2026 Mid-Term Elections

[Toni]

Bullshit. What creates monopolies is allowing mergers that reduce competition and innovation.

Technically monopolies mean that there is no competition because there is only one player.

Note that some industries require an oligopoly because the requirements for capital investment make the existence too many independent players not feasible. Cars for example. Or aerospace.

If it is bad for media—and it is very bad indeed—it is bad for other businesses as well.

That's what antitrust laws are supposed to be about. But, again, healthy competition is not incompatible with existence of billionaires. Especially since a billion dollar is worth a lot less than even just 10 years ago. $1G today is worth about $728M in 2016.

Yes, when competitors merge or are all taken over by a single entity, they form a monopoly.

Antitrust laws should prevent monopolies. That does not seem to be the case re: Amazon who now wants to provide medical care in addition to selling you everything or media mergers/acquisitions, for a couple of examples.

No person or entity should ever control so much of the market that it is functionally a monopoly.

 

[Toni]

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.

Everything in life requires tradeoffs. Yes, I think more support of public universities by the federal and state governments would be a good idea. But we should not waste taxpayer money. How many of which degree should be thus supported? We do not need an unlimited number of English or history or business administration majors. The number of degrees offered, including advanced degrees, should be based on the society's needs. And we need to get away from this idea that everybody should be able to go to college even if they barely passed high school and require remedial math and English classes. That only needs to dumbing down of college education. I've seen it at a local "university" here - unproctored online exams even in supposedly "in person" classes, skipping sections of curriculum so it , all to make passing easier because a large part of their student body (probably the majority) has no business pursuing college education.

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.

That is still possible with GTA/GRA stipends. But this also raises the question, how many PhDs do we need to train in different disciplines?

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.

Are you saying that there aren't enough history PhDs from the US? A few years ago we had a thread where the opposite was argued - that there were many humanities PhDs that they could not find tenured positions and had to make to being part-time adjuncts.
Surely, if a field is such that the main use of a PhD is to teach that same field on a tertiary level then the number of new PhDs trained should reflect that.

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.

Really? Where is he from?

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.

I am not a conservative, nor do I denigrate those degrees. They are definitely needed, as learning about those things is part of a well-rounded education. But we need a limited number of those degrees. That's just a fact. There are only so many history PhDs needed for teaching American History before or after 1877 to undergrads so they meet their graduation requirements for example. There are two ways to regulate how many new PhDs are made - either you cap the number of PhDs directly, or through restrictions on how much student loans are available for those degrees.

I think that people should be able to determine what degrees they wish to earn, not the government. We do not ‘need’ an unlimited number of any type of degree. Just because your imagination is limited about the utility of a lot of degrees, English, or history, does not mean that they are ‘useless’ to society or to those who earn these degrees.

There is zero need to limit the number of PhDs created. The amount of work and economic deprivation during the process of earning such degrees is sufficient. People drop out because they are tired of being poor and sleep deprived as it is. We should not be burdening them with crippling debt as well.

 

[Toni]

I see college students in Target at the beginning of the semester and a few before Christmas break. Otherwise? No. They don’t really bring any retail to this town except perhaps more vape shops? There is very little retail in town aside from places like hardware stores. Restaurants? Not so much although I don’t go to pizza places ( hubby makes great pizza at home) or burger joints (ditto). Plenty of bars, some of which cater more to the college crowd and some which are definitely townie dive bars.

So basically, these college students frequent local businesses and spend money, but they tend to be different places than the ones you frequent. And all that spending adds to the economic base of your town, which looks less and less Bumfuck-like.

In my hometown, it is under 30 miles from a large city which helps drive rents.

So it's basically an outer ring suburb. Looks even less Bumfuck-like. On the scale of Atlanta, your town is basically Duluth, and nobody would call Duluth "rural".

The town where I grew up is not really an outer ring suburb although in another 20 years it might become that. It was a bedroom community when I lived there and is still that. No one in my family ever worked in town nor did my friends or their parents, with one exception being the daughter of a realtor . There are still very very few jobs there with the growth being in those fulfillment centers.
Most of my current hometown’s economic

My current hometown’s economy is mostly based on industry as described in other posts. There is a concerted effort with some small success to attract tourism. College students and their parents believe that the entire town is supported by universities but that’s because they only get off campus to go to bars, Target and Walmart, except at graduation when they go to the one or two nicer restaurants ( see trying to attract tourists).

 

[unapologetic]

I think 'who gets the most out of it' is irrelevant.
We don't pay taxes 'by item'.
Who benifits from a war? (I am already sorry I asked, without WWII i wouldn't have been born)
I would like to say nobody, but we all know industrlists and shareholders do.
We pay to keep the whole system running.
You are ignoring that your income itself is a benifit of 'the system'.
Therefore a 'fair share' is a precentage EVERYBODY should be paying equaly.
(But 'the poor' should get a break because they need a break.)
Some have tried to not pay, because "I refuse to support this unjust war", but didn't get away with it.
'I should pay less because I get less back', dosen't work either. We have to fund the whole system, regardless.

 

[Derec]

The town where I grew up is not really an outer ring suburb although in another 20 years it might become that. It was a bedroom community when I lived there and is still that.

Regardless of how you want to classify where you live, it is not far from a major city, it has some industrial base, and it has an university with businesses that cater to its students. So not a Bumfuck, and hardly surprising that rents there are not low. So, let's end this digression.

 

[jonatha]

At least I do not see any reason to think that. Do you?

Well, he spent $500M to buy a yacht recently (plus $75M to buy a tender for it), and $25M to $30M every year since to keep it up...

 

[Derec]

I think that people should be able to determine what degrees they wish to earn, not the government.

People should be able to apply to study for any degree they want, yes.
But if the government is going to foot a large part of the cost of universities, they should have to say how many of each degree they want to fund.
Right now, universities are happy to offer a large number of seats to marginal students because the money flows - some from the government (for public universities), some from the overly permissive student loan structure, and some from out-of-pocket payments.

We do not ‘need’ an unlimited number of any type of degree.

True. But we need some more than others. We need more doctors and engineers than we do English professors.

Just because your imagination is limited about the utility of a lot of degrees, English, or history, does not mean that they are ‘useless’ to society or to those who earn these degrees.

Not useless, just not needed in the numbers we are producing them.

There is zero need to limit the number of PhDs created.

Those degrees have costs. Of course there needs to be some limit.

The amount of work and economic deprivation during the process of earning such degrees is sufficient. People drop out because they are tired of being poor and sleep deprived as it is.

Apparently not.

We should not be burdening them with crippling debt as well.

Then we should limit the access to loans based on degrees with low employment opportunities.

 

[Derec]

Well, he spent $500M to buy a yacht recently (plus $75M to buy a tender for it), and $25M to $30M every year since to keep it up...

Those numbers were from 2014-2018. I do not know how much income he declared in later years, esp. year he purchased the yacht. Do you?

 

[jonatha]

Well, he spent $500M to buy a yacht recently (plus $75M to buy a tender for it), and $25M to $30M every year since to keep it up...

Those numbers were from 2014-2018. I do not know how much income he declared in later years, esp. year he purchased the yacht. Do you?

Google points to an X post citing stock sales of $15.7B in 2020-21 and $13.6B in 2023. The post appears to assume the entire amount was taxed as long-term gain.

 

[Derec]

To get back to the actual topic of this thread, I let's talk about the upcoming NJ primaries.
Specifically, I am concerned about the NJ-12th district which is a safe D+13 district. That means that whoever wins the Democratic primary is a shoo-in for the seat. But at the same time, NJ only requires a plurality to win, which means somebody with little support can still win.

Enter Adam Hamawy. He is a darling of left wingers like Bernie "Quisling" Sanders, AOC and even the Congressional Fauxgressive Caucus.
In packed NJ-12 race, Bernie Sanders will support Adam Hamawy
AOC endorses Hamawy
Hamawy endorsed by Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC
Hamawy also campaigned with the tankie antisemite Hasan Piker. But he also testified on behalf of the "Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdel-Rahman. If you forgot, he is the one responsible for the first WTC bombing in 1993.
Hamawy also worked with Al Qaeda fronts, ostensibly as a physician.
A Candidate’s Past Ties to a Militant Cleric Are Surfacing in a N.J. House Race

Dr. Hamawy has led the race for campaign cash and has landed endorsements from such left-wing luminaries as Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Hasan Piker of the internet, who appeared with him on Saturday for a get-out-the-vote rally in Trenton. A newly formed pro-Palestinian political action committee, American Priorities, has spent more than $1.5 million on ads that highlight Dr. Hamawy’s work as a surgeon — a figure that dwarfs the campaign budgets of every other candidate.

Why is AIPAC spending money seen as this big problem, but big spending by Palestinian groups is not?

It was [during his gap year] that Dr. Hamawy began spending time with Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, a blind, militant Islamist who lived and preached in New Jersey. Four years later, Mr. Abdel Rahman would be tried and convicted of inspiring violence that contributed to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He died in 2017 while serving a life sentence.
[...]Dr. Hamawy, who traveled in a van with the two men, testified that he did not recall hearing Mr. Abdel Rahman say that to Mr. Salem. In the course of his testimony he also told jurors that he helped the blind cleric translate a fax from Egypt in 1993, spent time in his apartment and listened to him speak at area mosques.
[...]
When pressed on what had motivated him to travel with Mr. Abdel Rahman as a younger man, Dr. Hamawy downplayed the cleric’s reputation for fiery rhetoric, calling him a “blind old man” who was dependent on volunteers from the Muslim community to care for him. “He wasn’t preaching death and destruction all the time,” Dr. Hamawy added. “He had certain views that he spoke in certain forums, but that’s not what he did every single day.”
On the witness stand, however, Dr. Hamawy made clear that he understood that the sheikh saw Israel and the United States as enemies of Islam. When asked if he recalled the cleric stating that “Muslims had to do jihad against the enemies of Islam,” he said he did.
“Of course, that’s what he always talked about,” Dr. Hamawy testified. “He talked about jihad.”

His past associations with the Blind Sheikh are pretty damning. But, wait, there is more.
Leading N.J. Dem congressional candidate Adam Hamawy volunteered with Al-Qaida-tied group in Bosnia

But just one year before Hamawy took the witness stand to describe his travels with Abdel-Rahman, the now-Congressional candidate made a different journey with another party entangled in terrorist conspiracies: to Bosnia, with a group subsequently shut down for providing “logistical support” to Al-Qaida.
In a 1996 interview with the Newark Star-Ledger, according to a copy Jewish Insider recovered through an archive of print publications, Hamawy described volunteering in Bosnia during the summer of 1994 with a Chicago-based nonprofit called the “Benevolence International Foundation.”
Sarajevo and Zenica were the exact cities where Benevolence International maintained its offices — offices that Bosnian authorities raided in 2002, part of a joint effort with U.S. authorities to dismantle the group, which they had identified as a front for Al-Qaida. The 9/11 Commission Report would later identify the foundation’s base in the Bosnian capital as part of the “impressive array of offices [that] covertly provided financial and other support for terrorist activities” that Osama bin Laden established in the early 1990s.

This emergence of Islamists as Democratic candidates is very concerning, as is the level of support they enjoy from the fauxgressive wing of the Democratic Party.
Hamawy himself seems to be leading right now. In a poll from early May, he is 7 percentage points ahead of his closest competitor, Sue Altman. But that poll shows him with only 19% support, which means that due to NJ's undemocratic plurality rules, he could win the primary (and thus effectively the general election) with less than ¼ of the Democratic vote. How is that lower-case-d democratic?

 

[Derec]

Google points to an X post citing stock sales of $15.7B in 2020-21 and $13.6B in 2023. The post appears to assume the entire amount was taxed as long-term gain.

Plenty of money to fund his yacht and other hobbies. So, no need to to borrow anything as part of "buy, borrow, die". Why do you then assume he did?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Should they be the 91% or 100% that some are asking for? No.

Because you say so?
History disagrees with you.
1) a 100% top marginal rate has NEVER been imposed on anyone (in America) afaik.

"Asking for". Not actually exists. Brazil at one point had a tax bracket around 140%. Of course nobody actually paid it.

2) the highest marginal rates ever, coincided with America’s most prosperous era ever.
So, simply put, YOU’RE WRONG, QED.
I look forward to your next attempt to disassociate prosperity with high top marginal tax rates.

Of course we had a boom in the post-war era. We had most of the world's industrial capacity that hadn't been smashed in the war. To not have a post-war boom would be a major failure.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

That doesn't make Musk some sort of wunderkind. It just means he's rich and got a lot richer. It seems like it's pretty easy to get richer when you are already rich to start out. AAMOF, the only rich person I know of to almost lose it all is Trump. Lucky for him his dad bailed him out.

It's easier, doesn't mean it's automatic.

We used to know a couple in the 9 figures. Haven't seen them in ages, but their wealth was in the Aladdin. The Aladdin went bankrupt, I'm sure most of their wealth was gone.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You are not refuting him one bit.

And note that "workers are paid their contribution to production" is yet another guise for the labor theory of value. In practice it's a dog-whistle for "more", as the analysis never captures all of what does not come from that worker, and in would never happen in a sane market as an employer who pays the worker the full value of their work gains nothing, why hire them?

That assumes that there is no value to management or any of the support services that exist in most companies. It also assumes that the value of a worker’s labor is 100% equal to the increase in value added by his labor to raw materials plus cost of power to produce ( whatever is being produced). It’s not. The value of the final product is what the market determines it is.

Yeah, it assumes there's no value to management--the fundamental flaw underlying communism. We've just seen this in reference to Tesla--the idea that since the idea of the electric car existed that Tesla wasn't an innovation.

No one is saying that companies should not earn a profit. Everyone who works for the company deserves to be fairly compensated. While it is easy to say that labor should be compensated according to market forces, the absolute fact is that there can be and has been collusion among employers to limit compensation for labor. This is certainly what happened in my town for a very long time. Being geographically separated from any larger town/city by 50 miles, it was easy for employers to pay what they felt like and then denigrate their workers for being ‘unstable’ and not worth more pay. A number of millionaires were create this way: by underpaying for labor and feeling smug about it. And by enrolling their kids in the local Catholic school system and suppressing increases in property taxes that paid for the education of ‘their’ working class. Gotta keep ‘em down cause they sure weren’t keeping them happy.

You say that nobody is saying that--but I was pointing out it indirectly being said. You give the workers the full value, you just wiped out profit. (And you ignored the cost of their tooling.)

The stress of working multiple part time jobs or a full time plus part time job created the kind of stresses you’d expect; increased consumption of alcohol and other substances, increased stress, increased depression and family instability and domestic abuse along with increased housing instability. The rest of us paid for this by increased need for various social safety net organizations. Including policing. The millionaires enjoyed ski vacations and ‘cabins’ and ‘farms’ ‘to get away from it all.

Then the pandemic happened and people are earning much higher wages. Yes, there are still the working poor and demand for the local food shelves and section 8 housing. Groceries, gas and rent have gone up in price. But people are better off than they were. Because they are being better compensated for their work. And while there are still economic stresses, they have eased somewhat. Except for housing, which is an issue nationwide.

People are better off because Covid disabled/killed off enough workers to tip the balance. Fundamentally, that's the only way the balance tips--when you remove people from the labor pool.

And there's no reason to go ascribing local labor rates to collusion. You just had a glut in comparison to local demand. And, despite what you say about rural life, the reality is most of the good people leave for better opportunities.