Lawfare Is The Stupidest MAGA Neologism

 When the Biden DOJ began - slowly, oh so slowly - to investigate and prosecute Trump for his many crimes, his partisans screamed "Lawfare! They're weaponizing the Justice system!" The reality, of course, is that Trump WAS guilty of crimes. We know this because he was fucking convicted by a jury in NY. The other indictments never made it to trial, but there's a pretty good chance that he would have been convicted. 

The Lawfare idea was an example of two different aspects of MAGA. The first is that every accusation is a confession. Trump has treated the DOJ as his own private law firm to sue, bully and persecute his enemies. The other day, they went looking for a third indictment against James Comey. They couldn't even get an indictment against Cassidy Hutchinson. 

The second is the idea of muddying the waters so thoroughly that you can't distinguish the actual criminality with the firehose of scandals and quasi-scandals and outrages that flood your media. They are seeking to inoculate themselves from future prosecutions, by complaining about what is effectively their own behavior. Launch vindictive prosecution after vindictive prosecution and then you can complain that every prosecution is vindictive. 

This even has international implications, with the recent treatment of Flavio Bolsonaro. MAGA screams about criminal entering the country illegally, then illegally bring in a criminal. Not just Bolsonaro, but the Tate Brothers qualify as opening the doors for right wing criminals. 

This drives home the fundamental truth of Trump and MAGA: this is a group that is completely devoid of principles. Trump has always been intensely transactional in his relationships. A wife is not life partner (ha), best friend and helpmeet, but an ornament that exists as long as she looks good on his arm. A business deal is only successful if it screws over the other guy. Political figures only exist to serve him. 

The idea of "justice" as an abstract principle is so foreign to the marrow of MAGA that it cannot even occur to them that people might want to prosecute people "on their side" for crimes. Democrats aren't perfect, but they have moved pretty quickly to disown Graham Platner, Eric Swalwell and Bob Menendez when their misdeeds became apparent. Meanwhile, MAGA wants to shove Ken Paxton - a cartoonishly evil character - into a 6 year Senate term. Is he a criminal? Almost certainly, but he's on the team.

What's more, a criminal investigation of Paxton is not about finding whether he committed crimes but "lawfare." 

Recently, Elissa Slotkin said that there needed to be criminal investigations and prosecutions of low level MAGA people to dissuade the lawless behavior that is swirling through the People's Government. The equation was inherently conservative: If you have committed a crime, you should fear prosecution. It was not, however, "Conservative" in Wilhoit's Law, which says, "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." 

In MAGA, the in-group is, well, MAGA. The law should protect them from swarthy brown criminals, but not bind their own rampant criminality. 

If History is to be our guide, there will come a reckoning for MAGA. Perhaps it starts in a few days. Perhaps the true reckoning comes in 2029, but it will come. When it does, there will be voices suggesting that prosecuting the tsunami of corruption would be bad because Trump engaged in frivolous prosecutions and prosecuting him and his cronies would be the same. These are terrible voices and we should punch them in the fucking mouth. 

Collapse

 Richardson cheerily relates the circumstances of the Market Crash of 1929. Krugman, meanwhile, looks at the situation from today forwards. 

The three things Krugman looks at are a possible stagflation cycle, a liquidity trap caused by the bursting of the AI bubble and a debt crisis. All three are very, very bad. 

The stagflation argument has to be linked - though Krugman doesn't do so explicitly - to rising energy costs. The Iran war has caused energy prices - and therefore the price of everything that requires oil to be produced or shipped - to spike, and as businesses begin to price this in, that can create rising prices, even as the economy does not grow. There is some evidence that we are seeing to productivity gains related to AI, but the real economy - as opposed to the stock market - does not seem to be growing at the same rate as prices are rising.

The liquidity trap is related to the AI situation, because if that's a bubble (and it sure seems to be) and it bursts, the US is not in a great position to escape the downturn with monetary stimulus, because interest rates are already fairly low. We could spend our way out, but that leads to the third risk, which is a debt crisis.

It seems unlikely that the US could enter a debt crisis - France might -  because of the way the dollar functions. But the extraordinary costs of borrowing means that interest payments on US debt are rising at a time when we already have problems with revenues - Thank, Republicans! - and, oh, yeah, we are fighting a war with Iran.

Krugman also notes that there are risks we can't see. He talks about how Covid screwed everything up without warning, but what about a massive hack or crash of the digital world because of AI. That seems far more likely than SkyNet becoming self aware and wiping out humanity.

What goes unstated by Krugman, but Richardson nods at, perhaps without realizing the connection, is that we have absolute fucking morons running things in DC. Andrew Mellon's policies were a leading cause of the Great Depression, blinkered as he was by ideology. Trump is both blinkered and an idiot. The creatures he surrounds himself with warp themselves into his image. 

If any of these risks become reality, we don't have anyone in the Executive branch who seems capable of pulling us out. 

The market crash of 1929 didn't lead immediately to the "Great Depression." It led to one crisis, then another, most of which were met with poor or underwhelming responses. A depression was likely inevitable by the spring of 1929, but the Great Depression was created after October of '29.

Buckle up.

Taking Down A Warlord

 One hallmark of state dysfunction is the presence of warlords or regional powers within a country that are unanswerable to the national government. As state capacity declines, petty local rulers step into the gap and become powers unto themselves, unaccountable to the popular will.

Elon Musk should now be seen as a warlord within the teetering structure of American democracy. His decision to throttle Starlink and Starshield in Ukraine represents a form autonomy on matters of national security and national policy making that should be denied to any individual. You cannot have some ketamine-fueled autocrat unilaterally deciding whether a US ally - acknowledged and supported by the US Congress - has access to strategic assets.

What's more, Musk has done something that contemporary business leaders typically eschew: he has aligned himself not just with one political party, but one political figure. Some of this is the nature of Trump, who requires personal fealty, but some of this is Musk's complete simpering ignorance of how politics works in the US. Parties swap control of power, and that means that smart executives play both sides, give to both parties. Musk has wrapped himself so tightly around Trump that he's not really giving Democrats any reason NOT to go after him, once they have subpoena power. 

Musk's reputation as a genius is overblown. He has some decently profitable companies in Tesla and SpaceX, but their net profits are fairly low compared to their stock valuation. Tesla's P/E ration is a little over 350; SpaceX is somewhere between 160 and 225. Those numbers are...insane. Back before the tech start-up revolution, a safe P/E usually wouldn't exceed 20-25. Anything more than that would be considered intensely speculative. 

What's more, Musk's "safest" company is obviously SpaceX, because they have largely taken over satellite launches and Starlink is a genuinely impressive achievement. That company, though, is largely dependent on government contracts. What's more, if he's operating outside of governmental oversight and control, then he risks having the entire enterprise seized on national security grounds, and if he loses even a part of SpaceX, the whole enterprise collapses. 

Tesla is already getting hammered by people abandoning his cars in favor of companies not owned by megalomaniacal douchecanoes. Tesla's profits have declined 43% last year. People more on the left side of the spectrum are generally more likely to want to buy EVs and he's pissed them off all over the place. Europe has already hammered him and is trying to develop an alternative so SpaceX and Starlink. China obviously wants no part of ceding autonomy to someone who is not controlled by the Chinese state. If Musk loses cover in America, he's going to spend some time in the barrel.

Given that DOGE's murder of USAID is likely leading to the premature deaths of 100,000s of children, I'd say whatever brings this colossal colostomy bag to heel is a good thing. 

Polls And Narratives

 The follow-on revelations about Wedgewood polling add context to what we already know, but are not likely to be the end of what we will know. Wedgewood produced fake polls as a "social experiment" to see the impact of these fake polls on narratives. OK, so that's...bad. There is at least some evidence that this might have tilted close races, including the Michigan Senate race. Elliott Morris, who has been doggedly pursuing this story, suggests that the prime mover behind these polls was a Republican operative, but it might also be some degenerate Kalshi gamblers trying to sway "prediction markets."

The two big examples is that perhaps they tilted the Michigan race to Abdul El-Sayed and they certainly tried to tilt the Wisconsin race to Hong. Hopefully AES wins, because I think the Senate would be a better place with his perspective, but he could very well be an electoral underperformer in a Blue year. Hong thankfully lost, as she looked doomed in the general election. 

Ratfucking has always been a Republican prerogative, going back to Nixon. In Trumpistan, the reverence for the democratic will of the people is irrelevant, so ratfucking seems the least of things to worry about. Still, with Trump hitting historically low popularity numbers, the question is beginning to emerge about whether it will be a Blue Wave or Blue Tsunami. The numbers are reaching 2008 levels of anger at the GOP.

Ratfucking is all they have.

Getting a reform agenda through both Houses of Congress and past Trump's veto pen will be nearly impossible, but Democrats do need to be thinking seriously about reforms. A few places they should be looking:

- Ending partisan gerrymandering. This - and many other areas - are where legislation intersects with Court reform. Simply outlawing partisan and racial gerrymandering might not survive this Court's arbitrary constitutional interpretations, but they have to try.
- Campaign finance reform. This, too, will likely run afoul of the Court absent reform. At the very least, transparency laws need to exist.
- Prediction Markets. We have a gathering gambling scourge across multiple cultural avenues, but they need to ban gambling on political outcomes, even if they can't ban gambling on sports.
- Establish criminal penalties for fraud. This would include AI deep fakes, but also the Wedgewood nonsense. Electoral democracy cannot survive in a landscape where the very idea of objective truth is absent.

It's a lot and they won't get a lifted finger of help from the GOP. All they have is fraud and ratfucking. 

Drip, Drip, Drip

 Josh Marshall notes that we have defenestrated two corrupt Trump officials recently, and he warrants that more are to come. Trump is obviously the center of a massive amount of corruption himself. Do we think that Trump's latest betrayal of Ukraine is motivated by spite or perhaps corruption? Yes.

This all gives off vibes that Trump and the gangsters around him know that at least a Democratic House is coming, and that the good times of unbridled grift will give way to the times of slightly restrained grift. Trump himself knows that the Supreme Court has largely rendered him immune to prosecution, but the recent catapulting of various creatures around him suggests that either Trump is pissed that these goombahs got in on his action or that he doesn't want the headlines. He has to know that Capone went down for tax evasion.

One has to assume that the skittering grifters that circulate around Trump assumed that his immunity would transfer to them. However, Trump is absolutely and completely disloyal to anyone and everyone. He will stab you in the back and then complain that you got his knife all bloody. What happens when the pardons that they assumed would come don't come? When Kimberly Gargoyle gets called before prosecutors and discovers that there is no pardon coming, what tales could she tell?

Finally, there are quarters of the internet that consider the possibility of Democrats taking control of Congress as an impossibility. Trump will simply do another January 6th on steroids.

When you look at his actions, though, he doesn't look like he's got a plan for that? He looks like he's scared.

Not Sending Their Best

 Today, we have two stories of incompetence rising and crashing down among the grifters, clowns and incompetents that populate Trumpistan.

We have Kimberly Guilfoyle - shape shifting gargoyle that dated both Gavin Newsom and Don Junior - resigning as Ambassador to Greece because she got caught soliciting bribes. Was Guilfoyle qualified to be ambassador to Greece? Of course not. Was she corrupt? Naturally. Was she more corrupt than Trump? Heavens no. What was her sin? Getting caught.

Meanwhile we have a truly WTF moment featuring new Blonde Chatbot Katie Zacharia. Marshall's piece digs into her likely false claims about being a lawyer in China (China?) but the real story is that she gives off the Ms South Carolina vibes of someone whose personality comes from her hair dye. This is the official press secretary of the fucking White House. She seems largely incapable of reading her cue cards. Saturday Night Live should just quit, if this is the reality we live in.

We have levels of incompetence riddling our governing institutions. I have no idea what a Democratic House and Senate can do to stem the dismal tide of so much stupidity and greed.

Boutique, Concierge Treason

 Both Richardson and Krugman take aim at Elon Musk's efforts to prevent massive GOP losses by pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into dark money and other forms of campaign spending. I've been generally more skeptical of the idea that big money can save a bad candidate, especially in a bad political environment. However, there are two issues.

The first is that Democrats have greatly expanded the map in terms of competitive races. They seem to be leading in Alaska and Kansas, not to mention Texas. There are some vibes and data that places like South Carolina or Nebraska might be razor close. If Musk and other billionaires can make a 1-3% difference in the vote by spreading lies about transgender communists coming to make you wear a mask, then that might be the difference in those races. 

The second is that this represents the deeper pathologies of the hyper-rich of Silicon Valley. While the folks working at those companies are likely as liberal as most people with college degrees in the STEM areas, the Tech Lords are a weird-assed bunch of freaks. What's more is that they don't seem to understand the wheel of history. They are acting as if they will be immune from blowback from supporting Trump. 

The Gulf emirs, Netanyahu, various normie Republicans who all thought that they could deal with Trump have learned that he destroys everyone who comes into contact with him. He chews you up and spits you out, uses you and discards you. If that weren't enough, Democrats - I hope - will remember their perfidy when we have a trifecta again. These techbros are deeply unpopular, and like the earlier iteration of Robber Barons, they have so tightly aligned themselves with the Republican Party, that a broad progressive movement should keep the receipts and take them down.

It's similar to the Trump-Netanyahu axis of evil. As long as Likud rules Israel, I don't think a Democratic Administration can treat it as anything less than a hostile power. Same goes for Musk and the other cretins who were swept along with the tide of technological advancement but believed they were the moon itself.

Democracy v Oligarchy

 There is a clear sense that the mass of voters would prefer different policies than the self inflicted harm of Trump's erratic "policies." The Downballot notes that the historical trends of primary turnout suggest a 13 point advantage for Democrats this fall. Some of that advantage comes from disgust with Trump, which is running quite high. An autocrat unwilling to listen to criticism isn't likely to make popular choices or correct course.

The question really at this point is about money. In the olden times of "normal" politics, industries would lean one way or another in their contributions, because they wanted certain outcomes that aligned with one of the two parties. They would not, however, go all in on one party, because if that party gets locked out of power, then they can get hosed. (You see a similar dynamic with Netanyahu's bear hug of the GOP, which - along with his war crimes - has alienated Democrats to the point where supporting Israel is now a net negative in the Democratic Party.)

The problems that Democrats currently face is that Trump is vindicative prick who uses the powers of his office to punish his foes. If you give to Democrats, you could wind up seeing licenses yanked or meritless prosecutions initiated against you. That is usually reserved for Trump's public antagonists though. If you quietly give to the DNC, I don't think Trump will come after you.

The second issue is more problematic. The combination of Crypto Bros and Tech Lords who have moved decisively behind Trump and who have mountains of cash and a desire to be protected. Interestingly, this is less true of AI companies, who seem to be asking for regulation. Crypto, though, is a fundamentally bullshit industry whose main purpose sure seems to be criminal. The idea that Iran is using crypto to evade sanctions and fund their war industries, while Trump acts to insure no oversight of crypto is just a perfect distillation of the corruption and incompetence of Trump 2.0. 

It seems pretty clear that the broligarchy will spend heavily in behalf of the GOP this October. The question will be whether that makes a dent in the roiling anger of the American electorate.

GOP Healthcare Plan

 Apparently, it's "sue patients who can't pay, and then arrest them." 

I've been wondering just how far and where the backlash to Trump will manifest in November, and a place like Kansas is an interesting test case. Democrats have a strong candidate, but more than that, Trump's policies have been very damaging to farmers. The trade wars have shut off foreign markets, the deportations have crushed the agricultural work force, the Iran War has exploded the cost of diesel and fertilizer and the healthcare policies will shutter rural hospitals and clinics.

In Kansas, where you have the incumbent wrapped up both in the cuts to healthcare AND the draconian debt collection that accompanies our system, you have a real possibility to flipping a seat. Kansas has elected Democratic governors recently, often in the face of ideological incompetence. Iowa, too, could be ripe for a double-barreled message to the GOP.

Labor And Capital

 Richardson runs through the founding of Labor Day in the United States (and the backlash to a worker's political movement). One of the enduring mysteries in some quarters is why America never had a "Labour Party" (aside from the weird spelling). The best explanation is that workers had the vote far earlier than their counterparts in Europe and the Anglophone world. As a result, they joined existing parties rather than invest themselves in union movements that then merged with a political party once property restrictions on suffrage were removed.  In fact, the reluctance of Britain to extend the suffrage was likely a fear of the number of working class voters and what their votes might do to Britain. Mostly the result was that everyone get health care.

HCR has a quote from the Times in the 1880s arguing that everyone who works is a worker:

The New York Times denied that workers were any special class in the United States, saying that “[e]very one who works with his brain, who applies accumulated capital to industry, who directs or facilitates the operations of industry and the exchange of its products, is just as truly a laboring man as he who toils with his hands…and each contributes to the creation of wealth and the payment of taxes and is entitled to a share in the fruits of labor in proportion to the value of his service in the production of net results.”

I've seen this argument recently from - of all people - DSA types who want to make sure that their main demographic - college and post-college educated white people - don't feel threatened. "No, no, no, we aren't talking ACTUAL socialism. Just Vibe Socialism." I suppose that's a nice "big tent" approach, but I think it misses the actual issue.

There is a clear schism between people who work for wages and people who work for a salary. A lot of salaried jobs require a college degree, and that salary comes with benefits, usually. Even if you are "only" making a $55,000 a year salary, chances are you get health care and other perks. The whole compensation package is, just that, a package. If you work for $25 an hour, your pay is roughly the same, but you might not get the same benefits package.

Fair enough.

The real divide today though is not between wage earners and salaried employees. It is between wealth and income. You can earn $150,000 a year but not own enough stuff to be truly wealthy, especially if you are young. 

What Richardson did not talk about in her piece was that during the unrest from the laboring classes, one proposal from both Populists and Progressives was a graduated income tax. You earn more, you pay more. This was supposed to retard the growing accumulation of wealth from income.

In 2026, we have abandoned the idea that taxation can address inequality. We still mostly support some spending to address poverty (not most Republicans, but most Americans), but while we have a graduated income tax, we do not tax capital gains in the same aggressively progressive way. 

I don't know if Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax will work. I feel confident the Supreme Court will strike it down, but I also don't know precisely how it will work mechanically. How do you really assess wealth?  How can you tax a home the same as a stock portfolio?

Still, if we are going to arrest and rebuke the slide into oligarchy, we have to start somewhere. Encouragingly, we did it before.

Tax The Rich

 Krugman's weekend explainers are always pretty good, but today he looks at the decline in tax enforcement under the GOP going back to the 1980s. The story - unsurprisingly - has been that whenever possible, when Republicans have the trifecta, they slash enforcement measures by the IRS. The people most likely to avoid or evade taxes are the very rich. They have both the motive and means to create tax shelters or pass-through corporations or offshore accounts to avoid paying their share of tax. The tax code itself is legally crafted to preference capital over wages, and when you add various legal and illegal measures, the very rich pay a much smaller share of their yearly income or wealth than do people who earn most of their money through wages and salary.

When you hear various left wing populists talk about Medicare for All or expanding program X, they typically don't talk too much about where the money will come from, as they have learned from Republicans not to care about the national debt. However, we really are starting to get to a place where government borrowing to finance the debt is crowding out private borrowing, which is one reason why interest rates remain high. 

Closing the tax avoidance gap will by itself will not fund the progressive wish list. Particularly Medicare for All will require broad-based taxes to fund a broad-based program. You also likely need some version of a wealth tax to target the multi-billionaires, but again, this likely won't fund everything you want to do.

The thing is the billionaires have largely chosen their side. They are lining up behind Trump, because his own lawlessness and disregard for the public weal mirrors their own. Google just changed Lake Ontario to Lake America on Google Maps, which strikes me as a terribly short-sighted decision on the part of a company that is ripe for anti-trust prosecution under a Democratic administration. You could squint and see an argument that Democrats should go too hard after billionaires to prevent them from giving all their money to the GOP - most corporations balance their campaign contributions to preserve access to both sides. The billionaires have chosen their side, and like Trump himself, they aren't likely to be challenged on this by the murmuring minions who surround them.

Writing tax enforcement into law will help a lot. I would think you should also craft a treaty with the EU to standardize tax enforcement, because there will absolutely be efforts to hide wealth offshore. The Panama Papers were proof of that. Creating a universal enforcement regime and a universal suite of consequences would go a long way to stopping the descent into oligarchy. If Sergei Brin decides to avoid paying his taxes, and Google pays the price along side him, would he still avoid taxes?

Unravelling the corruption of Trumpistan will not be easy, and the Supreme Court will try and stand in the way. However, that has to be a major focus of the next Democratic trifecta. 

Go, Canada

 Trump has launched a trade war against arguably our closest ally, Canada. We have multiple trade agreements with Canada, but Trump's lawlessness and Congress's complete submission have rendered those laws moot. These trade wars make zero sense from any rational perspective. They have to be viewed through the ongoing psychodrama of Trump 2.0.

During the first maladministration, there was a lot of talk about the "adults in the room." Given the dysfunction of Trump 1.0, those assertions seemed absurd. We are now seeing that they were largely correct. There is no one to rein in Trump's erratic "policies." Of course, they aren't really policy, but rather the extension of his NY real estate tactics. You open a negotiation, seem close to a deal, then you fuck it all up to get more leverage. You "assert dominance" in a way to get the other side to submit to your demands. His routine stiffing of contractors was a prime example of that. They thought they had a contract, but he sued and blustered and reneged on agreements to exhaust the other side.

That doesn't work with sovereign countries with their own power dynamics. 

This recent falling out with Canada seems hard to divorce from Trump's other impotent crises. The failure in Iran, the cratering approval ratings, even the defeat of his endorsed candidates in primaries...all of these are expressions of weakness for a man who cannot ever, ever admit weakness. (see the above about NY real estate.)

So, he lashes out in febrile, unpredictable ways. Picking this fight with Canada is just fundamentally stupid. What's more, this is a lifeline to Democratic hopes in Maine, Michigan and other states that do a lot of business with Canada. For someone like El Sayed, this offers an opportunity to change the subject from his association with odious troll Hasan Piker. 

It's also worth noting that Trump is ALSO cutting tariffs to import more grounded beef to reduce prices. Trump has lied (shocker!) about the role that tariffs play in inflating prices, but his own plan to lower prices is to...lower tariffs. Basically he's driving prices up with one policy and trying to reduce it in focused ways to help him in November. All he's accomplishing is to piss off farmers, drive home the inflationary nature of his tariffs and probably import tainted beef. Anyone want to gamble on the rigor of the FDA's inspections these days? I guess people still eat at Taco Bell, so maybe they are.

The "adults in the room" really did turn out to be important. 

The Post-Reality Party

 A lot of pondering has gone on about whether Trump is a symptom or a cause of the decline of the GOP into a cult of idiocy. We know Trump is - by the standards of the Oval Office - a very stupid man. Josh Marshall relates how Trump made his money not through skill but through legal bullying. Trump is also incredibly unversed in the basic contours of liberal democracy as a concept. So, yeah, Trump is dumb; Trump is the center of a cult of personality; that cult of personality is super dumb. 

However, this cult of unreason does very much precede Trump. Reagan wasn't nearly as stupid, but he was also not some genius. That largely goes for both Bushes. They were...fine...in terms of intelligence compared to the average, but they also had long experience in government - unlike Trump. They were, in essence, trained in civic government. Trump is not, which is why he's an authoritarian goon.

The cult of unreason, though, can be seen in Reagan and Dubya, as Krugman points out with regards to budget math. Reagan bent a little to the reality that cutting taxes would not create so much growth as to pay for themselves. Bush 41 was even more responsible in that regards. Bush 43, however, was the same sort of spender that Trump has been. If a few hundred votes in South Florida had been counted differently in 2000, the fiscal situation in the US would be sterling. Gore would not have had a Democratic Congress, so spending would have remained low. There's a 50-50 chance that the Gore national security team stops 9/11, the way they did the Millennium bomb plot. Even so, they likely would not invade Iraq with that catastrophe hopefully avoided.

Maybe Obama and Obamacare doesn't happen in that world. Or maybe healthcare becomes such an issue it gets addressed without the collapse of support for Bush 43 from 2005-2008. 

The fiscal situation of the United States would be immeasurably better, and that really can't be debated.

A bunch of dumb ass voters, though, would continue to insist that Republicans are better for the economy, because...ugh.

Debt

 Paul Krugman and Jared Bernstein have a long discussion about the exploding national debt. Basically, the important thing is the ratio of debt to GDP and Trump's massive explosion of the debt has knocked us into an unhealthy place economically. The absolute number - $40 trillion - is eye-grabbing, but it's the ratio that's key and that is bad. Because economic growth is stagnating and possibly the start of stagflation that means the debt is growing up while much of the economy is a bit moribund. Take data centers out of the equation and things get really grim, really fast.

The obvious question then is: What is to be done? Both Bernstein and Krugman are pretty liberal, so neither one wants to embrace Austrian austerity. Ideally there are ways to get more revenue by taxing the rich and increasing enforcement of existing tax laws. There are likely a lot more ways to tax capital gains progressively, too.

However, one thing I've never seen anyone mention about trying - in 2029 - to increase social programs AND reduce the debt is the role that health care plays in everything. It's considered politically toxic to raise taxes on the bulk of the middle class, because they are struggling. Taxing them would work counter to the affordability issue that many see as Democrat's best lever. (I still think that corruption is lever number one, but affordability is right behind it.)

However, if we offered a public option in Medicare/Medicaid. that both individuals and corporations could access, we could shift what we currently spend on private insurance to the public programs without raising "taxes." People buying the public option would be replacing their Aetna premiums with Medicaid premiums. Most likely this system would be a hybrid, with most basic care being administered through tiered Medicaid/Medicare but then private insurers would allow for more boutique care and things like vision and dental. This is pretty common in countries with "universal" coverage. The same could be true here.

Ideally, the public option could raise revenue for the single most expensive part of the budget - healthcare - without being a "tax." 

Unless I'm missing something, which I wouldn't know, because I'm missing something.

The New Gilded Age

 Look, if you're not reading/listening to Heather Cox Richardson, I don't know what to say. 

Today, she makes explicit the resurrection of Gilded Age ideas about wealth and health care, two things we should understand as being intrinsically linked. No need to summarize it; read it yourself.

I've Been Saying!

 Krugman makes the political - as opposed to economic - case for allowing a public option within Medicare. The economics of single-payer are pretty well established. Yes, there is some rationing, but it is not based on ability to pay. There is, perhaps, some road in the US that leads to a baseline or floor of health care coverage that can be supplemented by private insurance. We travelled to Chile, where they have a universal system and a buy-in system. Everyone gets healthcare, but you can pay for private clinics. In an earlier post, Krugman notes that wealthy Canadians come south for some treatments.

At any rate, Krugman makes the political case that I've been making since Obamacare. We need a public option - not because it's the preferred policy outcome, but because it's a feasible policy outcome. If we allowed people and employers to buy insurance from Medicare the way they do from Aetna, then we should over time - if the theories are correct about costs and delivery - see more and more people elect to be covered by Medicare, until mandating the change only effects fewer than 10% of the population.

It would also allow the sort of gradual change that might prevent some of the problems that are attendant with big policy changes. When Obamacare rolled out, the system crashed. It was repaired, but first impressions and all that. Massively straining the Medicare system all at once would lead to the same poor first impression.

The other issue that would need to be addressed in the wake of Trump is how to insulate the new universal healthcare program from Republican fuckery. They will absolutely try and wreck whatever Democrats build and I'm not sure the American public has demonstrated that they are really smart enough to assign blame to the appropriate party. Slow rolling a public option would be perilous for this reason, but having corporate buy-in via cheaper costs could push back on this. If DynaCorp is paying 15% less in insurance costs, I would wager they'd be pretty eager to preserve that.

Finally, I have expressed by deep seething hatred of Joe Lieberman in over a decade, but man, what a horrific shitbag of a person he is. Yeah, Nelson of Oklahoma was also responsible for killing the public option in 2009, but Lieberman...man, I hate that guy. 

It's The Corruption

 My summer work has been to add to a student reader in US History, as we have to condense readings for a new schedule. The last installment was on the 1920s. I wrote about Harding's scandals and the market crash, while reading Sorkin's book on 1929. There are echoes today.

Richardson runs through the revelations about Trump's money laundering and the way big banks sheltered Epstein. Capitol One suspended Trump's accounts because they reeked of money laundering (though they waited until he left office, because they know he's a vindictive prick). We have the president of the United States with MASSIVE money laundering, tax evasion and other financial crimes...and there is seemingly nothing we can do about it. 

Harding himself - like Grant - does not appear to have profited from his office. His Attorney General sold liquor licenses (under Prohibition you needed a special license) and pardons. He did not serve any prison time, of course, but he was put on trial. His Interior Secretary did go to jail for selling strategic oil reserves to a private oil company. His Veterans Bureau leader also pocketed millions in kickbacks and bribes. What distinguishes Trump is that he personally is getting rich off his office. That has never, ever happened in our 250 year history that we know of. 

In the aftermath of the crash of '29, Congress eventually got around to holding hearings - the Pecora Hearings - on the financial crimes and mismanagement that Wall Street committed in the bubble of '28-29. The thing is, they didn't find many crimes, because there were no laws against insider trading, tax evasion and market manipulation. Those hearings led to a few prosecutions, but I can't recall many convictions - similar to 2008 in the lack of convictions. Instead, it led to the New Deal financial reforms, like Glass-Steagall and the Securities and Exchange Commission. 

Now, we have a (deeply unpopular) president who is at the nexus of a myriad of financial crimes and possibly a pedophile ring. He is building gilded monuments to himself with taxpayer money, while raking in bribes by the literal billions. 

Meanwhile, the Republican Congress is obsessed with Anthony Fauci and 45% of Americans will still vote for these corrupt fuckers. 

Even More Idiocracy

 When Trump was inexplicably returned to the White House by a feckless American electorate, I remember a conversation with a colleague about what might be the worst outcomes of Trump 2.0. He and I both agreed that losing the Federal Reserve's independence was high on the list of bad outcomes. 

I'm reading Aaron Ross Sorkin's 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History - And How It Shattered a Nation. I'm only about a quarter way through it, and I've already learned a lot, including how the Fed tried to rein in the speculative bubble on Wall Street in March of that year. That was news to me. Wall Street kicked back against that effort. I am anticipating that this was a major fuel to the conflagration that erupted in October.

When Jerome Powell retired and was replaced with Kevin Warsh, that was a really troubling development. He's a partisan hack rather than a dispassionate economist. As Krugman notes, Warsh made a statement on Wednesday about the decision to leave rates where they are and that tanked the bond market. Some of that was that there were three dissenters - and that's unusual. Some of it was that Warsh was placed on the Fed to give Trump what he wants, and Trump wants low interest rates. We are experiencing inflation from Trump's misguided tariffs and mishandled war, so we need to get ahead of inflation - the way we did in 2021. In that instance, the Federal Reserve was able to quickly address the Covid inflation and quell that fire without shoving us into a full blown recession.

Now, we have Warsh who is part of the Legion of Dumb surrounding Trump and his statements reinforced the perception that he is not interested in shepherding the economy through an inflationary period, but rather he just wants to assuage the Toddler in Chief with the binkie of low interest rates.

Can we come back to our old role in the world once Trump is gone? Kind of. It will be different, as Europe and the rest of the democratic world has seen that we can no longer be completely trusted. Still, we are a critically important country, and if we return to sanity, that will be welcomed in most corners of the world. 

If Trump really can corrupt the Federal Reserve, though, we might be headed for another economic catastrophe, which will take decades to crawl out from under. 

Bliss...Until It Isn't

 One of the nice things about the trip we were on was that I didn't feel compelled to read my writers every day. I didn't need to process all the hot takes and sage musings that I usually do. Driving through the Colorado high country, I could just take it all in and enjoy the company of friends and family.

It strikes me that this is how most Americans live and it must be nice. Sure, there are times when things seem really bad, and you don't have the cognitive architecture to process and understand it, but most of the time, a certain amount of ignorance really is blissful.

I did peek in on Krugman's shorter pieces, and it was interesting the theme of the past week has been just how damaging ignorance can be when it typifies the people in charge of government. Two examples that Krugman cites are the willful ignorance (or more like obstinate refusal to acknowledge facts) around climate change and the lying ignorance around the Iran war. 

Of course, you can't have any of this without the signature fact of the age: Donald Trump is a deeply stupid and damaged man. He has then surrounded himself with other deeply stupid people and smart people who make themselves stupid to twist themselves into courtiers to sate the omnivorous ego of this awful fucking man. 

The bizarre spectacle of the Fauci obsession is another brick in this towering edifice of stupidity. Anthony Fauci - and really the whole communicable disease community - were groping in the dark in the early days of Covid. They erred on the side of caution, but the stupidity and lack of leadership of Donald Trump and the fever swamps of right wing and woo woo conspiracy sites made Covid something it wasn't. "It's just the flu." 

In the end, over a million Americans died earlier than they otherwise would have because of Covid. If things like masking where taken seriously, that number would be lower. If people took the vaccine, that number would be lower. America had one of the worst records during Covid, because we were led by deeply stupid people in the early days of the pandemic, and because right wingers politicized it. 

People will point to the closing of schools as being a mistake, because kids rarely died from Covid (How many dead kids would have been too many?). This neglects that teachers - many of them older - were also part of school communities. 

All Fauci did was try and save lives. His caution and the desperate need for Covid to be a "lab leak" made him out to be a villain. Six years later, he's being dragged before Rand Paul because RFK, Jr. searched every file to find his personal diary - a diary that does nothing to discredit his decision making. 

One of the conversations we had in Colorado was with an old friend who works in the tech sector. He said he read a definition of intelligence that was basically: the ability to make predictions. I have been thinking about intelligence as a concept, and I came up with four different levels of intelligence.

The first is "Training" or simply the ability to be trained. A dog can be house trained, and a kid can be trained in spelling. The second is "Knowledge." This is the ability to recall information. Again, a dog can remember where her favorite plushie toy is, and a kid can remember the French word for toy. The third level is - with a nod to my friend - "Prediction" or "Analysis". Can you use knowledge and your mental training to predict things or draw meaningful connections? The final level is "Wisdom". Do you know the true value of things - not its price, its value?

When I think about the Trumpist movement - extending beyond Trump himself to his whole movement - I can see some Training, but when it comes to Knowledge they are so warped in what they "know" because they just don't want to understand the complexity of the world. They don't value complexity. 

This is how you get the Iran War. This is how you get inflationary tariffs. This is how you get a tariff on Canada for not raking their forests. 

The root of populism is that any person is as good as any other person and therefore rule by elites - especially cognitive elites or experts - is disdained in favor of putting loyalists into positions of authority and even in the implementation of policy.

It's stupid and it's degrading this country a little bit every single day. 

Class In America

Yglesias, the other day, raised the issue of how hard it is to define "class" in America. This is not a new challenge and it remains in many ways the single greatest obstacle that those self-styled socialists have in trying to win friends and influence people.

When Marx wrote back in the middle of the 19th century, he predicted that his communist revolution would most likely happen in America - a country he never set foot in. His reasoning was that the revolution had to occur in a place that had a highly developed industrial economy that relied on wage labor - the proletariat - coming to the realization that they were being exploited by capital - the bourgeoisie. Once they realized that, they would rise up in their numbers and overthrow the existing system of exploitation and replace it with a utopia where the fruits on industrial production would be shared equally.

So that never happened.

Where "communist" revolutions happened were in fact economically backwards societies like Russia, China and Cuba where you had the old feudal-style relationship between land owner and peasant. This was not at all what Marx predicted and predictably, those countries struggled to distribute the fruits of industrial production because they lacked industrial production. C'est la guerre.

This did lead to a bunch of feverish arguments all the way into the 20th century of why class-based politics never took hold in the US. Britain and other countries had Labour parties and Socialist Parties that routinely won elections. The Socialist Party in the US maxxed out with a 4th place finish in 1912. Despite real anger among many working class people, there simply never developed a fully "class conscious" proletariat in the United States.

Fast forward to the post-industrial US of today, the elements of class based politics is even tougher to create. Yglesias' jumping off point is the Graham Platner debacle in Maine, because Platner's definition of "working class" is so expansive, it's meaningless. Platner himself "qualifies" because he doesn't have a Bachelor's Degree, because he dropped out of college. He also went to Hotchkiss, which is not exactly working class. His attraction was that he seemed working class at first blush. He had a bushy beard; he was a veteran; he was an "oyster farmer." 

For that group of political consultants that elevated him to relevance, this was an antidote to "HR liberalism" that policed your pronouns and did land acknowledgements. (It was very much a gendered critique of current Democratic politics.) Platner looked credibly working class, so he must BE working class, and this will return working class voters to the Democratic Party.

Except wherever you look, including the current face off between the DSA Left and the Standard Liberal in the Michigan Senate primary, you see candidates like Platner or Abdul El-Sayed running much stronger amongst college educated voters than the "working class" voters that they purport to advocate for. In the NY House primaries, the DSA candidate defeated the head of the Hispanic Caucus by relying on voters in the Columbia University part of the district, not the Hispanic working class part of the district.

In other words, the biggest supporters of class-based leftwing politics are college educated voters who are not usually lumped into the "working class" basket. THOSE voters are not interested in "defund the police" or "Free Palestine". What's more, they typically don't really think government is going to work for them anyway, so what's the point in voting for someone who promises them "Medicare for All" when you don't expect Medicare to be there when you retire anyway?

Rather than grapple with this dynamic, WAAAAAY too many on that Left of Left of Center space are simply throwing out vibes candidates like Platner - who turned out to be a train wreck. You have a similar situation in Ohio's 7th CD, with a Republican who is credibly accused of violence against women facing another "working class" non-college graduate with some history of troublemaking in his past, too.

There is ONE version of class-based politics that I think does land, but I'm not sure who coined it: The Epstein Class. If you want to take down Trump and the GOP, that's a brilliant rhetorical flourish, because it links Trump's heavily implied crimes with Epstein's documented crimes with the heavily implied crimes of a bunch of rich creeps who hung out a private island and may or may not have raped a bunch of children. And except for Epstein, none of these super rich perverts has faced a whiff of legal consequences in this country. 

However, when you think about the "Epstein Class" you aren't differentiating between wage labor and salaried employees or between people who hold college degrees and those who don't. You're talking about a corrupt system whereby the very rich escape the consequences of their lawlessness. But if you simply attack the whole system as being corrupted beyond redemption, does that include the system that underwrites your mortgage? That raises taxes to educate your child? We are seeing the effects of dismantling the regulatory state in the explosive diarrhea moment. Isn't THAT system worth preserving?

If you're a DSA-type, you have to see the whole system as corrupt and needing to be replaced by a vanguard of non-politicians who arise from a working class that you likely never really were part of and who have no real credible plan to achieve their change via policy. Focusing instead on the specific corruption of Trumpism is less satisfying (especially because for many in the DSA, the real enemy isn't Trump but "establishment Dems").

Americans have never really seen themselves as part of a distinct class. Even in the Gilded Age and the New Gilded Age, when socio-economic mobility is deeply constrained, Americans have typically not seen themselves as "working class" and that term is now even more meaningless. As a teacher, am I working class? I have a graduate degree and a salary, so probably not. But you aren't going to create a mass class politics excluding people like me. In fact "people like me" are your most likely to embrace the DSA critique of America. 

I'll conclude by noting the most successful DSA politician in the country, Mamdani, has succeeded by being really good at providing public services and for embracing the joy of community. He's a really, really good administrator and a really, really good communicator. His popularity is not based on seizing the means of production, and where his earlier professions of DSA sort of politics like Defund the Police have caused him problems, he has simply jettisoned them. AOC also has a similar pragmatism to her politics. 

What we are seeing is that a pragmatic left is capable of real success, but waiting for Marx's moment of class consciousness is a non-starter.