Favorites August 31st 2021

Jonathan Chait @jonathanchait

Stepped-up basis is a loophole for the wealthy so absurd and unjustifiable that even Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney proposed to end it. But moderate Democrats won't let Biden kill it off.

nymag.comWealthy Lobbyists Have Already Slashed Biden’s Tax Reform by Three-QuartersModerate Democrats have quietly knifed the president’s legacy bill.

If we’re going to have new taxes, which the moderates seem to want, this is the most clear one to implement.

Owen Barcala @obarcala

Our government abducted people and took them to a secret off-shore military prison to be tortured before a drumhead trial, and they're *still waiting for a trial* two decades later, but people like Rich think ending the war is the worst capitulation of our values

Bruno Maçães @MacaesBruno

“The worst capitulation of Western values in our lifetimes” https://t.co/Onl4MEg0wt

To a first approximation, war is a capitulation of our values, it’s not that they shouldn’t happen, but we need to be certain of our goals. "All wars are crimes"

Alex Tabarrok @ATabarrok

Kinda hilarious. The Biden administration has put more political pressure on the FDA than Trump did.

endpts.comBREAKING: In a major blow to vaccine efforts, senior FDA leaders stepping downTwo of the FDA’s most senior vaccine leaders are exiting from their positions, raising fresh questions about the Biden administration and the way that it’s sidelined the FDA. Marion Gruber, director of the FDA’s Office of Vaccines Research & Review and 32-year veteran of the agency, will leave at th…

And the delay appears to be a response to anti vaxxers. There was also an NYT Opinion piece on the subject.

Josh Kalven @kalven

"Florida has done prescribed burns on more than 1.6 million acres so far this year. California has only burned around 35,000 acres."

I had no idea the South did so many controlled burns.

Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬 @lymanstoneky

Holy cow. Using a big household panel survey these researchers reconstruct household rosters and identify deaths, and suggest India's excess mortality due to COVID totaled at least 4.5 MILLION dead.

nber.orgUsing Household Rosters from Survey Data to Estimate All-cause Mortality during COVID in IndiaFounded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.

This would put India’s excess deaths at approximately the same number as of the entire world’s official covid death count. The full range of this estimate is 2.8 to 6.3 million.

Noah Smith 🐇 @Noahpinion

This is a great post. I think it comes down to this: As a country, we needed to give rural White Americans some sort of identity they could be proud of other than Confederacy-style white supremacy. We failed to give them one.

Will Wilkinson 🌐 @willwilkinson

In my latest, I argue that the urban/rural partisan divide hasn't *exactly* eclipsed the old North/South divide. It's more like everywhere not a city has become sort of Southern. https://t.co/yZCbIrLYrc

A shorthand for what this is talking about: Confederate flags in Maine.

Adam Nash @adamnash

Build. More. Water Storage. 🤦‍♂️ ktla.com/news/californi…

ktla.comCalifornia moves slowly on building more water storage projects that voters agreed to borrow billions for during last droughtIn 2014, in the middle of a severe drought that would test California’s complex water storage system like never before, voters told the state to borrow $7.5 billion and use part of it to build projects to stockpile more water. Seven years later, that drought has come and gone, replaced by an even ho…

This is especially crazy when we already approved the money to build it.

Mountain View, October 2018