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BOO
The pro trickle-down lobby group Club for Growth went in hard with the Halloween theme [[link removed]] last week, which isn’t terribly unusual: people responsible for creating internet content are always ready to seize on a holiday angle, especially when that holiday is Halloween. It’s a pretty easy content recipe: just call something you don't like “spooky” or “scary,” or you can go all out with that Halloween costume meme [[link removed]] , and you’re good with the holiday content at least until Veteran’s Day .
So it barely registers that the Club for Growth chose October 31st to release a report using seasonal language like “suffocate government spending,” “massacre marginal tax rates,” and “bring our economy back from the dead.” OK, fine, it’s typical if unimaginative horror-reference stuff, but why are we talking about this a week later? Because they also used the phrase “ zombie Reaganism ” in the body of the piece and even made it the title! Yup: the Club for Growth managed to suggest Reaganism has been killed, has no organic life to live, and consumes brains . And these are people who like Reaganism and want to bring it back.
Make it make sense.
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$3.70/hour [[link removed]] wage increases are coming soon to the paychecks [[link removed]] of non-union Toyota production workers in the US. The company rolled out these raises as an immediate response to the pay increase won by striking UAW members at the Big Three unionized US automakers.
$5.36 billion [[link removed]] is owed in damages and penalties by the National Association of Realtors and several large real estate firms after a jury found their commission practices inflated costs and violated antitrust laws [[link removed]] . The NAR controls the trademark on the word “Realtor” and has long been one of the largest and best-funded lobbying groups in the country.
1 in 9 [[link removed]] billionaires in the world have sought political office. A new study [[link removed]] found this is a far higher rate of office-seeking than is seen among other powerful groups, and that billionaire office-holders tend to “lean to the right ideologically.”
A Chart [[link removed]]
Many observers studying the apparently complicated interrelationships between politics and economics have wondered if the equation is actually a simple one: what if, in the end, popular approval of how the president is performing on the economy simply follows gas prices ? When prices are up, approval is down. And when prices are down, approval bounces back. Sure, this seems a bit too simple, but look at the overall trend in gas prices from 2020 through 2022, and you may become a believer — or at least feel less befuddled about why so many people have continued to express such downbeat sentiment about the state of the economy despite strong growth and record-low unemployment.
The chart also shows that while prices remain elevated as compared to the recent past, they seem to have stabilized over the past year, and are currently falling. So, if the simplest possible theory is correct, the forecast looks good for President Biden’s approval ratings to similarly stabilize in the months ahead and then tick up . And there’s all the more reason to crack down hard on corporate greedflation in the oil and gas industry.
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Blowing up the Groupchat [[link removed]]
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos recently announced a move to Florida, which he attributed to a desire to be close to his aging parents. His public announcement of the move mentioned taxes zero times — but that didn’t stop hot-take-havers from speculating that the move was a response to Washington state recently passing a modest tax on capital gains profits.
This kind of analysis wants desperately to come off as clear-eyed realism about how rich people behave, but there’s not actually any realism here. Extremely rich people certainly put lots of energy into complicated accounting schemes that minimize their tax liability [[link removed]] — but there is no evidence that the rich organize how and where they live their lives [[link removed]] as a tax-avoidance strategy. (In fact, some data suggests that millionaires move less often than the rest of us [[link removed]] .) Or as Jonathan Levin distilled it in Bloomberg [[link removed]] : “The uber-rich have far more money than they could ever spend, so they can afford to simply live in the places that make them happiest .” Besides, the rich are hardly known to hold their tongues about taxes, so if one of the richest and most powerful human beings on the planet actually had something to say about how taxes affected his life, the most obvious way we’d know is that he’d probably just, oh, well, maybe… say it?
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