Israel is testing a pill version of Covid 19 vaccine. I wonder whether, if a pill version had been somehow available from the beginning, would half of the vaccine “scardy-cats” even have thought of the vaccine as chancy?
A needle with a see through liquid can conjure up visions of Frankenstein laboratories with bubbling vats — while a pill may trigger no thoughts beyond a glass of water.
I wonder if a last ditch appeal to today’s “scardy-cats”, invoking the “what if” pill psychology, might not prod more than a few to see commons sense, at long last.
anyone wonder why the current Covid surge is being led by the countries with the highest vaccination rates (ie, the UK, the US, and the core of Europe)
even Israel, supposedly the first country to be fully vaccinated, has seen new cases rise from less than 10 a day in early June to over 2000 yesterday….over the past week, Israel has had more new cases than Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Egypt combined, all of whom have vax rates under 10%…
The spread of the super-contagious Delta variant has prompted new restrictions around the world and spurred stark new warnings from public health officials.
“The Delta variant is more aggressive and much more transmissible than previously circulating strains,” Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a White House briefing on Thursday. “It is one of the most infectious respiratory viruses we know of and that I have seen in my 20-year career.”
First identified in India, Delta is one of several “variants of concern,” as designated by the C.D.C. and the World Health Organization. It has spread rapidly across the world and poses a particular threat in places where vaccination rates remain low.
The variant is now responsible for more than 80 percent of infections in the United States, largely among unvaccinated people, according to the C.D.C. It is already fueling new outbreaks in states with low vaccination rates, including Missouri, Nevada and Arkansas. …
state vaccination rates tell an inconsistent story; at least 10%, and on some days up to 20%, of new US Covid cases have been in Florida, yet their vaccination rate is similar to that of Illinois, which has had about a tenth of Florida’s cases..
Ron (RC) Weakley (A.K.A., Darryl For A While At EV) says:
For Covid-19 then canoodling with strangers is a high risk activity. Reminds me of the early HIV days. South Beach was dangerous back then too. OTOH, just flipping people the bird from a safe distance poses no more risk than shouting obscenities across the street at each other.
As coronavirus cases resurge across the country, many inoculated Americans are losing patience with vaccine holdouts who, they say, are neglecting a civic duty or clinging to conspiracy theories and misinformation even as new patients arrive in emergency rooms and the nation renews mask advisories.
The country seemed to be exiting the pandemic; barely a month ago, a sense of celebration was palpable. Now many of the vaccinated fear for their unvaccinated children and worry that they are at risk themselves for breakthrough infections. Rising case rates are upending plans for school and workplace reopenings, and threatening another wave of infections that may overwhelm hospitals in many communities.
“It’s like the sun has come up in the morning and everyone is arguing about it,” said Jim Taylor, 66, a retired civil servant in Baton Rouge, La., a state in which fewer than half of adults are fully vaccinated.
“The virus is here and it’s killing people, and we have a time-tested way to stop it — and we won’t do it. It’s an outrage.” …
Probably not. But there are potential challenges with both supply and demand that put the economy at risk.
The good economic news, when it comes to the ascendant Delta variant of the coronavirus, is that it puts the economy at risk in only two ways. The bad news: They are supply and demand.
So far, the recovery remains robust by most available data. Real-time indicators of business activity show little evidence that Americans are pulling back their economic activity in any meaningful way.
But while there is no reason to expect a repeat of the huge disruption of 2020, the new variant puts at risk the kind of rapid recovery that has been underway for months. Just as major parts of the economy were figuring out how to return to full functioning, this may amount to throwing sand in the gears.
The emergence of the variant has already caused several wobbly days on Wall Street. And the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, is likely to face questions about the economic implications of Delta in a news conference Wednesday afternoon after a meeting of the Fed’s policy committee. …
As economists and policymakers game out the nature of those risks, what stands out is not the chance of a major shutdown. Instead, the concerns are the constraints on the availability of workers and on the supply and demand for many services.
On the supply side, there are already severe disruptions in many supply chains, especially those that rely on goods imported from Asia. These create ripple effects for the United States, such as a shortage of computer chips that is in turn hindering automobile production and contributing to high inflation. …
Back in the dark ages of 2012, two think-tank scholars, Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, wrote a book called “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks” about the rise of Republican Party extremism and its dire effect on American democracy.
In a related op-ed piece, these writers made a damning statement about Washington press coverage, which treats the two parties as roughly equal and everything they do as deserving of similar coverage.
Ornstein and Mann didn’t use the now-in-vogue terms “both-sidesism” or “false equivalence,” but they laid out the problem with devastating clarity (the italics are mine):
“We understand the values of mainstream journalists, including the effort to report both sides of a story. But a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality. If the political dynamics of Washington are unlikely to change any time soon, at least we should change the way that reality is portrayed to the public.”
Nearly a decade later, this distortion of reality has only grown worse, thanks in part to Donald Trump’s rise to power and his ironclad grip on an increasingly craven Republican Party.
Positive proof was in the recent coverage of congressional efforts to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol.
The Democratic leadership has been trying to assemble a bipartisan panel that would study that mob attack on our democracy and make sure it is never repeated. Republican leaders, meanwhile, have been trying to undermine the investigation, cynically requesting that two congressmen who backed efforts to invalidate the election be allowed to join the commission, then boycotting it entirely. And the media has played straight into Republicans’ hands, seemingly incapable of framing this as anything but base political drama.
“‘What You’re Doing Is Unprecedented’: McCarthy-Pelosi Feud Boils Over,” read a CNN headline this week. “After a whiplash week of power plays . . . tensions are at an all-time high.”
Is it really a “feud” when Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy performatively blames Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for refusing to seat Republicans Jim Jordan and Jim Banks — two sycophantic allies of Trump, who called the Jan. 6 mob to gather?
One writer at Politico called Pelosi’s decision a “gift to McCarthy.” And its Playbook tut-tutted the decision as handing Republicans “a legitimate grievance,” thus dooming the holy notion of bipartisanship.
“Both parties have attacked the other as insincere and uninterested in conducting a fair-minded examination,” a Washington Post news story observed. (“Can it really be lost on the Post that the Republican party has acted in bad faith at every turn to undermine every attempt to investigate the events of Jan. 6?” a reader complained to me.)
The bankruptcy of this sort of coverage was exposed on Tuesday morning, when the Jan. 6 commission kicked off with somber, powerful, pointedly non-political testimony from four police officers attacked during the insurrection. Two Republicans, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, even defied McCarthy’s boycott to ensure their party would be sanely represented.
This strain of news coverage, observed Jon Allsop in Columbia Journalism Review, centers on twinned, dubious implications: “That bipartisanship is desirable and that Democrats bear responsibility for upholding it — even in the face of explict Republican obstructionism.”
This stance comes across as both cynical (“politics was ever thus”) and unsophisticated (“we’re just doing our job of reporting what was said”). Quite a feat.
Mainstream journalists want their work to be perceived as fair-minded and nonpartisan. They want to defend themselves against charges of bias. So they equalize the unequal. This practice seems so ingrained as to be unresolvable.
There is a way out. But it requires the leadership of news organizations to radically reframe the mission of its Washington coverage. As a possible starting point, I’ll offer these recommendations:
In the early seventies, this type of attack on the capitol would not have been tolerated. 4th Bn 10 Marines and elements of the 82nd Airborne were trained in riot control with the intent to confront protestors if they got out of hand. It was a week long training for us down at LeJeune and most of us were Vietnam veterans. We would have crushed them if called out and without live rounds.
The police officers who testified should have called the Repubs out as cowards as not one of them capable enough joined the police in defending the capitol. Many of them are veterans like Lindsey Graham , granted a fat-assed Colonel. Badass Cotton was supposedly airborne. where was he? Senator Roberts and Marshall are veterans.
In the House (74 veterans)? Jim Banks, Louie Gohmert, Darrell Issa, Meijer, etc. to name a few of the big mouths in the Senate and the House. No danger? Why didn’t they stay? Why didn’t they confront the protest . . . errr rioters? Tough guys, yeah until they have to get their hands dirtied or noses bloodied. More cowards . . .
In the seventies as federal troops, we would have mopped the streets with them.
Key Republican senators said on Wednesday that they had resolved the biggest sticking points to a final agreement with the White House and Democrats on a far-reaching infrastructure bill, and planned to vote to allow the package to advance, paving the way for action on a crucial piece of President Biden’s agenda.
“We now have an agreement on the major issues and we’re prepared to move forward,” said Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio and a lead negotiator for his party in bipartisan talks on the infrastructure measure.
Touring a truck manufacturing plant in Pennsylvania, Mr. Biden was upbeat about the emerging deal, telling reporters, “I feel confident about it.”
The proposal was expected to fill in the details of an outline the group triumphantly announced at the White House in late June, but has spent weeks haggling over as they toiled to translate it into legislative text while keeping their fragile coalition together.
While details were not immediately available, the bill under discussion would pump the largest infusion of federal money in more than a decade into the nation’s aging public works system. The resulting bill is expected to provide about $550 billion in new federal money for roads, bridges, rail, transit, water and other physical infrastructure programs, according to a Republican aide who disclosed details on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to do so. …
The White House and a bipartisan group of senators agreed on Wednesday on a far-reaching $1 trillion infrastructure bill, and Democrats set an evening vote to advance it, paving the way for action on a crucial piece of President Biden’s agenda.
“We now have an agreement on the major issues, and we’re prepared to move forward,” said Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio and a lead negotiator for his party on the infrastructure measure.
Touring a truck manufacturing plant in Pennsylvania, Mr. Biden was upbeat about the emerging deal, telling reporters, “I feel confident about it.”
The proposal was expected to fill in the details of an outline the group triumphantly announced at the White House in late June, but spent weeks haggling over as they toiled to translate it into legislative text while keeping their fragile coalition together.
According to a fact sheet released Wednesday afternoon by the White House, the resulting bill would provide about $550 billion in new federal money for roads, bridges, rail, transit, water and other physical infrastructure programs. …
NY Times – The Senate voted on Wednesday to take up a bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure deal, as Republicans joined Democrats to pave the way for action on a crucial piece of President Biden’s agenda.
The 67-to-32 vote, which included the support of 17 Republicans, came just hours after senators in both parties and the White House reached a long-sought compromise on the bill, which would provide about $550 billion in new federal money for roads, bridges, rail lines, transit projects, water systems and other physical infrastructure programs.
While a final Senate vote on the legislation is days away, the test vote on Wednesday marked a major victory for Mr. Biden, who has pressed for the plan for months, and a validation of his faith that a bipartisan breakthrough was possible even in a polarized Washington. …
WASHINGTON — The huge increase in government aid prompted by the coronavirus pandemic will cut poverty nearly in half this year from prepandemic levels and push the share of Americans in poverty to the lowest level on record, according to the most comprehensive analysis yet of a vast but temporary expansion of the safety net.
The number of poor Americans is expected to fall by nearly 20 million from 2018 levels, a decline of almost 45 percent. The country has never cut poverty so much in such a short period of time, and the development is especially notable since it defies economic headwinds — the economy has nearly seven million fewer jobs than it did before the pandemic.
The extraordinary reduction in poverty has come at extraordinary cost, with annual spending on major programs projected to rise fourfold to more than $1 trillion. Yet without further expensive new measures, millions of families may find the escape from poverty brief. The three programs that cut poverty most — stimulus checks, increased food stamps and expanded unemployment insurance — have ended or are scheduled to soon revert to their prepandemic size. …
Vaccinations and federal aid helped lift the U.S. economy out of its pandemic-induced hole this spring. The next test will be whether that momentum can continue as coronavirus cases rise, masks return and government help wanes.
Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of economic output, grew 1.6 percent in the second quarter of the year, the Commerce Department said Thursday, up from 1.5 percent in the first three months of the year. On an annualized basis, second-quarter growth was 6.5 percent.
The growth, fueled by strong consumer spending and robust business investment, brought output, adjusted for inflation, back to its prepandemic level. That is a remarkable achievement, exactly a year after the economy’s worst quarterly contraction on record. After the last recession ended in 2009, G.D.P. took two years to rebound fully.
But the recovery is far from complete. Output is significantly below where it would be had growth continued on its prepandemic path. Other economic measures remain deeply depressed, particularly for certain groups: The United States still has nearly seven million fewer jobs than before the pandemic. The unemployment rate for Black workers in June was 9.2 percent.
Now a new threat is emerging in the highly contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus, which has led to a surge in cases in much of the country. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended this week that even vaccinated people should wear masks indoors in some parts of the country, and some mayors and governors have reimposed mask mandates.
Few economists expect a return to widespread business shutdowns or stay-at-home orders. But if the resurgent virus leads to renewed caution among consumers — a reluctance to dine at restaurants, hesitation about booking a late-summer getaway — that could weaken the recovery at a crucial moment. …
We are at war with ourselves, but not for the reasons you think.
What accounts for this? It’s here that our popular explanations run aground. It can’t be all about a rise in conspiracy theories, since they’ve been around for decades. It can’t be social media, since Facebook and Twitter have become popular in the political arena only over the past few years. It can’t be a decline in material comfort, since incomes and employment have steadily improved over the past couple of decades. It can’t really be social trends, since most of them have improved too. And most of the specific issues that might cause alarm—immigration, racism, and more—are unlikely candidates on their own. They may be highly polarizing, but in a concrete sense they haven’t gotten worse since 2000. In fact, they’ve mostly gotten better.
To find an answer, then, we need to look for things that (a) are politically salient and (b) have changed dramatically over the past two to three decades. The most obvious one is Fox News.”
Elizabeth Warren Schools Billionaire Over Social Security
Warren appeared alongside billionaire Ken Langone on CNBC’s Squawk Box, where Langone asked Warren why he, a billionaire, still receives social security checks, among other questions about taxes on the super-wealthy. When he finally gave Warren a moment to get a word in, she certainly delivered. Let’s check out the exchange and footage below.
Langone, who described himself as a “fat cat,” told Warren he had an “easy” question that would “surprise” her.
“How do you justify giving me a three thousand dollars a month check every month with all my wealth? Why don’t you people have the courage to address entitlements as to what should no longer be an entitlement?” He added that he shouldn’t get Social Security and asked why corporations don’t have a minimum alternative tax.
Warren took his questions in stride, starting by explaining how taxes work for the super-wealthy.
“Jeff Bezos has not paid taxes on the wealth that he has,” Warren stated, adding that in spite of being worth a “bazillion dollars,” he has not paid taxes on his wealth.
“In fact,” she continued. “Jeff Bezos, many years, has either paid nothing in taxes or has paid 1%. Why? Because his income is very, very small but he continues to grow his wealth through all of his Amazon stock. And how does he then fund a lifestyle, like he does? Not by cashing in Amazon stock but by borrowing against it.”
Warren explained that right now, our tax system simply doesn’t encompass people at a certain level of wealth (like Bezos), but does make low-income and middle-class folks pay.
In response to Langone’s second question about minimum tax rates, Warren addressed that she has herself suggested something very similar to a minimum tax on corporations, which she called a “real corporate profits tax.” She added this would be another way to get funds for universal child care and infrastructure repair.
And in terms of Social Security? Warren said it’s set up differently in that it’s structured more like an “insurance policy.” Warren broke down that you (in this case Langone, but also the public in general) pay in year after year, and that it’s not “welfare” or “charity.”
Social security, on the other hand, is an “agreement that every employee in the country, who is eligible for Social Security, paid into, and gets a return on the back end. Surely, you wouldn’t want to be the person to go on national TV and say, after a contract has been negotiated, and someone has paid into it for 40 years, that the federal government should turn around and say, ‘Oops! We changed our mind. We’re not going to give you the payout that you earned by making the payments all those years.’”
Also on Squawk Box, Warren offered up a fresh zinger toward Bezos when asked about how to take cryptocurrency, saying, “I want to see us tax wealth however your wealth is tied up. It shouldn’t make a difference whether you have real estate, or whether you have cash or whether you have a bazillion shares of Amazon.”
“Yes, Jeff Bezos,” she added. “I’m looking at you.”
Israel is testing a pill version of Covid 19 vaccine. I wonder whether, if a pill version had been somehow available from the beginning, would half of the vaccine “scardy-cats” even have thought of the vaccine as chancy?
A needle with a see through liquid can conjure up visions of Frankenstein laboratories with bubbling vats — while a pill may trigger no thoughts beyond a glass of water.
I wonder if a last ditch appeal to today’s “scardy-cats”, invoking the “what if” pill psychology, might not prod more than a few to see commons sense, at long last.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-covid-vaccine-in-pill-form-to-start-clinical-trial-in-tel-aviv/
anyone wonder why the current Covid surge is being led by the countries with the highest vaccination rates (ie, the UK, the US, and the core of Europe)
even Israel, supposedly the first country to be fully vaccinated, has seen new cases rise from less than 10 a day in early June to over 2000 yesterday….over the past week, Israel has had more new cases than Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Egypt combined, all of whom have vax rates under 10%…
The Delta Variant
state vaccination rates tell an inconsistent story; at least 10%, and on some days up to 20%, of new US Covid cases have been in Florida, yet their vaccination rate is similar to that of Illinois, which has had about a tenth of Florida’s cases..
Do people behave differently in Chicago than they do in Miami?
maybe in the summer; Chicagoans would be outdoors more…
For Covid-19 then canoodling with strangers is a high risk activity. Reminds me of the early HIV days. South Beach was dangerous back then too. OTOH, just flipping people the bird from a safe distance poses no more risk than shouting obscenities across the street at each other.
As Virus Cases Rise, Another Contagion Spreads Among the Vaccinated: Anger
Will the Delta Variant Wreck the Recovery
NY Times – Neil Irwin – July 28
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/journalist-both-sides-politics-trump/2021/07/27/c3afd1f8-eee0-11eb-81d2-ffae0f931b8f_story.htmlOur democracy is under attack. Washington journalists must stop covering it like politics as usual.
By Margaret Sullivan Today at 6:00 a.m. EDT
Back in the dark ages of 2012, two think-tank scholars, Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, wrote a book called “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks” about the rise of Republican Party extremism and its dire effect on American democracy.
In a related op-ed piece, these writers made a damning statement about Washington press coverage, which treats the two parties as roughly equal and everything they do as deserving of similar coverage.
Ornstein and Mann didn’t use the now-in-vogue terms “both-sidesism” or “false equivalence,” but they laid out the problem with devastating clarity (the italics are mine):
“We understand the values of mainstream journalists, including the effort to report both sides of a story. But a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality. If the political dynamics of Washington are unlikely to change any time soon, at least we should change the way that reality is portrayed to the public.”
Nearly a decade later, this distortion of reality has only grown worse, thanks in part to Donald Trump’s rise to power and his ironclad grip on an increasingly craven Republican Party.
Positive proof was in the recent coverage of congressional efforts to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol.
The Democratic leadership has been trying to assemble a bipartisan panel that would study that mob attack on our democracy and make sure it is never repeated. Republican leaders, meanwhile, have been trying to undermine the investigation, cynically requesting that two congressmen who backed efforts to invalidate the election be allowed to join the commission, then boycotting it entirely. And the media has played straight into Republicans’ hands, seemingly incapable of framing this as anything but base political drama.
“‘What You’re Doing Is Unprecedented’: McCarthy-Pelosi Feud Boils Over,” read a CNN headline this week. “After a whiplash week of power plays . . . tensions are at an all-time high.”
Is it really a “feud” when Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy performatively blames Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for refusing to seat Republicans Jim Jordan and Jim Banks — two sycophantic allies of Trump, who called the Jan. 6 mob to gather?
One writer at Politico called Pelosi’s decision a “gift to McCarthy.” And its Playbook tut-tutted the decision as handing Republicans “a legitimate grievance,” thus dooming the holy notion of bipartisanship.
“Both parties have attacked the other as insincere and uninterested in conducting a fair-minded examination,” a Washington Post news story observed. (“Can it really be lost on the Post that the Republican party has acted in bad faith at every turn to undermine every attempt to investigate the events of Jan. 6?” a reader complained to me.)
The bankruptcy of this sort of coverage was exposed on Tuesday morning, when the Jan. 6 commission kicked off with somber, powerful, pointedly non-political testimony from four police officers attacked during the insurrection. Two Republicans, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, even defied McCarthy’s boycott to ensure their party would be sanely represented.
Law officers became truth seekers about who was responsible for the Capitol attacks
This strain of news coverage, observed Jon Allsop in Columbia Journalism Review, centers on twinned, dubious implications: “That bipartisanship is desirable and that Democrats bear responsibility for upholding it — even in the face of explict Republican obstructionism.”
This stance comes across as both cynical (“politics was ever thus”) and unsophisticated (“we’re just doing our job of reporting what was said”). Quite a feat.
Mainstream journalists want their work to be perceived as fair-minded and nonpartisan. They want to defend themselves against charges of bias. So they equalize the unequal. This practice seems so ingrained as to be unresolvable.
There is a way out. But it requires the leadership of news organizations to radically reframe the mission of its Washington coverage. As a possible starting point, I’ll offer these recommendations:
….
Ken
In the early seventies, this type of attack on the capitol would not have been tolerated. 4th Bn 10 Marines and elements of the 82nd Airborne were trained in riot control with the intent to confront protestors if they got out of hand. It was a week long training for us down at LeJeune and most of us were Vietnam veterans. We would have crushed them if called out and without live rounds.
The police officers who testified should have called the Repubs out as cowards as not one of them capable enough joined the police in defending the capitol. Many of them are veterans like Lindsey Graham , granted a fat-assed Colonel. Badass Cotton was supposedly airborne. where was he? Senator Roberts and Marshall are veterans.
In the House (74 veterans)? Jim Banks, Louie Gohmert, Darrell Issa, Meijer, etc. to name a few of the big mouths in the Senate and the House. No danger? Why didn’t they stay? Why didn’t they confront the protest . . . errr rioters? Tough guys, yeah until they have to get their hands dirtied or noses bloodied. More cowards . . .
In the seventies as federal troops, we would have mopped the streets with them.
Over/under on the combined IQ of these four? Thinking it doesn’t hit triple digits.
Key Republican senators say they’re ready to take up an infrastructure deal, paving the way for a vote
White House and senators cement a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure deal
It seems likely that while the GOP electorate may support
infrastructure spending in their neighborhoods (which
persuaded even Mitch McConnell to vote in favor, at this
point), that as ‘debate’ unfolds in the Senate, the GOP
practice of halting/eviscerating Dem legislation will
take over, for all the obvious reasons.
It’s now down to around $350 billion of new spending.
Pandemic Aid Programs Spur a Record Drop in Poverty
The U.S. economy grew 1.6 percent in the second quarter, returning to prepandemic size
Kevin Drum on why we are the way we are.
” The Real Source of America’s Rising Rage
We are at war with ourselves, but not for the reasons you think.
What accounts for this? It’s here that our popular explanations run aground. It can’t be all about a rise in conspiracy theories, since they’ve been around for decades. It can’t be social media, since Facebook and Twitter have become popular in the political arena only over the past few years. It can’t be a decline in material comfort, since incomes and employment have steadily improved over the past couple of decades. It can’t really be social trends, since most of them have improved too. And most of the specific issues that might cause alarm—immigration, racism, and more—are unlikely candidates on their own. They may be highly polarizing, but in a concrete sense they haven’t gotten worse since 2000. In fact, they’ve mostly gotten better.
To find an answer, then, we need to look for things that (a) are politically salient and (b) have changed dramatically over the past two to three decades. The most obvious one is Fox News.”
https://www.motherjones.com…
Yes, and people that watch Fox News are all stupid.
Senators finally hearing the meatpacking industry is unsustainable.
https://www.agriculture.com/news/business/more-competition-in-meatpacking-or-bust-them-up-senators-are-told
Elizabeth Warren Schools Billionaire Over Social Security
Warren appeared alongside billionaire Ken Langone on CNBC’s Squawk Box, where Langone asked Warren why he, a billionaire, still receives social security checks, among other questions about taxes on the super-wealthy. When he finally gave Warren a moment to get a word in, she certainly delivered. Let’s check out the exchange and footage below.
Langone, who described himself as a “fat cat,” told Warren he had an “easy” question that would “surprise” her.
“How do you justify giving me a three thousand dollars a month check every month with all my wealth? Why don’t you people have the courage to address entitlements as to what should no longer be an entitlement?” He added that he shouldn’t get Social Security and asked why corporations don’t have a minimum alternative tax.
Warren took his questions in stride, starting by explaining how taxes work for the super-wealthy.
“Jeff Bezos has not paid taxes on the wealth that he has,” Warren stated, adding that in spite of being worth a “bazillion dollars,” he has not paid taxes on his wealth.
“In fact,” she continued. “Jeff Bezos, many years, has either paid nothing in taxes or has paid 1%. Why? Because his income is very, very small but he continues to grow his wealth through all of his Amazon stock. And how does he then fund a lifestyle, like he does? Not by cashing in Amazon stock but by borrowing against it.”
Warren explained that right now, our tax system simply doesn’t encompass people at a certain level of wealth (like Bezos), but does make low-income and middle-class folks pay.
In response to Langone’s second question about minimum tax rates, Warren addressed that she has herself suggested something very similar to a minimum tax on corporations, which she called a “real corporate profits tax.” She added this would be another way to get funds for universal child care and infrastructure repair.
And in terms of Social Security? Warren said it’s set up differently in that it’s structured more like an “insurance policy.” Warren broke down that you (in this case Langone, but also the public in general) pay in year after year, and that it’s not “welfare” or “charity.”
Social security, on the other hand, is an “agreement that every employee in the country, who is eligible for Social Security, paid into, and gets a return on the back end. Surely, you wouldn’t want to be the person to go on national TV and say, after a contract has been negotiated, and someone has paid into it for 40 years, that the federal government should turn around and say, ‘Oops! We changed our mind. We’re not going to give you the payout that you earned by making the payments all those years.’”
Also on Squawk Box, Warren offered up a fresh zinger toward Bezos when asked about how to take cryptocurrency, saying, “I want to see us tax wealth however your wealth is tied up. It shouldn’t make a difference whether you have real estate, or whether you have cash or whether you have a bazillion shares of Amazon.”
“Yes, Jeff Bezos,” she added. “I’m looking at you.”
To see the clip go here:
Elizabeth Warren Schools Billionaire Over Social Security | Crooks and Liars
So, Ken Langone, Home Depot billionaire ($5.7B) wonders why
he’s getting $3K per month from Social Security, suggests that
such unnecessary payments are wasteful guv’mint spending.
Hmmm. How much of a problem is that, and how much income
tax is he paying on $5.7B of wealth? Hopefully a lot more than
$36K of social security benefits. Hopefully, he has so much
taxable income that all of his social security benefits are taxable.
Assuming he has taxable income.
The point is, all of the soc-sec benefits paid to billionaires has
to be much, much, much less of a fiscal problem than the
income taxes they don’t pay. Langone is obfuscating.