Tag Archives: politics

Vivek Ramaswamy’s Brief Thought on Taxation

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And my brief response. Ramaswamy has said in the past that he favors an estate tax as high as 59% on his theory that passing wealth from parents to children breeds inequality and “hereditary aristocracy.” Stipulate that’s reasonably accurate: he needs to show that he’s considered other means of preventing that aristocratic development and how those alternatives are inadequate to the task.

More importantly, though, is this underlying theory of his:

I do believe in a vision of bringing income taxes as low as possible, if one could collect it back on the back end[.]

Collect what back, exactly? The money in question belongs solely to the one who has, or had, the income. Money being retained by its owner rather tautologically leaves nothing for government to “collect back” at some later time; government has lost nothing and so has nothing to regain.

I Have a Question

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It seems that employers offering/allowing remote work at least some of the time, are better able to hire quickly than employers who require full-time presence in the office for work. The subheadline nicely sums up the article’s thesis.

Employers offering flexible work options are hiring at a faster pace than those requiring full-time office attendance

And the lede:

With employers fighting for a limited pool of office workers, those offering remote-friendly jobs appear to have the upper hand.

Upper hand compared to what? That brings me to my question, which is this: what’s the quality of work done by the part-time remote employee compared with that of the full-time in-the-office employee?

OK, a second question: what’s the quality of employee who works remotely at least some of the time compared with the employee who works in the office full time?

A bonus question: what’s the quality of the quickly hired employee, or the quality of the work done by him—the partial remote employee, for instance, but not exclusively so for this question—compared with the employee who’s hired after some time spent by the employer in the search?

Have a Plan and Stick to It

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Or not. Apartment buildings—aka multifamily buildings—have been a sound investment for sound investors, but the investments aren’t all that these days, because the investors aren’t all that these days.

Apartment-building values fell 14% for the year ended in June after rising 25% the previous year, according to data company CoStar.

But even at that, apartment building values still were up more than 7% on the two years. On the other hand,

[u]nlike office buildings and malls, which have been hit hard by remote work and e-commerce, rental apartments have low vacancy rates. The apartment sector’s main problem isn’t a lack of demand—rents have soared since 2020—it is interest rates.

Oh yeah. Debt and the associated interest vig. That’s where investors, who used to have a plan, stopped having serious plans, or walked away from the ones they had. There exists, today, $2 trillion in apartment building mortgage debt, double that of a decade ago. That, by itself, shouldn’t be a problem, but. But, but, but.

Most apartment loans are fixed-rate, long-term mortgages. During the pandemic, however, investors took out more shorter-term, floating-rate loans.

The warning signs were obvious, though: increasing lock-down and related government overreactions to the pandemic already were leading to increasing rent payment delinquincies, to say nothing of Federal government-mandated rent payment deferrals; inflation pressures from the Federal government’s panicky pandemic-related spendings and bailouts that were already predicting a need to raise interest rates; and on and on. Why move away from the stability of long-term mortgage borrowing, except in the hopefulness of being able to flip the property or keep raising (unpaid and increasingly unpayable) rents to cover the rising debt costs of floating rate loans, when the loans would need to be rolled, soon, into ever higher interest rate loans?

Even in investing, it’s optimal to dance with the girl what brung you, to stick to your original plan, no matter how many hot, can’t miss, deals show up.

Wrong Way to Punish the FBI?

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are concerned that doing away with FISA’s Section 702 would be the wrong way to punish the FBI.

I agree. But the editors are missing the point. They too narrowly justify 702 with this:

Congress created Section 702 after 9/11 to address intelligence-gathering gaps. It lets the government collect information without a warrant on non-US citizens living abroad.

That’s a worthy purpose; although the realization has demonstrated the difficulty of using the capability to good effect, and without abusing it. Or the impossibility of that with the current regime. The FBI has demonstrated that, as an institution, it cannot be trusted with 702 output, and the FISA Court has empirically demonstrated that cannot be trusted, either—not after squawking about FBI lies in the latter’s filings and then proceeding to accept unquestioningly further FBI blandishments and warrant applications.

Answering those deficiencies, though, is a separate matter from applying the appropriate responses to the FBI’s misbehaviors and the FISA Court’s yapping about those misbehaviors.

The FBI is irretrievably broken—its lies to a court are only part of the institution’s failures; its stonewalling of Congress under the risible rationalization that its internal procedure policies are superior to Congress’ constitutionally mandated oversight obligations are another—and it needs to be erased from our government altogether. That, not dealing with 702, is the correct response to the FBI’s institutional dishonesty.

The correct FISA-related action is to make the FISA Court a public proceeding court or itself eliminated as well. That’s not punishing anybody; that’s simply getting rid of the stain of a secretive Star Chamber and forcing “court” activities out into the sunlight, or bringing the warrant application/granting process back into a proper Article III court. Those courts, after all, are fully checked out on the process of keeping warrants sealed until execution.

Be More Obsequious

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Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) is tired of the Republican Party.

I wish the Republican Party would be—somebody would take it back, that we’d have a real Republican Party.

The Progressive-Democratic Party position, as demonstrated by Pelosi, is that the Republican Party should go back to being satisfied with being the loyal opposition and stop being so uppity.