Year: 2017

That’s the name of a show ending its limited engagement April 28, so I’m remiss only to be telling you about it now.  But on the off chance you’re in New York and can snag a couple of tickets to one of the final performances, grab them.  It’s just so good.  How far gay men have come since The Boys In The Band.

Of course, it probably helps to have lived through all this.  I’m guessing that most bright humans would find the play funny and powerful, whatever their age or gender identity.  But for someone about to get his first Social Security check?  (Not me, of course, but let’s just say someone who last week got a letter proving that computers are not yet capable of writing fully logical prose.*)  For someone like that, Daniel’s Husband really resonates.

*”Here is how we figured your regular monthly payment:  You are entitled to a monthly benefit of $3,255.90.  Less $428.60 premiums for medical insurance = $2,827.30.  Less .30 because we are required to round down to a whole dollar = $2,750.80.”

Makes sense to me!

Need an extension? Form 4868. But you still have to pay a good estimate of what you owe.

And don’t forget that — if you’ve had significant 2017 income on which taxes were not withheld — your first estimated quarterly tax is also due today.

I, of course, have not done either, and neither of us wants me to get in trouble, so today I’ll just offer some tax-related headlines the DNC press shop has pulled together on how Trump would revise the tax code.

They tell quite a story.

Sean Spicer on Monday: Trump’s Campaign Tax Plan Was Still “The Backbone” Of His Tax Reform Plan.

Time: “Trump’s Tax Plan Could Cost $12 Trillion—and Save Him Millions in Taxes Each Year”

Washington Post: “Analysis: By 2025, most of Donald Trump’s tax cuts would go to the wealthiest 1% of Americans”

Vox: “Study: Donald Trump would raise taxes on millions of middle-class families”

Politico: “Think tank finds Trump’s tax plan would increase deficit by $10 trillion”

It’s clear Trump’s proposed ‘tax reform’ is a giveaway to billionaires like Trump.

Fortune: “Donald Trump’s Tax Plan Is Really Good for Donald Trump”

Wall Street Journal: “The first big tax cut moving through Congress under President Donald Trump would likely benefit the president himself, potentially saving him millions of dollars in taxes on his rental income next year and even more money on other income if he wins a second term.”

Catherine Rampell in Washington Post: “The top 1 percent of taxpayers get the biggest cut in raw dollar terms, as a percentage of their incomes and as a percentage of total tax cuts. They’d receive nearly half the total tax cuts under Trump’s plan.”

Trump’s tax plan would hurt, not help, the many Americans who voted for Trump.

Washington Post: “A new poll suggests that ordinary Republican voters…might even object to current plans to reduce taxes on corporations and the wealthy.”

Washington Post: “Large groups of Republican voters say they were already upset by the fact that some corporations and rich households pay too little.”

Washington Post: “The plan would also reduce the rate on corporate income from 35 percent to 20 percent and reduce taxes on corporations by $891 billion in total over a decade. Yet even more Republicans worry that corporate taxes are already too low. In the poll, 44 percent of GOP respondents said corporations paying too little bothered them a lot.”

Trump plans to pay for tax breaks for the rich by repealing or changing the Affordable Care Act, putting quality healthcare out of reach for millions of Americans.

New York Times: “Wealthy Would Get Billions in Tax Cuts Under Obamacare Repeal Plan”

Well . . . five minutes . . . all about our cell phone addiction.

Fun.

Are you marching for science a week from Saturday?  Click here!  (“Atmospheric CO2 concentrations are now on pace to double this century, reaching the highest levels in 50 million years. Without further action, we’re headed to a point of no return for the planet.”)

But here for 11 minutes of good news:

If astronauts on a little spaceship to Mars can recycle the CO2 they exhale into food they consume — with the help of some microbes whose name I can’t pronounce — what if the soon-to-be 10 billion astronauts aboard our little spaceship Earth could do the same thing?  Taking carbon dioxide out of the air and turning it into food?

I was once on Bill O’Reilly’s Show. Another time, we sat next to each other at dinner (as fellow contributing editors of PARADE, the Sunday supplement).  He was perfectly cordial both times.  But he has a temper.  I’d not seen these 90 seconds before.  Charming.

As advertisers flee O’Reilly’s show, he retains at least one prominent endorser: the President.  Donald knows Bill well, he says, and doesn’t think he’s done anything wrong.  (Do it with a Tic Tac, and who really has grounds for complaint?)

But a presidential endorsement is not what it once was.

“Meet The Press” commissioned a survey to find out how people would feel about a product endorsed by President Trump.  As you may have seen Chuck Todd report yesterday morning, a full 18% said the endorsement would be effective: they’d be more likely to use the product knowing it had Trump’s seal of approval.  But 49% said his endorsement would make them less likely to use it, with more than half those going further: 29% of all respondents said they would actively boycott the product.

I’ll tell you whose endorsement would mean a lot to me: Fareed Zakaria’s.

For me, “must-see TV” includes Fareed Zakaria every Sunday morning on CNN.

And here’s a surprise.  He thinks Trump has for a long time, until very recently, been right about something really important.

As he began last Sunday’s show:

The recent Republican debacle on healthcare could prove to be an opportunity. You see, it’s highlighted yet again the complexity of America’s medical system, which continues to be by far the most expensive and inefficient in the advanced world.

But Donald Trump could actually use the legislative collapse to fix healthcare if he went back to basics and to his core convictions on the topic, which are surprisingly intelligent and consistent. Really!

There is an understandable impulse on the right to assume that healthcare would work more efficiently if it were a free market, or a freer market. It’s true for most goods and services. But in 1963, the economist Kenneth Arrow, who later won a Nobel Prize, offered a simple explanation as to why markets would not work well in this area.

He argued that there was a huge mismatch of power and information between the buyer and the seller. If a salesman tells you to buy a particular television, you can easily choose another or just walk away. If a doctor insists that you need a medicine or a procedure, you are far less likely to reject that advice.

Every advanced economy in the world has implicitly acknowledged this argument because they have all adopted some version of a state- directed system for healthcare. Consider the 16 countries that rank higher than the United States on the conservative Heritage Foundation’s index of economic freedom.

All have universal coverage and state-driven, guided or operated systems. Hong Kong, often considered the most unregulated free market in the world, has a British-style government-run system.

Switzerland, one of the most business-friendly countries, has a private insurance system just like the United States, but found that to make it work, it had to introduce a mandate like Obamacare.

I am particularly struck by the experience of Taiwan, which canvassed the world for the best ideas before creating its system. It chose Medicare for all, a single government payer with multiple private providers.

The results are astonishing. Taiwan has achieved some of the best outcomes in the world, while paying only seven percent of its GDP on healthcare compared to 18 percent in the US.

I asked William Hsiao, an economist who helped devise Taiwan’s model, what lessons they took from the United States.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

WILLIAM HSIAO, ECONOMIST: You can learn what not to do from the United States rather than learn what to do.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: Americans often assume that despite its costs, American healthcare provides better services than others. For example, we often hear about the waiting time for care in other countries, but according to the Commonwealth Fund, among industrialized countries, the US is in the middle of the pack for wait times behind even the United Kingdom.

Trump has now taken up the call to repeal Obamacare. But until recently, healthcare was actually one of the rare public policy issues on which Trump had spoken out consistently for 20 years. In his 2000 book, the America We Deserve, here is what he said:

“I’m a conservative on most issues, but a liberal on this one. We should not hear so many stories of families ruined by healthcare expenses. We must have universal healthcare. We need, as a nation, to re-examine the single-payer plan as many individual states are doing.”

[10:05:04] Trump was right on this issue for much of his life. He has recently caved to special interests and ideology, unmoored by facts. He should simply return to his convictions, reach out to the Democrats and he would help America solve its healthcare crisis.

Zakaria and Trump are both American born Muslims (except for Donald), both magnificently educated deep thinkers (except for Donald), both courtly and unfailingly gracious (except for Donald) — so, okay, sure: they could hardly be more different.  Could they?  Yet on health care, until Trump’s recent flip, they both quite sensibly come out the same place as the rest of the civilized world.

When Trump pulled out of the Transpacific Partnership (that would have lowered tariffs for American exports and — importantly — solidified our leadership in the Pacific region), he handed China a tremendous strategic gift.

That’s not what this Daily Beast article is about — All Mapped Out: How China’s Charting Its Course as a Superpower — but it’s useful context.

Did you know that to the Chinese, golf symbolizes corruption?  Take a read.

Ms. Mayer wrote the book on Dark Money (now out in paperback with a new preface), and here, in the New Yorker, gives us Robert Mercer — The Reclusive Hedge Fund Tycoon Behind The Trump Presidency.

Enough to make non-billionaires take to the streets, though the UN warns that Americans’ right to protest is in grave danger.  (I’d say that headline is a little strong, but still.)

Republicans effectively “filibustered” Merrick Garland for 10 months — they wouldn’t even let his nomination get that far (the ultimate filibuster) — arguing that we would have to see  what the people wanted in the next election.  By a margin of millions, the people wanted Merrick Garland.

The Electoral College could theoretically elect a president who lost the popular vote by 20 million votes, but — although that would legitimately install an unpopular president — it would not represent the will of the people, any more than Trump’s loss by 3 million did.

Not to mention the loss would have been by more if we had not been attacked by Russia . . . and that most Trump voters were more focused on jobs than on rejecting Merrick Garland.

Mitch McConnell was wrong to flout the Constitution, changing the rules to deny Garland a hearing.  He was wrong to change his own standard and take Trump’s loss by 3 million votes as proof the people wanted a Republican-appointed Justice.  And he will be wrong if he changes the rules the Senate agreed upon, holding Supreme Court nominees — though not lower court judges — to the 60-vote standard.

Three wrongs, let alone all by the same guy, don’t make a right.

I checked in with the friend who suggested Home Depot a couple of years ago at $89.  With the stock at $147 or so, he’s holding on, hoping for double from here over the next three or four years.

Friday, I offered my high school pal Howard Blum writing in Vanity Fair on the possibility the Kremlin really does have its hooks into our president.

Earlier, I linked to Russia’s Art Of War in Foreign Affairs.

(According to FBI former special agent Clinton Watts — on yesterday’s Meet the Press — Donald Trump, wittingly or unwittingly, has helped the Russians amplify their attacks on America . . . and those attacks are succeeding, here and around the world.)

Today, I offer high school pal Richard Factor’s thoughts on solar energy (he drives an electric car that he may soon be powered from his roof) . . . and whether you should take the plunge.

Could Tesla become the first “terrabuck” company — worth $1 trillion?  Elon Musk hopes soon to become the leading U.S. luxury car manufacturer; but that’s nothing.  Imagine the millions of solar roofs he might sell, coupled to his battery packs. With continued improvements, how many homes a decade from now — let alone two — will have disconnected from the electric grid altogether (just as millions of cell phone customers have abandoned land lines)?  How many cars and trucks and homes and businesses will draw their energy not from ExxonMobil and PG&E, but from the sun?

(You probably know this quote:  “I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.” — Thomas Edison)

But before you grow too sanguine (as if that were possible, post November 8), here is Maureen Dowd in Vanity Fair on what scares Elon Musk. As technology races ahead to free us from fossil fuels and high voltage power lines and perhaps even to colonize Mars, so does it also race ahead to make machines smarter than their creators.

Uh, oh.  One more way our clever little species can do itself in.