elon being worth $1 trillion does not mean elon has $1 trillion in the bank. most of the people i see arguing for a 5% annual wealth tax appear to be willfully misunderstanding this.

This is a great graph. The point is not time. The x axis is gdp per capita. The point is that growth does benefit all. The idea growth only benefits the rich is dramatically false. timely given Stieglitz, Pketty et al recent degrowth noise.

Yes, it's kind of amazing how the socialist pitch shifted from "socialism will make you richer" to "socialism will make you poor, which is good because you deserve to be poor"

RT @ddeanjohnson: The March 2024 AARO reports were transmitted to Congress (classified) and the public (unclassified) with approval of the…

The new OMB grant rules are being sold as anti-DEI reform. They are much worse: a government-wide machinery for political control of science. Every award must advance “the President’s policy priorities.” Peer review becomes advisory. Grants can be killed on political whim. The nationalization of American science. marginalrevolution.com/margi…

Trump asks for a reconciliation package that includes $350B for the military and the SAVE America Act. Just days ago, Susan Collins, the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and Mitch McConnell, the top defense appropriator, said there won't be a third reconciliation bill. Trump has had uneven performance on the Hill. FISA about to expire. Filibuster in tact. Blue slips unchanged. Lots of GOP free agents on both sides of the Capitol.

Humans get rich in a market economy by “growing more bananas,” not hoarding them.

RT @JessicaBRiedl: Senators elected this fall will be in office when the SocSec trust fund hits insolvency. So it *should* be a major campa…

EXCLU - U.S. military blew up Boy Scouts balloon and Happy Birthday balloon with $500,000 missiles. And "bored" military drone pilots are the source of many "UFO" videos - weary operators end up filming balloons, birds, and more. nypost.com/2026/06/06/world-…

Really curious to see how New York and California Dems earning $200k feel about this — they’re not the most important voters in the world but they’re very loud, and a key plank of Dem politics since 2018 has been don’t mess with the upper-middle class.

If you’re wondering about this literature, now quite old and established, there’s a summary here economicforces.xyz/p/what-we… Tl;dr: it is a deeply unserious 🚩 to write something like “Markups are rising (De Loecker, Eeckhout, Unger 2019)”

The federal budget remains far out of balance. The CBO projects publicly held debt will hit a new record high within the next four years and rise to 175 percent of GDP by 2056. Our analysis points to the need to focus primarily on reducing spending growth—especially in Social Security and Medicare—and secondarily on relatively efficient, broad-based tax increases. Read more: hubs.ly/Q04jX6kB0

"Buy, borrow, die" is a neat theory for wealthy tax avoidance, but research shows that rich people don't actually use it. @PostOpinions washingtonpost.com/opinions/…

Yes. Defenders of free enterprise, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, called it "free enterprise" in the early 20th century. We should go back to that.

Egg producers became less greedy apparently

Because property taxes are, to a first approximation, good.

Yes, I had a very severe reaction to my second Moderna shot. But part of being a responsible scientist with a large platform is not extrapolating my personal experience to the entire population. I also have a rare autoimmune condition called Parsonage-Turner syndrome (diagnosed in 2013), so I may have been particularly vulnerable to side effects. Given my bad experience with the first mRNA vaccine I've ever taken, I have made the personal decision to avoid them in the future. However, it would have been incredibly unscientific and highly irresponsible of me to take this personal experience of mine and start telling millions of people online to not get vaccinated for COVID. There's a reason quack alternative medicine practitioners plaster personal testimonies all over their websites. They sound convincing to a lot of people. But it's purely manipulation. Personal testimony, even a large collection of them, isn't a substitute for real, population-level data. I am not an expert on vaccines, the COVID vaccine, or epidemiology in general. So when I experience a serious side effect taking something with a non-zero rate of serious side effects, I understand that my personal experience likely isn't an indication that we're all being lied to about safety. You should understand that as well. The impulse to extrapolate a very negative personal experience to the entire population is very strong. But responsible scientists, and especially those with large public platforms, should resist that impulse.

This is all disqualifying for a job that 100 people in the entire country have the privilege to hold. If this were a Republican every Democrat would say so. The party replaced its presidential candidate 100 days before the election—there’s no reason to be stuck with this guy.