The concept is basically simple enough that there is no way Elizabeth Warren could or would grasp it. She’s part of the problem thereby unable to comprehend it.
When politicians say “tax it” or “more taxes” I cringe. Their stewardship for the American people has been abysmal.
Based on current lack of competence the solution is NEVER to give the government more money.
Solutions are unpalatable to them. Rein in the Fed. Rein in spending. Balancing a budget will no longer work as surplus would be needed for debt servicing.
Bretton Woods, out of control spending and entitlements, world policing etc are culprits. All led to the out of control print imo.
I think it is a mistake to assume Senator Warren is unable to comprehend the problem. She is not a stupid woman. Elon Musk is the best at exploiting the rules of the game to accumulate wealth. Elizabeth Warren has proven to be pretty good at the game of accumulating political power. We must understand, she is not playing the same game as Elon Musk. Her success comes from winning votes, not solving institutional problems. Our challenge is not educating Elizabeth Warren, it is educating voters! The same can be said of educating many Republican voters as well. The messaging to Republican voters may be different but the continued spending, corruption, and exploitation remain the same.
Correct about Liz being smart. But let's call this what it really is -- Liz Warren GAMES the problem. She is often the final stop on Tax Payer funded Lobyist "Compassion Programs" that Magically never reach their written destination.
And the Irony -- When Elon was heading DOGE to uncover Government waste and then discovered Fraud, Liz was at every single hearing defending these elicit "Programs".
6/14 MARKET EVENING UPDATE - Futures are out and up huge [peace deal agreement] and right to the exact SPX Target Level of this "possible" B Wave advance I previously outlined. Be very, very careful of a Bull Trap Conclusion that starts the C Wave down to much lower levels.
However, if the SPX grinds to a new High then we will most likely be on a much longer path to 8000+ and the A-B-C pattern will be invalidated.
To your point -- Capitalism is the best/flawed system ever created on earth. It's effects throughout history have always tracked in long cycles of boom and bust. It is our own flawed animal spirits that flaw this Best Of All Options. It is only the Deceitful and Tyrranical who seek it's replacement.
Keep the system - end the Fed and bring back the Gold Standard.
Your comment (“underlying machinery”) immediately reminded me of Ross Perot’s campaign line about needing to “get under the hood and fix it.”
Pols spend all their time arguing about taxes, deficits, and spending—the outputs. Perot’s point was that if the machinery producing those outcomes is broken, every “solution” simply creates another problem that requires another solution. The underlying machinery (i.e., bureaucracy, lobbying, spending, etc) is almost never discussed because it’s harder than just sticking taxpayers with the bill.
Thirty-four years after Perot’s Presidential run, the politicians in Washington are still debating the outputs instead of opening the hood. And now it is too late—if they open the hood today, they’ll find only grime, rust, and mouse-chewed wires.
There *are* those who truly believe the words coming out of their mouths. But "leadership" in Washington comes from principals, not principles. The money from principals funds/amplifies the politicians who are most effective at expanding control and undermining foundational liberty (that was established to buttress God-given rights) by manipulating the masses' perception.
Lots of people think and talk about arbitrage in the marketplace as an economic edge at the casino's tables.
No-one seems to think of the arbitrage between perception and reality as the accumulation of power that undermines Western Civilization and makes us all serfs again. $39T (and counting) and another $100T on the hook on the public book, damn near $20T in household debt, and who knows how much corporate financialized debt...there's a reason why the WEFsters said "you'll own nothing, and you'll be happy"...their debt forgiveness is our slavery.
So...how does an individual arbitrage the mass formation? (Happy 250th!)
I liked Perot's practicality, his last second choice for VP not so much. I still voted for him though Clinton did eventually accomplish Perot's agenda, balancing the federal budget.
Excellent. This also explains while most every politician in Washington is a Lawyer. They already know what's under the hood -- because they are the mice. ....let's go with Rats.
Small government is the original and only equitable answer.
The systemic problem is that any politician who runs on the small government platform and wins then becomes part of that government and then seeks more power by expanding government.
The Framers founded a country that seeks to take human nature into account. But human nature will always find a way around obstacles.
The three branches of government jealously guarding their own power was an original check on runaway corruption. But with partisanship marinating all three branches, that check is gone, exacerbating the issue.
Humans are reactionary. The only thing that could address this is reaction to extreme pain. But what changes the pain will bring is an open question. Rational solutions or the end of self rule?
I think a small government for such a large country/economy is a pipe dream. There's simply too much need for for regulation, infrastructure, research investment, pollution oversight, etc. to just start hacking away (as DOGE found out big time). I would rather make the goal of making government better (which then perhaps would increase efficiency/decrease size).
Chris, I think you make an excellent overall point, and as curious_scientist says below, when someone with good intentions gets elected and becomes part of the machine, the machine tends to overwhelm.
Perhaps the greatest perversion of what our founding fathers had in mind is the career politician, someone who spends their life accumulating political power and using it as they see fit, rather than as a means to help their constituents. arguably, their constituents now consist solely of themselves and their friends and family, not those folks who elected them.
one solution, which I have grown strongly in favor of is the one and done system, anyone elected to any federal political office gets a single term in office, and is then restricted from any other terms as well as any direct business dealings with the federal government. we can change elected terms to 3 yrs for Reps, 5 yrs for the president and 7 for the Senate, and we can rotate 1/3 of the House each year, so we maintain some amount of institutional knowledge. but more importantly, we need to end the revolving door, no federal largesse to former politicians.
if we end that gravy train, then elected officials can focus on the major issues, not the next election. it would undoubtedly be a bumpy ride initially, but it's better than the current patronage plus system.
Personally, I'm not someone who believes that wealth inequality is a real "thing.". I look at how our lower and middle classes compare to those in Europe, Central and South America, the Middle East and Asia.
Everything is relative. But, it's not just how the lower and middle class are faring relative to the ultra-wealthy in this country. Other societies produce economic outcomes, too.
There's an old joke about socialism and the politics of envy:
An Italian, a Frenchman, and a Russian find a genie who grants each one wish.
The Italian looks at his neighbor's land and says, "my neighbor has a splendid villa. Mine is small and unremarkable. Make me the grandest villa of them all." Poof! His wish comes true.
The Frenchman looks down the block and says, "my chateau is dirty and in disrepair. My neighbor's chateau is the envy of the neighborhood. Make my chateau the best in all France." Poof! His wish is granted.
The Russian looks at his neighbor’s land, which included two cows and says: “My neighbor has two cows and I have none. Kill my neighbor’s cows.” Poof!
I'd rather read a week of dialogue with Luis (The Day I Became Phil Hellmuth, June 8) than see one puff of the peace pipe with that marxist masshole witch whose personal notion of a K-shape economy is centered at $930,027 = her Form 1040 Line 9 plus the Line 6 non-taxed $17,579 of her & Mr.'s $117,194 of Social Security benefits. Of which they gave a heap big 3.5% to charity. (Reference: https://elizabethwarren.com/tax-returns/, charitable amount on Sch. A on page 9 in the PDF).
And they paid merely the minimum standard 5.0% in Mass. state income tax, bypassing the opportunity to pay the higher 5.85%, as good-hearted redistrbutionists are supposed to do; that's why they put it in the law. Couldn't even spare another $6,213 for the Commiewealth's cradle-to-grave policies. (Page 44 of PDF, Lines 21 and 22)
The machine is corrupt and built to become a recursive wealth loop for the mega rich. Few deserve their ever expanding wealth with Elon being an exception. A man who - in spite of forces working against him - overcame all odds and survived the onslaught from both sides of the aisle to hit the mark.
The mega rich are - by and large - cunts. I’ll give you an anecdote from my days as a corporate stooge at a Fortune 500.
At the F500 we would receive our equity awards every November. My company was given a small allotment of shares to distribute to our fairly large company. So the C-Suite had to decide who received an equity awards each year. Naturally, the available shares were divvied up and handed out to the highest performers. Of whom I was one for the entire near 20 years of my tenure.
One year, instead of the normal RSU + options, we got PSUs. PSUs for those that don’t know are performance restricted shares. They come with the baggage of hitting performance milestones for the company or they are null and void. Now this might sound like it makes sense to you, but in a massive company with lofty top line goals these don’t become the golden handcuffs of an RSU. They become a golden noose for your best employees. These PSUs had the added fuck you of Cliff vesting, so if you hit 2 years of a 3 year vesting period and decided to quit, guess what? You get nothing. Previously RSUs vested yearly, didn’t have company wide performance requirements, etc… they were just flat out rewards for the best of the best. Hence the golden handcuff moniker.
ANYWAY, long story short, I was out to lunch with our CEO and I point blank asked him “why did we shift from RSUs to PSUs?” Explaining to him the glaringly obvious issue with the decision. After some reluctance and deflection I pried the reason out of him (because he also hated our parent company’s CEO). Turns out, the board had given our parent company’s CEO PSUs that year and in a petty child like tantrum, this petulant manchild demanded that everyone else be subjected to PSUs as well.
This man was amongst the highest paid CEO of publicly held companies at the time - well over 40M a year.
That wasn’t even the worst thing he ever did. Not by a mile. But that’s not a story for here.
Anyway the point is, we have gone from CEOs and C-Suite being compensated 30x the average employee of their company in the 70s to (last I checked) 350x. The C-suite has risen similarly and now we have bullshit to deal with like endless Founders bonuses and VC anal leakage etc…
So if you want to know why you can’t keep up with your grandparents, this is why. Your company is stealing your own money from you and your government is fucking you on the other end with taxes to enrich their friends in tax free money laundering operations known as NGOs while pot holes only get bigger.
We are being spit roast by capitalism. Which is why the cockroaches of communism have come out of their dark holes. The machine looks hopeless to overcome to most people, and so we get commies coming in spinning their High School Marxism bullshit to win over a disgruntled and much stupider generation of people to their cause. Which coincidentally will make the Corpo/Govt spit roast look like a welcome reprieve as we are thrown into economic gang bang territory.
Well said -- Feels a lot like 1928/29. just wait till the Great-er Depression Hits. The thirties were known as the Red Decade. Which is why I admire Ayn Rand so much, as a Russian who wrote here best work in support of personal freedom during that very time. This one might even be worse.
Its orders of magnitude worse because information flow control and manipulation are so thorough and advanced that they would make Orwell blush. The enemy has managed to turn half of the greatest nation on earth on itself. Honestly if it wasn’t so on the nose I would say “The Matrix” down to the last detail is the simulation we live in today.
If I don’t see it with my own two eyes, in person, happening live, I consider it bullshit and a psyop. It’s my origin story.
An economy that leaves this many people in the dust is not optimized, it's engineered. We can't deficit spend our way out of automatic asset inflation.
Your article is spot on. Here is an interesting fact, in Jan 1976, the M2 money supply in the USA was just $1 Trillion. Now 50 years later one person has a net worth equal to all the money that existed in America in 1976.
Today the M2 money supply sits at $23 Trillion and growing.
Now the question for Ms. Warren, just who is responsible for that sudden growth in the money supply? She and her colleagues are the ones responsible for what exists today. They created the inflation, they created the mess we have, and they created the opportunity for a select few to amass fortunes like this, that would not have been possible if it were not for what congress has done for the last 50 years.
Note, it was bad before 1976, but since that year the problem has grown exponentially.
You're right about the moral hazard known as the "Pascal's Mugger" dynamic. When decision-makers do not bear the full consequences of their failures (socialized losses) but reap the rewards of success (private gains), it creates a dangerous asymmetric incentive structure.
The Federal Reserve lowering interest rates, allowing for higher inflation, purchasing assets all increase the money supply that increase asset prices.
Open borders suppress wages and add to government expenditures, either for additional services for illegal aliens or for US citizens that can no longer find profitable work.
Globalization took high paying jobs and exported them, which again lowered wages for American workers and increased government expenditures for US citizens that could no longer find profitable work.
And globalization was a bonanza for anyone selling globally. Software exports scale much faster (both volume and margins) than American motorcycles and washing machines.
It seems like all government policy is geared towards greater wealth inequity. This isn't the worst outcome as long as everyone's boat is rising. Unfortunately this doesn't appear to be the case.
And the solution isn't a wealth tax. Frankly tax collection look rather reasonable if it wasn't for budget deficits and a souring national debt. But what we are learning is much of that is not caused by a lack of taxes, it is more the result of over spending including massive fraud, waste and abuse, along with poor government policy.
And we should also have a discussion about the hidden taxes, because all taxes are eventually paid by the citizens. Hidden taxes include overregulation, corporate income tax, inflation, social security/medicare taxes paid by corporations, etc.
The good news is much of the folks on the billionaire list is not folks that inherited their wealth, rather they have built their wealth, and unlike government their capital is being used productively to better humanity.
It is hard to criticize someone who has done what our government struggles with, including getting rockets into space, building electric cars that people want, advancing robotics and AI. And what I will forever be grateful for is personal risk taking to advance free speech. How close were we to getting a crazy Karen as the Czar of Government Information before Elon purchased Twitter and disclosed the government's censorship program. You think Zuke would have been so forthcoming before Elon spilled the beans?
This is a serious discussion for serious people and unfortunately Warren is not one of them.
I don't think it is only the likes of Sen. Warren that is not serious about solving these problems. A list of serious people across the 535 elected office holder in Congress would probably be less than 10 people. Rand Paul is the only one that comes to my mind at the moment.
Without globalization there would be no WalMart and vast numbers of the lower middle class would be worse for it. Globalization lifts boats but the least of us gets more lift than the wealthy.
SKUs, encoded in supermarket bar codes, will soon allow automated audits of SNAP spending. Accountability in many areas is coming soon. The only problem is that the deluge of outrageous abuse of programs will be such a fire hose that Americans may become immune.
Elizabeth Warren preys upon the weak minded "mo' shit free" voter . Her lying ugly ass makes my skin crawl. What's worse is the fact that most voters can't seem to see through this fact and she keeps getting elected .
She is a (one of many) poster child for term limits .
Honestly…. I don’t think she cares about solving the underlying issues.. sound prudent monetary policy is like sunlight…. It’s disinfects things.. She would never get re-elected if she went after the source. It’s well written and thoughtful but sadly it’s likely spent on a captured politician who survives on placating her base with endless promises of free shit! Write an open letter to the powers that be and unleash a modern gold standard and put a cap on spending to what is actually brought in each year from productivity.
Well said.
The concept is basically simple enough that there is no way Elizabeth Warren could or would grasp it. She’s part of the problem thereby unable to comprehend it.
When politicians say “tax it” or “more taxes” I cringe. Their stewardship for the American people has been abysmal.
Based on current lack of competence the solution is NEVER to give the government more money.
Solutions are unpalatable to them. Rein in the Fed. Rein in spending. Balancing a budget will no longer work as surplus would be needed for debt servicing.
Bretton Woods, out of control spending and entitlements, world policing etc are culprits. All led to the out of control print imo.
I think it is a mistake to assume Senator Warren is unable to comprehend the problem. She is not a stupid woman. Elon Musk is the best at exploiting the rules of the game to accumulate wealth. Elizabeth Warren has proven to be pretty good at the game of accumulating political power. We must understand, she is not playing the same game as Elon Musk. Her success comes from winning votes, not solving institutional problems. Our challenge is not educating Elizabeth Warren, it is educating voters! The same can be said of educating many Republican voters as well. The messaging to Republican voters may be different but the continued spending, corruption, and exploitation remain the same.
Correct about Liz being smart. But let's call this what it really is -- Liz Warren GAMES the problem. She is often the final stop on Tax Payer funded Lobyist "Compassion Programs" that Magically never reach their written destination.
And the Irony -- When Elon was heading DOGE to uncover Government waste and then discovered Fraud, Liz was at every single hearing defending these elicit "Programs".
Corrupt, yes!....stupid, nope.
A Toast! .....to 1929!
‐--------‐-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
6/14 MARKET EVENING UPDATE - Futures are out and up huge [peace deal agreement] and right to the exact SPX Target Level of this "possible" B Wave advance I previously outlined. Be very, very careful of a Bull Trap Conclusion that starts the C Wave down to much lower levels.
However, if the SPX grinds to a new High then we will most likely be on a much longer path to 8000+ and the A-B-C pattern will be invalidated.
Both scenarios are very active.
To your point -- Capitalism is the best/flawed system ever created on earth. It's effects throughout history have always tracked in long cycles of boom and bust. It is our own flawed animal spirits that flaw this Best Of All Options. It is only the Deceitful and Tyrranical who seek it's replacement.
Keep the system - end the Fed and bring back the Gold Standard.
Your comment (“underlying machinery”) immediately reminded me of Ross Perot’s campaign line about needing to “get under the hood and fix it.”
Pols spend all their time arguing about taxes, deficits, and spending—the outputs. Perot’s point was that if the machinery producing those outcomes is broken, every “solution” simply creates another problem that requires another solution. The underlying machinery (i.e., bureaucracy, lobbying, spending, etc) is almost never discussed because it’s harder than just sticking taxpayers with the bill.
Thirty-four years after Perot’s Presidential run, the politicians in Washington are still debating the outputs instead of opening the hood. And now it is too late—if they open the hood today, they’ll find only grime, rust, and mouse-chewed wires.
Well said. Really makes the whole thing feel fruitless...
Said another commenter: "Based on current lack of competence the solution is NEVER to give the government more money."
There *are* those who truly believe the words coming out of their mouths. But "leadership" in Washington comes from principals, not principles. The money from principals funds/amplifies the politicians who are most effective at expanding control and undermining foundational liberty (that was established to buttress God-given rights) by manipulating the masses' perception.
Lots of people think and talk about arbitrage in the marketplace as an economic edge at the casino's tables.
No-one seems to think of the arbitrage between perception and reality as the accumulation of power that undermines Western Civilization and makes us all serfs again. $39T (and counting) and another $100T on the hook on the public book, damn near $20T in household debt, and who knows how much corporate financialized debt...there's a reason why the WEFsters said "you'll own nothing, and you'll be happy"...their debt forgiveness is our slavery.
So...how does an individual arbitrage the mass formation? (Happy 250th!)
When God closes one door, He opens another.
I liked Perot's practicality, his last second choice for VP not so much. I still voted for him though Clinton did eventually accomplish Perot's agenda, balancing the federal budget.
Excellent. This also explains while most every politician in Washington is a Lawyer. They already know what's under the hood -- because they are the mice. ....let's go with Rats.
Small government is the original and only equitable answer.
The systemic problem is that any politician who runs on the small government platform and wins then becomes part of that government and then seeks more power by expanding government.
The Framers founded a country that seeks to take human nature into account. But human nature will always find a way around obstacles.
The three branches of government jealously guarding their own power was an original check on runaway corruption. But with partisanship marinating all three branches, that check is gone, exacerbating the issue.
Humans are reactionary. The only thing that could address this is reaction to extreme pain. But what changes the pain will bring is an open question. Rational solutions or the end of self rule?
"Small government is the original and only equitable answer."
Nicely said.
I think a small government for such a large country/economy is a pipe dream. There's simply too much need for for regulation, infrastructure, research investment, pollution oversight, etc. to just start hacking away (as DOGE found out big time). I would rather make the goal of making government better (which then perhaps would increase efficiency/decrease size).
Chris, I think you make an excellent overall point, and as curious_scientist says below, when someone with good intentions gets elected and becomes part of the machine, the machine tends to overwhelm.
Perhaps the greatest perversion of what our founding fathers had in mind is the career politician, someone who spends their life accumulating political power and using it as they see fit, rather than as a means to help their constituents. arguably, their constituents now consist solely of themselves and their friends and family, not those folks who elected them.
one solution, which I have grown strongly in favor of is the one and done system, anyone elected to any federal political office gets a single term in office, and is then restricted from any other terms as well as any direct business dealings with the federal government. we can change elected terms to 3 yrs for Reps, 5 yrs for the president and 7 for the Senate, and we can rotate 1/3 of the House each year, so we maintain some amount of institutional knowledge. but more importantly, we need to end the revolving door, no federal largesse to former politicians.
if we end that gravy train, then elected officials can focus on the major issues, not the next election. it would undoubtedly be a bumpy ride initially, but it's better than the current patronage plus system.
Awesome! Spot on, too.
Personally, I'm not someone who believes that wealth inequality is a real "thing.". I look at how our lower and middle classes compare to those in Europe, Central and South America, the Middle East and Asia.
Everything is relative. But, it's not just how the lower and middle class are faring relative to the ultra-wealthy in this country. Other societies produce economic outcomes, too.
There's an old joke about socialism and the politics of envy:
An Italian, a Frenchman, and a Russian find a genie who grants each one wish.
The Italian looks at his neighbor's land and says, "my neighbor has a splendid villa. Mine is small and unremarkable. Make me the grandest villa of them all." Poof! His wish comes true.
The Frenchman looks down the block and says, "my chateau is dirty and in disrepair. My neighbor's chateau is the envy of the neighborhood. Make my chateau the best in all France." Poof! His wish is granted.
The Russian looks at his neighbor’s land, which included two cows and says: “My neighbor has two cows and I have none. Kill my neighbor’s cows.” Poof!
Great piece. The funny thing is how Warren herself is a pretty big beneficiary of this very system.
I'd rather read a week of dialogue with Luis (The Day I Became Phil Hellmuth, June 8) than see one puff of the peace pipe with that marxist masshole witch whose personal notion of a K-shape economy is centered at $930,027 = her Form 1040 Line 9 plus the Line 6 non-taxed $17,579 of her & Mr.'s $117,194 of Social Security benefits. Of which they gave a heap big 3.5% to charity. (Reference: https://elizabethwarren.com/tax-returns/, charitable amount on Sch. A on page 9 in the PDF).
And they paid merely the minimum standard 5.0% in Mass. state income tax, bypassing the opportunity to pay the higher 5.85%, as good-hearted redistrbutionists are supposed to do; that's why they put it in the law. Couldn't even spare another $6,213 for the Commiewealth's cradle-to-grave policies. (Page 44 of PDF, Lines 21 and 22)
The machine is corrupt and built to become a recursive wealth loop for the mega rich. Few deserve their ever expanding wealth with Elon being an exception. A man who - in spite of forces working against him - overcame all odds and survived the onslaught from both sides of the aisle to hit the mark.
The mega rich are - by and large - cunts. I’ll give you an anecdote from my days as a corporate stooge at a Fortune 500.
At the F500 we would receive our equity awards every November. My company was given a small allotment of shares to distribute to our fairly large company. So the C-Suite had to decide who received an equity awards each year. Naturally, the available shares were divvied up and handed out to the highest performers. Of whom I was one for the entire near 20 years of my tenure.
One year, instead of the normal RSU + options, we got PSUs. PSUs for those that don’t know are performance restricted shares. They come with the baggage of hitting performance milestones for the company or they are null and void. Now this might sound like it makes sense to you, but in a massive company with lofty top line goals these don’t become the golden handcuffs of an RSU. They become a golden noose for your best employees. These PSUs had the added fuck you of Cliff vesting, so if you hit 2 years of a 3 year vesting period and decided to quit, guess what? You get nothing. Previously RSUs vested yearly, didn’t have company wide performance requirements, etc… they were just flat out rewards for the best of the best. Hence the golden handcuff moniker.
ANYWAY, long story short, I was out to lunch with our CEO and I point blank asked him “why did we shift from RSUs to PSUs?” Explaining to him the glaringly obvious issue with the decision. After some reluctance and deflection I pried the reason out of him (because he also hated our parent company’s CEO). Turns out, the board had given our parent company’s CEO PSUs that year and in a petty child like tantrum, this petulant manchild demanded that everyone else be subjected to PSUs as well.
This man was amongst the highest paid CEO of publicly held companies at the time - well over 40M a year.
That wasn’t even the worst thing he ever did. Not by a mile. But that’s not a story for here.
Anyway the point is, we have gone from CEOs and C-Suite being compensated 30x the average employee of their company in the 70s to (last I checked) 350x. The C-suite has risen similarly and now we have bullshit to deal with like endless Founders bonuses and VC anal leakage etc…
So if you want to know why you can’t keep up with your grandparents, this is why. Your company is stealing your own money from you and your government is fucking you on the other end with taxes to enrich their friends in tax free money laundering operations known as NGOs while pot holes only get bigger.
We are being spit roast by capitalism. Which is why the cockroaches of communism have come out of their dark holes. The machine looks hopeless to overcome to most people, and so we get commies coming in spinning their High School Marxism bullshit to win over a disgruntled and much stupider generation of people to their cause. Which coincidentally will make the Corpo/Govt spit roast look like a welcome reprieve as we are thrown into economic gang bang territory.
I hope you all let those metaphors marinate.
Dude , I knew I liked you , RAGE on : )
Well said -- Feels a lot like 1928/29. just wait till the Great-er Depression Hits. The thirties were known as the Red Decade. Which is why I admire Ayn Rand so much, as a Russian who wrote here best work in support of personal freedom during that very time. This one might even be worse.
Its orders of magnitude worse because information flow control and manipulation are so thorough and advanced that they would make Orwell blush. The enemy has managed to turn half of the greatest nation on earth on itself. Honestly if it wasn’t so on the nose I would say “The Matrix” down to the last detail is the simulation we live in today.
If I don’t see it with my own two eyes, in person, happening live, I consider it bullshit and a psyop. It’s my origin story.
Brilliant, exactly right.
An economy that leaves this many people in the dust is not optimized, it's engineered. We can't deficit spend our way out of automatic asset inflation.
Well said Chris! Philosophically, the problem is the privatization of profits and the socialization of losses, or the socialist impulse generally.
Your article is spot on. Here is an interesting fact, in Jan 1976, the M2 money supply in the USA was just $1 Trillion. Now 50 years later one person has a net worth equal to all the money that existed in America in 1976.
Today the M2 money supply sits at $23 Trillion and growing.
Now the question for Ms. Warren, just who is responsible for that sudden growth in the money supply? She and her colleagues are the ones responsible for what exists today. They created the inflation, they created the mess we have, and they created the opportunity for a select few to amass fortunes like this, that would not have been possible if it were not for what congress has done for the last 50 years.
Note, it was bad before 1976, but since that year the problem has grown exponentially.
Brilliant post. I wish I were able to sum it up so clearly and succinctly.
Amazing Chris. Also it’s so strange we still confuse cause and effect:
“But blaming Musk for the existence of the wave itself is like blaming a surfer for the tide.”
You're right about the moral hazard known as the "Pascal's Mugger" dynamic. When decision-makers do not bear the full consequences of their failures (socialized losses) but reap the rewards of success (private gains), it creates a dangerous asymmetric incentive structure.
The Federal Reserve lowering interest rates, allowing for higher inflation, purchasing assets all increase the money supply that increase asset prices.
Open borders suppress wages and add to government expenditures, either for additional services for illegal aliens or for US citizens that can no longer find profitable work.
Globalization took high paying jobs and exported them, which again lowered wages for American workers and increased government expenditures for US citizens that could no longer find profitable work.
And globalization was a bonanza for anyone selling globally. Software exports scale much faster (both volume and margins) than American motorcycles and washing machines.
It seems like all government policy is geared towards greater wealth inequity. This isn't the worst outcome as long as everyone's boat is rising. Unfortunately this doesn't appear to be the case.
And the solution isn't a wealth tax. Frankly tax collection look rather reasonable if it wasn't for budget deficits and a souring national debt. But what we are learning is much of that is not caused by a lack of taxes, it is more the result of over spending including massive fraud, waste and abuse, along with poor government policy.
And we should also have a discussion about the hidden taxes, because all taxes are eventually paid by the citizens. Hidden taxes include overregulation, corporate income tax, inflation, social security/medicare taxes paid by corporations, etc.
The good news is much of the folks on the billionaire list is not folks that inherited their wealth, rather they have built their wealth, and unlike government their capital is being used productively to better humanity.
It is hard to criticize someone who has done what our government struggles with, including getting rockets into space, building electric cars that people want, advancing robotics and AI. And what I will forever be grateful for is personal risk taking to advance free speech. How close were we to getting a crazy Karen as the Czar of Government Information before Elon purchased Twitter and disclosed the government's censorship program. You think Zuke would have been so forthcoming before Elon spilled the beans?
This is a serious discussion for serious people and unfortunately Warren is not one of them.
"This is a serious discussion for serious people and unfortunately Warren is not one of them."
Correct.
I don't think it is only the likes of Sen. Warren that is not serious about solving these problems. A list of serious people across the 535 elected office holder in Congress would probably be less than 10 people. Rand Paul is the only one that comes to my mind at the moment.
Without globalization there would be no WalMart and vast numbers of the lower middle class would be worse for it. Globalization lifts boats but the least of us gets more lift than the wealthy.
OK, I can live with, that but how often are "the least of us" the laziest ?
Just the other day I saw a woman purchase hundreds of dollars of $9.95 flank steaks , the only thing in her cart , with an access card .
Elizabeth Warren IS the scummy root of the very system that allows this .
SKUs, encoded in supermarket bar codes, will soon allow automated audits of SNAP spending. Accountability in many areas is coming soon. The only problem is that the deluge of outrageous abuse of programs will be such a fire hose that Americans may become immune.
Elizabeth Warren preys upon the weak minded "mo' shit free" voter . Her lying ugly ass makes my skin crawl. What's worse is the fact that most voters can't seem to see through this fact and she keeps getting elected .
She is a (one of many) poster child for term limits .
Honestly…. I don’t think she cares about solving the underlying issues.. sound prudent monetary policy is like sunlight…. It’s disinfects things.. She would never get re-elected if she went after the source. It’s well written and thoughtful but sadly it’s likely spent on a captured politician who survives on placating her base with endless promises of free shit! Write an open letter to the powers that be and unleash a modern gold standard and put a cap on spending to what is actually brought in each year from productivity.