an act of a Congress can insist this court can’t “referee” its own restructuring. Congress can just say so—it can limit the jurisdiction of the Court. if the Court doesn’t like it, too bad. the other branches can insist on the law as Congress wrote it. eg www.whitehouse.senate.gov/news/release...

i’ve seen a bunch of Canadian posters viscerally and not very gently mad (correctly so!) over Trump’s musings on absorbing Canada.

great point! i was only addressing the personal loan/income side. i’d have to think harder about what kind of regime i’d want for business leverage. i agree that eliminating the tax favorability of highly leveraged arrangements like LBOs would be very desirable.

(i love Canada, lived a summer in Toronto, had many of the best times of my reckless youth there. i don’t claim i understand Canada, but i do admire and sometimes pine for it.)

( great approach! i’d skip the 75% requirement, and default to treating loans as taxable income + basis www.interfluidity.com/v2/9028.html )

any time, it only takes an act of Congress. our electoral system is crap, gerrymandered, stabilized for incumbents within a duopoly, biased towards small, now red states, etc. but shit (bad shit) will happen. decisive elections can follow. could have happened in 2021, but for Sinemanchin and Biden.

there’s no getting around Court reform. this “court” is a farce, and a weapon of plutocracy.

i think persuading is important work we have to do. i wish we hadn’t let the problem fester so badly that we have to remedy it in ways i agree people will perceive as unpleasantly confiscatory. but we’ve fucked up, and existing concentrations of wealth are inconsistent with democracy.

“tax positivity” as @jdcmedlock.bsky.social puts it, the idea that taxation, besides buying stuff, does important things — not as a “weapon”, but for example shaping a wealth distribution consistent with democracy — is an important idea to communicate and persuade people of.

i think the motivation for my proposal was pretty clearly orthogonal to funding spending. it can finance some spending! but that isn’t the point. bsky.app/profile/inte...

again, is there really some communist nomenklatura in-group if the limit on wealth is $100M? is that asking Americans to accept some new hierarchy of identity? it’s not some weird communism to clip an absurd right tail almost no one ever reasonably even aspires to.

no dig perceived! again, this was the plain ask at the top of this thread. so far, overwhelming majority here say they agree but doubt it could be politically possible (mostly citing D donor class rather than popular inability to grasp non-financing justifications for taxation).

he believes in global warming and beachfront real estate.

you may say Donald Trump has achieved nothing, but he has performed a Christmas miracle. he has made Canadians impolite.

the government has to tax to make room for its spending, yes. but not all taxation is motivated by making room for more spending. not all taxation is the same. taxing Musk is taxing inert portfolio wealth. if the state translated that into spending, despite accounting balance it’s be inflationary.

we keep arguing about immigration but i wonder if pretty soon we won’t be competing to emigrate.

(government taxation and spending are decoupled. the government should tax away elon’s wealth. very little public spending, relative to the funds taxed, should result from that.)

i’d prefer we use the usual means to just tax them back to humans. but we have to apply those means with some vigor, since they will throw a lot of resources into trying to sabotage them.