Who should be Harris' VP

[giblets]

Is Donald Trump even capable of laughter?

[-Jrabbit]

Pretty sure that's a negatory...

[BeBMan]

Both candidates should explain how they'll ensure that the starliner crew will return soon and safely. This whole prob wouldn't have occurred under a real space president

[-Jrabbit]

Are they really calling it a "starliner"?? That thing won't ever approach an actual star...

[Elok]

I continue to be depressed by this election; Trump is an awful man and incapable of decency or competence, but Kamala is working hard to seem even less competent, particularly in the critical arena of economics. Presidents can do little to improve the economy, but the right kind of meddling can make it a good deal worse, and she has seen his stupid tariffs and raised him a proposal of ... actual price controls on groceries. Ugh. She also wants to subsidize first-time homebuyers (read: further inflate the price of housing) and I've heard rumblings about unrealized capital gains taxes (which will probably die a miserable death in the courts if she gets them through, but still, ugh, murdering the stock market is not a victimless crime).

OTOH I just did some googling and

The Trump campaign also quickly slammed the proposal, with Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance claiming “Kamala Harris wants to give $25,000 to illegal aliens to buy American homes.”

Yes, that's exactly what's wrong with this proposal. Illegal immigrants, who can't even fill out an I-9, are going to be using this pitiful boost to buy up all our houses with their loads and loads of free cash. That will totally be the fallout here. An abysmally idiotic proposal gets criticized in the most abysmally idiotic fashion possible by a greasy little sellout. **** this race.

[Lorizael]

The desire for a tax on unrealized capital gains is a result of very stupid memes that go, "Rich Whitemoney is worth $300,000,000,000. That means his hourly rate is 10 times what you make in a year! Yet Rich Whitemoney Inc. paid $0 in Federal taxes last year! Billionaires are thieves who don't earn their money! #guillotine #eattherich #theonlygoodbillionaireisadeadbillionaire"

Society would be vastly improved if we all suddenly forgot the concept of "net worth."

[Elok]

A college friend of mine posted on FB this silly estimate that Smaug's net worth--the pile of gold beneath him--was actually less than Elon Musk's. I didn't touch the part where Elon Musk got rich selling people things instead of murdering them and taking their stuff, or that the estimate of the gold's value was ignoring the part where locking all that gold up would have vastly diminished world supply and thus driven the price up. I just pointed out that, strictly speaking, Elon's billions are monopoly money, and that if he tried to liquidate more than a tiny fraction at once the price would tank and they would all vanish. Friend didn't reply.

I later did the fairly simple calculations required to determine that confiscating all of the man's wealth and distributing it equally to all Americans--ignoring the many, many technical problems inherent in doing so--would earn us all of $800 or so apiece. My family of five could pay our very low rent twice, almost three times! And then the inflation would hit and the cost of groceries would rise again and you can only bankrupt a rich dude once. Fundamentally, soaking the rich is an unserious answer to our nation's increasingly dire financial state. Social Security and Medicare go insolvent in about a decade. A substantial portion of our budget deficit is now dedicated to interest payments on existing debt. The government must shrink substantially, as a matter of basic mathematics. But nobody wants to hear that so we yell dumb slogans at each other. Alas.

[giblets]

Elok is always depressed.

[Elok]

Only about politics. My life is going pretty well, assuming the next (or current) president doesn't do something that will completely neutralize my recent enormous raise.

[Uncle Sparky]

I hope the highest tax rate goes back to 85%. Wherever you fit on the spectrum, hopefully your rate goes up, unless you are making under $50,000 US.

[Elok]

So, you either don't know that I'm sole breadwinner for several kids, are grossly ignorant of cost of living including housing costs in the US post-inflation, or are just being a jackass. Possibly all three.