Liberals

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said “the modern-day liberal” has proven to be a bigger “impediment” than those he was initially wary of — people like the “bigot in the pickup truck” or “Klansmen” — as part of remarks made in the upcoming documentary Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words.

The documentary, which features Thomas’s reflection on his contentious 1991 Supreme Court confirmation, reportedly features the Supreme Court justice explaining that the “modern-day liberal” has proven to be more of a problem than those he was initially wary of. “I felt as though in my life I had been looking at the wrong people as the people who would be problematic toward me. We were told that, ‘Oh, it’s gonna be the bigot in the pickup truck; it’s gonna be the Klansmen; it’s gonna be the rural sheriff,’” Thomas said, according to ABC News. “But it turned out that through all of that, ultimately the biggest impediment was the modern-day liberal,” he continued. “They were the ones who would discount all those things because they have one issue or because they have the power to caricature you.

T.D. Ameritrade & SCHWAB Merger

I feel bad.  Disappointed for the great T.D. Ameritrade employees who now have to deal with a partner I wanted no part of.    For about 8 years I had a custodial relationship with the Charles Schwab Corporation.  When I terminated that relationship and opened others I couldn't have found a better Custodian for clients assets than T.D. Ameritrade.

I always believed in having multiple custodians.  It served me very well and was one of the smarter things I done during my investment career.    When I shuttered my firm in the first half of 2019 I think I had 5 different custodians.   All had a bell or whistle better than the rest.

It's a sad day for the friends of Chippewa Partners, Native American Advisors, Inc. who worked at T. D. Ameritrade.

I wish all of you well going forward. 

Hipsters on the AMERICAN Military

Listening to the the slacker hipsters opining on military discipline & the chain of command, leveraging the full benefit of their experience with video games, student debt and fetching me lattes to teach me about how it works.

Definition of Inequality

1% Flying Private
10% Flying First Class

50% On Planes in Coach, Trains, Automobiles 39%. Sitting on a Greyhound Bus wondering what the hell happened!

It just doesn't register with some people...............

Some people will never understand that simply shutting-the-fuck-up is a very important communication skill.

Political Truth

The US has a spending problem not a taxing problem. Everyone who is either rich or poor is a parasite gaming the system. The ONLY way to stop this insanity is to have a flat tax that NO ONE can game. It would be the best thing for the middle class as they are the only ones who CAN'T game the existing 80,000 page tax code.

California's HOT MESS of the diarrhea attack!

When I rolled into San Diego in January of 1979 to find my fame and fortune it was a different state, a different city, a different time.

Today, it's time to ban assault buckets.

No doubt another few million sanctuary persons from South and Central America could also help settle things down.

These liberal Democratic politicians are at the front of cultural destruction.  Think about it.  Be honest.  It might be you next.

Where I come from a little common sense goes a long ways.  In California if you are mentally incompetent to stand trial but mentally competent to be released on the street and attack more people instead of being given proper mental health services it is all about the money. 

I wonder why so many stupid brainwashed people still vote the Democratic ticket?   Maybe the only chance of changing their vote is a hot mess on their head. 

USAF Flight Commander. Thank you for your service son.

P.T. Barnum was right.............

AT&T lost "a mind-boggling 1.4 million" subscribers across digital and traditional video in its most recent quarter. 

Funny that this company can't get on the same page with some common sense business practices.   The stooges that run CNN and the top ladder of management that indebted current shareholders of this once great company need to be replaced.

Paul Singer was right.  As time goes along he will be more right.

A day late a dollar short they say.

That's where we sit today.  

Donald Trump

President Trump continues to be unpopular with communists, open border radicals, DC elites, mainstream media hacks and brainwashed liberals.

He has five more years chumps.

Authored by US Army Major Danny Sjursen (ret.)

Patches, pins, medals, and badges are the visible signs of an exclusive military culture, a silent language by which soldiers and officers judge each other’s experiences, accomplishments, and general worth. In July 2001, when I first walked through the gate of the US Military Academy at West Point at the ripe young age of 17, the “combat patch” on one’s right shoulder - evidence of a deployment with a specific unit - had more resonance than colorful medals like Ranger badges reflecting specific skills. Back then, before the 9/11 attacks ushered in a series of revenge wars “on terror,” the vast majority of officers stationed at West Point didn’t boast a right shoulder patch. Those who did were mostly veterans of modest combat in the first Gulf War of 1990–91. Nonetheless, even those officers were regarded by the likes of me as gods. After all, they’d seen “the elephant.”

We young cadets arrived then with far different expectations about Army life and our futures, ones that would prove incompatible with the realities of military service in a post-9/11 world. When my mother—as was mandatory for a 17-year-old—put her signature on my future Army career, I imagined a life of fancy uniforms; tough masculine training; and maybe, at worst, some photo opportunities during a safe, “peace-keeping” deployment in a place like Kosovo.

Sure, the United States was then quietly starving hundreds of thousands of children with a crippling sanctions regime against autocrat Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, occasionally lobbing cruise missiles at “terrorist” encampments here or there, and garrisoning much of the globe. Still, the life of a conventional Army officer in the late 1990s did fit pretty closely with my high-school fantasies.

You won’t be surprised to learn, however, that the world of future officers at the Academy irreparably changed when those towers collapsed in my home town of New York. By the following May, it wasn’t uncommon to overhear senior cadets on the phone with girlfriends or fiancées explaining that they were heading for war upon graduation.

As a plebe (freshman), I still had years ahead in my West Point journey during which our world changed even more. Older cadets I’d known would soon be part of the invasion of Afghanistan. Drinking excessively at a New York Irish bar on St. Patrick’s Day in 2003, I watched in wonder as, on TV, US bombs and missiles rained down on Iraq as part of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s promised “shock and awe” campaign.

Soon enough, the names of former cadets I knew well were being announced over the mess hall loudspeaker at breakfast. They’d been killed in Afghanistan or, more commonly, in Iraq.

My greatest fear then, I’m embarrassed to admit, was that I’d miss the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It wasn’t long after my May 28, 2005, graduation that I’d serve in Baghdad. Later, I would be sent to Kandahar, Afghanistan. I buried eight young men under my direct command. Five died in combat; three took their own lives. After surviving the worst of it with my body (though not my mind) intact, I was offered a teaching position back at my alma mater.

During my few years in the history department at West Point, I taught some 300 or more cadets. It was the best job I ever had.

I think about them often, the ones I’m still in touch with and the majority whom I’ll never hear from or of again. Many graduated last year and are already out there carrying water for empire. The last batch will enter the regular Army next May. Recently, my mother asked me what I thought my former students were now doing or would be doing after graduation. I was taken aback and didn’t quite know how to answer.

Wasting their time and their lives was, I suppose, what I wanted to say. But a more serious analysis, based on a survey of US Army missions in 2019 and bolstered by my communications with peers still in the service, leaves me with an even more disturbing answer. A new generation of West Point educated officers, graduating a decade and a half after me, faces potential tours of duty in… hmm, Afghanistan, Iraq, or other countries involved in the never-ending American war on terror, missions that will not make this country any safer or lead to “victory” of any sort, no matter how defined.

A NEW GENERATION OF CADETS SERVING THE EMPIRE ABROAD

West Point seniors (“first-class cadets”) choose their military specialties and their first duty-station locations in a manner reminiscent of the National Football League draft. This is unique to Academy grads and differs markedly from the more limited choices and options available to the 80 percent of officers commissioned through the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) or Officer Candidate School (OCS).

Throughout the 47-month academy experience, West Pointers are ranked based on a combination of academic grades, physical fitness scores, and military-training evaluations. Then, on a booze-fueled, epic night, the cadets choose jobs in their assigned order of merit. Highly ranked seniors get to pick what are considered the most desirable jobs and duty locations (helicopter pilot, Hawaii). Bottom-feeding cadets choose from the remaining scraps (field artillery, Fort Sill, Oklahoma).

In truth, though, it matters remarkably little which stateside or overseas base one first reports to. Within a year or two, most young lieutenants in today’s Army will serve in any number of diverse “contingency” deployments overseas. Some will indeed be in America’s mostly unsanctioned wars abroad, while others will straddle the line between combat and training in, say, “advise-and-assist” missions in Africa.

Now, here’s the rub: Given the range of missions that my former students are sure to participate in, I can’t help but feel frustration. After all, it should be clear 18 years after the 9/11 attacks that almost none of those missions have a chance in hell of succeeding. Worse yet, the killing my beloved students might take part in (and the possibility of them being maimed or dying) won’t make America any safer or better. They are, in other words, doomed to repeat my own unfulfilling, damaging journey—in some cases, on the very same ground in Iraq and Afghanistan where I fought.

Consider just a quick survey of some of the possible missions that await them. Some will head for Iraq—my first and formative war—though it’s unclear just what they’ll be expected to do there. ISIS has been attritted to a point where indigenous security forces could assumedly handle the ongoing low-intensity fight, though they will undoubtedly assist in that effort. What they can’t do is reform a corrupt, oppressive Shia-chauvinist sectarian government in Baghdad that guns down its own protesting people, repeating the very mistakes that fueled the rise of the Islamic State in the first place. Oh, and the Iraqi government, and a huge chunk of Iraqis as well, don’t want any more American troops in their country. But when has national sovereignty or popular demand stopped Washington before?

Others are sure to join the thousands of servicemen still in Afghanistan in the 19th year of America’s longest ever war—and that’s even if you don’t count our first Afghan War (1979–89) in the mix. And keep in mind that most of the cadets-turned-officers I taught were born in 1998 or thereafter and so were all of three years old or younger when the Twin Towers crumbled.

The first of our wars to come from that nightmare has always been unwinnable. All the Afghan metrics—the US military’s own “measures for success”—continue to trend badly, worse than ever in fact. The futility of the entire endeavor borders on the absurd. It makes me sad to think that my former officemate and fellow West Point history instructor, Mark, is once again over there. Along with just about every serving officer I’ve known, he would laugh if asked whether he could foresee—or even define—“victory” in that country. Take my word for it, after 18-plus years, whatever idealism might once have been in the Army has almost completely evaporated. Resignation is what remains among most of the officer corps. As for me, I’ll be left hoping against hope that someone I know or taught isn’t the last to die in that never-ending war from hell.

My former cadets who ended up in armor (tanks and reconnaissance) or ventured into the Special Forces might now find themselves in Syria—the war President Trump “ended” by withdrawing American troops from that country, until, of course, almost as many of them were more or less instantly sent back in. Some of the armor officers among my students might even have the pleasure of indefinitely guarding that country’s oil fields, which—if the United States takes some of that liquid gold for itself—might just violate international law. But hey, what else is new?

Still more—mostly intelligence officers, logisticians, and special operators—can expect to deploy to any one of the dozen or so West African or Horn of Africa countries that the US military now calls home. In the name of “advising and assisting” the local security forces of often autocratic African regimes, American troops still occasionally, if quietly, die in “non-combat” missions in places like Niger or Somalia.

None of these combat operations have been approved, or even meaningfully debated, by Congress. But in the America of 2019 that doesn’t qualify as a problem. There are, however, problems of a more strategic variety. After all, it’s demonstrably clear that, since the founding of the US military’s Africa Command (AFRICOM) in 2008, violence on the continent has only increased, while Islamist terror and insurgent groups have proliferated in an exponential fashion. To be fair, though, such counter-productivity has been the name of the game in the “war on terror” since it began.

Another group of new academy graduates will spend up to a year in Poland, Romania, or the Baltic states of Eastern Europe. There, they’ll ostensibly train the paltry armies of those relatively new NATO countries—added to the alliance in foolish violation of repeated American promises not to expand eastward as the Cold War ended. In reality, though, they’ll be serving as provocative “signals” to a supposedly expansionist Russia. With the Russian threat wildly exaggerated, just as it was in the Cold War era, the very presence of my Baltic-based former cadets will only heighten tensions between the two over-armed nuclear heavyweights. Such military missions are too big not to be provocative, but too small to survive a real (if essentially unimaginable) war.

The intelligence officers among my cadets might, on the other hand, get the “honor” of helping the Saudi Air Force through intelligence-sharing to doom some Yemeni targets—often civilian—to oblivion thanks to US manufactured munitions. In other words, these young officers could be made complicit in what’s already the worst humanitarian disaster in the world.

Other recent cadets of mine might even have the ignominious distinction of being part of military convoys driving along interstate highways to America’s southern border to emplace what President Trump has termed “beautiful” barbed wire there, while helping detain refugees of wars and disorder that Washington often helped to fuel.

Yet other graduates may already have found themselves in the barren deserts of Saudi Arabia, since Trump has dispatched 3,000 US troops to that country in recent months. There, those young officers can expect to go full mercenary, since the president defended his deployment of those troops (plus two jet fighter squadrons and two batteries of Patriot missiles) by noting that the Saudis would “pay” for “our help.” Setting aside for the moment the fact that basing American troops near the Islamic holy cities of the Arabian Peninsula didn’t exactly end well the last time around—you undoubtedly remember a guy named bin Laden who protested that deployment so violently—the latest troop buildup in Saudi Arabia portends a disastrous future war with Iran.

None of these potential tasks awaiting my former students is even remotely linked to the oath (to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic”) that newly commissioned officers swear on day one. They are instead all unconstitutional, ill-advised distractions that benefit mainly an entrenched national security state and the arms-makers that go with them. The tragedy is that a few of my beloved cadets with whom I once played touch football, who babysat my children, who shed tears of anxiety and fear during private lunches in my office might well sustain injuries that will last a lifetime or die in one of this country’s endless hegemonic wars.

A NIGHTMARE COME TRUE

This May, the last of the freshman cadets I once taught will graduate from the Academy. Commissioned that same afternoon as second lieutenants in the Army, they will head off to “serve” their country (and its imperial ambitions) across the wide expanse of the continental United States and a broader world peppered with American military bases. Given my own tortured path of dissent while in that military (and my relief on leaving it), knowing where they’re heading leaves me with a feeling of melancholy. In a sense, it represents the severing of my last tenuous connection with the institutions to which I dedicated my adult life.

Though I was already skeptical and antiwar, I still imagined that teaching those cadets an alternative, more progressive version of our history would represent a last service to an Army I once unconditionally loved. My romantic hope was that I’d help develop future officers imbued with critical thinking and with the integrity to oppose unjust wars. It was a fantasy that helped me get up each morning, don a uniform, and do my job with competence and enthusiasm.

Nevertheless, as my last semester as an assistant professor of history wound down, I felt a growing sense of dread. Partly it was the realization that I’d soon return to the decidedly unstimulating “real Army,” but it was more than that, too. I loved academia and “my” students, yet I also knew that I couldn’t save them. I knew that they were indeed doomed to take the same path I did.

My last day in front of a class, I skipped the planned lesson and leveled with the young men and women seated before me. We discussed my own once bright, now troubled career and my struggles with my emotional health. We talked about the complexities, horror, and macabre humor of combat and they asked me blunt questions about what they could expect in their future as graduates. Then, in my last few minutes as a teacher, I broke down. I hadn’t planned this, nor could I control it.

My greatest fear, I said, was that their budding young lives might closely track my own journey of disillusionment, emotional trauma, divorce, and moral injury. The thought that they would soon serve in the same pointless, horrifying wars, I told them, made me “want to puke in a trash bin.” The clock struck 1600 (4 pm), class time was up, yet not a single one of those stunned cadets—unsure undoubtedly of what to make of a superior officer’s streaming tears—moved for the door. I assured them that it was okay to leave, hugged each of them as they finally exited, and soon found myself disconcertingly alone. So I erased my chalkboards and also left.

Three years have passed. About 130 students of mine graduated in May. My last group will pin on the gold bars of brand new army officers in late May 2020. I’m still in touch with several former cadets and, long after I did so, students of mine are now driving down the dusty lanes of Iraq or tramping the narrow footpaths of Afghanistan.

My nightmare has come true.

Liberal Life

Trump Enterprises is happy to introduce its latest development the LibFull building located in your head. 

Here you can live next to Donald and Melania rent free for the next 5 years as the building slowly rots from hate and despair.

Life is CHOICE, YOUR choice............

The shit you choose to tell yourself day in day out will either make your life or break it.

Choose wisely.

Leon Cooperman not speaking in forked tongue to Ms. E. Warren

Dear Senator Warren:

While I am not a Twitter user, several friends passed along to me your October tweet in which, after correctly observing that my financial success can be attributed, in no small measure, to the many opportunities which this great country has afforded me, you proceeded to admonish me (as if a parent chiding an ungrateful child) to “pitch in a bit more so everyone else has a chance at the American dream, too.” Our political differences aside, your tweet demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding of who I am, what I stand for, and why I believe so many of your economic policy initiatives are misguided. Because your tweet was publicly disseminated, I feel compelled to respond in the form of an Open Letter for all who are interested to read.

As I have noted elsewhere, mine is a classic American success story. I have been richly rewarded by a life of hard work combined with a great deal of good luck, including that to have been born in a country that adheres to an ethos of upward mobility for determined strivers. My father was a plumber who practiced his trade in the South Bronx after he and my mother emigrated from Poland. I was the first member of my family to earn a college degree. I benefitted from both a good public education system (all the way through college) and my parents’ constant prodding. When I joined Goldman Sachs following graduation from Columbia Business School, I had no money in the bank, a negative net worth, a National Defense Education Act student loan to repay, and a six-month-old baby (not to mention his mother, my wife of now 55 years) to support. I had a successful, near-25 year run at Goldman before leaving to start a private investment firm. As a result of my good fortune, I have been able to donate in philanthropy many times more than I have spent on myself over a lifetime, and I am not finished; I have subscribed to the Buffett/Gates Giving Pledge to ensure that my money, properly stewarded, continues to do some good after I’m gone. As I told Mr. Buffett when I joined the Pledge, asking for half of my money wasn’t enough; I intend to donate substantially all of it, Apart from my children and grandchildren, I cannot imagine a finer legacy.

My story is far from unique. I know many people who are similarly situated, by both humble origin and hard-won accomplishment, whose greatest joy in life is to use their resources to improve their communities. Many of their names — including those of Ken Langone, Carl Icahn and Sandy Weill, all self-made billionaires whom I am proud to call friends — are associated with major hospitals (NYU Langone Health, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Weill Cornell Medical College, and, in my own case, Saint Barnabas Medical Center and Boca Raton Regional Hospital) which tend to the needs of, among others, many thousands of poor patients each year who could not otherwise afford the best-of-class medical services that those fine institutions, with our support and that of others like us, provide.

Having grown up without much money and valuing highly the public education I received, have donated substantial sums to Hunter College of the City University of New York and to Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business —money for scholarships, libraries, and the construction of new buildings. In 2014, with a very large gift, I established Cooperman College Scholars, a program which identifies academically talented, highly motivated students of Strong character in Essex County (including Newark), New Jersey, who are traditionally underrepresented in higher education. children of color, impoverished children, children facing situational challenges that tug them away from educational priorities — and, through a contribution of high-school counseling, tuition grants, and ongoing cohort-based mentoring to help matriculated students navigate the challenges of transitioning successfully to college life — and by eliminating the negative impact of insufficient financial aid and social support systems on student persistence and graduation rates — enables them to attend college, thrive there and graduate. It is our goal to put 500 district and charter public-school students through college in the next few years. As I stated when my gift was announced, for splendid youngsters such as these to be denied access to a higher education, and to all the opportunities that that can afford, simply because of financial need is a national tragedy. My family feels very privileged to be in a position where we can help at least some of these children’s dreams•come true, and in the process fundamentally change their lives.

However much it resonates with your base, your vilification of the rich is misguided, ignoring, among other things, the sources of their wealth and the substantial contributions to society which they already; unprompted by you, make. Typically, unless born to money or married into it, people become rich by providing a product or service that others want and are willing to pay for.

• Ken Langone, Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank founded Home Depot in 1978 with $2 million raised from 40 friends — none of whom were wealthy by your standards (average investment $50,000) — after Bernie (age 49) and Arthur (age 36) had been fired from their previous jobs and — with three children each, no health insurance, no savings, and heavily mortgaged homes — were effectively broke. The rest is history. From nothing, Home Depot has grown into an enterprise with market capitalization of over $250 billion that provides employment to more than 400,000 workers thousands of Whom became millionaires investing in the company’s stock — while the founders have given away in excess of $1 billion in charitable donations (and still counting).
• In 1981, Mike Bloomberg, whose record of public service and philanthropy are legendary, created a machine that changed the way the financial world —a sector that is the source of much of the tax revenues that fuel your legislative priorities — conducts business. Today, Bloomberg L.P. has morphed into a diversified financial-services company that employs 20,000 people.
• In 1998, computer scientists Larry Page and Sergey Brin, while still in graduate school, founded Google, now one of the foremost search engines that power the Internet. Today, Google employs more than 100,000 workers, and Page and Brin have donated billions of dollars each to charitable causes.

The list goes on of self-made billionaires — Bill Gates (Microsoft Corporation 144,000 jobs), Michael Dell (Dell Technologies - 145,000 jobs), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook 39,000 jobs) and Larry Ellison (Oracle Corporation — jobs), among others — who have built huge businesses from the ground up, providing jobs and economic opportunity to hundreds of thousands of taxpaying workers, and voluntarily gift every year, in the aggregate, billions of dollars back to the society that nurtured their success. Their stories, and many more like they are the very embodiment of the American Dream. For you to suggest that capitalism is a dirty word and that these people, as a group, are ingrates who didn’t earn their riches through strenuous effort and (in many cases) paradigm-shifting insights, and now don’t pull their weight societally indicates that you either are grossly uninformed or are knowingly warping the facts for narrow political gain.

Now for your soak-the-rich positions on taxes and economic policy.

The two University of California at Berkeley economists who are advising your campaign, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, have drawn a lot of media attention for their contention that the U.S. federal income tax system is flat, which is to say, regressive and therefore fundamentally unfair to low-income Americans. But their analysis is open to challenge, and the conclusions which they (and you) draw from it are debatable.

• As others have pointed out, Saez and Zucman focus on gross, not net, taxes, ignoring transfer payments (Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits) which are disproportionately paid to the poor and middle class, and whose inclusion in their tax-burden calculations would materially skew the outcome in the opposite direction.
• They include excise and taxes which are by their nature regressive (and therefore overstate the outsized tax burden on low-income Americans) but have nothing to do with federal fiscal policy and tax-code structure — it’s simply how state and local governments have chosen to fund themselves; excluding those and similar taxes from their analysis would again yield a result counter to the economist’s thesis.
• By focusing on current-year rather than lifetime tax burdens, Saez and Zucman understate taxes on the rich (who are taxed both on current year’s income and on future dividends, interest arid capital gains earned on savings) and overstate those on the poor and middle class (since future transfer-payment benefits, which as noted are excluded from the economists’ calculations, comprise an increasing share of their financial resources as they age).

In sum, Saez and Zucman’s economic model appears to be based on highly dubious assumptions and tailored to promote a specific “progressive” policy agenda, and their conclusions are far less definitive and unequivocal than they maintain.

Further undercutting your economists’ fair-share arguments, the Internal Revenue Service recently released data that detail, for tax year 2016 (the latest year for which these data are available), individual federal income tax shares according to income percentile.

• As a percentage of total individual federal income taxes paid, the top 1% of taxpayers paid a greater share of that total (37 than the bottom 90% combined (30.5%).
• As a percentage of taxpayers’ adjusted gross income paid in individual federal income taxes, the top 1% of taxpayers paid an effective tax rate (26.9%) which was more than seven times higher than that of the bottom 50% (3.7%).
• The top 50% of taxpayers paid 97% of all individual federal income taxes; the bottom 50% paid the remaining 3%.

As analyzed by the Tax Foundation, a leading independent tax-policy nonprofit, the data demonstrate “that the US. individual income tax continues to be very progressive, borne primarily by the highest income earners.”

Saez and Zucman surface again in the debate over an explicit, recurring wealth tax (as distinct from property and one-time estate taxes — alternative forms of levy on wealth) targeting the richest Americans, e major plank of your economic platform. As numerous economists (if not yours) have observed, the history and prognosis of explicit wealth taxes is not sanguine.

• In a February 2018 article for the International Monetary Fund, the authors, economists James Brumby and Michael Keen„ noted that “there are now very few effective explicit wealth taxes in either developing or advanced economies; Indeed between 1985 arid 2007, the number of OECD countries with an active wealth tax fell from twelve to just four. And many of those were, and are, of limited effectiveness.”
• At a recent conference sponsored by the Peterson Institute for International Economics; Saez and Zucman debated their advocacy of:a wealth tax with Harvard economists Lawrence Summers (Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary and Barack Obama’s Director of the National Economic Council) and Gregory Mankiw (George W. Bush’s Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers). Your made the case that federal tax revenues should be raised to finance increased expenditures on education, infrastructure and healthcare subsidization but:as Mankiw and Summers argued, whether an explicit wealth tax is the preferred route is at best questionable — plagued by issues of constitutionality, tax avoidance, asset valuation and administrability — and the assumptions underlying Zucman’s analysis are,:as noted, suspect. As Summers put it: “For progressives to use their energy on a proposal that has a more than 50% chance of being struck down by the Supreme Court, little chance of passing through Congress, and whose revenue-raising potential is very much in doubt, is to potentially sacrifice immense opportunities.”

The opportunities to which Summers was referring — opportunities to raise funds for a more progessive legislative agenda that might stand a chance of passing Congress and weathering constitutional scrutiny, and whose revenue-raising potential is unquestionable — could include eliminating the exemption of capital gains from taxation upon death, the carried-interest exemption for private equity and hedge funds, and the capital-gains tax-deferral preference accorded like-kind exchanges under Section 1031 of the Internal Revenue Code.

It may be worth considering that wealth redistribution advocates might be wrong to focus solely on income inequality rather than on income opportunity more broadly. In economics, the most commonly used gauge of economic inequality across a target population is the Gini coefficient (or Gini index), named for the Italian statistician who developed it in 1912. A Gini coefficient of means the country has perfect equality of financial prosperity; a coefficient of one means maximum inequality. The World Bank, in its Gini coefficient-by-country analysis for 2019, ranks a number of countries — including Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Kyrgyzstan, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Ukraine, all with Gini coefficients in the 20s — high on its financial equality list. Yet despite the relatively high degree of financial equality implied by their numbers, none of these countries can boast booming economies or generalized income and wealth-creation opportunities. It would therefore appear that may be more aligned than those of most other countries in the fair distribution of wealth, but that does not translate in any meaningful sense into widespread prosperity. So what good is income equality to them? Should that — the narrowing of income inequality as an end in itself, as opposed to income growth for all — really be our fiscal policy imperative?

And that takes me to my final points — what I do, in fact, believe should be our fiscal policy priorities:

• Rather than adopt an explicit wealth tax whose efficacy has been widely debunked by experience around the world, let’s debate what the maximum individual and corporate: tax rates should be. I believe in a progressive income tax structure. The wealthy should pay more than those of lesser means, but they already do, and at some point, higher effective (federal, state and local combined) rates become confiscatory. That should never be the ethos of this country, I am on record as: having said that I don’t mind working six months of the year for the government and six months for myself, paying an effective combined tax rate of 50% off my income. But many who live in high-tax cities and states pay even more, while some of the nation’s highest earners pay less. A more effective way than a tax to right-size the latter imbalance might be to revisit some form of the Buffett Rule (repeatedly rejected by Congress since it was first proposed in 2012), which would implement a surtax on taxpayers making over a million dollars a year to better ensure that the highest earners pay their fair share.
• Let’s eliminate loopholes in our code that allow so much seepage through the cracks. A good start would be the short-list enumerated several above.
• Before levying more taxes of any stripe, candidates should commit to trying to fund their agendas through revenue-neutral proposals that would cull bureaucratic waste. I have seen too much evidence of governmental profligacy to have much faith in Congress’s ability to spend our tax revenues efficiently Frustrated efforts to privatize the U.S. Postal Service, which loses billions of dollars a year as a government-owned corporation, are a case in point. Social progress does not have to come at the cost of further administrative bloat.

I am a registered Independent who votes the issues and the person, not the party. The fact is, Senator Warren, that despite our philosophical differences, we should be working together to find common ground in this vital conversation — not firing off snarky tweets that stir your base at the expense of accuracy. Let’s elevate the dialogue and find ways to keep this a land of opportunity where hard work, talent and luck are rewarded and everyone gets a fair shot at realizing the American Dream.

Sincerely,
Leon G. Cooperman

Elizabeth LIEWATHA Warren

November 1.    The great Indigenous teacher from Harvard has spoken and it's fiscal destruction.  Only morons would believe her.   Her entire life has been a lie.   

She has put forth her plan to pay for all the HOPE & CHANGE she wants to provide America.  Her plan will put the final nail in the coffin for our nation! 

Her plan will finally collapse the country.

Why? Free isn't free.

Free health care, open borders, free college and "free" money for doing nothing?    GMAFB.   What could go wrong?

If you want to see FREE HEALTHCARE go spend a day in a VA Hospital, a great place to see socialized medicine in the USA.

I haven't heard of such a sweet deal since the US Government provided free blankets to my ancestors laden with smallpox.