Wait now. I forgot… climate =! weather
Climate change at work? Weather Service calls for third straight mild winter.
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Monthly Archives: December 2017
Analysis: False on that, Mike
Some politicians are people too, apparently
Holly likes movies, and Holly likes going to movies on Christmas night, and she has been doing this all her life. So movies were on the agenda last night as Xmas activities wound down. Holly, me, the 2 boys.
Wanted to see Darkest Hour, because I am something of a Churchill-o-phile, though I think about him less than I do baseball and sixguns. And my youngest is now something of a Churchill-o-phile.
So this reverence for Churchill… I feel like I was there on the ground floor twenty years ago (though yes, he was a cultish figure before that…). As a standard Churchill fanboy I did feel urgency to see the movie.
You had to jump through some hoops to see Darkest Hour. It’s out, but kinda limited release, only at AMC theaters here locally. There are none by where we live. We drove to Inver Grove Heights for the 5:10 show and it was sold out. So you check the phones… oh, it’s at Rosedale too. So we hit the road and made it to Rosedale for the 6:45.
We get our tickets and are standing there waiting for the showing to open for seating, and who ends up standing off about 15 feet behind us to wait… Amy Klobuchar and her husband and her daughter.
To the wife, I’m “Is that who I think it is?”
She says “yes, don’t stare”.
Much as there was any reason to doubt, I heard her chatting with the fam, and yes it was the Senator.
I was kind of star struck.
Short woman, not much taller than 5 ft. Looks a bit younger than 57 if that’s what she is. Her old man is about 6’ 6, and her daughter might be 6 ft. They looked liked they enjoyed each others’ company.
No one bugged them. I’m not sure anyone besides us noticed. That’s life without CNN or FOX running constantly.
Kinda comforting in some way to see her out enjoying normalcy. When they left I saw them get into a pretty modest late model Chev. Can’t say I approve of Chevrolet’s as a matter of judgment though, second rate cars. As a matter of politics she must feel compelled to drive American rather than a Toyota.
Now more than ever…. 529s work best if you’re rich
I’m really looking forward to the Chait-splainer that gives Obama a pass for the Hezbollah criminal enterprise
The Dacke War
I’m sitting here doing genealogy, and I feel like I’ve really zeroed in on my ancestral village like Alex Haley zeroed in on Juffure, Gambia: my paternal line comes from Gullabo, Sweden. An absolute nothing of a spot, which is what you want in an ancestral village. It’s in south Sweden, which was ground zero for Swedish emigration in the latter 1800’s … a little inland from the Baltic.
You look for stuff to read about Gullabo, your Wikipedia walkabout brings you to this, kind of a middle age / enlightenment libertarian revolt there amidst all the serfdom and peasantry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dacke_War
Very, very braveheart-ish, Nils Dacke is certainly as script worthy as Willliam Wallace eh. Nils Dacke was from Gullabo, which just isn’t very big. Ya figure there’s some chance I’ve got part of his bloodline in me. Ya figure.
Anyway, my peeps got on a ship in Gothenburg in 1889, their home parish listed as Gullabo, destination Stillwater, MN USA.
The week in law enforcement injustices
Officer Noor hasn’t yet been charged with manslaughter for killing Justine Damond for no good reason, and given the time that’s passed there’s some worry over that. With the news comments threads, there’s left and right fears that have taken hold:
- The left: that Noor won’t be charged because Freeman will want to ‘cover the shooting up’ to save the reputations of local municipal institutions.
- The right: that Noor won’t be charged because Noor is a Somali, and the Somali’s are shielded by political correctness or something…
These two thoughts, they are fucking dumb, inane shit.
Noor is going to get charged.
Ya know, when circumstances are fertile for it you’ll have politicians say they ‘do their job dispassionately, immune to public pressure,” yada yada…
Well, a dispassionate no-bill of Noor by Freeman in the face of an existing public furor would be an institutional destabilizing event for the Hennepin County attorneys office. Freeman is 70 and may not run again in 2018…. But not charging Noor ends his career the moment he announces there will be no charges. It ends his career as fast as the Damond shooting ended the police chief’s a couple months ago.
And we may assume he doesn’t want to go out like that, as a failure. Noor is going to get charged.
As far as this deal where Freeman was caught on phone camera blaming the BCA investigators… uh, he was caught telling the truth there, I’m sure…. And not that the BCA wants to protect Noor like it probably wanted to protect Yanez, but ya know…. Gov. Dayton got his undies in a bunch like Freeman was attacking the excellence of state workers….. gimme a break, these guys are no doubt mediocrities with no great ability in excess of going out to make a couple witness interviews. The Damond case is tricky given the beneficial assumptions we make of police, so this has lagged in Freeman’s office given the necessity for a different kind of prosecution.
But Noor will get charged. Maybe next week.
Media alert: fishmongers
This might have been on this morning. I missed it. I don’t know how old Sam is, way younger than me, maybe 25, I think hes the youngest Monson cousin. Could be older but I don’t think 30 is around the corner for him. Handsome devil, tall, poised. I could see him being a major league cuisine guy.
Zingy brushs up on pass throughs
OK, I knew what pass throughs were. If you are an S or you and your buddies are an LLC, your enterprise income isn’t taxed at the ‘company’ level because it just passes through to owners… if it was taxed at the corporate level you’d still have to pay the individual tax on your own income, and it would be taxed twice…. So, they don’t do that, with S’s and LLC and PLCs etc there is the pass through mechanism.
So you keep hearing, ‘but pass through owners are going to get this huge tax break’, and I’m like what? But they are paying at the individual rate, no different than anyone else.
Well… the pass through guys wanted a break comparable to the C corp guys, so what’s gotten written in is like, they get to deduct the first 20% of their money, then pay individual rates. So I guess if you have a business that throws you a $1M income, it will play out like this (let’s pretend we’re not actually calculating last marginal dollars and all that):
Current: $1M, you are taxed at top personal rates of say 39%.
Under Trump taxes: You shelter $200k right off the bat and then are taxed at top marginal rates of like 37%
K, in the first example, the dude isn’t actually paying $390K in federal taxes, alright. It’s somewhat less, but I’ve dummied this to be the difference between 39% of $1M vs 37% of 800k. And at that point, this difference is $94k. It’s just to say, if you have a bourgeois prosperous pass through, your tax cut is going to be in the tens of thousands.
Sooo…. Do these guys deserve it, is there a need to give them corporate tax treatment? Not really… But it isn’t the death of the country. I live near the river, right. I know who’s got the bourgeois pass throughs, the orthodontists, the building contractors, the accountants with great local practices, the physicians, the realtors, the lawyers. Way more of them out there than hedge fund managers.
I think they can basically use the money too, as far as it goes, and that its well spent in the private economy, which is dynamic but oddly sclerotic at the same time. Plus, quite a bit of deductions are being lost.
Tax Overhaul Armageddon + Zingy econ outlook for 2018
*** I think it’s going to be highly stimulative with the corporate rate cut and the overseas cash repatriation
*** Does this economy need a stimulant? Maybe not, but we need corporate tax reform as a matter of long term competitiveness. The time to do it is now, because we have unified govt. The Democrats would never allow it if they had a say, though they give lip service to corporate tax reform at times. Which is to say, they lie about that to seem pro business when they are not…
*** Yes adds to the debt, but I doubt in numbers bigger than what’s forecasted, $1.5 T over 10 years. I think it might come in lower due to, yes, Laffer / supply side optimization. You get 4% growth out of this like we very well might, things will really be cooking along.
***adding to the debt really isn’t much of a harm, people. It’s a tax in effect, and a pretty benign one at that.
*** Still, such that the govt requires budgetary equilibrium even though we run debt, there may be a need for another tefra / tamra 5 years down the road to fix the excesses of this thing just like happened with Reagan.
*** If things go well I expect homes to appreciate real fast again. That’s where the money goes when it gets made.
*** I doubt actually that ‘the richest among us’ are the biggest beneficiaries. Ya’ll notice there aren’t any cap gains cuts? People who’s livelihood is taxed at the investment rate didn’t get anything.
*** people with high w2 income made out pretty good I imagine, but who takes w2 income in amounts over a mere couple million? Joe Mauer and his ilk maybe, but not physicians, attorneys, rock star accountants, etc… So I’m saying, physicians, attorneys… the gold collar crowd… they do well under the tax cut. That’s not who I think of when I hear “richest amongst us” blah blah. They are pretty rich as far as it goes, but not grossly rich.
*** If I get $2.5 K relief, that’s quite a bit… probably a third off what I’ve paid federally last couple years. Meaningful amount of money, make up some for what I spend on health insurance, which was supposed to go down right…
Zingy Skyway Lunch 