Favorites: Recession Rumblings, Taxes on Penguins
Elderly millionaires shouldn't get a tax break, SCOTUS unites against Trump’s most obviously illegal deportations
If you didn’t hate Trump’s trade guy, Navarro, enough already, he ran for mayor in San Diego (cached) in 1992 on a straight NIMBY platform. “Don’t Yield to Developers” was his tagline. (Yes, as far as I can tell, the above is a joke screenshot)
Everyone likes taxes being cut, and when referred to simply as 'the elderly' there's often a certain sympathy. But when you're more specific here, elderly people who have made an extremely profitable bet on property prices are also extremely wealthy. It's not complicated to figure out why it's counter-productive to give them a huge tax cut, especially when it's an incentive to not move. Check out a thread summarizing the article (cached). Or the whole article. TL;DR lowering property taxes lowers family formation and causes people to have fewer kids than they report wanting to have.
Maybe "Maoists" is more accurate even, since there's a major cult of personality aspect as well, along with complete nonsense. Here's a whole article
Flotsam and Jetsam
– If you thought NAFTA is responsible for the reduction in American manufacturing jobs, you should see this chart. The jobs were mostly gone before NAFTA. (src)(cached)
– The second biggest scandal this week is that a 9/11 truther is firing NSC officials. (src)(cached)
– AI responses to virtual urgent care appointments were better than human physicians with access at AI assistance. (src)(cached)
– The White House argues that courts can’t order El Salvador to do anything, deliberately ignoring that the order was for federal officials to request the release of prisoners being held at Trump’s request. (src)(cached)
– AOC is out-polling Schumer in New York State, but what really bodes well for her is that it’s not because of huge outperformance among college grads or any racial group. (src)(cached)
– S&P drop from tariff announcement worse than the entire 2007-2009 recession. (src)(cached)
– The US team sent to help Myanmar after the recent earthquake has been fired while still deployed. (src)(cached)
– Trump’s tariff villain origin story starts with him being outbid by a Japanese businessman for a piano. (src)(cached)
– Wild how many more recessions have started under republican presidents since WWII, 1 under a Dem (Carter) 10 under Republicans (about to be 11 now) (src)(cached)
– Someone challenged menswear guy to a fight, because he pointed out (cached) that the guy uses sweatshops, in response to that conservative guy saying Nike should onshore (cached) their manufacturing. I enjoyed speculation (cached) about what he’d wear to the fight. MJ Beat It outfit? Kingsman tweed? Many options. Anyway, after all that, it appears the menswear guy won the fight (cached) (src)(cached)
– Normal Americans also care about the stock market. More American adults own stock than have a job. (src)(cached)
– Musk is publicly calling for zero tariffs, at least with Europe. (src)(cached)
– Thread detailing the new Llama 4 model capabilities. (src)
– Waymo is requesting permission from the California government to expand all the way out past San Jose. (src)
– You can tell things are bad with Trump right now: Musk is back to tweeting about rockets instead of politics. (src)(cached)
– Trump’s tariff announcement hurt Russia’s stock market as well, despite the fact that we have not hit them with any tariffs directly. It’s likely because of a falling price for oil in anticipation of a US recession. Tyler Cowan argues this indicates he’s not working for Russia, but I am not sure he predicted this second order effect. (src)
– They finally came up with a talking point for went they put a tariff on penguins. But it’s still nonsense, they screwed up and ate trying to create an explanation for why it wasn’t a mistake. (src)(cached)
– Trump's tariffs look like Liz Truss' disastrous budget rollout, except worse because he really can't credibly commit to not doing it again after rolling back the stupid plan. (src)(cached)
– Looks like Schumer was right to not filibuster the CR to fund the government, the argument was that it would mean Trump still owns all bad news. It would only work if he did something bad by the fall, it only took a couple weeks. Just blend into the wall (cached) and let the Republicans own the mess they were making. (src)(cached)
– YIMBY bills are being proposed in every state, that’s some good news! (src)
– The UK used to be equivalent in GDP per capita, Brexit and their land use policy have been so bad that now they consider Five Guys to be “posh” (src)(cached)
– Medicare advantage was already wasteful and now Trump’s appointee to OMB is making it worse. (src)(cached)
– Francis Fukuyama called it in 1992: a danger to liberalism is that we’ll destroy it even though it’s working great, just because humans like having something to struggle against. They’ll struggle you knock over the liberal order if it’s all that’s left. (src)(cached)
– Looking at polling data on tariffs, Domalewski argues that the 17% claiming tariffs are a tax *cut* represent Trump’s true floor of support. (src)(cached)
– All nine SCOTUS justices agree that Trump’s deportations without due process are illegal. Roberts says government isn’t in contempt immediately, but it certainly seems like they’ll get there soon. (src)(cached)
– Excerpts from a substack post by Helen Toner arguing that the defenses against AI we should be pursuing are essentially all ones we should be doing anyway, cyberdefense, biosafety. (src)(cached)