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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • It’s fascinating to watch. Vance, the old-school spin doctor, using euphemism, misdirection and weaseling to not-techincally-lie (eg, we want a national “standard” for abortion, not a national ban) versus Trump who just goes all-out loud, easily disproven, total bullshit. And that side seems to like Trump better, like they’ve been trained to recognize the used-car-salesman shtick, so it makes them uncomfortable even if they don’t recognize the lies, but the loud liar just cows any chance of disbelief with sheer volume.

    I feel like there’s really interesting psychology to study there, among the…let’s say “reality challenged” population, if anyone could figure out how to recruit them.















  • Tax on hoarded wealth is pressure to make that wealth do something productive. If you can’t get enough return on your invested millions to pay the tax, then you will slowly lose that wealth. Property tax works similarly for farmers and landlords.

    The ultra wealthy are exactly the people who should be making big, bold, high-risk bets with their money, because they’ll be just fine if they lose a few million. Yet these are the same people who can live a comfortable, even lavish life off the lowest risk, lowest return investments, like government bonds. The rich say social safety nets discourage poor people from working, and I say that tax-free capital discourage it from working.

    Also, very important to remember that wealth tax proposals generally target only wealth over a very high threshold. US proposals have been $10-50M, which seems pretty equivalent to the Spanish implementation.