The passthrough company stuff is proper bullshit. Even more so than it seemed at first.
Anyway, from reading the headlines on the bill, I figure I'd save a couple of thousand simply because (hello cheap house) of the increase of the standard deduction is basically throwing money at me. Of course, the loss of the medical deduction would cost my mom a huge amount more.
I look forward to going back to using the simplest 1040 form after this year.
Since I now no longer own a home, I'm all in favor of replacing the mortgage deduction with just mailing everyone a check.
Now that you no longer own a home, you're vulnerable to communism.
The destruction of American higher education by eliminating the deduction for tuition wavers is a particular blend of stupid and evil. That's such a large source of American economic and general soft power.
Now that I no longer own a home, I'm in favor of exterminating the kulaks.
6: It's mind boggling how badly that will screw universities if it goes through.
I once suggested to a fairly-rich-by-regular-person-standards acquaintance (retired small-company founder) about how much the tax code subsidizes the lifestyles of the UC/UMC and it seemed an alien enough concept to him that he barely registered it.
I think a huge chunk of my family counts as kulaks.
Richard Spencer is a straight-up bloodsucking absentee landlord (whatever it's called that the Soviets got rid of before the kulaks were a thing).
6 wavers s/b waivers of course. Bye bye waivers.
The waivers will mostly affect graduate students, which is a bigger problem at places like this than undergraduate students but I don't think it presents as much of a political opportunity for attack as the ending of the deduction for student loan interest. That hits more people and most of the people it hits probably don't get that the student loan interest deduction is already capped so low it doesn't help them much.
I wish the fucking media would be a bit more direct in pointing out that the really, really rich person part of the bill is tailored for being rich in the Trumpian mode. For instance, now that it is past October 1st el Trumperino has presumably filed last year's taxes and they certainly are not being audited, so maybe point out that there is a very precise way in which his statements/lies about personal impact could be tested...
The last couple of years the loan interest deduction has been almost my entire refund since I have the withholding at almost exactly the rate I'm taxed. One year it probably made the difference between needing to put a bunch of stuff I never put on credit on the credit card and then carrying a balance for a while and not doing that. It's not a huge absolute number but I think a lot of people who claim it probably do really notice it.
I forgot that it is above the line for the standard deduction, so it is probably more noticeable than most deductions.
6/12: Yes, I am horrified at the loss of waivers for grad students, because it would make science grad school unaffordable rather than free with a small salary. However, MH is pretty much right that it is an issue that wouldn't be popular. Not that many people go to grad school and many of them don't understand waivers for those that do. Furthermore, some who do understand waivers might be in favor of removing it for racist reasons, ie we let in too many Asians and educate them for free and then either they stay and take American jobs or they go home and use their free education to steal Ameeican jobs to overseas.
Do I have the crazy tuned in right?
And thus we can gut a generation of science just like we are gutting a generation of civil servants. Amazing how quickly and easily these things can fall apart.
Anyway, I paid my loans off this year, so after next year,
screw you debtors! I'm going to vote so my taxes benefit people way above my income bracket.
17.1: Yeah, I've seen several grievance-warrior politicians defend it because it would be better if the kids quit navel-gazing in school and took those new economy-boosting coal mine jobs. Or something like that.
And selfishly, I am hoping the mortgage interest deduction survives this round. (I mean, I hope the Rs fail entirely and Ds retake government and everyone gets a pony, but whatever). When we bought our house, I used the mortgage interest decuction (which I generally don't like, but I also am practical and live in the real world) in the calculation of whether it was best to buy or continue to rent. The house wasn't expensive compared to anywhere people actually want to live, but the mortgage interest deduction tipped the scale when I assumed no appreciation in value at all and moving in five years.
I don't think they are talking about removing the deduction on mortgage interest except for houses over $500,000.
18: Congrats! Now you can buy a yacht, right?
19: You are better at this than I am. I forgot the "kids these days" argument. They got theirs, so no one else should. Or they didn't get theirs, so no one else should.
22- Pretty sure it's interest on the portion of a mortgage over $500k. I don't see how they could possibly use property value as the threshold unless there's a big lobbying group from the American Home Appraisers Association pushing for that provision.
When I was in grad school the taxing of waiver thing was floated by the Hastert congress (maybe pushing kids out of school would make them more receptive to the Hasterts of the world). Stipends were small enough that some people would have owed more in taxes than they were actually paid. As far as it being a popular issue, how many people are actually family farmers, yet that is always trotted out as a reason for "death tax" repeal. Find some people like the ones above who would be paying the government for the right to get an education and brand it the "Paul Ryan education tax."
I guess for property tax purposes every home as an assessed value but that's really complicated in some jurisdictions where they don't use full value and have bizarre equalization ratios.
24: Yes, that's correct. But I'm pretty sure it's very hard to get a $500,000 mortgage on a house that's not worth at least very close to $500,000.
Aren't they grandfathering in existing mortgages, and applying the $500k cap only on new mortgages?
I guess for property tax purposes every home as an assessed value but that's really complicated in some jurisdictions where they don't use full value and have bizarre equalization ratios.
There's no practical reason they couldn't use the original value at the time the mortgage was granted. Plenty of mortgage laws I'm familiar with in Europe, including some on tax deductibility, are based on that.
I don't know anything about the current bill and property taxes, but I will re-recommend The Permanent Tax Revolt as a good book on the history of property tax in the US.
I was looking around for an example of what a $500,000 house was around here and I was shocked to see that it is now not nearly as nice as it was the last time I looked (a few years ago) and that the new condos somebody is building near me are going for $600,000. They're built on top of an old mortuary, so obviously haunted, plus right on a busy street.
Once higher ed has been transformed, I look forward to the NSF grant to study the job creation potential of generating new coal by harnessing the power of millions of workers to squeeze really hard.
By that time we may have pinpointed the optimal level of particulates in our air to enhance current health, and can target our coal burning appropriately. All we know now, thanks to the new expertise being brought into the EPA, is that our current levels and future targets are so low as to be actively harmful to human health.
To what extent could PhD programs in the US just stop charging tuition? I had assumed that all the programs that don't give tuition waivers to everyone they admit are basically not worth attending - is this wrong? Is the main issue foreign students, or programs that rely on grant funding (do those have to cover tuition!? Crazy if so...)?
Is there any chance that this would actually lead to a more rational system of graduate education pricing?
Houses worth more than $500,000 are really only for cash investors anyway, not ordinary people. This won't have any effects where you are.
I didn't read every comment, but did anyone take a stab at predicting success, as prompted in the post?
Actually, I just checked and the main deductibility law I was thinking about, in the Netherlands, is based on a value assessed annually by municipalities. Deductibility in the UK, before it was abolished, was based on loan size.
I predict *something* will pass. The exact characteristics of the cluster yet to be determined.
But I assume this language will be in it (or maybe Republican women in Senate will get it out?) :
(e) UNBORN CHILDREN ALLOWED AS ACCOUNT
BENEFICIARIES.--Section 529 (e) is amended by adding at
the end the following new paragraph:
"(6) TREATMENT OF UNBORN CHILDREN.
"(A) IN GENERAL. Nothing shall prevent
an unborn child from being treated as a des-
ignated beneficiary or an individual under this
section.
"(B) UNBORN CHILD.--For purposes of
this paragraph_
"(i) IN GENERAL--The term 'unborn
child' means a child in utero.
"(ii) CHILD IN UTERO.--The term
'child in utero' means a member of the
species homo sapiens, at any stage of dev-
elopment, who is carried in the womb.".
What's to prevent a woman from conceiving, aborting, and deducting every year. Or, saying she miscarried?
34. Here in MA, at least in the Boston metro area, $500K is (with luck) not a converted dog house. The median home price is around there. In many cities and town it is well above that.
26. Banks won't write mortgages these days without a decent-sized down payment. 20% is typical around here. So playing with assessed valuation will run up against all sorts of issues. Towns want their property taxes and redo all the valuations annually (by law). Banks want their collateral accurately priced.
1. Greg Mankiw thinks that if you make pass throughs have a lower rate than individual income taxes people will recast themselves as pass throughs (I think this used to happen back in ancient times, such as the 50s and 60s). No matter how cleverly the law is written, lawyers will grab the loopholes. He of course thinks that corporations, pass throughs, and people should all pay a max of 20%. Make it up with a carbon tax or a VAT. This will happen soon after there is an ice cream stand in the infernal regions.
Get a black woman to say she's going to do 37 on the internet and that language is gone.
people will recast themselves as pass throughs
Do you mean incorporating themselves or eating at Taco Bell?
38: I walk past a bingsha stand like, twice a day.
So,
(1.) What can be done to stop this or modify it?
(2.) What the hell do we have to do to get one of the chambers back?
My employer sent out an e-mail yesterday urging everyone who might be eligible for Public Service Student Loan forgiveness to start the process and employment certification now, saying that the future of the program is uncertain.
36: Barf.
What $500,000 buys in my neighborhood.
It seems to me that the primary beneficiaries of the mortgage interest deduction lean Republican. I don't get this at all.
Banks want their collateral accurately priced.
Not after they make the loan they don't.
38.1: heavy sarcasm on my part. Cheapest house around here currently.
Public Service Student Loan forgiveness
That was the program that was using flimsy technicalities to not forgive loans, including basically lying about whether people were in the right repayment program? Yeah, that one.
45: That's a small house, but it looks really nice. In conclusion, we need a new kitchen.
Greg Mankiw thinks that if you make pass throughs have a lower rate than individual income taxes people will recast themselves as pass throughs (I think this used to happen back in ancient times, such as the 50s and 60s). No matter how cleverly the law is written, lawyers will grab the loopholes.
The whole point is that the tax bill gives preferential treatment to passthroughs, with very weak protections against abuse, which will inevitably lead to more abuse. The law is not cleverly written. On top of that, according to the thing I linked, people exploiting that (and anyone else benefitting from the passthrough arrangements ) may well get to keep their state and local deductions.
43: But (1)they probably make it back in the AMT, and (2) it only affects new mortgages. The maximum they could be affected is a lack of deduction on the interest on $500000 (that is, their initial amount is $1M+) at the 39.6% rate; assuming 4% interest that's less than $20000 less deductible a year, for at most $7920 additional income tax. The lack of the AMT could make other deductions much, much more powerful (like dear leader's).
FWIW despite not being able to deduct state/local taxes, I save money under this plan--a few thousand, solely due to removing the AMT.
Over 40 comments, and I'm going to claim this is on topic: tomorrow Pennsylvania has a referendum on a tax-related constitution change. Is this bullshit, or is it bullshit?
Shall the Pennsylvania Constitution be amended to permit the General Assembly to enact legislation authorizing local taxing authorities to exclude from taxation up to 100 percent of the assessed value of each homestead property within a local taxing jurisdiction, rather than limit the exclusion to one-half of the median assessed value of all homestead property, which is the existing law?
I never heard of that. Are they trying to make it easier to give huge abatements?
Presumably they want to make it easier for white-flight suburbs to continue reducing taxes while depending upon the urban core to provide a useful economic base and literally forcing lower-income areas to subsidize their essential services. I'm not bitter.
FWIW we also have a Pittsburgh city referendum on changing the home rule charter to allow city employees to have second jobs as public school coaches or CCAC lecturers. I'm cool with that.
22/24: Sorry, was more imagining there would be folks in a similar situation for whom it tips the scale and I am sympathetic. I don't generally think it's good policy, but it was kind of nice for us. And yeah, there are a lot of places where pretty much owning a residence with two bedrooms costs $500K. It's a move to fuck the coastal elites, no?
It may not hit current homeowners, but it hits the people they're going to sell to. How does this not take 10-20% off the value of all homes $500k and up? And how many people who own those homes (and don't live in DC) vote D?
51: But the white-flight suburbs have their own school districts and municipalities. I think this is more old people (who mostly don't pay any local taxes except property taxes*) trying to avoid any contribution even if they are wealthy. I'm going to vote against it on that ground.
* Because they don't buy as much and because pension income isn't taxed in the local income tax.
54: I think the mere threat of it takes off something from the value of houses that are close to $500,000.
Yeah, the flippers out here are pretty skilled. That one went for $325K earlier this year, and was probably a dump. My more cryptic point was that this would have a disproportionate effect on homebuyers in the "coastal elite" cities who are so loathed by rank-and-file Republicans, and perhaps make it marginally easier for outside investors to scoop up single-family houses. Or no?
Anyway, not even particularly relevant to me in the end. I don't think we're ever going to pull the trigger and buy a house here. It's just too fucking much money for too many years.
Holy shit. I wonder if $250K even covers the improvements?
54: In the worst case scenario, you're exposed to the full $500k difference (meaning the principal of the loan is at least $1M). So let's say $1M with 4% interest rate; that's $719k interest over 30 years, but only $360k is exposed. That's an average of $12k extra taxable income a year, or, at a 39.6% marginal tax rate, $4743. Years early on will be more, years later on will be less.
On the other end, imagine you have a $650k house. You put 20% down so your loan principal is $520k. Only $20k of that is exposed to this; so out of $243750 total interest only $9375 is additionally taxable under this plan. Per year, the average tax increase (again, assuming the highest marginal rate) is $114. Not too bad.
I don't think this will affect houses in the $500-$800k range that much. Houses in the $1-2million range will be the most affected. And again, there will be other savings.
55: See the link. Said suburbs have found ways to offload costs onto the state. Likely they'll find more. I totally believe it's old wealthy people, too. We shouldn't allow municipalities who don't play ball to eliminate one of our few wealth taxes.
59.last: Yes, I saw that link. I think should be stopped put in a much larger fee if they don't have a local police force. But that's still pretty trivial compared to the schools which is why I don't think they can offload the property tax burden to people outside of their municipality to any great extent. They want to offload it to people in their municipality with jobs.
6/12: Yes, I am horrified at the loss of waivers for grad students, because it would make science grad school unaffordable rather than free with a small salary. However, MH is pretty much right that it is an issue that wouldn't be popular. Not that many people go to grad school and many of them don't understand waivers for those that do.
This is true. Hard to overestimate how little idea science grad students have any idea what their tuition is. We figure it's some nominal amount, just like you have to fill out a form twice a year to "enroll" in 12 "credits" of a course called "PhD Research" in order to technically be a "student".
Echo 33
49: I never paid any property taxes* on my now former place in Cleveland because they offered 100% tax abatement for the first 15 years, in a desperate move to get people to live in the city rather the surrounding streetcar suburbs. I got out 2 years before it expired.
Maybe the proposal you quoted is so municipalities can try things like that?
*Except for some trivial amount on the land itself that didn't amount to mote than about $150 per year.
60: I wouldn't say it's trivial. The net real estate tax income of PSD was about $180 million this year. Extrapolate that to the entire state--which will probably be an overestimate--and you get $7.2 billion. That Morning Call article says it costs $600 million for state police to police 2.5 million residents; extrapolated to the entire state, that's $2.8 billion. u
Anyway, we mostly agree. This is just the usual scam of rich people trying to abrogate what they owe to the common good. Balkanized, high wealth municipalities are just a means to that end.
63: I'd love to believe that, but we have a Republican-led legislature. I haven't seen any evidence that the big cities are clamoring for this; if it was, our rah-rah locally-promoting liberal mayor would be all over it.
My point is that if they tried to use "ending all property taxes" to skimp on funding for law enforcement, they would at the same time have to find a huge amount of money to fund the schools and roads. Given the huge number of retired people around, it would certainly be a big tax increase for anybody paying the wage tax.
Tuition waivers work the same for humanities students. I remember explaining to people that yes the stipend wasn't much but when you factor in tuition the funding package was something like 30k/yr above the stipend.
66: I agree that other forms of local taxes will increase. But the expectation is that state income and sales taxes will go up, too. The mechanism to pay the school districts is the Education Stabilization Fund.
That seems complicated, but a state-wide funding mechanism for school districts seems like a great idea in theory. Places like Duquesne and Wilkinsburg have basically been left to die on the vine without a tax base or aid.
School funding in PA and graduate school funding are both things that clearly have lots of room for improvement, but my main concern right now is making sure nothing gets worse.
I'm having some trouble sorting out whether the grad student waiver thing would be:
a) Kinda bad
b) The end of science in America
I don't think you can just set tuition to zero because, for one it's an important way that the university gets more money from grants, and two in-kind payments to employees are taxed at fair market value not at the actual value you charge. Also for state schools the state legislature would throw a fit.
69: Oh, sure. If we make the tax-base equitably statewide, that would be beyond excellent. The Mon Valley could certainly use it. But being a Republican-proposed bill I doubt that it'd be done equitably and I'm sure it's just part of a scheme to privatize benefits (or at least, restrict them to certain municipalities) and socialize costs. (I'm not good at reading these, but if you are, here's the bill.)
71: I'd lean more towards the latter. On the upside, having all scientists be independently wealthy will make it more like the Heroic Age of Science. Next step, steampunk.
The other thing is lots of schools do enroll a set of non-funded students paying full tuition. On the one hand, it would probably be better for the vast majority of these people not to go to graduate school. On the other hand, some of them do need for/benefit from the education even if there is no hope for them to have a career as an academic researcher.
I think corporations would sponsor students' tuition, in the name of objective science.
71: I'd lean more towards the latter. On the upside, having all scientists be independently wealthy will make it more like the Heroic Age of Science.
Getting a humanities PhD if you aren't independently wealthy has been insane behavior for 30 years now, and people still do it. Surely grad programs that fit into the magical incantation "STEM" will be at least as enduring.
Holy shit. I wonder if $250K even covers the improvements?
Based on the bids my brother got to add a bathroom and expand a closet, I'm guessing that would cover one bathroom and maybe two closets.
71: Our best hope is that university administrators are remarkably adept at being shifty and opaque about how the finances work. They might find a way to reclassify things so that tuition is called something else but still gets paid. Of course, that's assuming that they would use their powers for good.
The tuition waiver would also decrease the number of foreign students who want to attend grad school in the US.
I would have been screwed for sure - I think it would work out to over $250 extra expenses/month with my high foreign student tuition waiver.
Couldn't you increase stipends to cover expected tuition tax?
My guess is they keep the cuts, and get rid of most of the tax-raises, and then it doesn't pass.
The tuition waiver would also decrease the number of foreign students who want to attend grad school in the US.
Or ensure that they are all funded by foreign governments.
59
Its the 'worst case' scenario that baffles me. If you have a house that you thought would sell for a $1,000,000, it's now worth more like $900,000. Sure, this hits "coastal elites". But it sure seems to hit a lot of republicans - the kind that usually seem to matter.
It seems great. Why is this happening?
I'm with msw that it seems to hit their suburban strongholds in a weird way. Especially the white-flight "but the schools!" districts with artificially high home prices.
I'm only barely paying attention, because I don't think anything truly complicated is going to pass (and because my congressman will vote for whatever Ryan puts in front of him), but my sense is that the pass through advantage doesn't accrue to people who make their income working at the pass through. People like me, that is, operating as a single member LLC. I've read that either most or all my income will get taxed at my personal rate, while the deal they're cutting is for the Trumps etc whose pass-through income is more passive.
Bob Casey with a tweet thread of lowlights with references of the tax bill.
Now that we have actual bill text for the GOP tax plan, my staff and I spent the weekend going over all 425 pages.Casey emerging as such a consistently vocal opponent of the Admin/Repubs has been a pleasant surprise. More used to his minimalist "at least I'm not Rick Santorum" stance.
What follows are a few lowlights and where to find the explanation in the Joint Committee on Taxation description:
Hrm. Tax Policy Center estimates that with the doubled standard deduction, only 4% of tax filers would take the mortgage interest deduction, as opposed to the current 21%. So maybe the set of people affected is actually quite small? If many of the potential buyers would still fall under the standard deduction, it might be affecting only a small percentage of sales. And I should note that when I redid our household income from last year with my understanding of the GOP plan, it made sense for me and my wife, with our double tech income, to take the standard deduction.
So there's still a donut hole there, somewhere, that will lead to significantly decreased house values, but it's hard to say where it is.
It's also going to hit private university grad students harder. I'm pretty sure my university claims it pays itself something like 60K a year for me to attend, or at least it used to when I was in residency (Now I believe it claims it pays about 20K/year). If I had to pay taxes on that there's no way I could afford to. OTOH, I provide subsidized labor to my university, and they'd have to pay someone more to do my job. Anyways, the whole grad school system would collapse, and universities would probably do so as well.
Part of me is interested to see what's going to happen when we reduce all of our institutions to complete rubble.
Off topic, I feel extremely reassured to know that in America, any male asshole with an anger problem can access as many semi-automatic guns as possible.
Our best hope is that university administrators are remarkably adept at being shifty and opaque about how the finances work.
I have good news on that front, at least.
Huh. Apparently Rand Paul has severe injuries from that anesthesiologist neighbor which may keep him from DC (and from voting on this bill) for some time.
Too bad there's no way to make a joke about "knocked out by an anesthesiologist" joke without becoming part of the problem.
They guy admits coming into Rand Paul's yard and "tackling" Paul. Dude's lawyer:
"It was a regrettable dispute between two neighbors over a matter that most people would regard as trivial."
I sincerely hope this is a case of the HOA decided to go to the mattresses over Paul's siding color or something.
It may not hit current homeowners, but it hits the people they're going to sell to. How does this not take 10-20% off the value of all homes $500k and up?
If you read "10-20% off the value" in the above sentence as "10-20% off the price tag" it ends up being a wash for home purchases - or at least those who buy on credit. They get less value out of the tax deduction, sure, but the loss of that is made up for when they are able to pay a lower price for the house. So it does screw future homeowners, it screws current homeowners who will now need to discount their price.
I mean, assuming a spherical cow, of course....
The teats have to stick out at least a little bit or you can't get milk.
To get more accurate numbers on the mortgage issue, I figured I'd try taking into account time-value-of-money. Assuming 4% interest rate on a 30 year mortgage, a 2.5% discount rate, and the maximum marginal tax bracket, I have a $1 million mortgage leading to a $111,700-equivalent instantaneous cashflow. That is, a rational buyer with such a mortgage would expect the price to be discounted by that much. (Although the _actual_ value to discount the house to would have to take into account all these, too, yuck.) Which is very close to the number msw said--your intuition is a lot better than mine.
So I think either 1) they hope the donor class hasn't figured this out yet, which seems doubtful but not impossible or 2) some combination of the double standard deduction, removing the AMT and the estate tax, and the corporate tax changes still ends up being better for them. It does seem like an odd place to penny pinch, though--but I guess they can't be too obvious about it?
(Although I should note that that $1 million mortgage is on a $1.25 million house, not a $1 million one.)
I think this is implicit in much of the thread and discussion, but to answer 82 and similar, it seems clear that this represents the GOP turning even more barefacedly toward helping the super-wealthy at the expense of everyone else, up to and including the upper-middle class - donors over base. And this shouldn't hurt them with their base, given the latter sees racial grievance as a proxy for the safeguarding of its own material interests.
The teats have to stick out at least a little bit or you can't get milk.
That's why the cow is so round.
I would think the it will hurt them with the upper middle class, who are generally good a math. But they are concentrated in states Trump couldn't win anyway.
No! I'm having a premonition! This is the moment where it becomes clear that the Republican Base is not slack-jawed yokels but morally bankrupt suburbanites. Who never expected to get thrown under the bus like the slack-jawed yokels expect it. It's all coming true!
Re 33, I've seen various bits of commentary that it's not really feasible, due to how it would fuck up things like indirect rates* and might be flat out illegal for public universities that have to keep graduate and undergraduate tuition consistent.
*Another thing the administration is planning to go after, capping them at a much lower percentage (10%!) than some institutions currently have. That would more directly blow up a lot of places.
I think the House already tried to cancel all indirects and the Senate put it back. 10% indirects is the end of medical research at universities.
101: This region, though mysterious in nature, was known to be unattainable to females
http://dune.wikia.com/wiki/Kwisatz_Haderach
93: What I think you are missing is that, due to the massively leveraged nature of new home purchases, even a slight decrease in home prices will massively clobber any recent homeowners who have to sell. If you put 20% down, you are leveraged at 4:1, which means any % increase/decrease in your home value has 5x that impact on your equity. So if home prices go up by 10%, that's a 50% increase in your equity - yeah! That's the basis of house flipping in boom times. But if home prices go down by 10%, that means you just lost half your equity. A 20% decrease would completely wipe out your down payment, which may have taken you years to accumulate.
(Above analysis leaves out the transaction costs of selling, which clobber existing homeowners even more after a small downturn.)
You are the Kwisatz Haderach!
What are we talking about!
I would think the it will hurt them with the upper middle class, who are generally good a math.
But so many of these see themselves as incipient billionaires and evaluate tax policy in that light. (If they evaluate it at all! Plenty, I think, barely even understand progressive taxation, and think more income can be a net loss via going into a higher tax bracket.)
Including my brother. Who understands it when you stop to call him out on it, but then reverts as it serves his purposes to complain about how high his tax bracket is.
I'm only barely paying attention, because I don't think anything truly complicated is going to pass (and because my congressman will vote for whatever Ryan puts in front of him), but my sense is that the pass through advantage doesn't accrue to people who make their income working at the pass through. People like me, that is, operating as a single member LLC. I've read that either most or all my income will get taxed at my personal rate, while the deal they're cutting is for the Trumps etc whose pass-through income is more passive.
Last description I saw, professional services passthroughs are taxed like wages. Everyone else, for non-passive investment, gets 70% as wages and 30% at the lower rate.
10% indirects is the end of medical research at universities.
One would think this would piss off the business community. Pharma loves getting their research subsidized through universities.
Maybe they'll be allowed to market "natural male enhancement" pills without the FDA sending Smiling Bob to prison.
111: I've been thinking about effective strategies to explain it (assuming non-willful ignorance) and I wonder if a matroyshka doll analogy could help. Every rich person has a middle income person inside them, who has a poor person inside them. The poor person money gets taxed at a low rate; next comes the middle income person's money, who is taxed at a higher rate. Only the money left over from them is the rich person's. So rich people get some of their money at poor people rates.
Re: lack of waivers breaking grad school or science, it will just make grad school look more like undergrad. People will take out massive loans to afford tuition and spend a decade or two paying them back on salaries less than medical doctors or lawyers. It will siphon off people who don't want debt or who are from poorer families. Science will go on, but it will have a higher barrier to entry and leave folks with even fewer options for leaving bad jobs, because they have to make loan payments.
Also, ned!!
Two Kentuckians tell me Rand's neighborhood fracas stemmed from a dispute over some sort of planting or flora issue around the properties.
So it appears that Moby's pretty close in 92 with the HOA thing.
Every rich person has a middle income person inside them, who has a poor person inside them. The poor person money gets taxed at a low rate; next comes the middle income person's money, who is taxed at a higher rate. Only the money left over from them is the rich person's. So rich people get some of their money at poor people rates.
I think the analogy should be reversed: it should be that the biggest doll is the poor people doll, and then the increasingly wealthy dolls are hidden inside. It makes it viscerally clear that the most primary chunk of your income is taxed at the lowest level, and identifies all people as equal right off. Then the hidden wealth inside gets taxed at lesser rates, but only that hidden marginal amount of wealth.
That's kind of awesome in a petty, horrible way.
118: Hrm, maybe. But the higher tax brackets are pretty wide, some of them having an upper bound about twice as high as the lower bound. Specifically the 15%, 25% and 33% brackets. (Also of note is how weirdly small the 35% bracket is for single filers. Only a $1700 interval, huh?) But I see your point, most people aren't near the top of their bracket's range. I'll consider it. Ironically, the GOP plan would make this much easier to explain.
Or think of it like an egg, where everyone has the shell of a standard deduction and most of your income is the white and a little bit of yolk, and if you're really rich you might have a chick embryo there too. But you might have two yolks if you're subject to AMT or married earners with equal incomes (the "marriage penalty").
Yes I'm trying to demonstrate why analogies are banned.
121: I'm guessing a floral arrangement spelling out how someone did someone else's wife.
123: By analogizing education to debating?
I'm going to go ahead and predict this doesn't pass. I find it hard to believe Republicans with full control of government would be unable to even pass a tax cut bill, but this seems to be a particularly incompetent crew. The current House bill actually can't pass the Senate because it violates the Byrd Rule; presumably they'll amend it to try to fix that, but they still seem dead-set on keeping in a bunch of stuff that will make doing that extremely difficult. And that's not even accounting for the pushback they're already getting from powerful interest groups whose oxen get gored.
This is sheer ignorance on my part, but I am continually amazed the filibuster is still in existence. Without it, they'd be able to pass anything they had a majority for without worrying about the Byrd rule.
A lot of the time doesn't a majority with less than 60 prefer to keep it because they can say they supported something unpopular overall but that's a litmus test for the base- say, a huge regressive tax bill- but not face the consequences of it actually passing?
Did anyone predict that instead of getting rid of the filibuster, they would embrace the system where every bill has to be revenue-neutral over a period of exactly 120 months but then in year 11 we need a new bill or else apocalypse happens? It's like Congress is the Houston Rockets trying to work within the salary cap. The bill is the bill, and then it also is a bunch of poison pills none of which makes the faintest sense on its own but they balance each other out according to the actuarial prognosis of some eggheads we hired.
Yeah, at the moment I think the balance of probability is against it passing. I know massive wealth is gaining the upper hand over bourgeois wealth, but if they can pass something universally loathed by real estate agents and their army of lobbyists, we'll be in a very different world than I'm familiar with.
A lot of the time doesn't a majority with less than 60 prefer to keep it because they can say they supported something unpopular overall but that's a litmus test for the base- say, a huge regressive tax bill- but not face the consequences of it actually passing?
Yes, I think this is how McConnell and most of his caucus feel. Especially since the House is so crazy these days.
In general, my impression is that both Ryan and McConnell are very good at understanding the formal rules of their institution and coming up with clever ways to game them, and very bad at whipping votes on anything where their caucuses aren't already unanimous. This makes them bad at their jobs, overall.
46: yeah, the crappy servicers piss me off. People working for the ABA also thought they would qualify and were told they would.
I'm currently in it. I'm in IBR, and I work for a 501(c)(3) so I want the program to continue for selfish reasons.
I think McConnell is clear-eyed that if he abolishes the filibuster, next time Democrats are in power they will undo all his work and then some, but if he keeps it around, they will be much more hamstrung while his cause is almost as well served by stasis.
On the property tax issue first mentioned in 49, my wife says dalriata is right that everybody should vote against it and that it is "shady as hell". (I copy my wife's vote on this kind of stuff because I'm lazy a feminist. She also says it will pass and won't actually do anything since to amend the constitution you have to have more than one vote and even after that the legislature has to pass an actual bill.
It's hard to believe that they won't manage to pass something, but also hard to believe that they can pass anything as utterly nuts as the current bill.
On passthroughs, I don't get why nobody is making a huge stink over the fact that passthrough treatment is ALREADY tax-favored. If you prefer to pay taxes at the business level and then only owe personal tax on what you take out in salary or dividends, you can do that right now. People choose passthrough forms because it saves them money to only pay one level of tax, even if the nominal rate is higher.
And yes, I'm so indignant about that one provision that I struggle to get as outraged as I should about the rest of it. Our taxes will go up, and I'd be OK with that if the increased revenue were going to reduce the deficit or strengthen programs, but to give a tax cut to Donald Trump, Apple, et al? Give me a break.
It's remarkable no one has mentioned the actual, though implicit, reasoning behind capping mortgage interest or state / local tax deductions. High tax, high property value urban hellscapes with significant populations (SF, LA, Boston, NYC, Chicago, etc) are overwhelmingly Democratic. So are universities for that matter, hence the tuition wavier provision.
There is zero reason (other than opposition from the handful of GOP reps from red suburbs) for a GOP government to subsidize these areas. This is straight Bannonism.
Did anyone predict that instead of getting rid of the filibuster, they would embrace the system where every bill has to be revenue-neutral over a period of exactly 120 months but then in year 11 we need a new bill or else apocalypse happens?
Wasn't that the Bush tax cuts?
I wonder if the Republicans have decided that obstruction was so successful under Obama, why not try it when in power? If it works, they could have even larger majorities and then get down to doing even more damage later. Just a couple more votes and they'd have the health care repeal, whether they really wanted it or not.
It's hard to believe that they won't manage to pass something, but also hard to believe that they can pass anything as utterly nuts as the current bill.
Yeah, that sounds right. They won't pass the utterly nutters bill that they currently propose, but they will pass something that is almost as crazy, almost as cruelly and stupidly vindictive.
As heebie likes to periodically remind us (thanks, heebie!), Trump's real base is not the rural white working class that is the subject of so many agonistic essays and thinkpieces, it is the suburban UMC homeowners who want a tax break (and who don't mind a bit of race-baiting, if it lowers their tax bill).
(Dearest Brenda, we are now at sea...)
I think I feel more hopeless today than I did last November. Please talk me down from the ledge...
Or think of it like an egg, where everyone has the shell of a standard deduction and most of your income is the white and a little bit of yolk, and if you're really rich you might have a chick embryo there too. But you might have two yolks if you're subject to AMT or married earners with equal incomes (the "marriage penalty").
New I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue game: One Tax Bill To The CBO Score Of Another.
136: See 52/3. Lots of chat upthread about who gets hit hardest, wealthy suburban Trump voters or coastal elites.
The upper middle class in New Jersey is going to be royally screwed by the loss or limitation of the state and local tax deduction. Especially awful for those who live in New Jersey and also pay wage taxes in New York City or Philadelphia (clears throat and subtly points to himself . . .) . Since those folks are the only significant block of Republicans here, the New Jersey house delegation will either reduce the "aye" votes by five, or in 2018 reduce the number of Republicans by around five.
Straight Bannonism hates those Republicans at least as much as it hates liberals.
I think Republicans are in a weird place where they need to fail in order to have any hope of succeeding at the polls. They absolutely had to try to repeal Obamacare, but God help them if they had succeeded. They have to try to pass tax cuts for the richest -- and that should certainly be easier to do -- but it's really unpopular policy.
If they got rid of the filibuster, they'd have to start doing stuff. And then, even white people might start noticing what's going on.
But I'm most interested in the loss of the adoption tax credit. The adoption agency pushed this one for obvious reasons.
So we decided to do it right, get receipts for everything for the month we were traveling for adoption. Learned how to request receipts in the local languages. Discovered that receipts are not a big part of the retail culture in that region. Gradually accumulated receipts in three currencies and four languages.
By the end of the trip receipts were scattered among official documents, money belts, suitcase pockets, pants pockets, and various diaper bags. We found a few in a suitcase a decade later.
At tax time I hunt down the historical dollar/euro and dollar/tenge exchange rates, uncrumple and add everything up.
At which point I discover that the tax credit is capped at a level less than the single receipt from the adoption agency. And then it turned out that the credit was means tested at a level that we did't qualify for at all.
I joined the baby that night for a good cry.
My prediction is that they abandon the idea of making the tax cuts revenue-neutral and just settle for blowing a ten trillion dollar hole in the budget over ten years.
I don't understand how that tax credit works, but I'm watching to see what religious conservatives do and because it looks like a very obvious line of political attack.
Personally, if I want another baby, I'm going to get it the old fashioned way, by spinning straw into gold for a woman who will be killed if she can't do that.
Kind of on topic: I enjoy that the Secretary of Commerce was a Wilbur who served as his own spider writing "Some Billionaire" by his name on the Forbes list right up until he had to answer questions about his assets under oath.
Since this seems to be the most nearly active general politics thread, in the "I hate everything and everyone" genera I highly recommend this Katra Pollitt piece "Year One: My Anger Management". Of course not a useful guide for anything other than providing a lot of self-recognition.
For months after the election, I could hardly read, except for books about Roman history, which turns out to be full of Trumps: fantastically rich sociopaths obsessed with crushing their enemies.
...
But the main difference is that I hate people now.
...
I especially hate everyone who thought that electing a reactionary monster would be okay because it would--or could, or might, who can tell?--bring on the revolution. Looking at you, Susan Sarandon and Slavoj Zizek! You are idiots and my heart seethes with wrath against you.
And of course, I hate myself, too. That's how hate works
...
Our minds have been hijacked and colonized by a ridiculous con artist and reality TV showman, and we are of no real use to anyone anymore.
I decree two more years of hatred!
The turn of phrase in 149 is the best.
I am pretty impressed to see all you people actually talking about a current policy issue. The flood of crazy news has felt so fast and furious* today that I am genuinely overwhelmed, like, I can not even parse one wtf story before the next one pops up, nor decide which things amidst the shitstream I could reasonably feel dread/outrage/interest about. I'm just flicking through my twitter timeline going, "dude."
Per the other thread, maybe that's why I come here for political comment. It's the good role models.
*you're welcome to use this as a straight line for a joke about one of those movies, but I won't get it.
Today has just been utter insanity. It's the deadline to release the 58 Brexit reports...but maybe the big secret is that they don't really exist! The foreign secretary just fingered some poor sod to the Iranian secret police! The equivalent of the USAID Administrator is running a private foreign policy with Israel and a buncha lobbyists! Oh yes, and the whole Trump/Russia ball of wax just rolled into town!
I am pretty impressed to see all you people actually talking about a current policy issue.
On the internet, no one can hear you screaming into the pillow.
Speaking of Toomey (my comment in the segregated thread) here's what is BFFS Club for Growth had to say about the tax plan:
A prominent conservative group, the Club for Growth, criticized the House bill on Tuesday for what it called "four serious shortcomings," including maintaining the existing top tax rate on millionaires and phasing out the estate tax instead of repealing it immediately.
The grievance it is strong in these ones.
157: What's amazing is that they can safely expect Republicans to take such grievances seriously.
|| Its as if $300 million in digital pogs screamed out in agony, and then vanished. |>
159: Calling your digital cryptocurrency "ether" really seems to be asking for it.
If I send that to my bitcoin-lovin' brother, will he have an eye-rollingly obvious reply as to why that couldn't happen to bitcoin?
I assume he prints out hard copies of his bitcoins.
Well, the bitcoin blockchain isn't really capable enough to have this particular category of flaw. Bitcoin's eventual implosion is much more likely to be fraud-related than a problem with the tech.
|| Good news! Charges against woman that laughed at Jeff Sessions have been dropped.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/07/politics/sessions-protester-fairooz-case-dropped/index.html
||
So is this the election thread? Here's Nate Cohn's estimator of the Virginia vote, which, if you are like me, will trigger your PTSD from the presidential election.
But if memory serves, Cohn figured out very quickly how that election was going. Going in, he's calling it an even race, which I think bodes ill for Northam.
Gillespie is obviously going to win. Weaponized racism is going to dominate American politics until the demographics shift, and probably past then.
166.2 seems unnecessarily bleak to me.
166.1 strikes me as roughly the correct amount of bleak.
I will never be out-bleaked again. We will all be dead by Wednesday.
Oddly, though what do I know, CNN put its exit poll results by demographic but not with any top line. But it does seem to show Northam up, because it gives him 45% among men, 59% among women.
I am basically prepared for bleakness, but FiveThirtyEight has me optimistic so far. One of the least reported-on aspects of Ed Gillespie's negatives is the fact that he has a very weird chin.
164: That is really good to hear. Thanks!
If you're joking, I'll lower your house.
I see that the Republican candidate for Lt. Gov. is doing a bit better than Gillespie. This makes me a bit nervous because she was quicker to embrace Trump. But at least she has a decent chin.
I think looking like a weasel probably does cost about 30,000 votes.
Amazing and a bit disorienting to have some good news for once.
Over-under on whether the Deep State can convince Trump that it's a bad idea to nuke North Korea while he's in Seoul?
I was briefly considering whether it would be worth starting a war on the Korean peninsula while Trump is in town. I consulted my Bible, which had this to say:
For what shall it profit a man if he should gain the whole world but lose his Seoul?
Mobes is going to cut you for that. Or at least lower Heebie's house.
Hey Mobes and other Pennamites, that stupid constitutional amendment they tried to sneak by in an off-year lost. I'm ecstatic.
Wait. Those most be county results only. Disregard, I'm a moron, probably. Never mind, it probably passed, then. Sigh.
Hooray for Ward 8! Congratulations Andrea Jenkins!
187: yeah, up by a decent amount...Yes: 546,585 No: 454,031.
71% in (and big urbans in already, looks like a few big Philly suburban are out--they are crushing for yes.)
Thanks for harshing the buzz.
But, fuck that shit; we fucked the shitfuckers pretty good tonight. And pathetic loserman Trump uses his first 280:
Ed Gillespie worked hard but did not embrace me or what I stand for. Don't forget, Republicans won 4 out of 4 House seats, and with the economy doing record numbers, we will continue to win, even bigger than before!
Fox news echoing... "an establishment Republican" etc.
I was pleased to see many affluent South and North Hills suburban wards go no. Oh well.
I had my wife write me in for the entirely uncontested Judge and Inspector of Elections positions in my precinct, which should put me above the yahoos who couldn't even rope their spouses into voting for them.
Medicaid expansion winning big in Maine, and Va House of Delegates close to even--had been 66-34 R thanks to Gerry Mander.
193.2: But behind everybody with adult children.
Hopefully, this was a good shot across the bow re: Tax Reform.
I'm all about the on-topicness.
191: Oops got the vote polarity of the Philly 'burbs wrong. Still not going to save it. Down almost 10 with 85% in
Apparently there was a House seat picked up tonight.
Glenn Greenwald media choice tonight: Go on Tucker Carlson show on Fox to pile on the Brazille/DNC dustup.
I didn't even know a House seat in Georgia was on the ballot.
You know, 54% to 45% (the Virginia result) is really a pretty big margin.
292: I think those were Georgia State House seats.
I think only House seat was Utah: Jason "Weaselfucker" Chaffetz's former seat. Held for Rs.
Then I was really good at not paying attention.
Sorry. You can lower my house, if you can dig through solid rock.
Looks like our mayor will be re-elected, which is good.
199: Despite whatever good he's done, Glenn Greenwald's a shitnozzle.
Yglesias says Gillespie lost because of those meddling kids.
Guys. Commenting to share great joy and give thanks to the metal gods.
It's ok to like commenters, Robert. We'll love you, no matter who you like. You don't have to think of a reason every time.
Are the commenters civil rights heroes OF METAL?
208 The poetic justice was so hard it was METAL JUSTICE!
212: If you don't get to know them, you'll never find out.
So, so glad to see an end to the era of Chris Christie. Yesterday, he was still governor of NJ (but with an approval level of only about 14 percent, which is an impressive disapproval level, I guess). Today, he's just another mook from New Jersey.
He bowed out on a typically high note, of course, with some verbal abuse and high-school bullying of an NJ voter.
Christie should be told to get his shinebox wherever he goes.
Is that tunnel plan Christie killed permanently dead or could it be brought back? If it's brought back, could it be named after him out of spite?
218: Not permanently dead, I hope, and I think the tunnel plan might be brought back to life under different leadership.
But millions upon millions of dollars (maybe $600 million? it's not easy to get firm figures...) had already been spent, before Christie decided to sacrifice the transportation needs of millions of residents of NJ and NYC on the altar of his stupid, misguided, and fantastical presidential ambitions. Because that's how "fiscal responsibility" works, GOP-style.
Are the commenters civil rights heroes OF METAL?
My mind is now stuck on a slideshow of images provisionally entitled "If The Leaders Of The Civil Rights Movement Had Also Been In A Metal Band". Martin Luther King, oddly, is proving less incongruous in that setting than Malcolm X, when you'd have thought it would be the other way round.
Results looking fairly good all round. I'm pleased about Roem, but Hurst makes me even happier.
220. Malcolm X always looked pretty clean-cut, but the eyes, the eyes. Metal as all get out.
Everybody from Omaha is secretly metal.
222 Fuck that, Malcolm was punk.
The biggest loss of the night was on the prescription drug bill in Ohio, which got clobbered. But as best as I can tell, otherwise the Dems/libs ran the table.
I suppose it's still possible that they may not pick up the Virginia legislature, but that wasn't supposed to happen anyway.
(looks it up) OMG, our own local horrible person Michael Weinstein took his terrible-policy, confusingly "liberal" but actually crap drug policy act on the road and after losing on Prop 61 in California tried to get the exact same thing done in Ohio. Who knew. Nice work Ohio, you probably don't even get "Syphillis Tsunamai" billboards to go along with having to deal with this guy and aren't used to your evil characters bizarrely running mismanaged AIDS charities.
Don't let that one spoil a rarely excellent night.
If there were "Syphilis Tsunami" billboards in Ohio, I would drive to see them.
Is THAT was syphilis tsunami was all about??? I was baffled. And no, Ohio hasn't been hit with that.
Oh, not that there's not syphilis! Just not billboards.
Honestly, I don't know which is worse.
Even though Ohio has the Rubber Capital of America, people still don't take care.
I've seen billboards in Ohio. And Lord knows I've seen syphillis there.
SYPHILIS IS DEFINITELY WORSE.
226: What was the deal with that? It just didn't make any sense. I voted against it.
A gentleman in the streets, a vector in the sheets.
My mind is now stuck on a slideshow of images provisionally entitled "If The Leaders Of The Civil Rights Movement Had Also Been In A Metal Band". Martin Luther King, oddly, is proving less incongruous in that setting than Malcolm X, when you'd have thought it would be the other way round.
Bayard Rustin was a regular performer at Greenwich Village nightclubs, making him the 1940s equivalent of a metal band.
I'm so confused by Glenn Greenwald. Wasn't he held up as a real great investigative journalist by us on this very blog prior to wikileaks? Do I have his descent right?
Don't let that one spoil a rarely excellent night.
Cool! I wondered why it got beaten so badly.
So what should I be bummed about? Is the independent who won as Syracuse mayor a problem?
I don't know what to do with myself if I can't find any bad news.
240: Certainly I held him up that way. He was a genuine contributor. Hell, I was even onboard during the early libertarian-curious phase, where he suggested that people like Rand Paul might be useful in some narrow ways.
I'd still argue that the guy legitimately earned his Pullitzer.
Back to the tax bill, more unbelievable bullshit:
the tax bill also allows the beneficiaries of estates to not pay capital gains taxes on the increase in value of assets held by the estate
No estate tax, but they kept the basis step-up.
240: THIS IS WHAT I'VE BEEN SAYING! Like, I'm really curious what happened, if there's any more to the story than just some kind of random onset of assholism.
I'm trying to find a recording of Roem's band, Cab Ride Home, where I can actually understand her, but I've been unable to. People who record metal shows live and post them onto Youtube apparently don't care about video quality.
241: PA state-wide elections came out as fairly friendly to the Republicans. My guess is that it's because it's an off-year, and despite the anti-Trump wave, not having any non-judicial candidates made it really hard to get people excited. We had ~25% turnout in Allegheny County. Then again, local elections were nice and liberal, and both of the DSA supported candidates won.
243: It's really cool. It means a family could never pay taxes on very valuable capital gains, and live off resulting dividends (which they would pay taxes on) forever. Fuck. That. Shit. If they're going to work so hard to make a rentier aristocracy they might as well legalize ennoblement.
I think he had one specific issue -- surveillance, roughly -- where his beliefs were in line with our kind of lefty. And that was a huge, hot issue in the Bush years, and that's when he got famous, so we all loved him. But he never had any public presence as a good guy on any other issue, people just extrapolated that he must be generally good because he was good on that one issue.
This turned out not to be the case.
244: Well, if wiki is trustworthy, this is him in 2006:
This extremism is neither conservative nor liberal in nature, but is instead driven by theories of unlimited presidential powerSo the both-sidesism has been coming for some time.
I guess never paying taxes on the capital gains is guaranteed regardless--what the basis step-up minus estate tax lets them do is arguably more insidious: suppose I buy stock for X, and my heir inherits it at 3X. They pay no tax on receiving it. They sell it a week later, but normal fluctuation brings it down to, say, 2.95X. This registers as a loss of 0.05X for tax reasons, letting them deduct other taxes. Did I understand that correctly? Jesus fucking christ.
he never had any public presence as a good guy on any other issue
His anti-torture crusade, and punishment of the NYTimes and other outlets for not using the word were what made me like him. Not that I'm disagreeing with your premise more generally.
I find the way he's blowing off the significance of all the Russia stuff to be really perplexing.
My theory is that Glenn Greenwald and Donna Brazile have been compromised by the Russians.
The completely implausible parts of Donna Brazile's story are her heroic attempts to sneak by her Russian keepers indications that she's not sincere.
The first words of each chapter form a cry for help.
Also presumably if their inheritance includes things which have to be valued by an expert's opinion (not stocks) the valuer will be tipped the wink to value high so that the step up gives them a great base cost for any future disposal.
I wonder if regular appearances on Fox News are part of the story. It's presumably worth a good deal of steady money to be a putative liberal or at least non-Republican who can reliably be called on to slam Democrats. (Not necessarily conscious on his part; not necessarily not.)
On Donna Brazile, I'm beginning to wonder whether her goal is to destroy any possibility of Hillary Clinton running again in 2020.
248- Maybe we'll see elderly rich people playing the market by offing themselves at a financially advantageous bubble. Incentives, after all. "Today in stocks, the market continued a three week rally and two more 90 year old billionaires suffocated themselves ahead of an expected market correction."
255: Greenwald would actually be a great get for Fox if he were turned; his mongoose-like tenacity against an adversary would always be great tv of exactly the sort they peddle. Maybe it's as simple as that.
I think he had one specific issue -- surveillance, roughly -- where his beliefs were in line with our kind of lefty. And that was a huge, hot issue in the Bush years, and that's when he got famous, so we all loved him.
Yeah. It's worth remembering that the political landscape has really changed a lot in the past ten years or so, especially in terms of which issues are most salient, and the coalitions have correspondingly changed too. National security and civil liberties were huge areas of focus during the Bush years in a way that allowed for a much closer alliance between left-leaning and libertarian-leaning types who both cared a lot about preserving civil liberties than would be natural now that other issues on which those groups are more divided. So someone like Greenwald may not even have changed much personally while the issue landscape changed around him.
Odds are going up that if anything passes, it will just be $1.5 trillion sprinkled over as much of the electorate as they can manage. If the Senate produces a bill that fully repeals the state and local tax deduction and is maybe a bit less egregiously slanted to the tippy-top of the income distribution, it's going to be hard to reconcile with the mess the House is producing. Then they'll be really desperate to just pass something they can call a tax bill, and "cuts for everyone" would make a certain amount of sense, but probably there's nobody who can herd the cats to make it happen.
$500,000 Bay Area homes are becoming an endangered species
Maybe we'll see elderly rich people playing the market by offing themselves at a financially advantageous bubble.
Or, more likely, being murdered by their heirs.
Any policy that produces more Golden Age mystery stories is a good policy for me. I have my traumatic nightmares, monocle and evening dress on standby.
That could really use the old Balliol Oxford comma.
Any policy that produces more Golden Age mystery stories is a good policy for me. I have my traumatic nightmares, monocle and evening dress on standby.
Compromise amendment - bring back tontines!
Kids today aren't even afraid of being murdered by being trapped in a bell tower during a ringing. I blame smart phones.
267: It was the BBC Radio version that did it for me. I'll bet we could find it as a podcast. Not sure about YouTube video, though.
My monocle is traumatic. My evening dress is not. So I suppose I should have said "I have my traumatic nightmares and monocle and my evening dress on standby".
266: If we don't have any more unfoggeDCons, we should at least have an unfoggedtontine.
Kids today aren't even afraid of being murdered by being trapped in a bell tower during a ringing.
Spoilers, old chap.
268: I did not know that existed. I'll have to try to find it.
268: the BBC rebroadcast it last year. It's not on iplayer any more though you can buy it on CD.
|| Things are all a bit grim these days. Can we have a Culture novels reading group? Or some other cheerful but non-lightweight subject matter.
|>
Nearly unfounded pee-tape speculation isn't cheering enough?
274 I've never read them and they've been on my list forever so I would LOVE a Culture novels reading group. Which one would we start with? Also I'll need time to get my hands on a copy if my library doesn't have it in.
274: YES! I've never read any but I'm having ankle surgery at the end of the month and non-grim sounds like a good idea.
275 The pee tape is real. You can take it to the bank.
274: I'm up for it. I hardly ever reread novels but I'd be up for doing that. I think I've read them all except his short story collection, which I've been avoiding because I don't want to run out of IMB.
My favorite was Use of Weapons, but it's gimmicky and I'm curious if that holds up on second reading. The canonical first reads are Consider Phlebas or Player of Games, each with their own virtues. We could also read the Culture-like The Algebraist, which is technically self-contained (although the "mathematical" mystery macguffin it resolves around is transparently obvious if you know the least amount of physics).
My bank is really cagey about accepting urine.
Culture novels: there are eight of them, plus a couple of short stories, so I think we either limit the number under discussion (perhaps to the first three, "Consider Phlebas", "The Player of Games" and "Use of Weapons", which give lots to be going on with), or we give a few months of warning to allow Thorn, Barry et al to read them all.
Or we could simply pick one and limit ourselves to that, in which case I'd go for "The Player of Games".
Thoughts?
My library has all of the Culture novels you listed. Unfortunately this would require me to break my personal vow never to get a library card...at the library where I work. But I'd do it for this.
By normal standards, I read a lot and quickly. Three would be easy but whatever works for others is fine. Mossy Character is usually in for readalongs, but I don't know if he'll stoop to fiction. Should we ask someone for a front-page post to discuss options or just let ajay boss us around? I'm fine with either.
I'll at least read the Wikipedia plot summaries.
Much as I would like to just boss everyone around, a FPP seems like a good idea...
Why not both?
But I've pinged neb about the FPP because I enjoy harassing him most.
This thread is making my ankle hurt now.
Sorry, Mobes. It's going to be arthroscopic and recovery time should be much faster than I'd feared. Does that help?
Maybe. Anyway, lately the tendons in my foot have been worse than the ones in my ankle.
I'm totally up for Culture. If non-grimness is the goal I think Use of Weapons is out (though I think it's the best and I think it's even better on re-reading). If we choose just one I vote for Consider Phlebas. But I'm up for anything, I've read the lot.
I really wanna read Use of Weapons though.
It is legitimately great, and I want to re-read it too. I'm just saying it's pretty grim. Also hard to discuss without spoilers, so everyone will need to be caught up before we start.
It is grim--but it's grim in a way that's mostly not relevant to why our current situation's bad.
I reserve the right to take that back if North Korea or Saudi Arabia spirals into a larger regional or global war.
The first three are ordered and I should get to them soon, so any timeline works for me.
My favorite Culture novels are Excession and Look To Windward, which I guess puts me in the minority.
Consider Phlebas and Player of Games are both good as well, though.
Excession frustrated me. I also love Look to Windward, but again with the grimness.
I think that the Culture novels are similar enough that people tend to like them in the order that they read them. What makes them so great is the setting of an almost-utopia and the people who don't quite fit into it.
299: I think there's a degree of that. I also find it hard to remember individual characters, beyond a few stand-out protagonists. Many times, the idea of the Culture is what's important.
None of the books are bad; the absolute worst is just a good way to spend a dozen hours.
Excession was one of the weaker ones, I think, but it has an interesting premise. But it's hard premise to work with. Look to Windward was good, too, although it felt more--I dunno, touristy?
I noticed after reading Phlebas (which I read second) that his plots feel, well pardon the phrasing, like a slow-motion train-wreck: most of the time you can see the catastrophe at the climax coming, and you're just waiting for all the pieces to slam together.
Two points on Greenwald:
1- National security and civil liberties were huge areas of focus during the Bush years in a way that allowed for a much closer alliance between left-leaning and libertarian-leaning types who both cared a lot about preserving civil liberties than would be natural now that other issues on which those groups are more divided.
I think this is right, with the caveat that I'd replace "now" with "as of late 2016". Unfortunately, in our nightmare timeline, civil liberties / surveillance / executive overreach are once again rather important.
2- So someone like Greenwald may not even have changed much personally while the issue landscape changed around him.
The thing is, Greenwald wasn't just an observer of all this stuff; he also a real participant. Because of his reporting, he's now a person of interest to the security apparatus; his partner was detained and had his laptop seized while travelling, and I imagine a lot of other stuff has happened that I don't know about. I suspect that, if you were personally involved in the Snowden leaks, you'd probably be treated by the US government in a way that would make it very difficult, psychologically, to avoid developing an extremely oppositional stance towards it -- even if your overall philosophical convictions stayed the same, your affective dispositions would likely shift, and reasonably so. When they really are out to get you, it's hard to avoid getting a bit paranoid.
301.last - But Greenwald isn't in an oppositional role with the goverment. He has become a supporter of the administration orthodoxy to the point of absurdity on Russia: Move along. Nothing to see here. Witch hunt.
I'm pleased to see that with Greenwald my policy of ignoring anyone incapable of making a concise argument once again pays off.
300.last. I think his plots are deliberately that way.
I read "Player of Games" first, then "Use of Weapons" and to my mind, the latter is "more Banks-ish" although they are similar in some ways. "Consider Phlebas" is a middle-of-the road choice, but very good. There's also his short story collection, "State of the Art"; the eponymous story has some interesting culinary tips.
His non-SF novels are actually pretty good, too. Most people know about "The Wasp Factory," but most of the others are readable and sort of, well, comfortable in a bizarre way.