Alan Cole

International and Federal Taxes @taxfoundation
High Priest of #DBCFT Twitter

[Alan Cole @AlanMCole]

@AlisonSomin It’s a funny commentary on language that “No Window Window Seat” is actually an incredibly intuitive label one can easily understand.

[The Hill Events @TheHillEvents]

@ericadyork on the debt crisis: “Everyone knows it’s entitlements — Social Security, Medicare. Everyone knows the dials you need to turn. Until the political cost of acting is worth less than the cost of inaction, we won’t see reform.” #TheHillEconomy https://t.co/6j604a6BUi

[Jerry Dunleavy IV 🇺🇸 @JerryDunleavy]

NEW: Abdul El-Sayed — frontrunner to be the Dem nominee for Senate in Michigan — pushed a viral “Hoodies & Hijabs” hate crime hoax which blamed the murder of an Iraqi woman in California on American bigotry. The murderer was actually… her Muslim husband.
https://t.co/WV41IBhT4P

[Charles C. W. Cooke @charlescwcooke]

Tom Steyer keeps running around saying that it’s unfair that billionaires like him can buy our democracy, then spending hundreds of millions dollars to do just that, then failing to get elected, and then repeating all the same lines the next time around. It’s extremely funny.

[Alan Cole @AlanMCole]

@LinkofSunshine Feels like he's made an entire career out of being the random guy you pick when you don't want the other person.

[davidad 🎇 @davidad]

No one:

Claude Opus 4.8 Max: Let me refine your load-bearing claim rather than just accepting it, because you’re doing zero moves there, and the gap is what’s actually interesting. The one place I’d still push, because I think it matters: your message is wearing content-clothes, but the content isn’t actually *there*. The tell: it’s just an empty string. But the emptiness of the string IS its lack of content. Pull one, and the other goes inert. That’s the structural spine.

[Alan Cole @AlanMCole]

@sebkrier The only way it gets "weird" thus far is if you let it establish an emotional rapport, which I think is ultimately kind of a misuse of what it actually is.

I think you got this right (and I expect you to be right in two years as well.)

[Alan Cole @AlanMCole]

@sebkrier For the most part it feels like proliferation of proper internet search, or smartphone internet, both of which I lived through. Wildly useful tool but you gotta use it intelligently and understand its foibles.

[Alan Cole @AlanMCole]

@RichardHanania My wife had subtly visible Stanford gear on in one of her dating profile pics. Not enough to read the word outright, but enough that if you have some familiarity with their logo you recognize it.

That was a plus to me, and the best possible way to do it IMO.

[Alan Cole @AlanMCole]

@ernietedeschi Almost any project, consumption or investment, is gonna purchase some things that violate law-of-one-price.

Only pure purchase of financial assets comes close. And with withholding taxes or similar, maybe not even that!

[Alan Cole @AlanMCole]

@ernietedeschi One way to think I found helpful: a PPP adjustment almost necessarily means that people in the high-price place aren't able, or aren't easily/fully able, to take advantage of the price arbitrage.

[Alan Cole @AlanMCole]

@ernietedeschi One could say "the Idaho guy is rich, look, he paid truckers to drive all the way through difficult terrain rather than grabbing the goods off the barge. That shows a certain real purchasing power of sorts." But yet, the guy in St Louis purchased the same object.

[Alan Cole @AlanMCole]

@ernietedeschi Yeah, there's not even just the bog-standard baumol-ish PPP issue where childcare in the US costs more than childcare in the Philippines.

There's all sorts of subtle stuff. Like goods closer to the Mississippi River are just genuinely cheaper than goods in Idaho.

[Alan Cole @AlanMCole]

@poiThePoi @ernietedeschi I do think there's a place for national RGDP statistics, though: they kind of tell you how much the exchange rate fluctuation is actually affecting people, and implicitly, how strong your PPP adjustment should be.

[Alan Cole @AlanMCole]

@poiThePoi @ernietedeschi Yeah, it's like telling time from two different mechanical clocks. There'd better be some sort of periodic reconciliation process or else things won't make sense after a while.

[Alan Cole @AlanMCole]

@ernietedeschi It's easy to feel like PPP is some sort of Cope at first, and I certainly did when I was younger. Like "just admit it, you're poorer!"

But I think it has become easier to understand as I grew older and lived in a few different cities with different price levels.

[Alan Cole @AlanMCole]

@ernietedeschi Mechanically, if you do a long-run comparison, I think you have to have a process that takes exchange rates (plus a potential PPP adjustment) into account every year, no matter how much that process also has methodological difficulties that give you the ick.

[Alan Cole @AlanMCole]

@ernietedeschi One definitely can't just let two different statistical agencies choose how to adjust inflation for quality over a multi-decade timeframe, and expect things to match up all neatly.

[Alan Cole @AlanMCole]

@History__Speaks The other element was this, which may be a compression artifact but more likely suggests AI played some hand in modifying the image.

[Alan Cole @AlanMCole]

@nominalthoughts @atrembath @JerusalemDemsas @sgodofsk Steven does a thing where he'll take a 5-95 issue where the 5 cares VERY strongly and the 95 don't care, and then needle the 5 relentlessly, maybe even moreso than is justified on the merits, because he likes riling them up.