Year: 2019

If you missed Rachel Friday night, here it is on audio without commercial interruption.

Do you know whom Giuliani brought to George H.W. Bush’s funeral?

W.O.W.

Trump seems to have a thing for crooked lawyers – Roy Cohn (disbarred), Michael Cohen (in jail), and now, it seems, Giuliani.

(Not to mention William Barr — in whom Trump found his Roy Cohn — who seems hellbent on following in the footsteps of John Mitchell, Nixon’s deeply loyal, and ultimately incarcerated, Attorney General.)

It’s the October 18 podcast, “Criminal Case Overlaps Uncomfortably . . .” complete with a vivid description of enormous Mar-a-Lago bedbug bites.

Also not to be missed: Derren Brown: Secret, in case you’ll be in New York before January 4.  Funny!  ASTOUNDING!  I saw it with a brilliant young professional magician (and budding hypnotist) who knows Derren, and knows how much of this is done, though not all — and who rates Brown’s skill and showmanship nothing short of “fantastic.”

By the way?  A good way to buy tickets at often-good prices — to this, as I did, or to anything, in quite a few different cities — is the TodayTix app you can put on your phone.

Trump awards himself a lucrative government contract.  (Why would world leaders want to meet in Aspen, say, when they can hold their June meeting at his low-occupancy resort in Miami? Experience the heat! The humidity! Mosquitos the size of hummingbirds!)  Just as his doctor assured us he’s the healthiest man ever to assume the presidency, his site-selection committee assures us that no other facility in America can equal Doral to hold the G7.

John Lithgow on Trump as an entertainer.

The origin of the term “fake news.”

Wonderful photos of the last 150 years.  (Thanks, Mel!) And more and more!

Denmark found a way to de-radicalize potential terrorists.  (It still makes sense.)

Elizabeth Warren fields a question on marriage equality — 36 seconds.

So let’s say you were wrongly imprisoned for 26 years — what would you draw?

Have a great weekend.

America has suffered three:

The first, by Japan on December 7, 1941, killed more than 2,300 of us.  The ultimate retaliation, under Roosevelt and Truman, came in the form of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The second, by radicalized Saudis on September 11, 2001, killed nearly 4,000 of us.  (Not counting the Washington Post journalist dismembered 18 years later.)   Our retaliation, under the leadership of George W. Bush, came in the form of wars that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans (whose countries had not attacked us) and ultimately led to the defeat — to a meaningful extent — of the untold numbers of Al-Qaeda and ISIS jihadists those wars helped to radicalize.

Thirteen of every million Americans died on 9/11.  More than 300 of every million Kurds have been killed helping us defeat ISIS.  On some level, you could say that their willing sacrifice was 24 times as great as ours, the more so because it was willing . . . and that it was willing because they trusted us.

In abandoning the Kurds, Trump gave his journalist-murdering friends Putin and Erdogan a great victory.

They are not America’s friends, but he likes them (and has business interests).

Also big winners: Iran and ISIS.

The third, by Russia in the year leading up to November 8,  2016 — and ongoing — has ended our world leadership.  America’s current-commander-in-chief has sided with our attacker.

A Spice Company Spent $92,000 on Pro-Impeachment Facebook Ads.  I went and bought some exotic pepper.

Worse than an “uh, oh” is our abandoning the Kurds, with all that means.  Everyone from Moscow Mitch to Lindsey Graham to Pat Robertson — not to mention all the good guys, of whom they are not generally three — is horrified.  Robertson, indeed, is “absolutely appalled.”

It is so sad for democracy; so sad for what was left of our moral authority and world leadership.  So good for Putin and the world’s other journalist-murderers with whom Trump gets along so well.

But, at the risk of piling gloom upon doom, this previously scheduled column is about something else.

To wit:

Chickens generally come home to roost.

I say that never having owned one nor being entirely sure what “roosting” is.  I know which came first (the egg), but next to nothing about roosts.

And are chickens any more ever allowed the freedom of leaving home in the first place?  One reason not to eat them, unless they’re free range, is the way they’re treated.

And where do roosters fit into all this?  Do they roost, too?  And roasters?

But this is a post about your money.

John Mauldin’s letter last week is not going to cheer you up in any way — but you should read it.  He sees tough times ahead for investors and future retirees.

(He also says he’s just taken out a 6% mortgage on his home in Puerto Rico, where mortgage rates are, relative to mainland rates, crazy high.  I don’t know John — who I assume is quite wealthy — but if I did, I’d ask him, “You took out a mortgage?  Not having to pay 6% is as good as earning 6% — risk-free! — and as you’ve just argued, a 6% risk-free return is pretty great these days.)

The one hope that could keep our legs pumping straight ahead, defying gravity for a while even after we run out past the cliff — switching metaphors from chickens to cartoon characters — and that might even, conceivably, get us to the other side of the canyon without dire consequence — is the onrush of technology.

As a species we do now have the technology and resources for everyone to live decently if  . . .  an enormous if . . . we can figure out how to live with each other, sharing the fruits of the 200,000 years of struggle and misery that — especially in the last few hundred years of invention and discovery — have gotten us to this miraculous point. (That’s why books like Andrew Yang’s The War On Normal People are so relevant and important.)

But is technology enough to spare us the tough sledding Mauldin foresees?

Probably not.

For many, especially among those who voted for Trump, it’s already been decades of tough sledding.

Hence the appeal of his rallies and the hunt for someone to blame (“Lock her up!” “Send them back!”  Smash the machines!).

A start on mitigating the damage would be to vote for leaders who “believe in” science and honesty and decency and diplomacy and shared endeavor.

For now, though, as noted above, Putin is winning — big-time.

Ever thought about starting your own business?

Or have a child or grandchild who’s thinking about it?

Gro Academy offers a free interactive guide to thinking it through.

Let me know your thoughts.  I like the price — and I’m pals with the folks who’ve launched it.

Ever thought about, well, dying?

Or have a parent or grandparent who’s thinking about it?

Compassion and Choices offers free tools to help think it through.

Let me know your thoughts.  I like the price — and just chipped in a little to support their advocacy.

Bonus: David Leonhardt on whether or not to pack the Court.

My friend funded this startup back in 2006 — if only I had had a chance to invest! — that stores energy from solar and wind by freezing air . . . then releases it as needed by allowing the frozen air to gasify, powering a turbine as it does.

With no emissions, a much longer life than batteries, and — the company says — at about half the cost of battery storage.

Bye-bye fossil fuels!

This specific effort may or may not make it . . . watch the video and make your own assessment . . . but it’s exactly the kind of way in which our species moves towards sustainability, perhaps in time to avert the worst of the looming climate catastrophe that Trump, with full backing from the Republican Senate, claims is just a hoax (just as they claim Russian efforts to subvert our democracy are a hoax, so no need for paper-ballot backups).

With amazing technology — and new leadership — there’s an unbelievably exciting future to look forward to.

Note that it’s been 13 years since my friend put up the first money for this promising new technology.  WheelTug seems to be on about the same time line.  (And television, first invented in 1926, took 20 years to enter the first homes.)

Some things take time.

Have a great weekend!

So what’s next for Borealis?  I hope what’s next is FAA approval, now that WheelTug has secured the funding to (I hope) see that process through to a successful conclusion . . . a process for the complexity of which you can gain some appreciation from this 105-page FAA guide . . . and then “entry into service” on a few of the airlines in queue to lease systems.  From what I can gather, that’s likely to take a couple of years, or perhaps longer, which is of course crazy making.  How to cope?

When I feel my sanity slipping, I play this.  And when that doesn’t work — as invariably it does not — I watch the first 90 seconds of this.  Better.  Try it.

And now . . . taxes.

I got no push-back to the part of yesterday’s post calling for a different tone in taxing the rich . . . but several worthy comments on the substance of David Leonhardt’s column (The Rich Really Do Pay Lower Taxes Than You).

Joel Margolis:  “Here and here are two critiques of Saez and Zucman’s work.  Saez and Zucman found a willing shill in Leonhardt.”

→ Yet while Saez and Zucman may have overstated their case, the larger picture is that the country needs to collect a lot more revenue if we are to tackle problems like crumbling infrastructure while not growing the National Debt faster than the economy as a whole . . . and the obvious place to get a big chunk of that extra revenue is not from the poor or the middle class, or even the upper middle class, but from the uber-wealthy for whom, as everyone’s data agrees, the last 40 years have been (at least relative to the preceding levels of taxation) a bonanza.

John G.: “I appreciated your column on taxes. I wonder if you saw this piece published at Daily Kos April 7, 2019, as it might make a great companion piece: “The Hidden Tax: Average Americans Pay a Tax of 74% That They Don’t Know About.”

→ Well, no.  The piece says the average worker produces $106 of goods and services in an hour, yet is paid $27.50 an hour — just 26% of the total.  Calling the remaining 74% a “tax” is absurd, not just because it fails to include “benefits” but also because it fails to include all the other costs an employer incurs, like raw materials and rent and utilities and insurance.  The real question is:  how do wages compare with profits?  And there the answer is disturbing enough without overstating the case.

Simply put: inflation-adjusted wages have been largely stagnant for decades, even as after-tax corporate profits have soared to nearly 12% of GDP . . . which is why we should return the corporate tax rate at least partway back to where it was pre-Trump . . . and why we should encourage higher minimum wages and collective bargaining.

But after-tax profits are still dwarfed by wages, not the other way around.

Perhaps most relevant of all is this column comparing the Elizabeth Warren and Andrew Yang tax plans — each aimed at reducing inequality, but (in the author’s view) one a lot more workable than the other.

There’s room for lots of honest debate on how best to raise revenue and/or reduce record-level inequality.  To me, the Republican pledges never to raise taxes . . . and always, somehow, to cut them mainly on those least in need of relief . . . and, most egregiously, their relentless effort to eliminate the estate tax on billionheirs, which is a terrible idea . . . are not part of that honest debate.

It turns out, writes David Leonhardt in the New York Times, The Rich Really Do Pay Lower Taxes Than You.

---

. . . For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans last year paid a lower total tax rate — spanning federal, state and local taxes — than any other income group, according to newly released data.

. . . The overall tax rate on the richest 400 households last year was only 23 percent, meaning that their combined tax payments equaled less than one quarter of their total income. This overall rate was 70 percent in 1950 and 47 percent in 1980.

For middle-class and poor families . . . taxes have remained fairly flat.

The combined result is that over the last 75 years the United States tax system has become radically less progressive.

The data here come from the most important book on government policy that I’ve read in a long time — called “The Triumph of Injustice,” to be released next week. The authors are Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman  . . .

“Many people have the view that nothing can be done,” Zucman told me. “Our case is, ‘No, that’s wrong. Look at history.’” As they write in the book: “Societies can choose whatever level of tax progressivity they want.” When the United States has raised tax rates on the wealthy and made rigorous efforts to collect those taxes, it has succeeded in doing so.

And it can succeed again.

Saez and Zucman portray the history of American taxes as a struggle between people who want to tax the rich and those who want to protect the fortunes of the rich. . . .

By the middle of the 20th century, the high-tax advocates had prevailed. The United States had arguably the world’s most progressive tax code . . .

But the second half of the 20th century was mostly a victory for the low-tax side. . . . Politicians cut every tax that fell heavily on the wealthy: high-end income taxes, investment taxes, the estate tax and the corporate tax. The justification for doing so was usually that the economy as a whole would benefit.

The justification turned out to be wrong. The wealthy, and only the wealthy, have done fantastically well over the last several decades. G.D.P. growth has been disappointing, and middle-class income growth even worse.

The American economy just doesn’t function very well when tax rates on the rich are low and inequality is sky high. It was true in the lead-up to the Great Depression, and it’s been true recently. Which means that raising high-end taxes isn’t about punishing the rich (who, by the way, will still be rich). It’s about creating an economy that works better for the vast majority of Americans.

In their book, Saez and Zucman sketch out a modern progressive tax code. The overall tax rate on the richest 1 percent would roughly double, to about 60 percent. The tax increases would bring in about $750 billion a year, or 4 percent of G.D.P., enough to pay for universal pre-K, an infrastructure program, medical research, clean energy and more. Those are the kinds of policies that do lift economic growth. . . .

I already know what some critics will say about these arguments — that the rich will always figure out a way to avoid taxes. That’s simply not the case. True, they will always manage to avoid some taxes. But history shows that serious attempts to collect more taxes usually succeed.

Ask yourself this: If efforts to tax the super-rich were really doomed to fail, why would so many of the super-rich be fighting so hard to defeat those efforts?

---

→ If you have time, read the whole column — not least for its dynamic graphics.

The one thing I’d add is that those (like me) who advocate higher taxes on the best off need to change the tone.  Elizabeth Warren and others should frequently preface their remarks by saying (in effect):

---

Hey, it goes without saying — which is why I haven’t said it, but it’s time to say it now: super rich people are mostly pretty wonderful. We should celebrate their success — and thank them for the millions of tax dollars they do pay.  But you know what?  We need them to pay even more, as they did throughout much of the last century.  Same with corporations and corporate executives.  Most of them are pretty great and well-meaning — not all of them, but most of them — and we should celebrate all they produce and achieve and invent.  Truly!  But you know what?  Many of them make billions of dollars in profits and pay little or no tax.  We need to tax their profits so we can rebuild the crumbling infrastructure they rely on to MAKE those profits.  And that WE rely on to get to work and have water to drink and all the rest.  So this is not “us versus them, the rich are the enemy.”  This is “we’re all in this together, and need to make some important adjustments to assure a bright American future.”

---

No?

I’d like to see a Forbes 400 of the biggest taxpayers — and maybe some medals — to thank and honor those who do the most to fund everything from our national defense to our National Institutes of Health.  Make the richest and most powerful feel appreciated — not stupid — for paying a lot in taxes.

Al Briggs taught history at my high school.

All our other teachers were more or less “liberal” so far as anyone knew (one, Bob Moses, went down to Mississippi to found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) . . . but Briggs was vocally — all but caricaturishly — right wing.  He would rant about the evils of communism, the need for teachers to sign loyalty oaths, and all sorts of other things that seemed just wacky to most of us at the time.

I’m telling you this because I learned in Marie Brenner’s just-published Vanity Fair profile of our current attorney general that:

(a) Mr. Briggs considered Roy Cohn to have been his best student ever. 

Yes, that Roy Cohn, Senator Joe McCarthy’s right hand man and Trump’s mentor; the self-loathing  homosexual portrayed by Al Pacino in Angels In America.  (See: Sony Pictures Classics’ Where’s My Roy Cohn? now playing at, or soon coming to, a theater near you.)

(b) Mr. Briggs, were he alive today, might well have ranked Billy Barr number two.

Little did I dream at the time, sitting in Al Briggs’ history class, that he may have had an impact on history.

Friday’s post — Of Alligators and the Humane Center — may have led non-readers to assume it was about some ASPCA-affiliate dedicated to the decent treatment of alligators (among other creatures), and so to pass it by . . .

. . . when in fact it was about Trump’s idea for a moat; Moscow Mitch and the many important House-passed bills he has killed this year; and the humane center of the political spectrum, into which North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz believes most of us fall.  (I’m Not The Radical Left, I’m The Humane Middle.)

Take another look?

Carl — whose continued admiration for Trump I do not share and upon whose sense of humor I have commented before — emailed to say the alligator moat thing was a joke.  Could I be so tone deaf as not to know that?  It’s funny to think about desperate people, after walking 2,000 miles to within sight of a better life, being stymied – or eaten — by alligators.

I’m not so sure Trump was joking, because apparently some of his aides took it seriously enough to go cost it out.

Either way, it made me think of a different outlandish idea . . . equally impractical, but coming from a more loving place.

In a 1996 L.A. Times interview, Elaine May asked her one-time comedy partner Mike Nichols:

“How would you go about achieving world peace if you had the time?”

To which the late, great film director replied:

“I would institute a huge tax break for interracial marriages as well as marriages among warring factions. Eventually we would have one very good-looking group of people who get along fine. I admit this would take time but I am patient.”

Think about it.

And then think about this, the David Brooks column everyone is talking about.  Democrats should, for sure, speak to Trump voters not just with policies (most of ours being far better than Trump’s for those worst hurt by global economic forces and automation and the decades-long rise in inequality) but also, importantly, with respect.