Bobby Ras

[Amy Siskind @Amy_Siskind]

More Elon Musk's DOGE 'brilliance:'
a report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that IRS audit revenue was $6.5 billion in fiscal year 2025, a 35% decrease from the $10 billion the prior year, as staff cuts resulted in the IRS losing roughly 30% of its audit staffers.

[Justin Wolfers @JustinWolfers]

The scarier story isn't a president firing a commissioner over bad jobs numbers. It's what happened last week, quietly, with no front-page coverage: our statistical agency actually put out a number shaped to please the president.⁣
⁣
That's not a bad data point. That's the loss of a shared source of truth. https://t.co/LyjI42W7lt

[Stephanie Kelton @StephanieKelton]

My latest. https://t.co/SHbBhRZnJK

[Lunwi @lunwi75]

Remember when Musk challenged the World Food Program to explain how he could solve world hunger with just $6 billion, they did, and he just completely ignored them?

[Mr PitBull Stories @MrPitbull07]

The history books quietly bypassed is that Barack Obama, during the most pressure-saturated nights of his presidency, would retreat alone to the Treaty Room on the second floor of the White House residence — not to strategize, not to take calls, but to handwrite personal letters to ten ordinary American citizens every single night, a practice he maintained with almost monastic devotion across all eight years, selecting the letters himself from the 40,000 that arrived daily at the White House, and his longtime correspondence director Fiona Reese confirmed that Obama would often weep privately while reading certain letters, folding them carefully before writing responses so personally detailed and emotionally present that recipients frequently described the experience of receiving them as the most significant moment of their lives, with one Ohio steelworker writing back to say that Obama's letter had physically stopped him from making a decision that would have permanently altered his family's future. What makes this practice almost unbearably moving is the detail that surfaced later — Obama never used a computer for these letters, always a black felt-tip pen, always legal yellow paper first as a draft, always rewritten onto White House stationery by hand a second time, because he believed, as he told historian Doris Kearns Goodwin in a rare private conversation later recounted in her 2018 work, that the physical act of pressing pen to paper forced a quality of attention that typing simply could not replicate, a philosophy rooted in his years as a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago from 1992 to 2004 where he developed the conviction that democracy only functions when its leaders remain genuinely, uncomfortably close to the specific gravity of individual human suffering rather than processing it from behind the insulating distance of institutions and screens."

[Dave Troy @davetroy]

How can I be sure? Longitudinal study of this network’s activities over the last four decades. If it was coming from different people, it might merit consideration. But this is the same tired people pushing the same tired stories from the same sources. It’s all BS.

[Brian Albrecht @BrianCAlbrecht]

Populists across the spectrum, left and right, hate economists. I joked its some puzzle but I think there's a simple reason. It's not about liking capitalism or something.

And the disagreement is almost always about how to reason about problems, not about values.

Populists want solutions. Economists offer trade-offs. I'm not the first to point this out but its a huge distinction.

A carbon tax doesn't solve climate change. It prices carbon so people make better decisions at the margin. To the populist, that sounds like accepting the problem.

Same with manufacturing. A tariff doesn't create jobs. It shifts them, from the millions of workers in industries that buy steel to the 160,000 who make it. To the populist, "protect American workers" sounds like a solution. To the economist, the question is: which American workers?

We can go down the list. Rent control intends to help renters. It produces housing shortages. The populist sees the economist opposing rent control and concludes: you don't care about poor people.

As Sowell put it: "The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics."

I think, not surprising, the economists are right.

It's more than just two different approaches. Thinking in trade-offs forces you to trace each step: who actually bears the cost of a tariff, what happens to housing supply when you cap rents, how a carbon tax changes behavior at every margin.

You can't skip ahead to the answer. You have to follow the chain. This is why economists spend careers doing exactly this and still argue about the answers. That's what it looks like when you take the problems seriously.

The populist skips all of this based on some intuition pump. Think of the person on a group project who's so confident in the answer that they never bother learning the material. That's populist economic reasoning from inside the discipline. The confidence comes from not having looked at the trade-offs closely enough to see how hard they are.

Stewart is the populist left. Oren Cass is the populist right, and he's more dangerous because he sounds like an economist, and plays one on TV, without putting in the work of thinking about trade-offs.

[derek guy @dieworkwear]

kind of funny that an olympian said they are here to represent "compassion, respect, love for others" and some people automatically know that's a statement against them

[Claudia Sahm @Claudia_Sahm]

This one is an incredibly sad statement on this site.

[Midwest Modern @JoshLipnik]

@Eric_Erins Arguably makes life more inconvenient for the average person. QR menus, having to download an app for every simple task, tip screen for every transaction, etc.

[Armand Domalewski @ArmandDoma]

96% of the cost of tariffs was paid by Americans.

[Steffen W. Frølund @SteffenFrolund]

"The beacon of Amon Dîn is lit"

I always imagined Denmark as part of Rohan. Viking'esque, stoic and hardened. They even have men from Fenmark. Viggo Mortensen is Danish.

But now we are Gondor. We have lit the beacons and our friends and allies have answered.

Thank you 🙏

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

Appropriate vehemence. Causing chaos and destruction, betraying allies and agreements, and then complaining about the obvious consequences and blaming your victims is a recipe as old as politics. That it's the USA doing it and not the usual dictatorships is the only twist.

[Bobby Ras @bobbyras]

@jasonc_nc By what otherworldly math is that 36%?

[Norse Mythology @NorseMythNews]

MAGA Christianity now includes praying to Charlie Kirk. What a time to be alive.

[Craig Shimala @cshimala]

Look h'HOO-hoo-hoo returned to the Chicago lakefront this windy morning! #snowyowl

[Norse Mythology @NorseMythNews]

"protecting the Western civilization"

"civilizational suicide"

Trumpies continue to use rhetoric learned from white nationalists.

There's no bottom for these sycophantic hireling politicians.

[Norse Mythology @NorseMythNews]

He stirs them with a ladle
As they melt into a stew
You write a stupid comment
Then he's coming after you!

4/end

[Norse Mythology @NorseMythNews]

And little Stephen Miller
Filled with hate and filled with bile
Hides a camera in the toilet
Then he watches with a smile

Now Krampus comes a-calling
And he finds this nasty bunch
He puts them in his bucket
And he takes them home for lunch

3/

[Norse Mythology @NorseMythNews]

Pam Bondi lost the records
Of the girls all underage
They vanished when she noticed
Donnie's name on ev'ry page

Melania is laughing
At the kids beat up by ICE
Don't ask about her green card
How she earned it wasn't nice

2/