I wish candidates (and others) would put legit links in their email, because then I could look at them and be reasonably confident they were legit.
I want to make a donation to a candidate, but I want to make it in the most efficient way possible—without some intermediary siphoning off a bunch of the money. I especially don’t want some rival tricking me with a bogus solicitation.
The email looks legit, but the link to click.actionnetwork.org followed by several hundred random characters does not fill me with confidence. (Some research makes me think it is legit.)
Cory Doctorow points out a key—and helpful to us—aspect of Project 2025:
These are the conflicts that are so central to the priorities of blocs that are so important to the coalition that they must be included, even though that inclusion constitutes a blinking “LOOK AT ME” sign telling us where the right is ready to split apart.
This makes me really want to read Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger:
there is a tradition on the radical left when it comes to mistrusting the system, and a tradition on the radical right for seizing on that mistrust when they can.
I’m generally unimpressed with Krysten Sinema, whose failure to support Democratic initiatives has generally been harmful. However, I kinda like the tax changes she’s forced into the climate package.
Fundamentally, I like dividends and I hate stock buybacks. So a tax on stock buybacks—even a small one—makes things better.
Now, most economists would have you believe that the two are equivalent. This is false.
Economists can gin up a model that suggests that owning a slightly larger share of a slightly smaller company is “equivalent” to getting paid a share of the company’s profits. Or that getting cashed out completely (by taking the buyback), and then finding a place to invest almost all of that cash in some new company is somehow equivalent. I don’t think either of those things is true even in an economic sense, but I think both are clearly false in a larger societal sense.
New York Stock Exchange
The way things used to work was that a company earned a profit, reinvested an appropriate amount of that profit in growing the business, and then paid out the balance to shareholders to do with as they pleased. (They could reinvest the money by buying more stock, they could spend it on luxuries—or necessities, they could invest it in some other company, they could donate it to charity—the possibilities are literally endless.)
This situation produces a sort of virtuous circle. A company that earns a reliable profit—and shares it with its stockholders—becomes more valuable, because people will pay more for a company that pays a reliable dividend. It’s good for the owners (their stock is worth more), it’s good for the employees (both line workers and managers), it’s good for the community (a profitable company pays taxes, their employees have money to spend, their shareholders have money to spend, etc.).
The non-dividend situation lacks all these dynamics. Instead of wanting to produce a profit, the company has all sorts of weird incentives—to maximize “growth” or “revenue” or “earnings” according to whatever weird metric appeals to Wall Street that week. Owners don’t get cash that they can spend. Instead they get the option to cash out at random intervals. The weird incentive structure encourages companies to make weird decisions regarding investing in growth (or dumping cash into buybacks). Shareholders who would otherwise be living on dividends are constantly having to make difficult decisions about selling small amounts of shares in this or that company for money to live on.
Maybe there’s some technical economic sense in which buybacks and dividends are equivalent, but they are very much not equivalent in a societal sense, producing very different results for ordinary investors and their communities.
The only reason any ordinary person would think a stock buyback was even close to equivalent is because capital gains have been tax-advantaged over dividends. So, something that reduces that tax advantage is all to the good.
Some decades back I read a pretty good book that advocated for a “guaranteed job” for anyone who wanted one as a better solution to poverty than a “citizen wage” (or any sort of welfare assistance). I don’t remember all the details in the book, but the advantages primarily had to do with preserving the existing social structures around employment.
One question I always struggled with had to do with the strength of the guarantee. Suppose a few percent of the people with such jobs have (as I do) seasonal depression such that they cannot be productive during the winter months. Would the job guarantee permit them to simply show up and get paid, even though they can’t get any work done until spring?
This particular for-instance matters to me, as one who suffers from SAD, but it’s a broader problem—lots of people have some sort of condition, medical or otherwise, that makes them unproductive for long stretches of time. Do they get to keep their guaranteed job? How can you tell them from malingerers? Does it matter? How do you deal with workplace tensions when many perceive their coworkers as not doing their fair share of the work?
These sorts of issues are why I’ve always come down on the side of a universal basic income as a better way to reduce both poverty and the abuses that come along with having a few rich people and a vast class of precarious workers. But I’m willing to give alternatives serious consideration, as long as they work for people like me.
Bemused by people surprised re Afghanistan. This outcome widely forecast; anybody with two clues to rub together saw it coming 20 years ago. Last chance for anything different: when Cheney and Rumsfeld invaded Iraq rather than spend money and attention in Afghanistan.
It is perpetually tempting to imagine letting the red states (whose voters imagine that they are getting the short end of the stick, when in fact they are vastly subsidized) go their own way. Tempting, but both impossible and harmful.
Much better, as cogently explained here by @interfluidity, is to build things up in the red states, so that their citizens perceive that they have an economic and political stake in the United States.
“The only way to mitigate this tendency towards corrosive crisis is to ensure that differences of interest between larger and smaller states are generally modest.”
