Doom Report (Week 72: Tax Wealth, Not Work)

When I was a kid (which was, admittedly, half a century or so ago), surely one of the most famous newspaper headlines in the world was “Dewey Defeats Truman”.  This is a headline from 1948, which is long before I was born—hell, my mother and father were two and three years old, respectively.  But not only did my parents learn about this headline, but even I did: some 25 years later, the power of the headline was not yet lost.  But now we’re closing in on 80 years later, and we, as a society, have not retained the lesson.

You, dear reader, perhaps do not understand the lesson either, because you most likely have no idea who Dewey is (and you might even be a bit hazy on Truman).  If you need a refresher, Truman was chosen to be FDR’s third vice-president; if Wikipedia is to be believed, he was specifically chosen because FDR’s second vice-president was considered too liberal to be president, and Roosevelt knew he wasn’t long for this world.  So WWI veteran and US Senator from Missouri Truman was chosen to carry on after FDR’s death.  Roosevelt and Truman ran together in ‘44, and Truman served only 82 days as VP before FDR died and passed the torch.  Truman served out the remainder of the term, and, in 1948, he ran under his own ticket.  Meanwhile, the Republicans ran the exact same candidate they had in ‘44: one Thomas A. Dewey, federal prosecuter, District Attorney of Manhattan, and most recently governor of New York.  By all counts, he was quite a good governor, but not popular enough to be a serious challenge for the juggernaut that was FDR, who beat him by 7.5% in the popular vote and over 300 electoral votes.  But Truman was a much tighter race, complicated by inveterate racist Strom Thurmond running under the “States’ Rights Democratic Party” (I suppose the “We Wish We Could Bring Back Slavery Party” was a bit too on-the-nose).  It was a tight race: polls showed Dewey with a strong lead right up to the end of October, and bookies were giving 15:1 odds for anyone foolish enough to bet on Truman.  As election day wound down, Truman went to sleep early, with everyone in his administration already looking for new jobs.  Again according to Wikipedia, when Truman woke up at midnight and flipped on the radio, the news told him that while he was ahead in the popular vote, there was no path to victory in the electoral college.  A lot of people called the election before all the votes were counted, including the Chicago Daily Tribute, which printed their early edition with the fateful headline.  And, not only was the headline famous, but the resulting picture, of newly elected President Truman holding up the newspaper and grinning madly was equally well-known ... once upon a time.

The headline and the picture were—once upon a time—a cautionary tale: a warning against rushing to judgment when it came to elections.  Because votes take time to count: they just do.  And we let ourselves deploy all sorts of electronic machines to help us count the votes faster and then, for some bizarre reason, we decided that paper ballots and hand counting were safer, but we forgot how much slower that was, so here we are demanding our votes be counted in the slowest way possible while simultaneously demanding that count be finished in the timeframe to which we’ve become accustomed.  And, when that doesn’t work (because, how could it?), people start claiming that something must be fake, that someone must be cheating.  Or, hell: maybe they just say those things as a way to delegitimize the election while knowing perfectly well that it’s all bullshit.  Either way, as the folks over at Even More News put it: “Oh Look, They’re Claiming Election Fraud Again.”

If you want a better explanation of why we don’t have the primary reults from California’s primary yet, Elex Michaelson, former local LA anchor who now works for CNN explains it to Brian Tyler Cohen better than I ever could.  Runaway races get called early because however many votes there are left can’t possibly change the outcome; tight races go down to the wire.  That’s just the way it is.  Let’s all chill and wait for the votes to be counted.

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Other things you need to know this week:

• On Thursday’s “Closer Look,” Seth Meyers takes a look at Rubio claiming he’s never seen Trump fall asleep in a meeting—immediately followed by a clip of Trump falling asleep next to Rubio in a meeting—Trump’s truly stunningly bad choice to replace Tulsi Gabbard, and Trump’s weird obsession with reflecting pool size.

• Over on Legal Eagle, Liz Dye talks about the Broadview 6 case ...  which, as it turns out, was insanely bad.

• Strict Scrutiny covers the Shadow Docket decision allowing Alabama to proceed with an unconstitutional map.  I’ve mentioned the rank hypocrisy before, but we’re achieving new heights (really, new lows), and Leah Litman is appropriately outraged.

• Another pretty good Adam Kinzinger day in review on Monday, covering why we should stop believing Trump when he says we’re “really close” to a deal in Iran (although why anyone was believing him in the first place, I have no clue), Trump getting smacked down over his Kennedy Center rename, more tittering over the Freedom 250 debacle, and some uncomfortable facts about how the ATF is no longer going after illegal gun dealers. To be fair, it wasn’t all good: he ends it with what I felt was an irrelevant attack on Jill Biden’s new book.  But everything up to that point was pretty awesome.

• And, because things in the UK are just as awful as they are here, Owen Jones examines whether Nigel Farage will become Britain’s Trump.  I thought the case he laid out was articulate (and sobering).

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For some more positive news from the UK, Garys Economics breaks down the Jeff Bezos interview, including yet another banger metaphor.  You may recall back in week 39 that he compared people whinging about how hard it was to create wealth taxes as somewhat like saying “yeah, I know there’s a hole in the bottom of the Titanic, but it’s really hard to fix a hole in a ship while we’re sailing in it; let’s do something else insetead.”  Which I thought was apt, trenchant, and poetic, all in one.  This time he compares Bezos responding to “why don’t we tax you more?” with “why don’t we just tax working people less?” like so:

This is a bit like you and I go to a restaurant, and you know that I’m, like, loaded because you’ve been reading the Daily Mail, and you are, like, struggling for money.  And you say at the end of the meal, “Hey, listen, you know, how about maybe, you know, you cover this one?”  And I say, “Listen, forget about that.  I’ve got a better idea.  I’m not going to pay for it.  But how about you ... don’t pay for it?”

Which is also kind of brilliant, and points out the idiocy of what Bezos is saying.  He’s just trying to distract you.  “What, you want me to pay more?  Quick! look over here!”

And to top it off, Gary put out another video where he says that some prominent folks in the UK are starting to absorb his ideas, even if only via osmosis.  He talks about an essay from Tony Blair and the responses from Labour by saying this:

So Tony Blair, for those who don’t know, UK Prime Minister from 1997 to 2007, I think, came out and basically said the way to fix the, economy is to, like drink a massive fucking glass of AI and deregulate everything.  Which is great intervention from Tony Blair: thanks for that.

And there are responses from Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, and from Andy Burnham, and from Wes Streeting, who are the most, the 2 best-known candidates for Prime Minister.  And all of these guys came out and said, “Why the hell are you not talking about inequality?”  I want to read a couple of quotes from what Wes Streeting said.  Now, I want to make it clear in all this, I’ve never met Wes Streeting; I’ve never met Andy Burnham; I’ve never met Keir Starmer.  So, I don’t know any of these guys.  But people say that Wes Streeting is on the right of Labour and is not the kind of guy who wants wealth taxes.  But listen to what Wes Streeting, the most unexpected guy, has been saying about the economy in the last week.  Wes Streeting says, “Inequality, rather than being incidental to the crises reshaping Western democracies, is actually their cause.  It is vital to tip the balance of taxation away from work towards wealth.”

So, at least in the UK, Gary’s message of “tax wealth, not work” is finally resonating.  Will we see something similar here in the US soon?  One can only hope.