Any apprentice who wants to join Trump's ticket has to prove they won't accept the election results unless Trump wins—and Tim Scott shows he is a willing collaborator. Plus, most students aren't on the side of the protesters, the threat to Biden from the sense of disorder, and the pathology of Kristi Noem. Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger join Tim Miller.
show notes
Columbia's cancellation is sad for those graduating students who didnt get a HS graduation as well during covid either
True most of the Democrats don't care about the protesters. I bet most of the protesters are probably either not American or not people who would ever vote for Biden.
Oh, Bill Kristol!!: "maybe Cricket wasn't killed and he is living happily somewhere or, perhaps Cricket never existed? This is top shelf slap-stick hilarious humor that leverages the Republican compulsion for lying about everything. Awesome!
I live in CA. Maybe hour or so from Mexico/San Diego border. I NEVER hear anyone complain about the illegals coming over. We need gardeners, farm works, service jobs. We don't want to pay $15 an hour for those jobs. We are fine with Biden.
I am one of those old-school empty-headed liberals that's been finding somw comfort at the Bulwark - and I hate when old-school Republicans pop up with old-school GOP ideas, like about keeping wages low so i can have my comforts without paying fairly for them. How is anyone supposed to live decently on less than $15 an hour doing hard labor jobs? Please tell me it's a joke in bad taste.
Democracy can not function without a minimally prosperous citizenry.
Hense the value in employing migrant workers from South of the border. Republicans have in back asswards
A bunch of thoughts…
Tim I think you are right with respect to the protests and immigration. The protests fundamentally affect very few people but do look like disorder. What I don’t understand about people who bitch about them is what they expect Biden to do? It’s not like he can force Columbia or USC or any other university to do something about it. It isn’t his job and if he did then I don’t want to hear anyone complain if trump does the same thing in 2025. In his speech he supported free speech and is against intimidation, vandalism, violence and antisemitism. If that isn’t enough to make a center right voter vote for Biden then they were never going to vote for Biden. They are just looking for excuses.
The debt issue is wholly Republican issue. The reason no one cares about it is that for 50 years republicans told us we were going. To collapse because of the debt. Then they would come into office and massively increase debt. You know what happened? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. You can’t cry wolf for 50 years and not expect the voters to just tune you out.
Tim and Bill,
Nice work taking the verbal wire brush to Andrew to get the residual Dispatch stank off of him.
While I understand how evil Donald Trump is and I won't ever make any excuses for him, I think we blame him too much for his acolytes becoming Trumpists. Tim Scott, Marco Rubio, JD Vance, etc. were all fundamentally corrupt human beings with no standards long before Donald Trump. All Trump has done is bring sunshine to these people not fundamentally change who they are as people. Not from the Bulwark staff, but other traditional Republicans have spent years trying to prop up people like Vance, Scott, Rubio, Cotton, ... as conservative and the opposite has been true. They are disgusting opportunists that are a natural fit for Trump not people corrupted by Trump.
Totally agree. They were always snakes. Because of Trump they can say the quiet parts out loud.
I've come to see our current crop of politicians as diligent students of Groucho. "Those are my principles. If you don't like those, I have others."
Trump made it even easier for them. Now it's just whatever he thinks I agree with. They don't even need to know what they believe at the moment (to be most advantageous). they just sync with Trump.
I don't know. Maybe they have to pretend in public that they have some thoughts on any question, hence the word salads. The GOP came in for some serious ridicule for the 2020 platform, "Whatever Trump wants."
I wouldn’t have thought so before Trump but wow was I proven wrong.
It kind of doesn’t matter the reason. This is now who they are.
Mike Collins did put out a 1/2 apology today. Not whole-hearted but decent for today's Republican Party.
Embarrassingly, I probably get 90% of my sports news from the Bulwark podcast. But the sports news is kind of good to know. Who couldn't use a healthy distraction.
I want this bullshit era to end.
I’m betting Spies got a “golden handshake” for being terminated, but conditioned upon issuing that statement.
Right now the latest performance audition for Trumpster's VP is not accepting the 2024 vote if he loses. We saw it over the weekend with Tim Scott and Doug Bergum. Next up, Hillbilly Vance and Little Marco.
Of course. If they didn't, than that means Trump lost. Trump can't stand a loser. So he can't possibly be a loser. Too bad all the Republican men have cut off their "you know what" In order to be Trump's slave girls. Do they have any idea how pathetic they look?
They've already been there. J.D. Vance has been the most willing to go there even when he's not prompted.
That is probably why Trump will select him.
Next time when any network has somebody on(like Scott,Bergum or Noem),be really prepared to follow up. Fact check with facts instantly.This can be done without seemingly being partisan or rude. The best at it was Tim Russert. As for Tim Scott, pull out the Tim reply: "Already, I've had enough". Then simply state that all swing states have had three recounts.And 60+ court cases found no evidence of fraud.And that includes the SCOTUS. Simple. Case closed.
Today's episode was nearly perfect. It started off with Tim baiting bill into running smack about the Nuggets (hate them too Bill, but damn, they sure are fun to watch), and the episode ended with Tim dropping an Alex P Keaton reference. In-between was, as always, a great discussion from the brilliant minds at The Bulwark. Keep up the good work!
Hey Tim, a note of caution on that Politico piece about protest funding. I think you should reread the piece to include the correction at the bottom of the piece. Because the entire premise of the story is debunked in the correction.
Jeez - thanks
It is quite the hefty correction:
“CORRECTION: An earlier version of this report misstated that The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation seeds the Tides Foundation’s work. It no longer has active grants to Tides. It also said POLITICO contacted Gates. POLITICO contacted an agency that has represented the Gates Foundation but did not reach out directly to Gates. It said IfNotNow was one of two of the main organizations behind the protests. IfNotNow is supporting protests, but students are leading them. And it misstated the year Rockefeller Brothers Fund donated to Tides and that the donations to Jewish Voice for Peace went through an intermediary. The donations to Tides took place prior to 2022, and the Fund directly contributed to Jewish Voice for Peace.”
Jeez, they should have just pulled the article.
But other than that mistake :)
I’m with Tim in thinking that Noem might not be quite ready for prime time and give another possibility for the KJU confusion. She and Cory Lewandowski went to a Halloween party, she was Eva Braun and he was KJU?
Or maybe she met Dennis Rodman and mistook him for Kim Jong Un
Also gosh darn it, I’m such a Bill Kristol Stan. It’s weird to Stan pundits but yeah, it’s just like a pina colada for the soul to hear such thoughtful, reasoned, reflective comments about the state of things. He reminds me to think the best of people, he’s very fair, it’s very centering and I appreciate him so much. 🙂
Guest suggestion re last minute topic: Emmanuel Saez and or Gabriel Zucman. They’re tax wonks, both I think from uc Berkeley but I might be wrong… wrote a great book that you’ve prolly read, but for anyone who hasn’t, “the triumph of injustice: how the rich dodge taxes and how to make them pay” is a good read by them. Really digs into the budget and debt and spending and highlights some policies that we would probably be talking about if we lived in a magical world where DJT didn’t haunt our dreams and pollute our discourse ala fist pump and chest bump and the non profit industrial complex (<—my opinion) wasn’t feeding off our collective woe and draining the extra change from our bank accounts. Ok, that latter issue being maybe specific to me, but in any event, they do make a point to trace how much we’ve privatized and reframed entitlements and government assistance into charities. And charity is good, in theory, but not so much when it’s a vehicle that allows private actors with agendas and ethical/moral priorities to throw grand balls and galas and rent massive premium office space and get praised for their benevolence in assisting those in need, where in the before times such needs would be administered by the state, by representative government actors and policy. They also discuss the lunacy of the revamped bankruptcy laws that allow for discharge of all debt but somehow exempt student loans, and where’s the moral hazard in that? As someone with cough cough several hundred thousand in student loan debt, I sometimes daydream how much I would have rather just bought a house or bought a bunch of designer clothes and took my friends around the world on vacays and then yeah - then I could declare bankruptcy, I could have that debt discharged, my credit in shambles but at least reset. All other debts, discharge is an option, think of corporate bankruptcies and all manner of everyday discharges, they are all allowed, but not student debt. Makes no sense. Anyway that’s my rant that I didn’t mean to go on and yeah ok back to me garden…
On campus protests, people are getting sick of them in the same way that people get tired of being around someone who complains too much. It's going to be a drag on Biden's ticket because people associate campus protestors with the left and negative views of the left trickle up to the national ticket in the same way that the GOP's radical abortion stance at the state level trickles up to Trump's ticket.
A lot of these protestor kids have already committed to not voting for Biden anyway so punishing them to boost the party's image with moderate voters is a better play than being sympathetic to them in my view. That's before we talk about college-aged kids having the lowest turnout levels among voter demographics too. There's more to gain in coming out against the protestors than there is to getting behind them. Biden should tell the protestors that they'd be making more of a difference raising money to aid Palestinian victims than taking the media's attention away from Gaza and instead focusing on college kids acting wild and doing illegal shit like violating private property rules and creating disorder.
Or they can go to Gaza and help. I am 66 and all of my friends/contemporaries are Dems as well and we are all sick to death of the little brats.
The excuse that maybe he didn’t know about the whole Univ of Miss video is exactly why R’s get to continue doing whatever they want. There’s always a “serious” voice out there making excuses or saying maybe they don’t really mean it.
Two things - first, I agree A.B. is a usually a downer and I'll repeat on this thread that student loan forgiveness is helping more middle aged folks than under 30 because so much of it is streamlining the administrative process of laws passed by Congress in 2007 to forgive the balance of loans people have been paying for 20 years undergrad and 25 for graduate school + public service loan forgiveness for those who have worked for a qualifying agency for 10+ years. Please, can those facts penetrate the Bulwark commentators? Second, your recent guest Simon Rosenberg mentioned that the college students being impacted by cancelled commencement ceremonies are the same kids (for the most part) who didn't get to have high school graduation ceremonies and they are not not happy with this additional disruption.
The other thing that is always left out of the loan forgiveness debate is that it doesn't apply only to rich kids that went to Harvard. A lot of it is directed at for-profit schools and other post-secondary institutions that train lower-income kids for trades. The GOP is painting it as relief solely for the Dem elites. That's not accurate (surprised that GOP would be inaccurate, right?).
All true, except AB is *always* a downer. Except her The Day After special. That was just phenomenal.
I like her a lot though. I just turn my Eeyore filter way up. She’s very funny.
Eyesore filter, lol. That's great.
Thank you, Bill. The 2020 election was basically seamless. Andrew was way too wishy-washy about it.
I’m in OH. Our recently MAGA-ed SofS mandated ONE dropbox per county. Needless to say, in huge counties which include Columbus and Cleveland, this was voter suppression because it can take a long time to get to THE box.
It didn’t matter. Turnout was huge. More important (OH was always going for Trump) turnout was huge for abortion and weed, each of which passed.
Is the debt really that big of a deal? The US debt to gdp ratio is 123%, China 83% and Japan a whopping 225%... Do you think Japan isn't good for it? Us, China? Ok, so maybe we should slow down accumulating debt... just led it ride a bit. We'd have to raise some taxes, cut something maybe, let inflation work it's magic, print money. And then what? What's actually better?
Guess who owns most of this debt? Americans.
to me its more about the rate of adding more debt... maybe a simple of goal of 'let's stick to the gdp growth" for 5 yrs. or something like that ... just as a start.
What annoys me with the “voter fraud” crap and how some states did this and some states did that. Hell, every County in a State does different things as far drop boxes, mail in, etc. unless you have Federal Country wide rules that all States must follow exactly, every area will do things different. So sick of Republican Maga’s boo hooing over shit they have absolutely no substantial proof of.
Sarcasm alert: What does substantial proof have to do with it?
On that national debt talk of the final minute:
Would love to tax the wealth of the rich to pay down the national debt, but the Reaganism that conservatives of yesteryear supported think that's communism so we have the decadence of the billionaire class instead of the "communism" of a balanced budget. Thanks Reaganites. We're going to tax cuts our way to the default house some day because guys like Elon and Bezos don't have enough decadent wealth for your liking.
!! Me too! Like let’s seriously fund the irs and let them do their thing; if they could it would wipe out so much debt and - I mean it’s such a clear fix. Such a clear fix that the fact that it’s not done is part of what makes everyone so jaded, why politicians can seem so nihilistic and self interested. Tax the rich! But like the super rich!
I wont talk about the deficit until republicans talk about a pretty massive increase in taxes.
As Liz Cheney says; " This election is not about policy.It is about democracy".
I’m voting for Biden even if he is in a coffin.
The people on the center right, not so much. Youth maybe not. Progressives maybe not.
I just find it really weird how center right republicans don’t see, in general, that they sound like the progressive youths.
Center right “I’m not sure if I can vote for Biden unless he deals with protesters and gives his full throated support for Israel.”
Progressive youths: “I’m not sure I’m voting for Biden unless he stops the war in Gaza.”
Youth have an excuse for being idiots.
Yeah the WSJ types don't want to vote for Joe Biden until he is able to get a hold of the people that in unison shout "F*&^ Joe Biden!" ... seems perfectly reasonable
They won’t vote for ANY democrat. That’s why I find it hard to take them seriously anymore. They are never ever objective.
The never trumpers are at least honest. They bitch and complain but we know the stakes. I love the bulwark because of that. My only political pundit complaint is that they never recommend taking positions that are unpopular with their own worldviews but would help Joe revitalize his base. For example I hate loan forgiveness but I see Joe has weakness with his youth base and I’m like “well I only care if he wins. If these idiot kids need their loan forgiven so that they vote for him then so be it.” There are a bunch of other issues too. Bill, who I love, is the worst about this. He is still talking about Afghanistan. That was a dead loser position since Obama’s second term
I stumbled across something a couple of days ago I didn't even know existed: "Politics Chat" by Heather Cox R. The 4/30 edition is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a876Hb6c4F8. It's one of the most educational things I've ever heard.
She covers several topics in depth, but you might be interested in the details she provides of the loan forgiveness stuff, which starts at about 53:50. I too wasn't happy when I first heard about it, but I have a very different opinion now that I understand it. For example, it involves zero tax dollars.
HCR is so incredibly knowledgeable; I wish the Bulwark folks had time to listen to this but I know it's very long. I can't imagine what it's like being her, knowing so much and yet recognizing how little most of us truly understand the issues.
Yeah she is smart and thoughtful. I was just using student loans as an example though. I am supportive of Israel but I think Biden should pivot hard on Israel now to gain support with the youth vote.
In the end I just don’t trust center right politicos that say if “Biden abandons Israel then I have to vote for Trump.” These voters (pick any issue) are going to vote for Trump anyway. They are just looking for an excuse to do it and blame Biden.
I agree w/ your last point!
What I don't understand, now that I've heard HCR explain the details, is why anyone is opposed to the banks now having to honor the terms of the student loans - which is what results in the forgiveness. I was initially opposed b/c I had a total misperception about what was being done.
Because explaining means you’re losing. Also, the details don’t matter. To most people, someone is getting a benefit and it’s not them so they don’t like it. Classic human politics
JVL's horse shoe political spectrum at work. Hell, I'll vote for Joe if he is six feet under!
But I’m not talking about the far right. I’m talking about the writers at NRO or wsj or the dispatch. So frustrating.
Yeah, this is about Podhoretz and Douthat. Not Erickson or Barr.
I'm opposed to wealth taxes on considerations of both practicality and principle. but I think that we need to kick the income tax rates on EVERYBODY up to what they were during the Eisenhower Administration for starters, and then do mid-course corrections if necessary. As the Economist wrote in an important article on May 2, "America’s fiscal outlook is disastrous, but forgotten". Following standard American procedure we'll probably wait until disaster hits to start thinking about corrective actions, but it sure would be great if for once, we did better.
The less the Americans with the most are willing to sacrifice, the more the country will continue to deteriorate financially. It's either that or we end social security and you add to the current batch of the homeless camps with sick/old low-income Boomers and Gen Xers in addition to the migrants and evicted. Because if 65% of federal spending is on entitlement programs and we cut that you're going to see whole new levels of homelessness and medical premium rises as hospitals foot bills that aren't covered by government programs and that gets passed onto consumers via medical insurance rates going up. Then it's going to look a lot like that movie Elysium.
The main hurdle you run into in taxing the wealthy is not the wealthy, it is the incentives nature of government, which is not the same incentives nature as The People. Government wants wealthy people to spend a bunch of money on things like the opera, so it incentivizes the wealthy to spend a bunch of their wealth on such things in order to "reduce" their taxes. Or, conversely the government could tax that money and fund the opera itself, but that's the hard way to fund the opera and results in less funding overall, because people are way more willing to Give than to Have Taken. The incentive for the government is thus to find ways to encourage wealthy people to "donate" as much money as possible, while saying as loudly as possible that doing so is really honest-to-god avoiding taxes. (But of course, it isn't, just like an IRA it is just government wheedling you into volunteering to do something it wants you to do.)
But even discounting that, the wealthy do pay a bit less in taxes these days: specifically just about 2% less than at the height. Yes, 2%. I know, there's all that talk about the 70% tax rate from FDR's time, but that was just propaganda. Nobody actually paid that, unless they volunteered to do so. That tax rate was specifically made to not actually gather any taxes, but to have something to point to to SAY you were taxing that much. And it worked; it worked so well that all of these decades later, people still think it was real. FDR was super good at propaganda like that. More to the point, though, since a tax costs some money to implement (tax coding, agents, printing, etc), if a tax doesn't bring in any funding, it actually costs the government money, which in turn reduces the budget for some other programs. So, implementing that fake tax robbed funding from programs that people like, but helped FDR get re-elected. As I said, he was GOOD at propaganda.
All of which is not to say that one can't successfully tax the rich. It's just, most politicians who say they want to, they're not actually serious. You will know the serious ones when they talk tax implementation and final taxes paid, not tax rates, vanishing middle-class and Forbes's pretend list of the wealthiest people. (The actual wealthiest person is Putin, and there's a huge long list of people until you get to the folks who advert their brand in Forbes. If you're adverting your brand, you're not actually one of the most wealthy people, who don't need to advert for new clients.) Anyone talking the latter are either talking propaganda or they haven't learned anything about the methods of getting money out of people.
SCOTUS actually heard a case this week in which an argument was made that homelessness can be criminalized.
I’m pretty sure the pitchforks will be out before long. Maybe worse. We can have a Gilded Age, or just hire Robespierre 2.0.
The easiest thing in the world is to define what somebody ELSE should "be willing to sacrifice". Confiscation of other people's property on that basis conflicts with everything that the United States is founded on: that's the first principled argument against it.
The second principled reason is that if we need to reform our revenue policy to massively increase revenue (which I agree we have to do), everybody should be contributing. And if everybody IS contributing, then we may finally have the honest debate that our politicians keep avoiding on how and how much we should reduce the spending side.
The first practical reason is that wealth taxes don't work. Almost every country that's tried them has dropped them, because they only produce a good return in the early years, then the rich find ways to avoid them. So they're not effective as the basis of a fiscal policy, no matter how much class-warfare jollies some may derive from them.
The most important practical reason of all is that even if you completely soak the rich, there aren't enough of them to balance the budget on forever; what's your next act?
The problem is that the gamed tax system allowed the accumulation of huge piles of self-reinforcing wealth. The question is how to reverse these black holes of wealth.
To some people, that clearly appears to be a vitally important question. After we save the Republic, I guess we can have a huge debate on it.
Yes. That, of course, comes first -- because without a real Republic, there will be few debates of any kind.
No, the easiest thing in the world for folks like you is to tell poorer Americans that they should live shorter lives or carry ridiculous levels of medical debt because the rich need to fly around in a G650. That's a lot easier than telling the rich to sacrifice more apparently.
And no, the country was founded on "taxation without representation," not taxation in general (big difference). Not only do the rich have representation here--unlike the colonists who didn't--but they have people like you defending their decadent wealth for them on top of that.
And it's pretty easy to tax wealth so long as you're not carving out any loopholes. You just set the taxes to 100% on any wealth held above a certain limit. They only avoid the taxes when you let them do so and don't punish them with consequences for trying to avoid paying them. Throw a few in prison for dodging new wealth taxes and the rest will get in line. You also make those taxes owed regardless if they try to move to other countries and you arrest them abroad if they try to flee to avoid paying them.
We're talking about paying off the national debt that stands at $34T. Deficits and national debts are two different things. If you paid off the debt via taxing wealth, then the deficit is the problem that's leftover that you have much more time to solve since the debt is wiped clean and takes a lot more time to reaccrue. You answer that side by raising capital gains taxes on wealth above a certain threshold so it doesn't hit working/middle class retirement plans, etc., to force people at the top of the income/wealth ladder to work for income rather than collect income passively and having it taxed at lower rates via capital gains, and then set caps on income via taxes as well (all $ earned above threshold caps are taxed at 100%) sop that the rich can't reward themselves further with decadently high income brackets. That puts a lot more money into the economy as opposed to walling it off in rich people assets, which stimulates consumption and raises revenues that way (increased consumption leads to job creation, more jobs equals more payroll revenues at all levels of government). Basically you are maximizing to the highest degree possible the money moving through the economy via consumption and then raise higher revenues that way to pay for the outlays already on the books with a balanced budget. That's my solution to the budget side of things.
Tax the rich! I’m with you! We ride at dawn! (For real tho, all the “let’s talk about the individual being responsible blah blah blah is centrifuge for the rich to distract us ala self righteous infighting. It’s really just the crazy rich- they are CRAZY RICH. The need to pay taxes!)
You have a nice day, and if you're ever able to have a policy discussion without stooping to personal attacks, we'll have to give it another try.
But fighting aside, it’s nice to be doing so over a non trump issue! Yep. 🙂
What personal attacks? That I said you were defending their decadent wealth? Well aren't you? That's not an attack so much as it is a reasonable descriptor.
If someone’s income is utilized to pay for food, shelter, and other basic expenses, and they’re just getting by, they don’t need their taxes raised, they need them lowered.
Fair taxation means that higher earners pay a higher percentage of their income for taxes. There were no billionaires when Eisenhower was president.
The IRA means that wealthier people will pay at least their fair share, which they’ve skirted consistently. There are no faultless billionaires; they’ve all inherited money earned through exploitation of others, or they’ve exploited people themselves.
It’s not a taking, because that isn’t what a taking is. We need a purer progressive tax system (we had one but the GOP flattened it out substantially) and soon.
You and I have no argument on a progressive income tax. You know what the rates before the Kennedy Tax Cut were like, right? We've NEVER had a "pure" progressive system, but I'm all for starting. In fact, I think that it's absolutely necessary.
"There are no faultless billionaires; they’ve all inherited money earned through exploitation of others, or they’ve exploited people themselves." The problem with assuming that your political preferences are facts that don't require proof is that you can't convince anybody of them who doesn't already share them. that one is especially easy to debunk. As far as I know, Warren Buffett didn't have much of an inheritance, and didn't exploit anyone himself, unless you think that "exploit" is a synonym for "employ". He has made a lot of other people rich, though.
"There were no billionaires when Eisenhower was president." I'm not sure that's true, but if there were, there were far fewer. A billion dollars were a lot harder to accumulate then, not that it's really easy now. In purchasing power, the 2024 US Dollar is worth about 9.4 1960 CENTS, which means that $1 Billion in 1960 was equivalent to $10.55 Billion today.
https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1960
Buffett is pretty much the exception that proves the rule. And, he’s had 93 years to get there. He wasn’t a billionaire when Eisenhower was in office.
I’m talking about Bezos and Musk and all the tech guys and the Saudi billions. The Waltons, the Sacklers, the Johnsons. I’m not a Marxist, but I have eyes. If you’re a Walton and you’re paying Walmart employees minimum wage, that’s exploitation. It doesn’t have anything to do with my political party. CEOs should make 100 times the salary of the lowest paid worker, not 10,000 times.
I would gladly pay more in taxes if Jeff Bezos had to pay his fair share.
My idea has always been progressive up to 70% for the top bracket.
These are the tax brackets that I'd like to see, and simple, with very few deductions. Of course, all of the dollar values need to be multiplied by 10 (see my last response for the reason), and there should probably be no tax below three or four times the poverty level:
https://www.tax-brackets.org/federaltaxtable/1960
I've never understood all the Bezos-hate on the Left. Nobody's forced to buy from Amazon, nobody's forced to work for Amazon, and minimum wages are set by elected representatives: if some people want them higher, it seems to me that it would be more constructive to organize to make that happen than to slander individuals, although I know that slander is a whole lot easier. Millions of people's lives are better every day because Jeff Bezos thought Amazon up; the lives of additional millions were not just better, but bearable during the pandemic thanks to Amazon. I don't just like Amazon, I LOVE Amazon, and I'm not ashamed to say it.
I hate Walmart myself; it's probably been 20 years since I've even been in one, and then I didn't stay long. But millions of people disagree with me, and far be it from me to say that they're wrong. If they don't think that the Waltons are giving them fair value for their money, they'll stop giving it to them. As for minimum wage, see above.
"CEOs should make 100 times the salary of the lowest paid worker, not 10,000 times." That is certainly an opinion -- but that's all it is. Until it becomes a law, it's no more or less valid than anybody else's opinion. I'd rather approach the subject through the tax brackets above, and include deferred income, rather than tell companies what they can and can't pay their executives. But that's just an opinion, too.
As for the Sacklers and Musk, and people you didn't mention like the investment bankers who caused the 2007-8 Crash, prosecutors as well as tax collectors should be after them, and the holes in our criminal laws that they sneak through need to be fixed.
Also, I’m not the Left. I’m a centrist, left of center. The Left aren’t Democrats.
The Bezos hate doesn’t come from buying from Amazon. That’s just a choice. The hate comes from the abusive working conditions and anti-union labor violations of the company.
I live in a big city. Maybe you do too. If we don’t want to shop at Walmart we have dozens of choices. If you live in an Ohio county in southeastern OH, though, you live in a depressed community in a food desert and Walmart is the only store for 40 miles because they put everything smaller out of business.
The CEO earnings aren’t my opinion; that’s where things stood (roughly) until the eighties. And employers are allowed to pay MORE than minimum wage. If employers paid enough money to live on and raise kids, there wouldn’t have to be a minimum wage, but no huge corporation is going to do that. Apple is always going to have little children in China make its components. If they didn’t, cell phones would be $7500. So phones should either be $7500 or Apple should figure out a way to cut costs without involving small Chinese children.
Absolutely with you on the Wall Street stuff, Al. If you’ve not seen The Big Short, do. Steve Carell’s character embodies the moral disgust of the subprime mortgage market.
How much of the strife that we're seeing between different factions of the Democratic coalition is due to Russia? They helped Trump win in 2016 and now, Putin is in a bad way in his war. It would stand to reason that a Russian sympathetic US President would be very much in Putin's interests.
I think it's more China. A lot of these kids who are protesting get their news from TikTok, and that content has been weaponized. Of course, Russia benefits from internal discord as well.
As Bill pointed out at around the 12 minute mark, most of the students don't have the opinion of the protesters. And I'll keep reminding people, don't stereotype students.
Yes, my son just completed his Freshman year at one of the oldest colleges in the Midwest. I was visiting him the weekend of October 7th. Over the past few months I asked him a couple of times about protests and he said that he was aware of some protesting but his campus didn't see anything remarkable and he wasn't sure what it was all about.
This moment REALLY feels like the Summer of 2020 with the George Floyd protests and manufactured media attention. There are Americans, today, right now, who believe that every major city in the country was destroyed by BLM marches that summer.
Hey, Senator Scott...we've had unemployment below 4% for over 20 months now, and the rate of inflation has cooled. But let's not let the data get in the way of your pathetic display of fealty to an adjudicated rapist.
Listening to that made me embarrassed for him.
But what does facts got to do with it? It sure has worked out for Trump.(so far) :)