Doom Report (Week 43: Atlas Shrugged ... Then He Went Ahead and Paid His Damn Taxes)

If there was ever any question that the Democratic Party could take any amount of headway, no matter how huge, and still manage to shoot themselves in the dick, the Democrats in the Senate answered it definitively this week.  Eight Democratic senators (well, 7 plus Independent Angus King) voted to roll over and show their bellies to the Trump regime, which promptly kicked them in the guts.  They gave the Repubs everything they wanted and got nothing in return.  Now, by amazing coincidence, every single one of these 8 senators are either not up for re-election next year or are flat-out retiring.  Totally weird how it just happened to turn out that way.  Meanwhile, supposed minority “leader” Chuck Shumer got to claim that he was totally opposed to the whole thing; he’s also not up for re-election next year, but he likely needs the cover to hold on to his leadership position.  I’m not sure that’s gonna work, but I’ve moved well beyond expecting anything but failure from the majority of the current Dems.

Probably the best evaulation of this debacle was from Even More News’s Tuesday episode, including the assesment that Shumer is either in on it (and therefore lying) or too incompetent to do his job: either way, he needs to get gone.  For a shorter take, Adam Kinzinger opines on whether or not the Democrats caved (spoiler alert: yes.  yes, they did).  If you want to know how I feel about it, as a progressive who is definitely not a Democrat, I think this week’s Armageddon Update sums it up better than I ever could.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Another pretty good week in review from Adam Kinzinger.

• Strict Scrutiny tells us why it won’t mean much if the Supreme Court finally says “no” to Trump on tariffs.

• Some More News examines Trump’s weird meme war, as well as exposing the whole “antifa” ridiculousness.

• On the Daily Show, Josh Johnson examines the depths of Trump’s current fumblings, from 50-year mortgages to $2,000 tariff rebates to attempts to end the affordability crisis by putting his fingers in his ears and yelling “LA LA LA!” at the top of his lungs.

• In another brilliant “In My Opinion” appearnace on The Daily Show, Nick Offerman explains how Trump hates farmers.  Offerman is quickly emerging as the greatest “In My Opinion” contributor outside Charlamagne tha God (and may even be giving him a run for his money).

• I didn’t much mention the whole Epstein files thing, because I refuse to believe anything will stick to ol’ Teflon Don, but, if you need a decent breakdown, Devon over at Legal Eagle has got you covered.

This week’s bright spot, in my opinion, was Jon Stewart interviewing Lina Khan on The Weekly Show.  Khan, who is one of the smartest people in the progressive movement today, gained fame as Biden’s head of the FTC, and is now going to be part of Mamdani’s transition team.  Always a great interview, she and Jon play off each other well and have some great moments.  The only place I disagreed with Jon was when he was asking about how real the threat that all the billionaires would move out of New York was, and he said this:

... because we all know capital can travel; labor can’t.  It’s one of the advantages capital has, and we saw that with globalization.

Now, this is a super common argument: if you tax rich people, they’ll just leave—it’s the entire plot of Atlas Shrugged.  Of course, the majority of these arguments are coming from the rich people themselves, which makes them a bit suspect.  Gary Stevenson has debunked this fallacy several times; here’s a particularly articulate example:

And this is relevant to the idea of “if you tax them they’ll leave,” because, if you try and tax a working person, like a doctor or a lawyer or a Youtuber, then that person can very often move to Dubai or move to Singapore, and they can do their job in the other country; they can pay tax in the other country, which might be at a lower rate: they can avoid the tax.  If we’re talking about taxing billionaires, billionaires, they don’t make their money from their work: they get their money from owning assets.  And assets means property, assets means land, assets means natural resources, assets means government debt, it means your mortgage, it means businesses that sell to the West.  These guys they own largely property and debt—I think one way to think about it is, if I have an asset, I get a passive income: where does that income come from?  So, if I own British businesses, it comes from British consumers.  If I own British debt, it comes from British mortgagees, people have mortgages.  If I own British government debt, it comes from the British taxpayer.  If I own British property, it comes from British renters—you know, and the same is true all over the West.  So if I own a ton of British assets, and I tried to move to Dubai, I’m still taking an enormous amount of cash flow from British people when they pay that passive income.  So wealth holders can be taxed even if they leave.

To make it more concrete, if you’ve got ten billion dollars, and one billion of that is just in a bank account somewhere, then, sure: you can just leave.  Move from New York to Floria, move to Canada, move to the Caiman Islands, move to Dubai (as Gary suggests).  But, if your one billion dollars is in waterfront property, you can’t really take that with you, now can you?  What if your billion dollars is in the form of the local sports stadium?  What’re you gonna do: pick it up with a crane and put it on a truck and ship it to Florida?  Now, if your billion dollars is in the form of the local sports team, then you could theoretically move the team (to Florida, at least; probably not to Dubai).  But how much is that going to cost you?  As Mamdani famously said about one of the billionaires funding the opposition to his candidacy: “he spent more on trying to keep me from getting elected than I was planning to tax him.”  And you’ll see people do that sometimes.  But, for the most part, if it costs $20 million to stay (the vast majority of proposed wealth taxes are 2%; 2% of one billion is twenty million) and $200 million to move the team (likely a conservative estimate), the billionaire may threaten to move, but they’re not going to do it.  Rich people who routinely spend 10x what they need to just to make a point don’t typically stay rich for long.

But, that nitpick aside, I thought Lina made some excellent points in the interview, and it’s people like her that give me hope that we might be smart enough to come out of this cesspool in the long run.  And, as far as the billionaires all leaving, Jon’s producer Gillian Spear put it this way:

I don’t see it happening.  Like, New York City isn’t cool because you’re here; you’re here because it’s cool.  So I’d like to see you try and leave.

Mic.  Dropped.