Monday, August 31, 2026
Canadians Overwhelmingly Approve Of PM Carney Standing Up To Trump
The charts above are from the Abacus Data Poll -- done between August 21st and 26th of a nationwide sample of 2,022 Canadian adults, with a 2.2 point margin of error.
The Best Of Us And The Worst Of Us
This is from the website of Robert Reich:
Even at 80 years old, she was still bringing Americans together. At 80, he continues to tear us apart.
She always stood for the underdog. He stands for the overlord. She was among the most generous people in American public life. He is the most self-centered. Hers was a voice of clarity, courage, and hope. His is the voice of cruelty, corruption, and incompetence.
If you line up the human species from most admirable to least, she’d be among the first; he’d be among the last.
Sadly, she is no longer with us. Sadly, he is.
This week he took to his Truth Social media to share an AI-generated illustration of himself walking arm in arm with her around the White House (see above). “I knew her a little bit,” he boasted on Glenn Beck’s radio show. “She really liked me, I will tell you!” at which Beck laughed out loud.
Most of the people I meet around this country are more like her than him. Americans are kind, friendly, empathic, optimistic. We want to protect the vulnerable and comfort the afflicted.
We’ve given refuge to those fleeing violence and persecution. We’ve aspired to equal opportunity for the disadvantaged, help for the destitute. We’ve given louder voices to those who’d otherwise not be heard. We’ve been a beacon of hope in the world.
These ideals are embedded in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Emma Lazarus’s poem affixed to the Statue of Liberty, FDR’s second inaugural address, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington.
We haven’t lived up to them, of course. There’s always been a dark side to America — a part of our soul that exemplifies him rather than her. We’ve been intolerant and bigoted. We’ve supported dictators. Earlier on we enslaved and engaged in genocide.
But most of us aren’t proud of that dark side. We’ve been proudest of our ideals.
So why did we elect him president again? Everyone has a view: Joe Biden should have exited the stage sooner, Democrats should have had a mini-primary, Kamala Harris wasn’t the best candidate, Trump cheated, and so on.
The deeper reason, I think, started several decades ago when those who had accumulated a great deal of power and wealth began to change America.
They destroyed the basic bargain at the heart of our economy: that if you worked hard and played by the rules, you’d do well and your children would do even better. Since the late 1970s, some $80 trillion has been siphoned from the bottom 90 percent of Americans to the richest 1 percent.
Yet they got us to blame each other for our struggles rather than look upward and see where all the power and wealth had gone.
Trump gave voice to the scapegoating — blaming undocumented workers, the “deep state,” transgender people, Latinos, Black people, “communists,” Muslims, and Democrats. Now even Canada! All along, he’s been the mainstay of big money, the tribune of the wealthy and powerful.
But his power is now waning. Americans are seeing where he and the dark side have led us — to another unending war, to higher prices and lower wages, to cruel and brutal mass deportations.
We are finally looking upward and realizing where the power and wealth have gone.
We will have an election in just over nine weeks. It will give us a chance to correct some of this — not just constrain him but also start the long and difficult process of rebuilding the nation toward the ideals we’re most proud of, and which she exemplified.
GOP Congress Has Made It Easier For Their Rich Friends To Evade Paying Taxes
The following is part of an article by economist Paul Krugman:
Much of the rise of the modern American oligarchy has been driven by deliberate policy rather than technological or market forces. And that deliberate policy has been the decades-long dismantling of the system of progressive taxation — a system that had ended the Gilded Age, the last period of great inequality. Starting in the 1970s, right-wing politicians pushed through large reductions in effective tax rates on the wealthy. And in the 2010s, Republican-controlled congresses stripped the IRS of resources to enforce the tax code. These two changes set the stage for the reemergence of immense fortunes, with vast social and political consequences.
What exactly does a “reduction in effective tax rates” mean? Much of that change was implemented through reductions in the statutory rates. For example, the top federal tax bracket on individual incomes was more than 90% in the 1950s, versus 37% now. Large corporations paid a tax rate of 52% on their profits in the 1950s, which is now down to 21%. Large estates paid a 77% tax rate until 1976; now the rate is only 40%, and that only applies to the value in excess of $15 million.
However, beyond these reductions in statutory rates, tax avoidance and tax evasion have grown significantly. “Avoidance” and “evasion” may sound like synonyms, but they are not: avoidance involves exploiting loopholes in the tax code in ways that are legal, even if they shouldn’t be, while evasion involves breaking the law.
And tax evasion is now a very big concern. Reasonable estimates of the “tax gap” — taxes that individuals and businesses are legally obliged to pay, but don’t — are startlingly large — $600 billion a year or more – approximately 40% of the current budget deficit. Furthermore, much of this tax gap is surely accounted for by tax evasion by high-income Americans. So tax evasion is a significant contributor to both the rise of American oligarchy and the high federal debt.
Thus it is startling to realize that, except for a brief attempt to reduce the tax gap by the Biden administration, the U.S. government has over time reduced its efforts to ensure that the wealthy pay the taxes they owe. It’s clear that the purposeful reduction in the enforcement of the tax code for the wealthy is both a symptom as a well as a cause of America’s rising oligarchy. It is a key factor in America’s downward spiral into oligarchy, which is currently ravaging our politics and our democratic institutions.
Sunday, August 30, 2026
Saturday, August 29, 2026
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