Icy 🥶

Just a guy who tries to appreciate the absurdity of life.

[Icy 🥶 @PacNW55]

@voteholyk Don't count your chickens before they're hatched.

[Icy 🥶 @PacNW55]

@BrettErickson28 And, Iran could strike, or quietly threaten to strike, desalination plants, which are absolutely critical to countries throughout the Middle East.

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

In 1879, JP Morgan paid a man to invent the lie that is the foundation of modern economics.

A billionaire who helped start Amazon just exposed the whole thing on Diary of a CEO, and once you hear it you will never look at paychecks the same way again:

146 years ago, a guy named Henry George wrote a book called Progress and Poverty.

It was the first mainstream book about the rich systematically stealing from the poor, and It literally became the bestselling book in the history of the United States at the time.

The working class was reading it everywhere, and the people at the top of the economy completely lost their minds.

So JP Morgan personally brought a man named John Bates Clark to Columbia University, which was essentially the intellectual headquarters of Wall Street, and told him to fix the problem.

Clark wrote a book called The Distribution of Wealth. In it, he invented something called the "theory of marginal productivity," which claims that because markets are perfectly efficient, the amount of money you earn reflects EXACTLY the value you contribute to the economy.

If you make $15,000 a year, that's because you're providing $15,000 of value. If a hedge fund manager makes $500 million a year moving money around, that's an accurate reflection of the value he creates in the world.

And Clark literally said the quiet part out loud IN HIS OWN BOOK.

He wrote that they had to prove to working people that no matter how much they make, whether it's a little or a lot, it accurately reflects their value, because if workers ever concluded that their labor was worth more than they were being paid, they would revolt and destroy the entire system.

That was the whole point. The theory was built to prevent a revolution.

And it worked so well that it got absorbed into mainstream economics and is STILL taught as a foundational principle to this day.

Every time a CEO tells you "the market decides your salary," they're repeating a framework that was literally commissioned by JP Morgan in the 1800s to convince you not to ask for more.

Nick Hanauer, the billionaire who told this story, also shared the numbers that prove why it matters right now:

The median full-time worker in America earns about $60,000 a year. If that same worker had maintained the same share of GDP they held in 1975, they wouldn't be making $60,000. They'd be making $120,000. That gap goes all the way up to the 90th percentile. If you earn $180,000 today, you'd be earning $250,000 under the old distribution.

The ONLY people who benefited from 50 years of economic growth were the top 10%, and the vast majority of that went to the top 1%. That is trillions of dollars every single year that used to be wages for ordinary working people and now sits in the accounts of the wealthiest people on the planet.

This happened because of policy. Tax cuts for the rich, deregulation for the powerful, and wage suppression for everyone else, all justified by an economic theory that was invented specifically to make you believe you deserve exactly what you're getting.

And the craziest part is that GDP growth rates in America were 4 to 4.5% for decades when workers were included in prosperity. As soon as the neoliberals took over in the mid-1970s and implemented these policies, GDP growth fell to 3% and eventually to 2%.

Including people in the economy doesn't slow growth down. It's literally the thing that CREATES growth. And the theory that convinced the world otherwise was a hit job paid for by one of the richest men in history to keep workers quiet.

What do you think?

[Icy 🥶 @PacNW55]

@minty_hawk Interesting and good data to add perspective. I worked in downtown Seattle 1980-2000. There were no homeless encampments, no broad-daylight drug deals and an office vacancy rate of 8%. Today the office vacancy rate is 35%.

[Icy 🥶 @PacNW55]

@Mr_Derivatives Ouch

[Icy 🥶 @PacNW55]

@AlaskaAir @NEWSGUYSULLY I fly Alaska frequently and have noticed repeatedly that Alaska does not uniformly enforce it's carryon policy.

[Icy 🥶 @PacNW55]

@Mike_Pence Well Mr. Pence, not exactly all of your life. Your conservative principles were pretty much trashed beginning the minute Trump began his first term.

[Icy 🥶 @PacNW55]

@BrettErickson28 You may be right, that Trump is shoveling sh*t to MAGA. I'm not sure however that Trump "knows" it's a ridiculous offer/demand.

[Icy 🥶 @PacNW55]

@seattleiscrazy There are about 10000 homes on Mercer Island and average value is about $2.5 million.

[Icy 🥶 @PacNW55]

@ChrisDaniels_TV Many people don't realize that the income tax applies to all residents but those with income less than 1 million are exempt from taxation. There is no language in the law that would prevent, in the future, this threshold from being lowered.

[Icy 🥶 @PacNW55]

@JimWalshLD19 Many people don't realize that the income tax applies to all residents but those with income less than 1 million are exempt from taxation. There is no language in the law that would prevent, in the future, this threshold from being lowered.

[Icy 🥶 @PacNW55]

$DELL is on fire!

[Icy 🥶 @PacNW55]

@choeshow Many people don't realize that the income tax applies to all residents but those with income less than 1 million are exempt from taxation. There is no language in the law that would prevent, in the future, this threshold from being lowered.

[Jason Rantz on Seattle Red @jasonrantz]

Activist judges keep winning Washington Supreme Court races because voters leave those lines blank.

This November, five of nine seats are on the ballot — the most in decades. Two justices retired early specifically so the governor could hand-pick their replacements before voters ever got a say.

Are you paying attention to these races?

[Steve Grasso @grassosteve]

Rates front and center.

Every time I hear an academic call for higher rates to fight inflation, I want to hand them an economics textbook, the right one.

Raising interest rates into a supply shock does absolutely nothing to reduce prices.
Nothing hard stop.
The inflation isn't coming from excess demand it's coming from constrained supply. And yet the cure gets applied like it's 1979.
Worse, it creates a double pain point for the people who can least afford it.
Higher prices at the pump,
higher prices on everything bought on credit, and now higher borrowing costs on top of it.
Demand is already being crimped, the market is self-correcting.

Remember: the cure for high prices is high prices.

AND NOW SOMETHING THAT ECONOMISTS CHUCKLE AT, AND HAPPEN TO BE WRONG ON.
Cutting rates in a supply shock isn't boosting inflation. It's giving a small lifeline to the people who don't own assets outright.
The elites who snub their nose at rate cuts right now have a mortgage paid off and a stock portfolio. They're not feeling it.

And here's the part that's genuinely mind-boggling, and almost nobody knows this:
Section 2A of the Federal Reserve Act explicitly states the Fed shall promote "maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates."
That's three mandates. Not two.
Moderate long-term interest rates is sitting right there in the statute — and it's never enforced, never discussed, and never questioned.

Raising rates into a supply shock violates all three simultaneously:

-It doesn't fix prices — the inflation isn't demand-driven
-It kills jobs — businesses can't afford to borrow and expand
-It explicitly violates the mandate to keep borrowing costs moderate — the one nobody reads

With debt financing now front and center in every policy conversation, the third mandate is about to become impossible to ignore.

@federalreserve
@realDonaldTrump
@SecScottBessent

[Icy 🥶 @PacNW55]

@RedWavePress I agree with Bezos. But it's just happy talk from him until he actually puts some real effort and muscle into making it happen.

[Chris Martenson @chrismartenson]

Here's my hypothesis.

What we just witnessed in KY with the Massie loss was a 'struggle session.' It was designed to send one message: "We're fully in control, you have no power, and you might as well not even waste the time to vote."

It was an operation designed to inflict demoralization. Same as not being allowed to be on the beach alone during 'Covid.' That's it's complete nonsense **IS** the point.

Same as publicly executing Charlie Kirk. Same energy, same intention, & the same people. The point is to demonstrate their power, with the target being your sense of agency and control.

We no longer need to wonder why the Trump administration has zero interest in finding CK's actual killer. It's the same people.

Who was that figure in white seen leaving the roof of the Sorenson building at UVU that fateful day? That nobody cares on Tyler's 'defense team' or with any investigative authority is meant to be both obvious to the thinking person, as well as demoralizing.

That's the play; fracture and divide us. Demoralize people to the point of giving up before they can even begin to organize, let alone fight. It's a form of cognitive warfare, and it's been running non-stop since Covid first appeared in 2020.

Why? Because someone hates America and its people and wishes to see us taken down.

The Barbarians are inside the gates.

That's what the Massie loss means to me.

[Icy 🥶 @PacNW55]

@ThoNg676733 Stop Making Sense

[Icy 🥶 @PacNW55]

$CRWD showing strength today!