tikimixologist
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User ID: 257
Consider that in the first part of his presidency they had both parts of the legislature and executive. He got nothing done with all that!
As you note, he made a major tax reform which eliminated loopholes that funnel money to high income Democrats. He ended the PATRIOT act. His supreme court hit rate is 100%, resulting in ending Roe vs Wade, compared to the 50% hit rate for all Republicans since the 80's [1]. He started 0 wars.
He also made Operation Warp Speed happen, saving millions of lives by routing around the regulatory state.
Now I'd prefer DeSantis to Trump. But lets not pretend Trump did nothing; he certainly did far more than I expected, and far more good things than the swamp dwelling Republicans he was running against.
And realistically speaking he also made other Republicans better. In a world without Trump putting wokeness on our radar, would DeSantis be anything other than a generic Republican?
[1] Bush Jr: Roberts and Alito. Bush Sr: Thomas and Souter. Reagan: O'Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia and Kennedy.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
I think that the term 'government funded media' clearly takes on a negative implication that extends beyond the strict meaning of the words.
This is of course the point. The American establishment uses terms like this as epithets to characterize their opponents, and simply avoids using these terms - even when literally true - for it's own mouthpieces. Now twitter is simply using these terms literally and in an unbiased manner and the establishment is losing their minds.
When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.
(By "unbiased", I simply mean twitter seems to be applying a standard of "does their website say they get X% of their money from the government", at least based on Musk's tweets.)
tikimixologist
1yr ago
I'm confused. What religion do you believe is being discriminated against, and what religion do you believe this rule does not apply to?
Unless I'm interpreting this horribly wrongly, I'm pretty sure this bans any religions advocacy. It's just wide enough to also capture certain religious beliefs that purport to be secular.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
Republicans spent all 8 of his years burning political capital on opposing Obama, to the point of government shutdown.
Govt was shutdown for 27 days under Clinton (2 separate shutdowns), 16 under Obama, and 38 days under Trump (also 2 shutdowns). Clinton was impeached, Bush was not (in spite of many calls to "Chimpeach the Chimperor"), Trump was impeached, Obama was not. I'm not sure that things did get more heated under Obama - it's not like Bush Derangement Syndrome wasn't a thing prior to that.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
Yeah guess I misinterpreted your post as saying both property tax and LVT have this property, as opposed to just the latter. My bad!
tikimixologist
1yr ago
There’s no deadweight loss, it’s very difficult to game/avoid,
Property taxes very much have a deadweight loss - you may choose not to put your property to it's most efficient use since that would increase it's assessed value. Gaming is also reasonably straightforward - make improvements off the books (i.e. to interiors of your house and don't get permits).
That's why an LVT is so much better than a property tax - a vacant lot, a burned out husk, a single family home or a 20 story condo, either way you pay the same tax but more improvements -> more value for you and others.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
the idea that Wall Street and Exxon are left-wing now,
Is a straw man you invented, along with the rest of your comment.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
Yes, the links I provided also explain that.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
Recall that the question you were answering is premised on the Trump wing beating the Cheney wing. You are now saying the Trump wing has not successfully beaten the Cheney wing yet.
That's true, but kind of a non sequitur.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
Boeing, Raytheon and Exxon all contribute fairly equally to Dems and Repubs. All favored Biden over Trump.
The republicans will be more loyal to the military industrial empire and wall street than to their working class voters. Four years of Trump, and he delivered on everything he promised to Israel and almost nothing he promised his base.
It is true that the left and their allies in the military industrial empire did prevent Trump from ending existing wars and conspired to mislead the American people about him (ze russkies!!!). Wall St has been solidly part of the left for 20 years.
You might be confusing Trump and the populist right with Liz Cheney.
Also, the newer version is more accurate in some ways. Segregation laws did apply to "some groups" (not only African Americans) in states with appreciable numbers of "some groups" - typically "Negroes, mulattos, Mongolians and Malays", but also including pacific islanders in Oregon.
I wonder which state had a significant number of pacific islanders?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jim_Crow_law_examples_by_state
tikimixologist
1yr ago
No, the explicit reasoning of the fed in blocking TNB is that it would discourage people from putting money into institutions that lend.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
People were buying a mix of 4 week t-bills and other short term debt in order to put their money to work. It was not always paying 4.5% interest though, a while back it was maybe 0.1-0.2% + protection against tail risks of your bank shutting down.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
The phrase "Narrow Bank" is the name of an actual bank that the Fed shut down because it did not lend out money and just held 100% safe reserves.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
My mistake on whether the funds will be taken from workers or people who deposit money in banks that engage in prudent risk management.
But I guess going forward, there's no point bothering to put your deposits into the reliable banks.
The money to make depositors (who are mostly employers, not VCs)
Who owns these depositors, and has been furiously lobbying the government to protect their asset over the weekend?
The issue here isn't the government. It's running a business with $millions in cash but not having a person familiar with basic corporate finance to help them manage it, as well as not spending a bit of time on investopedia to learn it themselves.
Banks fail. The government has rules in place as to what happens when they do, they require banks to disclose these rules (e.g. FDIC insured up to $250k) and these rules are enforced. Is it your belief that SVB stopped disclosing FDIC insurance limits? SVB is only minimally a story of government being useless/corrupt - at least, it wasn't a story about govt corruption until Yellen/Biden decided to take money from workers and give it (indirectly) to wealthy venture capitalists.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
Money market accounts != treasury management.
However, robo-treasury management (taking 10bps off the top and automating some projections) might well be a useful niche and I should investigate if it exists.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
Regional banks do have proprietary advantage - domain specific knowledge of regional industry and real estate as well as local relationships. JPM or BofA need to have fairly uniform underwriting rules and these rules will not necessarily allow them to service some particular industry with weird cash flow patterns (such as startups). Rapidly scaling SAAS is a very good example of this.
Another great service SVB provided is a degree of self dealing/moral hazard - founders can get a mortgage backed by illiquid equity if they do corporate banking with SVB. This sort of self dealing is a problem for startups, but it is not really a problem and is a useful feature for family offices.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
I'm kind of wondering what value add VC's provide if not giving founders advice on basic skills like this.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
If there are zero prominent black doctors, lawyers etc,
From what I can tell there are maybe 3 prominent doctors of any race: Fauci, Phil and Oz. In 2019 there were only 2.
Even if you include TV doctors played by actors in the list of "prominent", you get this:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ac/GreysAnatomysSeason1Cast.jpg https://imgs.search.brave.com/hysRef-QN6BMM2eTEp8a6s-UR42RuFNs4yhGsO9lyXU/rs:fit:1200:798:1/g:ce/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cu/dHZpbnNpZGVyLmNv/bS93cC1jb250ZW50/L3VwbG9hZHMvMjAy/MS8wNC9lci1zZWFz/b24tNC1jYXN0LTE0/MjB4Nzk4LmpwZw https://imgs.search.brave.com/OLW5OIoYr8AmyV94xcc_5PDdTCn7cVPUTJCgLP31ZpQ/rs:fit:1200:1080:1/g:ce/aHR0cDovL3R2c2Vy/aWVzZmluYWxlLmNv/bS93cC1jb250ZW50/L3VwbG9hZHMvMjAx/Ni8wMy9zY3J1YnMu/anBn
Plenty of black people, but quite oddly not a single Desi. That's pretty different from literally every hospital I've ever been to in the US.
Yet in spite of about 0% of prominent doctors being Desi, and Desis being about 1.3% of America, they still make up 30% of doctors.
I'm going to use this text, posted in last week's thread, as a jumping off point to make a little effortpost on a boring area that's actually kind of important, and where I know a little bit: treasury management!
If the FDIC or other banking entity does not cover deposits, any business that depends on SVB and has a
$125K bimonthly payroll will have to do furloughs or layoffs. That's basically any business above ~15-20 people.
... From a survey of my VC and startup friends, it seems reasonable to assume that 25% of that are extremely dependent on SVB (e.g. payroll, no cash sitting elsewhere, and incoming customer payments aren't going to cover anything).
This will only happen if your CFO is incompetent and doesn't do treasury management.
Treasury management - the most basic practice of any corporate finance department - is the practice of managing corporate cash in order to earn interest on what isn't being used , ensure that whatever cash is needed by the business is available, and also minimize tail risks like your bank going belly up.
Step 1 is observing that you can get 4.5% on 4 week treasuries. These are, regardless of amount, backed by full faith and credit of US Gov.
Now suppose you are a business with $500k of biweekly expenses ($500k due on Mar 15, $500k due on Mar 31). You have $20M in venture capital remaining which gives you about 1 year 8 months of runway.
All of that - minus $500k or so needed for short term investments - goes into 4-8 week treasuries which you reinvest whenever they mature. This earns 4.5% or about $900k/year in essentially free money. Money sitting in government bonds with duration < 90 days is called cash equivalent by corporate finance people.
Your not incompetent CFO just extended your runway to 1 year 9 months.
Step 2: ensure that the maturity dates of these cash equivalents line up to your payroll dates. $500k cash is due on Mar 15 for payroll/etc. Fortunately, $500k worth of your 4 week treasuries got turned into cash on Mar 9 (typically the maturity date is thurs).
Another $500k cash is due on Mar 31. You have another $500k worth of 4 week treasuries maturing into your bank account on Mar 30 (a thurs) or maybe Mar 23 (also a thurs) if you really want to be safe.
Step 3: line up a short term credit facility.
Some expenses are less predictable. Part of the job of CFO is to project these expenses, come up with upper bounds, and inform the CEO what it will cost if these bounds are exceeded. Then the CFO goes to a few banks and lines up credit facilities - a $2-3M line of short term credit backed by cash equivalents from step 2.
Step 4: have a few bank accounts including one at a "too big to fail".
That's treasury management, obviously oversimplified.
Now suppose your CFO actually did his job. It's Mar 13 and SVB just imploded. You had $500k sitting in SVB for Mar 15 payroll and that's locked up. Here's what you do:
Mar 11: Quickly call up your credit facility and tell them to wire $500k to your payroll provider on Mon. Call your payroll provider and tell them to confirm with the bank that this is happening to avoid any snafus.
Mar 13-14: As soon as SVB allows it, wire the $250k FDIC insured money to your credit facility. Also redirect treasury maturity payments to said account, and take another $250-270k of cash equivalent and don't reinvest them.
Mar 16 or Mar 23 (a thursday when your maturity payment gets deposited): get $270k worth of 4 week treasury maturity payments from the US govt. Wire this money back to your credit facility.
Net result is that you make payroll with no interruption. You just lost $250k to SVB's errors and paid your credit facility $20k in interest. The end.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
This tweet thread explains it well: https://twitter.com/jonwu_/status/1634250754486857729
Highlights:
"Say you're a founder (or VC) with a bunch of illiquid but sure-to-be-worth-something-someday startup equity or fund carry, and you need a house.
Typical mortgage lenders won't help you.
But SVB will, at the same insanely good terms they're known for in the venture debt world."
tikimixologist
1yr ago
In this scenario representative share is important. Seeing a lot of people like you doing something makes it feel a lot more possible than seeing a few people do it.
There's two ways of interpreting "representative share."
One is as a proportion of the role the model inhabits. I.e. what percentage of CEOs are Asian American? What percentage of doctors were Asian American at the time the answer to that question went from "approx 0%" to "basically all"?
A second is proportion of people that the modeler observes. I.e. what percentage of Asian Americans that a young Asian American sees are doctors, CEOs/business executives/etc? I think you are alluding to the latter. By definition this will be biased towards highly visible roles such as rapper or sports player.
The natural solution then is to reduce the number of black people in highly visible professions. We could ban rap music and penalize sports teams where whites/Asians are underrepresented. Then black kids will have fewer rappers/basketball players to look up to and might turn to people they know in real life with more achievable professions.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
Is it clear that the mental health gap is actually real? I fully believe that left wingers are more likely to performatively talk about their poor mental health. On the other hand, aren't actual "deaths of despair" - which have no consistent definition across different studies, but are stereotypically suicide, drug overdose and alcohol abuse - typically happening to red-coded men?
Recently thezvi noted a similar effect in the gender distribution of actual suicide vs suicide attempts, and how it gets reflected in the popular portrayal:
It is kind of stunning, or at least it should be, to have five boys die for every girl that dies, and for newspapers and experts to make it sound like girls have it worse here.
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2023/03/08/the-kids-are-not-okay/
SALT tax deduction was a way that blue states could raise taxes without making their high income taxpayers angry. Trump capped it, meaning now a rich NYer has to actually pay the high state taxes he advocates for.
Also mortgage interest cap impacts people with multimillion dollar homes who itemize.
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