Can’t die of overdose if the state kills you first.

So. The secretary of defense is not an elected position. Most people in the country don’t even know who currently holds the role.

The opinion of those he leads and works with is much more important.

Leaders say a lot of things. Even without nukes, Israel has enough conventional military might to have a significant detergent effect (and to defend against attacks that actually do happen).

Further, the politics in the middle east has not been Arabs vs Israel for decades. Israel is a well positioned member of the anti Iran coalition.

That hasn’t been the case for decades. Israel has a lot of allies in the region (basically the entire anti-Iran coalition). Admitadly, these alliances are largely premised on Israel’s military and intelligence might, which would be diminished without US support; but Israel still has significant in-house capabilities.

As to the actual power dynamics, I agree that the US has a lot of leverage. But that is meaningless if they don’t use it. Moreso now that Israel knows they would only need to wait for the next administration to reverse course if we started using our leverage now.

American’s were used to living in a low inflation environment. Argentinians have been living in a high inflation environment for decades.

In what way is Argentina inconsistent with MMT?

Israel is not alone in the region anymore. The middle east is bipolar now, and Israel is well established in the anti-Iran coalition. I wouldn’t call this “stabilizing”, but if the actual fighting is contained to Israel, Iran, and Iranian proxies, that is good for the rest of the anti-Iran coalition.

Sucks for Israel, but when your political leadership is fighting with military leadership because the latter is not sufficiently hawkish, I don’t think “stability” is the policy objective said leadership is actually pursuing.

Both can be true. A large swath of the electorate is stupid for electing Trump, but the Democratic party failed to reach them. This is a lesson that Republicans have known for decades but Democrats still don’t get. Voter’s are not rational; being better than your opponent does not win elections. People can be annoyed at the voters for making this reality, and at the Democrats for still not getting it.

In fairness to the Dems though, the incumbent party lost ground in almost every Democracy, and Harris underperformed less in swing states where both parties campaigned.

No. There haven’t been any real birds since the US government exterminated them in the 60s. Any “bird” you see today is a surveillance drone.

All models are wrong, but some are useful. Thinking of evolved features as having a purpose is wrong, but it is also incredibly useful.

Why do we have eyes? In some sense, there is no reason, just a sequence of random coincidences, combined with a slightly non-randon bias refered to as “survival of the fittest” (itself an incorrect model).

However, saying that we have eyes to see has incredible explanatory power, which makes it a useful model. Just like Newton’s law of Universal gravity. We’ve known it that is wrong for a century at this point, but most of the time still talk as if it’s true, because it is useful.

It’s common enough that my State’s toll provider has had a banner on their front page about it for months https://www.driveezmd.com/

If you want to file a complaint, the Internet crime control center is asking for information on these scams specifically https://www.ic3.gov/PSA/2024/PSA240412

The Social Security Trust Fund does not exist. It is an accounting fiction. When Social Security was passed, it came with a tax increase to offset the increased spending. For decades, the tax increase was greater than the spending increase, so the government spent the difference on other stuff; but made a note that Social Security had a surplus. However, since 2010, this flipped and the cost of Social Security has exceeded the income of its associated tax. The bean counters would the flip happened in 2021, but that is because they believe in the fiction of the Social Security Trust Fund, so that interest on the Trust Fund counts as income to Social Security, despite the fact that said interest is paid by the federal government.

So, why does this accounting fiction called the Social Security Trust Fund matter? Because it has the force of law. Under current US law, Social Security is exempt from the the typical budgetting rules. As long as the bean counters would say the Trust Fund has a positive balance, Social Security is authorized to increase it’s budget to meet it’s obligations. In contrast, most Federal programs get their budgets increased as part of the yearly budget (or a continuing resolution when Congress can’t pass a budget. Or they just close when Congress can’t pass a CR).

So, what happens when the trust fund runs out?

Option 1, Congress does not authorize continued spending at current levels. This is typically known as a spending cut. But because it is triggered by an existing law and Republicans have spent decades playing up the trust fund, they can act like this cut was a force of nature, and not them actively deciding to cut it in the congressional budget.

Option 2, Congress funds social security just like it funds everything else, through an appropriations bill. SS keeps operating, and becomes another political football in the annual budget fight

Option 3, Congress picks some way to tell the bean counters that the social security trust fund is still positive. Social security keeps operating at current lol levels, and remains exempt from the normal appropriations process.

So, what is all this talk about removing the cap on the Social Security payroll tax? If we ignore all the accounting trickery, that is about taking a regressive income tax payed by workers earning less that $168,600/year and turning it into a flat tax. Nothing whatsoever to do with social security, but I agree that a flat tax is better than a regressive tax. Still not as good as a progressive tax, which is the only thing that would have been politically viable but for the fiction that this tax is at all related to Social Security benefits (and their associated limit).

Social Security isn’t even the only federal program to have this issue. Our highway system is payed for by the Highway Trust Fund, which is funded by a tax on gasoline. This fund has been insolvent since 2008, so Congress just included highway funding in their appropriations bills and payed for the difference like they pay for most Federal programs.

The monthly payout of social security is based on how much you earned while you were working, which is roughly correlated with how much you payed in [0]. However, the monthly payment has a hard cap. No matter how much you earned while working, SS will not pay you more than someone who averaged $168,600/year. Even below that cap, there is a progressive structure, where those with a lower income see a larger marginal benefit.

[0] not exactly, as it only looks at you inflation adjusted best 35 years

CPI does weight items by based on spending patterns (although the details of how to determine this weight are complicated and the main reason there are multiple inflation indecises).

The 2022 CPI has a 0.178% contribution from the price of milk, and a 45.065% contribution from the price of Housing. Housing itself is subdived into several subcategories. Notably, neither the purchase price of a house nor the typical mortgage are included. Instead, homeowners cost of shelter is covered by “owner’s equivelent rent” which attempts to answer what the owner would be paying if they had to rent the house they are living in.

https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/2023.htm

There is a solution to this: homestead exemption. A lot of states already implement implement this with their normal property tax. If a property is your primary residence, then the tax you pay on it cannot increase by more than x% a year. Some states also give preferential tax treatment to senior’s primary residence. Their is no reason we couldn’t implement these same breaks on a LVT.

We’ll support you a bit less … after our elections are over and we can support you without any domestic consequence.

Remember the airdrops and logistics piers that the Biden admit spent months touting as the US’s solution to the humanitarian crises, and we just need to give them time to be implemented. Then, when they didn’t work (as anyone who was paying attention knew would happen, because they were fundamentally stupid ideas from the start), the admin quietly rolled them back without much fanfare.

This is at least slightly better in that it is in principle and actually good idea. But the Biden admin has no credibility for actually following through. The state department will release a public report saying that Israel is in compliance and military aid will continue uninterrupted; regardless of the facts on the ground.

By the time voters can see for sure that this was a lie, the election will have ended.

I bought in 2022 and can’t imagine having that much interaction with a mortgage broker. My interaction consisted of giving them my information. Getting pre approved for a stupidly large mortgage (about twice what I could afford). Then, when I found a place to buy, they punched in the address for the “virtual appraisal” and approved the loan.

Part of plausible deniability is that it has to be plausible. There has been no plausible argument presented that Israel did not do the pager and walkie talkie attack. For that matter, there hasn’t even been a denial about it.

Trump is an existential threat to Iran. Iran is in a regional cold[0] war with Israel. Israel’s ability to wage this war is largely dependent on US support; both in terms of raw military assistance, and in the US providing diplomatic and economic cover for Israel.

While the US had not applied nearly as much moderating pressure on Israel as I would have liked, it has still provided some. Israeli prime minister Netenyahu, in contrast, has been angling for a direct confrontation with Iran for decades now. Given the past 11 months, there are serious forces, both in Israeli politics, Iranian politics, and the inertia of war, pushing in that direction.

Trump is aligned with Netenyahu on this point, and would push him towards a direct confrontation with Iran. By all indications, Harris is not. This dynamic was made clear to Iran when the Democratic administration signed the Iran nuclear deal (against Israeli opposition), from which the US under Trump proceeded to unilaterally withdraw from.

[0] Cold might be a bit of an understatement after the last 11 months. However, apart from a brief tit-for-tat exchange, the fighting has stayed confined to Israel and Iranian proxies.

The 27th amendment was sent to the states by the first congress allong with the 10 that would become known as the bill of rights. This group also included a still unratified amendment that would increase the size of the house of representatives based on population (as of the 2020 census, today’s house would have about 6600 members).

The way the 27th amendment got ratified is a truly inspiring story of political activism. It was largely forgotten about until 1982, when Gregory Watson wrote a paper arguing that 18th century proposal could still be ratified. This paper received a C in Watson’s undergraduate political science class. This injustice led Watson to lead a 10 year campaign to ratify the amendment, which ultimately succeeded in 1992.

This scandal was so big, that Watson’s professor fled academia [0]. Eventually, Professor Waite was tracked down to her family’s farm, and in 2017 submitted a grade change revising the paper to an A. Later that year, the Texas legislature passed a resolution on the subject:

RESOLVED, That the 85th Legislature of the State of Texas hereby congratulate Gregory D. Watson on receiving a revised grade of A in his 1982 Government 310 class at The University of Texas at Austin

Thus finally closing the chapter on one of this nation’s most infamous grading disputes.

[0] Historians dispute the fact thar Proffesor Waite’s decision to leave Academia, which occured prior to the ratification of the 27th amendment, was in any way related to this.