“Facebook always was hugely important to Trump in his political rise and reign. Twitter, which has booted him forever, tended to be more front and center — it was for Trump a rough, running focus group, and a real-time, utterly un-private diary. But if Twitter was the loudspeaker, Facebook was the less flashy but nonetheless critical organizing, advertising and fundraising infrastructure. Compared to Twitter’s noisy café, Facebook was the underground pipes. It’s hard to see how Trump would have become president without it.
“I understood early that Facebook was how Donald Trump was going to win,” Brad Parscale, the digital media director on Trump’s 2016 campaign who then started as his campaign manager in 2020, said in 2017. “Facebook was the method — it was the highway which his car drove on.”
“… large numbers of conservative voters, ability to broadcast all day, multiple times to the same audience, and the numbers were showing in the consumer side that people were spending more and more hours of their day consuming Facebook content,” he said in 2018. “Being able to show a message directly from President Trump talking… talking directly to camera was very important. I could get it right there not filtered by the media, not filtered by anyone. It was his face. It was the person you wanted to hear from talking directly to you.”
A New Yorker headline in March of 2020 referred to “Trump’s Facebook Juggernaut.”
“He arguably has the best fundraising list in Republican politics right now, which means he has the best email lists and text messaging lists, but there’s a half-life on that — because people change emails, change cell phone providers. So it’s important that he keeps filling that pipeline with new contacts, and that’s where Facebook comes in,” Wilson said, noting that polling he’s done suggests that 60 percent of voters log on to Facebook every day.”
https://www.politico.eu/article/biden-makes-the-eu-look-like-the-bad-guys/
“how do megabillionaires pay their megabills while opting for $1 salaries and hanging onto their stock? According to public documents and experts, the answer for some is borrowing money — lots of it.
For regular people, borrowing money is often something done out of necessity, say for a car or a home. But for the ultrawealthy, it can be a way to access billions without producing income, and thus, income tax.
The tax math provides a clear incentive for this. If you own a company and take a huge salary, you’ll pay 37% in income tax on the bulk of it. Sell stock and you’ll pay 20% in capital gains tax — and lose some control over your company. But take out a loan, and these days you’ll pay a single-digit interest rate and no tax; since loans must be paid back, the IRS doesn’t consider them income. Banks typically require collateral, but the wealthy have plenty of that.
The vast majority of the ultrawealthy’s loans do not appear in the tax records obtained by ProPublica since they are generally not disclosed to the IRS. But occasionally, the loans are disclosed in securities filings. In 2014, for example, Oracle revealed that its CEO, Ellison, had a credit line secured by about $10 billion of his shares.
Last year Tesla reported that Musk had pledged some 92 million shares, which were worth about $57.7 billion as of May 29, 2021, as collateral for personal loans.”
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“after decades of wealth accumulation, the estate tax is supposed to serve as a backstop, allowing authorities an opportunity to finally take a piece of giant fortunes before they pass to a new generation. But in reality, preparing for death is more like the last stage of tax avoidance for the ultrawealthy.”
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“Normally when someone sells an asset, even a minute before they die, they owe 20% capital gains tax. But at death, that changes. Any capital gains till that moment are not taxed. This allows the ultrarich and their heirs to avoid paying billions in taxes. The “step-up in basis” is widely recognized by experts across the political spectrum as a flaw in the code.
Then comes the estate tax, which, at 40%, is among the highest in the federal code. This tax is supposed to give the government one last chance to get a piece of all those unrealized gains and other assets the wealthiest Americans accumulate over their lifetimes.
It’s clear, though, from aggregate IRS data, tax research and what little trickles into the public arena about estate planning of the wealthy that they can readily escape turning over almost half of the value of their estates. Many of the richest create foundations for philanthropic giving, which provide large charitable tax deductions during their lifetimes and bypass the estate tax when they die.
Wealth managers offer clients a range of opaque and complicated trusts that allow the wealthiest Americans to give large sums to their heirs without paying estate taxes. The IRS data obtained by ProPublica gives some insight into the ultrawealthy’s estate planning, showing hundreds of these trusts.
The result is that large fortunes can pass largely intact from one generation to the next. Of the 25 richest people in America today, about a quarter are heirs”
“”Amid surging lumber prices that are already adding an average of $36,000 to the construction cost of new homes, the Biden administration is moving forward with plans to double tariffs on lumber imported from Canada,” Reason’s Eric Boehm reported last week.
While former President Donald Trump is often rightly criticized for his protectionist policies, and did, in fact, impose a 20 percent tariff on Canadian softwood lumber in 2017, his administration slashed that duty to 9 percent last year as lumber prices soared. The Biden administration, on the other hand, proposes to hike tariffs once again, to over 18 percent for many firms, based on the premise that Canadian producers “made sales of subject merchandise at less than normal value” (we should be so lucky).
“It is a particularly egregious move, seeing as how lumber prices are still near multi-decade highs (still, despite a recent dip, up over 300% from one year ago) and US timber firms remain unable to sate demand,” points out Peter C. Earle of the American Institute for Economic Research. “The increased costs will ultimately fall upon American citizens in the form of higher prices and decreased availability of goods and services.”
That is, in the midst of soaring prices and short supply of lumber in the United States, the federal government is doing everything in its power to choke off other sources of the stuff that might fulfill demand and help to bring down costs.”
“Despite ProPublica’s best efforts to make the information enclosed within seem damning, the data tell us little we didn’t already know. For the 2018 tax year, the last year for which we have data, the top 1 percent paid over 40 percent of federal income taxes, despite earning just under 21 percent of total adjusted gross income (AGI). The bottom 50 percent of taxpayers earned 11.6 percent of total AGI, but paid less than 3 percent of income taxes. The same story holds when looking at all revenue sources too, so it’s not just the income tax that is progressive.
ProPublica, however, tries to make the case that the wealthy are getting away with murder through the tax code, so they “do a calculation that has never been done before,” comparing growth in wealth over the course of a year to taxable income. They use this to calculate an individual’s “true tax rate,” which is sort of like handing out wins in a baseball game in the middle of the early innings and calling it the “true outcome” of the contest.
It’s hard to overstate how nonsensical this comparison is (which is perhaps why it’s never been done before). Our tax system rightly does not tax growth in one’s wealth until it is realized as income. After all, the alternative is a monstrously complex and unfair system of wealth taxation that developed countries have avoided.
The reason that wealth isn’t taxable is fairly straightforward: You aren’t directly benefiting from it until it’s turned into income (at which point it is taxable). Wealthy Americans may not pay taxes on the growth that their net worth sees, but should they wish to sell assets that have appreciated in value, they would be liable for capital gains taxes on that growth.”
“Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has positioned himself as more than a Republican, but as a true conservative. It was with that framing that the leader of the Lone Star State signed a law to ban private businesses from setting their own terms of service when it comes to helping customers.
“Texas is open 100 percent,” Abbott said in a clip posted to Twitter. “And we want to make sure that you have the freedom to go where you want without limits.”
He will not extend that same freedom of association to individual actors who have their own enterprises. “The Texas legislature passed a law that I am about to sign that prohibits vaccine passports in Texas,” he added. “No business or government entity can require a person to provide a vaccine passport, or any other vaccine information, as a condition of receiving any service, or entering any place.””
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“The Texas bill “violates private property rights,” says Timothy Sandefur, vice president for litigation at the Goldwater Institute. “The longstanding legal tradition has always been that businesses owe an obligation to protect their customers’ safety, at least to some basic extent, and this law comes along and says, not only are they not free to make that choice, but they’re prohibited from doing so.”
The legislation uses several different state levers to strong-arm businesses into compliance. It weaponizes governmental occupational licensing requirements—something Abbott has rightly railed against in other contexts—and threatens to withhold “a license, permit, or other state authorization necessary for conducting business in this state” should a company run afoul of the law.
Perhaps more notably, it also precludes any entity that disobeys from “receiv[ing] a grant or enter[ing] into a contract payable with state funds.”
Yet it was Abbott who applied the exact opposite justification when he (again, rightly) signed a law that allowed taxpayer-funded faith-based adoption agencies to operate within their belief systems when pairing children with prospective parents. The difference here: One comports with his personal values, and the other—vaccine verification—does not.”
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“”It cannot be rationally justified,” adds Sandefur. “It’s simply a matter of people saying that the government shouldn’t force people to do things they don’t like and should force people to do things they do like. It’s totally inconsistent, and a violation of basic property rights and constitutional law.””
“robust as the response was, the crisis exposed the fragility of the UI system. Technically, America’s process for handling unemployment claims was built on antiquated computer systems (some written in COBOL, a language largely abandoned in the 1980s), and millions of workers endured weeks of delays in getting their benefits.
So a major priority for Congress in 2021 has to be reforming the UI system: improving its functionality and making it more generous.”
“For millions of Americans, the pandemic has been a nightmare. But many have also found that the country’s safety net actually caught them.”
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“The country is recovering quickly from the economic shock of the pandemic.
And we did so despite botching our response to the crisis itself. Using aggressive social distancing, testing, and contact tracing to contain the virus — as nations like South Korea and Australia did early on — had huge economic benefits, and the US’s failure to contain its outbreak had enormous economic costs.
But many other large, rich countries also botched their response to the pandemic. If you compare the US to the five most populous countries in Europe, it fares roughly the same in terms of deaths from Covid-19. Germany does better, but the UK, Italy, Spain, and France are right there in the muck with the US.
If this past year is any indication, countries are not always going to be able to contain future pandemics. If and when that happens, they need to be able to manage the economic fallout.”
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“the US is near the top when comparing countries for the scale of their stimulus responses. What makes the US response more unusual is its focus on spending to increase the incomes of its residents, as opposed to backstopping businesses.”
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“Reasonable people can disagree on whether the fiscal programs to assist Americans during 2020 and 2021 were excessive or merely generous. What’s inarguable, though, is that they were massive, and enough of them worked to make the overall economic response incredibly strong.”
“Thanks to the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, which mandates that all infrastructure projects receiving federal funding pay “prevailing” (generally union) wages, organized labor has been getting a piece of the action for nearly a century. This requirement raises labor costs by as much as 22 percent, according to an analysis by Suffolk University’s Beacon Hill Institute.
The president’s insistence that he’ll sign off on a contract only if it’s with “an American company with American products all the way down the line and American workers” will raise costs even further. Existing “Buy American” provisions are a well-established driver of transportation project costs.
A 2019 report from the Congressional Research Service found that buying American steel costs around twice as much as importing it from China. Requiring road builders to use pricier domestic steel raised the cost of highway construction by about $2 billion from 2009 to 2011, back when then–Vice President Biden was overseeing the spending of stimulus dollars on infrastructure projects.
If the president’s goal were truly to “build, baby, build,” he would be making every effort to pare back regulations that raise the labor and material costs of federal infrastructure projects. Instead, Biden wants to double down on those rules.”