Assume an open countenance when the appetizer tray looms nearby
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another example of how labor union bosses do not speak for the members.
UAW leaders came out for El-Sayed. But the rank and file aren't happy about the idea of giving up their private healthcare plans they’ve fought hard for…and trade them in for El-Sayed's govt proposal. John Roberts interviews one such worker who’s damned mad.
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Big tax ballot measures:
-CO keep flat tax vs. progressive rates
-AZ forbid mileage tax
-IA 2/3 majority for tax hike
-WA repeal 9.99% "millionaire tax"
-UT 60% threshold for tax hikes
-NC flat tax cap
-TN forbid property tax
-CA asset seizure
See ATR's ballot guide atr.org/ballotguide2026/
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Wow the DC government has a narc hotline to tattle on restaurants that give you a plastic straw instead of a mandated lame paper straw:
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If you were in charge of California and wanted to stem the tide of people fleeing your tax + regulatory burden, what would you do?
Well, the Dem candidate for governor is getting ready to impose a vehicle miles traveled tax. That should work wonders.
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French Berkeley professor Zucman dreaming about a federal wealth tax:
“If Prop 40 passes it will pave the way for a federal [wealth] tax.”
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Wealth tax proponents’ academic work filled with errors and bias:
I've been pointing out since the early 2010s that Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman have a bad habit of biasing their data construction to fit their politics.
Whenever they make a suspect call in how to handle stats, it ends up showing that inequality is on the rise. They almost never go in the other direction. The errors are non-random and almost invariably reinforce their political claims about rising income and wealth concentration since 1980.
Piketty did this throughout his book Capital in the 21st Century.
Piketty and Saez did this throughout their famous 2003 paper on inequality in the US.
Piketty, Saez, and Zucman Saez and Zucman did this in their Distributional National Accounts paper that Auten and Splinter dissected.
Saez and Zucman did this in their 2019 book on tax incidence and inequality.
Saez and Zucman did this in their flurry of "studies" and white papers to support Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax proposal, California Prop 40, a new wealth tax in France, and dozens of other similar examples.
A new AI report (linked below) audited 138 papers by Saez and Zucman. It found thousands of errors, 194 of which were serious. A whopping 97% of the serious errors went in the same direction: they showed inequality rising faster or made it higher.
But there's a bigger scandal at play here. Despite these clear biases, Piketty, Saez, and Zucman have enjoyed a stream of praise and prestige within the economics profession. They get expedited and friendly reviews in top econ journals even though a more serious peer review should have caught many of these errors (the Quarterly Journal of Economics is a recurring offender in this regard). Journals regularly give them a pass after the errors in their old work come to light - they're never expected to correct any of it, and just keep on using it as if nothing changed. Their non-peer reviewed data claims are also treated as gospel by major media outlets such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. And they get showered with prizes - Saez and Zucman are both Clark Medal winners from the AEA, and Zucman got his prize in 2023 after evidence of major data shenanigans in his work came to light in 2019.
Until now, those of us who have been trying to correct the record have had to wade through the PSZ trio's cluttered, disorganized, and often non-transparent replication packages (almost all of which are convoluted piles of Excel spreadsheets) to find the problems. I did a line-by-line replication of Piketty and Saez's entire 2003 US income inequality series to use one example, and found it was riddled with errors - almost every single one of which biased their results in favor of their political story.
We had the means to catch this stuff as it was happening, but the economics profession failed to do its job. And it failed precisely because its elite ranks wanted to believe the Piketty-Saez-Zucman story for political reasons.
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James Talarico vows to ban Right to Work in Texas and nationwide
atr.org/talarico-wants-to-ba…
#TXSen
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Talarico wants to take away Right to Work.
He wants to ban Right to Work in Texas and nationwide.
He has endorsed the PRO Act which will abolish Right to Work nationwide and impose an even crazier version of California's destruction of independent contractors and freelancers.
Leaders like Cesar Chavez built strong unions and a strong middle class.
But corporations bribed politicians to weaken unions with “right-to-work” laws.
On this Cesar Chavez Day, I’m introducing legislation to repeal “right-to-work” and let workers organize in Texas. #txlege
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French Berkeley professor trying to saddle CA with a wealth tax, points to a group of nice houses and says "My billionaires are right there!"
Zucman and another professor have been paid $8.5 million by taxpayer-funded Berkeley since 2013.
archive.is/VnGWh
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Blue state over-regulation and tax hikes continue to kill opportunities and drive residents to red states.
Oregon's foolishly written data center moratorium is blocking broadband deployment. This means Oregonians cannot access better high-speed internet.
This doesn't just affect communities on the wrong side of the digital divide; it also impacts thousands of local tradespeople and skilled laborers who cannot get to work because of this ridiculous policy.
Expect more stories like this in states that implemented hastily written data center moratoriums without considering how they would affect broadband buildout.
oregoncapitalchronicle.com/2…
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Taxpayer-Funded Berkeley Has Paid Wealth Tax Proponents $8.5 Million Since 2013
atr.org/taxpayer-funded-berk…
#Prop40
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Hungary is about to wreck itself with a permanent annual wealth tax that hits “billionaires” — as in 1 billion Hungarian forints — which is $3.08 million.
Once in place, they will lower the threshold even further and turn the dial on the rate even higher. Very dumb.
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John Kartch retweeted
Cooler weather, smarter spending. 🍂 Get a new America First Visa® Platinum and enjoy an introductory 0% APR for the first six months.
Subject to membership, eligibility, terms, creditworthiness, conditions & change. Additional requirements apply.
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Yes and the government monopoly lacks any meaningful surface area — exposure to corrective feedback mechanisms — and do not have to justify their existence on an ongoing basis.
If a government monopoly performs poorly, it is awarded with more taxpayer dollars.
Those who are opposed to corporations and favor government do not realize that government is simply the largest, most monopolistic corporation of all and it has a monopoly on violence.
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40 years ago: The day after signing the landmark 1986 tax reform act, Reagan hit the trail for candidates who signed the Taxpayer Protection Pledge and urged all Republicans to make this written commitment to the taxpayers. Democrats had already begun an effort to raise taxes.
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John Kartch retweeted
Tariffs are the GOP's anchor at -39 percent approval.
WSJ's analysis finds Dems have spent $58,347,905 on negative tariffs ads this cycle. The GOP has spent $0 mentioning tariffs.
1/ Trump called “tariff” the most beautiful word in the dictionary. He somehow made it the most hated word in politics. He has thus endangered would could have been a legacy-defining shift in American trade policy. My column: wsj.com/economy/trade/how-ta…
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John Kartch retweeted
Here's the best way to understand what Gabriel Zucman is up to on the California billionaire tax, and why it's a problem:
Suppose you were tasked with assembling a complex historical time series of an important economic indicator, but also suppose the data needed to build it is of widely varying quality. There are gaps in some years when components you need simply weren't measured. In other years the stats you do have are not as reliable. Or maybe the source changed the way it recorded things, or changed the underlying definition. And on top of all that, your indicator contains components that are simply hard to measure with any precision.
So what do you do? You'll inevitably have to make some discretionary calls on how to handle the challenges you encounter.
Zucman's inequality stats all face this problem. They draw on data that are often incomplete, and go back almost a century in some cases. Reliability varies, as do underlying sampling techniques that generated them. There are also gaps from things that aren't easily measured where you have to make a defensible judgement call on how to handle it. And each and every one of those calls affects your end results.
A rigorous researcher's judgement calls would follow certain defensible principles or rules that were clearly articulated and replicable. The effects of those calls would also distribute in different directions. Some would increase the final output number, others would decrease it.
In Zucman's work, we typically find the opposite. He makes judgement calls out of necessity, but they almost always go in the same direction, which is to show (a) rising inequality and (b) declining tax burdens on the rich. They always skew in a nonrandom direction, and that direction conveniently aligns with the political story he's telling about inequality and wealth taxes.
Or think of it this way: if you're assembling a century-long measure of income concentration it's quite plausible you may have to make 50 different judgement calls on how to handle gaps and uncertainties in the source data. If 30 of those cause your results to show higher inequality in cumulative, but 20 of those reduce inequality in cumulative, that suggests a fairly even distribution is at play. In Zucman's work (as well as his coauthors Piketty and Saez) though, you'll find situations where 50 out of 50 discretionary calls all happen to cause the headline measure of inequality to increase.
That's not random - it means that whenever they must make a choice on how to handle data uncertainty, they choose the path that confirms the political story they wish to tell. And this is why the various Piketty-Saez-Zucman measures of inequality are *always* on the high side compared to alternative measures of the same thing.
Overlay that with the fact that all three of them are partisan political activists who advocate for wealth taxes, and you see the problem. Their empirical academic work ends up skewing in favor of their political objective, even though it's masquerading as a data-driven exercise.
And that's why their empirical claims should be checked against other sources and heavily discounted when they do not align - which is frequently the case.
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