Ian Welsh – The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

So, Merz has announced that German workers will need a note from a doctor day one of calling in sick, and they must get that note in person: phone calls are no longer acceptable.

All the usual garbage: uncompetitive, high costs for employers, blah, blah, blah. (This comes after raising the retirement age.)

Here’s the actual sick leave situation:

Hey, it suddenly increased after 2020? Is anyone surprised? Bueller?

Anyway, doctors and clinics are a fixed resource. Forcing people to go in and see a doctor (normal wait times in Germany are two to three days) mean taking more time with the patient. That means pushing other patients back. So wait time will increase.

Second more sick people will go into work. Some of them will be infectious. More people would wind up sick than if you just let people stay home.

Sub voce this is “we don’t trust people, we think some of them are lying” plus “people really should work when only slightly ill. Suck it up sunshine.”

But the increase in sick time is clearly Covid related, presumably long Covid, so it isn’t likely there’s a sudden epidemic of malingering. And while you can’t pass on long Covid directly, it still means that other people who do have diseases they can donate to their co-workers will come in.

Governments rarely seem to think thru these second order effects and ask if they’re worth it. The City of Toronto has been forced by the Province of Ontario to shut down supervised injection sites.

Now if you’re a normal human person you’re probably thinking “oh no, people will die!”

And that’s true. But Premier Ford doesn’t give a damn about that. There is another effect, however, that he should give a damn about, because voters care, and the Conservaties do have seats in Toronto.

Average wait times in emergency wards are a bit over an hour thru the province. But they’re much higher in Toronto. As of this writing the closest emergency department to me has a wait time of a bit over five hours.

According to ER doctors overdoses can drive those times up significantly. Overdoses require priority treatment, after all. So if more drug users are overdosing (or their drug wasn’t what they thought it was, because the supply is so adulterated), then wait times will go up more.

And voters care about this. A lot. (Last time I went to an emergency department I waited over eight hours. I needed stitches, it was overnight, but I was in no danger, so I got to wait a very long ) People have in some cases died because of wait times, since it isn’t always obvious how bad something is, and while the number may not be large, the bad publicity often is.

This is something Ford and the Conservatives should care about, but it’s rarely mentioned. Bleeding hearts (which I mostly am) tend to lead with “drug users will die”, not getting that to Ford that’s probably a good thing. But “regular citizens will wait longer in the ER and some of them will die” is not something he wants. He may not personally care (I doubt he cares about anybody but himself), but he does care politically.

As for Merz, he’s the worst German leader of my lifetime, trying to run military Keynesianism and letting Germany’s industry be destroyed while he fiddles with marginalia. A few extra sick days aren’t why Germany’s losing its industry and it won’t make the least bit of difference. What is required is innovation and driving down energy prices, but that would require making peace with Russia and Merz is a warmonger.

Ruled by fools.

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

Most US Jobs Won’t Support An American Lifestyle

By Ian Welsh

On July 6, 2026

17 Comments

Over at Interfluidity there’s a good post titled “Why Are Americans So Unhappy?”

Part of the answer boils down to this graph:

What this measures is what percentage of expenses of employees wages pay.

You’ll notice it keeps going down. It peaked near 100% around 1968 and has been trending down since. It’s now under 80%. Note the spike in 2020 when the government let lose the taps and actually helped people. I know a lot of people who, contra the “lockdowns sucks” remember 2020 as the only time they got to take a paid vacation. (And suicides in the under 18 group dropped massively, because school sucks.)

What makes up the rest of the money people use to support themselves? Well, for the better off its assets based wealth: dividends, capital gains and all that good stuff. But for all intents and purposes if you aren’t in top 10% the amount of money you get from these sources is infintesimal. So, in fact, what actually makes it up is having two people working where one plus maybe a minor part time job would cover it.

The post is worth reading in total, but I want to point out something simple: this is deliberate. This is a result of policy. This is what American elites worked hard to create.

There are a lot of moving parts, but the most important for a long time was that the idea of NAIRU, that unemployment below a certain level was bad and caused inflation, so every time unemployment got low, the Federal reserve would crush the economy. (This is why good employment news would cause the market to go down, and bad employment news would cause it to rise all through the 80s to 2000s.)

Low unemployment is when employers are forced to raise wages, since there’s more jobs than applicants. It’s when labor has pricing power. So the Federal Reserve spent over 30 years (and still does occasionally) deliberately suppressing wages because they figured that wages were the most important form of inflation.

Or that’s what they said. There’s lots of sources of inflation, but somehow the Fed was never concerned with bubbles, never concerned with moral risk, never concerned with oligopolies and monopolies, never concerned with actually supply as opposed to demand. Nope, it was all those nasty workers who wanted raises.

Now a cynic, or perhaps a realist, might think “if there were a lot of ways to deal with inflation and the only one they did was crush wages” that perhaps inflation wasn’t at least 50% just an excuse to crush wages.

A realist might notice that everything else happening, like tax cuts on the rich, the end of Glass-Steagall, deregulation and much more all seemed to have as its effect making the already rich richer, and notice that wages are an expense to rich people, not their primary source of income, and that crushing wages thus also helped make the already wealth even richer.

Since many people pointed out, as early as the mid 80s, that the result of the policies being pursued would be rampant inequality, and indeed it was showing up in the stats as early as those 80s, one can safely assume that decision makers, whether at the Fed, Congress or anywhere else understood what the results would be.

But, after all, they are the important people. The good people. The job creators. The people who are worthy of having lots of money. Nurses, orderlies, janitors, clerical workers, garbage men: pretty much everyone who has a job that actually does something the economy actually needs done and when it isn’t done people scream, they’re putzes and don’t deserve to have a good life. Just disposable trash.

At its heart it really is this simple. There were plenty of ways to deal with inflation, and many were suggested at the time. The most regressive path, one everyone knew would cause a lot of poverty and increase the wealth of a minority massively was chosen. It was chosen because it benefited the people in charge and their retainers, and those people didn’t and don’t care about anyone else.

Along the way the morons also managed to piss away America’s industrial and tech lead and lose America’s superpower status. But being fake rich (because it’s China that’s actually rich now, no matter how many billions of US dollars you have) and crushing their lessers was what was important to them.

And yeah, plenty of people, your kind and gentle host included, predicted this, well in advance. It was known. If you didn’t know, it was because you metaphorically had your fingers in your ears as you chanted “it doesn’t matter who makes things, or where. The market is global and fungible. It doesn’t matter who makes things, or where the market is….”

Anyway, it worked out for a few people. A few million. It’s a big club, as a comedian once noted, and you aren’t in it.

Your living standard was crushed, your wife was forced to work (not just permitted, but forced) and your children’s future was pissed down the drain deliberately, along with America’s place in the world, because it made a few million people rich, and a few thousand so rich Gilded Age barons would be jealous.

There was a class war.

The rich won.

You lost.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 05, 2026

By Tony Wikrent

On July 5, 2026

6 Comments

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 05, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

UNhappy birthday, America

Reconsidering the Constitution’s Preamble: The Words that Made Us U.S. — University of Wisconsin Legal Studies Research Paper Series Paper No. 1718

David S. Schwartz, September 25, 2021 [37 Constitutional Commentary 2022]

[TW: I now refer to the GOP and its members as (anti)Republicans and the (anti)Republican Party, because they believe in a philosophy of governance that is repugnant to the original principles of civic republicanism on which USA was founded. The two major principles of civic republicanism are promoting the general welfare, and justice, as explained by Senator Charles Sumner in a speech on February 5 and 6, 1866, The Equal Rights of All: The Great Guaranty and Present Necessity, for the Sake of Security, and to Maintain a Republican Government; Speech in the Senate, on the proposed Amendment of the Constitution Fixing the Basis of Representation. (Here are excerpts.)

[(Anti)Republicans have openly and explicitly rejected the founding principle of promoting the general welfare. This rejection is centralt to their attacks on the “welfare state.” See Randall G. Holcombe’s 1992 article arguing that the major improvement of the Confederate Civil War constitution was the elimination of the General Welfare mandate. Holcombe served on Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors in Bush’s 2016 presidential campaign. Also see Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s May, 2011 misinterpretation of James Madison, enumerated powers, and the General Welfare mandate.

[Recovering the meaning of the General Welfare Clause necessarily includes a rebuttal of conservative / neoconfederate / (anti)Federalist attempt rewrite the Constitution with their pet theories of constitutional originalism and enumerated powers.

[Until they were shocked by the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022, liberals and leaders of the Democratic Party have been blind to this reactionary project. Democrats and “the left” have committed a grievous error of omission by ignoring the historical record of the fight within USA between republicanism and oligarchy, and rejecting out of hand USA Constitutional law and political history as mere instruments of an oppressive and exploitative capitalist system tainted irremediably by slavery, racism and bigotry. This omission has crippled the ability of “the left” – not to mention the leadership of the Democratic Party – to comprehensively understand how thorough, insidious, and deadly the reactionary project is. They mistakenly believed liberalism was a derivative of civic republicanism instead of seeing how much of liberalism — with its emphasis on “private property” and “individual liberty” — was shaped as an oligarchical response to civic republicanism and the rise of the American republic. Thus they were disastrously outflanked by the Rehnquist / Scalia / Thomas assault on the law and persistent undermining of the principles of civic republicanism.

[Nevertheless, some constitutional scholars and historians — such as those listed in the excerpts below — were quite aware of the reactionary assault on the USA justice system, and working to correct a historical record that had been hijacked by the conservative / neoconfederate / (anti)Federalist project. The liberal / Democratic / “left” response to “the right” is bound to fail until it incorporates the work of these constitutional scholars and historians.

[Conservatives and originalists dismiss the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution as a “stylistic flourish with no operative legal significance,” but “the drafting history of the Preamble, observable by comparing the preambles in the Articles of Confederation, the Committee of Detail draft of the Constitution, and the Committee of Style’s final version, demonstrate that the Framers considered the Preamble to be substantively meaningful.” There is room to debate the exact meaning of the Preamble — “it might be viewed as a rejection of compact theory, as an interpretive guide to the powers granted in the body of the Constitution, or as a source of implied powers.” But concluding that the Preamble is “a legally inoperative flourish has no basis as a matter of text or history.”

[In his 1833 three-volume Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States — long considered the most through and faithful exposition of Constitutional interpretation — Justice Joseph Story wrote that while the Preamble does not confer any “substantive power” on the national government, it does “expound the nature, and extent, and application of the powers actually conferred by the
constitution,” and should be used as a guide to interpreting the Constitution when “the terms of a given power admit of two constructions, the one more restrictive, the other more liberal.” Further, interpretation should be “governed by the intent of the power;” that is, Constitutional interpretation of federal powers should “promote” and not restrict — Story uses the word “defeat”” — that power. Schwartz writes,

“For Story, then, the preamble is an argument against strict construction of federal powers: a statement that the Constitution’s grants of powers are to be liberally construed, to promote such things as “the general welfare.”

[This is, of course, the exact opposite of the doctrines of conservatives and originalists such as William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito, not to mention the entire (anti)Federalist Society. Schwartz makes the important point that

The argument that the preamble meant nothing more than a stylistic flourish … was highly congenial to compact theorists, nullifiers, and secessionists.

[We have seen this throughout American history: the “domestic enemies” of the Constitution have tried repeatedly to have the Constitution reinterpreted in ways that limit and even abrogate the powers of the national government. Today, the “domestic enemies” of the Constitution want to dismantle “the administrative state” and allow “free enterprise” and “private property” free reign to foul our environment, alter our climate, exploit our labor, limit our economic prospects, mute our political participation, and surveil our lives.

[Schwartz ends by noting that at the time of ratification, the Anti-Federalists fully understood that the grand objectives proclaimed in the Preamble meant that the federal government was not at all strictly limited in its powers, but pointed to an expansive realm of implied powers, as Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton would argue in his February 1791 report to President Washington on the constitutionality of establishing a national bank.

[Schwartz writes,

The Framers felt they had to clarify that the new government was a truly national government, and moreover, one based on republican principles—that is, authorized by the sovereign people, not by a grand interstate compact.

Significantly, nothing in the Preamble makes “limited enumerated powers” an object, or—pace Madison—an essential characteristic of the national government. The preamble does not list “federalism,” or “state sovereignty” or “balancing national powers with the rights of the states” among its great objects. [p. 10] ….

Federalists and Anti-Federalists during the ratification debates and early republic both understood the Preamble “as reinforcing a theory of sovereignty and national union that expanded the scope of national power, beyond either those powers that were enumerated or those powers that might be aggregated from that enumeration.” This nationalist reading, channeling the constitutional vision most acutely expressed by James Wilson, was thus a prominent reading—although so read with horror by Anti-Federalists—as Federalists in the early post-ratification years argued that the Preamble was indeed a legitimate source of implied powers. [pp. 11-12]

[There is plenty of history that clearly demonstrates the wild inaccuracy of “originalist” interpretation: Hamilton’s reports, Justice James Wilson’s law lectures in the first years of the republic [and it was actually Wilson who wrote most of the Constitution; Madison is better known because he took notes on the proceedings and later became President], Justice Story’s Commentaries, and more. Never forget that yhe Southern slaveholders insisted the slave states were the true republics in their time. Failure to understand what a republic really is at that time, and repudiate the slaveholders accordingly, led to civil war. ]

Open Thread

By Ian Welsh

On July 4, 2026

21 Comments

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts. If you’re in America, I hope you enjoyed the holiday.

The Surveillance Society Is Here Courtesy Of Private Enterprise

By Ian Welsh

On July 3, 2026

17 Comments

In China they have cameras everywhere. I’m not a fan, but by most accounts the government doesn’t abuse this power much and it has made Chinese cities far safer. (If you want to argue they do abuse the power a lot, please look at incarceration per capita in China compared to the US. China seems to suck at police stateing. Yes, I know that’s not a word, but this is my blog and I’m going to use it anyway!)

In the US it’s flock cameras. They’re everywhere it seems.

⚠️Ten years ago we saw videos of China’s wall‑to‑wall cameras and said, “Glad that’s not us.”

Well… are we there yet?

HT: @jamesmadisonaudits pic.twitter.com/AfOR5WQCrx

— Jason Bassler (@JasonBassler1) June 17, 2026

The network currently is mostly about license plate readers, but the cameras are being expanded (no facial recognition yet, but I’d lay long odds they have it soon.)

Flock has recently expanded into other technologies, including advanced cameras that monitor more than just vehicles. Most concerning are the latest Flock drones equipped with high-powered cameras. Flock’s “Drone as First Responder” platform automates drone operations, including launching them in response to 911 calls or gunfire. Flock’s drones, which reach speeds up to 60 mph, can follow vehicles or people and provide information to law enforcement.

The key thing here is that police can get this data easily, without a warrant. Even if you’re smart enough to leave your phone at home, pretty soon they’ll be able to track everything you do. This data will be stored, and if it’s ever time to get you, they will have years of data. What was innocuous at the time (that organization wasn’t on the watch list when you were involved) can be used against you, especially since America’s laws are so labyrinthine that practically everyone has committed something a prosecutor could call a crime.

And the idea that only police will have access to the data is laughable.

Trust America to create a panopticon which is worse than a government controlled one. Not only does the government get your 24/7 activities, but so can corporations and connected rich people.

God bless the Free market.

Old timers will know I used to write a lot about the coming surveillance society. Well, it’s pretty close to her. Less than five years, I’d guess, and anonymity will be essentially totally gone. Welcome to fishbowl world.

I also wrote many years ago that I’d know people were getting serious about freedom when they started destroying surveillance cameras, and there’s some signs of that:

🚨 BREAKING NEWS: People are straight-up DESTROYING Flock cameras across the country right now.

They’re out at night with power tools, sparks flying, cutting these surveillance poles down like it’s nothing.

Is this the start of a real privacy uprising… or just reckless… https://t.co/GYWmc1DFOF pic.twitter.com/WaMdqo5rH4

— Noah B. Price (@TrueOnX) July 2, 2026

A sliver of a silver lining, but better than nothing.

As for China, the CPC may be using this mostly responsibly, but it’s a loaded gun waiting to picked up when the government turns tyrannical and if history tells us anything it’s that over a hundred years or so, that’s almost guaranteed.

A surveilled world may be safer in some ways, but the price is significant.

The Basic Elements of Meditation: Meditation As Exercise

By Ian Welsh

On July 2, 2026

4 Comments

Meditation is simple.

Not easy, but simple in the same way exercise is. You do reps, with proper technique (bad technique can injure you or make the meditation unsuccessful).

Over time these reps teach your mind to operate in different and hopefully better ways.

To meditate all you need is a simple algo. Concentration meditation:

Pick an object of meditation. Your breath, a mantra, the center of your forehead, a flame, pretty much anything., Put your attention on it. When you notice you’re not paying attention, congratulate yourself for noticing and put your attention back on the object.

That’s it. It really is that simple, though as you advance there are various tricks and so on which can help. But you could go all the way just with that.

Vipissana (one type)

Notice something in your consciousness. Place your attention on it for a few seconds, then dismiss it gently (with love if you can), move to another object, do the same thing again. If you notice you’ve stopped this sequence, congratulate yourself for noticing and go back to it.

Not exactly rocket science, is it? It’s just that we are never trained how to use our minds or control our attention or awareness. There are plenty of different variations, but at their heart, almost all of them are like this.

Any type of meditation of this sort of also trains meta attention, which is just knowing what you’re paying attention to at any time. If you’ve ever intended to do something and realized you’ve been doing something else for a few minutes, or longer, then your meta-attention failed. For most people, this is frequent. You can’t control your attention if you don’t know if what it’s doing is what you intended. This is probably the most important meditative capacity, and it’s useful in life as well.

There are two types of meditative accomplishments.

The first are like exercising to stay in shape. If you stop doing cardio your resting heart rate goes back up and you can’t run for very long without losing your breath., If you stop lifting weights the muscles slowly go away. Concentration meditation and the altered states it can get you into (which are VERY nice) is like this. If you want this capacity you’ll first have to get into mental, probably at a retreat, then you need to maintain the ability, which is about two hours a day.

The second type is like learning how to throw a ball or ride a bike. If you keep meditating/exercising, you’ll be a better, but if you stop you don’t forget. These sorts of accomplishments include things like being less reactive and more relaxed, various psychological improvements and various attainments that are sometimes considered enlightened such as viewing the world as yourself, having no self (interpretative difference), lack of suffering on automatic as opposed to requiring meditative tricks and so on.

The second type are often called insights. They aren’t like intellectual insights (though intellect can be used to help gain them), they are changes in how you view the world at a subconscious level. Sometimes this can go back, there’s a whole group of shrinks treating meditators who drove themselves crazy with depersonalization or derealization. Both “I am not a person” and “I am not real” are insights, but if you can’t handle them, they go from good to bad.

So the general rule of meditation is that if starts getting really scary, stop. Consult a teacher you trust, but take a break. Now this doesn’t mean stopping at any unpleasantness because as soon as you make actual progress there will be unpleasantness. Your mind starts to calm, the chatter grows less, and all the garbage and trauma and fears and desires that have been suppressed start bubbling up.

It’s ugly. The more screwed up you are (and you may be more screwed up than you think) the more it sucks. Over time, if you stick it out, you learn to let all this crap go, or most of it and you feel a lot better. But the process isn’t fun.

Anyway. Meditation is just learning how to control your own mind, or learning about the mind in general, since you sure can’t control a lot of it. It’s pretty simple, the complications all come from what happens when you begin to realize you aren’t who or what you thought you were. That can be ugly.

Find a meditation you like, do the reps. Always be sure to include some lpving kindness or concentration meditation, never do just insight meditation except under the instruction of a teacher you trust who is monitoring your progress.

Management Theory (MBAs) Are Two Thirds About Non-Competition

By Ian Welsh

On July 1, 2026

19 Comments

There’s book from the 2000’s called “The Management Myth” by Stewart on my bookshelf. It didn’t sell all that well, but it’s an important book because it explains what management science is really about.

Stewart was a consultant, he reported from the belly of the beast.

Here’s the short of it: while Economics is crap, it is right about a few things, and one of those is that actual competitive markets have almost no profits.

A competitive market has:

low barriers to entry
many buyers and sellers
no one with pricing power,
and products are similar, meaning not identical but that competitors can quickly catch up with any advances.

If you’re a businessman, you don’t want to be in a market like this. You won’t make much money. Nor do you want to be in a regulated market where they attempt to make sure that anyone who has pricing power or another “moat” as they like to call it these days doesn’t make huge profits although more than in a competitive market. This is how the West was run between about 1933 to 1979. If your market was competitive, other than baseline rules, you were left alone. If it wasn’t, you were regulated. The most extreme case was usually utilities, which made x% (usually about five percent) profit a year. Not more. Not less.

Anyway, this sucks ass if you want to be as filthy rich as mud wrestlers are dirty.

So what Western businessmen (and a few women, but mostly men) did was take over government and dismantle all the rules and regulations intended to make sure that monopolies and oligopolies and so on didn’t form, and that if they did, they were regulated to protect consumers.

And now companies make MASSIVE profits. It’s sweet.

Except in China, where they mostly don’t. China’s notorious for having a low ROI.

That’s because China runs competitive markets or regulated markets, and very little in between. The CPC is on this like Nancy Pelosi trading inside information. They put CEOs in prison. They execute them. They regulate. You will compete, and if you disobey the law in a way that becomes big enough to notice, they will suggest you come in for a nice little chat.

There’s some talk that China’s low ROI is a “crisis”. And it could maybe bit a little higher. But only a little, to help avoid a deflationary depression trap (see “Great Depression.”)

But if China tackles this by allowing competitive markets to become un-competitive they’ll lose the juggernaut that is crushing industries in the rest of the world. People buy Chinese because it’s cheaper, and sometimes better. Product cycles are blazing fast, everyone’s cutting prices and improving models. This is why China has cars for under $20K—they aren’t able to charge oligopoly pricing. This is also why you can’t buy Chinese cars in America or much of Europe, because Western car makers would wind up like Carthage: burned to the ground, with the earth salted.

To simplify, but not to over-simplify, America and the West lost their lead because their businesses wanted to make lots and lots of money, so they destroyed competitive markets. This is also why you see this happening as the wave of MBAs and quants and other people who know nothing about product but have studies management science take over from the Engineers as CEOs.

Your economy can make lots of profits, or it can be competitive and thus keep prices low for consumers. It cannot do both. Pick one.

BYD also sells a LOT more cars, their revenue is only comparable with Tesla because Teslas cost MUCH more.

Anyway, if you want the details, read the book, though it’s somewhat out of date now, it gets the basics down better than any other one I’ve read. And since prices keep going up, and since this blog is free to read, perhaps consider subscribing or donating. I promise the money is only, occasionally, wasted on eating something nice and buying books. No I don’t have a book problem. Why are you looking at me like that?

How Many Poor People Could Elon’s Trillion Lift Out Of Poverty?

By Ian Welsh

On June 30, 2026

25 Comments

Every once in a while a complete tool graces the comments and inspires a post with their sheer stupidity.

A trillion dollars is a million million dollars. Elon is worth over a trillion dollars. Let us say that all of that minus 20 million was taken from him and it added up to on trillion. He should be fine on just 20 million. (I sure would be. Perhaps your need to snort cocaine off naked models is greater than mine. Hey, I’m not judging.)

Now let’s take that trillion dollars and give it to the homeless. Supposedly there’s about 750K, but we’ll give the next poorest 250K money too.

That’s a million each.

“But Ian”, you cavil, “they must be irresponsible people because only bad, stupid drug addled bad bad bad people wind up homeless. They can’t manage a million dollars and they’ll just spend it all on drugs in a few months and be homeless again!”

That’s not actually what the evidence shows. When you just give homeless people money, they mostly use it on smart stuff, but let’s pretend it is and admit that some of them, like some of us, don’t make the best decisions.

We’ll buy them annuities. Assuming age 40, that’s about $3,500 a month. Age 60, over $5,000 a month.

So, Elon has enough money to make every homeless person not homeless. And he’s only one billionaire+.

All total America’s billionaires hold about 8.5 trillion dollars. If we knock them all down to 20 million we could give at least 8 million of the poorest people in America annuities that pay about $3,500 a month. (One does feel for the cocaine dealers and models in this scenario, however. Oh, an the mega-yacht builders. No progress without someone suffering, I guess.)

Now do “use the money corporations spend on stock buybacks.” Left for the reader, but… there won’t be any poor people left in America.

The fact is that the really rich people are, well, so amazingly rich that it boggles comprehension. They don’t have a lot of money. They don’t have a LOT of money. They don’t have a LOT of money.

They have a LOT of money.

OK?

And yes, they do get a lot of it by making other people poor, they receive massive public subsidies, blah, blah, blah. I’ve written a bunch of those articles and if you’re making the argument that they did it all on their own Atlas Shrugged’esque, you an idiot. A very useful idiot for the people with so much money.

(This proposal is illustrative, not expected and yes, if taken seriously it would cause a lot of economic re-balancing and lots of people would whine it wasn’t fair. It’s illustrative. Illustrative. Repeat after Ian, “illustrative”. It’d still be a better way of using the money than the AI bubble though.)

America has poor people because the people with money and power want it that way. The details of how it is done are complicated, but it really is that simple.