A Wealth Tax is Not a Terrible Idea

I would like to write a little bit about a wealth tax; motivated by, but not specifically in the context of, Elizabeth Warren's recently proposed tax on high net wealth individuals. The title might give away a bit of my feelings on the matter, but first, a bit of more general context.

Taxes are a tricky subject, societally speaking. The first-level goal of taxation, of course, is to support the activities of the government: to pay salaries, to pay for services, to pay for defense, etc. However, how taxes are levied, and on what, can also have a fairly substantial impact on the trajectory of a society. Governments frequently use tax policy to encourage or discourage types of behavior, for example, as a short-term leverage point over societal trends. In another facet, tax policy can also have longer term indirect implications for societal trends, some of which may not be obvious to the majority of the public even years after the policies are implemented.

To give a specific example of the latter point, consider California's property tax system, in light of Prop 13. For those who are not in California, the salient point in the law change was limiting the growth of valuation of property for tax assessment purposes to a maximum of 2% annually, far below the actual average annual increases in value. This means that in general, the longer you hold property, the less taxes you need to pay (as a percentage relative to the rest of the population), which means that the people who can accumulate and hold property pay less taxes over time, and relocating has a disproportionately high associated cost. Both of these secondary effects are terrible for California, and contribute the incredibly counter-productive societal forces in the state; it would not be a stretch to say that this aspect of this proposition is the #1 societal issue facing the state in the long term.

But getting back to the main discussion, though, there is significant wealth inequality around the world, and in the US in particular. This is a problem, for various reasons, not the least of which is the tendency of such to destabilize countries in the long term, through eventual revolt. As one might guess, a lot of the problem is tax policy related; for example, capital gains taxes are purposefully lower than income taxes, in a perverse counter-productive policy which rewards people who have substantial existing assets to passively invest, at the expense of people who need to work for a living. Coupled with equally societally damaging property tax policies and other tax-related advantages for passive income sources, and huge wealth disparities between classes of workers in the private sector (ie: corporate executives vs everyone else), and you have a system which primarily propagates and amplifies wealth inequality.

This is a societal problem, and even many people in the top 0.01% know that this is a problem. It's a testament to the effective oligarchy system of government that this problem is still as bad as it is today.

So how could you fix it, if we (the people) were actually able to? Well, obviously, you'd want to fix many of the perverse and broken taxation related systems previously mentioned, as no-brainers, but that by itself would not be enough. Indeed, you would likely also need something like a wealth tax: a recurring tax as a percentage of net wealth, to attempt to counter some of the passive-income related inequality growth inherent in the capitalist system itself.

Now do I like Warren's specific proposal? Only sorta. Although I think the general idea is sound, I would prefer to have something more objective and mathematical, and less arbitrary. For instance, I might construct a system around percentages, where the higher percentage you were in (ie: top 1% vs top 0.01%), the higher your wealth tax rate was, with a smooth increase and no arbitrary steppings.

So for example, the tax could be such that it was based on the logarithm (base 10) of your net wealth, normalized to 0% for the minimum net wealth of someone in the top 1%, and capped at 10% annually. So currently, that would be ~$8M base (amount to be in top 1%); anyone under that would pay 0% net wealth tax, and that would establish a baseline (in log10) of 6.9. Your net wealth tax rate would then be log10(NW) - 6.9, where NW is your net wealth. So someone with $1B net wealth would pay a 9 - 6.9 = 2.1% tax rate, while Jeff Bezos (current net wealth ~$140B) would pay a 4.24% rate. This would be very close to Warren's proposed rates, but would automatically scale in the future without government adjustment, is a smooth curve with no arbitrary steppings, and (also importantly) scales tax rates down if/as the overall average wealth of the country goes up.

That's my 2c, anyway.

Trump and Weaponized Stupidity

There are not too many things which I would give Trump credit for as the President so far. Initially, for example, I thought that perhaps his public persona of an uninformed, insensitive, abrasive jerk might have been somewhat contrived, in an effort to appeal to a specific subset of the population. However, as all of his personality traits have persisted far beyond the election, and there is no apparent evidence to the contrary, I've long since concluded that Trump actually is an uninformed, insensitive, abrasive jerk. In such, he is singularly bad at being in a diplomatic leadership position; in fact he's quite possibly objectively the worst President in the entirety of the history of the country.

However, that being said, he has managed to do one thing which is somewhat impressive in context, even though I give no credit for purpose or planning in such. Trump has managed to weaponize stupidity, to remarkable effect. He has, in some sense, managed to take what for any other leader would be a likely crippling flaw, and turn it into a decided advantage.

So what do I mean by that? Well, firstly, Trump is unequivocally stupid; not only is he an imbecile in comparison to other former presidents who were vastly more qualified (and in particular the immediate predecessor in the office), but he's even rather slow in comparison to the general population. He barely has command of the English language, is seemingly unable to grasp basic policy topics, is primarily "informed" via cable news, cannot even pay attention through briefings, etc. By all accounts, and in every facet of his life, he's flat out dumb.

But he's also kinda turned that stupidity into a distinct advantage. For example, he's made himself effectively immune to criticism for either purposefully lying or being woefully ill-informed in public statements, via his inner circle implying that he is just prone to hyperbole. He's been able to brush off obvious lies (eg: one of the first, the number of people attending his inauguration) by doubling down on lying, and it seems that many people have mentally excused those lies with something akin to "that's just because Trump is ignorant". Ironically, he may well be ignorant; being stupid makes lying about things for which you are poorly informed easy and credible. Trump's administration has reach a level of dishonesty hither to unapproached by previous leadership in the US, yet his support is virtually unchanged.

Yet it's even more than that, and to me, where it gets more interesting. Trump is virtually unwatchable in his public speeches by anyone with even basic knowledge of grammar and/or proper sentence structure, not to mention awareness of current events (eg: I personally cannot watch his speeches; they are offensively stupid and mentally painful for someone like me). News reporters have remarked in fact-checking stories how miserable the assignment is, not only because of the sheer bulk of dishonest statements, but also because of how mentally arduous it is to parse through Trump's atrociously poor language structure. In effect, Trump is self-selecting the type of people who are even able to listen to his public addresses, and those people happen to overlap with his strongest supporters. This creates a striking disconnect between the people who listen to his speeches, and the analysis of his policy points presented in the general news media; it's not surprising that Trump demonizes the latter to great effect, given the divide.

Trump has, then, weaponized his own stupidity to both insulate himself from effective criticism, and ensure that the people giving him feedback on his own performance are by and large only his supporters. He has created his own insular bubble, and amplified the situation where the two ideological sides in the country "talk past each other", as a reflection of what he himself is doing. He has in this sense become a quintessential politician, entirely disconnected from any semblance of association with the disastrous consequences he is bringing upon the country.

(Closing side note: It would be an easy "excuse" to say that Trump is working as an agent of Russia, and all his ruinous divisiveness is purposeful and directed. I don't think that's accurate, though, at least pending additional evidence. The far simpler explanation is that Trump is just dumb, and dumb people are easily used as tools by more capable groups, such as Putin and his intelligence services. Trump is by essentially all accounts a tool, one which the GOP and Russia both thought they could use for their own ends, with the tool being none the wiser for it.)

The Religious Divide in America

As a preface, this post is more about an opinion on the current state of events in the US, and less on-point to a specific topic. It was, in part, motivated by this piece and related events, but my thoughts on the topic are a bit more general.

The US is going through a period of transition currently, one which will likely span several generations. As this piece accurately notes, "as societies become more modern, they become less religious". This is, I think, generally accurate, as can be observed in the recent history of the world. It is also somewhat intuitive: as people learn more about how the world works, there is less need for superstition to explain how and why things happen, and hence less need for religion.

Unfortunately, this is not something which can or will change overnight. Primarily, this is because so many people have so much of their own self-worth and self-identity inexorably associated with their religion, that it's practically impossible for them to alter their views. In large part, this is a testimony to the efficacy of the indoctrination mechanisms employed by the various organized religions, whereby children are, in effect, brainwashed into the religions long before they can make well-informed and self-directed choices. By the time people reach intellectual maturity, religion tends to be ingrained enough in their mental models that it requires substantial effort and motivation to displace, both of which are usually lacking. As a result, the evolution of religion out of more advanced societies is a multi-generational process; the older people literally need to die off to advance the societal trends.

Fortunately, most religion and religious practices are by-and-large not too harmful to a society; there are always outliers and zealots, of course, but generally most religious tenants are broadly compatible with societal values. Indeed, based on the foundational documents of the country, and the opinions of the people founding it, the early leaders of the US were entirely comfortable with people being religious in general, as long as that religion didn't intrude duties or decisions in the government itself. Presumably, and pragmatically, this was likely to try to mitigate anyone in government imposing their religious beliefs on anyone else in the country, as the founders would have been wary of, based on the history in Europe and such.

Unfortunately, the progress of science and society has outpaced the slow multi-generational ideological transition necessary to expunge religion from the US, and this is now causing some pretty substantial friction within the country. For example, we now understand that gender is scientifically not binary, and we have very strong evidence that the basis for gender attraction is genetic as well, yet both of these facts are in conflict with long-standing religious doctrine.

(Side note: This is not the "fault" of the religions, per se; remember, all religions make up everything they believe based on what's generally accepted at the time, and the majority religions of today have been around for many centuries. One of the necessary side-effects of the intellectual indoctrination mechanisms is that altering precepts of the religion to match current scientific understandings would weaken the indoctrination itself, so such modifications are necessarily minimalized. This, over time, results on the religions clinging to obsolete ideology, an effect which is magnified by speed of scientific advancement and widespread information dissemination. This is why, for example, the issue is more prevalent in the US, as opposed to less educated and/or developed countries.)

This all brings us back to the motivating topic at hand. The current VP of the US is Mike Pence, a Christian religious zealot. His wife is employed as a religious "school", which mixes education and indoctrination, and requires an oath of allegiance to the religious precepts. Among the religious precepts is enshrined (among other things) bigotry and baseless discrimination against non-heterosexual persons; behaviors which societal in general now finds to be unacceptable (and by that, I mean the societal trend has just recently passed the 50% mark, and the majority of society now accepts that this form of bigotry is unacceptable). This, naturally, causes a conflict: Mike Pence is offended that his family's bigotry and discrimination is being looked down upon, while the majority of the country is offended that Mike Pence advocates for bigotry and discrimination.

This is more symptomatic of a general issue/divide in the country, though. To wit, the strongly religious people in the country believe that their religion should be a justification for maintaining personal beliefs and opinions which are at odds with the general societal values at the time. The principles of the country would generally accept this, but "draw the line" at the point where those beliefs would be harmful to others in the country; in essence, you are allowed to be a bigot, as long as your bigotry doesn't impact anyone else. The reality, though, is that this is practically impossible: everyone interacts with other people, and eventually everyone's hate is going to directly or indirectly cause harm to someone else. As it happens, sometimes this effect is also very public, as with Mike Pence at the present time.

There's no easy fix for this issue, unfortunately; it will take generational change before religion is marginalized enough for this kind of situation to become anomalous in the US. In the meantime, the voters would do well to stay away from zealots in elected positions, but understandably this is more difficult in the areas of the country where religion still has a strong presence. I have hope that eventually this issue will go away, but in the meantime, expect to have a lot more conflict around instances like this.

Leaving a Better World, the Surveillance State Edition

So recently I've been thinking a bit about the old adage, meant to serve as sorta a litmus test for the longer-term value of decisions: try to leave the world a better place for your children. I don't honestly know the origin of the sentiment, and/or if it's American or otherwise, but it seems self-evident enough in meaning. Basically, you want the world to get better over time, and especially if you have children directly, you want them to live in a world which is at least as accommodating as the one you lived in.

The thing is, though, that's not always easy to do. The world has quite a lot of "bad" people in it, and absent meaningful efforts toward positive change, there's certainly no guarantee that the world of the future will be better than the world of today. This seems especially true in the current time in the US in particular; the list of pending worrisome things is getting quite long indeed (eg: spiraling national debt, partisan divisiveness driving the country apart, wealth inequality, the unchecked rise of AI, rekindled threats of nuclear war, etc.). One of the other rising threats which stands out to me more recently is the surveillance state, and the end of personal freedom.

Now, people have never had an explicit right to privacy; that's not something codified in the US Constitution, nor really even enshrined in law. We've always enjoyed a semi-implicit amount of freedom from observation, though, owing to the lack of ability for the state to monitor everything at all times. This freedom is implicit, for example, in much of the historical exercise of the right of assembly, protest, freedom of the press, etc. After all, in most historical cases, if the government had full surveillance of all aspects of those activities, they either would have been implicitly suppressed, or explicitly so, using some justification (eg: the ever ubiquitous "national security", invoked to justify all manner of atrocities against the people).

This implicit freedom, though, is going away, and absent some sort of dramatic shift, might be entirely gone in our lifetime. Already the government monitors effectively all personal communications, using advanced AI to filter through the incomprehensibly large data sets for keywords/persons of "interest". All telephone conversations are recorded and logged (through Echelon, along with undoubtedly newer versions of the same), all social media data is mined (Prism and related), all internet communications are tapped, etc. Governments are even now passing legislation to make strong encryption illegal, in the few cases where it might otherwise be inaccessible (and/or to disguise pre-existing compromises). Drones are being deployed by the state to monitor people 24/7 from the skies; the DoT is even currently working on approving civilian usage as such.

By the time today's children are adults, they will not know a world where the state cannot know everything that you do, always. China is already using this reality to their advantage, through "social credit" scoring designed to forcibly control the behavior of their population, and the US will do effectively the same thing. Astute parents are already carefully monitoring their kids' online activities to try to ensure they don't inevitably damage their future "social scores" (in whatever form they come to be), by trying to curtail social media posts and recorded speech, but in most cases the damage will not be prevented, and/or is already done. The next generation will not be able to express dissent, lest they find themselves enemies of the state, with all that entails.

Indeed, I struggle to even conceptualize a scenario when the world today's children will inherit is better in that respect than it is today. The rise of the surveillance state is as inevitable as the existence of the bad people in it, and as predictable as the corrupt politicians who will exploit it. Today's children will inherit a world where privacy, and the implicit freedoms attached to it and dependent on it, are but a memory of a past which will by then seem like a utopian fantasy. That's what we're leaving for our children today, and honestly, I see no viable alternative path. As the quote goes, "I know what it’s like to lose. To feel so desperately that you’re right, yet to fail nonetheless." This is the world which we will leave for our children, in its depressing inevitability.

More Thoughts on the Federal Government Shutdown

Since there's no end in sight for the current government shutdown, and both sides are giving indications that no progress is being made and no short-term end is likely, I have a few additional thoughts on the current state of political gridlock.

As I said before, the system should really be more resilient against this sort of "using the American people as leverage" political fighting strategy; the current state of sorta absurd. Beyond that, though, in the context of Trump's Russian ties being investigated, I think the Republicans in Congress are doing a substantial disservice to their own political careers (not to mention the damage to the country) by not tossing aside solidarity with Trump, and his wall-funding tantrum. In my opinion, the Republicans in the Senate should pass a basic budget and dare Trump to veto it, and they should override him if he does.

After all, Trump himself gave them an "opening" to do so, so to speak, when he raised the possibility of using emergency powers to steal the money to fund the wall anyway. Notwithstanding the clear would-be unconstitutional nature of such a move, the Senate Republicans can credibly claim that they were passing a budget for the overall good of the country on-balance, and put the onus on Trump to follow through on this alternative plan to fund his wall, if he thinks he can sustain the justification in the face of the inevitable House inquiry into abuse of his position. It's not like there's that much downside for Trump in that scenario anyway; it's very likely the House will be investigating him soon anyway, and challenging everything else he does in the next two years, not to mention the collusion subtext which will be attached to his actions.

So, in summary, it's well time for the remaining Republicans in Congress to cut ties with Trump, and leave him on an island with his considerable baggage, so to speak. That's my opinion, anyway.

Thoughts on Autonomous Vehicles

Autonomous vehicles are a hot topic these days, as auto makers rush to add more self-driving and vehicle communication technology to their offerings. The state of the market is somewhat reminiscent of the internet boom, where tech companies rushed to produce every type of service/product they could imagine, and any consideration for societal impact (and/or hope of thoughtful regulation) was left hopelessly behind. It also reminds me of the rush to create AI for everything, where business and government interests are rushing far ahead of any consideration of the societal effects, even though the people closest to the technology have serious concerns about the direction the development is going.

Let's get this out of the way first and foremost: Autonomous vehicles are going to kill people, and in ways which would have been avoided if humans were driving.

Why do I feel entirely confident making that claim, when most proponents of the technology advocate the opposite (ie: that autonomous vehicles will save lives, by avoiding accidents which human drivers would have been involved in)? To answer that, you have to think less conceptually about the eventual promise of the technology if everything goes to plan, and more pragmatically about how technology (and software in particular) actually gets developed.

I write software for a living. All software has bugs; the more complex the software, the more bugs it will have, statistically speaking. There are well-established methods of minimizing the number and effects of bugs, but these are expensive; NASA does a lot of things to make sure their software systems don't fail, for example. Automobile manufacturers do not do any of these things; one needs only look at the abysmal state of infotainment systems in modern vehicles, not to mention security models of connected cars, to understand how fundamentally terrible automobile manufacturers are at producing quality software.

Why is this? Well, primarily, there's no significant incentive to do so. With a NASA program, for example, its very costly and publicly embarrassing (and potentially deadly) to have a software system failure in a deployed module. As a result, NASA spends the time and money to get quality engineers, produce quality products, and engineer for reliability. In contrast, automobile manufacturers at worst pay comparatively small penalties via recalls for faulty systems; for most systems, they just let the consumer suffer with the issues. Consumers, by and large, do not demand quality software from automobile companies, and in the absence of any sort of oversight or mandate to produce such, manufacturers will always take the lowest-cost options. This is why most software in automobiles is garbage, and only what's minimally sufficient to not appear egregiously broken.

This will end badly in the rush to produce autonomous driving systems. In the absence of any sort of objective standard/test for quality, manufacturers will deploy systems with flaws, and sell them to consumers. When the inevitable errors and accidents happen, they will deflect blame, as they do for every other case where flaws in the design and/or production cause injuries and/or death. Moreover, this will continue to happen, and given past evidence of government speed to react to new technology developments, many people will probably die (in and outside of the autonomous vehicles) while the technology is being beta testing on live roads. It's inevitable, given the trajectory of how this technology is being pushed forward and deployed.

So how would I fix it, in theory?

Well, primarily, we would need to have government oversight to accomplish anything; just asking for companies to "do good" is utterly pointless. Given that, ideally the government would develop a test suite of simulated scenarios for autonomous cars to encounter, with criteria for acceptable outcomes (which would meet or exceed those outcomes which an attentive and skilled human driver would create). This should be a large suite, expanded every year with new scenarios, and be not directly available to manufacturers (so as to minimize cheating by coding to the test). The administrator for the oversight would mandate a specification to allow an autonomous UI to be evaluated against the test suite (ie: by standardizing the inputs and output, and making a pluggable test harness to evaluate systems, in a similar method to how other tests for compliance are done).

Then, the government should mandate that for approval for inclusion in a vehicle certified for sale in the US, any autonomous driving program must pass the then-current driving test suite with 100% success. That is, if you want to sell a system with controls the vehicle in any manner, it must meet or exceed the performance of a skilled human driver in every single scenario included in the test suite. That would be the uniform standard for every vehicle, every system, every year, no exceptions; if you don't pass, your system cannot go into a vehicle for sale in the US.

The government could then release the test scenario suite each year after the certification period (ie: release the old suite once a new expanded suite is in place), so manufacturers could see which tests their systems failed, and incorporate changes. Moreover, I would also encourage manufacturers to submit tests from their own independent testing for incorporation into the general test suite; this would allow manufacturers to attempt to gain advantages over competitors (ie: by incorporating tests which they knew their systems would pass), to the benefit of everyone.

Only when we get to that point will we have any hope of autonomous driving systems being actually "better" than human drivers. Until that point, there will be issues forever, and the government ultimately (through their inaction) would be culpable for the results, imho.

Topic of the Moment: Government Shutdown, Budget Impass

So, normally I would comment on something like this, as it's sorta mundane politics and all, but it occurred to me recently that many pundits tend to only take stances on "easy" issues, and tend to dodge the harder ones (and/or take an oversimplified view on them, to avoid a possible admission that real-world issues can be "hard"). I've always thought of myself as a problem solver (first-order approximation and all), though, and to that end I think it's somewhat worthwhile to give a perspective on more messy issues also. So to that end, my thoughts on the current government shutdown conflict and impasse.

First, the basics. Trump wants funding for the wall (well, really a down payment; the actual wall is estimated to cost between $8B and $70B, although a reasonable guess is probably around $25B, and Trump is demanding $5.7B). The Democrats don't want to fund it, and that's had caused a budget related government shutdown.

Next, some observations, re Trump's take. Trump campaigned, in part, on building a wall, and threw in a boast that he'd make Mexico pay for it (initially directly, then later revised to mean through savings with trade agreements; both boasts are utterly absurd lies, of course). Trump claims an ongoing crisis of illegal immigration, which may be true in the general sense, but in the context which Trump frames the narrative (ie: crime), is also utter crap. Similarly, the national emergency as a potential workaround to Congress refusing to allocate the money is garbage, many of the statistics Trump quotes are false, etc.; in what should be news to nobody at this point, Trump is mostly ignorant and/or full of shit on this entire topic, as usual for him.

Side note: Also as typical for Trump, he is showing that he's an abysmally poor negotiator in this context, essentially just grandstanding and throwing childish tantrums. He's literally holding the functional government hostage to extort money from Congress, as we would call "terrorism" in any other context.

However, somewhat lost in the partisan fighting and grandstanding, there is an ongoing (and large) issue with illegal aliens in the country, and by extension with border security in general, and the Democrats are not blameless in that problem. In fact, the whole previous amnesty grant fuels a lot of the current issues, with the Obama unconstitutional DACA edict (ie: amnesty-lite) amplifying the problem. Once again, despite all the ignorance, nonsense, lies, tantrums, and political garbage, Trump is sorta incidentally right that there is a problem; it's unfortunate that all his other garbage means nobody can even begin to discuss the real issues.

So, what I would do, to prevent this sort of impasse:

First and foremost, we need a different mechanism of funding basic governmental operations, so that corrupt and partisan politicians cannot hold that hostage. We should have a defined set of operations which are "normal" (ie: ongoing operations, no new projects or new expenditures), and in the absence of an explicit budget allocation, those should continue to be funded. Along the same lines, the debt ceiling should be automatically raised in tandem (although I detest unlimited deficit spending, the debt ceiling has proven wholly ineffectual at limiting that anyway, and is worse as a tool for partisan fighting). The government should do these two things, so people who we need/want to keep working while politicians fight about garbage issues will keep getting paid, and basic services will keep getting funded.

Aside: Honestly, that step alone should be sufficient, if done well, to eliminate 90%+ of government shutdown budget fights. Removing the ability to hold basic welfare and livelihoods of a large swath of the American population hostage would remove a lot of the leverage politicians have to get pork projects pushed through.

Second, we need to figure out how to limit the pork and "horse-trading" which defines budget composition in general, and make Congress approve every individual spending project. Fund the stuff which is non-controversial and generally desired first, then worry about fighting over the down payment for a well/fence or whatever. Yeah, that means less special-interest pork projects without broader consensus... ie: a win for the American people.

Honestly, that's probably all that would be needed for this particular problem. Yeah, we should do more for border security, but I'm not sure what the "right" answer there is, and I'm absolutely sure that we're not going to make positive progress toward that answer in the current political climate. I have some thoughts, but I won't get into them here, since this is already somewhat long.

One problem at a time; the more pressing one is getting the partisan wackos out of office, and preventing them from getting elected again. That, though, is a really "hard" problem.

The Disingenuity of Abusing the Statistics

So, I really shouldn't have to say anything about how non-objective Paul Krugman is in his "economic analysis", but periodically he will spew something so egregiously absurd that it inspires a response. Case in point: The Economics of Soaking the Rich.

Now, I'm not going to go into too much depth; hopefully anyone reading this blog will be intelligent enough to already be aware of how much of a biased shill Krugman is. But this piece is just obnoxiously misleading enough to really need a call out.

To wit, a few points which Krugman fails to mention entirely (and indeed, might be too stupid to even comprehend, in fairness):

Effective Tax Rate

While the nominal tax rates have varied widely, that only tells half the story; the effective (real) tax rates are a combination of nominal rates and allowed deductions. When the nominal rates were high (eg: in the 70's), there were many more deductions, such that the "wealthy" paid basically the same effective rates as they do today. It's a load of crap to insinuate that the economy did better when the government taxed more; if anything, the government taxed less when nominal rates were higher. In fact, that was part of the nominal impetus for simplifying the tax code in the 80's (to make the rich pay a more fair share, by removing the loopholes).

Fairness in Taxation

I suppose it goes without saying, but there's an implicit underlying argument in liberal doctrine that progressive tax rates are more "fair" than flat tax rates, because... the "rich" deserve to have more earned income stolen? I honestly don't know the moral basis or justification for this. I can see the argument for wealth redistribution, but that would imply higher taxation on assets not income, which is not what PK is advocating. So there's that whole "look over here, not over there" part of the argument.

Contradiction with his Fundamental Economic Theory

Perhaps the most damning indictment of PK's argument is that he's always advocated the government printing money as the solution to all problems (wealth redistribution, recessions, etc.), yet there's this direct quote in this op-ed: "when taxing the rich, all we should care about is how much revenue we raise." WTF? Since when is gathering revenue to balance spending even on the radar of any liberal, much less the literal poster-child for unbounded government deficit spending? It's like every economic principle went straight onto the dumpster fire the moment an opportunity to promote the socialist agenda came up.

Paul Krugman is one of the worst kinds of people in America: someone who uses his education and background to give nominal legitimacy to partisan political garbage. He and his kind are a cancer on the country.

Thoughts on Trump, Two Years In

It's hard to believe that Donald Trump has held the highest office in the United States for about two years now, but that's the current state of the world. Almost as hard to believe is that the country and world are still mostly in one piece; you could quibble about deteriorating security overseas and/or the current state of a non-operational US government with the budget impasse, but nothing overtly catastrophic has yet transpired.

Victory?

Well, no, not at all... it's more appropo to simply note that's some of the most generous praise which could be attributed to the Trump presidency: in spite of Trump being a failure in the role of President in effectively every measurable way, the country is (to date) still standing, and there's a reasonable chance we've made it at least halfway through this dark period in US history.

... At this point, I feel like I need to take a brief aside, and note that the abject failure I'm referencing is Trump the person, in the office, and not the nominal Trump/GOP policies. Many of the policy ideas are sounds, and could be quite reasonable if presented in a more amicable and professional context. Trump as POTUS, however, is certainly the most incompetent and embarrassing president in my lifetime, and likely in the history of the US itself.

Let's review some of the primary traits which would make someone a good president, and see why Trump is so terrible at the job. For fun, I'll add my perception of Obama (who's policies I liked less) in the same role, for contrast.

Trustworthy LeaderTrump has lied repeatedly since the start of his campaign (and well before, but it didn't "count" as much before). He seems to be a pathological liar, and strongly prefers spokespeople who are equally willing to ignore the facts in favor of the party line. He's almost laughably dishonest, with most media organizations giving up on fact checking his speeches as a waste of time.
Obama was dishonest, but not nearly to the same measure, and did a vastly better job of disguising it with half-truths and infrequent usage.

Eloquent SpeakerTrump is a very bad public speaker, with atrocious sentence structure, and only a seemingly grade-school level command of the English language. His manner of speaking may work well for appealing to uneducated masses, but it's objectively bad.
Obama is a very eloquent public speaker.

Good DiplomatNominally what should be Trump's saving grace, his ability to negotiate and strike deals, has proven to be entirely farcical. Trump appears utterly inept at anything related to diplomacy, which might be has most damning failure as president.
Obama was a marginally better diplomat; vastly better in some areas (such as public appearance), but not substantially better in others (eg: end results of deals).

Very Knowledgeable
The president should have good working knowledge of a wide range of topics, know how to gather accurate information, and simultaneously understand the limitations of his/her own personal knowledge. Trump fails this test badly on all counts: he's woefully ignorant, gets information from biased and shallow sources, and vastly overestimates his own knowledge and intelligence. It's hard to even fathom someone worse at this aspect of personality than Trump.
Obama was very knowledgeable, gathered information well, and was seemingly aware of the limitations of his own information.

Relatable
This is perhaps the only area where Trump might have some claim to an advantage, with using social media to "talk" directly to the people, usually for the worse. It's not quite enough to counterbalance his obvious total disconnect from the lives of people who aren't uber-rich, but he get some points for trying, I guess.
Obama had the opposite problem, to some extent: grew up normal, but was perceived as "elite" because of education, intelligence, and eloquence. Still, he did better than Trump as being relatable.

For fun, let's also check how Trump rates for the desirable traits for a Boy Scout: Trustworthy (nope, see above), Loyal (nope, see turnover), Helpful (no evidence either way), Friendly (nope, see conversation), Courteous (nope, lol), Kind (maybe), Obedient (n/a), Cheerful (nope), Thrifty (lol, nope), Brave (bone spurs), Clean (nope, per reports), and Reverent (n/a). So he basically gets a one out of five for good scouting traits, with two n/a and two maybes. That's pretty poor for a person in general.

In my opinion, Trump is an utter disaster as a president, and a painfully embarrassing reminder of an entirely broken political system which allowed him to inhabit the office. I can only hope the American people find some way to break this cycle of terrible leadership in our nominal democracy.