Never underestimate the greed of the ignorant. Trump, Musk and all the rest look to the era of the Robber Barons as not only the Gilded Age, but the Golden Age for the obscenely rich. They want those days more than they want the next dollar they can extort from a wage slave. And let's be real, their vision of government is one without Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid or any semblance of a social safety net. They would be happy if government existed only to pay for a police force and a massive military with only one job - to protect them from all perceived enemies, foreign and domestic.
Take away Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid, and they’ll need a top notch military force just to protect the two of them - from their own voters.
I think you're over-estimating MAGAts. Cheeto will tell them the Dems destroyed the safety net and they'll be attacking Nancy Pelosi's and the Obama's houses before you know it.
"I can pay half of labore to murder the other half" --Jay Gould, an OG Gilded Era Oligarch. They might not even have to pay them, merely praise them for doing it.
Well, a very significant minority, at the least. Remember what George Carlin said, “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
What the lords of the universe fail to understand is that if they have a privatized security force ( of any size), they very rapidly become the target instead of any perceived external enemy. The financial incentive is huge, and all it takes is one bullet...
Everyone thinks the system is screwed up at some point; until they need it. Bitcoin will not save us.
Our oligarchic betters *already* have privatized security services. The high-end ones are all ex-Special Forces, FBI, etc. But they wear suits instead of uniforms.
Correct - laws for me but not for thee. Or: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
The odd thing is that with their current money they have the means of a much better life as well as more control over American & global political economics than the richest men of that generation.
Then again, Elon Musk is currently fighting a Delaware court for 40 billion dollars rather than accepting compensation worth a fraction, albeit still billions, of that.
The fact that this guy has convinced people he can cut costs is astounding. We live in an anime world.
I call this "Doctor's Syndrome". A lot of my parents' friends are doctors and really smart in their fields. Yet once you get them onto other topics they have no idea what they're talking about though they think otherwise.
Dr. Krugman, you're giving credit to billionaires for being honest about their intentions. Musk, Andreessen, etc., don't give a sheisse about government efficiency or anything else. They just want to pay no taxes because they give us jobs instead (in their twisted minds), and if no taxes from billionaires means that government doesn't function or people can't live, oh well.
Policy is being used to create a roadmap to a desired end. It's the end that matters to these people, not the policy that's the vehicle to get there.
Greed is the story. An endless, bottomless amount of greed. And policy is the means to fulfilling that greed...except they never can.
Didn't Wagner write an epic cycle of 4 operas about what happens when the already powerful and mighty are not satisfied with having nearly everything, and want even more for themselves at the expense of others who have next to nothing by comparison?
They want lower on themselves but not the elimination of taxes. They just want regressive taxation (such as tariffs ) so that the tax burden is carried by middle-income people and the poor. Bottomless greed, indeed.
The plot revolves around a magic ring that grants the power to rule the world, forged by the Nibelung dwarf Alberich from gold he stole from the Rhine maidens in the river Rhine. With the assistance of the god Loge, Wotan – the chief of the gods – steals the ring from Alberich, but is forced to hand it over to the giants Fafner and Fasolt in payment for building the home of the gods, Valhalla, or they will take Freia, who provides the gods with the golden apples that keep them young. Wotan's schemes to regain the ring, spanning generations, drive much of the action in the story. His grandson, the mortal Siegfried, wins the ring by slaying Fafner (who slew Fasolt for the ring) – as Wotan intended – but is eventually betrayed and slain as a result of the intrigues of Alberich's son Hagen, who wants the ring for himself. Finally, the Valkyrie Brünnhilde – Siegfried's lover and Wotan's daughter who lost her immortality for defying her father in an attempt to save Siegfried's father Sigmund – returns the ring to the Rhine maidens as she commits suicide on Siegfried's funeral pyre. Hagen is drowned as he attempts to recover the ring. In the process, the gods and Valhalla are destroyed.
“Everyone says he is crazy – which maybe he is – but the scarier thing about him is that he is stupid. You do not know anyone as stupid as Donald Trump. You just don’t.”
—Fran Lebowitz
To which I can only add that a significant portion of our wealthy media class — including your former employer — are deeply invested in the notion that Trump can’t possibly be as stupid as he shows himself to be, because they can’t deal with what his becoming president says about what’s happened to this country on what they think of as their watch.
In the realm of practical biology Trump was a little more needy. Despite denouncing Anthony Fauci (who I think runs a close second to Albert Schweitzer), when Trump contracted Covid 19 he ate a heaping portion of crow, sought Fauci's advice, and received Covid 19 anti-sera.
Apparently a Presidential Pardon from a viral infection was not an option.
I haven’t seen Donald Trump do anything except for himself. So I’ve been wondering why he remains so determined to follow his tariff policy in the face of so much expert opinion. Might his focus on tariffs be due to the fact that under our legislative system he can sell exclusions from those tariffs to whichever industries offers to pay him for those exclusions. Is this another huge opportunity for graft?
Is it an opportunity for graft? Of course it is. It was back in the good ol’ days, too. The great irony of today is that we have a relatively honest system (civil service, conflict of interest rules, etc) that is skewed by the influence of great wealth, which people see as corrupt and have decided to trade in for an administration that has basically promised to be incredibly corrupt in every way.
As the good doctor here has pointed out, Cheeto seems to get fixated on various narratives-mostly from the 70's and 80's-but sometimes from elsewhere. And once he gets an idea (or someone gives it to him), that's sort of the end of the discussion. It's not as if he is reasoning or thinking things over. Maybe if someone was able to flatter him into thinking tariffs were bad for him, personally?
Why else do you think Musk gifted Trump's campaign $250m + X (formerly Twitter)? He's ingratiated himself to ensure that any future tariffs on Tesla vehicles and components made in China, fall lightly or not all.
Trump is a fucking moron, we have to remember. A brain stem or digestive tract. No higher functions at all, arrested before he got toilet trained, and saved by being incredibly fucking rich. Which is hard to bear in mind because he's such a pig and a boor.
He's surrounded by ass-wipes. An army of ass-wipes, without whom he'd have drowned in shit. Sorry, Paul, I'm just messing around here. And being deliberately crude, to welcome you to Substack, where we can call a piece of shit a piece of shit.
I like the label ”Great Man's Disease." I call it billionaire-itis. Walter Isaacson tells the story in his Jobs biography of the time Steve Jobs got a one-hour private audience with President Obama. Jobs spent the entire time lecturing the president on what the U.S. educational system required at the moment. From the description of the conversation, even Jobs wouldn't be impressed if he went back and listened to himself a few years later.
Jobs did not have to die from his cancer. He sought real medical treatment too late because he got into pseudo-science and listened to the quacks that told him what he wanted to hear. My impression is that Jobs was actually a very smart guy, unlike Trump, Andreesen or Musk. But the thing they all have in common is they all think they are better than than rest of us, they deserve their massive wealth and as a result, the rules just don't apply to them.
In Job's case, he died because he thought he knew better than actual medical experts but his decisions didn't affect the rest of us. For the other three, god help us all.
"Jobs was diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer, called an islet cell tumor or gasteroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumor (GEP-NET), which is a different form of pancreatic cancer than the highly aggressive and often rapidly fatal pancreatic adenocarcinoma.
GEP-NETs are slow growing tumors that have the potential to be cured surgically if the tumor is removed prior to metastasis.
There are limited clinical trial data on GEP-NETs and highly effective chemotherapy agents to treat GEP-NETs have not been identified."
"There has been widespread speculation about whether Jobs’ decision to use CAM approaches hastened his death by postponing initiation of potentially life-prolonging conventional treatments (Grady, 2011).
However, the details of Jobs’ diagnosis and specific treatments received, both conventional and unconventional, have not been made public. Therefore, we cannot comment on whether or not he made the best decisions on his cancer treatment, nor can we comment on whether he would have had different outcomes had he chosen a different treatment approach.
It is unknown whether Jobs’ outcomes would have been different if he had pursued surgery at the time of his diagnosis, or if had followed a specific chemotherapy protocol. And it is unknown how effective any of his acupuncture, botanical and dietary approaches may have been before or after his surgery."
The bias of this article is apparent when they use the term “CAM” which is “complementary alternative medicine”. CAM is not medicine because it literally never has a clinical trial associated with it. CAM is pseudoscience. If it were actual science, it would have placebo controlled studies to back it up and would just be called medicine. He did acupuncture, botanicals and dietary changes none of which have any effect on cancer. None. What does have an effect on cancer? That’s right, surgery and chemo. The claim that because he was rich he had the best access to care is ridiculous on its face. Because he was rich, he had the best access to “doctors” who were happy to tell him what he wanted to hear. That is the point of Krugmans piece. The rich are told what they want to hear and push away anyone who tells them otherwise. Because Jobs was a great designer of products didn’t make him a medical expert.
Paul, you are articulating the same sense as Brian Klass has done in his Substack about “The Myth of the Secret Genius”…just because somebody got lucky, or like all the aforementioned oligarchs were inserted as a pinch runner on third base and scooted on a wild pitch, these guys say they hit a home run when they never truly got an at bat. Then some many people believe it. It is scary and frustrating to watch. These guys will run the economy into the ground if they really do what they say they will.
Congrats on leaving the NYT and coming back to the world!
I've picked up some great artists over the years based on Prof K's recommendations. These interludes, however, come at the risk of sending me down a YouTube rabbit hole. It is building my resilience, however, so all to the good.
A problem some noted when Ben Carson was talking about pyramids: people who know one area well wrongly think they know everything well. And as you say, the rich and powerful are surrounded by yes people.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” Upton Sinclair
“Never argue with a man whose job depends on not being convinced.” H.L. Mencken
Income taxes, if anything, need to be raised on the billionaire––and multi-millionaire––class. (Millionaires are now getting a pass, as well paid Boomers socked away or stocked away their path to affluence.)
They know what they’re doing. They’re not half as stupid as people think they are. They’re just greedy and will lie about anything to keep raking in money. The economic doctrines they posit are a little more flimsy than Democrats’ deficit spending; a physicist would not tolerate the excesses of such doctrines and would find a way to cut military spending (which Clinton actually did, with a balanced budget) and adjust taxation levels toward a more progressive path. A polymath would certainly see that, and not manufacture consent toward one error or another.
To quibble, income taxes are quite high - 49% top marginal rate for state + federal income tax in California. We need to raise non-income taxes like capital gains and estate taxes to eliminate loopholes like "buy, borrow, die."
Professor Krugman: nobel prize winners are FAMOUS for making stupid illogical unfounded statements about, well, mostly everything from what i've been able to see. and they get really mad when someone points this pout to them. for example, whilst writing for The Guardian, i invented a little award that i named "The Nobel Prize in Quackpottery" that i only awarded to those who already won Nobel Prizes. one of these awardees -- ahem, https://www.theguardian.com/science/grrlscientist/2012/oct/09/nobel-prize-quackpottery-physics -- spent a year or so email stalking me and threatening my life.
it was really quite exciting.
so if the orange potato and elon musk (a white potato if i stick to this analogy) want to believe they are the smartest and bestest of all people, then who indeed (as you noted) will tell them different?
SPOILER ALERT - when you put people in charge of Government whose life mission has been to make money, what do you suppose they will do with the Government? Doesn't take a genius to figure that one out.
Well, keep in mind that these are also the people who have been saying since St. Ray-gun, if not earlier, that "government is the problem." And whenever they control gov't, they prove their point in spades.
Mr. K, since slipping the bonds of the NYT you have come alive. Congratulations.
Your wise, witty columns are not only educational but make it obvious that you are having fun. You Go, Boy!
I was going to ask him: Are you having fun yet? ‘Cause we are!
That's Dr. K. He didn't go to K school to be called Mister.
Sometimes I say "professor" - is that okay? :(
My reply was adopted from a line of Dr. Evil's, in one of the Austin Powers films:
“It's Dr. Evil, I didn't spend six years in Evil Medical School to be called "mister," thank you very much.”
I agree!
Never underestimate the greed of the ignorant. Trump, Musk and all the rest look to the era of the Robber Barons as not only the Gilded Age, but the Golden Age for the obscenely rich. They want those days more than they want the next dollar they can extort from a wage slave. And let's be real, their vision of government is one without Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid or any semblance of a social safety net. They would be happy if government existed only to pay for a police force and a massive military with only one job - to protect them from all perceived enemies, foreign and domestic.
Take away Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid, and they’ll need a top notch military force just to protect the two of them - from their own voters.
I think you're over-estimating MAGAts. Cheeto will tell them the Dems destroyed the safety net and they'll be attacking Nancy Pelosi's and the Obama's houses before you know it.
Spot on...
"I can pay half of labore to murder the other half" --Jay Gould, an OG Gilded Era Oligarch. They might not even have to pay them, merely praise them for doing it.
Divide and conquer, baby. The only way our Oligarchs can ride this latest Gilded Age beyond the sunset.
That, and help FOX News and its lesser imitators grow market share to feed the faithful more pro-GOP "alternative facts".
In their 'perfect world,' I'll bet they'd prefer privatized police & 🔥 protection.
A lot of smart people in the USA, they will not be safe here at all.
The election result proves this is a lie. Most Americans are morons.
Well, a very significant minority, at the least. Remember what George Carlin said, “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
That’s what they want
Peter, that was Ayn Rand's vision too--plus courts to protect property rights. I'm afraid Musk and the other tech bros think they're John Galt.
Note how she ended up toward the end of her life...
Ironically, she enrolled in Medicare & took her SS due to mounting medical bills. She couldn't live her philosophy.
Yes. That is what they want—a govt the size of that during the McKinley era and earlier. It is the aim of DOGE.
Agree- is this where the cutting of government services will potentially come into play?
I agree with your analysis.
What the lords of the universe fail to understand is that if they have a privatized security force ( of any size), they very rapidly become the target instead of any perceived external enemy. The financial incentive is huge, and all it takes is one bullet...
Everyone thinks the system is screwed up at some point; until they need it. Bitcoin will not save us.
Happy New Year
Our oligarchic betters *already* have privatized security services. The high-end ones are all ex-Special Forces, FBI, etc. But they wear suits instead of uniforms.
Indira Ganhdi
Praetorian Guard
Correct - laws for me but not for thee. Or: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
That is Charles Koch’s idea of government. Just protection of HIS wealth.
The odd thing is that with their current money they have the means of a much better life as well as more control over American & global political economics than the richest men of that generation.
Then again, Elon Musk is currently fighting a Delaware court for 40 billion dollars rather than accepting compensation worth a fraction, albeit still billions, of that.
The fact that this guy has convinced people he can cut costs is astounding. We live in an anime world.
I call this "Doctor's Syndrome". A lot of my parents' friends are doctors and really smart in their fields. Yet once you get them onto other topics they have no idea what they're talking about though they think otherwise.
Dunning-Kruger Effect, yet again, with Elno perhaps the greatest exemplar.
Elno, on the spectrum for sure!
Dr. Krugman, you're giving credit to billionaires for being honest about their intentions. Musk, Andreessen, etc., don't give a sheisse about government efficiency or anything else. They just want to pay no taxes because they give us jobs instead (in their twisted minds), and if no taxes from billionaires means that government doesn't function or people can't live, oh well.
Policy is being used to create a roadmap to a desired end. It's the end that matters to these people, not the policy that's the vehicle to get there.
Greed is the story. An endless, bottomless amount of greed. And policy is the means to fulfilling that greed...except they never can.
Didn't Wagner write an epic cycle of 4 operas about what happens when the already powerful and mighty are not satisfied with having nearly everything, and want even more for themselves at the expense of others who have next to nothing by comparison?
They want lower on themselves but not the elimination of taxes. They just want regressive taxation (such as tariffs ) so that the tax burden is carried by middle-income people and the poor. Bottomless greed, indeed.
Richard Wagner: The Ring of the Nibelungs
Storyline (it all comes tumbling down):
The plot revolves around a magic ring that grants the power to rule the world, forged by the Nibelung dwarf Alberich from gold he stole from the Rhine maidens in the river Rhine. With the assistance of the god Loge, Wotan – the chief of the gods – steals the ring from Alberich, but is forced to hand it over to the giants Fafner and Fasolt in payment for building the home of the gods, Valhalla, or they will take Freia, who provides the gods with the golden apples that keep them young. Wotan's schemes to regain the ring, spanning generations, drive much of the action in the story. His grandson, the mortal Siegfried, wins the ring by slaying Fafner (who slew Fasolt for the ring) – as Wotan intended – but is eventually betrayed and slain as a result of the intrigues of Alberich's son Hagen, who wants the ring for himself. Finally, the Valkyrie Brünnhilde – Siegfried's lover and Wotan's daughter who lost her immortality for defying her father in an attempt to save Siegfried's father Sigmund – returns the ring to the Rhine maidens as she commits suicide on Siegfried's funeral pyre. Hagen is drowned as he attempts to recover the ring. In the process, the gods and Valhalla are destroyed.
Lower taxes and more government funding for their businesses.
“Everyone says he is crazy – which maybe he is – but the scarier thing about him is that he is stupid. You do not know anyone as stupid as Donald Trump. You just don’t.”
—Fran Lebowitz
To which I can only add that a significant portion of our wealthy media class — including your former employer — are deeply invested in the notion that Trump can’t possibly be as stupid as he shows himself to be, because they can’t deal with what his becoming president says about what’s happened to this country on what they think of as their watch.
Great Lebowitz quote!
Let's hope that the recently found IQ test result of T is going to be made public soon - what was the result again? 78?
It reminds me of all those anonymous sources that insisted George W. Bush was actually really smart even though there was no evidence it was true.
“He’s way smarter than you would think based on everything he says or does!”
OK thanks for my daily dose of tales of hubris.
In the realm of practical biology Trump was a little more needy. Despite denouncing Anthony Fauci (who I think runs a close second to Albert Schweitzer), when Trump contracted Covid 19 he ate a heaping portion of crow, sought Fauci's advice, and received Covid 19 anti-sera.
Apparently a Presidential Pardon from a viral infection was not an option.
Trump is a viral infection.
I didn't realize cancers are viral infections.
He can be both.
"He can be both." You are correct - because if there's anything that Cheeto excels at, it's that he's the best at being the worst!
Well the only thing he is truly good at is failure.
I haven’t seen Donald Trump do anything except for himself. So I’ve been wondering why he remains so determined to follow his tariff policy in the face of so much expert opinion. Might his focus on tariffs be due to the fact that under our legislative system he can sell exclusions from those tariffs to whichever industries offers to pay him for those exclusions. Is this another huge opportunity for graft?
Is it an opportunity for graft? Of course it is. It was back in the good ol’ days, too. The great irony of today is that we have a relatively honest system (civil service, conflict of interest rules, etc) that is skewed by the influence of great wealth, which people see as corrupt and have decided to trade in for an administration that has basically promised to be incredibly corrupt in every way.
The bribes. He's in it for the bribes. Oh, excuse me, per the Supreme Court they're only 'sparking gratuities'
"On June 26, 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court held 6-3 in Snyder v. United States that a federal statute, 18 U.S.C. § 666(a)(1)(B), does not criminalize “gratuities” to state and local officials—i.e., payments made to those officials after an official act as a reward or token of appreciation" https://www.akingump.com/en/insights/alerts/supreme-court-narrows-federal-bribery-statute-that-applies-to-state-and-local-officials-2024#:~:text=On%20June%2026%2C%202024%2C%20the,reward%20or%20token%20of%20appreciation.
As the good doctor here has pointed out, Cheeto seems to get fixated on various narratives-mostly from the 70's and 80's-but sometimes from elsewhere. And once he gets an idea (or someone gives it to him), that's sort of the end of the discussion. It's not as if he is reasoning or thinking things over. Maybe if someone was able to flatter him into thinking tariffs were bad for him, personally?
Why else do you think Musk gifted Trump's campaign $250m + X (formerly Twitter)? He's ingratiated himself to ensure that any future tariffs on Tesla vehicles and components made in China, fall lightly or not all.
Trump is a fucking moron, we have to remember. A brain stem or digestive tract. No higher functions at all, arrested before he got toilet trained, and saved by being incredibly fucking rich. Which is hard to bear in mind because he's such a pig and a boor.
He's surrounded by ass-wipes. An army of ass-wipes, without whom he'd have drowned in shit. Sorry, Paul, I'm just messing around here. And being deliberately crude, to welcome you to Substack, where we can call a piece of shit a piece of shit.
I like the label ”Great Man's Disease." I call it billionaire-itis. Walter Isaacson tells the story in his Jobs biography of the time Steve Jobs got a one-hour private audience with President Obama. Jobs spent the entire time lecturing the president on what the U.S. educational system required at the moment. From the description of the conversation, even Jobs wouldn't be impressed if he went back and listened to himself a few years later.
Jobs did not have to die from his cancer. He sought real medical treatment too late because he got into pseudo-science and listened to the quacks that told him what he wanted to hear. My impression is that Jobs was actually a very smart guy, unlike Trump, Andreesen or Musk. But the thing they all have in common is they all think they are better than than rest of us, they deserve their massive wealth and as a result, the rules just don't apply to them.
In Job's case, he died because he thought he knew better than actual medical experts but his decisions didn't affect the rest of us. For the other three, god help us all.
FYI-
"Jobs was diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer, called an islet cell tumor or gasteroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumor (GEP-NET), which is a different form of pancreatic cancer than the highly aggressive and often rapidly fatal pancreatic adenocarcinoma.
GEP-NETs are slow growing tumors that have the potential to be cured surgically if the tumor is removed prior to metastasis.
There are limited clinical trial data on GEP-NETs and highly effective chemotherapy agents to treat GEP-NETs have not been identified."
"There has been widespread speculation about whether Jobs’ decision to use CAM approaches hastened his death by postponing initiation of potentially life-prolonging conventional treatments (Grady, 2011).
However, the details of Jobs’ diagnosis and specific treatments received, both conventional and unconventional, have not been made public. Therefore, we cannot comment on whether or not he made the best decisions on his cancer treatment, nor can we comment on whether he would have had different outcomes had he chosen a different treatment approach.
It is unknown whether Jobs’ outcomes would have been different if he had pursued surgery at the time of his diagnosis, or if had followed a specific chemotherapy protocol. And it is unknown how effective any of his acupuncture, botanical and dietary approaches may have been before or after his surgery."
TL;DR: Maybe, maybe.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4924574/
The bias of this article is apparent when they use the term “CAM” which is “complementary alternative medicine”. CAM is not medicine because it literally never has a clinical trial associated with it. CAM is pseudoscience. If it were actual science, it would have placebo controlled studies to back it up and would just be called medicine. He did acupuncture, botanicals and dietary changes none of which have any effect on cancer. None. What does have an effect on cancer? That’s right, surgery and chemo. The claim that because he was rich he had the best access to care is ridiculous on its face. Because he was rich, he had the best access to “doctors” who were happy to tell him what he wanted to hear. That is the point of Krugmans piece. The rich are told what they want to hear and push away anyone who tells them otherwise. Because Jobs was a great designer of products didn’t make him a medical expert.
He had a rare form of cancer that was known to be treatable ( not untreatable). His delay likely caused his death. I can provide links as well: https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/steve-jobs-treatment-biographer-jobs-delayed-surgery-pancreatic/story?id=14781250#:~:text=Jobs%2C%20fascinated%20by%20Eastern%20mysticism,to%20an%20unnecessarily%20early%20death.%22
That'd be an interesting read. I wonder how Obama reacted?
Paul Krugman is a national treasure.
Paul, you are articulating the same sense as Brian Klass has done in his Substack about “The Myth of the Secret Genius”…just because somebody got lucky, or like all the aforementioned oligarchs were inserted as a pinch runner on third base and scooted on a wild pitch, these guys say they hit a home run when they never truly got an at bat. Then some many people believe it. It is scary and frustrating to watch. These guys will run the economy into the ground if they really do what they say they will.
Congrats on leaving the NYT and coming back to the world!
I have really appreciated and learn from your Substack writings. And also enjoy your music selections; the one today is great. Thank you!
I've picked up some great artists over the years based on Prof K's recommendations. These interludes, however, come at the risk of sending me down a YouTube rabbit hole. It is building my resilience, however, so all to the good.
A problem some noted when Ben Carson was talking about pyramids: people who know one area well wrongly think they know everything well. And as you say, the rich and powerful are surrounded by yes people.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” Upton Sinclair
“Never argue with a man whose job depends on not being convinced.” H.L. Mencken
Income taxes, if anything, need to be raised on the billionaire––and multi-millionaire––class. (Millionaires are now getting a pass, as well paid Boomers socked away or stocked away their path to affluence.)
They know what they’re doing. They’re not half as stupid as people think they are. They’re just greedy and will lie about anything to keep raking in money. The economic doctrines they posit are a little more flimsy than Democrats’ deficit spending; a physicist would not tolerate the excesses of such doctrines and would find a way to cut military spending (which Clinton actually did, with a balanced budget) and adjust taxation levels toward a more progressive path. A polymath would certainly see that, and not manufacture consent toward one error or another.
To quibble, income taxes are quite high - 49% top marginal rate for state + federal income tax in California. We need to raise non-income taxes like capital gains and estate taxes to eliminate loopholes like "buy, borrow, die."
Or - None so blind as those who won’t see.
Professor Krugman: nobel prize winners are FAMOUS for making stupid illogical unfounded statements about, well, mostly everything from what i've been able to see. and they get really mad when someone points this pout to them. for example, whilst writing for The Guardian, i invented a little award that i named "The Nobel Prize in Quackpottery" that i only awarded to those who already won Nobel Prizes. one of these awardees -- ahem, https://www.theguardian.com/science/grrlscientist/2012/oct/09/nobel-prize-quackpottery-physics -- spent a year or so email stalking me and threatening my life.
it was really quite exciting.
so if the orange potato and elon musk (a white potato if i stick to this analogy) want to believe they are the smartest and bestest of all people, then who indeed (as you noted) will tell them different?
Poor Linus Pauling.
Ask any linguist about Noam Chomsky
Hmm...
Ever read this?
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2008/krugman/facts/
of course! i've been reading paul krugman's column for a long time in the NYTimes (well, until i dumped the NYT about six months ago.)
but yes, this is amusing.
SPOILER ALERT - when you put people in charge of Government whose life mission has been to make money, what do you suppose they will do with the Government? Doesn't take a genius to figure that one out.
Well, keep in mind that these are also the people who have been saying since St. Ray-gun, if not earlier, that "government is the problem." And whenever they control gov't, they prove their point in spades.