modern witchcraft, in a pejorative sense, is detaching words in public speech profoundly from any defensible meaning, for personal or political gain. it can work! but it pollutes the epistemological commons, our collective ability to make sense of the world and to act fruitfully within and upon it.
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by "no one is above the law", they mean "no one is above the donald". they believe no law or even constitution binds the donald, or binds them when they act with what they claim to be his writ.
yes. wealth defined as total net worth, including all assets. and perhaps as gross assets. no individual should be in the business of holding and controlling $1B in assets, even if they have $900M in debt against them.
agreed, but see bsky.app/profile/inte...
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i don't think that's a fair characterization. i think if asked to answer "which is more progressive?" i think most people would say wealth taxes. and it's a great point that high income taxes without wealth taxes fix old winners rather than even the score. 1/
nevertheless, income taxes already exist. changing levels and brackets is a far easier lift than developing and imposing a new tax and necessarily complex enforcement mechanisms. so "progressives" tend to talk about income taxes more, as lower hanging fruit. 2/
plus marginal income tax rates alone have had and would have virtuous effects. 3/
in particular, the very wealthy, while not expropriated by income taxes, lose their capacity and so motivation to engage in destructive rat races to get richer and richer. 4/
instead, they allow income to collect in firms as retained earnings, where other stakeholders (workers, customers, vendors) compete for payouts with shareholders whose heart isn't in the fight, given the tax rate they'd pay. 5/
in other words, taxing payouts to the already wealthy is a powerful tool in favor of a better predistribution, even if it cannot alone rid us of our Elons. 6/
not getting rid of our Elons, though, is better than breeding more of them in the name of not locking in current winners. that Elon and Jeff were able to knock Bill off his pedestal never for a moment helped the rest of us. 7/
of course what we really want is both high marginal income tax rates, and wealth taxes to ensure no one can hold wealth of more than ~$100M over anything but a brief period. /fin
94% was what FDR brought marginal rates on then very high incomes to. Seems like a good number to me.
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if the answer to bad speech is more speech… drafts.interfluidity.com/2025/03/09/v...
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i have no idea who does or doesn’t deserve credit for helping to negotiate it, but i’m incredibly grateful there’s a ceasefire between India and Pakistan.
i would really appreciate it if India and Pakistan would just not do this. please.
sometimes my enjoyment of the present is overwhelmed by premonitions of future nostalgia.
"Biden rejected Reaganite trickle-down economics but settled on another kind of trickle down: fixing things in the far reaches of supply chains in hopes the benefits will eventually reach ordinary people." @isabellamweber.bsky.social foreignpolicy.com/2025/05/09/a...
it's not that i'm hopeful. it's optimism of the will. we have to do this. we have seen some successes, in and through the courts. the public's interest and support does help judges find courage i think. Stephen Miller wants to do evil, a lot of evil. we have to stop him. bsky.app/profile/muel...
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There’s a difference between not thinking about operations because we’ve designed and automated them, and not thinking about them because we’ve lost the capability to understand them.
We agree this is not a system working for everyone. I’m terribly sorry to hear you are living in a car. It’s intolerable that we don’t provide a foundation well above that. I’m not quite there, but am not great. We disagree about what to do about it. But I get, viscerally, where you’re coming from.
i think the result of violence is usually catastrophe. the last 80 years includes the best period in US history. the last 50 have been a bad. we got the better years by reform, under threat of breakdown sure, without enduring the miseries of actual, complete breakdown. careful what you wish for.
what they used to call a “rap session” is now described as a “trade deal”.
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reform vs revolution is an old debate. i guess we have different views about what history reveals. (i’m on the reform side, though i have to concede that the risk of revolution, the threat of a real breakdown, has often been crucial to reform. so the “sides” are not quite fully opposite.)
Among the most urgent things we need to do is reform the electoral system, in order to change the nature of Congress. Seems hard! They benefit from the *status quo*. And yet, in recent decades Australia, New Zealand, Japan all did manage to reform how their parliaments are elected. It can be done.
Who are we? The people Donald Trump hires, literally from Fox News? We've seen transitions to more virtuous systems. The governments of the Nordics didn't result from burning everything down. The resulted from political conflict, in which farmers and workers aligned to build power, and then reform.
We do have the wealth and sophistication to transition to those things! But that wealth and sophistication resides in our institutions. If you just burn them all down, rather than reshape and reform them, you'll find you don't have the wealth and sophistication to provide the better society we want.