[Mick]

I don’t think my kids feel betrayed by the Democrats . . . yet. I am trying to alert them to the dangers of socialism.

My sister, the Stanford PhD, is a dedicated, diehard Socialist. She and I were debating the merits of capitalism vs. socialism in front of my eight-year-old son. He asked “What’s the difference?”

I said, “Capital is money, and people use it to build products and services that people buy. In capitalism, people have a choice of which goods and services to buy. And how well you do is dependent on three things: your talent, a little bit of luck, but mainly how hard you work. The harder you work, the more money you make.”

Sis says “That’s all great, but…do you remember when you were in kindergarten, and everyone got an apple and everyone got a cookie and everyone got a juice box…remember when everyone got the same thing? That’s Socialism. Everyone works just as hard as they want to, and everyone gets the same thing. Isn’t that great?”

My son thought for a moment and asked, “So no matter how hard I worked, I would get paid the same?” My sister, not understanding his point, said “Yes! Isn’t that great?”

He then replied “then why would I work hard?”

She started to splutter about the joys of proletarian cooperation, and he shook his head and said “I’d rather just work hard and make a lot of money.”

 

[Mick]

My youngest son is 30. We had a real conversation about politics for the first time in maybe five years. He was a student body president in high school, on the conservative side. He worked a Hillary Clinton fundraiser in 2016 (25 people at $25k a plate, he was an intern in college for a PR firm) and he called me and said “I don’t think she’s going to win.” I said “she’s far ahead in the polls, why don’t you think she’ll win?” He said, “because she doesn’t look people in the eye. When she made her prepared remarks to 25 people, she stared at the back wall like she was presenting to a stadium. No eye contact.” Her husband was the king of eye contact.

At any rate, he spoke about today’s political environment with some real vitriol and anger at the status quo. He’s doing well, but he feels — as did the author — that the establishment elites on both the left and the right have hung his generation out to dry.

[Mick]

Wisconsin and Michigan are next…

Up next for the DSA? Two major swing states. – POLITICO

[Mick]

They like us, they really like us!

World Cup soccer fans can teach Americans what’s good about America

These visitors aren’t amazed by free refills; they’re amazed by what free refills represent. They’re seeing, for the first time and with fresh eyes, the product of 250 years of freedom, capitalism, hard work and the most audacious political experiment in human history.

• This reply was modified 1 month, 2 weeks ago by Mick.

[Mick]

Personally, I find it stunning that a voting populace would consider a low-information Socialist like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes. For people who want an actual summary of reasons, she shouldn’t be President, here you go:

1. She is stronger at agenda-setting than lawmaking. AOC is highly effective at moving national conversation around climate, student debt, housing, health care, ethics, and economic inequality. The perceived weakness is that her public influence still appears larger than her record of turning major personal proposals into enacted law. That said, the “she gets nothing done” attack is too crude: the House passed her geothermal cost-recovery measure, and the Center for Effective Lawmaking listed her as the top House Democrat on energy policy effectiveness in the 118th Congress.
2. She has an intraparty coalition problem. She inspires progressives, younger voters, and online activists, but some establishment and swing-district Democrats remain wary. Her 2024 loss to Gerry Connolly for ranking Democrat on House Oversight, by a 131–84 caucus vote, was a clear sign that many colleagues still valued seniority, trust, experience, and caucus relationships over her public profile. AP also reported that New Democrat Coalition members had concerns about her past support for primary challenges against Democrats.
3. Her district does not test swing-state appeal. NY-14 is a very safe Democratic seat; Cook Political Report rates it Solid D with a D+19 partisan voting index. That does not diminish her legitimacy, but it does mean her electoral incentives differ sharply from Democrats who have to win Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, or purple suburban districts.
4. She is nationally polarizing and already well-defined. YouGov shows her with very high name recognition — 81% fame — and 41% popularity, but also 27% disliked and 14% neutral. For a presidential candidate, the challenge is that many voters already have a fixed mental image of “AOC,” shaped by both her own prominence and years of conservative media framing.
5. Her ideological brand is an easy target. Her association with democratic socialism, the Green New Deal, Medicare for All-style politics, and left-populist Socialist economics makes her a hero to many progressives but also gives opponents a simple “too radical” frame. That would likely be a major Republican line of attack in a national race.
6. Her policy vision is more morally forceful than operationally complete. The Green New Deal is the classic example: it was hugely influential as a movement document, but critics saw it as broad, aspirational, expensive, and light on legislative detail, cost structure, implementation sequencing, and political path to passage. Axios described the original resolution as ambitious but lacking detail and a clear route to becoming policy.
7. She lacks executive experience. Like most House members, she has not run a state, a large agency, a city government, or a major bureaucracy. She hasn’t even run a bar. A presidential race would force the question: can a movement-oriented legislator become a chief executive responsible for personnel, crisis management, budgets, agencies, and national-security decisions?
8. Foreign policy and commander-in-chief readiness are fundamentally nonexistent. Her official foreign-policy framing emphasizes human rights and moving away from interventionism and “forever wars.” Supporters may see that as principled restraint; critics would press whether she has enough depth on military strategy, great-power competition, Taiwan, China, NATO, Israel, Ukraine, and crisis decision-making. Recent criticism of her foreign-policy comments at the Munich Security Conference shows how quickly that issue could become a presidential-campaign vulnerability.
9. Her fundraising model is powerful but structurally limiting. She can raise serious grassroots money: Politico reported that she raised $9.6 million in the first quarter of 2025, with an average donation of $21, while rejecting lobbyist and corporate PAC money. That is a strength. The perceived weakness is whether a small-dollar, anti-corporate model can reliably match the financial infrastructure, bundler networks, and institutional donor support needed for a full presidential primary and general election.
10. She is a movement leader rather than a governing manager. Her strengths are communication, moral clarity, media fluency, and agenda-setting. But presidential voters often also look for steadiness, executive judgment, managerial competence, coalition discipline, and reassurance. Opponents would likely argue that she is better at defining the fight than managing the government.
11. Her online and media power should not translate into institutional power. AOC is unusually good at commanding attention, but Congress still rewards seniority, relationships, procedural fluency, trust, and internal deal-making. Her Oversight defeat illustrated the gap between public visibility and caucus control.
12. She creates down-ballot anxiety for moderate Democrats. Swing-district Democrats may worry that elevating her would let Republicans nationalize House and Senate races around socialism, spending, crime, immigration, climate mandates, or “the Squad,” even when local Democratic candidates are running more moderate campaigns. AP’s reporting on New Democrat concerns during the Oversight race reflects that broader anxiety.
13. She faces structural identity-based headwinds. AOC herself has expressed doubt that the country would elect someone like her, citing misogyny, racism, and hostility toward women of color. Those barriers are not “shortcomings” in her abilities, but they are real perceived obstacles in national electoral politics.
14. Her core appeal is too concentrated. She is very strong with progressives, younger voters, activists, and parts of the multiracial urban left. The open question is whether she can expand that appeal to older Democrats, suburban moderates, union households skeptical of cultural left politics, independents, and persuadable voters in battleground states.
15. Her candidacy invites a referendum on ideology rather than competence. A national AOC campaign could become less about individual policies and more about whether voters want democratic socialism, aggressive redistribution, climate-industrial policy, and a generational confrontation with political and economic elites. For supporters, that is the point. For critics, that is the liability.

AOC doesn’t lack talent. It is that her talent is currently most proven in movement politics, media, agenda-setting, and ideological mobilization — while a presidential campaign would test broader coalition-building, executive readiness, foreign-policy fluency, institutional trust, and swing-state persuasion.

• This reply was modified 1 month ago by Mick.

[Mick]

Happy 250th Birthday, U. S. of A!!

[Mick]

Colorado has gone pretty far left. Biden won it by 13.5% in 2020. CA is left, going Socialist in LA. Same with Seattle/Washington. Same with New York City/New York. Same with Colorado. Chris Rabb, D-primary in Philly. Janeese Lewis George in WashDC, D-primary, along with the Ward 1 city council member. Socialist candidates won primaries in Maryland, Georgia, Kentucky, Oregon, Arizona, North Carolina and Vermont. Blue states, so they’ll be likely wins in November.

Socialist wave coming just in time for artificial intelligence to eliminate 10 million American jobs. Life’s going to get interesting for the rich, techies, and especially rich techies.

There’s always been a tension between the ultra-rich and their party of choice, the Democrats. The three second-tier groups favoring the Dems are either comparatively poor (Big Academia, Big Labor and Big Media) or moderately well-off regardless of who wins elections, but make money when there’s litigation (Big Law). The three wealthy groups favoring the Dems either make their money in make-believe (Hollywood) or live make-believe lives (Wall Street) or are insular and insulated (Silicon Valley). All of those groups were supportive of Democrat/Leftist/Liberal/Progressive policies…just as long as they never touched the rich. So tax rates stayed relatively low, Obama bails out Wall Street and screws over Main Street.

And people don’t forget. And when the gap between rich and poor widens to unfathomable levels and millions of American citizens (and voters) lose their jobs, they want change. The challenge for Democratic societies is that you make changes with a scalpel so it doesn’t get done with a meat cleaver.

That isn’t to say the DSA won’t screw it up. It’s Socialism, so by definition it will screw up. If the DSA doesn’t focus on climate change and illegal immigration, then it should last a while longer than it otherwise would.

The cleaver isn’t here…yet. But it’s right over the horizon. Buckle up, folks. This is going to turn into a wild ride.

• This reply was modified 1 month, 3 weeks ago by Mick.
• This reply was modified 1 month, 2 weeks ago by Mick.

[Mick]

Not only did she win, she won by A LOT, 6%.

Melat Kiros, a Left-Wing Insurgent, Ousts a 15-Term Congresswoman in Colorado – The New York Times

Funny thing is…if the Socialists learn to refine their message, they’ll find a very receptive country. By that, I mean if they don’t fall into anti-Semitism, and if they keep a closed border — they will find a very willing voting population. You have a large number of low-education voters, and Socialism sounds great until you Google it for 20 minutes to see all of its excesses.

But you get the government you deserve.

[Mick]

3,302 billionaires and counting…

The World Now Has 3,302 Billionaires and They’re Getting Richer – SWI swissinfo.ch

[Mick]

I asked ChatGPT:

1. How many billionaires in California?  214 by their count, Forbes said 239 at the end of 2025, and 250 at the present date.
2. How many have already left California? Nine.
3. How many are likely to leave? 25-60, with 40 being ChatGPT’s best guess.
4. Any oddities? Key issue is whether the 15 ultra-wealthy ($50 billion or more) decide to leave.

Also asked about Newsom’s national billionaire tax. This is a little bit different, because if you want to leave the USA to avoid the billionaire’s tax, you need to renounce your American citizenship.

There’s an important twist here: once this is federal, “leave” mostly means renounce U.S. citizenship, not move to Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico, Monaco, or Dubai. That makes the departure number much smaller, but the avoidance/planning number much larger.

Yes — at the federal level, the math changes dramatically.

My estimate: if Newsom’s federal $100M+ minimum-tax proposal passed, probably 500–2,000 ultra-wealthy U.S. households would try to leave the U.S. tax system over 10 years, with a base case around 1,000–1,500. Of those, I’d guess 25–75 billionaires would actually expatriate or seriously restructure citizenship/residency. That sounds big politically, but it is small relative to the affected population.

The reason: moving abroad is not enough. U.S. citizens are generally taxed on worldwide income even while living abroad, so the tax-avoidance move is not “buy a house in Dubai”; it is renounce U.S. citizenship or abandon long-term resident status. The IRS also already has an expatriation-tax regime for people with $2M+ net worth, which would cover every $100M+ taxpayer.</p>

The headcount affected

There are likely tens of thousands of Americans above $100M. One estimate based on Federal Reserve data put the number at about 74,000 U.S. households worth $100M+ as of 2022, and that number is probably higher now after the AI/market run-up. The billionaire tier is much smaller: Forbes’ 2026 list says the U.S. has 989 billionaires, while IPS/Forbes real-time data showed 935 U.S. billionaires with $8.1T combined wealth at the end of 2025.

How many leave?

Here’s my practical range:

Scenario	Likely expatriating / leaving U.S. tax net	Billionaires included
Strong exit tax, immediate effective date	300–800	10–30
Normal political compromise	1,000–1,500	25–75
Weak exit tax / delayed effective date	2,000–5,000	75–150

The base-case number is not higher because federal taxation is sticky. The ultra-rich can change state residence in a weekend, but renouncing U.S. citizenship is permanent, reputationally loud, logistically hard, and taxable on exit. Empirical wealth-tax migration studies find real but modest migration effects: one recent Scandinavian study estimated that a 1 percentage-point wealth-tax increase reduces the stock of wealthy taxpayers by about 2% in the long run; a U.K. study of super-rich non-doms also found emigration responses were “modest.”

How much more revenue?

For a Newsom/Biden-style minimum tax on $100M+ households, I’d pencil in: $500B–$900B over 10 years gross, and probably $400B–$700B net after avoidance, litigation, valuation disputes, installment rules, and some expatriation.

That is much less than a Warren-style annual wealth tax, but still real money — roughly $40B–$70B per year net, on average. The closest prior federal model is Biden’s “billionaire minimum income tax.” The earlier 20% version was estimated by Treasury at $360B over 10 years from about 20,000 richest households; Biden’s later FY2025 version was a 25% minimum tax on income including unrealized gains for households above $100M. With 2026 asset values much higher, especially in AI/tech, a $500B+ decade estimate is plausible.

But if Congress passed a true annual wealth tax instead — say Warren-style 2% above $50M and 3% above $1B — the revenue number gets much larger. Penn Wharton estimated the 2021 Warren bill at $2.1T–$2.4T over 10 years, while the 2026 Jayapal/Warren release claims $6.2T over 10 years from 260,000 households.

So the clean answer: A federal $100M+ minimum tax probably raises $400B–$700B net over 10 years and causes about 1,000–1,500 ultra-wealthy households to leave or attempt to leave the U.S. tax system. A true annual wealth tax could raise several trillion, but would also trigger far more avoidance, litigation, valuation warfare, and expatriation planning.

[Mick]

This remains a very interesting topic given tax minimization opportunities and the raging budget deficit. I guess part of me thinks persons over a certain wealth can and should contribute more, but they can flee the US just like they can flee NY or CA . . .

Some definitely can and will flee the U. S.  But I wonder how many would leave the U. S. over an incremental increase in the wealth tax and a large increase in inheritance taxes? In which country would you rather live?

Second question: at what point will the U. S. just default on our collective debt? The Baby Boomers are starting to retire in numbers (I’m still four years away), and then GenX will want to retire. Will the remaining workers — who can’t afford a house and feel quite strongly that the Baby Boomers and GenX types got all the great opportunities — want to continue increased taxes while they are still physically able and their forebears are in their dotage?

Personally, I think they’ll continue the long trend of American selfishness that dates back to the 1970s. Remember when the 1970s were called the “Me” generation? Since then, each successive generation have had it worse than the prior generation — and their parents haven’t been collectively interested in their childrens’ travails.

• This reply was modified 1 month, 3 weeks ago by Mick.

[Mick]

In January 2025, the FireAid Benefit concert raised $100 million. Not one dime went to people who lost their houses in the fires. It all went to left-leaning non-profits, including (originally) a non-profit run by Jennifer Siebel Newsom. When this travesty was publicized, Siebel-Newsom’s nonprofit returned the funds. To date, no homeowner benefited from the $100 million raised.

Recently, Gavin Newsom’s chief of staff, Dana Williamson, 53, pleaded guilty to federal charges of conspiracy to commit bank fraud and wire fraud, subscribing to a false tax return, and making false statements to a federal agent.

California’s fraud has outdistanced Minnesota’s by a considerable amount. And that doesn’t include the lengthy list of Newsom’s failures in this state.

And you dutifully reported a 100% pro-Newsom opinion. Makes sense.

• This reply was modified 2 months ago by Mick.

[Mick]

Jake Tapper’s response was…unique.

CNN’s Jake Tapper slammed for response after shots fired near Donald Trump

[Mick]

Why the Left finds moral justification in murder and mayhem…

Opinion: The moral monstrosity of the New York Times podcast

Article is by Jonathan Turley, professor at George Washington University Law School. Not a conservative, nowhere close.

Jonathan Turley – Wikipedia

The modern monstrosity of the New York Times, head of moral relativism.

Opinion: The moral monstrosity of the New York Times podcast

I wonder why the NYT keeps driving this narrative. Maybe Mark Halperin has the answer:

Donald Trump has done a lot of things antithetical to belief in the First Amendment. He’s done a lot of things to limit press access, and those things should be scrutinized and covered and debated and pushed back against institutionally. But until we, as a profession, acknowledge what the media did on Russiagate and on Joe Biden’s loss of the mental acuity, we don’t have standing.

Halperin: Until we acknowledge what the media did on Russiagate and Biden’s mental acuity, we don’t have standing

• This reply was modified 4 months ago by Mick.
• This reply was modified 3 months, 4 weeks ago by Mick.

[Mick]

To your point…

Peter Zeihan: Ukraine’s Attacks On Russian Oil

I agree, I think Russia has lost. They have a demographic time bomb that is exploding. Their infrastructure has crumbled. They’ve lost more than 1.3 million men since the war began four years ago:

Ukraine says Russia has lost 1,321,450 troops in war

The Atlantic discusses it in detail. Their thesis is that Russia is basically a junior-grade ally to China:

Russia Is Losing the War—Just Not to Ukraine – The Atlantic

• This reply was modified 4 months ago by Mick.

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