The death of Hasan's hero must have really hurt for him to lash out like that against a white woman over her choice of a mate.
Here.
Sunday, November 1, 2026
Holy Moly Miss Haley
Democratic Rep. Stevens endorses Republican Rogers over rival El-Sayed in Michigan Senate election
... Stevens had the endorsement of much of the Democratic establishment during the bruising primary, making her endorsement of Rogers even more stunning. ...
I thought it was about corruption: I wish they'd make up their minds
Relatively speaking America is a low corruption country in 2025, and in 2026 core inflation is 1992ish.
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| https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2025 |
Saturday, October 31, 2026
Michael Lind and the tariff advocates are delusional when they say tariffs will get manufacturing to come back to the United States
During the heyday of American tariffs, tariff revenues were tiny and went to fund a tiny federal government.
From 1880 to 1910, federal spending grew from about $300 million nominal to $800+ million, and tariff revenues more or less tracked it to pay those bills.
At the same time the rich risked their own money to build US manufacturing, and the tax code was uniquely arranged to reward them for it.
To put it simply, until Reagan we taxed ordinary income at high marginal rates, while income from long term capital investment received relatively preferential tax treatment. That investment translated directly into American manufacturing, higher-paying American jobs, and robust economic growth.
High marginal ordinary income tax rates, which dominated the tax code from WWI except during the roaring 1920s, were first brought down by JFK to 70% from 91%, then to 50% by Reagan I, and finally to 28% by Reagan II. Democrats subsequently lifted these into the high 30s where they are now.
Capital gains rates of 25%, which persisted throughout the period, suddenly lost much of their appeal because the spreads closed. The new arbitrage which opened up because of globalization was between costly labor at home and cheap labor abroad, which the rich then exploited to get even wealthier.
For those of us who lived through this period, it was accompanied by the constant drum beat of one business after another closing up its domestic operations and moving them abroad, leaving a steady stream of workers behind who were forced to find usually less well paying work here.
We did this to ourselves and called it conservatism.
Michael Lind here is delusional about how to turn back this clock:
Tariffs — taxes on imports — are a means to the end of “reshoring” manufacturing in America. By making some imports more expensive, Trump hopes to expand the market for those products at home for American manufacturers.
Apart from not working (!), this makes the consumer pay the bill instead of placing the risk where it belongs, with the capitalists, who have the capital!
You will never accomplish with tariffs, whose arena is now much too small, what you can with the stick of high ordinary income tax rates, high capital gains taxes on income from US investment abroad, and the carrot of relatively lower capital gains taxes on income from domestic investment.
We need to attract capital back to the United States and give it preferential treatment in the tax code while penalizing in a relative way the income received from foreign sources and from high ordinary incomes received at home.
Ordinary incomes up to $101,082/$134,776 single/married-filing-jointly in Sep 2026 should be free of federal tax, but anything higher should be progressively and steeply taxed.
Capital gains tax rates should follow the reverse course: steep taxes on income from capital held up to a year, and progressively lower taxes on income from capital held 2, 3, 5, 7, 10, 20, and 30 years.
In such a tax environment, corporate taxes would be redundant, unnecessary, and counterproductive.
Meanwhile 10 years of the Trump tariff regime are not working to revive domestic manufacturing, and the long term comparison with the pre-Reagan past remains negative.
Friday, October 30, 2026
Gold and silver rocked and crushed by oil
3896.10 Gold, down 10.11% ytd, up 0.17% 1Y
50.06 Silver, down 30.74% ytd, up 4.6% 1Y
103.37 WTI, a year ago 60.97 up 69.5%
Haley Stevens' fiancee: Stop blaming the Joos for the price of bananas
Haley Stevens' house is divided before it even starts.
The fiancé of Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Mich. has come out and said he cannot vote for Democratic Michigan Sen.-nominee Abdul El-Sayed, believing he is an antisemite.
Stevens, though, remains undaunted, backing the candidate for Senate. Jason Turkish, a Jewish registered Democrat, told The Detroit News he will be voting for Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers, appearing at a Rogers event sponsored by the Republican Jewish Coalition on Wednesday night at the Townsend Hotel in Birmingham, Michigan.
"I waited, and I watched and and I listened for Abdul to moderate – but he didn't moderate, he escalated," Turkish, a Michigan lawyer himself, told reporters on the sidelines of that event in a video published by The Detroit News.
"He's gotten worse, and worse and worse as this general election campaign has gone on. Rather than bringing people together he's just driven them further and further apart."
... Turkish says El-Sayed's anti-Israel rhetoric makes his community "less safe," fearing his party will bend to radicals claiming that there is a "genocide" in Gaza.
"When he says genocide over and over again, when he refuses to condemn an ad that says Jews are to blame for the price of bananas, he makes my community less safe," Turkish said. "He makes a lot of communities less safe."
... "Every time he talks about genocide, Jews get death threats," Turkish added. "We have never seen a candidate for U.S. Senate act so recklessly toward the safety of Jews in the community as we have seen from Abdul."
... "I watch him in recent weeks as he has become verbally combative with any reporter who has the gall, as he sees it, the gall to ask him about Hasan," Turkish said.
"Everything we hear from Abdul El-Sayed includes equivocation, and it includes equivocations to try to explain away hate, and there is no explaining away hate. And I predict to you that Michigan will reject this."
... Turkish is the second major figure from Stevens’ orbit to back Rogers in recent days. Her former campaign chair, attorney David Kramer, said Tuesday he also plans to vote for Rogers. Stevens endorsed El-Sayed after the primary but has not campaigned or appeared with him publicly since a unity breakfast shortly afterward.
The hysterical Peggy Noonan says Trump, whom everyone now knows to be a bumbler because of Iran, still might not bumble the overthrow of the republic?!
You've got to be kidding me.
He's been bumbling everything since he was elected in 2016. Hell, he bumbled his 2016 campaign, during which he switched from Lewandowski to Manafort to Bannon/Conway! He wasted 2017 trying to repeal and replace Obamacare. He could never get The Wall built. He lost the House in 2018. He handed the war on terror over to the Taliban! Weeks later he utterly capitulated to hysteria during the pandemic, even boasting about the spending orgy of the $2.2 trillion CARES ACT. His cosplaying revolutionaries who strolled through the Capitol in January 2021 had dinner reservations for that evening at The Olive Garden. In 2025 he launched an insane tariff regime, fought the Houthis to a draw, made our friends in The Great White North our enemies, sent ICE goons into the streets who ended up executing two Americans in broad daylight in January, and in February started this stupid war completely unprepared to finish it.
Trump has never been a threat to the Republic. He's the chief clown in a circus act. He's ten times the bungler we ever thought Obama to be.
But whatever happens Tuesday, just remember that Peggy is just fine with giving the revolutionaries of the other side power and influence.
Better to keep your head while everyone else is losing theirs.
... Mr. Trump’s problem is that everyone on both sides of the issue knows that he’s out of his depth in running a major war. They weren’t sure of that when it started.
Democrats think he went in because he’s a bumbler, Republicans think he can’t win because he’s a bumbler. Supporters and opposers of his decision are united: He’s a bumbler whose bumbling made things more expensive.
... If Tuesday yields only a small wave, it will embolden and empower the president’s attempts to undo the results. He will try—he’s Donald Trump. They rigged it! We won’t certify!
He never misses an opportunity to toy with the republic, and it didn’t start in 2020. McKay Coppins’s recent biography of Mitt Romney recounts how supporter Donald Trump reacted to Mr. Romney’s 2012 loss to Barack Obama. In transit to Mr. Romney’s victory party, “Trump sat in the dark of a helicopter, unraveling.” He decided, based on nothing, that the election had been stolen. He started tweeting: “This election is a total sham and a travesty.” “We are not a democracy!” “We should march on Washington and stop this travesty.” “Revolution!”
The 2012 election wasn’t a sham, Mr. Trump just made his charges up, as he did in 2020, when his supporters stormed the Capitol.
It’s what he does. He’ll likely do some variation next week.
... It is likely true that if the Democrats get a big, historic outcome Tuesday, they will misread their mandate and go off on various toots. They’ll think that change by definition must be extreme or won’t be noticed. A growing number will continue their grim plodding toward socialist revolution. ...
Thursday, October 29, 2026
Christine Lagarde to resign from ECB in February instead of October in order to be able to speak more freely to French politics
My bet is she will be a candidate against Marine Le Pen.
Christine Lagarde to Resign Early as ECB President
... Her commitment to finishing the job has been in question for more than a year, fueled in part by her own acknowledgments that she could quit early.
Speaking to reporters Thursday, Lagarde said there was never a good time to leave. But, she said, her decision was informed by a desire to speak more openly about world affairs. That includes developments taking place in France, her home country, according to people familiar with the matter.
“I want to have the freedom of speech, the freedom of expression and the freedom to engage on matters that are not monetary-policy matters,” she said. “I think that my voice can help. My action can help, in relation to principles that are dear to my heart.”
... Lagarde’s decision to step down early means Macron will also have the chance to help pick her successor before he leaves the Élysée next May. ...
Real GDP at 3.4% in the first estimate for 3Q2026 is good, but the trend since 2Q1983 is still not like the robust post-war
I'd rather have the economy trending to 5.4% than the one trending to 2.2%.
Trump Republicanism overpromised and has not delivered. It has been nothing more than an irritable mental gesture toward Reaganism.
Reagan Republicanism, as a form of liberalism, underestimated the power of evil in human nature. It sincerely but naively thought that everything would turn out just hunky dory if you let people decide what to do with their own money, and give them more of it.
Well, they miss-allocated it, just in a more respectable form than the corner beggar.
The post-war consensus had kept ordinary income tax rates high and arbitraged that against relatively lower long term capital gains tax rates which benefited the domestic investment which produced the jobs, marriages, durable goods purchases, and homes young people can only dream about today. In short, the GDP.
The high ordinary income tax rates went bye-bye, and the money went where it was willed in an orgy of individualism. The big money got miss-allocated in the dot-com bubble, and globalism arrived just in the nick of time to rescue it, fleeing abroad. As a result middle classes were built elsewhere while the middle class at home withered. It now had to work two jobs and have smaller, or no, families. And cultural commentators seriously wonder how identity came to be questioned to the point of gender.
We can quantify this social disaster in the form of $10.5 trillion of missing real GDP in 3Q2026 since 3Q1983.
We have today $24.611 trillion of real GDP, having grown at a compound annual rate of 2.733% for the 43 years since 1983.
At the 36-year post-war CAGR of 3.585%, however, real GDP would be $35.104 trillion instead, 42.6% better.
Nothing guarantees that growth would have continued at the old post-war rate had the Reagan Revolution never occurred, but that doesn't change the fact that he sold his program in the belief that America's best days were not behind her.
Arguing at this long remove that Reaganism hasn't really been tried reminds me of nothing so much as Keynesianism redivivus. And AOC thinks his first name is Milton.
Republicans today are oblivious to all of this, and the only Democrat who comes close to understanding it that I know of is Rahm Emanuel, but the Democrat Party of today openly hates the Joos.
We are, as the kids like to say, totally screwed.
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