From Bloomberg:
The Blue State-Red State Tax Divide Isn’t Really That Fair
The Trump administration’s many attempts over the past couple of weeks to halt federal spending have met mostly with approval from Republicans on Capitol Hill and outrage from Democrats. That’s sort of what one would expect given that Trump is a Republican, but also kind of weird in that states and congressional districts that vote for Republicans are as a rule much bigger net beneficiaries of federal spending than those that vote for Democrats.
With the federal government running a deficit of 5.9% of gross domestic product in the 2022 fiscal year — the most recent available in the state balance of payments data compiled by the State University of New York’s Rockefeller Institute of Government — even blue states got more back from Washington than they sent there. But their deficit amounted to just 0.4% of GDP. The red-state shortfall was 3.1% of GDP, with interest payments accounting for most of the rest of the federal deficit.
Blue states did receive more federal largesse per capita than red ones in 2022, but that can be chalked up to the anomalous cases of Maryland and Virginia, where many federal agencies and contractors are based (the District of Columbia is not included in these statistics). Remove those two states from the calculations and per capita spending is slightly lower in blue states than in red ones. And all but one of the 11 states that paid more into the federal government in 2022 than they got back out voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 (Utah being the exception).
It’s a pattern that reveals inequality as well as wealth: The district with the lowest income tax revenue in the US in 2022, New York’s 15th in the South Bronx, was just across the Hell Gate span of the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge (formerly the Triborough) from the district with the highest, and a 45-minute walk through Harlem from the third-highest. The second-lowest-revenue district, California’s 21st in the San Joaquin Valley, was about 60 miles as the crow flies from both the second- and fourth-highest. But in New York and California, the rich districts outweigh the poor ones, and both states send more to Washington than they get back.
First
that’s easy, Blue progressive states are makers
Red Maga uneducated maoists free universal healthcare recipients are takers.
Who makes, who takes
Posted on March 2, 2025 by grim
From Bloomberg:
Ridiculous
VSG: NJ is set up in complete reverse. Red voting areas are the educated and high earning ones, Blue voting areas are the resource hogs consuming enormous quantities and offering little in return.
What happens if we put the 1% as a US state?
Chi- Now do Lakewood.
Really all of Ocean County.
What happens if we put the 1% as a US state?
The state with the most climate diversity would be California so I suppose that would make the most sense. Is there another state? Do we carve out an area and draw new lines? What luxuries would the state offer? Be creative. :)
Ocean County… aside from the beaches, it’s a flat, boring, loamy terrain of scrub pines and aging strip malls and aging muppets.
Answered my own question, although jot what I expected:
From https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2024/
1% paid about $1 Trillion in taxes compared to the rest who paid $1.4 T, if I am reading this right.
Chi 7:53, where is the data to claim this. If you look at a place like Princeton it is dark blue and it’s contribution to taxes is disproportionally high.
Give Zelensky the nuclear weapons he wants.
https://kyivindependent.com/ukrainians-raised-hr-22-mln-for-nukes-in-hours-after-the-white-house-clash/
Meanwhile across the pond. It seems the Europeans have come to their senses and now want a ceasefire.
“LONDON — Britain, France and Ukraine have agreed to work on a ceasefire plan to present to the United States, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Sunday as he prepared to host a summit of European leaders to discuss ending the war.”
“ Sunday’s summit is likely to include talks on establishing a European military force to be sent to Ukraine to underpin a ceasefire. Starmer said it would involve “a coalition of the willing”
“ The summit will also include leaders from France, Germany, Denmark, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, Canada, Finland, Sweden, the Czech Republic and Romania. The Turkish foreign minister, NATO secretary-general and the presidents of the European Commission and European Council will also attend.”
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/02/g-s1-51585/uk-france-ukraine-ceasefire-plan
How much would they have paid with a 1950’s tax rate, date adjusted, maths people?
RentL0rd says:
March 2, 2025 at 8:32 am
Answered my own question, although jot what I expected:
From https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2024/
1% paid about $1 Trillion in taxes compared to the rest who paid $1.4 T, if I am reading this right.
Too far apart, not gonna happen. Shells continue to fly.
But one can dream.
Juice Box says:
March 2, 2025 at 8:47 am
Meanwhile across the pond. It seems the Europeans have come to their senses and now want a ceasefire.
Here is your chance, send your kids. These families did. Feel free to donate their blood. Just stop sending my tax dollars there when we have homeless vets of our own.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/03/01/ukraine-foreign-fighters-marines-hertweck/
Touché. It’s French, but hey, let the Mexicans borrow it for a bit.
U.S. gun companies are asking the Supreme Court this week to stop an unusual lawsuit from Mexico, a case that coincides with a critical moment for relations between the two countries.
“Just as [American officials] are worried on the movement of drugs from Mexican territory to the United States, we are worried and working on the entry of weapons from the United States to Mexico,” President Claudia Sheinbaum said during a recent news conference. “A lot of the drug abuse is in the United States, while the violence, the loss of lives, is in Mexico.”
Mexico alleges that U.S. firearms manufacturers know their guns are trafficked into Mexico and make deliberate design, marketing and distribution choices to retain and grow the profitable but illegal market.
For the RayCists. A little tip on where it’s safe for you to purchase a home:
The house color that tells you when a neighborhood is gentrifying
A Washington Post color analysis of D.C. found shades of gray permeate neighborhoods where the White population has increased and the Black population has decreased.
“A Washington Post color analysis of D.C. found fifty shades of grey permeate neighborhoods where the White population has increased and the Black population has decreased.”
Where do I sign?
“ Sunday’s summit is likely to include talks on establishing a European military force to be sent to Ukraine to underpin a ceasefire. Starmer said it would involve “a coalition of the willing”
Trump was right again.
Mr Zelensky is said to have uttered ‘Suka, blyat’ in response to Mr Vance criticising him for an alleged lack of respect, during Friday evening’s confrontation.
The slang phrase, also spelled as ‘cyka’, is variously said to translate in English as ‘son of a b****’, ‘b**** f***’, ‘f***ing hell’ or ‘f*** you, b****’.
The Ukrainian president was seen crossing his arms in dismay as both Mr Trump and Mr Vance laid into him, before Mr Zelensky was sent on his way from the Washington DC summit sooner than scheduled.
The clash between Mr Trump and Mr Zelensky in the Oval Office was broadcast around the world on Friday, with the US President claiming his counterpart was ‘gambling with World War III’.
Mr Trump’s administration has made it clear privately it wants a public apology from Zelensky to mend relations,
In other news, 3 rich entitled geezers thinking they are smart enough to fly a plane flew a bit too close to one of the “Kings” palaces.
NORAD Scrambles F-16s To Intercept 3 Aircraft Breaching Mar-a-Lago, Florida Airspace
An interesting take on the White House meeting with Zelensky. I have a feeling it was a bad move not to apologize prior to leaving the US.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/victor-davis-hanson-10-bad-takeaways-from-zelenskyy-blow-up
Kaitlin Collins’ exec producer quits, Racquel Maddcow’s staff fired… why don’t these leftist stations put up a 24/7 yule log type banner that just says “Trump Sucks”. It’ll save them a ton of money and still get their anger and resentment across. They try to explain their view in twisted, sophisticated ways, thinking they’re impressing millions of people with some sort of intelligence when all it’s doing is creating content to mock and ridicule. The left trying to be serious has become a new form of comedy.
Make America Great Again. Nice slogan. How about Make America Reasonbly Competent Again,or MARCA?
Or just let Musk and his AI do the thinking. Boomer ousourced all of the brain work along with Boeing who put finance fucks in place of making planes instead of actual engineers from America.
The U.S. Air Force will inspect its entire fleet of 89 Boeing (NYSE:BA) KC-46A Pegasus aerial refueling tankers after cracks were found on two of the four new planes set to be sent to the Military Delivery Center,
Heat is really gonna be turned on when Musk goes to eliminate Social Security and Medicare, both that are gonna be bankrupt in 11 years.
Those geezers are gonna fume. Oh, and everyone else who has been paying in, that includes all of the current kids working at ShopRiteBowlandBasket.
Dark Phoenix,
You might not have to wait long. Tomorrow is a big Social Security pay day and I know of a relative and friends that are very nervous as there is already a missing payment due on Friday 2/28 that was never received. So you might have angry Geezerpelusa tomorrow.
Chicago,
You might like this. Is from Forbes. I heard of the Mar-a-lago accord which seems to have been dreamt up by some nitwit that was high as kite.
The key selling point is China, Japan, etc is forced to trade their marketable USA debt for 100yrs zero coupon non marketable bond in return for tariff waiver and USA security protection, which after the Zelensky meetings means nothing because like mobster we can change our demand anytime we want.
If they try this bs I can see a massive global USA debt product sell off and abandoning the USD as reserve currency. Think of Canada and Mexico offering Oil at a % discount if you pay in Canadian Dollars or Mexican Pesos.
From Forbes,
Why Trump’s ‘Mar-A-Lago Accord’ Would Financially Matter To You
It’s difficult to say whether President Donald Trump is serious about every plan he suddenly announces, but a new one on top of tariffs and trade policies is potentially financially disturbing on a global level.
Being called the “Mar-a-Lago Accord,” it would involve several stages. First, the U.S. would try to force some foreign creditors, which hold large amounts of long-term Treasury notes, to trade them in for special extra-long-term Treasurys.
Swapping Debt Types
Bloomberg reports that the replacements would be 100-year, non-tradeable zero-coupon bonds. That means the bonds wouldn’t pay interest. Instead, they would sell at a discount from their face value. Holding them to maturity would be the only way to recoup the investment and the accompanying return. If one of the countries needed cash, they could borrow temporarily from the Federal Reserve against the bond.
In theory, this could drive down interest payments on the federal debt, which last year topped $1 trillion annually for the first time. Eventually, interest would come due, but in 100 years, all the politicians responsible would be long-dead, having kicked the can down a full century.
Weakening the Dollar
Another aspect is the existing push on tariffs. The Trump administration wants to use them in the process of restructuring global trade and weaken the dollar, although they say outwardly that they want a strong dollar. The reason for a weaker dollar would be to reduce borrowing costs, as Jim Bianco, founder of research and analysis firm Bianco Research, told Bloomberg. If the dollar is worth less, so is the total debt.
While that is one view, another is that a weaker dollar would ultimately make debt more expensive because foreign investors would be worried about U.S. stability and, as a result, demand higher interest rates, eventually increasing the cost of debt.
Bianco also said that while he didn’t think it would happen soon, or maybe ever, Trump could turn global financial markets upside down and inside out.
First, the amount of publicly-held debt owned by foreign and international investors is much smaller than many think. At the end of the third quarter of 2024, the total amount of the federal debt held by the public was $23,325,715,000,000.
Consequences of Debt
The amount held by foreign and international investors was $8,672,900,000,000, which is about 37.2%. Focusing on a few of the largest foreign holders, like Japan and China, would affect a relatively small part of the debt, and it seems unlikely that such countries would agree to exchange all of their holdings for very long-term debt.
Trying to force other countries to take such a deal would be a dangerous move, showing weakness and undermining confidence in the U.S. That could result in demand for higher interest rates to compensate for greater perceived risk. Another potential issue would be undermining the stance of the U.S. dollar as the world’s leading reserve currency.
The move toward a weaker dollar would mean imports would cost more. Companies would pass along at least some if not all of those expenses to customers, pushing up prices and increasing the risk of growing inflation.
Only suckers pay taxes…..
Take America Back…. to neanderthals
https://adanews.ada.org/ada-news/2025/february/utah-set-to-ban-community-water-fluoridation/
Who needs perfect teeth any way.
A guy paying zero taxes for all his life. Elected and put on Mt Rushmore. We do not deserve to be the reserve status any longer Especially ambushing allies to sign over their minerals with NO guarantees.
Big estate sale will go on at MarALago
We must break it. To rebuild it on our Silicon Valley image. That is the goal of LordTurd.
From New Yorker.
Infinite Scroll
Techno-Fascism Comes to America
The historic parallels that help explain Elon Musk’s rampage on the federal government.
By Kyle Chayka
February 26, 2025
Illustration by Ariel Davis
Save this story
When a phalanx of the top Silicon Valley executives—Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Google’s Sundar Pichai—aligned behind President Trump during the Inauguration in January, many observers saw an allegiance based on corporate interests. The ultra-wealthy C.E.O.s were turning out to support a fellow-magnate, hoping perhaps for an era of deregulation, tax breaks, and anti-“woke” cultural shifts. The historian Janis Mimura saw something more ominous: a new, proactive union of industry and governmental power, wherein the state would drive aggressive industrial policy at the expense of liberal norms. In the second Trump Administration, a class of Silicon Valley leaders was insinuating itself into politics in a way that recalled one of Mimura’s primary subjects of study: the élite bureaucrats who seized political power and drove Japan into the Second World War. “These are experts with a technological mind-set and background, often engineers, who now have a special role in the government,” Mimura told me. The result is what, in her book “Planning for Empire” (2011), she labelled “techno-fascism”: authoritarianism driven by technocrats. Technology “is considered the driving force” of such a regime, Mimura said. “There’s a sort of technicization of all aspects of government and society.”
In the nineteen-thirties, Japan colonized Manchuria, in northeastern China, and the region became a test ground for techno-fascism. Nobusuke Kishi, a Japanese commerce-ministry bureaucrat, was appointed to head the industrial program in Manchuria, in 1936, and, with the collaboration of a new crop of the Japanese conglomerates known as zaibatsu, he instituted a policy of forced industrial development based on the exploitation of the local population. When Kishi returned to national politics in Japan, in 1939, along with a clique of other Japanese technocrats who had worked in Manchuria, he pursued similar strategies of state-dictated industrialization, at the expense of private interests and labor rights. This fascistic regime would not be structured the same way as Mussolini’s or Hitler’s, with power concentrated in the hands of a single charismatic leader, although Kishi had travelled to Germany in the nineteen-twenties, as the Nazi movement expanded, and drew inspiration from German industrialization for his Manchurian project. Instead, Mimura said, Japan “kind of slid into fascism” as bureaucrats exercised their authority behind the scenes, under the aegis of the Japanese emperor. As she explained, techno-fascist officials “acquire power by creating these supra-ministerial organs and agencies, subgroups within the bureaucracy that are unaccountable.” Today, Elon Musk’s doge is the Trumpian equivalent.
American corporations of the twentieth century flirted with a merging of state and industrial power. The entrepreneur Henry Ford promoted a system of industrial organization that came to be known as “Fordism,” whereby the state would intervene in the economy to guarantee mass production and consumption. In the nineteen-thirties, I.B.M. did business with the Nazi government through a German subsidiary, lending its technology to projects like the 1933 census, which helped identify Jews in the country. As a recent feature in the Guardian by Becca Lewis laid out, Silicon Valley itself has exhibited right-wing tendencies for decades, embracing misogynist and hierarchical attitudes about achievement. The journalist Michael S. Malone was issuing warnings about emerging “technofascism” way back in the late nineties, when he warned about “IQ bigotry” in the tech industry and the willingness of people to push forward digital revolution while “tossing out the weak and wounded along the way.” But our current moment marks a new conjunction of Internet entrepreneurs and day-to-day government operations. American techno-fascism is no longer a philosophical abstraction for Silicon Valley to tinker with, in the vein of intermittent fasting or therapeutic ketamine doses. It is a policy program whose constitutional limits are being tested right now as doge, staffed with inexperienced engineers linked to Musk’s own companies, rampages through the federal government.
Musk has slashed the ranks of federal employees, shut down agencies whose authority challenges his own, and leveraged artificial intelligence to decide where to cut, promising a government executed by chatbots such as Grok, from Musk’s own A.I. company. doge has gained access to Americans’ private data and developed tools to e-mail the entire federal government at once, a digital megaphone that Musk recently used to demand that employees send in a list of their weekly accomplishments. As Mimura put it, “You try to apply technical concepts and rationality to human beings and human society, and then you’re getting into something almost totalitarian.” The techno-fascist opportunism goes beyond Musk; one can sense other tech entrepreneurs and investors slavering to exploit the alliance between Trumpism and Silicon Valley capitalism, building infrastructure on a national scale. Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, has arranged his own deals with Trump’s government, including Stargate, a heavily hyped data-center project worth a potential five hundred billion dollars. Apple recently announced its own five-hundred-billion-dollar investment campaign in the U.S. over the next four years, including a plan to begin building A.I. servers in Texas. However nebulous, these extravagant plans signal a spirit of collaboration. On Truth Social, Trump posted approvingly that Apple’s plans demonstrated “FAITH IN WHAT WE ARE DOING.”
Erin McElroy, a geographer at the University of Washington who studies Silicon Valley, has used the term “siliconization” to describe the way that places such as San Francisco or Cluj-Napoca, Romania, to which many western tech companies have outsourced I.T. services, have been remade in the image and ideology of Silicon Valley. According to McElroy, the first signs of Washington’s current siliconization can be traced back, in part, to the Administration of Barack Obama, who embraced social-media platforms such as Facebook as a vector of government communication. For a time, digital platforms seemed to support democratic government as a kind of communal megaphone; but now, a decade later, technology seems to be supplanting the established authority of the government. “There is a crisis of the state,” McElroy said, and Silicon Valley may be “trying to corrode state power” in order to more quickly replace it.
Silicon Valley is premised on the idea that its founders and engineers know better than anyone else: they can do better at disseminating information, at designing an office, at developing satellites and advancing space travel. By the same logic, they must be able to govern better than politicians and federal employees. Voguish concepts in Silicon Valley such as seasteading and “network states” feature independent, self-contained societies running on tech principles. Efforts to create such entities have either failed or remained confined to the realm of brand-building, as in the startup Praxis, a hypothetical plan for a new tech-driven city on the Mediterranean. Under the new Trump White House, though, the U.S. government is being offered up as a guinea pig, McElroy said. “Now that we’ve got Musk running the state, I don’t know if they need their little offshore bubbles as much as they thought they did before.”
Such visions of a technologized society represent a break from the Make America Great Again populism that drove the first Trump Administration. maga reactionaries such as Steve Bannon tend to be skeptical of technological progress; as the journalist James Pogue has explained, their goal is to reclaim an American culture “thought to be lost after decades of what they see as globalist technocracy.” Bannon has denounced Silicon Valley’s ideology as “technofeudalism” and declared war on Musk. He sees it as antihuman, with U.S. citizens turned into “digital serfs” whose freedom is delimited by tech companies. In a January interview with Ross Douthat, of the Times, Bannon said, “They have to be stopped. If we don’t stop it, and we don’t stop it now, it’s going to destroy not just this country, it’s going to destroy the world.” Whereas the maga right wants to restore things as they were (or as they imagine things were), the tech right wants to, in Mark Zuckerberg’s phrasing, break things. In the Times interview, Bannon called Musk “one of the top accelerationists,” referencing another technology-inflected political ideology that treats chaos as an inevitability.
Accelerationism has been popularized in the past decade by the British philosopher Nick Land, who is part of the so-called neo-reactionary or Dark Enlightenment movement populated by figures including Curtis Yarvin, a former programmer and blogger whose proposals for an American monarchy have enjoyed renewed relevance during Trump 2.0. The accelerationist attitude is, as Andrea Molle, a professor of political science at Chapman University who studies accelerationism, put it to me, “This collapse is going to come anyway—let’s rip the Band-Aid.” Accelerationism emerged from Karl Marx’s idea that, if the contradictions of capitalism become exaggerated enough, they will inspire proletarian revolution and a more egalitarian society will emerge. But Molle identifies what he calls Muskian “techno-accelerationism” as having a different end: destroying the existing order to create a technologized, hierarchical one with engineers at the top. Musk “has to completely break any kind of preëxisting government architecture to impose his own,” Molle said. He added that a government thoroughly overhauled by Musk might run a bit like the wireless system that operates Teslas, enabling the company to theoretically update how your car works at any moment: “You’re allowed some agency, but they are still in control, and they can still intervene if the course is not going in the direction that it is supposed to go to maximize efficiency.”
Techno-fascism’s cold-blooded pursuit of efficiency quickly results in a state of alienation that may not be appealing to either side of the political spectrum. If Japan is any example, the collaboration between technocrats and right-wing politicians is unlikely to last forever. In 1940, the Japanese Prime Minister announced the New Order movement, which sought to overhaul the government’s structure to create a single-party state with absolute power. Mimura, the historian, said, “It reminds you a little bit of now: everything needs to be fixed, all at once. It is a little eerie to draw that historical comparison: this is the New Order in America.” Yet the power of Japan’s technocrats began to wane. When the country started faring poorly in the war, the military pushed to continue the campaign past the point that technocrats considered feasible. Kishi, the architect of technocratic Manchuria, left the government in 1944. Still, as Mimura explained, the bureaucrats had no political constituency or party to hold them accountable for their techno-fascistic program. When the U.S. sought to rebuild Japan, in part as a counterbalance to Soviet power in the region, Kishi and his colleagues were the ones who set about industrializing the nation once more. Their status as unelected officials meant, ironically, that they could stage a return to politics without “any blood on their hands,” Mimura said. In 1955, Kishi helped establish a new political party, and a few years later he became Prime Minister. ♦
“Crypto Reserve” announced by King Trump…….God help us…..
UK using seized Russian funds to support Ukraine.
Why won’t Trump do the same?
Lib —–> Trump con I mean coin.. $16.81 +28.01% (1d)
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/official-trump/
£2.26 billion big whoops…
There is 350 Billion Euros sitting as the Euroclear bank in Belgium. That is good for another two years and a million more dead.
BTW – It’s over three years..So let’s call it an even 3 million dead…
Three equal annual payments of £752m.
UK’s contribution to the G7 Extraordinary Revenue Acceleration (ERA) Loans to Ukraine scheme..
Scheme for sure.
The NY Times has headline of “ Hegseth Orders Pentagon to Stop Offensive Cyberoperations Against Russia”.
Of course Mr.Vodka soak tampon wearer believes that the russkie will play nice, just like a 5 yrs old would pet a cute Lion. This smells like Kim Philly and the Cambridge Five. Look it up.
I would recommend everyone to lock down your technological hatchets and consider that from this point on the US Government will not be able to protect you and actually work against. If you believed this before as conspiracy theory, now is a reality.
We need those troops the keyboard warriors busy hacking Russian servers if we are going to invade Mexico the 52nd state. On Friday Hegseth said the US military was “prepared to take unilateral action” to combat drug cartels..
Just more feet dragging too while the King Charles coddles Zelensky.
“This loan follows the announcement by the Prime Minister committing the Government to increase UK defense spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027”.
I thought the Ruskies were coming now?
Because it’s theft.
Grim says:
March 2, 2025 at 5:30 pm
UK using seized Russian funds to support Ukraine.
Why won’t Trump do the same?
It’s only money.
Not all that different from when the local police use drug money seizures to buy equipment.
Also theft.
But who cares?
I’ll tell you who cares, Trump does, because he’s probably promised the Russian oligarchs he’d get their money back.
They invited Canada, who came to represent the US? Certainly not JD, he spent the day in Vermont getting insults hurled at him. That dude skis in jeans.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/02/europe/ukraine-russia-zelensky-starmer-summit-intl/index.html
With all the talk from UK about putting “boots on the ground” in Ukraine, I’m not so sure they got Trump’s
PutinPeace-at-any-cost memo.They don’t seem to be so concerned about WW3, and this shit is burning on their doorsteps (well, except for Canada, oh poor Justin).
What a stark difference in optics. European leaders all went out of their way for photo ops with Zelensky, and now Trump and Vance look even more like complete assholes.
Hopefully China can step up to take our place…
https://nypost.com/2025/03/02/us-news/elon-musk-appears-to-back-us-withdrawing-from-nato-the-un/
Not sure any of this is adding up to making America great … again? Never again.
Photo ops with Zelensky… Bunch of wannnkers gave a few billion to France.
5000 missiles really? Thales is a French-owned company that got that missile contract for 5000 missiles. Lightweight multirole missiles (LMMs). Again it’s air defense with a 7 kilometer range means it needs to right on top of you when you fire. Not offensive weapons and it won’t take down a single Russian bomber.
https://www.thalesgroup.com/en/markets/defence-and-security/air-forces/advance-air-defence/rapidranger
Give Zelensky Nukes.. Russia will back down after all that is left of Kyiv is radioactive ashes.
I think most of us are very clear-eyed about what is happening right now. The plan appears to be the destabilize the population by cutting off resources and making past services absent of unreliable.
By flooding the Nation in chaos and putting an end to the government as we know it and then replacing it with their own regime. A regime which appears to be cruel and corrupt.
Casual looking at formerly hot markets like Scottsdale and Orlando, it looks like real estate is about to dive off the cliff. People learned nothing from 2008.
I was in a meeting with a non profit that supports local causes for the poor. They were considering using Google Workspace for collaboration but nixed the idea. Guess why?
They don’t trust the US Govt to not snoop and penalize for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion activities. Equal opportunity, as you know now, is considered a bad thing! Go figure!
So, yea, they’ll continue to use low-tech means to collaborate.
Elsewhere, I heard CDC workers not using Zoom and instead meeting in coffee shops – I think I mentioned this before, because it is too risky to transcribe everything they say.
Anyone else getting 1935 vibes?
SO i have a friend who has an elderly parent, who followed a text message to donate to Donnie. They thought it was a one time donation, but since then Donnie has been extracting $50-100 a DAY from their account. This has been going on for 5 months until the kid caught it
The worst part is that that don’t grab it all in one transaction. It is multiple transactions a day $5, $7 etc to run under the fraud algorithms.
So between $7500 and $15K in grift.
An interesting question.
https://x.com/eddies0715/status/1896339997831348610
But he still hasn’t found out he was donating to an Indian scammer
I’ve been following historian Jeffrey Sachs. He’s worked with the who’s who of world history – From Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Clintons, Biden, etc.
And his perspective seems to be not not from ideology or bias.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7WUryDLAb4
^ the latest one. His previous analysis including a strong rebuke of the European Union are worth listening to.
Some great points including that Putin and Trump have agreed to stopping the war and Europe can do nothing about it… and that the US’s unilateral rule is now dismantled.
The other important point being – US is now in one-man rule, very similar to how the Rome converted from a republic to an empire.
He stops short of saying Trump has been bought by Putin… but it’s not far from that conclusion.
DJT IS DOWN 10% in the last week and 25% in the last month.
On Grim’s original post about makers and takers, this is exactly how the Democrats want a progressive income tax system to work. Places with the highest incomes pay the most income taxes, send it to DC, and then it gets sent back out via the big welfare state.
However I think the aggregation of politics by congressional district is obscuring a lot of detail. I suspect that the people who actually earn the biggest incomes and pay the majority of those taxes are not necessarily Democrats. If votes were weighted by taxes paid, would those places still be represented by Dems? Not necessarily. It’s that the taxes are being paid by a smaller minority of earners in urban centers outnumbered and surrounded by lower-earning democrat voters who elect Democrats to redistribute those few earners’ wealth both locally and nationally.
Clearly this dynamic hasn’t given Dems even the slightest nudge toward taxing incomes less or making them less progressive, so these Dem congressmen are happy with this situation.
Both parties now have large numbers of “poor and stupid” voter bases. Trump gets Honey Boo Boo and the Wrestling fans, Dems generally get the Shaniquas and the baristas. So far they haven’t figured out how to keep the government spending generous for their gang, but not the others. On the other income and contributor end, the Dems get the “intellectuals,” mis-educators and artists, the Republicans the small businessmen.