2023 Archives

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Now that both Colorado and Maine have disqualified Trump from the ballot for committing insurrection in violation of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, a few Democrats have joined virtually the entire GOP in claiming that it should be the “right of the voters, not the courts” to decide who our next president will be. — The Maine Republican who filed the initial complaint that led to Trump being removed from that state’s presidential ballots is also calling for Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from Trump’s appeal of Secretary of State Shenna Bellows’ finding that he’s disqualified by virtue of his treasonous attempted sedition. — Lev Parnas was sentenced to over a year in prison for funneling Russian money into the Trump campaign. — Putin is “betting the farm” on Trump getting elected in 2024. — Speaking of Putin and Ukraine, now that the entire US press corps has left Kiev and relocated themselves like lemmings to Israel, Russia is doubling down on their violent, criminal assaults on Ukrainian civilians, schools, hospitals, apartment buildings, and shopping centers. — The Argentine crises deepens. — Leonard Leo and his Christianist fellow travelers are setting up a new case for the Supreme Court to okay a religious school to be 100 percent funded with taxpayer money. — Coal multimillionaire unhappy with President Biden’s decision to promote green hydrogen — Geeky Science! Global warming is killing salmon.

Republicans will then begin lobbying to “reduce spending” by cutting the amount allocated for the vouchers, locking the emerging two-tier status of publicly funded education into place... In 1776, British economist Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, a book that laid out the principles that modern economies have operated under for centuries (with the exception of the Reagan Revolution years of 1981-2021). In addition to arguing for a strong domestic manufacturing base and high taxes on the wealthy, Smith pointed out that one of the things that most directly constitutes the wealth of a nation is its educated workforce and well-informed populace (as a result of that education).

How would you react if one day you were sitting at home and the phone rang and when you picked it up you heard a man shout: “Kill yourself now so we can save ammo!”

The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream. As productivity continued to rise, due to increasing automation and better technology, so too would everyone’s wages. Or so went the theory. The glue holding this logic together was the then-top marginal income tax rate. In 1963, just before the Time article was written, the top marginal income tax rate was 90%. What that did was encourage CEOs to keep more money in their businesses: to invest in new technology, to pay their workers more, to hire new workers and expand. After all, what’s the point of sucking millions and millions of dollars out of your business if it’s going to be taxed at 90% (or even the 74% that President Lyndon Johnson lowered it to in 1966)?