2026 Mid-Term Elections

[Toni]

I'm pretty certain some in here are saying they want the rich to pay tax, not turn the rich into snacks.

The rich already pay tax. Toni and her Ilk want to tax billionaires so much, they cease to be billionaires. She is ignoring all the negatives of that plan, like forced sales of stock holdings.

I didn’t know I was an ‘ilk.’ To be clear, I think our tax structure needs to be overhauled in order to prevent or discourage billionaires, largely through corporate tax laws and rules and regs. Why should not business executives have to actually pay for the perks that allow them to believe themselves more privileged than the rest of us? Why are those benefits not taxed?

After all, we are now apparently trying to tax student loans as income and to limit the amount of of loans available according to degree.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

If Amazon and Walmart did not drive other businesses out of business then there would be other jobs available. I get it: you live in a major metropolitan area and I don't know that you ever travel outside of that area to more rural areas or small towns. I've lived in major metropolitan areas before and now I live in a more rural setting (small town/city) and the effects are dramatically noticeable where I live. Dramatically. Businesses I relied on for quality products no longer exit because of predatory practices by these mega retailers. The jobs provided by Walmart, for instance, do not support a single adult, much less a family even if both parents are working. Walmart doesn't do 'full time' employment except for a few people. Everyone else is relegated to part time hours and expected to be available whenever they are wanted. No health care, no living wage. We are subsidizing such employers by providing assistance that their underpaid employees require

WalMart jobs tend to pay more than small business jobs.

 

[Derec]

Really? What was Elon Musk’s innovation?

Maybe you do not realize how big a deal this was in 2008. The EVs of that era tended to be ugly econoboxes that were significantly overpriced compared to what they were. For example, the 2009 Mitsubishi i-MiEV was >$40k for a subcompact car. Or else they were affordable but basically glorified golf carts like the G-Wiz with the 2008 model (2nd gen) having a 17 horsepower motor and maxing out at 50 mph.

The original Roadster showed that EVs can be sexy. And by competing in the higher-priced sports car market, the added cost of EV tech was not a significant portion of the cost, unlike with EVs offered until then.

And yes, he squandered a lot of cachet of the Tesla brand later with substandard quality, poorly thought out models like the Cybertruck and unrealistic promises of autonomous driving. But on the other hand, the Powerwall is a solid battery system for example. With SpaceX, the Falcon launch system is a cost-effective way to get into the orbit.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Really? What was Elon Musk’s innovation?

Maybe you do not realize how big a deal this was in 2008. The EVs of that era tended to be ugly econoboxes that were significantly overpriced compared to what they were. For example, the 2009 Mitsubishi i-MiEV was >$40k for a subcompact car. Or else they were affordable but basically glorified golf carts like the G-Wiz with the 2008 model (2nd gen) having a 17 horsepower motor and maxing out at 50 mph.

The original Roadster showed that EVs can be sexy. And by competing in the higher-priced sports car market, the added cost of EV tech was not a significant portion of the cost, unlike with EVs offered until then.

And yes, he squandered a lot of cachet of the Tesla brand later with substandard quality, poorly thought out models like the Cybertruck and unrealistic promises of autonomous driving. But on the other hand, the Powerwall is a solid battery system for example. With SpaceX, the Falcon launch system is a cost-effective way to get into the orbit.

Clearly Derec hasn't head that 'Tesla isn't a car company anymore'.

Probably not the right web forum for that.

But seriously, yes, Musk would be an example of some very rich dude helping provide the economic cash burn needed to create something new. Billionaires can have a place, but a single person alone being worth $200 billion has almost no value to the economy, unless they provide active value to the economy. Which is what this is all about, right? Locking up $200 billion in wealth from the economy is a negative economic thing. We need that money doing stuff. He helped foster Tesla, that created something, jobs, a viable car company for at least a few years before he went insane.

I want what is in our economy's best overall interest.

 

[Derec]

I didn’t know I was an ‘ilk.’

You are definitely part of an "Ilk".

To be clear, I think our tax structure needs to be overhauled in order to prevent or discourage billionaires,

That would also prevent or discourage creation of successful businesses.

largely through corporate tax laws and rules and regs.

There is a big difference between corporate taxes on say Amazon or Tesla and personal income taxes on say Bezos or Musk.
And corporate taxes in the US are hardly low compared to other countries.

Why should not business executives have to actually pay for the perks that allow them to believe themselves more privileged than the rest of us? Why are those benefits not taxed?

Business executives are different than business owners. And what kind of "perks" do you want to see taxed (more)?

After all, we are now apparently trying to tax student loans as income

[citation needed]

and to limit the amount of of loans available according to degree.

That is probably a good idea. After all, there is a big difference in the likely ability to repay the loan between borrowing a quarter million for a medical degree vs. borrowing an equal amount for a PhD in comparative folk dancing and advanced fly-fishing (to borrow from Heinlein). A high loan for a degree that has a low average return-on-investment should be either declined or require collateral.

 

[Derec]

Clearly Derec hasn't head that 'Tesla isn't a car company anymore'.

I did mention his overpromises. But the question from Toni was "what was his innovation?" and bringing electric cars into the mainstream by releasing the Tesla Roadster was a big deal in pushing EV development forward.

Locking up $200 billion in wealth from the economy is a negative economic thing. We need that money doing stuff. He helped foster Tesla, that created something, jobs, a viable car company for at least a few years before he went insane.

How is the $200G or however much "locked"? It's not like he has a vault filled with gold coins like a certain duck.

I want what is in our economy's best overall interest.

And that would be exactly what? The big problem with current Tesla is that the investors still believe he can deliver innovations despite, as you say, him going insane. But I don't see how you can fix that without doing more harm than good.

 

[Derec]

Probably the same one that stole your sense of proportion. It is blatantly obvious that the rhetoric around "billionairs" is a metaphor for the top 1% or 10% of wealthy.

That's not obvious at all, and certainly not universally true. But for those that might be using it that way, that is a very poor metaphor. The net worth of top 1% and especially top 10% is <<$1G.
Billionaires are the top 0.0003% of the wealthy.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I simply object to your use of the word 'worship'. You do know what worship means, so if we're talking about people who think billionaires are taxed enough already, we have zero justification in saying they worship billionaires unless they indicate that in their posts. Which no one has done.

Yes this is a nit, a minor point about what words mean. Sorry.

Note that the two options are not exclusive.

Should tax rates on the top brackets be higher? Yes.
Should they be the 91% or 100% that some are asking for? No.

And will it make a big difference either way? No. There simply aren't enough of them, and people keep mistaking wealth vs income. None of them actually have the supposed wealth--if they tried to sell it off they would crater their stock.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Of course we are. We are subsidizing any employer who pays employees so poorly that they must supplement their income by food stamps, Medicaid, and other poverty relief measures. We are subsidizing them by increased number of children who need to go to subsidized daycares, Head Start programs, be in Medicaid, or free lunch programs, etc. We also are subsidizing all corporations by building infrastructure: roads, water and sewer, utilities, etc. We are especially subsidizing corporations every single time they are given tax breaks when they decide to build another store or warehouse in any community.

What you fail to understand is that removing bad jobs won't make good jobs appear. The actual result is pushing people into unemployment.

The status quo is we are currently supporting housing and food for people with jobs. That seems absurd.

Our economy transitioned from manufacturing to services. It was profitable, it made costs go down, made access to goods easier... for the people who didn't lose their jobs.

Now our economy will be transitioning from services to some services/gig/AI, while you are whining about paying people who work at low wages higher wages. What you should be thinking about is how is to manage a population when there are only jobs for 1/5 of it in America? We clumsily made our way through the first transition. And no one is asking the questions about the next one which is going to be much harsher.

You aren't addressing my point at all. We demand more and more be given to workers and pretend that doesn't reduce the demand for workers.

There will come a point where there aren't enough jobs, but we aren't there yet. What we have now is hype, not a fundamental change.

 

[Toni]

Of course we are. We are subsidizing any employer who pays employees so poorly that they must supplement their income by food stamps, Medicaid, and other poverty relief measures. We are subsidizing them by increased number of children who need to go to subsidized daycares, Head Start programs, be in Medicaid, or free lunch programs, etc. We also are subsidizing all corporations by building infrastructure: roads, water and sewer, utilities, etc. We are especially subsidizing corporations every single time they are given tax breaks when they decide to build another store or warehouse in any community.

What you fail to understand is that removing bad jobs won't make good jobs appear. The actual result is pushing people into unemployment.

The status quo is we are currently supporting housing and food for people with jobs. That seems absurd.

Our economy transitioned from manufacturing to services. It was profitable, it made costs go down, made access to goods easier... for the people who didn't lose their jobs.

Now our economy will be transitioning from services to some services/gig/AI, while you are whining about paying people who work at low wages higher wages. What you should be thinking about is how is to manage a population when there are only jobs for 1/5 of it in America? We clumsily made our way through the first transition. And no one is asking the questions about the next one which is going to be much harsher.

You aren't addressing my point at all. We demand more and more be given to workers and pretend that doesn't reduce the demand for workers.

There will come a point where there aren't enough jobs, but we aren't there yet. What we have now is hype, not a fundamental change.

Your point seems to be that it is more important for billionaires to continue to profit enormously from the labor of workers who should be satisfied with wages that do not allow them to simultaneously have decent housing, sufficient decent food and to save for their eventual retirement. Hell, these days billionaires are saying no one should retire, ever, much less enjoy a decent standard of living and the ability to raise and educate children should they so desire to have children.

So that billionaires can maybe not make it to trillionaire status.

 

[Toni]

I didn’t know I was an ‘ilk.’

You are definitely part of an "Ilk".

To be clear, I think our tax structure needs to be overhauled in order to prevent or discourage billionaires,

That would also prevent or discourage creation of successful businesses.

largely through corporate tax laws and rules and regs.

There is a big difference between corporate taxes on say Amazon or Tesla and personal income taxes on say Bezos or Musk.
And corporate taxes in the US are hardly low compared to other countries.

Why should not business executives have to actually pay for the perks that allow them to believe themselves more privileged than the rest of us? Why are those benefits not taxed?

Business executives are different than business owners. And what kind of "perks" do you want to see taxed (more)?

After all, we are now apparently trying to tax student loans as income

[citation needed]

and to limit the amount of of loans available according to degree.

That is probably a good idea. After all, there is a big difference in the likely ability to repay the loan between borrowing a quarter million for a medical degree vs. borrowing an equal amount for a PhD in comparative folk dancing and advanced fly-fishing (to borrow from Heinlein). A high loan for a degree that has a low average return-on-investment should be either declined or require collateral.

There are many many successful businesses that do not create billionaires. In fact, most of them do not create billionaires. Our corporate tax structure certainly seems to allow a lot of businesses to believe themselves created and to flourish.

Do you know what is anti-business creation? Monopolies. Do you know what is anti-business creation and anti-democratic? Media conglomerates that own huge shares of media, including news media. We are seeing right now that billionaires do not like to have their underlings do anything like—criticize their decisions. Think first themselves. Actually present facts to the people.

 

[Toni]

I didn’t know I was an ‘ilk.’

You are definitely part of an "Ilk".

To be clear, I think our tax structure needs to be overhauled in order to prevent or discourage billionaires,

That would also prevent or discourage creation of successful businesses.

largely through corporate tax laws and rules and regs.

There is a big difference between corporate taxes on say Amazon or Tesla and personal income taxes on say Bezos or Musk.
And corporate taxes in the US are hardly low compared to other countries.

Why should not business executives have to actually pay for the perks that allow them to believe themselves more privileged than the rest of us? Why are those benefits not taxed?

Business executives are different than business owners. And what kind of "perks" do you want to see taxed (more)?

After all, we are now apparently trying to tax student loans as income

[citation needed]

and to limit the amount of of loans available according to degree.

That is probably a good idea. After all, there is a big difference in the likely ability to repay the loan between borrowing a quarter million for a medical degree vs. borrowing an equal amount for a PhD in comparative folk dancing and advanced fly-fishing (to borrow from Heinlein). A high loan for a degree that has a low average return-on-investment should be either declined or require collateral.

A better idea would be to make education much more affordable for all degrees. Back in the olden days public universities were actually well supported by public tax dollars. That’s why people my age could go to university on money earned from summer jobs and could be supported ( albeit at subsistence level) by the university while they earned Ph.D.s. Do you know how hard it is for universities to recruit American educated Ph.Ds to teach and do research? Not that I believe all or even most university profs should be American but I don’t think that parents will be thrilled when their kids are learning American history from someone born not in the Americas. Actually, I know that is true because I have friend not born here but who earned their PhD from a prominent t American University and definitely some students pushed back against learning about US government from someone who was ‘only’ a naturalized citizen.

I realize it’s cool with all the conservatives to denigrate any degree that isn’t hard science or math or computer oriented but look at the Doge kids and see what happens to kids who have no background in liberal arts, especially language, history, art, literature, sociology and psychology. Those are what make life worth living for most people. Otherwise you just have a bunch of ignorant little sociopaths running around breaking everything.

 

[Tigers!]

You make electorates, districts based solely upon number of noses. Pick a number N and all districts need to be that size =/-%N.
The key is N is solely numeric. You do not concern yourself with what colour the noses are or how they voted large time. Just numeric.

Sounds like such a straightforward, simple and logical idea at first glance.
Until you look at the BIG picture.
Capriciously, randomly disenfranchising noseless people might not look too fishy at first glance, until you realize that the noseless are already a repressed class of citizens.
But leave it to those big-nosed Australian conservatives to turn their noses up at the innocently noseless. I guess they fear that letting the noseless vote, could some day saddle them with a noseless majority in leadership.

I will not pretend I have any idea what you are trying to say.

That isn't a surprise, seeing your solution provides no more guidance than the Constitution does. You seem to be unaware that states can be split up into roughly an infinite number of orientations if you just count noses. How in the heck do you think that solved anything?

If you just count noses rather than the colour of the noses it will reduce significantly the possibility of racism affecting the electorates.
Which does seem to be a huge problem at present.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Worse, my experience with WalMart is that even when you tell them you cannot work on some date or some time, they will sometimes schedule you anyway and then write you up for it!

Personally, I think this should at least mean that such "open" availability, and the desire/usage of it, should entitlebthe "openly available" employee to the benefits of a full time position, even if not the hours.

This would promptly end WalMart and other companies' abusive practices of monopolizing people's entire 168 hours of time a week in exchange for 20 hours of wages.

Disagree. I would do two things:

1) Required availability has some minimum wage that applies.

2) Part time employees get a pro-rated share of the benefits a full-timer would get. If they can't get a share (say, health insurance--no way to divide it) it's paid in cash at whatever it costs the employer, and if they get a total of 40 hours they can go to whichever employer they have more time at and have them provide it, taking the money the other employer would otherwise have paid.

And my understanding is that some states prohibit such open availability anyway. All should other than if compensated.

That still leaves the problem my former employer had, though--he found he got better workmanship from the installers if things were a little lean. Then we ended up having to keep things lean for them because of one bad apple. Installation work was paid entirely piecemeal. Here are the jobs available, each has a diagram showing what to do and how much it will pay. Originally we basically did not police this, you could work as much or as little as you wanted, just finish any papers you took. One bad hire, promptly fired over mistakes, went to the labor board claiming overtime violation. Hey, we weren't scheduling time at all (unless some job had some sort of access hour restriction or the like), overtime?! Seems what he tried to do exceeded 40 hours of work for him, labor board sided with him, from that point on we had to limit what people were allowed to do. (And some of the installers did not like this--some were particularly good at certain jobs, we had one guy very good at apartments, when they came along he would work 16 hour days because his hourly rate came out so high.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Reality: you end up lowering most everyone's standard of living this way. Walmart is better than the mom-and-pops.

What you fail to understand that reality is always more complex. The standard of living extends beyond the real income of laborers.

Certainly the standard of living of the mom and pops of those mom-and-pops stores may be lowered. And while the standard of living of the many of Walmart's customers might improve, the standard of living of some of the employee's may be lowered via their overall working conditions and wages. Not to mention the degradation of the global or local environment due to the large amount of low quality merchandise made and transported to the Walmarts.

Taking all of the above into account, it is not clear that in reality most people's standard of living is lowered by making Walmart provide better compensation and working conditions even if there are fewer hours or jobs available. Of course, someone might study this and provide some reasonable estimates, but until that time, your opinions remains unsubstantiated.

And you failed to even address the real point: Walmart tends to pay more than the mom and pops. Just because the unions keep demonizing them doesn't make their numbers true.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Of course we are. We are subsidizing any employer who pays employees so poorly that they must supplement their income by food stamps, Medicaid, and other poverty relief measures. We are subsidizing them by increased number of children who need to go to subsidized daycares, Head Start programs, be in Medicaid, or free lunch programs, etc. We also are subsidizing all corporations by building infrastructure: roads, water and sewer, utilities, etc. We are especially subsidizing corporations every single time they are given tax breaks when they decide to build another store or warehouse in any community.

What you fail to understand is that removing bad jobs won't make good jobs appear. The actual result is pushing people into unemployment.

The status quo is we are currently supporting housing and food for people with jobs. That seems absurd.

Our economy transitioned from manufacturing to services. It was profitable, it made costs go down, made access to goods easier... for the people who didn't lose their jobs.

Now our economy will be transitioning from services to some services/gig/AI, while you are whining about paying people who work at low wages higher wages. What you should be thinking about is how is to manage a population when there are only jobs for 1/5 of it in America? We clumsily made our way through the first transition. And no one is asking the questions about the next one which is going to be much harsher.

You aren't addressing my point at all. We demand more and more be given to workers and pretend that doesn't reduce the demand for workers.

There will come a point where there aren't enough jobs, but we aren't there yet. What we have now is hype, not a fundamental change.

We are going to be there, so we need solutions now, not pants pissing over paying aomeone a wage I haven't made in over 27 years!

 

[laughing dog]

Reality: you end up lowering most everyone's standard of living this way. Walmart is better than the mom-and-pops.

What you fail to understand that reality is always more complex. The standard of living extends beyond the real income of laborers.

Certainly the standard of living of the mom and pops of those mom-and-pops stores may be lowered. And while the standard of living of the many of Walmart's customers might improve, the standard of living of some of the employee's may be lowered via their overall working conditions and wages. Not to mention the degradation of the global or local environment due to the large amount of low quality merchandise made and transported to the Walmarts.

Taking all of the above into account, it is not clear that in reality most people's standard of living is lowered by making Walmart provide better compensation and working conditions even if there are fewer hours or jobs available. Of course, someone might study this and provide some reasonable estimates, but until that time, your opinions remains unsubstantiated.

And you failed to even address the real point: Walmart tends to pay more than the mom and pops.

If that was your real point, you hid it well.

Please substantiate your “real point” with a link.

Just because the unions keep demonizing them doesn't make their numbers true.

You didn’t address a single point I made. And why are you babbling about unions demonizing WalMart?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

But the Pandemic-era expanded child tax credit is part of the same problem. You do not need to itemize, but it is available up to $400k of income. Why should a single person making $40k subsidize the children of somebody making 10x that?

That single person making $40k isn't paying a lot of tax in the first place.

Or talk about workarounds that avoid the estate tax. There are tactics wealthy people can employ (because if you’re not wealthy, you’re not going to qualify for the estate tax). One is called step-up basis. Say you have some assets. You bought them decades ago and they’ve appreciated significantly. You are ultimately taxes on the increase in their value for capital gains, and it takes a sale of the assets to trigger the tax. Instead, you hold the assets until your death, when they pass onto your heirs. But with a basis step-up, the value is reset to its current level and the heirs don’t suddenly have a big tax bill to meet. All that increased value is now invisible to the tax authorities.

The author is conflating estate taxes with capital gains taxes. Estate taxes are, yes, due only above a certain high cutoff ($15-30M) and applies to the value of the estate. Step-up basis applies to capital gains on increase of an asset value and is not affected by the estate tax cutoff. If your parent has a $300k rental property they bought decades ago for $100k, $200k is taxable income if they sell it, but it resets if it passes to you. Of course, those with more assets benefit more, but the author is wrong for conflating it with the estate tax.

Yeah, its' not ideal, it's just the alternatives are worse.

Another National Bureau of Economic Research study, this one from 2021, pointed to a massive amount of tax dodging by the wealthiest in the country. “We estimate that 36% of federal income taxes unpaid are owed by the top 1% and that collecting all unpaid federal income tax from this group would increase federal revenues by about $175 billion annually,” the researchers wrote.

Top 1% is far more people than just the handful of billionaires you and some others here are so focused on.

And the answer to tax dodging is fixing the dodges, not raising the rates. Simply raising rates even more punishes the honest and rewards the dishonest. This is the same issue as antidiscrimination efforts painting with a broad brush.

That would pay for the child tax credit and still leave $50 billion additional to put toward the national debt. But who’s taxes get the most scrutiny? People who earn very little.

I disagree that we should expand the already very generous child tax credit. Especially in the Biden-era form of it being available up to $400k in income and not tapering off with increased number of children.

We are below replacement. Lots of immigration or more children per couple or big problems down the road.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Those who don't think the uber rich should pay their fair share of taxes, that they give enough already. Even though sometimes that enough is less than what a worker at a nursing home pays. Or effectively nothing.

We have already shown that you are mistaken in the notion that the "uber rich" pay "effectively nothing".

It’s already been discussed that some uber wealthy do not draw income but live off of loans borrowed against their assets, there for owing no income taxes. Musk in some years has drawn no income from his assets and therefore owed no personal income taxes. Warren Buffet famously remarked that his housekeeper paid more income taxes than he did.

Major error on Buffet: He said his housekeeper paid a higher tax rate than he did. Not more tax!

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The disconnect between "wealth growth" and "total income reported" is not that they borrowed the difference tax free, but that they did not use more than the reported income

Bolded is unsubstantiated by the figures. We have no idea what their cash flow was.

But we have no reason to think they were borrowing.

However, note that for three of them it makes good sense if they want more income as the stock is appreciating faster than the interest on a margin loan.