2026 Mid-Term Elections

[Derec]

Drive the qualify of American education above its current Third Word quality

That is not primarily due to funding. In the US, spending per student is comparable with most EU countries. It's about how that money is spent.

There is too much politization. Like when schools in California banned teaching of algebra before the 9th grade because of the intellectually bankrupt idea of "equity".
San Francisco Killed 8th-Grade Algebra. Now It’s Set to Come Back.
After more than a decade, they reversed that decision.
Then you have Oregon, which scrapped graduation requirements, again because of "equity".
Oregon just dropped all graduation standards, failing all of its students in the name of ‘equity’
Dumping more money into a flawed system is not necessarily going to make it better.

Why can’t we dominate in cricket!!!

Why should we?

 

[ZiprHead]

Income is money or value received by an individual or business in exchange for goods, services, labor, or investments. It is the total consumption and saving opportunity gained within a specified timeframe, and serves as the foundation for measuring economic growth, assigning tax burdens, and evaluating wealth. [1, 2, 3, 4] - Legal Information Institute

It was a political decision to exempt stock gains from income.

Note the verb "received". You do not receive "money or value" from an increase of an asset until you sell it or receive periodic payments such as interest and dividends.

That is completely wrong. It ignores the second sentence.

But you are right, any taxing decisions are inherently political. It was a political decision to pass the 16th Amendment which authorized the income tax to begin with. But there is a reason why unrealized gains are generally not taxable worldwide. For one, what happens if an asset goes down in value? Do you get a tax refund?

If I win a car on a game show. I am taxed at its full sticker price as income. As soon as I drive the car off the lot it loses 25% of its value. Do I get a tax refund? No. Neither should the person in your situation.

Question: Why are you schilling yourself for the massively wealthy? Do you think you will be one of them someday?

 

[Shadowy Man]

There is too much politization. Like when schools in California banned teaching of algebra before the 9th grade because of the intellectually bankrupt idea of "equity".

how many “schools in California” was that? California is much more than just SF. My kids had no problem learning algebra in California before 9th grade.

 

[bilby]

Why can’t we dominate in cricket!!!

Because you replaced your traditional aristocracy with a neo-aristocratic class who prefer rounders.

 

[unapologetic]

Question: Why are you schilling yourself for the massively wealthy? Do you think you will be one of them someday?

Haven't you learned by now, arguments make Derec happy.

 

[Elixir]

Why are you schilling yourself for the massively wealthy? Do you think you will be one of them someday?

I silently ask that question every time some fool argues against their own interests in defense of the supremacy of wealth over humanity. I think many like Derec get off on imagining that yes, one day they will be rolling in billions and laughing at the doubters.
Meanwhile, the shoe is in the other foot and they are the butt of the joke.

 

[Toni]

“Why is a nurse in Queens who makes $75,000 a year paying more than $1,000 a month in taxes?” Bezos said. “That’s $1,000 that could help with rent, or groceries, or anything … To me, it’s kind of absurd that we’re doing this. We shouldn’t be asking this nurse in Queens to send money to Washington. They should be sending her an apology.”

Bezos argues that the lower half of earners contributes just 3% of total tax revenue — yet someone like that nurse is devoting roughly 16% of her salary to produce that negligible share. She’s paying a meaningful personal price to fund a rounding error in the federal budget.

His point is good, but a nurse making $75k is above the median, not below.
He is also neglecting the fact that due to all the reproduction-dependent tax credits almost half of people do not pay federal income taxes (and even have a negative rate). But depending on how many children they have, a lot of those (Romney's infamous 47%, percentage might be even higher now) are in the top half of earners.

This moment of empathy may be surprising coming from Bezos, one of the wealthiest people in the world.

Why exactly would it be "surprising"?

Billionaires like Bezos have taken advantage of holes in the tax system so that they pay income tax on just a small percentage of their annual gains.

That's not a "hole in the tax system". Income tax is paid on income, not on "gains". Note that this is the same for everyone. If you stock portfolio gains $50k one your, that is not taxable either.

In 2007 and 2011, Bezos didn’t pay income tax at all. According to a ProPublica investigation, Bezos’ wealth increased $127 billion from 2006 to 2018, but he reported $6.5 billion in income. While this amounted to a huge $1.4 billion tax payment, this represented a tax rate of only about 1%.

No, it represents a tax rate of 21.5%. Is that too low? Do we need to add a couple of income and capital gains tax brackets? I would say so.
But let's not pretend that you can just divide two numbers and call it a "tax rate".
This ProPublica article did a lot of damage to people's understanding of how taxes work.

This isn’t illegal. Americans are not taxed on unrealized capital gains, meaning that if Amazon’s stock balloons to make Bezos even more wealthy, he will only pay taxes once he sells that stock.

Finally, a glimmer of sentience.

The ultra-wealthy do whatever they can to hold on to their investments. Instead, they take out massive loans using their stock as collateral, live off of those loans, and avoid paying taxes on them, since those loans are technically debt.

They hold onto these investments because these investments represent ownership of - and thus control over - their companies.
They also hold onto them because they only need a fraction of them to live on, even incredibly lavishly. Bezos is far more interested in traditional trappings of enormous wealth than somebody like Musk. I am talking huge mansions, megayachts, lavish parties like that wedding of his. According to the numbers above, Bezos realized ~$500M per year of taxable income to fund this lifestyle, which is a huge amount by anybody's standards. Should billionaires be required to take out even more gains just so Uncle Sam gets his?

I have already calculated why this "buy, borrow, die" does not work as a long term strategy. Bank interest is not free, and it cumulates. That's why somebody like Bezos over the years still sold billions in equity and paid the appropriate taxes on the capital gains. If BBD worked as imagined by people like this writer, why bother?

Has Jeff Bezos finally realized how unfair this is? Does he now understand the frustration of the middle class, who can’t just take out loans on their heaping piles of company stock to avoid reporting capital gains?

Technically you could, but you'd have to pay interest.

And yes, the tax rate paid by Bezos is not fair. There should be higher tax brackets. But it does nothing for the argument, and in fact it undermines it, to understate his tax rate by a factor of 20 like ProPublica and those parroting it are doing.

We tend to give tax breaks to things we want to encourage. We ( or a lot of us) want to encourage people to have children.

The word "billionaire" seems arbitrary and ephemeral in this argument. There's nothing magical about $10⁹; The same discussion could have been had in the 1920s about mere millionares.

What matters is what a person wants more money for.

A poor person who gets more money spends it on necessities (food, clothing, rent, bus fares, etc.).

A middle class person spends it on luxuries (gormet dining, designer wear, houses, cars, etc.).

A rich person spends it on indulgent super-luxuries (personal chefs, personal shoppers, mansions, private jets, etc.).

Once an individual gets to this "rich" level, they can have pretty much any object or experience they want. They can eat anything, wear anything, live anywhere, travel anywhere, But even this is not the kind of wealth under discussion.

The hyper-rich person spends their next dollar on political power, influence and legacy. They are aristocratic, despite their lack of formal aristocratic titles, and despite the (hypothetical) absence of aristocracy at all in the USA and the (hypothetical) removal from lower of aristocracy in Europe.

It is this to which people who object to "billionaires" are opposed. Not the $10⁹, nor even (for most objectors) the private jets or yachts. Political power in modern democratic nations is supposed to be held equally by all voters. Having $10⁹ should ideally give a man no more (or less) say in who will be President than having $0 does.

Whether this problem - this breaking down of the democratic ideal by aristocrats - can be solved by progressive taxation or other wealth limiting laws; Or whether it should be addressed by other legal means (such as bans or severe restrictions on lobbying, political advertising, political fundraising, political parties, etc.) is an interesting question, but one that the USA may be unable to ask due to the very broad rights granted to Americans by their first ammendment.

In Europe, aristocrats (in the broad sense that includes anyone with abnormal political clout, whether due to wealth, title, or position) are limited in what they may say or do to influence the choice of political leaders and representatives. Perhaps not limited enough; But there are rules about what can be said and done by such people, including prohibitions on, or strict spending limits on, political advertising. It's a balancing act, in which free-speech absolutism is as extreme, and as foolishly ineffective, at protecting the people from aristocratic excesses as was Soviet Communism.

As such limitations seem to be unconstitutional in the US, the remaining option for preventing or curtailing aristocratic (mis)behaviour that undermines democracy is to limit the ability to be wealthy enough to do it. THAT is what this discussion seems to me to really be about; "Billionaire" is a shorthand for "Aristocrat" here, rather than strictly meaning "person who has $10⁹".

The question is not "How do we eliminate billionaires", so much as "How do we prevent anyone from becoming wealthy enough to significantly distort democracy".

The aim is to ensure that the next dollar the richest Americans acquire will go to non-political expenditure. If the only way to do that is to confiscate that dollar (or 99¢ of it), then that's the price of defending the revolution. If you wanted to be ruled by an oligarchy of aristocrats, why did you bother secceeding from the British Empire?

Government of the people, by the people, for the people, is not (or may not be) incompatible with the existence of billionaires per se, but it is incompatible with letting billionaires influence what laws get passed (or repealed), or who sits in Congress, or who sits in the Oval Office.

I think you are naive regarding the influence of billionaires. My town has one or did until he died recently so I suppose his widow is now a billionaire. Actually, we have a decent share of really wealthy people. The father of one of the girls who played soccer years ago earned annual bonuses of >$1M. Around here, that's a lot, considering how many people live in or are trying to get into subsidized housing.

Aside from the ability to purchase a senator or representative or two (definitely happened in my town), the very wealthy carry an outsized influence that goes beyond what any one person or family should have. Sometimes, it works out for the better, especially if control over the actual museum or building is wrested away from the initial donor. OTOH, when people's little feelings get hurt, they tend to pull funding and projects stall for months, leaving a lot of very localized chaos. Again: happening in my town specifically because the billionaire who tried to purchase whatever he could in town died and the widow is less....committed to his commitments to various projects. The project that is currently just making it past stalled saw the demolition of about 8-10 houses, some of which had once been grand homes of upwardly mobile Victorian era big shots, some of which were more modest. All of which had been converted into multi-unit dwellings, mostly for students. Guess where there is a big housing shortage? Here in my town. But hey, we'll have a big bright and shiny new thing because the same thing at either of the two universities just wasn't good enough (really, they were). The same billionaire steered conventional belief in this town to strongly favoring the Catholic school system (of which he was a donor) and did his best to discourage....tax revenues being used to fund the local public school system. Just a couple of things. But of course, corporations and universities also often have an outsized influence. The larger of the universities has taken over a big chunk of the local jewel of a public park for its baseball fields.

Smaller community groups will fundraise to put in playground equipment for school kids but that does absolutely nothing to persuade the local powers that be to keep that school open. If only they had a billionaire sponsor! I wish to hell I were kidding

I don't think we can legislate ourselves out of this but we do need to do something to limit the rich people political power on a national and state and hopefully local level. Donations are great but dictating how they operate and how they are named and what content they can have is something else altogether.

Money don't talk, it swears
Obscenity, who really cares
Propaganda, all is phony

It's all right Ma Democracy is dying

 

[Toni]

Why are you schilling yourself for the massively wealthy? Do you think you will be one of them someday?

I silently ask that question every time some fool argues against their own interests in defense of the supremacy of wealth over humanity. I think many like Derec get off on imagining that yes, one day they will be rolling in billions and laughing at the doubters.
Meanwhile, the shoe is in the other foot and they are the butt of the joke.

I think a lot of people think that people become billionaires because they worked hard for it, are successful and deserve it. They are smarter and harder working.

And to a certain extent, that is true, plus a lot of luck. But a lot of very wealthy people became very wealthy by suppressing the wages of the working class, by skewing the tax code to favor their interests, by buying whatever influence they can whereever they can.

 

[bilby]

I think you are naive regarding the influence of billionaires.

And yet the rest of your reply to me in no way suggests how, nor does it disagree with anything I said - on the contrary, you seem to be in violent agreement with me.

I am wondering if your response was actually directed at Derec, and your quoting of my post as well as his was a technical glitch?

 

[ZiprHead]

I think you are naive regarding the influence of billionaires.

And yet the rest of your reply to me in no way suggests how, nor does it disagree with anything I said - on the contrary, you seem to be in violent agreement with me.

I am wondering if your response was actually directed at Derec, and your quoting of my post as well as his was a technical glitch?

I think it was meant for Derec and she included your post for more proof of the influence issue.

 

[Elixir]

a certain extent, that is true, plus a lot of luck. But a lot of very wealthy people became very wealthy by suppressing the wages of the working class, by skewing the tax code to favor their interests, by buying whatever influence they can whereever they can.

… all of which can be done more effectively once you become rich, thus perpetuating and aggravating the haves/have nots divide.

 

[Derec]

how many “schools in California” was that? California is much more than just SF. My kids had no problem learning algebra in California before 9th grade.

It was an example of education suffering due to politics independent of level of funding. Yes, that particular example was about one city in California, but the Oregon example is statewide.

 

[Derec]

That is completely wrong. It ignores the second sentence.

Since increase in unrealized asset value is not treated as "income" in (almost) any tax system, I think your interpretation of that second sentence is what is "completely wrong".

If I win a car on a game show. I am taxed at its full sticker price as income.

True. But that is because you received an asset, not because it increased in value.
If that car increases in value next year (for example because James Bond drives it in the next movie) you are not taxed on the increase in its value either.

As soon as I drive the car off the lot it loses 25% of its value. Do I get a tax refund? No. Neither should the person in your situation.

But those are very different situations. Receiving an asset (either a car in a game show or stock as part of a compensation package) is income, yes. But that is different than taxing an increase in value of an asset you hold.

Let's get back to that car you won. You paid income taxes. But because President Zombie Bernie and Speaker of the House AOC passed the Unrealized Gains Taxation Act of 2036, you are taxed when the value of that car spiked because of the new James Bond movie. You are a but miffed, but you begrudgingly pay the extra tax. But of course, the value drops back to normal after the buzz dies down and the movie is shown on Amazon Prime. So would you not be miffed if you do not get a refund now that the value of your asset dropped?

Why should it be different for stock? If you receive stock as part of a compensation package, it is income, and taxed accordingly. So the stock gains 20% in 2037. You pay the Bernie/AOC tax. It drops 15% in 2038. Should you not receive a refund? It gains 10% in 2039 but that does not even cover the losses from 2038. Stocks go up and down. You are proposing taxing only on the upswing, but not compensating for the downswing.

Question: Why are you schilling yourself for the massively wealthy? Do you think you will be one of them someday?

I am not. I am just offering a reality check over flawed arguments offered here. I even proposed higher tax brackets for income and capital gains. But I guess that is not ideologically pure (nor "sexy") as novel and not very well thought out taxation schemes.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Is there some data linked to this, or is it just a quote based on vibes?
How much was Buffet's income in that year? How much tax did he pay?
How much was the secretary's income in that year? How much tax did he/she pay?
What taxes are included in the calculation, if any was ever made? FICA? State and local taxes, or just federal?
Was that year representative, or was it in some way unique - a one-time windfall for the secretary (like selling an investment property or a bunch of stock) or Buffet realizing some losses which decreased his tax burden?

Without numbers to back it up, this quote in meaningless.

In a sense he's right, but it's also not a proper representation of the situation.

Buffet: Most of his income is going to be capital gains, thus 20%.

Secretary: Most of her income is going to be regular income and she's paying the 7.65% SS/Medicare "taxes". I find it entirely believable his secretary ends up paying more than 20% total. We are both self employed (which puts the FICA at 15.3%), we end up paying more than 20% despite the low brackets and some capital gains.

But Social Security payments also top out. He's counting retirement money as tax.

And there's also the issue of inflation. Over the long run looking at the average return for the market we find the capital gains rate plus inflation produces a true tax bracket pretty close to what regular income is. The true tax inequality is dividends have both the income tax and the inflation tax, they are thus treated much worse than either wages or capital gains.

 

[Toni]

“Why is a nurse in Queens who makes $75,000 a year paying more than $1,000 a month in taxes?” Bezos said. “That’s $1,000 that could help with rent, or groceries, or anything … To me, it’s kind of absurd that we’re doing this. We shouldn’t be asking this nurse in Queens to send money to Washington. They should be sending her an apology.”

Bezos argues that the lower half of earners contributes just 3% of total tax revenue — yet someone like that nurse is devoting roughly 16% of her salary to produce that negligible share. She’s paying a meaningful personal price to fund a rounding error in the federal budget.

His point is good, but a nurse making $75k is above the median, not below.
He is also neglecting the fact that due to all the reproduction-dependent tax credits almost half of people do not pay federal income taxes (and even have a negative rate). But depending on how many children they have, a lot of those (Romney's infamous 47%, percentage might be even higher now) are in the top half of earners.

This moment of empathy may be surprising coming from Bezos, one of the wealthiest people in the world.

Why exactly would it be "surprising"?

Billionaires like Bezos have taken advantage of holes in the tax system so that they pay income tax on just a small percentage of their annual gains.

That's not a "hole in the tax system". Income tax is paid on income, not on "gains". Note that this is the same for everyone. If you stock portfolio gains $50k one your, that is not taxable either.

In 2007 and 2011, Bezos didn’t pay income tax at all. According to a ProPublica investigation, Bezos’ wealth increased $127 billion from 2006 to 2018, but he reported $6.5 billion in income. While this amounted to a huge $1.4 billion tax payment, this represented a tax rate of only about 1%.

No, it represents a tax rate of 21.5%. Is that too low? Do we need to add a couple of income and capital gains tax brackets? I would say so.
But let's not pretend that you can just divide two numbers and call it a "tax rate".
This ProPublica article did a lot of damage to people's understanding of how taxes work.

This isn’t illegal. Americans are not taxed on unrealized capital gains, meaning that if Amazon’s stock balloons to make Bezos even more wealthy, he will only pay taxes once he sells that stock.

Finally, a glimmer of sentience.

The ultra-wealthy do whatever they can to hold on to their investments. Instead, they take out massive loans using their stock as collateral, live off of those loans, and avoid paying taxes on them, since those loans are technically debt.

They hold onto these investments because these investments represent ownership of - and thus control over - their companies.
They also hold onto them because they only need a fraction of them to live on, even incredibly lavishly. Bezos is far more interested in traditional trappings of enormous wealth than somebody like Musk. I am talking huge mansions, megayachts, lavish parties like that wedding of his. According to the numbers above, Bezos realized ~$500M per year of taxable income to fund this lifestyle, which is a huge amount by anybody's standards. Should billionaires be required to take out even more gains just so Uncle Sam gets his?

I have already calculated why this "buy, borrow, die" does not work as a long term strategy. Bank interest is not free, and it cumulates. That's why somebody like Bezos over the years still sold billions in equity and paid the appropriate taxes on the capital gains. If BBD worked as imagined by people like this writer, why bother?

Has Jeff Bezos finally realized how unfair this is? Does he now understand the frustration of the middle class, who can’t just take out loans on their heaping piles of company stock to avoid reporting capital gains?

Technically you could, but you'd have to pay interest.

And yes, the tax rate paid by Bezos is not fair. There should be higher tax brackets. But it does nothing for the argument, and in fact it undermines it, to understate his tax rate by a factor of 20 like ProPublica and those parroting it are doing.

We tend to give tax breaks to things we want to encourage. We ( or a lot of us) want to encourage people to have children.

 

[Toni]

I think you are naive regarding the influence of billionaires.

And yet the rest of your reply to me in no way suggests how, nor does it disagree with anything I said - on the contrary, you seem to be in violent agreement with me.

I am wondering if your response was actually directed at Derec, and your quoting of my post as well as his was a technical glitch?

I think you are either vastly simplifying or vastly underestimating the ability of wealthy people—not just uber or ultra wealthy people to influence and control at least the sphere around them.

Our local billionaire did not come close to the uber wealthy such as Musk or Bezos. But he had and will continue to have a very outsized influence on this town for years to come.

The place I’ve called home for the past 38 years or so is mostly a working class town that is also home to two small universities. Our billionaires and his millionaire buddies have done a great deal to ensure that they maintain a subservient underclass who will be grateful to work at their crappy factories for generations to come.

All politics is local. And it’s not necessarily about or just about what happens at the polling place.

If the locals start to make too much noise about working/living conditions and to demand ( and by demand, I mean gently suggest) that low wages/no benefits are not keeping up with inflation, then the Big Shots threaten to move to the next town. Tends to quiet things down quite a bit.

 

[bilby]

I think you are naive regarding the influence of billionaires.

And yet the rest of your reply to me in no way suggests how, nor does it disagree with anything I said - on the contrary, you seem to be in violent agreement with me.

I am wondering if your response was actually directed at Derec, and your quoting of my post as well as his was a technical glitch?

I think you are either vastly simplifying or vastly underestimating the ability of wealthy people—not just uber or ultra wealthy people to influence and control at least the sphere around them.

I am not sure that what I wrote supports that; Sure, it's a simplification (as any general statement must be), but not, I think, a vast simplification.

Perhaps I could have mentioned that there are no sharp lines between the tiers of wealth I sketched out, but I thought that this was too obvious to need explicit mention.

And I certainly don't underestimate the ability of wealthy people to manipulate their community.

Our local billionaire did not come close to the uber wealthy such as Musk or Bezos. But he had and will continue to have a very outsized influence on this town for years to come.

The place I’ve called home for the past 38 years or so is mostly a working class town that is also home to two small universities. Our billionaires and his millionaire buddies have done a great deal to ensure that they maintain a subservient underclass who will be grateful to work at their crappy factories for generations to come.

All politics is local. And it’s not necessarily about or just about what happens at the polling place.

If the locals start to make too much noise about working/living conditions and to demand ( and by demand, I mean gently suggest) that low wages/no benefits are not keeping up with inflation, then the Big Shots threaten to move to the next town. Tends to quiet things down quite a bit.

Nothing here is in disagreement with what I wrote. I agree with you wholeheartedly.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I absolutely do believe that there must be limits on the amount of wealth and influence any person is able to accrue because we seem to inevitably accord them special dispensation from the rules, regulations and laws the rest of us must abide by.

How would you accomplish that without dispossessing people from ownership of companies they built up? I have brought that point up before, but you have not addressed it.

They're rich, they aren't people!

But, as someone who owns some Berkshire Hathaway shares I much prefer the company to be controlled by those who follow his philosophy rather than by the usual Wall Street mentality. It's to my advantage that it not be broken up.

Since Citizens United, we now allow the wealthy to purchase lawmakers and judges as well as law enforcement to further stack the odds on their favor. This is unAmerican to its very core.

As I said, I think CU was wrongly decided. But expropriation of those who built up successful businesses is too draconian a "solution" to thta problem.

Citizens United was correct even though it was unpleasant. If we are to reign in political speech the First will need to be modified. And I think that ship has sailed, anyway--they'll just work with intermediates that aren't in the US.

Because that's what most people want. A big house, not a two bedroom condo or a small house.
Although there are also a lot of condo complexes being built. I just went on Zillow and looked at Atlanta listings. Many <$200k listings and even some <$150k listings still exist, but they are for small houses as well as condos. If you want a 4 bedroom 2500 sq. ft. house, you have to pay accordingly.

It's more than that.

The fundamental problem is land. There's a fixed amount of it in desirable locations. As demand rises the price per square foot goes up. Apartments/condos?? The reality is the more you pack into a square foot of land the more a square foot of the place will cost. The condo might be cheaper per unit, but more of that cost is in things which provide no apparent value to the occupants. (Land, walls, stairs etc.) Thus luxuries become a smaller portion of the total cost and people will favor the nicer place that's a small percent more expensive when they wouldn't have made the same choice with a cheaper place where the same luxury was a higher percentage. Thus the market favors the nice places.

And there's the usual opposition to higher density stuff. A lot of that has a legitimate basis--higher density means more people around and that which is out of place is less likely to be noticed. Thus there is more crime. Amazing how the crime map follows the people. And two lanes supports a lot more traffic than a typical residential street--the practical effect is the more people around the more traffic density on the roads. It is in the interest of the homeowners to keep the density low and to favor ownership over renters. (I've seen this even on our street--used to be entirely owner-occupied. Now it's not. I've found my trash cans on the driveway once--nearby house has far more cars than parking, they're frequently parked in front of our house. Never mind that I put the trash out, they moved the cans to park, the trash guys didn't take them.) I don't kneed to look at the property deeds to know which houses are rentals.

 

[Toni]

I absolutely do believe that there must be limits on the amount of wealth and influence any person is able to accrue because we seem to inevitably accord them special dispensation from the rules, regulations and laws the rest of us must abide by.

How would you accomplish that without dispossessing people from ownership of companies they built up? I have brought that point up before, but you have not addressed it.

They're rich, they aren't people!

But, as someone who owns some Berkshire Hathaway shares I much prefer the company to be controlled by those who follow his philosophy rather than by the usual Wall Street mentality. It's to my advantage that it not be broken up.

Since Citizens United, we now allow the wealthy to purchase lawmakers and judges as well as law enforcement to further stack the odds on their favor. This is unAmerican to its very core.

As I said, I think CU was wrongly decided. But expropriation of those who built up successful businesses is too draconian a "solution" to thta problem.

Citizens United was correct even though it was unpleasant. If we are to reign in political speech the First will need to be modified. And I think that ship has sailed, anyway--they'll just work with intermediates that aren't in the US.

Because that's what most people want. A big house, not a two bedroom condo or a small house.
Although there are also a lot of condo complexes being built. I just went on Zillow and looked at Atlanta listings. Many <$200k listings and even some <$150k listings still exist, but they are for small houses as well as condos. If you want a 4 bedroom 2500 sq. ft. house, you have to pay accordingly.

It's more than that.

The fundamental problem is land. There's a fixed amount of it in desirable locations. As demand rises the price per square foot goes up. Apartments/condos?? The reality is the more you pack into a square foot of land the more a square foot of the place will cost. The condo might be cheaper per unit, but more of that cost is in things which provide no apparent value to the occupants. (Land, walls, stairs etc.) Thus luxuries become a smaller portion of the total cost and people will favor the nicer place that's a small percent more expensive when they wouldn't have made the same choice with a cheaper place where the same luxury was a higher percentage. Thus the market favors the nice places.

And there's the usual opposition to higher density stuff. A lot of that has a legitimate basis--higher density means more people around and that which is out of place is less likely to be noticed. Thus there is more crime. Amazing how the crime map follows the people. And two lanes supports a lot more traffic than a typical residential street--the practical effect is the more people around the more traffic density on the roads. It is in the interest of the homeowners to keep the density low and to favor ownership over renters. (I've seen this even on our street--used to be entirely owner-occupied. Now it's not. I've found my trash cans on the driveway once--nearby house has far more cars than parking, they're frequently parked in front of our house. Never mind that I put the trash out, they moved the cans to park, the trash guys didn't take them.) I don't kneed to look at the property deeds to know which houses are rentals.

Good to know that Mammon still has his worshippers.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

He's got a point. Taylor Swift is, for all practical purposes, a self made billionare in her mid-30's. It would seem the "no billionaires" crowd would have to put a stop to this. Even though she enjoys what she does and most certainly wants to keep making records and touring. Given her fame popularity and work ethic, its a given she would continue to grow her wealth pretty substantially for the near future. Hmmm...what to do? Maybe she should give up her music career and become Travis Kelce's trad wife?

Most billionaires got that way by finding something to do that creates a bit of value for an awful lot of people. Saying "no billionaires" effectively is telling people not to be very good at creating value for others. What's different with Taylor Swift is that she provides the value (entertainment) directly, rather than like Bezos (facilitating dealing with a bunch of companies. Much less friction to buy something from them, they provide a trusted intermediate in dealing with little companies. Not like the one source for something I wanted that was out of stock, your card will be charged now but it will ship when it comes in.)