Wednesday: Hili dialogue

35 thoughts on “Wednesday: Hili dialogue”

1. Oh wow, I made Indian Pudding and Grape-Nut(TM) Pudding a year or two ago because PCC(E) posted it!

   Never got back to refining the recipe – used a slow-cooker, I believe… was good, esp. with fresh whipped cream!

   Recently thought about getting back into it… maybe after my bread project…

   1. I might try that Indian pudding recipe. Question for Jerry: when you refer to it as an indigenous American dessert, do you mean only that it originated in America (using locally available maize, “Indian corn”)? It was an adaptation of a British pudding recipe that used wheat. None of the other ingredients (except possibly eggs) were known to the pre-Contact indigenous peoples of the Americas. I realize this peculiarly Canadian use of “indigenous” that may be causing my confusion.

2. In one of the aerial photos of the surroundings of the house on Morris Street, Halifax, you can see the hospital where I had my bone marrow transplant!

3. I wll always remember Stefanik for her open mic comment after Biden told the story about his uncle who was eaten by cannibals (he wasn’t): “Never trust a man whose uncle was eaten by cannibals.”

4. Jerry…Jerry…Jerry. I am so tired of people lamenting the tired “tax cuts for the rich” BS. The reality is we in the middle and low income class are a bunch of freeloaders when it comes to paying taxes. Here is IRS data as compiled by the Tax Foundation:

   * The top 1 percent’s income share rose from 22.2 percent in 2020 to 26.3 percent in 2021 and its share of federal income taxes paid rose from 42.3 percent to 45.8 percent.

   *The top 50 percent of all taxpayers paid 97.7 percent of all federal individual income taxes, while the bottom 50 percent paid the remaining 2.3 percent.

   1. The top 1% get more than a quarter of all the income and you are trying to convince me that they are paying too much tax?

      There’s a reason why higher earners pay relatively more tax. It’s because they can afford it. If you tax everybody at the same rate, you’ll push the net income of poorer people below the level that they need to survive.

   2. How about cutting taxes on wages and compensating by raising taxes on gains from assets? The latter portion drives inequality and is much less earned than the former one.

5. One more thing…Justice Sotomayor should resign because she’s not very good. Her opinions are intellectually thin and border on being rants. At times her questions during oral arguments are embarrassing because she gets law wrong. More than once her colleagues or the lawyers she has questioned have tactfully saved her from further embarrassment.

   Philosophically, I’m a Justice Alito type of guy. But I appreciate the legal intellect Justice Jackson has brought to the court. So Justice Sotomayor, do the country a favor…and resign.

   1. True. But you want idiotic judicial opinions? Then VP “Justice” Kamala Harris says “Hold my beer!”
      We do not need a joy justice.

      D.A., J.D.
      NYC

      1. I don’t understand. If Sotomayor resigns, there’s nothing in law that says Biden has to appoint Harris as her successor.

         I think Sotomayor should resign as should all judges when they reach the age of seventy.

         I think they should be replaced by justices who have shown competence in interpreting the law rather than those whose political views are the same as the President. Of course, Tr*mp doesn’t agree with me and that is why you have a politically biased supreme court. The last thing you want is for Supreme Court justices to be replaced by GOP presidents. They have no respect for impartiality.

   2. I had a negative opinion of Jackson with her “I’m not a biologist” comment during the confirmation hearing, but I’ve been impressed by Jackson as well. Her opinions have been well reasoned and based on her interpretation of law. Kamala Harris is nowhere near that level of intellect.

   3. I don’t see a realistic way to replace her in time. It takes too long.

      1. And we’ve already seen the GOP block Obama’s attempt at a late stage appointment. This would just be handing another seat to Trump.

6. On cat kissing: There’s an old lady near me whose yorkie has a permanent lipstick- ed forehead. She wears bright red lipstick and she confessed – it is a kissing “injury” to the doggie.

   With us it goes in the other direction. Puppers always wants to kiss me but as you can see from my WEIT picture, doggie kissing is not my thing.
   https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/06/10/photos-of-readers-93/

   I have to dissent with PCC(E) on Judge Sotomayor. I think he might be a bit touchy on age related issues. She’s diabetic type 1, overweight, and the possible loss or disability of her would be terrible. Retire your honor, I say. (Not PPC/E – he’s doing a great job).

   D.A.
   NYC

7. It seems that The Guardian is throwing a strop and no longer Tweeting out its articles to its 10 million followers on Twitter. All because people with other views also get to Tweet on Twitter.

8. Trump’s appointees are interesting, and scary. I do agree that Stefanik and Rubio will be friends of Israel, and I particularly hope that Stefanik has the stones to stand up to the Israel-hating U.N.—even if she is a bully (and maybe because of it).

   Regarding Sotomayor, I don’t think she should resign simply because she is 70 and has diabetes. I think that Bakari Sellers is being a bit of an alarmist. But let’s imagine that Sotomayor retires on Thursday and that Biden immediately names a successor. Would her successor be a slam dunk for Senate confirmation? Would the Democrats be able to prevent a filibuster? Or would special maneuvering be required to get the successor across the finish line before Trump and the Republican Senate take office, shut Biden’s nominee out, and put their own conservative justice onto the bench? It seems to my untrained eye that there is less risk in Sotomayor staying on than there is risk in trying to make a change now.

   Finally, the more the country sees of the campus protestors—this time denigrating our veterans—the more the public comes to reject them. That’s a good thing. That’s how the social contract works. Rejecting the deranged protestors disincentivizes them from further protests.

   1. Yes, Sotomayor resigning now would be much too risky.

9. ” When the Presidents answered (correctly) that “it depends”…’

   This is embodies the Achille’s heal of the hyper-rational.

   1. What Achille’s heal? Avoiding categorical answers to questions where one lacks adequate information? ISTM we’re in far more danger from the hypo-rational.

      It was surely an inept performance politically, but why blame rationality? What’s your preferred alternative?

      1. From NYT, question asked by Stefanik:

         “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules on bullying and harassment?” she demanded of Claudine Gay, the new president of Harvard University.

         “It can be, depending on the context,” Dr. Gay responded.

         “What’s the context?” Ms. Stefanik shot back.

         https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/07/us/politics/elise-stefanik-antisemitism-congress.html

         Talking about context doesn’t seem right to me here. When it can possibly be right?

         1. Just speculating here, but it seems hypo-rational of her white-shoe legal team to not anticipate that kind of followup question to a “depends on the context” response. She was clearly not adequately prepped for the hearing.

            And her whole testimony seemed based on hypo-rational wishful thinking that her entitled status at Harvard would automagically carry over into the Congressional hearings.

      2. The hyper-rationalism is the editorial comment “(correctly)”– a less one-dimensional, more grounded view on the situation would lead to seeing the political context and so how ridiculous the answer was.

         1. I truly do not understand how our host’s editorial use of “(correctly)” indicates excessive rationality, rationalisation, or anything else related to rationalism. Please expand on this.

            1. Only in a narrow, technical sense is it correct to assert that whether calling for the genocide of Jews violates rules against harassment depends on context. (E.g., if someone was quoting Hitler).

            2. Not so narrow and technical, unless one considers the First Amendment and its case law to be narrow technicalities.

10. Re: taxes – why is it that legislation to decrease taxes is framed as “costing money”? It is our money in the first place, not the government’s. By reducing taxes, the govt. is not incurring a “cost”, as defined as spending; it is taking in less revenue (or potentially more revenue, as illustrated by the Laffer curve).
    Also, corporations don’t pay taxes – customers do.
    Think about it in simple terms: you are a single person consulting firm. You charge your client $100k per year for your services. That $100k includes $30k in taxes that you pay, leaving you with $70k to pay expenses, rent, food, etc., and maybe put $10k in profit in the bank. Now, taxes get raised by 10%, so you now only have $60k at the end of the year. Do you say, well, so much for my savings account, because it’s your civic duty to pay more taxes? No, you look for some efficiency improvements to offset some of the increase, and then you raise your consulting fee so that you can still have $70k to cover expenses and maintain your $10k profit. Same thing happens at big corporations on a larger scale.

    1. The risk is that you may not be able to raise your prices enough to pass the tax on to your customers. If what you are selling has a legally fixed price, like medical services in Canada, then you pay the tax increase right out of your pocket. The tax increase is transparent to the consumer. This is the extreme case for illustration. There are other free-market reasons why you may not be able to pass on the tax increase. If demand for what you sell is highly elastic, your customers may simply buy less from you if you try to raise your price. Customers may be able to buy the same thing from foreign corporations who don’t pay taxes to Uncle Sam. (This is where firms faced with an increase in the corporate tax might find themselves supporting tariffs on imports to keep that business at home.)

       For these reasons, corporate America should lobby to reduce taxes on its profits and not rely on passing them on. That they do is why corporate taxes can be pushed down. It is a necessary anti-democratic political activity to protect shareholder value. And if they fall in America, Canada will be forced to follow suit in order to stem capital flight.

    2. That is not a good description of a single person consulting firm. No single person consulting firm is paying corporate taxes. Ever. A whopping 95% of business are pass-through. Pass-through corporations pay individual income tax, not corporate.

       Expenses for the business are deductions, and thus reduce the amount of taxes. The profit you make for the business is also your take home, i.e. pass-through company. So, in your analogy, your expenses could be 40K especially since you must pay both employer and employee SSI and Medicare. Thus reducing your business income to 60K, which in the state of Colorado means you pay about 13K in total taxes: including employee SSI and Medicare, which as business expenses those are already deducted, so lets call the income taxes 8K. Leaving you with 52K. You pay your rent/mortgage and food from that. And if your personal expenses are low, you can put 10K in the bank still.
       Now, what happens when the Feds decide to raise individual income taxes by 10%, which is most analogous to your scenario? In that case, your 8K goes to 8.5K because part of your 8K was Colorado income tax. So you adjust your 100K fee to 100.5K and end up with the same take home. So, 10% increase in taxes should cause a .5% increase to the consumer in my more valid scenario.

       But worse, in that scenario, all the salaried and waged employees just had their income taxes increased too. Which means the big corporations will either ignore it, and every employee outside the C-suite will take an effective cut in wages; or the big corporation will increase their pay and have more expenses, thus decreasing their net revenue and thus their taxes go down (unless the Feds increased the corporate tax as well). Of course, big corporations need their net revenue to increase for shareholder value, and thus they will pass on some of the increase to customers. And those customers are also the workers from all the companies, whose effective salary was just decreased or at best held steady. Thus, inflationary. Or perhaps the big corporation will lay off workers. But the key is the big corporations are going to pass on increases anyway because they must pad their ROI for shareholders – a tiny fraction of which is increased corporate taxes. Either way, inflationary. Since it is inflationary, that consultant probably wants to increase the 100K fee to 102K anyway because the overall economy in good times better be slightly inflationary.

       The point is that big corporations are never the same issue as that 95% of corporations that are pass through. They run under a completely different set of rules. If you change the corporate tax, you only affect 5% of companies.

       1. Dragon, I completely understand your point. I was attempting to just illustrate a simple case, and I perhaps should have added that this was not realistic in terms of a typical single-proprietor business.
          On the other hand, we do agree on the point I was trying to make: big corporations will pass on some of the tax increase to their customers. Per your point, their concern is ROI for shareholders of course. I also concur that the cycle you mention is causes prices to rise in a chain reaction based on this.
          Your post clarifies this greatly, thank you for that.

          Also, per Leslie’s point, an increase in corporate tax can push companies to push for tariffs on goods from countries with lower tax rates as a tool to allow for increases in prices without losing price competitiveness.

          1. Darryl’s sketch is pretty close to how it does work for an incorporated solo contractor in Canada, which is why I found myself grooving along. An increase in the corporate tax rate has to be absorbed, compensated for through improved efficiency, or offset through higher prices or increased sales volume. The least painful choice, a price increase, may not be possible.

             1. To add, governments may, and often do, adjust corporate tax rates without changing personal rates. So if the corporate rate goes up, the Canadian small business in my example will see a higher tax bill without there being, necessarily, any change in the personal rates paid by its employees or in the wages paid by the business deductible in its hands. Nor will there, necessarily, be any change in the personal tax on the salary or dividends the owner of the corporation takes out for himself.

                Disclaimer: this is how it works for incorporated professionals like physicians, the only small-business corporation I am personally familiar with. An unincorporated sole proprietor or partner pays the personal rate on the entire profit of the practice which would be more similar to Dragon’s scenario. Many small business people need to draw their entire profit to fund their living expenses and personal savings. They will end up paying the personal rate on that profit, as it comes out of the business, even if they are incorporated. (There are other good reasons to be incorporated, of course.)

          2. My point was actually a little more that the big corporations use any excuse to raise prices so they can far exceed record profits. They did it during the pandemic, they do it now. As I tried to explain, the cost of increased taxes is a tiny fraction of any increase in the cost of goods and services. The more they complain about taxes, the more consumers think the increase is from taxes – but it isn’t. Quick proof: did cutting taxes anytime since 1980 ever reduce the cost of goods and services? Nope.

             In the US (I don’t know about Canada), the C-suite also get much of their compensation in stock. Then they mortgage the stock so they never sell it and never pay capital gains taxes. All their personal expenses are paid from the loans, even for yachts. But more importantly, all their political contributions to buy politicians are paid from their loans. And the politicians are happy to give them even more tax breaks so they will retain more and more wealth and buy more and more politicians. Because the Supreme Court ruled bribery isn’t bribery, it is just a gratuity/tip.

             1. This has morphed from a technical discussion of tax policy to a screed against corporate greed which I don’t find particularly interesting. So I’ll pass.

11. Oh yuck, he wants the creep Matt Gaetz for Attorney General.

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