Author: A.T.

The Republican tax bills would:

• Cut the tax rate on billionheirs — from 40% (already down from 55%) to ZERO.  This would help them — Trump’s kids would save billions — but do nothing for the bottom 99.8%, whose inheritances fall below the estate tax minimum.
• Hurt charities.  (Because the after-tax cost of bequeathing $100 million would jump from $60 million to $100 million. When something costs more to do, people do less of it.)
• Eliminate the alternative minimum tax, which would have saved Trump $20+ million in 2005, the one year we know he paid tax, but which would do nothing for most. (The AMT hits about 5 million of us, and is annoying, to be sure; but we need the revenue.)
• Keep the carried-interest loophole — a great gift to a few thousand very fortunate folks who pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries.
• Push US jobs and factories abroad (now there’s one you didn’t expect) as explained  by Bob Pozen here in the Financial Times.
• Balloon the deficit — and not for the purpose of revitalizing our infrastructure (something worth borrowing for, that would create good jobs) but, rather, to enrich the already rich — and the corporations that they own.
• Crimp badly needed spending, e.g., cutting $25 billion from Medicare next year alone. (How would that help Trump voters?)

And more.

So:

TAXES:  Aid the rich at everyone else’s expense.

HEALTH CARE:  Repeal it.  Sabotage it.  Roll back the tax on the wealthy that helps subsidize it.

CONSUMER PROTECTION:  Bludgeon it.

Watch Barney Frank explain. He challenges the CFPB critics to name one specific thing the CFPB has done in fighting for consumers that they wish it hadn’t.  They can’t.  Consumers like it when Wells Fargo is called to task for setting up millions of unauthorized accounts.  They like it when those who victimize unsophisticated borrowers are called to task.

CLIMATE CHANGE:  Deny it.

DIPLOMATIC CORPS: Decimate it.

ONGOING RUSSIAN ATTACK ON OUR HOMELAND: Ignore it.

Or, really, abet it.  Because the attack is designed to heighten the divisions in our society and to destroy trust in the institutions that make our system work — the free press, the judiciary, the electoral process, norms of common decency and mutual respect.

Trump may or may not have actively colluded with the Russians — I don’t know — but he is abetting all those goals and has already taken our national brand down from #1 in the world to #6.  In less than a year.

Is ignoring an attack from our chief adversary of the past 70 years not a form of treason?  Or does treason have to be as explicit as, say, revealing classified information to them in the Oval Office (oh, wait, he did that, too).

Is bragging about grabbing women’s genitals not some form of misdemeanor?

What about constant lying (albeit not yet under oath)?

Any issues with the emoluments clause?

Obstruction of justice?

I think you know where I’m headed with this.

Boo Boo was a bear.  (Click for the photo.)

My friend Danny Sebright, formerly of the Defense Department and the Defense Intelligence Agency, knows a thing or two about weapons.

I found his post affecting:

Facebook Friends, I post below with some amount of sadness and trepidation.  As you all know, I am not a big fan of “rants” on FB, whether they be about jobs, friends, politics, or each person’s latest malady or general state of malaise.  However, I feel that I am owed a rant this morning!

Boo Boo was legally shot by a hunter near my home in PA on Saturday!  Boo Boo visited my property on a regular basis over the last 12 months.  He was the sweetest, most gentle animal.  He occasionally “played” with a bird feeder or two, but let it be said that he was more afraid of me and my dogs than we were of him.

What is the purpose of killing a noble animal like this?  Certainly, the hunter who killed Boo Boo is not going to eat the meat.  Maybe he/she will make Boo Boo into a carpet, or stuff or mount his head on the wall.  But, why and for what purpose?

Is it the adrenaline rush that comes from killing a helpless animal when you know you are already at the top of the food chain in the animal kingdom?  Sort of pathetic when you use a high power weapon to track, hunt, and kill a defenseless animal.  Wow, is that called stacking the odds?

Or, is it a Napoleon Complex of trying to over compensate for your own small penis?  They have medical devices and implants these days that might do a better job of helping you make up for your own personal inadequacies.

God gave us the earth and everything on it to wisely use what we need and conserve the rest.  My father, who is a lifelong farmer, taught me to respect the land and all of the creatures who live on it.  Why is it that today so many are so fixated on needlessly raping, pillaging, and consuming all of the bounty and glory of God’s wonderful gifts to us?

And please, before any of you start with responses back to me of “over population” or of the importance of “thinning the herd,” just stop!  We would not be in this position to begin with if we as humans had not over-populated the earth, and, over the last 100 years had not caused significant impact to our climate and earth’s eco systems.

Hunters in my area:  get your license and kill a deer every year IF YOU MUST for the bounty of its meat on your table, but please let the rest of God’s creatures alone and try to learn to live with them in peace in this world.

Rant over:  I will miss Boo Boo every day!

As explained well here.  In small part:

. . . Trump is unquestionably unpresidential (this is the man who mocked a disabled reporter), but he’s nothing like Hitler. I encourage everyone to challenge and condemn the immoral and unfeasible ideas that Trump has, such as the proposal to deport 11 million undocumented migrants, but comparing Trump to Hitler is not only inaccurate, ineffective, dishonest, and dangerous, it also trivializes the tragedy of the Holocaust in the name of scoring political points. . . .

Right.

No question.

But to compare the nature of Trump’s appeal and his rhetoric to Hitler’s . . . and to note, as I have, repeatedly, that, according to his ex-wife, he frequently read from a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside . . . and to note his affinity for journalist-murdering dictators like Putin and Duterte . . . and to find it telling that he defended some “very fine people” among the white nationalists carrying torches in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us” — well, it seems to me, these are data points that someone evaluating Trump’s world view and fitness to be president should take into account.

I’m not an idiot, and my neighbors are not idiots — and many of them have housekeepers who are not idiots — but do many of us really have any idea what happens to the stuff we “recycle?”  And what goes where?

Now I do!

If you live in New York City, here it is in one minute.  New York is a “two-stream” city (basically: paper stuff in one stream, glass, metal, and plastic) except now the city has begun picking up “compostables” separately (click here for instructions, here if you want them in Bengali) and electronics even more separately still.

If you live in Winnipeg, here it is in 3 minutes.  At least as of this 2o13 video, Winnipeg was a one-stream city — everything recyclable in one big bin.

That’s possible because — if you live anywhere — this 8-minute video shows you just how all your stuff is sorted once it gets to the “murf” and then what happens to it after that.  Which I found both interesting and helpful.  Now I get why I’m supposed to do this.

Don’t worry about the staples in your magazines or the glassine windows in your junk mail.  But Styrofoam and plastic bags?  Nope.

If you watch these videos, you’ll have a better sense of what goes where and why.  And how.

Ideally, Google will turn up a video for your own town, because some of the things you can recycle in New York you can’t in Winnipeg. E.g., aluminum. How nuts is that? (See? Canada isn’t perfect either, though it comes close.)

Or you could find ways to recycle stuff yourself.  Here are 38 things you can do with plastic bottles. I will do none of them; but I do save the clear plastic bags the dry cleaner folds my shirts into (even Charles got with that program).  And I save those red plastic cups everybody uses at parties.

“Do you recycle?” my guests ask.

“No!” I cry, alarmed, as they appear ready to toss them trashward — “I reuse!”

I mean, how dirty does a cup of beer get? 

Rinse immediately in really hot water; air dry; reuse.

This six-minute Philadelphia story starts out nicely and just gets better and better. (Thanks, Mel!)

Have a beautiful day.  I’m thankful for your readership!

But first — hey, look at this!  FANH, first suggested here at $5.40 (when the symbol was CISG) closed last night at $23.75.  Profits are way up and they have begun to pay a dividend.  Sometimes, patience is rewarded.  I’m selling half and letting the rest ride.

And also — turns out, now that I’ve read it, there’s much to recommend in Donna Brazile’s book, the unfortunate excerpt that fueled the notion the primary was rigged, notwithstanding.

That the news media seized on that excerpt is understandable, but later in the book Donna writes, more plainly:

[Bernie] had legitimate reasons to complain about the actions of a handful of people at the DNC, and I had been totally forthcoming to him about that.  But overall the game was not rigged against him.  He knew this and has said as much, but his staunchest supporters refused to accept it.

Personally, I would go a little further in characterizing the situation.  My own perspective is that, especially in context, there was even less legitimate room for complaint than most Bernie supporters came to believe.

But however you look at it, nothing the DNC did could possibly be construed to have won Hillary 4 million more votes than Bernie.  For better or worse, as Donna has gone on to say, Hillary won fair and square.

Where the rigging was real, aggressive, and almost surely history-changing — as you’ll see in some pretty scary detail if you read Donna’s book and continue to follow the news — was in the general election.  Russia rigged it.  That we as a nation are not going batshit over this successful attack on our democracy is just part of Russia’s victory.

(Donna’s book also devotes quite a few pages to the CNN debate question she was fired for having given Hillary in advance.  If you read her account, I think you’ll believe her when she says she honestly has no recollection of ever having done this; can’t find any record of it on her computer; and can’t say for sure, but thinks this may have been Russian one more example of Russian disinformation, designed to screw things up.)

Because: disinformation is real, and a lot of Americans really do seem to be disinformed.

Here’s why — arguably — Hillary won by only 3 million votes when it should have been 30 million.  (There’s no sound; just watch the captions that flash by.  E.g., 40% of Trump voters think he won the popular vote; 39% believed the stock market went down under Obama; 67% believe the unemployment rate went up under Obama; 46% believe Hillary helped run a child sex slave ring out of a DC pizza parlor.)

And now!

Jim Burt on the estate tax (which they call the “death” tax but should really be called the “inheritance” tax, because it burdens not dead people, or estates, but inheritors of great wealth):

Our Founding Fathers considered the concentration of wealth in a few families dangerous to a free republic.  They didn’t have tools like income taxes or inheritance taxes, as those had not yet been invented, but they wrote three measures to fight hereditary inequality into our earliest laws.  The Constitution prohibits titles of nobility, with their baggage of hereditary status and privilege – ‘privilege’ being a word from two French roots, meaning ‘private law’.  The other two measures were written into the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, enacted by a unanimous Congress before ratification of the Constitution and re-enacted by the first Congress under the Constitution.  One of these prohibited primogeniture, the other, entail — two major devices for massive wealth accumulation in the 18th Century.

If the Founding Fathers had thought of the inheritance tax — a tax on wealth accruing to people by virtue of their wise choice of parents — the evidence suggests they would have adopted it, and likely at a high rate.  How do we know this?  Well, the laws I summarize above are the best evidence, but we can also look to their words:

“A power to dispose of estates for ever is manifestly  absurd. The earth and the fulness of it belongs to every  generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from  posterity. Such extension of property is quite unnatural.” — Thomas Jefferson

“There is no point more difficult to account for than the right we conceive men to have to dispose of their goods after death.” — Adam Smith (not a founding father, but an inspiration to them)

“The great object [of political parties] should be to combat [this] evil: . . . by withholding unnecessary opportunities from a few, to increase the inequality of property, by an immoderate, and especially an unmerited, accumulation of riches . . .” — James Madison

“[America] will not be less advantageous to the happiness of the lowest class of people, because of the equal distribution of property.” — George Washington

“I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind. The descent of property of every kind therefore to all the children, or to all the brothers and sisters, or other relations in equal degree is a politic measure, and a practicable one. Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on. If, for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be furnished to those excluded from the appropriation. . . . [I]t is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land.” — Thomas Jefferson (in reaction to the evils observed in France)

Our Founding Fathers considered vast disparities in wealth and the concentration of wealth in a few hands to be pernicious to the survival of a free republic.  They were right.  The inheritance tax is the least we should do to further the founding principles of our country.

Have a great weekend.  a short, heart-warming clip tomorrow, while the turkey bastes.

As you know, Trump often re-read a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside.  From the foreword to that 1941 volume — a passage that might be seen to apply equally well to Trump:

Hitler is past master of throwing up verbal smoke screens to conceal his intended moves. He knows equally well the effectiveness of massive oratorical assaults that shake the nerves of his victims and opponents and break down their resistance. He knows how to give pledges that will be broken later but will serve temporally to divide and confuse and to create the illusion of Security. He uses insults and lies in the same manner as his generals use Stuka planes and tanks to break the respectable but often weak front of his adversaries. He contradicts himself constantly but his contradictions often produce the effect of a psychological pincer-movement which crushes the best defenses of logic and ordinary morality.

It is in that unhappy context that I offer these sober stocking-stuffer suggestions:

• The Dictator’s Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy, written in 2012 — and
  “prescient,” as Fareed Zakaria recently told us (4 minutes well worth watching).
• The Despot’s Apprentice . . . Donald Trump’s Attack On Democracy.
• Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.

America’s brand ranked #1 worldwide under Obama.  Now the headline is: Germany Takes Top ‘Nation Brand’ Ranking, As U.S. Drops to Sixth.

According to a survey of 20,185 people in 20 countries conducted this past July:

. . . global perception of the United States saw a substantial decline over the past year, causing the U.S. to drop from first to sixth place in Anholt-GfK’s annual Nation Brands Index (NBI).

Germany moved from second to first place; France rose to second place from fifth; and the U.K., which lost some ground after the Brexit vote, improved its score and maintained its third-place ranking.

Japan saw a large (2.12-point) jump in its score and made the top 10 ranking for the first time since 2011, tying with Canada for fourth place. Italy rose to sixth place, from seventh.

Switzerland, Austria and Sweden maintained their eighth, ninth and tenth places, respectively.

Who would have thought, in 1945, that one day Germany and Japan would outrank us in world esteem?

We have a lot of work to do to regain our footing.  I don’t believe Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner, Donald Trump, Kellyanne Conway, Sam Clovis, Sean Hannity, and Vladimir Putin are the bunch we need to do it.

And — given, as the latest evidence, their terrible tax plan — I don’t think the Republicans in the House and Senate are, either.

I don’t want to be relentlessly negative. Look for a post Thanksgiving Day that will warm your heart, and another Friday that will turn you into a recycling genius.  (Or click here for Stage 4 cancer hope.)

But how to look at last week’s events and not have your head explode?

(By the way? Exploding Head Syndrome, from which one of the characters in Meteor Shower, Steve Martin’s terrific new play, suffers, is real.)

Yes: a deeply conscientious Democratic senator was — rightly — called out for a stupid, gross, unacceptable thing he did in an earlier career, while volunteering his time for the troops.

He quickly acknowledged his mistake as inexcusable and constructively apologized.

The victim accepted that apology (if she can, can’t we?) but our disastrous president — himself widely accused of much worse and taped boasting about some of it — used the occasion not to apologize himself, but to divert attention from the tax bill he hopes soon to celebrate, as he recently celebrated passage of a “mean, mean, mean” health care bill.

Diversion is necessary, because as attention is focused on the tax bill, heads explode.  Even now, CNBC reports, “the tax-cut package is extremely unpopular, and it’s not hard to see why.”

The bill is in serious trouble because it so clearly and overwhelmingly favors the rich.

Indeed, it goes further!

Here’s how the Republican tax bill takes from the rich to give to the extremely rich:

The House Republicans’ tax reform plan has arrived. And as it turns out, the people it aims to please aren’t the infamous 1 percent, the upper class, or even millionaires.

Instead, they’re multi-multi-millionaires and billionaires — the top 0.1 percent or even the top 0.01 percent.

This rarefied group has poured gobs of money into Republican campaigns in recent years. And they expect a return on their investment.

First up is a cut in the federal tax rate that corporations pay on their profits — from 35 percent to 20 percent. Republicans have dutifully argued this cut will help ordinary workers by encouraging companies to expand and create jobs, but this is nonsense. The tax savings would largely go to dividends and other payouts to stock owners. And since wealth ownership in this country is even more unequal than income, the benefits of this cut overwhelmingly go to the richest of the rich. . . .

And there’s more.  Read the whole thing.

Here is Congressman Tim Ryan’s head exploding in two minutes.

Maybe he gets a little carried away — but can you blame him?  Record inequality is already tearing our country apart and dimming our future.  Now they want more?

It is a vibrant middle class, not a plutocracy, who are the “job creators.”

We’ve tried this.  Presidential candidate George W. Bush told a multi-trillion-dollar lie — that “by far the vast majority” of the benefits of his proposed tax cuts would go to “the bottom of the economic ladder.”

That was as bald-faced and demonstrable a lie as Trump’s idiotic insistence that today’s Republican tax cuts are directed at the middle class — and would not benefit people like him.

In the case of Bush, the electorate was fooled into giving him almost as many votes as Gore, in part based on this lie; the rich got dramatically richer; take-home pay remained stagnant for everyone else; infrastructure decayed; the National Debt soared.

In the case of Trump, the electorate was fooled into giving him nearly 3 million as many votes as his opponent (he promised massive tax cuts for the middle class and “great health care for everybody at a tiny fraction of the cost”) and the rich are poised to get dramatically richer again, as infrastructure decays, the deficit grows, and everyone else is left behind.

(In his own case, the principal tax we know he paid in 2005 — the Alternative Minimum Tax — the Republican bills would eliminate.  That alone would have saved him $20 million.  Eliminating the estate tax — if his net worth is $10 billion as he claims — would save his heirs $4 billion.)

Listen: there are things that should be done to improve the tax code.

But the estate tax — which should be called the inheritance tax, not the death tax, because it is the inheritors, not the dead, who bear its burden (if inheriting only $70 million, say, instead of $100 million, can be called a burden) — should remain at 40% above the first $11 million.

(So if, after your spouse inherits everything tax free but then dies and leaves your/her heirs $20 million, 40% of the amount above that exempted $11 million would still be taxed away, leaving them only $16.4 million.)

On estates above $50 million the rate should rise to 50%!

And on that portion of an estate above $250 million, to 60%!

Why not?

Would entrepreneurs and inventors and venture capitalists be any less incentivized to get rich, knowing that they’d be able to pass each grandchild somewhat smaller trust funds (even if they could name just as large a university research center, orphanage, or opera house)?  Would they wind up creating any fewer jobs?

Does anyone — anywhere — actually believe this?

The same is true of so much else in the Republican tax bill, but elimination of the estate tax is easiest to understand and perhaps more clearly than anything else puts the lie to their professed motivation of boosting the economy and aiding the beleaguered common man.

One more example.  Do you know why eliminating the “individual mandate” is projected to save the Treasury $330 billion over 10 years?  It’s because millions fewer people would be getting coverage.  And that’s great, from the Republican perspective, because it means the government would not have to chip in subsidies to keep their health care affordable.

My view: we should not be eliminating the individual mandate — or cutting rates for the very wealthy — we should be modestly raising taxes on dividends-and-capital-gains-above-$1-million — by 2%, say — in order to lower co-pays and deductibles to make coverage more affordable.  And that would still leave the rate on investment income lower than it was when Ronald Reagan, world’s greatest American, left office after eight years.

My head is exploding.

(And this is just the tax bill!  What about ceding world leadership to China?  What about ignoring Russia’s ongoing attack on our country that changed the course of our nation’s history?  What about allowing our planet to become uninhabitable?  What about respect for science, competence, facts, and truth?)

Let me leave you with two last thoughts:

> There is much talk of “simplifying” the tax code, and, invariably, reducing the number of tax brackets.  Hello?  The number of tax brackets is not what makes the tax code complicated.  The tax table (if anyone even ever looks at it anymore) is less than one page in a tax code thousands of pages long.  For 99.9% of individuals, the tax code needs no simplifying.  You simply open an inexpensive tax-preparation program like this one or this one (that used to have my name on it) — or perhaps this free one — answer the questions, and you’re done.  After the first year, you won’t even have to type your name and address, social security number, bank account names, and the rest.

It may well make sense to simplify the corporate code.

It may also make sense to lower the 35% rate by closing some loopholes.

But only if these things can be done in a revenue-neutral way — or perhaps in a way that raises more revenue, because we clearly need it to revitalize our infrastructure and damp down our deficit.

> You’ve played Monopoly™, right?  How about a new rule: when the game ends, the winner gets to keep all his money and houses and hotels (or give it all to his kids) to use at the start of the next game.  That’s what eliminating the estate tax does.  That’s what Republicans, the party of the rich and powerful, stand for.  And if you think that’s a good way to structure the game, more power to you.  But it makes my head explode.

Plus health care, dictatorship, a 24-hour marathon . . .

But first: what about WheelTug?  This 18-minute video in the style of a 40’s film noir would be excruciating for anyone expecting the The Maltese Falcon.  (In real life, CEO Isaiah Cox talks as fast as Bogart, but here he is addressing airline executives for whom English is not their first language.)  But for those of us who own shares in Borealis — bought only with money we can truly afford to lose, and with “limit orders” so as not to pay double what we need to — it may be of interest.  As you’ll hear, the FAA approval process is underway, and “just last week they completed their PDR,” which stands for “preliminary design review,” a milestone of sorts.  None of this guarantees success; but is surely, at very least, “the stuff that dreams are made of.”

(Seriously?  You don’t get that reference?  Watch the trailer and then the film!)

And now: Following up from yesterday’s post, one victim of whataboutism — John Podesta — writes that Trump wants to upend 230 years of constitutional principle:

. . . What the Founding Fathers built with a written Constitution and 85 Federalist Papers, the president is trying to tear down 140 or 280 characters at a time.

For months, Trump has been trying to divert attention from the walls closing in on his former campaign chairman, his former national security adviser and his own son Donald Trump Jr. . . . Trump has practiced some of the favorite tactics of his role model Vladimir Putin, labeling any damaging revelation as “fake news” and practicing a refined form of “whataboutism.” . . .

But what appeared to be a typically Trumpian media damage-control strategy has taken a more lawless and sinister turn. This week, it was reported that Attorney General Jeff Sessions — in an apparent effort to appease Trump — is considering appointing a special counsel to investigate Clinton’s role in approving the purchase of Uranium One . . .

. . . a charge entirely debunked, as noted in the link from Fox News yesterday.

It’s worth reading the full Podesta column.

And find 4 minutes to watch Fareed Zakaria on how the world is shifting away from democracy — and not just in Turkey.  It’s an overview everyone should have in mind as they watch Trump cozy up to Putin, Erdogan, Duterte and the rest . . . even as he dismantles our foreign service and cedes world leadership to one-party China.

Republicans desperately want to help the wealthy by ending Obamacare (whose subsidies are paid for in meaningful degree by an extra $3.8 million in taxes on each $100 million in dividends and capital gains you earn) . . . and so they’ve done all they can to kill it.  Yet enrollment is 46% ahead of last year’s pace — apparently, some people want it — and that’s good, because the Republicans have halved the enrollment period.

I.e., get on the stick, people.

If you know folks who need health insurance, shoot them this link and let them know they have just 29 days left to sign up.

Meanwhile, what are you doing December 4th and 5th?  Any interest in spending all or part of 24 hours circling the globe, trying to keep it habitable?  Sign up to watch, free, from the comfort of your home.

Have a great weekend!

I had never heard this term before — “whataboutism.”

As in: Sure, Trump is a pathological liar who’s destroying our government and our standing in the world, but what about the child porn ring Hillary ran out of a pizza parlor? What about the four Americans she killed at Benghazi?  What about the uranium deal?!  The attorney general needs to appoint a special prosecutor!

I have two things to say about that.

1. If you haven’t already seen it, here’s Shepard Smith on Fox News explaining the uranium deal.  Guess what: Hillary did absolutely nothing wrong.
2. Here is John Oliver explaining whataboutism.  Warning: it’s very funny and, yes, very irreverent.  Trump supporters, just like Judge Roy Moore supporters, will find it deeply disrespectful, elitist, snide — all that. And they will stick with the alternative facts with which they are comfortable.  But the rest of us?  Until this nightmare ends — as soon as possible, because it’s truly an emergency — we can never be reminded too often how absurd and deeply dangerous Trump’s presidency is.  Putin is winning, bigly.

Have a great day.