A thread for Democrats Only
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A Real Post-Neoliberal Agenda
Bidenomics foundered on ten years of Democratic reluctance to declare war on inequality
By Marshall Steinbaum | February 11, 2025
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/a-real-post-neoliberal-agenda/
The year 2014 was a heady moment in the economic policy world. That spring, French economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century was published in English to astounding commercial and intellectual success. The book painted a devastating picture of the post–Cold War economic order, uniting groundbreaking empirical evidence with a comprehensive theory explaining the vast accumulation of wealth and power at the top of the global economic pyramid. And it appeared at a moment when the apparatus of the Democratic Party needed just such a shock.
Now that Trump has dealt a deathblow to the post-Obama political system, it’s worth taking stock of where the Piketty moment went.
Recovery from the 2008 financial crisis, itself a consequence of Clinton-era financial deregulation, had been too long and too weak in the making; inequality ratcheted ever upward and jobs continued disappearing overseas. These trends signaled that the policies, rhetoric, and personnel of the Obama administration simply weren’t up to the task. Piketty’s reception, though not without pushback, helped cement consensus that something had to be done, kicking off a spirited effort within the progressive policy world to reform the Democrats’ approach to the economy.
Now that Trump has dealt a decisive deathblow to the post-Obama political system, it’s worth taking stock of where that moment went. Postmortems on Bidenomics have tended to focus on climate provisions, rising protectionism in trade, and the macroeconomics of stimulus and inflation. The limits of the administration’s “industrial policy,” touted as marking a “post-neoliberal” paradigm shift, have been extensively documented; it was always a national security program first — an ill-conceived reaction to fears of a rising China — and a pro-worker agenda second, if at all. The bigger, less talked-about picture is the long arc of ten years of failure to confront inequality after the Piketty moment in 2014. Across four key policy areas — taxation, labor standards, the welfare state, and antitrust — Democrats could have pursued a comprehensive program for combating plutocracy and empowering workers. But the opportunity was frittered away through a relentless focus on playing by the old rules of policy debate and routing reform through the usual elite channels, insulated from — and often outright hostile to — the voices and views of on-the-ground constituencies. All that came at the cost of forging a durable political coalition.
The result is that Trump is now festooning his second administration with the wealthiest people in world history. Getting out of this mess requires clarity about what happened over the last decade that led to this dire situation: exactly how Piketty’s clarion message was absorbed into, and then quietly killed by, a political system that sorely needed to take it to heart to have any hope of defending itself.
* ________*
Progressive taxation is the single most important policy lever for reducing the power of the rich — not because it raises revenue that can be redistributed via public programs or directly to the poor, but because it imposes a de facto statutory maximum on income or wealth, eliminating the incentive to hoard the economy’s resources. Unrestrained capital accumulation is the main reason for economic stagnation and the hollowing out of productive capacity. Conversely, as Piketty’s research shows, economic growth is both faster and more equitably distributed — meaning pre-tax top income shares are low — in jurisdictions where effective tax rates at the top are highest. When elites face limits on how much they can take home, they use their dominant position to grab less, so there’s more for everyone
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Bidenomics foundered on ten years of Democratic reluctance to declare war on inequality
Fuck Off.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Trumptard, if your life is fucked up, it is your fault, not the Democrats'. Your fault. All yours.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The widespread assumption that only Democrats have any agency or causal influence over American politics.
CORRECTION: Only Democrats had agency and influence over American politics up until the end of 2024.
Now they are being gutted.
The world you thought you were living in 6 months ago no longer exists.
This isn't about me. This is about America.
And none of this changes the fact that your party is being gutted and scrapped for spare parts.
Also, I find it quite ironic that if I were a black man that you'd be blaming everybody but me for my problems.
You only save that racism of low expectations for people who aren't white because you are a college "educated" liberal who hates black people in your own special way.
Fuck you second.
Blacks voted against Harris, just like I told you they would.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The widespread assumption that only Democrats have any agency or causal influence over American politics.
CORRECTION: Only Democrats had agency and influence over American politics up until the end of 2024.
Now they are being gutted.
The world you thought you were living in 6 months ago no longer exists.
Trumptard, if your life is fucked up, it is your fault, not the Democrats'. Your fault. All yours.
This isn't about me. This is about America.
And none of this changes the fact that your party is being gutted and scrapped for spare parts.
Also, I find it quite ironic that if I were a black man that you'd be blaming everybody but me for my problems.
You only save that racism of low expectations for people who aren't white because you are a college "educated" liberal who hates black people in your own special way.
Fuck you second.
Blacks voted against Harris, just like I told you they would.
Everyone I know who is a fucking thief, liar, rapist, tax cheat or con artist also voted for Trump. You Trumptards, with crappy lives that you refuse to believe are caused by your failures, your faults, your mental illnesses, voted for horrible people. I am just fine that your lives are a fucking mess. You deserve your suffering, you goddamn assholes.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:Trumptard, if your life is fucked up, it is your fault, not the Democrats'. Your fault. All yours.
Originally posted by second:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The widespread assumption that only Democrats have any agency or causal influence over American politics.
CORRECTION: Only Democrats had agency and influence over American politics up until the end of 2024.
Now they are being gutted.
The world you thought you were living in 6 months ago no longer exists.
This isn't about me. This is about America.
And none of this changes the fact that your party is being gutted and scrapped for spare parts.
Also, I find it quite ironic that if I were a black man that you'd be blaming everybody but me for my problems.
You only save that racism of low expectations for people who aren't white because you are a college "educated" liberal who hates black people in your own special way.
Fuck you second.
Blacks voted against Harris, just like I told you they would.
Everyone I know who is a fucking thief, liar, rapist, tax cheat or con artist also voted for Trump.
Nobody believes this. Not even you.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:I find it peculiar that angry poor white trash such as 6ix think they are not angry, not poor and not trash. If you Trumptards had more insight, you'd be able to see your fellow Trumptards for who they are. Once that was revealed to you, you'd then know why your crappy life is all your fault, not because some black got a job you think a white person deserves. See 6ix in full racist mode at "The Blacktain Anti-America Failure Thread"
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nobody believes this. Not even you.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=36&tid=66463
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Heather Cox Richardson | Feb 15, 2025
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-15-2025
After World War II, the vast majority of Americans—Democrats and Republicans alike—agreed that the federal government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights. But not everyone was on board. Some big businessmen hated regulations and the taxes necessary for social welfare programs and infrastructure, and racists and religious traditionalists who opposed women’s rights wanted to tear that “liberal consensus” apart.
They had no luck convincing voters to abandon the government that was overseeing unprecedented prosperity until the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision permitted them to turn back to an old American trope. That ruling, which declared segregation in the public schools unconstitutional, enabled opponents of the liberal consensus to resurrect the post–Civil War argument of former Confederates that a government protecting Black rights was simply redistributing wealth from hardworking white taxpayers to undeserving Black Americans.
That argument began to take hold, and in 1980, Republican president Ronald Reagan rode it to the White House with the story of the “welfare queen,” identified as a Cadillac-driving, unemployed moocher from Chicago’s South Side (to signal that the woman was Black). “She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands,” Reagan claimed. “And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names.” The woman was real, but not typical—she was a dangerous criminal rather than a representative welfare recipient—but the story illustrated perfectly the idea that government involvement in the economy bled individual enterprise and handed tax dollars to undeserving Black Americans.
Republicans expanded that trope to denigrate all “liberals” of both parties, who supported an active government, claiming they were all wasting government monies. Deregulation and tax cuts meant that between 1981, when Reagan took office, and 2021, when Democratic president Joe Biden did, about $50 trillion moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. But rather than convincing Republican voters to return to a robust system of business regulation and restoring taxes on the wealthy and corporations, that transfer of wealth seemed to make them hate the government even more, as they apparently were convinced it benefited only nonwhite Americans and women.
That hatred has led to a skewed idea of the actions and the size of the federal government. For example, Americans think the U.S. spends too much on foreign aid because they think it spends about 25% of the federal budget on such aid while they say it should only spend about 10%. In fact, it spends only about 1% on foreign aid. Similarly, while right-wing leaders insist that the government is bloated, in fact, as Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution noted last month, the U.S. population has grown by about 68% in the last 50 years while the size of the federal government’s workforce has actually shrunk.
What has happened is that federal spending has expanded by five times as the U.S. has turned both to technology and to federal contractors, who outnumber federal workers by more than two to one. Those contractors are concentrated in the Department of Defense. At the same time, budget deficits have been driven by tax cuts under Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump as well as the unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the Treasury actually ran a surplus when Democratic president Bill Clinton was in office in the 1990s.
More at https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-15-2025
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Buy, Borrow, Die
How to be a billionaire and pay no taxes
By Rogé Karma | March 17, 2025, 7 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/tax-loophole-buy-bor
row-die/682031/
America’s superrich have always found ways to avoid paying taxes, but in recent years, they’ve discovered what might be the mother of all loopholes. It’s a three-step process called “Buy, Borrow, Die,” and it allows people to amass a huge fortune, spend as much of it as they want, and pass the rest—untaxed—on to their heirs. The technique is so cleverly designed that the standard wish list of progressive tax reforms would leave it completely intact.
Step one: buy. The average American derives most of their disposable income from the wages they earn working a job, but the superrich are different. They amass their fortune by buying and owning assets that appreciate. Elon Musk hasn’t taken a traditional salary as CEO of Tesla since 2019; Warren Buffett, the chair of Berkshire Hathaway, has famously kept his salary at $100,000 for more than 40 years. Their wealth consists almost entirely of stock in the companies they’ve built or invested in. The tax-law scholars Edward Fox and Zachary Liscow found that even when you exclude the 400 wealthiest individuals in America, the remaining members of the top 1 percent hold $23 trillion in assets.
Unlike wages, which are taxed the moment they are earned, assets are taxed only at the moment they are sold—or, in tax terms, “realized.” The justification for this approach is that unrealized assets exist only on paper; you can’t pay for a private jet or buy a company with stocks, even if they have appreciated by billions of dollars. In theory, the rich will eventually need to sell their assets for cash, at which point they will pay taxes on their increase in wealth.
That theory would be much closer to reality if not for step two: borrow. Instead of selling their assets to make major purchases, the superrich can use them as collateral to secure loans, which, because they must eventually be repaid, are also not considered taxable income. Larry Ellison, a co-founder of Oracle and America’s fourth-richest person, has pledged more than $30 billion of his company’s stock as collateral in order to fund his lavish lifestyle, which includes building a $270 million yacht, buying a $300 million island, and purchasing an $80 million mansion. A Forbes analysis found that, as of April 2022, Musk had pledged Tesla shares worth more than $94 billion, which “serve as an evergreen credit facility, giving Musk access to cash when he needs it.”
This strategy isn’t as common among the merely very rich, who may not have the expensive tastes that Ellison and Musk do, but it isn’t rare either. Liscow and Fox calculated that the top 1 percent of wealth-holders, excluding the richest 400 Americans, borrowed more than $1 trillion in 2022. And the approach appears to be gaining momentum. Last year, The Economist reported that, at Morgan Stanley and Bank of America alone, the value of “securities-backed loans” increased from $80 billion in 2018 to almost $150 billion in 2022. “The real question is: Why would you not borrow hundreds of millions, even billions, to fund the lifestyle you want to live?” Tom Anderson, a wealth-management consultant and former banker who specializes in these loans, told me. “This is such an easy tool to use. And the tax benefits are massive.”
Annie Lowrey: Trump says his tax plan won’t benefit the rich—he’s exactly wrong
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/09/trump-tax-plan-be
nefit-rich/541584/
You might think this couldn’t possibly go on forever. Eventually, the rich will need to sell off some of their assets to pay back the loan. That brings us to step three: die. According to a provision of the tax code known as “stepped-up basis”—or, more evocatively, the “angel of death” loophole—when an individual dies, the value that their assets gained during their lifetime becomes immune to taxation. Those assets can then be sold by the billionaire’s heirs to pay off an
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I almost forgot about our "Losers Only" thread.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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