Would Jon Ossoff Really Fight?
Inside the mailbag: Billionaires ... Robert Mueller ... New Hotness
c0ffeep0t: Why aren’t Democrats loudly and preemptively blaming Republicans for any terror attacks that occur as a result of Trump’s war of choice and the GOP’s unwillingness to fund TSA separately?
Same set of reasons they haven’t blamed Donald Trump and Sean Duffy for the uptick in air disasters and near misses since last January, and why they haven’t taken up the causes of the service members killed since Trump began the war, and why they haven’t blamed Trump and Kash Patel for terrorist attacks (their words, not mine) that have already happened on their watch.
I can’t claim to have a total diagnosis, but a misguided sense of propriety is part of it. Terminal fear of blowback is part of it. And a consistent underrating of the power of rhetoric—and of being first to establish narrative control—is also part of it.
That last one is an especially big liability because it leaves them reacting to events and accusation in all scenarios, not just in ones where there’s clear partisan credit to claim or blame to cast.
Preemptively blaming Trump for reprisal attacks is obviously good offensive politics, but it’s almost as obviously good defensive politics. Republicans aren’t waiting. They’ve seeded the idea that Democrats will be to blame, because they shut down the Department of Homeland Security. Now, which party do you think will be better prepared for the partisan spin wars if and when such an attack happens? And which version of events is the public likeliest to believe? The one people hear first, or the one they hear later, from the other party trying desperately to set the record straight after the fact?
Obviously we can’t know things will play out this way. Maybe there will be no reprisal attacks. Maybe they will only happen after DHS is reopened, or at least the non-immigration components of it. But the revealed analysis—of how the party understands the formation of public opinion—is a general problem that extends way beyond the immediate news environment.
Not only are Democrats much less proactive than Republicans at telling stories about current events, and finding stories they can treat as microcosms of current events; they’re simultaneously blasé about the mechanisms of message transmission.
Democrats essentially sat on their hands through the buildout of the conservative propaganda apparatus, Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, and now the steering of TikTok, CBS, CNN, etc. into the hands of Trump’s oligarch allies. They have not tried to stop any of it, nor shown any indication that they believe it’s a source of strength for the GOP. Every time they’ve had an opportunity to govern this century, they’ve been left to complain that media outlets aren’t interested in telling their success stories. But at this pace, by the time they win back power again, most media will only be interested in telling stories, true or fabricated, about their failures.
Matt Colbert: If you could implement your own zany tax plan, what would you do?
Fun one! If the Constitution were no object, any plan I’d implement would include wealth and land-value tax provisions.
Given that the Constitution makes it pretty tough to raise adequate revenue in a progressive way from anything other than income, my fantasy tax plan is a 100 percent income tax on everybody’s income, followed by government transfers to all citizens, based on formulas that balance need and productivity.
So imagine you accept a job offer for $100,000 a year. Instead of receiving biweekly paychecks from your employer, with tax withheld, your employer would send your entire gross income for the pay period to the government, which would in turn remit back to you everything you’re entitled to: gross incomes, minus taxes, plus benefits. If policy says you pay 25 percent in tax, but also are entitled to benefits that equal 10 percent of your pre-tax income, your net income would be $85,000 and the government would send you a bit over $3,500 twice a month. And that’s it. You’re done.
This is only different than the system we use in accounting terms; but it manages to cut out a bunch of middle men and paperwork and wasted time. No tax-filing season, no monitoring expenses. Your employer wouldn’t need a payroll service company. The government wouldn’t need to survey employers en masse to track national economic conditions.
It’s roughly analogous to the ways single-payer health insurance would be more efficient than a similarly universal system that funnels money from both the Treasury and private bank accounts to highly regulated insurance companies.
But just as single-payer health insurance is ripe for demagoguery—durrr socialism arglebargle!—a 100 percent tax rate before transfer payments would make most Americans instinctually recoil. That’s MY money!! And if you take all my money, that’s communism!
Given these practical constraints, and partisan biases, and false intuitions, and the power of propaganda, I think my basic aim would be: maximum fairness and efficiency for the overwhelming majority of taxpayers; significantly greater focus on externalities, and extreme progressivity once we reach people with high incomes, such that we can strike a good balance between collecting adequate revenue and disallowing any class or individual to become more powerful than the state itself.
To be more specific: