>Katyal is an MSNBC mainstay who came to prominence as a liberal defender of Republican president Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, all of whom will now rule on the case. In recent years, Katyal has helped Nestlé defend itself in a child slavery case before the Supreme Court and represented Johnson & Johnson in its bid to use bankruptcy to block lawsuits from cancer victims.
Listed on the Katyal-authored amicus brief alongside SAFE is the group’s senior adviser, former Louisiana Democratic senator John Breaux, who also lobbies for ExxonMobil, Norfolk Southern, and Boeing — corporations whose top executives could have a financial interest in the outcome of the case. Breaux also lobbies for billionaire financial magnate and Democratic megadonor James Simons.
What a fucking scumbag. This guy is a corporatist, and blatantly for sale.
>SAFE is organized as a so-called social welfare nonprofit, which allows it to hide the identity of its donors and avoid taxes while spending money to influence policy decisions.
This scheme needs to be outlawed. Lobbying to ease the tax burden of billionaires is not social welfare, it's social cancer. Also, if donors chose to avoid taxes, they don't get to provide "input" on policy decisions. You pay tax, you get a voice. You avoid tax, you don't get to have a voice.
It helps if you assume that every political action group lies about its name. Anybody who lives in DC knows instinctively that "Saving America’s Family Enterprises" is about enormous, usually publicly-traded, companies. You don't even need to know who the donors are; your guesses are usually right.
(The political groups that are actually there to represent the people doing actual work usually have dull, on-the-nose names like "Society of Paper Towel Manufacturers", or occasionally the personal name of their founder.)
> Johnson & Johnson in its bid to use bankruptcy to block lawsuits from cancer victims
I'm not an expert, I really only know what Matt Levine has published in his Bloomberg newsletter, but this sounds like a very disingenuous description in order to stoke outrage. The bankruptcy proceedings were more about orderly management of a bunch of different lawsuits in different jurisdictions on different timelines.
At least by Levine's analysis, the victims were likely to fair better as a whole through the bankruptcy proceedings (all victims would be guaranteed a fair share) than without it (victims who got their court cases through the system faster might get more than later verdicts).
Or maybe Levine was unfairly charitable to them and the bankruptcy thing was purely to minimize total payments.
I don't follow politics closely, and I noticed it's creeping up on here more and more, but from my shallow observations, it seems that Democrats are just rich people protection as Republicans, if not more? A lot of it seems to be done under the guise of liberty and social welfare too. Am I wrong?
If the Democrats were "just as rich people protection" as the Republicans, they wouldn't need this. A billionaire tax is popular among Democrats. It's just not universal.
A thing like this is mostly political posturing. No "billionaire tax" is going to happen this year or any time soon. There are plenty of Republicans who can ensure that, without any Democratic help. But centrist Democrats are trying to avoid the perception that it it's a likely thing, which they think will play badly during the next election.
There are more realistic things that Democrats do plan on, that billionaires don't like. They want to use regulations designed to rein in harm by large corporations, end tax cuts that benefit the wealthy more than others, shift rapidly away from a fossil fuel economy, etc. They also have a further left wing which wants to do even more, and there are genuine differences of opinion within the party.
The centrist wing, which is mostly in charge of the party, thus gets tagged both with being too liberal by Republicans and too conservative by their own left wing. Moderation is much less popular than political theorists would have you believe.
To be really fair, a "wealth tax" would be a nightmare to administer.
If someone has some income they can sock some of it away to pay the IRS. If you look at the case of Twitter, for instance, how do you tax it? Is it worth $44 billion, $22 billion or is it a Superfund site that has negative value? How does the owner get the cash?
(I think of how the business model of Premier League football seems to be something like: buy a team for $300M, lose $30M a year running it for ten years, sell it to someone else for $1B, at least you can tax a $700M capital gain - $300M of operating losses.)
The manipulations that people can make with capital gains are already bad enough but when you sell something there is a real price, there will be all kinds of crazy games with a wealth tax.
> Is it worth $44 billion, $22 billion or is it a Superfund site that has negative value? How does the owner get the cash?
It would be worth the last buying price for that owner, that is $44 billion. Gives an incentive to negotiate down as much as possible, instead of buying at inflated prices. The seller pays capital gains and the buyer pays a wealth tax on the asset.
It doesn't matter if Twitter is a negative income entity, if it is ascribed some value. It would essentially become the equivalent of a white elephant. There used to be a time in India when people who did not have an income but had lots of erstwhile assets (usually upper caste folks with zero skills) would sell off their properties just so they didn't have to pay wealth tax. That was essentially how my parents bought their first property.
The caveat is that enforcement is going to be a bitch, black money will proliferate in the market but if digitally maintained, collection could be streamlined.
Somehow, Colombia, France, Norway, Spain and Switzerland make it work.
I don't doubt that it's an accounting nightmare, but Elon Musk can afford an accountant who can apply the Generally Accepted Accounting Practices.
I have no doubt that games would be played, and that the IRS would constantly play cat-and-mouse with them. Arguably, we could solve the problem without a wealth tax just by funding the IRS properly to enforce the rules already on the books.
That's why things like this happen. Rules get written; wealthy people subvert them; new rules pile on more. It's not great, but it's better than the alternative of just giving up.
I actually have no idea whether a wealth tax is a net benefit. I just know that it's not going to happen in my lifetime (not with a Supreme Court guaranteed to find it unconstitutional), so I don't spend any time thinking about it on the merits.
> how do you tax it? Is it worth $44 billion, $22 billion
I'd say a start would be what is the value it's being borrowed against? Quite often you see rich people getting loans based on the imaginary value of these ethereal assets. Seems like a good starting point for taxation.
And yet we make the wealth tax work for the middle class. For most people in the middle class, their house is most of their net worth and states/counties will tax that asset around 1/2% per year. But when someone has Billions in stocks (which arguably are more liquid than a house since you can sell only a fraction of what you own to cover your tax bill) suddenly it becomes unfair and impossible to administer.
which tends to push people towards more dependency on property tax, particularly the idea that high property taxes might be a good thing if they drove people in San Francisco to abandon their single family houses. I posted an article from Jacobin advocating that a few weeks back and was shocked to get a swell of people blaming immigrants for high rent that and some other experiences make me wonder if YOShInOn and I should quit posting articles from Jacobin.
(That said, the left around Ithaca NY has gotten the idea that high property taxes cause high rents but that's because Ithaca has the unusual problem that so much of the land in Ithaca belongs to educational and other institutions that are tax exempt so the remaining landowners have quite the burden.)
The article reads that way until you get half way through it and realize that it’s a few sellouts shilling for dollars. The second half outlines that democrats are the ones who are actually proposing wealth taxes to begin with.
It’s a classic outrage based clickbait article format.
It's Jacobin, they have a massive agenda and despise "liberals" as they call them. It's a classic case of extremists who think their greatest enemy is the moderate faction of their party, rather than the other party.
It’s frankly a shame we’ve gotten to the point where the other side is an enemy.
Washington and Adams strongly believed parties shouldn’t exist in America because of this. Jefferson manipulated the situation to his advantage and won, enshrining the enshitification of American politics in just the way Washington and Adams feared it would.
I'm too much of a cynic to believe that this was anything, but inevitable. It's not as though countries with many parties or no parties are somehow less divided right now. And frankly when one party led to what we saw on 1/6, and that party is doubling down on that ideology, it's hard to frame them as something other than an enemy. I've never felt that way about the GOP until quite a bit into Trump's presidency, but the feeling has stuck.
At some point we're beyond both civics and civility.
You aren't wrong, but let me offer a nuanced perspective... in the absence of a party, people would congregate together anyway. For example, this is a non-partisan campaign year, and yet the people who have one set of values are all lining up behind certain city council and school board candidates, because their values align. That's the part that I think a lot of apolitical / people who feel disenfranchised from politics miss - at a local / state level, political parties are mostly just your neighbors. They aren't ideological per se, they just care about their community and want to band together with people who they believe share their common views. The existence of political parties is just a natural extension of a desire to "find your people."
Consider this - in Germany, are the Greens and the SPD really that different? In Canada, are the Liberals and New Democrats really all that different? In many countries what happens is that these slightly nuanced parties end up in coalition governments anyway. Which could be a good thing as a party can be formed around a single issue and can strongly advocate in coalition for that issue.
In the US, both dominate parties are actually coalitions that would be separate parties in other countries. It isn't perfect, and these factions sometimes have serious disagreements, but within the Dems we generally believe we are stronger together. The Republican party is going through a serious reckoning between its traditional base and a more extreme wing. It won't surprise me if Democrats go through something similar in about another decade as Gen Z comes of age and wants to push their agenda faster than the traditional moderates within the party.
Liberals are not a moderate part of a socialist faction. They critique the democrats like they critique republicans because neither are in any way compatible with socialism.
Some sort of Great Depression? And then I assume the downswing after was catalyzed by the miserable failure of socialism in the context of the USSR, PRC, Cuba, and other countries. Combined with the astonishing associated death tolls, I'm guessing that took the shine off the ideology. Plus it's harder to sell people on one extreme without another extreme like fascism to play off of. IMO that's why extremists are always so focused on moderates; opposing extremists justify and enhance extremism, but the existence of moderates threatens their attempts to frame matters in purely Manichean terms.
Funnily enough, we are once again faced with a choice between rational socialism of the kind that was implemented in the USA in the 1930s, or fascism of the kind that was implemented in various other places in the 1930s.
At that time, America rejected Fascism and chose Socialism, and they prospered for the rest of that century, though by the end the process of dismantling the source of their own success was well along.
You make it sound like we don't already spend trillions each year on a network of social programs, as though that somehow stopped instead of endlessly expanding. You also make it sound like only socialism and fascism exist, as though moderate views aren't even in the mix, despite that being where most people have always been.
This being ycombinator, before I would attempt to get on the same page with you, I would need to know your income level and how much time you spend walking on sidewalks without bodyguards.
We exist in very different realities; mine is informed by the reality I see around me in the physical world, yours apparently exists in links to economics papers. I suspect that we don't have the same day-to-day experience at all.
As to socialism and fascism... I did not say that only the two exist. I did say that one or the other is coming to America. The idea that this is all going to continue indefinitely, in the USA of all places, is absurd. You people hate aristocracies more than just about anything.
And after the 1940s after defeating Fascism, America entered a cold war with the USSR/Communists. The capitalists prospered the rest of the century and the Communists after looking good in the immediate aftermath of WW2 had stunted growth before eventually collapsing in the 90s
You're not completely wrong. We're watching the slow-motion transformation of both parties. The Republicans are becoming a working class, multi-racial party while the Democrats are turning into the party of rich, upper-class white people.
I'm so old I can remember when Democrats would be standing with the auto workers instead of snuggling up obscenely overpaid, incompetent Detroit executives but that's what they're doing now.
Took two seconds of google to see that US Auto Jobs went down after NAFTA and Mexican auto jobs went up after NAFTA
If Democrats successfully passed the Trans Pacific Partnership we would have seen another decline of US Auto jobs and an uptick in Vietnamese or South Korean auto Manafacturing.
Rich upper-class white people are still absolutely a republican demographic, if there's any rich people the democrats woo it's highly educated wealthy people, urban wealthy people, and wealthy people who are minorities of some sort. Whereas your prototypical rich republican is a WASP who owns something like a mining company and lives on a ranch or something.
The democrats also notably have a lot of support among the poorest in society, and this base is a LOT of their electorate, so this really shouldn't be overlooked.
It's hard to see the Democrats as supporting the super-wealthy MORE when the Republicans are running Donald Trump who introduced a ton of tax breaks for his buddies, and the proposals for wealth taxes are coming from the democrats.
I am however increasingly seeing the Democratic Party leave the middle class and start to pull more of their electorate from the fringes of the poor and wealthy, whereas republicans have more of a middle-class focus nowadays. So there has been a notable re-alignment with the democrats focusing more on the wealthy with the trend I suppose starting with Clinton.
Consider the capital gains tax in Democratically-controlled Washington state. There's no question that the backers intended it as an overt tax on the wealthy.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadListed on the Katyal-authored amicus brief alongside SAFE is the group’s senior adviser, former Louisiana Democratic senator John Breaux, who also lobbies for ExxonMobil, Norfolk Southern, and Boeing — corporations whose top executives could have a financial interest in the outcome of the case. Breaux also lobbies for billionaire financial magnate and Democratic megadonor James Simons.
What a fucking scumbag. This guy is a corporatist, and blatantly for sale.
>SAFE is organized as a so-called social welfare nonprofit, which allows it to hide the identity of its donors and avoid taxes while spending money to influence policy decisions.
This scheme needs to be outlawed. Lobbying to ease the tax burden of billionaires is not social welfare, it's social cancer. Also, if donors chose to avoid taxes, they don't get to provide "input" on policy decisions. You pay tax, you get a voice. You avoid tax, you don't get to have a voice.
(The political groups that are actually there to represent the people doing actual work usually have dull, on-the-nose names like "Society of Paper Towel Manufacturers", or occasionally the personal name of their founder.)
I'm not an expert, I really only know what Matt Levine has published in his Bloomberg newsletter, but this sounds like a very disingenuous description in order to stoke outrage. The bankruptcy proceedings were more about orderly management of a bunch of different lawsuits in different jurisdictions on different timelines.
At least by Levine's analysis, the victims were likely to fair better as a whole through the bankruptcy proceedings (all victims would be guaranteed a fair share) than without it (victims who got their court cases through the system faster might get more than later verdicts).
Or maybe Levine was unfairly charitable to them and the bankruptcy thing was purely to minimize total payments.
A thing like this is mostly political posturing. No "billionaire tax" is going to happen this year or any time soon. There are plenty of Republicans who can ensure that, without any Democratic help. But centrist Democrats are trying to avoid the perception that it it's a likely thing, which they think will play badly during the next election.
There are more realistic things that Democrats do plan on, that billionaires don't like. They want to use regulations designed to rein in harm by large corporations, end tax cuts that benefit the wealthy more than others, shift rapidly away from a fossil fuel economy, etc. They also have a further left wing which wants to do even more, and there are genuine differences of opinion within the party.
The centrist wing, which is mostly in charge of the party, thus gets tagged both with being too liberal by Republicans and too conservative by their own left wing. Moderation is much less popular than political theorists would have you believe.
If someone has some income they can sock some of it away to pay the IRS. If you look at the case of Twitter, for instance, how do you tax it? Is it worth $44 billion, $22 billion or is it a Superfund site that has negative value? How does the owner get the cash?
(I think of how the business model of Premier League football seems to be something like: buy a team for $300M, lose $30M a year running it for ten years, sell it to someone else for $1B, at least you can tax a $700M capital gain - $300M of operating losses.)
The manipulations that people can make with capital gains are already bad enough but when you sell something there is a real price, there will be all kinds of crazy games with a wealth tax.
It would be worth the last buying price for that owner, that is $44 billion. Gives an incentive to negotiate down as much as possible, instead of buying at inflated prices. The seller pays capital gains and the buyer pays a wealth tax on the asset.
It doesn't matter if Twitter is a negative income entity, if it is ascribed some value. It would essentially become the equivalent of a white elephant. There used to be a time in India when people who did not have an income but had lots of erstwhile assets (usually upper caste folks with zero skills) would sell off their properties just so they didn't have to pay wealth tax. That was essentially how my parents bought their first property.
The caveat is that enforcement is going to be a bitch, black money will proliferate in the market but if digitally maintained, collection could be streamlined.
I don't doubt that it's an accounting nightmare, but Elon Musk can afford an accountant who can apply the Generally Accepted Accounting Practices.
I have no doubt that games would be played, and that the IRS would constantly play cat-and-mouse with them. Arguably, we could solve the problem without a wealth tax just by funding the IRS properly to enforce the rules already on the books.
That's why things like this happen. Rules get written; wealthy people subvert them; new rules pile on more. It's not great, but it's better than the alternative of just giving up.
I actually have no idea whether a wealth tax is a net benefit. I just know that it's not going to happen in my lifetime (not with a Supreme Court guaranteed to find it unconstitutional), so I don't spend any time thinking about it on the merits.
I'd say a start would be what is the value it's being borrowed against? Quite often you see rich people getting loans based on the imaginary value of these ethereal assets. Seems like a good starting point for taxation.
There is this doctrine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
which tends to push people towards more dependency on property tax, particularly the idea that high property taxes might be a good thing if they drove people in San Francisco to abandon their single family houses. I posted an article from Jacobin advocating that a few weeks back and was shocked to get a swell of people blaming immigrants for high rent that and some other experiences make me wonder if YOShInOn and I should quit posting articles from Jacobin.
(That said, the left around Ithaca NY has gotten the idea that high property taxes cause high rents but that's because Ithaca has the unusual problem that so much of the land in Ithaca belongs to educational and other institutions that are tax exempt so the remaining landowners have quite the burden.)
It’s a classic outrage based clickbait article format.
Washington and Adams strongly believed parties shouldn’t exist in America because of this. Jefferson manipulated the situation to his advantage and won, enshrining the enshitification of American politics in just the way Washington and Adams feared it would.
At some point we're beyond both civics and civility.
Japans politics are terrible though.
In the US, both dominate parties are actually coalitions that would be separate parties in other countries. It isn't perfect, and these factions sometimes have serious disagreements, but within the Dems we generally believe we are stronger together. The Republican party is going through a serious reckoning between its traditional base and a more extreme wing. It won't surprise me if Democrats go through something similar in about another decade as Gen Z comes of age and wants to push their agenda faster than the traditional moderates within the party.
The DSA has what, 90,000 members?
At that time, America rejected Fascism and chose Socialism, and they prospered for the rest of that century, though by the end the process of dismantling the source of their own success was well along.
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/58888
We already spend a tremendous amount of our GDP on explicitly socialist programs, I don't see any value in framing that as a thing of the past.
We exist in very different realities; mine is informed by the reality I see around me in the physical world, yours apparently exists in links to economics papers. I suspect that we don't have the same day-to-day experience at all.
As to socialism and fascism... I did not say that only the two exist. I did say that one or the other is coming to America. The idea that this is all going to continue indefinitely, in the USA of all places, is absurd. You people hate aristocracies more than just about anything.
I'm so old I can remember when Democrats would be standing with the auto workers instead of snuggling up obscenely overpaid, incompetent Detroit executives but that's what they're doing now.
https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/amp/shows/maddow/blog/rcna107966
this took two seconds to google
https://www.chicagofed.org/publications/economic-perspective....
Took two seconds of google to see that US Auto Jobs went down after NAFTA and Mexican auto jobs went up after NAFTA
If Democrats successfully passed the Trans Pacific Partnership we would have seen another decline of US Auto jobs and an uptick in Vietnamese or South Korean auto Manafacturing.
The democrats also notably have a lot of support among the poorest in society, and this base is a LOT of their electorate, so this really shouldn't be overlooked.
I am however increasingly seeing the Democratic Party leave the middle class and start to pull more of their electorate from the fringes of the poor and wealthy, whereas republicans have more of a middle-class focus nowadays. So there has been a notable re-alignment with the democrats focusing more on the wealthy with the trend I suppose starting with Clinton.