If you want a general idea for why the entire political media seems horny for Trump to be back… https://t.co/Oz9B2LoDRk
— Centrism Fan Acct đš (@Wilson__Valdez) March 27, 2024
the New York Times is now running op-eds insisting Joe Biden is unpopular in *another country.* (The only current polling the op-ed cites in support of its core premise shows Irish people prefer Biden to Trump by a 50-14 margin.) pic.twitter.com/17g41j8T8w
— Jamison Foser (@jamisonfoser) March 27, 2024
TIRED: going to a small-town diner to center the views of Trump voters
WIRED: crossing a whole damn ocean to find someone to criticize Joe Biden
— Jamison Foser (@jamisonfoser) March 27, 2024
As my Irish granny would’ve said, he’ll live, and do well of it:
Despite votersâ doubts about Joe Biden and the economy, the president is pushing an âidea that would once have been almost unthinkable,â writes @FeliciaWongRI. âHe is vowing â almost gleefully â to raise taxesâ on the rich.
Read: https://t.co/0H7CYmO5kf
— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) March 27, 2024
A rather different ‘guest essay’ — Felicia Wong, “Biden Is Breaking Campaign Rule No. 1. And It Just Might Work.” [gift link]:
Should we have trillionaires? Should we even have billionaires? According to at least one recent analysis, the economy is on track to mint its first trillionaire â that is 1,000 billion â within a decade. Such staggering accumulations of wealth are made possible in large part by the fact that Americaâs federal tax burden is so comparatively light. After a long period of seeming to venerate the 1 percent, or the 1 percent of 1 percent of 1 percent, American sentiment is swinging hard against this imbalance.
Now President Biden, behind in many polls and with an economy that is objectively strong but politically unpopular, is hoping to boost his re-election bid with a policy idea that would once have been almost unthinkable: For this portion of the population, at least, he is vowing â almost gleefully â to raise taxes.
Even for a popular president, this would seem like a huge risk. For a Democrat with low job approval ratings and precarious poll numbers on his handling of the economy, itâs a shocking rebuke to conventional wisdom â and practically an invitation to critics to call him a tax-and-spend liberal. But on the politics as well as the policy, Mr. Biden is making the right call. Economic ideas that were once dead on arrival are now gaining traction on both the left and the right. The moment has arrived for changes in the tax code â and maybe beyond…
Anti-tax activists made cutting taxes an explicit political litmus test. In 1988, George H.W. Bush famously pledged, âRead my lips: no new taxes.â Twenty-five years later, Barack Obama modestly raised taxes on the highest-earning Americans, but he kept quiet about it, instead touting middle-class tax cuts that, he said, left middle-income families with a lower tax rate than at âalmost any other period in the last 60 years.â
Fast-forward to Mr. Biden, who is making $5 trillion in tax increases central to his re-election campaign. During his State of the Union speech this month, he even made fun of Republicans for favoring cuts. Getting the rich to pay their share is right up there with getting greedy companies to stop charging you junk fees and, he said, shrinking your Snickers bars.
What explains the pivot? The president is following the money. Over the past decade and even more since the pandemic, wealth concentration has shot up astonishingly. Elon Musk was worth about $25 billion in 2020 and at the end of 2023 was worth almost 10 times that. In 1990 there were nearly 70 American billionaires. Today there are nearly 700. To what earthly end are we encouraging trillionaires?…
Could we get past the sense that taxes are what the government takes and toward an idea of taxes as a means of patriotism, a kitty we all pay into to build something for community use: a school, a library, a road, a college, a hospital? What if taxation could bring us all together? Itâs not that wild an idea. As the political scientist Vanessa Williamson notes, both liberal and conservative Americans view paying taxes as a moral duty. Just think of the pride with which people refer to themselves as taxpayers.
Of course, taxes are a civic good only if the tax rules are perceived as being fair. Which is why Mr. Bidenâs calculated risk could pay many dividends come November.
Peter Baker weeps into a starched linen hankie. Them dear, departed days!…
No truer words pic.twitter.com/DlIBv8Cmt8
— AlwaysOnVacation (@AlwaysOnVacati3) March 27, 2024
Baud
Hasn’t Dems always campaigned on raising taxes on the wealthy?
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
I am so sick of the media narrative, especially since it is so stuck in the 80s and 90s. Itâs like the last four decades never even happened!
Thank god for President Joe, who has moved forward with the rest of us, despite being a creature of those times.
But the media refuses to update themselves.
âContemporize, man!â
David đ âThe Establishmentâđ Koch
No drama O’Biden
Matt McIrvin
I poked around Google News to verify the story about Joe Lieberman and saw a couple of op-eds weirdly touting RFK Jr.’s VP pick as transforming his candidacy into a serious bid to heal America, or something. I don’t know what’s going on with the mainstream media.
TBone
BREAKING: California State Bar recommends that John Eastman be disbarred.
CaseyL
@Matt McIrvin: The MSM has spent the last few years gutting regional newspapers, firing their real reporters, and making nepo/social media hires.
There are few if any actual journalists left. The ones remaining are studying to stay in their employers’ good graces… and their employers are soulless ghouls who have all adopted Rupert Murdoch as their model of a modern news monger
@TBone: Good! But I’m confused about the mechanism: does the State Bar follow its own recommendations? Is there another. hearing or meeting or whatever to actually do the deed?
Betty
@TBone: Good. Jeffery Clark may be next.
Tony Jay
Dorothy A. Winsor
@TBone: Good. Now do Clark
ETA: Me and Baud: Two heads with a single thought
TBone
TBone
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I like your style Dorothy! Rush Limbaugh is still dead as well.
And I like Baud’s style too!
Brachiator
I didn’t look at this story because I already know that it is beyond stupid. In the UK, Tory government officials are perpetually butthurt because the mutual love affair between Biden and the Republic of Ireland meant that the Brits could not pull any bullshit related to BREXIT involving the Good Friday Agreement.
sab
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon: Biden was a creature of the 1970s, when we still believed in government.
TBone
@CaseyL: Not being a CA resident, I have no idea. My imagination says that recommendation has weight though.
bjacques
@Matt McIrvin: in light of her background, her campaign slogan has to be: Do Your Own Research, America!
Princess
Judging by the normies on my FB feed, taxing billionaires would be enormously popular.
Brachiator
@Matt McIrvin:
What news sites published these op-ed pieces? Most stuff I’ve seen treat RFK Jr as a weird joke. Or a political fart.
@CaseyL:
Newspapers have been dying for some time now. I don’t think that many people here read or subscribe to any newspaper. And for the general public, newspapers are a quaint relic of an earlier age.
WaterGirl
Unthinkable? Â Only if your’e a rich asshole or doing the bidding of the rich assholes at the NYT!
edit: I couldn’t bear to read much of that article when I saw it earlier, the whole premise is ridiculous.
Scout211
Re: Eastman
Martin
@TBone: Yeah, I don’t know law licensing particularly well, but I’m pretty familiar with other forms.
The license is issued by the state board of labor (or equivalent) but leaves the qualification for licensing largely to the professional organization – the state bar. Same for doctors and engineers and a bunch of others. The profession determines what is appropriate qualification and behavior, which varies somewhat by state – sometimes for good reason, sometimes not.
So my guess is that if the bar tells the state that his license should be revoked, the state will do exactly that. There may be an appeal process through a proper court, but that’s about it.
Tony Jay
@Brachiator:
I canât even figure out what the point of that article is supposed to be about. Biden is supposed to be more popular in Ireland than some arbitrary percentage figure the hack writing it picks? Heâs supposed to have 60% pick him over Trump? 70%? Otherwise heâs technically âunpopularâ?
Iâm just going to go with the theory that someone had to start bulking up their quota of anti-Biden hit pieces and decided a bit of McArgle level contrarian gymnastics about Joeâs Beloved Oireland was the way to do it.
Kristine
@Brachiator: One RFK Jr article was in the Atlantic: “The outsider candidate has money, a running mate, and a growing army of supporters determined to upend the election.”
WaterGirl
@Tony Jay: Hey Tony Jay,
Is the email you use for Balloon Juice a live account that you actually check? Â I want to send you a message so I am wondering.
Brachiator
I am very much on the left when it comes to social policy, but although I believe in a progressive tax system, this kind of nonsense is dumber than the Apple Antitrust Lawsuit.
Fight me.
And despite receiving the blessing of Elizabeth Warren’s economic advisors, most countries have tended to avoid wealth taxes.
ETA. For the gazillionth time, no one paid taxes at the highest rates when the top marginal tax rate was 90 percent. The top effective tax rate was around 40 percent. And there were rich people paying no taxes, which is why Congress finally got around coming up with the alternative minimum tax.
Sister Golden Bear
Details about the CA judge recommendating Eastman be disbarred. Also, from a paywalled SF Chronicle article:
I’m sure the CA Supreme Court will follow the recommendation.
FelonyGovt
@TBone: Good, at least my Bar dues arenât ALL wasted.
Layer8Problem
And “Glad to see John Eastman is going though some things” pops up in my rotating tags up top. Thank you WaterGirl, I think.
Tony Jay
@WaterGirl:
It is.
If itâs about the rumours that I masquerade as Ever So Sore when hopped up on furniture polish and carpet cleaner cocktails, donât believe a word of it.
Jackie
Curious; can Presidents restore a lawyerâs license? How many lawyers have been disbarred because of misplaced loyalty to TIFG?
Brachiator
@Kristine:
Thanks for the Atlantic link to the RFK Jr story. My browser froze when I tried to read the piece, which is probably a good thing.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Princess:
I’m far from normal and I’m all for it! Tax them fuckers into millionaires.
Dan B
@Betty: Clark apparently had a bad day in court, 5th on repeat and a witness testimony was brutal.
Good
There are questions about next steps / consequences for Eastman as Dean of Chapman University School of Law.
Baud
@Jackie:
No.
Sister Golden Bear
@Jackie: IANAL, but presidents can only pardon federal criminal convictions. Since they can’t pardon state convictions, I’m assuming they can’t state pardon disbarments, which would also be considered a civil penalty that’s outside the reach of a presidential pardon.
Scout211
They just updated his listing on the State Bar of California site.
WaterGirl
@Layer8Problem: Â :-)
WaterGirl
@Tony Jay: Dammit, did you have my phone bugged???
RSA
I think this is a danger. A lot of the news-related sites I read, aside from the newspapers I subscribe to, are aggregators and opinion sites. Like this one. It’s all fine, part of the news ecosystem, but in the end we do need original news reporting.
Way back in 2010 Pew did a study of news in my city and found some disturbing things.
…
I’m guessing things have changed, but not for the better. The bit about stories being initiated by government is surprising but believable. I don’t know where news reporting will come from if people aren’t willing to pay for it.
OzarkHillbilly
@Brachiator: I prefer to just, “Kill the rich.”
WaterGirl
@Scout211: Does inactive mean revoked, I wonder?
Or is that like staying a ruling while you figure out what’s next?
Scout211
No, itâs just a hold until the final decision is made. Â He canât practice law starting next week but he hasnât been disbarred yet.
OzarkHillbilly
Is he even a member of the bar? No? Than no.
Layer8Problem
@WaterGirl: Hey, we notice this stuff out here in TV Land! đ
Another Scott
Warning Politico – from September 2021:
They want the eyeballs and clicks again. They figure the rest of society and government will take care of themselves if TIFG gets in – “not our job…”
Grr…,
Scott.
Another Scott
@Baud: Of course.
Clinton balanced the budget by raising taxes on the wealthy. First time the budget was balanced since LBJ.
Didn’t matter. He wasn’t a GQPer so it didn’t count.
Grr…,
Scott.
JaySinWA
@RSA: Don’t blame me, this household has 3 paid newspaper subscriptions.
Martin
@Jackie: Oh, absolutely not. There’s about a dozen reason why that’s not a thing.
Brachiator
@OzarkHillbilly:
“Quand les pauvres n’auront plus rien Ă manger, ils mangeront les riches!” (When the poor have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich!).
Attributed to Rousseau
Steve in the ATL
@WaterGirl: did you try [email protected] ?
Steve in the ATL
@OzarkHillbilly:Â @Jackie: no. And itâs irrelevant whether the president is a member of the state bar. Â No individual has that power, even within the state bar.
Chief Oshkosh
@Baud: Yes.
SAFSQ
WaterGirl
@Steve in the ATL: I knew I should have asked you first!
Dammit, note to self. Â Always go with your first thought.
persistentillusion
@RSA: In Colorado, people from the Denver Post, Rocky Mountain News and other local news orgs are trying a new approach. The https://coloradosun.com/ has original reporting, and interestingly to me, they quantify their reporting like this:
Type of Story: News
Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
I think it’s an interesting new model and I support them financially. They’ve been around about 5 years.
ETA: their reporters are all people laid off or fired from the above-referenced news sources.
bcwbcw
The “lost the Irish” author is from the Irish Times, in its defense they are responsible for the following quote about the British monarchy:
Chief Oshkosh
I have a few Irish friends and acquaintances living in Ireland (N=5). FWIW, they love Biden and they tell me that he’s quite popular. They also thought O’Bama was great. They all thought Shrub was a complete loser moron and they think even less of Trump.
But then, none of them are rich…
Another Scott
@RSA: I haven’t read the story.
[ cynic hat ]
How new is this, really?
UPI and AP were created to send stories to a common place and then newspapers could pick and choose what to put in their papers.
Decent size cable outfits usually have “public access” channels that have cameras at local city council and school board meetings and the like as part of the contract for being allowed to have a quasi-monopoly in town. They’ve been there for decades. C-Span has existed for decades. Who actually watches them?
[ / cynic hat ]
News reporting is important. Citizens need to be informed about what’s going on. But lots of things are important and there are only so many hours in the day. I’m not sure that news needs to be from a daily newspaper, especially a daily newspaper that is controlled by a zillionaire who pushes his dirty hands on the wrong side of the truth scale.
(Yes, publishers have always had their points of view, Remember the Maine and all that.) But there were always alternatives to the various scandal sheets – other papers, strong unions, strong churches, strong universities, and political agitators of all kinds. Similarly, while we often don’t have those things any more, we have a huge variety of easily available news sources now that are just a click away.
tl;dr – if there isn’t a commercial newspaper covering local issues, then maybe people in the town don’t see the need for it. Maybe they get their local news other ways, or their lives are so full that they just don’t have space and time to be informed about it and trust their local representatives to handle it. Trying to guilt people into spending hundreds of dollars a year for newspaper is probably a losing strategy.
Dunno.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
Ken
Surely the important question is whether the God-Emperor in Perpetuity of These United States can.
sab
@Jackie: Lawyers are licensed by individual states. They can be licensed in several states, but each state’s license is its own thing.
Jackie
@Steve in the ATL: I didnât really think so; I just needed the reinforced reassurances! Thank yâall!đ
waspuppet
Michelle Wolf is forgetting Trump’s stewardship of the USFL. He failed at selling football to Americans.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@WaterGirl:
He’s a Brit, I think they use “buggered”. ;)
Jackie
@Ken: Yes, I confess that worry did have something to do with my wondering.
Brachiator
@RSA:
There is a site called “Newspaper Deathwatch,” which had been moribund for a while, but which recently posted the following.
While ordering some takeout, I overheard a group of young people talk about news. One person noted that the only person she saw read a physical newspaper was her grandfather. Not even her father. So, two generations from old, traditional news media.
A lot of people see news as at best distraction or entertainment, and they want entertainment to be free, or at most cost 19.99 a month for an infinite amount of product.
prostratedragon
My favorite “4 years ago:”
trollhattan
@Brachiator:
Our sole local paper is a sliver of its former self, perhaps 10% of the editorial staff and not enough people in the op-ed staff to fill a Suburban. We still subscribe on hopes it somehow lurches back to life and not be owned by Oklahoma wingnuts.
Digital costs $16/month, dead-tree is $9/week.
Do not see this ending well.
ETA they sold off their sprawling property to housing developers and contract for printing the fifty or so physical copies that get delivered. The old vending boxes are all cat play structures or something.
trollhattan
@prostratedragon:
That shit is like reading “Today, a hundred years ago, Kaiser Wilhelm was referred to in print as “His Satanic Majesty.”*
*True fact, did not know the Stones had not coined the term.
TBone
@Betty: Ron Filipkowski said the disbarment hearing will be live- streamed on Tuesday.
catclub
I don’t really follow this. Is the MSM the owners of the regional newspapers? I think the regional newspapers are ‘failing’ because before craig’s list and the internet classifed ads were a license to print money. When that went away the owners wanted to invest in something, anything, much more profitable than what newspapers are now.
Kristine
@Brachiator: I probably should’ve sent it as a gift link. Trying again.
Ken
@Brachiator: I see the group’s legislative goals are (1) tax credits for newspapers and (2) subsidies for companies that advertise in newspapers. I don’t see how either of those will address the problem that fewer and fewer people subscribe to newspapers.
Perhaps the end state will be something like Colonial Williamsburg, where tourists can visit a “newspaper office” and see them “reporting”, and leave with a souvenir printed paper.
CaseyL
@TBone:Â Must see TV!
I’ve mentioned before that I subscribe to a lot of newsletters, many of them reporters who have gone through the “newspaper/TV news > Twitter > Substack > ????” wringer.
Then there are a few who’ve set up their own blogs, or taken shelter in nascent aggregators (like Defector Media), or banded together to do pure investigative reporting (ProPublica).
Most have a free subscription level, and then modest subscriptions rates for full access.
The news is out there, but you have to want to find it.
Ken
In other legal news, Sam Bankman-Fried’s sentencing is Thursday. The prosecution is recommending 50 to 60 years — lenient, in a way, since the sentencing guidelines add up to 110 years — and restitution of $11 billion. Bankman-Fried has requested 5 to 6 years and no restitution. This is all from Molly White’s newsletter.
Brachiator
@catclub:
RE: The MSM has spent the last few years gutting regional newspapers, firing their real reporters, and making nepo/social media hires.
That wasn’t my quote. I agree with you that classified advertising evaporated and doomed many newspapers. Also, the decline in display advertising. The few that had some revenues were further hurt by bad financial decisions and some by hedge fund managers.
Captain C
@waspuppet: I still donât understand how âwhat kind of businessman bankrupts three casinos AND runs an entire football league into the ground?â wasnât a central part of the Clinton campaign.
NorthLeft
Yes, because it has been proven time and again that taxing obscenely wealthy people fairly will absolutely cause you to lose the middle class voteâŚ.says who?
WTF?!? Being in the upper middle class virtually all my life I call bullshit on this ridiculous assertion.
JaneE
I understand that a book about competent people just doing their jobs in a well managed organization might be a snoozer for the average reader, but it would be a textbook for how to fix the real mess your predecessor leaves and valuable to historians for that alone. OH well.
I admit that I am kind of (?) strange about a lot of things, but I have never felt oppressed by taxes. I have benefitted from government spending, even though I really bitch about the state of our roads (or the state of our potholes, asphalt between them is almost optional in some places) but without my share of taxes it would be even worse. If I make more money I should have to pay more money. It is not as if I don’t have more money in my pocket too. Progressive tax brackets are designed to take more funds from those with more funds, which is probably why the GOP prefers regressive taxation. Don’t take my money because I am rich, but take poor peoples’ money and make them suffer more seems like the GOP take.
You should have seen the looks I got when I said I didn’t think taxes were too high, since they were lower than any time in my life – that was after the Bush2 tax cuts, I think. Most everyone there was close enough to my age to remember when marginal rates were over 50%, and most of us should have remembered 70% top rates but the damn idiots tried to claim that taxes were the “highest” they have ever been. Sales taxes (recessive) are higher. Social Security taxes are higher – by law, signed by St. Ronnie back in the 80’s, again a more recessive than not tax because of the income limit.
The GOP has been trying to undercut education for decades, and a generation or two of ignorant fools is what they want and we are stuck with. Makes me glad I am old. I feel sorry for the kids who will live through even worse.
wjca
To be fair, it may have been true. When the super wealthy were worth maybe 25-50 times what the upper middle class were worth. But when they’re up at 500 to 1,000 times? Whole different deal.
At this point, you could set a wealth tax lower limit at 50 times the upper middle class level (i.e. about the very most they could dream of seeing in their working lives), and they’d cheer. And inequality would get brought down while giving the government a 1 time windfall. One which could get a whole lot of dangerously-past-its-design-life infrastructure refurbished or replaced as appropriate.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
That bridge disaster yesterday reminded me how absurdly focused the MSM has become on politics, or rather Trump. There are two wars right now, and all they want to do is obsessed over this love child of Archie Bunker and Al Bundy.
Fair Economist
@Brachiator:
My mother *wants* to subscribe to a newspaper. And can’t. Metropolitan Birmingham, AL, population 1.2 million, doesn’t have a traditional newspaper. She’s tried subscribing to some smaller nearby cities which, oddly, still do, but they deliver by mail about once a week, and she says, “what’s the point?”.
Brachiator
@Fair Economist:
I presume that your mother is old.
What happened to the traditional newspapers? When did they die?
Ironcity
@JaneE: Changes suggested for the tax laws come up all the time. When Alternative Minimum Tax came around I thought the rich would finally have to give at least a little more but it just seemed to result in more computations to make. Sure, I paid more and the way the computations were done 3 or 4 levels down the really rich didn’t end up paying more. Hmmm
The tax laws are like the laws in general that just seem to accrete more and more sections, addendums, and provisions until there is no way practically to print the things, you have to have searchable electronic versions. The laws, and associated regulations, should be treated like large ships and every so often they should be hauled out and all the weed and barnacles scraped off, a new coat of antifouling paint applied and put back in service for another while, nice and clean and more efficient and fit for purpose.  I’m not holding my breath, and you shouldn’t either..
Miss Bianca
@persistentillusion: Colorado Sun does a fine job.
Paul in KY
@Tony Jay: You should try an Ever So Sore parody once. Bet you’d do a better one than he does.