Well, looks like you need an open thread.
Cubbies aren’t looking too good. Republicans are lying. Or as we like to call it, Sunday night.
Carry on…
Also, because I can:
(Bet you didn’t see that coming)
Reader Interactions
79Comments
Comments are closed.
redshirt
11:11 is the best time of the day.
Cacti
Bernie has announced his first proposal that I really think will hurt him in the Dem primary.
Across the board payroll tax hike for all income levels.
dedc79
Glad Familia learned his lesson about covering first base. Let’s go Mets!
GregB
@efgoldman:
Why didn’t the inventor of that word make it spelled the same back to front too?
Warren Terra
Since it’s an open thread …
Gawker is trying to concoct a story that Kanye West and Lindsay Lohan are going to run as a ticket for President/Veep in 2016.
I predict the West Lohan ticket will campaign on States’ Rights.
Warren Terra
@Cacti: That is flat asinine. Emphasis on flat.
benw
@efgoldman: A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!
Warren Terra
@efgoldman: My only interest in this absurd story is the pun it makes possible.
Cacti
@efgoldman:
I don’t get it either.
Payroll taxes are already one of the most regressive tax schemes on the books.
Mike J
@benw: Tacocat
Roger Moore
@benw:
No, sir! A war is on.
NotMax
Darned annoying that TCM has stopped including an audio announcement of the next movies up after one ends.
Karen
I’ve been a Mets fan for probably 40 years or so. I wasn’t old enough for the 1969 World Series win. I was old enough for the 1986 WS win. My dad has been a Mets fan since the Brooklyn Dodgers left for LA. He’s 80 years old. It would be so wonderful if he and I could share this win (if it happens).
Mike J
@Roger Moore: Star? Come Donna Melba, I’m an amiable man, no Democrats.
Roger Moore
@Mike J:
Racecar
ETA: Able was I ere I saw Elba.
Cacti
@Karen:
It’s odd to find myself cheering for the Mutts, but there it is.
Can’t stand the Cubs. Or rather, I can’t stand the Cubs’ fans.
Tom Q
To combine the two main topics of this thread so far — the Mets and palindromes — Roger Angell’s response to the Red Sox losing Game 6 in ’86 despite being one strike away: “Not So, Boston”
Mike J
Baseball/health care
http://imgur.com/gallery/zU2BgMS
Matt McIrvin
@efgoldman: It sounds as if the proposal actually came from Kirsten Gillibrand; it’s not an anything-goes campaign promise, it’s an actual Senate bill. Funding it via payroll tax may be some sort of compromise intended to get it passed.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@GregB: Why doesn’t the word “umlaut” have an umlaut in it?
hilts
@Cacti:
Step right up and meet the mutts. NY Yankee fans are far and away the most obnoxious of all sports fans.
@NotMax:
Agreed, don’t understand why TCM made that decision.
Roger Moore
Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.
Wait, that’s a pangram, not a palindrome.
Cacti
@efgoldman:
Unless it’s accompanied by that minimum wage hike to $15/hour, thanks but no thanks.
We have enough regressive taxation already.
Warren Terra
@efgoldman: You lost me at the notion that the Repubs will vote for anything that a Democrat can support, and that seeks to actually accomplish something.
hilts
@Karen:
1969 – Damn, that was one hell of a year. The Mets’ World Series win, Woodstock, and the Apollo moon landing.
Roger Moore
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym:
Most words are not autological
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Cacti: 0.2% is hardly enough to be noticed by most people. But the optics are horrible.
It’s apparently S.786. It lists the 0.2% number in the text. Presumably it was done this way, and financed this way, to have it be part of the existing Social Security/Disability system.
It’s not a fatal flaw to do it this way, but Bernie needs to explain it and have offsetting provisions so that those who can’t afford it are hurt even more.
I notice that Bernie was not one of the initial 12 co-sponsors. I wonder why that was…
Cheers,
Scott.
Warren Terra
@Roger Moore:
Not “autoorthographical”?
Cervantes
@GregB:
So glad you asked.
“Palindrome” comes from the Greek δροµος (“dromos” = running) and πάλιν (“palin” = backwards).
(You read that right.)
JCJ
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym:
Excellent point, although I presume the etymology is “um” as a prefix means to change and “laut” refers to sound, neither of which has an umlaut.
BTW – I did get it as a joke, but just thought I would throw this in there. Examples of “um” words include umsteigen, often meaning to change trains; umziehen – change clothes, Umfahrt – detour.
JCJ
@Cervantes:
Huh. I always thought “palin” meant “idiot”
khead
@efgoldman:
The last TD by Indy turned my great day into a little better than break even. Sports books have to be overjoyed because everyone was on NE.
SFAW
@hilts:
The joke that year (plus or minus a few months) was:
The Jets beat the Baltimore Colts (Super Bowl III)
The Mets beat the Baltimore Orioles (1969 World Series)
The Knicks beat the Baltimore Bullets`(1970 Eastern semis)
And if Baltimore had an NHL team at that time, the Rangers would have beaten them for the Stanley Cup
Thems were the days.
redshirt
@khead:
Literally, a betting nation screamed in anger.
I’m glad I don’t bet.
Cervantes
@JCJ:
Well, “backwards” does …
Joel
Well, at least Jim Irsay got to call in his favorite special teams play.
khead
@redshirt:
Yeah, it was a tough one to take. We aren’t talking rent money bets ($10 parlays in DE) but the Pats killed 3 tickets including a 5 teamer when all the other teams had won.
TaMara (BHF)
@Cervantes: That made this whole thread worth it.
Nite all.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Cacti: Good cause(paid family leave) and it’s not a big tax hit(0.2 percent). No, it’s not going to go over well.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
G sent me a video of our 9-year-old niece making brownies all by herself. I mean, sure, it’s from a mix, but give her a break, she’s only nine!
I think she’s been watching a lot of Cooking Channel with her other uncle, because she has the patter *down.*
redshirt
@efgoldman: I thought it was prescription drugs? But then I don’t care and don’t pry.
Aleta
@Tamara –Great song for a Sunday night. Thanks!
Aleta
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzapgZI5SEc
Sarah Jarosz – Come on up to the house
Cervantes
@Cacti:
Gosh, that sounds terrible.
Leaving aside your smaller errors, let’s look at the numbers.
If this proposal becomes law, here’s what various families can expect to pay in payroll taxes (data are from the Treasury; analysis is mine; first column is percentile; second column is what these families pay now annually on average; third column would be the new annual payment; fourth column would be the annual increase per family):
000-010: $522 $523 $1040-050: $3419 $3426 $7
090-100: $18527 $18564 $37
In return (according to your article):
Tell me again how this proposal would hurt anyone anywhere (never mind Bernie Sanders in a Democratic primary).
@efgoldman:
It is?
@Warren Terra:
It is?
Goblue72
@Cacti: Good. We all need to pay more in taxes. A strong social welfare safety net like they have in Scandinavia that progressives claim to want to have in the U.S. is not free. It means steeper marginal tax rates on the wealthy AND broader taxes on all of us, preferably a VAT, which is a relatively efficient tax that can raise a lot of revenue.
Aleta
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9givzkjDsSY
The Mike + Ruthy Band – “Bright as You Can”
Mike J
@Goblue72: We don’t need to raise payroll taxes. Reagan doubled payroll taxes so he could cut taxes on the rich. Every year, people have paid more into Social Security than it paid out. For bookkeeping, the amount of overage was noted and marked down as what the US owed Social Security. The cash was spent each year as it came in, allowing lower taxes on the rich without as much pressure on the budget.
The rich got a free ride for 35 years. It’s time for them to pay back what they’ve taken from Social Security.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Goblue72, @Mike J:
And isn’t a VAT yet another regressive tax?
BillinGlendaleCA
@Steeplejack (phone): Yes, and I’ve always been a bit puzzled why many liberals have VAT love. I guess you can have some exemptions for the VAT to keep it from being horribly regressive.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Goblue72:
Or we could simply raise the current ceiling on Social Security, which IIRC is still well under $200,000.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
Wow, did I overestimate — the 2015 cap is $118,500.
Mike J
@Steeplejack (phone): Yes, and I’m against it.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Yup, it’s not that much and should be raised or eliminated.
David Koch
It’s a small amount, but it’s politically dumb, if not suicide. Just ask Mondale.
If you listen to the LBJ tapes, which are online, he could have had Medicare/Medicaid in 1964 but it would have required an across the board payroll hike, which LBJ didn’t want to do because raising taxes before an election is dumb. He wanted to fund it out of the social security surplus, but Congress said no (imagine that – the bully pulpit didn’t work). You can here it for yourself with this tape, which contains a pretty terrible rape joke (NSFW). In the end LBJ had to give in and raise payroll taxes, but he did it after the election (Shockingly, the post-landslide bully pulpit also failed) .
David Koch
@BillinGlendaleCA:
because it’s european. and too many progressives are europhiles. you know, like the people who cheer when someone says the US should be like Denmark.
BillinGlendaleCA
@David Koch: I remember studying VAT’s in grad school and it just seemed like a glorified and somewhat complex sales tax. I never did understand the love for it, I guess being Europhiles is as good as an explanation as any.
I can understand the need for consumption taxes on the state and local level with balanced budgets being mandated by law. They make no sense to me on a federal level(the feds can print money).
mclaren
@Cervantes:
Sorry, no, δροµος in Greek means “path” or “road.” πάλιν can mean “backwards” but more often means “returning.”
mai naem mobile
I think some people like the VAT because it gets the ‘illegals’ and thats an easier sell. I think you could tailor the VAT to reduce the regressivity(take out food,medical stuff and some basics.) I know some people who make a living under the table and I’m pretty sure they make okay money, not just minimum wage money. I know rich people do much worse legally, but I still.think we should capture this under the table money.
mclaren
@Steeplejack (phone):
If a VAT applies at all dollar amount purchases, yes, it is regressive. A VAT which applies only on purchases above, say, a million dollars would be a strongly progressive tax. We could use such a VAT.
Bernie’s proposal has once again been grossly distorted by the media and by Republicans. If Sanders proposed to increase access to antibiotics for the poor, the media + Republicans would announce that the Greek root of “antibiotic” means “anti-life” and that therefore Bernie Sanders wants to kill all poor people.
mclaren
@BillinGlendaleCA:
For a simple and obvious reason: if you set the VAT tax at a high level, like a million dollars or five or ten million dollars, this will eliminate the practice of using a mansion to hide your assets. It would also eliminate hoarding of worthless luxuries like billion-dollar super-yachts by billionaires. If such assets got taxed, the rich would be far less likely to hide their assets that way. Many CEOs who drove companies into the ground kept the 50 million dollar mansions because of various loopholes — plus, they get mortgage deductions for them. We need to end that. A house that costs 100 million dollars is not a home in any conventional sense and should not be treated like one.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@mclaren:
. . . you’ll hardly raise any money. Aside from which, you don’t seem to understand how a VAT works. The VAT on a mansion will be zero unless it’s new, and even then, the taxable amount will be a lot less than what the rich person pays for it. It will be on the difference between what they pay for it and the cost of the materials and labor used to build it.
BillinGlendaleCA
@mai naem mobile: Wouldn’t a simple sales tax(with food and maybe a few other essentials exempted), do the same thing? The VAT is exactly that, a tax on the Value Added at each step of the manufacture of a good. The sales tax would also tax the raw materials. I guess that’s the primary difference.
Thoughtful Today
Erm…
Hillary is against a “proposal [that] would allow workers to get up to 66% of their salaries as paid family leave for up to 12 weeks” because it “would impose a new 0.2% payroll tax to finance family leave payments”?
Or to pull out my inner Cacti: ‘Why does Hillary hate mothers, fathers, and babies?’
Yes, those optics, would be terrible, if true.
I’d be astonished if Hillary didn’t support Senator Kirsten (very moderate) Gillibrand’s legislation.
In fact, I suspect some in Hillary’s camp are disappointed she wasn’t the first Democratic Presidential Candidate to support it.
And God Bless you Cervantes, for actually reading the article, doing the math, and considering the proposal in your usual thoughtful way. May we all learn from you.
Zinsky
All I can figure is that Bernie is trying to preemptively address the Republican’s pathetic but frequent complaint that the poor don’t have “enough skin in the game”. But this is a loser proposal- no doubt!
Zinsky
@mai naem mobile: I find it humorous that conservatives are pushing a VAT for the United States. They have obviously never lived under one. If they think the U.S. Tax Code is “intrusive” and “bad for business”, go live in a country that has one! They are extremely onerous and difficult to administer!
Thoughtful Today
Kirsten Gillibrand’s legislation provides that “when a mom has a baby, she can, in fact, stay home with that baby for three months rather than go back to work at the end of one week.”
Clinton’s balloon-juice partisans think that is a “demented”, “asinine”, “loser proposal”?
Seriously?
You know who doesn’t think that: Mothers and fathers.
Maybe you think the infant thinks it’s a bad idea? It’s hard to get polling data on those tykes.
Another Holocene Human
@mclaren: what about such terms as hippodrome (the place of the horse race) and the sun-runner (helio-dromos sp?) of the Mithraic cult?
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@David Koch: Since the bill in the Senate (S.798) only has 19 co-sponsors, and was sent to die in the Finance Committee in March, it’s clear that it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.
Why did Bernie not support it, or at least not co-sponsor it, earlier?
It just seems like a totem at the moment. Sure, the Democrats should push for paid family leave, and doing it through the Social Security / Medicare / Disability system makes sense from a logical and efficiency standpoint.
But they and we know that the reporting on it will be almost exclusively confined to OMG! Higher Taxes!!11. If they really want to push this benefit as a contrast to the Teabaggers, they need to have a counterpoint other than “It’s only about $10 a year for the median family income!” We know one of the counterpoints will be – “Sure, it’s not much now, but you know that it will only increase! That’s what those tax-and-spend Democrats do!!1” :-/ Finding a way to break memes like that would be great, but I haven’t seen anyone find that yet.
It would be good to see Whitehouse’s response (he’s one of the original co-sponsors).
On the VAT stuff – I’d much rather see something like sales taxes apply to services and financial transactions than a national VAT. Maybe at a lower rate, but since those are such a large part of the economy now, they should contribute to the upkeep of society as well. So, I could get behind a small, national GST as opposed to a VAT, but the devil’s in the details.
Cheers,
Scott.
Applejinx
Huh, this is weird. I wonder if it’s bait?
Kind of like Donald Trump is prepared to bitchslap the whole ‘Bush Kept Us Safe’ thing, which was deemed inarguable…
Maybe Bernie is attempting two things: one, to say ‘kick in a buck a year so ALL AMERICAN MOMS can stay home nursing babies for three months, not even at full pay either: literally the least we can do’ and see who throws an ugly fit over Mom (and Apple Pie?)
Two: is there a context, any context, in which you can say ‘across the board tax hike’ and break the curse? Because this is stupid. We need services and for some things government is WAY better than a freemarket capitalist ratrace (pharmaceuticals? 4000% price increase?) and after being strangled in a bathtub for decades we cannot simply set government free to provide all the great economies-of-scale services and also cut its revenues even more because you always do that.
I don’t know exactly what conditions are required for breaking that spell (the Grover Norquist spell now being defended hardest by Teahadis) but the defenders are looking insane for other reasons, and are pushing very hard to shut government down completely in service of this aim.
I wonder if that’s it. Maybe as a tactic because the bill requires it, maybe not calculated from the start for this purpose: but if the idea is ‘You will kick in a buck a year… for THIS. How, since you can’t object to supporting Mom? They’re called ‘taxes’ and they’re not supposed to be zero because they do things’.
I don’t know. D: or, possibly this is Bernie continuing to go for broke? Recognizing that he is SO strong with the people (rather than the Village) that he’s going to both settle them down a bit, and SHOVE the window leftward knowing that people aren’t going to drop him? If he can float the idea of taxing literally everybody a buck for Mom, either he or Hillary will look very generous by proposing to just soak the rich. This could be a trial balloon to soften people up.
I think it’s Bernie being shocking on purpose. He can do this because he never intended to win, he intended to shove Hil to the left and make that plausible. Exit strategy? Or doubling down?
I’ve literally given Bernie, directly, a couple hundred dollars, and I am poor as shit. I’d like to see what he does with that because he’s better at this governmenting stuff than me, and keeps track of things I don’t know about.
If he wants me to kick in another buck for Mom in taxes, just to make the point, he’s got my blessing. What the FUCK do people think taxes are for anyway, decorating Aaron Schock’s office? Oh wait. So does that mean we abandon all roads, all FDA and USDA etc and forget taxes, or do we throw Schock the fuck out and kick in an extra buck for Mom?
Call it kicking in a buck for Mom. That’s apparently what it is, aka ‘taxes’. We are just not used to the government doing a fucking thing for Mom besides maybe bombing her with drones. Time to reboot the government and make it do better things.
Marc
@Cervantes: The pathological hatred that some of the posters have for Sanders leads them to Greenwald levels of distortion. Yup, a 0.2 percent tax increase dedicated to paid family leave is totally and completely out of bounds.
Christ on a stick, the special snowflakes still nursing a grudge from the initial BLM skirmishes with Sanders need to grow up.
Applejinx
I just realized something else. Never mind that our choices about whether to compel Mom to get back to work immediately and be incredibly stressed out in the formative earliest months of her baby’s life directly affects what the next Americans will BE like, whether they’ll be fucked up or well adjusted and so on. Never mind that, it’s too practical or something. What about this?
Don’t the wingnuts, particularly biblethumpey social conservatives and Quiverfull and so on, WANT Mom to only stay home making babies?
This is literally about paying for Mom to stay home focusing on babies. You’d think that would resonate with a certain type of conservative. I guess we get to see if they’re serious about that.
Cervantes
@mclaren:
Hey, thanks, but I’ll stick with my translations, if you don’t mind.
@Applejinx:
You’re on to something. I like it.
Cervantes
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
To heck with them, how about you? What can you do to make it happen?
Cervantes
@mclaren:
And by assorted dopes here and there.
And the sun rose in the East this morning.
Cervantes
@David Koch:
Except no one said that, and therefore no one could have cheered.
What Sanders has said is that we should learn from how economic policy in the Scandinavian countries helps working people as opposed to the already-wealthy. Feel free to disagree, but do it honestly and out in the open, if you know how.
Cervantes
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Yes, I would get rid of it.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Cervantes: What I’ve been doing – that’s about it. Commenting, pushing back (some) on things I find stupid, contributing to candidates and organizations that I support.
You?
Cheers,
Scott.
burnspbesq
@hilts:
I take it you’ve never been to a game at Citizens Bank Park.
The Sailor
@efgoldman Pats barely made it past the Colts. One TD, and a bad call.
After The Pats, and Brady, have to cry whining to Federal Courts just to make it make him allowed to play.
The Pats don’t have to cheat, they choose to.