gehringer_2

Yup. The dirty little secret that modern welfare state governments (and yes, the US is a 1st world welfare state - we just aren't very good at it.....) need property and income taxes because they are stable. Sales taxes, excise taxes, tariffs, can all swing wildly with the business cycle leaving government budgets to swing likewise.

I'm only disappointed that since Trumps coin was $TRUMP, Melania's wasn't $TRUMPETTE.

Tariffs will act just like sales taxes in the sense that they will hit the bottom half of the income distribution hardest (as President Cleveland understood perfectly well a century ago). Just what the US income distribution needs is a Trillion in new taxes paid mostly by the underclass. We are doomed.

Qouth the Dodgers: "All your players are belong to us"

Melania knows how to sell herself.

Pretty simple really. I want him to support vaccine research and use since that's how you eventually solve it for the birds as well as any people once it makes the jump we are all waiting for. (not!)

Here in the People's Republic of Ann Arbor, we just voted to allow the City to start up it's own electric utility. Talk about daylight madness. Granted DTE has done a ****ty job of line maintenance here for about 20 yrs - they basically stopped tree trimming hoping people would start paying them for it. Well they didn't particularly care to, and the power outages in town are probably the #2 civil complaint after the potholes. So in the last couple of years, after the "public power" political drumbeat started, DTE has upped line replacement and maintenance in a big way, but the it was too late to salvage their reputation in town and the public utility initiative sailed through in the election. Now of course it's the City that is already responsible for the roads, (that #1 complaint) which they can't figure out how to maintain, so doesn't it make perfect sense to give them charge of something infinitely more complex to do than paving roads and filling holes? Sure it does.....

No, but his buddy RFKj may be the worst pick in the world to try and end it.

Yup. You can have all the stuff in the world, but you have to have command. His walk rates last year were too high. Certainly something everyone assumes will fall into line, but he hasn't proven it yet.

It comes down where you put resources to get the best return. As long as there are owners out there willing to rack up deferred liability out to 2050, a team like Detroit will probably remain better able to use its resources more effectively on scouting and development and rehab recovery. I don't see trying to 'outstupid' the orgs that have income to burn as a likely route to more winning. No - I don't care about the money per se, but the team won't operate at a loss, so big non-productive contracts do affect what else they can spend on, Ilitch's personal wealth not-withstanding.

One interpretation of Cleveland is that he believed it was the government that was the primary culprit in mal-distribution of wealth because of a highly regressive regulatory and tax-system (largely tariffs in the pre-income tax days). So he might have a foot in both the left (anti-wealth disparity) and right (anti-government 'interference') in today's paradigms. Some of the leaders around the turn of century were pretty economically radical. Hayes apparently favored nearly total inheritance taxes. With money running US politics today, no leader today can be as patently anti-rich as some of those guys were. There are certain steps that a system may take that turn out to be irreversible, and it appear to me that Citizen's United was one of those. We've politically empowered monied interests to the point where they can stop the political process from ever controlling them again. If the US fails to repair its broken politics and thus ultimately fails - and right now I see little prospect of that repair, CU will be the root cause.

Always good advice, even if it came from a lapsed Anglican.

Wasn't it poor line maintenance by AEP that brought us the great 2003 black-out?

This is why I never got my panties in any kind of bunch over the supposed influence DEI at schools like UM on the larger culture. All this stuff rolls mostly right off the kids' backs. It's millennial - and older - faculty that were the most charged up. The bulk of students just saw it as extra work and a distraction, and I'd guess for every student that got "proselytized" by it, one other was driven to become more conservative/reactionary. Personally I never saw anything particularly onerous in anything I was asked to participate in, my larger concern was always the return on investment on the resourced devoted to it. Interestingly, from what I've been reading, the research on diversity program effectiveness done by business says stop talking about who is right and wrong or oppressed and oppressor and just spend the time educating people on how to have their antennae up and be more inoffensive - you play on people's natural predisposition to self-improvement. And given that young people today tend to be deficient in sophisticated social skills today anyway, I can get behind that. Also apparently, simply dropping the 'E' seems to make a difference in how people respond. Folks seem to be OK with "Diversity" and "Inclusion" but "Equity" immediately makes them think their own jobs are at risk. One analyst I heard discuss this said "Equity" is a problematic term because people don't parse the difference between "equity" and "equality" very well.

that didn't age well.

Tim Allen is less funny as .... almost anyone.

It is a hard group to predict. On the positional side, they've shown they can do some things, but not that they can do them consistently over 162. A couple of guys swinging better or worse will create a big swing. On the pitching side, Cobb is not an exciting pickup, Skubal is the one guy on the team that can't be any better than he was last season, and the rest of the arms are either untested and/or promising but recovering from injury. Which is why I'm anxious to see another front of the rotation guy signed.

good thing the football game is about to start. Wings give up 2 goals in the 1st 2 minutes of the 2nd. 3-0 TB

Bingo

And Thompson can't sink a trey with no-one within 20 ft of him. /.sigh./. It's ironic for all the talk there has been in the past about Cade and Ivey not being optimal on the same team, Ivey is the slasher with the speed to make teams pay for bringing their D up court.

what the heck was JB doing there - you needed your guys on the court more than you needed the TO, then THJ can't make FTs.

that was pretty bad. You hate to say the fix is in, but the fix is in.

Most recent thing I have seen was from last month - he's supposedly started running. A "fighting chance" to be ready. (?) https://www.foxsports.com/mlb/javier-baez-player

Yes - you are correct. Truman has served more than half of FDR's term but I forgot the amendment didn't apply to till the Presidency after him. Apparently his prospects for re-election in '52 were pretty bad anyway, but that just goes to the point about most presidents not sustaining their popularity.

Flaherty is the guy that would make my off-season. Hinch and the kiddy corps will find ways to score runs with or without Bregman, but while the Tigs have a lot of arms, they need another one that's bone fide top line, and Jack should be it.