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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Or you don’t work full time because you have other priorities. Or you work up to double time (80 hours per week) in an industry/location that pays federal minimum wage and still make less than that, but can’t pursue other career options for reasons that are your own business (e.g.: you are a migrant worker and any attempt to better your working conditions is met with the full force of the Gestapo). Or you’re one of the other 37 million people in the US living below the poverty level (31200 for a family of four in 2023) for whatever other reason that is more likely to by systemic than personal because, contrary to popular belief, poverty is not something people do if they have other options. Or IDK, you live outside the US in a country where 32k may be a substantial salary. Brother, if you think a person not making 32k is an indication that they are personally deficient, you need to wake up and smell the roses. Odds are, you are much closer to people making less than 32k than you think, both in terms of earnings relative to the 1% and in terms of how many things would have to happen to you before you found yourself in their shoes




  • Combining the two: centrists have bad vibes because they always have an authenticity problem. They position themselves against change, but then happily go where the Overton window takes them (see Biden’s outgoing border bill). They are for nothing except what they think is popular at the moment, which is usually out of date information, and that comes across as fake and focused on accumulating power rather than solving problems. You don’t need to be a policy wonk to see that centrists will say anything to get your vote and do nothing to solve your problems











  • Ah yes, the west. The monolithic political entity that definitely involves nobody who is critical of Donald Trump’s ravings. Trump and his sycophants have no place to criticize thanks to his words and actions. Anybody who gets behind his proposed annexations has no place to criticize. But there’s a lot of daylight between those groups and the entirety of “the west”, both within and without the US. If Brazil or South Africa want to criticize Trump’s annexation threats, their involvement in BRICS wouldn’t invalidate that criticism so long as they are also willing to criticize the threatening words and actions of Jinping and Putin. The world is not (yet) composed of 1984-esque political monoliths, and there is no need to voluntarily give up that heterogeneity in order to silence criticism of aggressive and threatening geopolitics





  • It’s maybe worth pointing out that the analysis covers 10 years and appears to account for $0 in GDP growth (and corresponding tax base growth) dependent on those policies. If I’m reading this correctly (big if to be fair): Assuming the government continues to capture 17.5% of US GDP, Harris’ policies would need to generate roughly 4% GDP growth per year (no small feat, granted) to be net zero relative to absolute debt levels and less than that to be net zero relative to debt as a percentage of GDP. Government expenditure is not like consumer spending because almost every dollar it spends looks less like consumption and more like an investment, and leveraging investments is actually a valid strategy, especially when you have the economic momentum/inertia of a nation state to balance the risks involved with debt, and that is before you even get into fiscal monetary policy