OK this is good. Trump is going after his own SCOTUS cabal.

!!! Did Bezos write this? The comment I posted: Beyond mentioning the “wealthy and well connected” in the second paragraph, his speech doesn’t even mention the powerful (except Cuomo the Scion), much less vilify them. ⬇️⬇️ www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

It makes me crazy that Hax and other “advice” columnists are *always* in the most-read lists at both WP and NYT.

New Wealth Economics post: studying wealth accumulation and distribution, while ignoring 10s of $trillions in capital gains wealth accumulation over decades, is a non-starter. @jarobb.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/wealthec...

“Imperial“ is right. He doesn’t want to be a king, he wants to be an emperor.

The last ten years from the perspective of someone who only receives income for working. Wages +16%. Home prices +95%. Shares of stock +158%. Why we need a universal Common Wealth Dividend, to distributed the unearned property income that we all create together.

Here’s hoping for a serious coattails effect in this year‘s election, and next…

SCOTUS should rule that the 1977 IEEPA is unconstitutionally broad. Good luck with that…

🤦🏻

I’m not a supporter of Democratic Socialists because with only a handful of brief exceptions, every self-proclaimed socialist government has been or is a single-party state. And that’s directly at odds with democracy. Social Democracy, count me in, with bells on!

A new poll finds 79% of Americans say the Citizens United decision was wrong—and that unlimited campaign spending makes our democracy weaker. The numbers show a deep backlash against a system where political power is tied to wealth. Via @levernews.com https://bit.ly/4qCMPWc

The whole damn point of the welfare state is to deliver income to the 50% who Don't Work: mostly children, elderly, caregivers (~3% are "unemployed") Do they have sufficient "merit" that they "deserve" a decent, comfortable, secure life w/o a working adult supporting them?

Boy, North Carolina Republicans sure don't want the attached story to circulate. I sure hope that this stupid threat from their spokesperson doesn't boomerang on them and have a lot more people read and share the story, which once again, is conveniently attached below. That would be a shame.

“His administration has all but shuttered the department’s Public Integrity Section, an elite crime-fighting unit created after Watergate to investigate and prosecute corrupt public officials. Its force has been reduced from more than 30 prosecutors to two.” www.nytimes.com/2025/10/30/o...

Best Halloween book you've never heard of: David Mitchell's Slade House. www.goodreads.com/book/show/40...

"Economics has an elitism problem." Ya think? (HHI = Herfindahl-Hirschman Index value, commonly used to measure industries' concentration of firms, for example.) hanzhezhang.github.io/research/240...

It’s like Trump is dead-set on laying claim to the term “trumped up” to burnish his legacy. ‘I’ll show you trumped-up!’ (All the way back into Old French, tromper means to deceive, dupe, trick, fool, or mislead, or in the reflexive form, to be mistaken. English “trumped up” emerged in the 1600s.)

it’s getting increasingly scary to criticize TrumpCo/Maga here or anywhere. How long until they get down to going after nobodies like me?

This strikes me as a really big deal. While I have immense admiration for aspects of America and especially its founding, I don’t feel that I can claim any credit much less pride simply for having been born here… That would be groundlessly self-congratulatory, so v distasteful to me.

On the emotional burden and depression that an oppressive regime imposes on a people: In Q1, the first published edition of Hamlet (it’s a badly degraded text), Hamlet includes an item in the "To be..." speech that might make life not worth living. Not in the Second Quarto or First Folio editions.

Trump doesn’t want to be a king. He wants to be an emperor.

How much of households’ total property income is *not* from "yield" — which is the NIPAs' measure of property income. How much of of HHs' property income, total return on assets, comes instead from capital/holding gains accrued and accumulated over lifetimes? Curious, just pulled this graph.

lol no this is not The Onion.

Since Barack Obama, Democratic presidential candidates and "dark money" groups have raised more money than Republicans--often doubling them. So much of the Dem money is wasted. Publishing a piece on this Sunday explaining these graphs and much more. I need your help to make the piece viral. Thanks!

This sounds for all the world like a video clip from Justin Wolfers. @justinwolfers.bsky.social

If you burn down a house and rebuild it, it increases GDP! FTW. (I can’t vouch for this data so TIFIW.)

Our country is not just engaged in extrajudicial murders abroad, our government is actively bragging about it. That’s a sea change.

“Take America Back”? To say, 1942? Here's what you were hearing on the radio, @ 0:34. And here's how that's going. www.radioechoes.com?dl_date=1942...

Wait you mean "expansionary austerity" isn’t…expansionary? Whodathunkit? www.imf.org/external/pub... (Takeaway: Cyclically Adjust Primary Balance is a pretty artificial and methodologically dicey constructed measure...) Hat tip Matthew Klein. theovershoot.co/p/the-latest...

Why Europe's GDP/capita growth has been low for decades: "a VAT, standing alone, seems to be inherently and irreparably regressive" Even despite various back-flips to make it *somewhat* more progressive. Concentrates wealth, which reduces spending. scholarship.law.ufl.edu/cgi/viewcont... p. 420

This administration’s level of amateurish incompetence is just mind-boggling.

What exactly do you mean by "income"? Brittanica sez... www.britannica.com/money/income...

ooh well done

Slipstream fiction is the great modern genre.

The #1 job of police officers is to be the sober, peaceful adult in the room. Inflaming and escalating peaceful situations into violent conflicts is the very antithesis of that.

“Money is like manure. You have to spread it around or it smells.” People have known this at least since Francis Bacon in the 1620s. barrypopik.com/blog/money_i...

The Wealth Pump is a firehose. Trickle-down is…exactly as described. peterturchin.substack.com/p/the-struct... It's not about "the billionaires." It's about a system and machine that constantly funnels wealth into ever-fewer hands.

stole this from @ivanthek.bsky.social

First fire of the season…

Random graph FYI: from the ’50s to the ’80s, US private investment spending grew as a share of GDP. Then came Reaganomics.

Darned interesting, this. If the crux of "populism" is "dividing society into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups—'the pure people' and 'the corrupt elite'"—the least populist ideology worldwide is center-left. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

The Montana Plan is a super interesting approach to gutting Citizens United. Think it's got any legs? transparentelection.org

Remember bumper stickers? Here’s one I created shortly after the Citizens United decision came down. I’ve sold a handful of them… www.zazzle.com/overturn_cit...

A household with $100K spends all its cash income one year; no "saving." But the asset markets go up, and they have $110K — $10K more "retirement 'savings'". They have more "savings," so did they "save" or didn't they?

Plato on maximum wealth. I just came across this in The Laws, late Plato in which Socrates is absent. A Cretan, a Spartan, and an Athenian discuss what the laws should be for a new colony. This passage by the Athenian raised my eyebrows. www.gutenberg.org/files/1750/1...

Sorry, took a while to look up original poster, she deserves the credit for the video

The protests are on one block. Nothing is burning down. His justification for sending in troops is all based on lies.

Inflation has been and increasingly is controlled by extreme concentration of wealth and income into ever-fewer hands. The arithmetic of this mechanism is really easy to understand. The top 20%++ just sits on their wealth, doesn't turn it over in spending. 1/

The fundamental American conflict, embodied in the compromise document that is the US Constitution, is between those who cherish and champion the "self-evident" truths proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, and those who…don't.