Slate's Jordan Weissmann is scared of Joe Biden's propensity to flirt with cutting entitlements like Social Security and Medicare

[O]ur ex-VP has talked extensively about his desire to return to an era of bipartisan cooperation. And whether we’re talking about Social Security or another major program, the budget is one area in which those instincts are truly scary.

Read the whole thing here.

Jordan Weissmann affects a fever over QAnon despite Pew finding that "commitment to representative democracy is strongest in North America and Europe"

Here:

What makes QAnon a little a different, and little bit scarier, than many of the conspiracy theories Americans have latched onto through the decades, is that it’s fundamentally authoritarian . . . They’re waiting for the sitting president to deliver their country from evil by rounding up his political opposition. Adherents have taken to jubilantly counting up the sealed indictments federal authorities have filed lately because they see them as a sign that a mass wave of arrests is coming. At Trump’s Wednesday night rally in Tampa, Florida, a shocking number of attendees showed up with QAnon T-shirts and signs. These people are all but asking for a strongman to seize control of the country . . . You can’t tell how many are really out there, but they’re now part of the political fabric in a country where around 1 in 5 people think we’d be better off with a strongman leader, and 17 percent say they’d be OK with military rule.

He's referring to this from Pew, which nevertheless finds "broad support for representative and direct democracy" globally:

There is less support for a strong leader who can make decisions without interference from a parliament or courts. Still, about a quarter or more back this idea in Japan, Italy, the United Kingdom, Israel, Hungary, South Korea and the U.S. And while military rule is relatively unpopular, 17% endorse this idea in the established democracies of the U.S., Italy and France.

France, Italy, the US, three overly generous countries being injected with many costly, difficult to assimilate, and lawless "refugees".

Slate takes The Atlantic to task for not taking the 1% seriously enough

Here in "Actually, the 1 Percent Are Still The Problem".

Actually, the Reagan 1986 tax reform was the problem, but Jordan Weissmann never mentions it.

This despite his wonderful graph of the top 10% over time showing the 1% take-off after the reform. When it becomes easier for the already rich to take high incomes the ordinary way, like everyone else, because of low top marginal rates, less money ends up getting plowed back into productive purposes like it used to before 1986.

We keep believing the myth that "the rich are different than you and me", but they're not. They're as indolent, undisciplined and blinkered as any middle class family leveraged to the hilt which believes it deserves a house a little larger than it can afford, two car payments, the weekly fine dinner out and the expensive annual winter vacation.

The 1% aren't the problem. You will have them always with you, by definition. The problem is human nature, and government's failure to correct for it.

Say what you will about "Christian" belief, previously it at least curbed the 1%'s enthusiasm, with the stick of high marginal income tax rates and the carrot of low long term capital gains taxes.

National Review's Kevin Williamson looks left and heads to The Atlantic

Where Kevin and his sneering elitism will find a larger audience. Slate's Jordan Weissmann pretends not to get it: "Above all else, Williamson is something fairly rare in U.S. media: an explicit, unrepentant elitist."