren't caught in the online Discourse feel about that.
This isn’t a defense of Platner but there’s a really weird double standard here where no one is talking about Collins pretty sordid love life.
I have to say, this is the first I've ever heard anything about that. Do you have an article to point to?
I wonder how many of these people will be backing Collins or at least unendorsing Platner by November, I guess it depends on how much more comes out.
My hot take on Horseshoe political theory is that it's mostly the humdrum observation that whatever your positions, your adversaries are not generally homogenous. To YOU that looks like a horseshoe - but there is no one horseshoe; it's just an illusion caused by your own perspective.
Person A likes gambling and legal weed, and sees a horseshoe of nanny-state liberals and social conservative republicans. Person B is an elite neoliberal and sees a horseshoe of leftie socialists and right-wing populists. Person C is a MAGA populist and sees a horseshoe of elite liberals and country club republicans. Person D supports immigration and sees a horseshoe of left labor protections and right-wing ethnic nationalism. etc. Person E is a DSA communist and sees the corporate dems and corporate republicans working together... Etc...
But it's all just the totally routine observation that my adversaries are not homogenous.
One real part of the horseshoe is statism. Far left and far right types both like a more aggressive and intrusive government that folks in the mainstream do.
Well, but my point is that a statist can equally look out and sees things like the MAHA coalition, where the "far left" and "far right" are the horseshoe of people opposed to mandatory vaccination.
If you try to do British-style video surveillance in the US, you get opposition from a funky horseshoe coalition of "don't tread on me" Republicans and anti-Fascist Lefties - again anti-statist.
But this is a fun game! Throw me another one!
Almost no one pays attention when urban governments run huge public surveillance programs in house, but the second you attach a corporate name to it the lefties go nuts.
Which is probably how it should be, if governments want to do this they need to retain complete control over the data and be held to legal standards in employing it, including civil recourse and damages when it is leaked.
The average smaller government entity has extremely bad IT and security compared to reputable private tech companies. Even the federal courts got hacked (and now you have to 2FA into them). So if you’re concerned about cybersecurity this is not the right approach.
That is a solvable problem. Placing the data in private hands and actually regulating its use is, demonstrably, not a solvable problem.
Take Flock out behind the shed and shoot it, mandate footage be stored and processed, if any ML-based processing is taking place, entirely using on-premise hardware or private GovCloud environments, and put in place draconian civil penalties for governments that misplace or leak footage that isn't specifically being released to find suspects in criminal investigations, along with draconian criminal penalties for public sector workers who misuse footage to which they have access.
You’re going to have to massively increase the competence of government employees and probably pay them private sector tech industry level salaries for this to work. I was adjacent to government surveillance in a past job and saw some shockingly careless stuff around sharing data (never any maliciousness or misuse, just careless/incompetent). Non-tech private companies can be pretty bad about this too.
The most reliable form of data protection means data minimization. I actually don’t really care about security footage in public places where people don’t have an expectation of privacy anyway per se and of course stopping violent sort of street crime is very important. But we should prevent the government from getting private data and have simple policies that require data to be deleted after a certain fairly short time.
I saw an anti body cam argument the other day that was basically like “it actually lets us do crime, which we like, because that is our culture”
Honestly the anti-vax thing is different. It's just a non-polarized issue (or at least used to be).
Non-polarized issues are different from the horseshoe. Another non-polarized issue is hawkishness/doveishness.
Why do you describe that as non-polarized when I would describe it as another of these infinite horseshoes?
To the hawks, there is a horseshoe of right-wing isolationists and left-wing peaceniks.
To the doves, there is a horseshoe of right-wing neocons and left-wing Liberal Hawk "global policeman" interventionists? (It's still an invasion, whether we are smashing our enemies or liberating the oppressed foreigners)
You can find plenty of centrist doves and extremist hawks. So there's no horseshoe. Just a distribution of minority views throughout the political spectrum.
A horseshoe happens when the views are collected on the extremes, which IS true about things like anti-free trade, conspiracy theories, police state views, etc. But isn't at all true about hawks and doves.
Hmm, I worry we might be bogged down in semantics.
But I do think your words here were the point I was trying to make when I said the horseshoe is an illusion: "So there's no horseshoe. Just a distribution of minority views throughout the political spectrum."
Not necessarily true, anarchists and libertarians are generally considered far-left or far-right but their whole thing is being against an aggressive government.
I agree that that part is key to the most common horseshoe, but to Miles's point, there can also be a less common inverted horseshoe where different ideological factions are seen as insufficiently enforcing certain laws or government actions.
But that doesn't explain why Rae Huang (the splitter socialist LA mayor candidate) and Spencer Pratt were being friendly on Twitter before the election.
I'm in New York so I don't know anything about this, but I asked ChatGPT and this reply seemed reasonable:
The key context is the top-two runoff math. L.A.’s mayoral race advances the top two candidates if nobody gets 50%, and late polling had Bass, Raman, and Pratt bunched together, while Huang was polling around 9%. That made Huang’s voters potentially decisive: votes for Huang were mostly votes not going to Nithya Raman, the progressive with a real shot at the runoff.
So Pratt had an obvious incentive to be “nice” to Huang: elevate the left candidate who could split Raman’s progressive lane. That does not require Pratt to like socialism; it only requires him to prefer a fragmented left. A social-media post praising Huang over Raman would function as a wedge: “leftists, vote for the purer left candidate,” which helps Pratt if it keeps Raman below him.
Huang’s incentive was different: her campaign was arguing against “viability” and “tactical voting,” explicitly framing those arguments as establishment gatekeeping. Her campaign site told voters not to wait until November and to “vote with your values,” which fits the decision to reject pressure to consolidate behind Raman.
Right, both candidates share a dislike for mainstream liberalism and prefer making alliances with people whose substantive views they hate rather than compromising with the electorate or anyone else.
I like this a lot. People say things like "horshoe is undefeated" about wildly divergent things to the point it seems entirely nonfalsifiable.
This would be nice if it were true, but "the far left" and "the far right" are relatively objective features of American politics, and the observation "the far left and the far right have more in common with each other than the political center or the median American voter" is deeply offensive to both groups, so horseshoe theory resists collapse.
This is going to sound uncharitable, maybe more uncharitable than intended, but I tend to see the dynamic on the post Reagan right in question as coming down to increasing consolidation of low IQ, low human capital people into a single party. Or maybe a realization of that old saw about not all conservatives being stupid but most stupid people being conservative.
I say this as someone who more or less agrees with a lot of the criticisms, by say, an Andrew Sullivan, of institutionalized liberalism, and maybe more controversially here, sympathizes with a lot of the once far left now often seen as far right concern about the natsec state that would be associated with Glenn Greenwald types.
Among the (many) differences that keep me a liberal is that I don't think these things can be addressed by putting f*cking idiots in charge, who are constitutionally incapable of actually solving problems. Moreover I think the larger right is mired in an ecosystem of reactive grievance, where no matter what their own idiotic leaders do, they have conditioned themselves to jump to a litany of past provocations by their opponents to justify it. Ultimately its gotten them to the place where they are now, with total brain drain from their party, their institutions, and a lot of their candidates, to the point that they can't study their own past or govern effectively when given the chance.
It’s a real moral rot. I am relatively conservative but Republicans’ affinity for lazy and casual dishonesty, inconsistency, and nihilism makes them utterly repulsive to me.
One interesting thing about working in and around government as an economist is that many (most?) of us can’t be GOP because of the moral rot. However, the vicious inflexible stupidity of the democrats when they get in power, especially of those they choose to give power and appoint to agencies (Chopra being one, the crazy transportation kleptomaniac being another, I’m not even including Khan who I thought did pretty well towards the end) is truly dangerous and causes a lot of harm.
This means many serious people are left without a home.
You might want to rewrite this because your preceding and following statements are a bit disjoint. It’s early. Start a second sentence rather than comma conjunction.
Yeah that’s a bit better I think.
I got to sleep in to 6:30 actually.
I think you have that combined with a seeming inability to connect actions to achievement of their own stated goals.
Politics just seems to be getting dumber, their certainly human capital sorting, but leftist ideologues believe in complicated theories that require some level of verbal ability to understand, but have no evidence and fall apart if anyone questions them.
I tend to refer to their ideas as theological dogmas. I call Marxism a theology. It has dictums, scripture, and priests bestowing revealed truths.
I am stumped by Marxists, they seem smart, but the basis is a guy in the mid 19th century making predictions that didn't come true and the whole idea is a specific teleology of human history, which is odd to believe for atheists. I don't think there are that many Marxists on the Left, far more are vaguely anarchist who see rule enforcement as oppressive and lots of obviously dumb and hypocritical identity politics theories. Far more common than any ideology is people who think there is an easy way for govery to get money accompanied by a refusal to do cost benefit analysis or investigate spending.
Most of it is an aesthetic now. A weird pop Marxist aesthetic to paint over a bunch of incoherent and incompatible beliefs.
They decimated their policy shop (which was fierce in the 1980's) and started listening to Rush Limbaugh instead. That was the key moment.
Also went to war with their own members. Contract with America and family friendly senate made being a congressperson or senator deeply unappealing. You see more turnover than I think you’d see otherwise, which is good and bad.
Is it that smart conservatives would rather own successful businesses than toil for the government? When they cross over, you would hope it would be a Romney or a Bloomberg, but instead we're getting a Trump (or a late-stage Musk)
I don't think it's the top down phenomenon that would imply.
That's reasonable but if there's a supply shortage of smart conservatives who want to be politicians, how would we know? Supply-demand works in an economic market, but the premise here is that the incentives are better in the actual market than in politics. Political "demand" can annoint a Trump, but if you'd rather not be a politician than a business leader, it can't offer you anything.
I dunno man. I think Mitt Romney would happily be president right now if he could, and after watching people I would've once thought of as arch conservatives run out of their own safe seats I'm not sure any of them with half a brain could win if they wanted to.
Smart conservatives have different politics than dumb ones. Romney and Bloomberg are technocrats who have more in common with Obama than Trump, even if the former has trouble realizing it. Ted Cruz and the Elon Musk "tech right" are rare exceptions.
Could smart conservatives get elected?
Who would elect the head of an investment bank like Dimon or whoever runs Goldman if they were conservative and interested in running?
Hell, I just listened to an interview with Yannis Varoufakis and the Left isn’t interested in electing an intelligent guy who doesn’t try to sell magic and one weird trick solutions.
Yes but being in office changes you. Look at Mike Lee, a genuinely intelligent iconoclast who has taken a toxic asshole turn.
See Mitt Romney.
If we’re just constraining it to smart guys Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton are pretty damn smart. Joni Ernst. John Thune is very smart. I respect the hell out of Tim Scott’s institutional knowledge and staffers.
Deep red states I think tend to elect smart senators but I also note they might not survive a primary if it were held tomorrow.
I personally believe that's why universities are so much more drastically tilted than they were; not sure about government.
I don't think this is it. It's that Trump has successfully been able to turn the GOP into a party of yes-men by going after anyone that stood up to him. And those people tended to by less principled who are now more interested in saying yes to Trump than pursuing a conservative agenda. That's not a GOP thing, it's a Trump thing, and I'm curious to see how it changes in a post-Trump world.
I think John Podhertz has a theory that the Republican Party is much more top down than the Democrats and generally just reflects the character of the top of the ticket in every cycle.
I'm sure that's true, but I don't think it explains the current level of submission.
Trump was uniquely popular in the party and willing to primary or threaten to primary congressmen and senators to get his way. Would Biden or Obama threaten to do the same with someone they disagreed with? Would they have even been able to?
And there were 4 years where he lost but managed to retain the leadership of the party, so we essentially went through 6 cycles ('18, '20, and '22) prior to his 2nd election where was able to mold the GOP in his image and remove any checks and balances.
This particular set of circumstances seems unlikely to repeat itself. Unless someone is able to take on the mantle of Trumpism. Trump could potentially keep it alive from the sidelines if he remains popular, but he's also old and declining rapidly. I could see him running off into the sunset (unless the State comes after his corruption, in which case he would remain involved to defend himself).
Maybe! But while nothing is forever I'd be surprised if the conservative intelligentsia is ready to reconstitute so quickly and after being done so dirty. Part of it is their own fault of course in light of the discrediting policy disasters of the W Bush administration but I'm a lot less certain anyone is waiting in the wings.
I don’t really get why people say they don’t do anything. There’s core Republican goals and they’ve accomplished all of them: stopping illegal immigration (done), not banning guns (done), cutting taxes for the rich (done), banning affirmative action (done), starting a war in the Middle East (done), making tax evasion easier (done)
They've had their wins in the courts but most of this is via EO and the lack of actual immigration legislation strikes me as a massive fail on their part. It's something they pretty clearly had a mandate to tighten up and that would be hard for Democrats go undo but they haven't even tried.
As a still Registered Ronald Reagan Republican, I am more than happy to talk about conservatives. There are none left in the Republican Party. There are reactionary, post liberal populists, but nary one conservative that I am aware of.
None of Trump’s policies are conservative, limited government, for example. In what world would a conservative government take ownership positions of private companies?
Tom Cotton is pretty traditionally conservative. There are others.
Not if they stay silent on Trump's breaking of core traditional values. Unless, of course, you count cowardism as a core conservative value.
“ineffective altruism”
I'd open a recording studio and promote local artists on my own radio station.
Centuries long endowment for a cheetah domestication program.
An organization that runs large scale randomized trials for common behaviors. Like let's actually identify the causal effect of dental cleanings or college admissions without the SAT.
I'd open a batting cage and charge a quarter for 20 pitches like the old days. All of the batting cages near by closed down, despite them being busy whenever I would go. I think they all got displaced by shiny, expensive private coaching facilities that cost an arm and a leg to get into.
I’d start a prison abolition group, or just join Sunrise.
If I wanted an effective somewhat activist ecoterrorist group, I’d start a fund to spray paint private jets
"Hey, I'm landing here!" https://frinkiac.com/img/S06E18/453536.jpg
I would finance a musical remake of "Logan's Run", starring Taylor Swift as Logan and Lana del Ray as Francis.
I'd put on a stage adaptation of John Landis's Oscar (itself an adaptation of a play) and commission an animated adaptation of Hadestown.
Airplanes are certainly full of bogus emotional support animals, and this is despite a Trump and Biden initiative that now requires people to perjure themselves to do it. They commit the perjury because shipping a dog the right way, or boarding a dog (as I do) costs lots of money.
It seems to me you just have to put your middle finger up to the disability rights movement (which hates gatekeeping) and gatekeep. Make people disclose their disability, document it through a psychiatrist, and do periodic audits and pull the licenses of any psychiatrist who participates in a bogus certification.
Trump tore up the social contract and used it as toilet paper, and COVID flushed the toilet
This from Josh Barro is a good take on Graham Platner. I don't think he has done anything disqualifying and I don't think it is dignified or healthy to talk to exes or look into someone's marriage, but he is so obviously a terrible and irresponsible guy.
Why can't the party find a local doctor or vet 40-55 with no baggage and tempt them into every race where there is a lack of obvious political choice, every district must have lots to choose from?
https://joshbarro.substack.com/p/low-conscientiousness-losers-are?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1tkxvc
There actually seems to be some political pull towards non-professional candidates like Dan Osborne in Nebraska or, to an extent Josh Turek in Iowa. But, one can find those candidates without someone as whatever as Platner is.
Dan Osborne was a good candidate, but the default should be to find a responsibile professional especially medics, they are the most likely to be smart, conscientious and responsible, they have been tested for at least 20 years by their job and schooling.
You are grossly overestimating the civic virtue of the professional class, lol.
The amount of malfeasance (miscoding, billing "errors," public benefits corruption) coming out of the medical sector is just astonishing.
There are plenty of good medical professionals but assuming that any single individual would be a better candidate than someone like a mechanic with an interest in policy that affects the working class is not justifiable IMO.
Perhaps, but the rabble are just as unvirtuous.
I disagree, both with the term rabble and that they're less virtuous than the professional classes.
AH. I said "just as unvirtuous," not "more unvirtuous." 🙂
Yeah I get - though am annoyed that - political operators didn't want to take on Collins, but *someone* would, someone green and idealistic enough not to be spooked, someone who isn't an obvious jerk.
LOL.
Moderate outsider Democrats tried that here with Ala Stanford; the machine candidate refused to drop out, it came out that her COVID-era "non-profit" paid her $400k a year that she wasn't reporting to the IRS, and the moron proggie coasted to victory over the divided moderate field with 44% of the vote.
Hopefully he makes enough of an ass of himself to get primaried but my guess given how Philly politics work is that he's got the office until he dies.
Yay.
I just hope that if Platner wins that no one takes that as a lesson on what to do going forward. Just that Susan Collins sucks (which is hardly news).
Republicans are definitely screenshotting lots of Dem defences of Platner for when they have a candidates who has problems with exes or dodgy Reddit posts.
Collins has a lot of problems with exes though.
As far as I know no abuse allegations!
I mean why not? Having moral fiber is for suckers; we've all learned this.
We will see.
How can I contribute to the Matthew Yglesias Nonprofit Movie Theater That Shows Cool Old Movies and Brings in Guest Speakers and Other Programming Foundation?
Also ticks are the answer to the last question.
Is the SAT problem going away? UMass and UCs still don’t require them. You can’t even submit them at UCs.
Also, the math portion of the SAT seems slightly busted with savvy kids using Desmos regression to get the hard math questions right. Maybe good schools should require APs instead?
SAT should not allow calculators
I feel the horseshoe has a simple answer, at both extremes they are antisemitic nutjobs, so they have something in common.
Horseshoe politics is just an inevitable byproduct of political dimorphism more generally and when that dimorphism is organized around a particularly arid and empty metaphor ("left" and "right" refer to what exactly?) then a number of worthwhile instances of accord are processed out of the system as extremist when they're not.
The example I keep coming back to was Romney's 2021 offer to Biden for a child tax credit. It was fiscally conservative because it consolidated existing programs and tidied up the bureaucracy. But it won the support of DSA types like Matt Breunig because this consolidation allowed the funds to be distributed more effectively by the SSA instead of the IRS and, even better, guaranteed they went people who desperately needed it, cutting child poverty in half in one stroke. That could have been a moment of bipartisan celebration were it not for ... liberals.
Liberals wanted to keep the existing patchwork because each patch in it was once something they had to fight for and each one required its own staff to track and enforce. The Romney plan had a narrow slice of families that would be slightly worse off, but nothing that couldn't be patched. And yet this narrow slice was held up as fatally worse than the status quo even though the status quo didn't come close to reducing as much child poverty! NPR and others didn't even debate the proposal, they just pretended it didn't exist.
All of which is to say "moderation" and "centrism" must be qualitative propositions and not some vague calculation of units-left and units-right or we're going to freeze out a lot of great ideas.
Thanks for answering my question. I am not quite sure what the answer is but lots of people with power make decisions with obvious negative effects, despite being told ahead, this was especially common in 2020 and are never held accountable.
Part of the answer is every organisation needs more accountability and a willingness to fire people. Probably also need to discipline the kind of people who said maths tests are racists etc they can't be conducive to a good academic atmosphere.
Can't decide if the Platner Punt is a masterpiece of mailbag trolling, or a straight-faced answer, or both.
I'd like to see Matt reckon directly with treating him like a serious candidate days after and days before serious, er, quality issues came out about him. But I sympathize with the punt insofar as the story isn't over *yet* and he may as well let it cook for a little since obviously things will keep popping off.
Follow-up on Will’s question: In the American system, dividends and long-term capital gains are taxed at the same rate. That biases companies toward stock repurchases, since buybacks let each investor decide when to sell and realize taxes.
Should the American system be more pro-dividend? It seems healthier if companies returned to paying dividends, and rich founders would receive a steady income stream instead they could use instead of these stock collaterization schemes. It would also make revenues more predictable, which would help states like CA.
I've been pro-dividend for almost 25 years now aa a means of tamping down stock market bubbles.
"Conservatives don’t seem very interested in what happens when they wield power and whether they are making choices that they are happy with."
I think this is substantially downstream of the obvious, demonstrated ineffectiveness of legal change at accomplishing (right-wing) Republican goals. This dynamic is what opened the door to Trump - if organizing, voting, and winning is irrelevant to government policy, then smashing the institutions that drive that irrelevance starts seeming like a good idea.
Five examples:
1) Gay marriage/public acceptance of homosexuality
2) Immigration - Reagan's amnesty was supposed to lead to ~no unauthorized immigration from the Third world.
3) The Quebec-Maine power line, built anyway after a referendum specifically rejecting it
4) Confederate statues
5) Abortion - the bureaucracy managed to end-run state disapproval (which was the result of 50 years of organizing and protesting) by allowing abortions via telemedicine
You could just as easily come up with areas they have been successful: affirmative action, funding police, gun laws, low taxes on the rich, right to work, school vouchers and phonics in education.
With the exception of gun laws, those all have supermajority support, last time I checked. So it isn't really fair to call them specifically Republican goals.
This comment is like the dictionary definition of a word salad, I have no idea what connects these 5 different policy issues or even what you're trying to say. Organizing, voting, and winning (I'd add persuasion) famously absolutely did lead to public acceptance of homosexuality......? I'd argue abortion rights too. The Quebec-Maine power line lead to Trump......? The median person in Maine opposed to the power line is a Kamala-voting leftist NIMBY. Confederate statues....... huh?
Back to the drawing board with this argument I think
The connection - these are all policy areas where more-conservative policy was supported by formal laws in place/won referenda, but actual public policy was left-leaning.
Did the 1980s write this comment? The liberal policy is what's more popular on both gay rights and abortion rights. If you're not aware of that, I think the most charitable explanation is that you're deluding yourself
Sam's making a historical argument, so I think the answer is yes, the 80s (/90s) wrote that comment.
The first two things and the last are not government policies. Conservatives have dominated government policy for decades but that doesn’t mean they could dictate people’s attitudes towards gays or where they choose to move or get abortions. If they still aren’t happy and want to control private decisions like 2 and 5 and even private thoughts like 1 then they are advocating for totalitarianism and that makes them extremely dangerous.
The courts overturning Prop 8 and Prop 187 in California was absolutely a government decision.
Sure, but your initial comment said “public acceptance of homosexuality”. If their concern is public acceptance of homosexuality, which I think is the real concern given that looking strictly at government policy such it’s clear conservatives are winning, while the areas liberals are winning in are more along the lines of “public acceptance of X”, then the solution is going to be totalitarianism.
Public as in "government", not public as in "family and friends." (ETA - government, and things downstream of government like HR policy.)
I'm not sure where to place 3 at all, but as regards 1, 4, and 5, none of these things would have occurred if the conservative position in public opinion weren't incredibly weak. The Court, at best, sped up a trend that would probably have seen either the large majority of states or the federal government enact gay marriage legislatively. Confederate statues are in big southern cities and towns and their own electorates usually regard them as an embarrassment; when they were preserved it was by state preemption. And it turns out that first-trimester abortion access is ~70% popular and no one cares to actually try to legislate against it because it's a loser!
The only one of these with some merit is 2, and the enforcement side of that deal was scuppered by business-lobby Republicans at the time and remained so for 3 decades. It's only since the 2010's that the main constituency against immigration enforcement in Congress has shifted to become the left!
Maybe work on actually trying to persuade people of the merits of these positions?