Our Next President?

[LazyBoy]

Re: Our Next President?

France should build out a big hospital complex on St. Pierre and run weekly direct flights out of Boston and NYC. They could provide high quality care to Americans at a fraction of the cost. With the tourism it would bring in alone, it would probably pay for itself and still be considerably more affordable. Do dental work too.

I believe there will be some EU medical types looking for work soon as they leave the UK.

[LazyBoy]

Re: Our Next President?

The top 1% pays 48% of all New York taxes, and now some are leaving for lower tax states. Money moves to where is is
treated best.

One man left NJ a couple of years ago and it caused some concern.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/01/b...shuddered.html


Nevertheless, "That's where the money is." IMO, if more people are paid a nice middle-class wage we can get more tax revenue from them. Otherwise, we have to go where the money is. A functioning society costs money.

Should states underbid each other for the rich like they do for companies that promise jobs? Should NYC and VA offer Bezos some personal tax breaks so he'll move to an HQ2?

[dcarrigg]

Re: Our Next President?

It's a racket. Nothing but a middle class shakedown.

What would it cost to make public college tuition free? 5% of Trump's tax cut?

What would it cost to wipe all the federal student loans off the books and just forgive them? 1 year of Trump's tax cut?

Whenever anyone comes up with a plan to change the rules to give money to the middle class, the hemming and the hawing about deficits and how much money it costs starts.
Whenever anyone proposes a tax cut for the rich and corporations that's 20 times bigger than shit the middle class is asking for, all the sudden worries about the deficit go out the goddamn window.

The only difference between mafia bosses and billionaires is whether the last names end in a vowel or a consonant. It's a racket. Nothing but a crooked strong-arm shakedown.

The rules only change one way.

And you know the worst part? I think people would have tucked tail and put up with it of only they took 10% of their kitty they've amassed these past 40 years and spread it around a little. But they're too greedy and crooked for that. It takes millions of police and prison guards and soldiers and patent clerks and deed officers and teachers and maids and cooks to them them fat and happy and their property safe. And the guys running the neighborhood have been squeezing them all as hard as they possibly can for decades, taking more for themselves and leaving less for everyone else with each additional tax cut.

Watch what happens when more and more of folks wake up and realize it. Gotta wonder what they thought was gonna happen when they literally let nothing at all trickle down for decades as they flaunted the law and committed crime after crime with no consequence. Not exactly enlightened leadership. Even Caesar knew to pass out a few sestertii and some free bread from time to time. Now'a'days they just insist on making the deal worse and worse every year.

[jk]

Re: Our Next President?

https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2019/0...tion-recovery/

[dcarrigg]

Re: Our Next President?

I'm largely in agreement insofar as I think we'll see radical structural change over the next decade or two, likely starting within the next 5 years or so. For two generations things have been one way. Soon they'll be another way.

[jk]

Re: Our Next President?

Jeffrey GundlachVerified account @TruthGundlach

Fed says it is currently discussing using QE as a regular tool, not just during “emergencies” or when the Funds rate is at the “zero bound”.
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anyone have any doubts that mmt's day is coming?

[jk]

Re: Our Next President?

Jeffrey GundlachVerified account @TruthGundlach

Fed says it is currently discussing using QE as a regular tool, not just during “emergencies” or when the Funds rate is at the “zero bound”.


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anyone have any doubts that mmt's day is coming?

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Modern Monetary Theory or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the National Debt

[dcarrigg]

Re: Our Next President?

anyone have any doubts that mmt's day is coming?

Symptom, not a cause. The goal is ancient; oligarchy with power hard-wired down bloodlines. Borrowing $10 trillion from the treasury to pay it out as free and clear cash to billionaires and large corps is just a means to an end. Unlimited printing is just a consequence of the means.

Assume, just for a moment, that there are those who have no love for the republic, who would rather see it destroyed and replaced with a series of ruling kleptocratic families. Then ask yourself what would they do?

People often think the threat to the republic is the majority; the common people printing themselves too much out of the treasury by the vote. But the truth is, there's no real threat of that. The common people haven't gotten so much as a crumb in 40 years. Wages stay flat, rents go up, fees go up, healthcare goes up, services get rescinded, pensions get rescinded, so on and so forth. But guess who got $10 trillion of Uncle Sam's money free and clear for doing nothing in the biggest bill passed in the last decade by dollars under Trump?

The game's the same. Trump, Schultz, Bloomberg; Republican, Independent, Democrat. The billionaires all want the same thing. They all golf together. The rest is just window dressing.

The real struggle isn't over GDP or numbers or resources anymore. They already robbed that cupboard blind. Now it's over power and rights. And there's precious little time left to exercise them.

And I'll tell you something else, the Bezos, Trump, Pecker Pic feud is just a preview of what's to come. They're all morally bankrupt. Every one of them lies, cheats, steals, and whores, and so every one of them is open to extortion, and none of them are beneath it. The only thing that kept them from each others throats was the common goal of fleecing Uncle Sam. But once they think Uncle Sam's tapped dry, they'll turn on each other.

I mean it. As we rapidly approach the point at which they write this country off, as more and more of them vacation and invest in dictatorships that cater to them, like Dubai and Singapore, increasingly they will view the real power struggle not as with the republic, which is weak and dying and no real threat, but with each other. We've never seen billionaires toying with running for office in the numbers they are today, and it's not because political office is more powerful than it was in the 00s or 90s or 80s. If anything, the union is relatively less powerful than then. It's because they want to use the office to attack each other and defend themselves from each others' attacks.

The story is the same in any failing republic for the last 2000 years. Crassus and Sulla and Caesar. Mercer and Trump and Bloomberg. Not a patriot among the lot of them. But plenty willing to move against the republic and each other to ensure their own families' power.

One way or another, big change is coming in the next few years. It could be good; it could be bad. It will be up to the lot of us. But we'd be fools to discount the possibility of these folks abolishing the estate tax--the oldest American tax, the only one Jefferson and Adams; slave owners and abolitionists; the founders across the board could agree on for the purposes of promoting merit instead of bloodlines--and following it up with attempts to declare emergencies and suspend government and otherwise install their families as rulers in perpetuity.

[jk]

Re: Our Next President?

Symptom, not a cause.

absolutely. not even a symptom, really, just an excuse or cover-up

from the "how i learned to stop worrying and love the national debt" piece i linked above:

Modern Monetary Theory – which is neither modern nor a theory – is a post hoc rationalization of political expediency and power-expanding action.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Our Next President?

absolutely. not even a symptom, really, just an excuse or cover-up

from the "how i learned to stop worrying and love the national debt" piece i linked above:

Modern Monetary Theory – which is neither modern nor a theory – is a post hoc rationalization of political expediency and power-expanding action.

Yeah. Don't even need tinfoil when you think about it. Doesn't have to be coordinated. Just politics. Who gets what, when and how. If the wealthiest among us can appropriate themselves trillions borrowed out of the treasury, why can't the rest of us do the same? Pick any excuse you like. The example has already been set. It's not like MMT is any more dangerous than the idea that tax cuts pay for themselves. Anyone can rationalize it however they want. In the end of the day, it's almost certainly worse if the looting is asymmetrical. Better to have a deeply indebted state with rule of law in tact than a somewhat less deeply indebted state run by a handful of ruling families who are above the law.

[seobook]

Re: Our Next President?

Good call, on the surface. A newcomer with a relatively blank slate onto which bits and pieces of voter preference can be written as the campaign goes on, ala Obama, starting with "opposite of Trump" positioning of "love for each other and for our country." Ideal as a marketing campaign president for more of the same policies as Bush and Obama but without the Trump crazy.

She was highly involved in the Great Recession & its aftermath, actively choosing to look the other way while a San Francisco DA & then as the AG of the state of California.
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=234916

She is arguably the reason that not one single bank executive went to prison for rampant fraud all across California when the housing market blew up.
She was AG from 2011 to 2017, when the location of all the buried bodies from the crash were known. In addition she was DA of San Francisco from 2004-2011 and thus was a willful participant in looking the other way in one of the hottest parts of the nation while all the mortgage, securitization and servicing fraud was going on during the bubble itself.
She knew good and damn well that WaMu, for example, was paying out more in dividends than it had in free cash flow, making up the difference with "capitalized interest" -- in other words, exploding "teaser rate" loans that negatively amortized

That mean's she'll get plenty of campaign contributions from deep pockets painting her as a new and different path while in reality she represents a continued bet on failed policies from the recent past.

[Polish_Silver]

Re: Our Next President?

I think low income people could be helped by changing the benefit threshold structure. As wages rise, you lose benefits very quickly. So your effective income tax rate is very high. And the medical costs are a burden for families up to $150k income. The country has a some really serious problems.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Our Next President?

I think low income people could be helped by changing the benefit threshold structure. As wages rise, you lose benefits very quickly. So your effective income tax rate is very high. And the medical costs are a burden for families up to $150k income. The country has a some really serious problems.

I think you're right that folks would benefit from those kind of changes. But in the US they've spent so long stigmatizing it that it's probably not going to be a political winner even if it's a policy winner. Millions of folks just won't take them. Millions more don't know how. The middle class is largely completely detached from this stuff.

The healthcare system desperately needs to be hit with a sledgehammer and totally rebuilt. It's really beyond tweaking or fixing. Hospitals are run by reits like retail malls now. There's 17 different profit companies operating out of each one. There's thousands of different prices for every little thing, which makes coding, billing, and IT a total nightmare. There's layers on layers of insurance, pharma, device operators, and others all with layers on layers of marketing, sales, and advertising. And I've yet to see any comprehensive plan to get it under control by small technocratic tweaks, largely because I suspect it's not possible. We tried the Romneycare/Obamacare/Heritage Foundation thing. We've tried HMOs, PPOs, HSAs, FSAs, EPOs, HDHPs, POSs, etc. etc. There's a new scheme every few years that's supposedly going to get costs under control. None of them do. The results are not good.

[DSpencer]

Re: Our Next President?

I think you're right that folks would benefit from those kind of changes. But in the US they've spent so long stigmatizing it that it's probably not going to be a political winner even if it's a policy winner. Millions of folks just won't take them. Millions more don't know how. The middle class is largely completely detached from this stuff.

The healthcare system desperately needs to be hit with a sledgehammer and totally rebuilt. It's really beyond tweaking or fixing. Hospitals are run by reits like retail malls now. There's 17 different profit companies operating out of each one. There's thousands of different prices for every little thing, which makes coding, billing, and IT a total nightmare. There's layers on layers of insurance, pharma, device operators, and others all with layers on layers of marketing, sales, and advertising. And I've yet to see any comprehensive plan to get it under control by small technocratic tweaks, largely because I suspect it's not possible. We tried the Romneycare/Obamacare/Heritage Foundation thing. We've tried HMOs, PPOs, HSAs, FSAs, EPOs, HDHPs, POSs, etc. etc. There's a new scheme every few years that's supposedly going to get costs under control. None of them do. The results are not good.

It's also true that we haven't taken what is, in my opinion, the obvious first step: ending (or at least modifying) the employer sponsored tax break. It seems to be an issue that is mostly non-partisan, yet it doesn't get done. Presumably that's because the insurance industry, like any other, likes when there's huge tax breaks for buying their products and they lobby to maintain it.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Our Next President?

It's also true that we haven't taken what is, in my opinion, the obvious first step: ending (or at least modifying) the employer sponsored tax break. It seems to be an issue that is mostly non-partisan, yet it doesn't get done. Presumably that's because the insurance industry, like any other, likes when there's huge tax breaks for buying their products and they lobby to maintain it.

They like more than the tax break.
They like selling a product to one person at corp HQ benefits dept but delivering the product to someone else, a pipe fitter two states away.