For example and drastic oversimplification just for easy mathematics:

Jane Citizen works at the Widget Company and gets paid $50,000 a year and is taxed at an effective tax rate of 20%. She spends $5,000 a year on groceries. As it is now, her tax bill would be $10,000 and she pays $5,000 for groceries leaving her with $35,000 for all other living expenses. But with this proposal she'd have the same wages get $600 as part of the universal benefits and chose to elect $4,000 of her wages go into her SNAP account. Her tax liability would go down $800, she'd still spend $5,000 on groceries throughout the year but $600 would be funded by Uncle Sam and she'd be left with $36,200 to pay for the rest of her living expenses, which is enough to be felt even if it's not enough to be a dramatic improvement.

As far as the cost of the program from the federal government's revenue and the additional $600 benefits per person of $18 billion a year or 1/10th of what is being asked to spend on the war of choice against Iran. Can the Federal government afford this? It's only a matter of priorities, if we were to roll back to the taxes of 2002 and refrain from exorbitantly expensive military adventurism, not only would it be affordable but it would allow us to pay down the debt, while alleviating the tax burden for the typical American.

There will be a financial crisis that might not even be perceived as related to the war against Iran, but it would the inciting act just as Covid was in 2020 or Lehman Brothers bankruptcy being starting pistol for the 2008 Great Recession, attacking Iran will be the event that brought on this oncoming financial crisis (although it might have still occurred, just later).

AI and the reflexively accepting corporate mergers & acquisitions are pushing the whole system to teeter and a major disruption like that of the war against Iran is the thing that will tip the system over. The Trump administration, isolating the American economy with willy-nilly tariffs signaling to the rest of the planet that the US is not a reliable partner for trade, then threaten to invade Greenland, and now following through with military action towards Iran that caused Iran to respond with a chokepoint on the global economy in the Strait of Hormuz and the Gulf of Aden with the Houthis in Yemen all culminates in a hard crash landing that is an own-goal of the Trump's design.

The paradox that the exerting military prowess of the US while having a domestic economy that is precarious in a myriad of ways, couldn't have been designed any worse and now that it has been iniated I can't see a way to get out of the quagmire that is a combination of Vietnam and the stagflation of the late 1970s just occurring concurrently rather than consequentially in quick succession. The past two or three decades has seen an increase of political polarization where partisan schismogenesis is replacing any policy or ideological differences is another ingredient for catastrophe since there will be no incentives to avoid the hardanding and work together for the benefit of the American people, but the incentives to dig into tribalism will remain or even get further entrenched. I am sorry for being such a Debbie Downer, but would love to know where I am wrong.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Senate Republicans voted down an effort Wednesday to halt President Donald Trump’s war against Iran, demonstrating early support for a conflict that has rapidly spread across the Middle East with no clear U.S. exit strategy.

The legislation, known as a war powers resolution, failed on a 47-53 vote tally. The vote fell mostly along party lines, though Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky voted in favor and Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania voted against.

The war powers resolution gave lawmakers an opportunity to demand congressional approval before any further attacks are carried out. The vote forced them to take a stand on a war shaping the fate of U.S. military members, countless other lives and the future of the region.

https://apnews.com/article/iran-war-senate-vote-war-powers-06f9465c16218f90192f7502baa736eb

Retired Brigadier General Smedley D. Butler, 1937

In the last century, the United States used to cosplay as a benevolent imperialist unlike those bad Old World imperialists, and held soft touch colonies, with local tyrants that were accountable to Washington DC and the wheelers and dealers that were the exclusive beneficiary of the American Empire. Rather than colonial governors or military forces to institute such an archipelago of imperial possessions like the French, British, and German Empires of the 19th century, there was the imposed “liberty” of the American corporations on its overseas possessions, regardless of the the popular will of those overseas possessions. The contradiction between the American action and the mission statement of both the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution’s preamble to institute not just government overreach but straight up tyrannical institutions all across the world were seen as the flaw of the American system when contrasted with a competitor on the world stage of the Soviet Union. No longer could the US simply be brutish and overrun the democratic will of the people of the global South, we must be a positive alternative to the evil empire and pretend that the corporate power was democracy in juxtaposition of the authoritarian/communist adversary of the Cold War, but this too was cosplay just as the cosplaying of the good imperialist of the first half of the 20th and the tail end of the 19th century.

What are the guardrails of behavior for the US from disingenuously being either a benevolent imperialist or a corporate democrat? There never was any guardrails, just a social norm of pretending to be the good guy and being in pursuit of some altruistic cause. In 1956, there was televised panel show of foreign exchange students that must have been enlightening to the any Americans who watched it as it was surprising for the UK teenaged girl who was surprised that the Filipino, Indonesian, and Japanese teens were not only unappreciative of the colonization of European countries (omission of the US might have been the excuse that “that's those bad imperialists not us”) but that it was rejected by the people that the colonizers deluded themselves so thoroughly that even their children were espousing the lie as if were the Bible Truth. There is no reason why why the citizens of the colonizing nation has to come to terms with the consequences of their nations’ atrocities committed onto others in their name. The Belgian can say that they never cut off the hands of millions of Africans, even if their monarch was the individual responsible for institutional barbary against the indigenous people of the Congo. The Turks never had to be held accountable for the deaths of millions of Armenians. There are people alive today who genuinely believe that enslaved Africans were better off in chains than free, and it's been 166 years since the end of the Civil War; no accountability ever demanded for the atrocities done to the others, simply because they are the others.

These same hundreds of millions of people across a myriad of nations will have either in their religious traditions or civic principles the belief that humans are intrinsically equal “endowed with certain inalienable rights” yet allow the contradiction that heinous acts can be justified to those others but would be unjustified if against someone who they consider equal in humanity. Can X government against Y people commit A action? Depends on who are X and Y are, but not what A action is, because it could be acceptable if X commits A against Y, but entirely a cause to go apoplectic if Y committed A action against X. There's no relativism until there's a need for relativism to defend their preferred outcome. Can a military/paramilitary use consumer goods or service to kill thousands of people at the same time? It doesn't matter the means of killing, if the target of the killings are individuals who aren't seen as worthy of life. Is a government able to commit an unprovoked attack against another, again it doesn't matter what the means being used it's a matter of who is doing the act that determines the morality of the act. September 11th attacks used commercial flights to kill thousands of people, Israeli Mossad used beepers to kill thousands of people, the former is morally abhorrent while the latter is morally approved. Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, US attacked Venezuela neither with declaration or hostilities, the former is morally abhorrent while the latter is morally approved.

In the 19th Century, Chinese migrant workers working on the railroads brought with them folk medicine which included such cures as oil of the Chinese water snake, which is rich in the omega-3 acids that help reduce inflammation, snake oil in its original form really was effective, especially when used to treat arthritis and bursitis. The effective treatment for inflammation requiring extracting oil from a specific live snake, was turned into a rank scam more often than not had alcohol and boiled down carcasses of whatever snakes were at hand as well as anything else but oil extracted from live Chinese Water Snakes. The pitch that went out from con artists who took a medicine for inflammation to be a cure-all for whatever one could imagine, it obviously went downhill from there.

Let’s imagine an alternative universe where instead petty-ante scammers going town-to-town defrauding whomever believed their lies, that the wider economy began to integrate itself on the fact that the actual effectiveness was proof that it could be a cure-all and therefore would be radically transformative for the society. Snake oil goes from being the McGuffin for grifts, to being what the “smart money” invests lion’s share of the money traded on stock markets because it might make humans immortal and therefore who would want to be a barrier to such utopian thinking. Why would anyone make such an illogical jump and dump double digit percentage of the national GDP into such easily debunkable claims? Because they don’t want to miss out on the promise of the windfall fortune if the claims turned out to be true, of course.

This is exactly the financial quicksand that American (and therefore the global) economy finds itself in with Magnificient 7 stocks driving the S&P 500 and the market as a whole up with the claims that everything AI will come up roses, so much so that provide financing to become customers of their soon to be ready AI products and services.

Do you need a loan or other means of financing to buy our snake oil/AI? Why we’d be happy to help you so that we can pretend that we are operating a healthy business for a product/service that we haven’t yet figured out how to deliver or exactly how it will be useful, but hey you can make your baby appear to sing to your favorite song or insert yourself into a photo-realistic picture historical events and also porn to your personal specifications. Productivity increases, or elimination of human employees, yep that’s the cure-all being offered but how to get there from here is just as plausible as the snake oil to cure hysteria or shellshock or consumption or dropsy or dyspepsia. Large language models and other AI generative models use probabilities so which core competencies of a business would you be willing to release probabilities where the only certainty is that there will not be certainty to it’s output. Will there be a anyone within the financial industry that will rely primarily on probabilities of AI where the service provided will only provide services if the terms of services indemnifies the service from any financial missteps from the service? This is like the fortune teller Madam Cleo on latenight TV ads at the end of the last century having the disclaimer “that this is for entertainment purposes only”. What good is the AI service if it can’t be relied upon, and if it provides unreliable service it can’t be held accountable.

Snake oil of the 19th century never needed to be reliable to be a cure in all cases, because the salesman left town, AI is being sold to the world and inflating the stock prices of a dozen or so firms with 7 of those stocks inflating their value so much that it raises the rest of the stock market with it. AI has no town to flee once it is realized the industry can’t do what it was promised; it was scam but worse since most of the inflated value is tied with vendor financing and stock swaps that makes all the biggest movers and shakes captured to keep the scam going or the house of cards falls down.

With the promises that AI will make automation of everything possible and the ability to find all cures inevitable, all caution is tossed into the wind millions of retail investors (small individual investors with accounts on Robinhood or Fidelity or whatever) have dumped billions into the market on the promise that they will miss out on the next boom that will provide a utopia.

The costs of both training data centers (that create the models) and production data centers (that need to be closer to population centers to provide the service) are getting more expensive not less expensive for each inference that is derived; each incident where an enduser asks AI to do something, in order for it to become more reliable and produce photo-realistic pictures of famous people with 6-fingered hands or 3 legs there needs to be recursive self-checking models that require more of the data centers for each inquiry - and that’s for the innocuous fun AI generative art and not essential services or core competency to industry which requires even greater inference intensive tasks. But it’s ok, because the it’s a hundreds of billions of dollars robbed from Peter to pay Paul, instead of effort to build durability of the house of cards it is just built higher and higher upwards.

Snake oil-based economy, it sure will be fun to see where this goes, but it would better if sitting outside of the global economy and watching it from a safe distance.

My personal experience with incorporating entities is two times. First time was a campaign committee that had an unnecessary Employer Identification Number (EIN) from the IRS and filed virtual paperwork with the New York State secretary of state. The second time was an LLC from Connecticut's secretary of state. More than a hundred years ago, this flippantly gaining a corporate charter would have been seen as ludicrous. Having the threshold of getting a corporate charter to be nearly non-existent devalues the mechanism of incorporation while at the same time granting extra-legal rights to corporations that excelled corporations far past the rights of the individual born persons. This is couched with the widely held belief that the way things are, have always been or will always be going forward. There is a moral hazard in letting the state extend protected rights to non-person entities in a libertine manner, since the rights and liberties of the individual persons gets diluted and overwhelmed by corporate entities to the level that the legislature becomes servants of those corporations and the citizens get relegated to the backseat of priorities from the government of, by and for the people.

We could return to a time when corporations were simply tools granted by the government to serve a purpose that benefited the people as a whole, but to do so would be a enormous tidal change in widespread belief that legal fictions like corporations are entitled to special legal rights that exceed the breathing humans that they have largely subjugated into a Stockholm Syndrome relationship rather than seeing corporate entities being the tools of humanity that they should be.

My personal experience with incorporating entities is two times. First time was a campaign committee that had an unnecessary Employer Identification Number (EIN) from the IRS and filed virtual paperwork with the New York State secretary of state. The second time was an LLC from Connecticut's secretary of state. More than a hundred years ago, this flippantly gaining a corporate charter would have been seen as ludicrous. Having the threshold of getting a corporate charter to be nearly non-existent devalues the mechanism of incorporation while at the same time granting extra-legal rights to corporations that excelled corporations far past the rights of the individual born persons. This is couched with the widely held belief that the way things are, have always been or will always be going forward. There is a moral hazard in letting the state extend protected rights to non-person entities in a libertine manner, since the rights and liberties of the individual persons gets diluted and overwhelmed by corporate entities to the level that the legislature becomes servants of those corporations and the citizens get relegated to the backseat of priorities from the government of, by and for the people.

We could return to a time when corporations were simply tools granted by the government to serve a purpose that benefited the people as a whole, but to do so would be a enormous tidal change in widespread belief that legal fictions like corporations are entitled to special legal rights that exceed the breathing humans that they have largely subjugated into a Stockholm Syndrome relationship rather than seeing corporate entities being the tools of humanity that they should be.

The spoils system was the means of which machine politics gained and retained power and was at it heights for most of the 19th century and was weened off from in the first half of the 20th century to our current system of national parties that have more similarities with corporate entities than the political clubs/Grange halls/labor unions/and other organizations that were the base of the spoils system. On the micro scale the ward boss of a certain political stripe would need to deliver voters to the polls in order to dole out jobs and benefits from the municipality, on the macro scale the individual who's on the top of a pyramid of nesting smaller political organizations can be transactional with candidates for the president to get federal jobs and contracts from the federal government. The obvious downside is that the government is not seeking out competency or efficiency, but rather it's to ensure that the wheelers and dealers can extract their pound of flesh, so how can I make a case in favor of this corrupt system?

If one sets the goal of efficiency and competency then the spoils system cannot deliver the goals, but if it is democratic feedback that each compartment of the political machine has a personal relationship with their respective constituency and aggregates the will of that constituency up the system it becomes apparent why it would be more beneficial than technocracy or corporatized political system that by design ignores the hoi polloi and their popular will. A technocratic system would bestow the policy decision making power to an authority of their particular field of expertise and despite the majority may want the “wrong answer”, the correct policy is implemented. Similar to the corporate system that has some class of individuals who were successful in business and so have been deemed to be the authority of public policy because they've demonstrated their merit by divine selection of the invisible hand of the market and so therefore all of the market losers who didn't succeed, don't need to be listened to, or they have been heard through the extremely limited scope of choosing between the competing political brands. These two systems, technocracy and corporatization, are the current dominant means that politics are determined by in the US. There are still spoils system characteristics that continue to hang on, but no one could say that it still is the dominant determination as to what the government does today nor has it been the case since the Pendleton Act of 1883 that set up non-partisan civil service for some federal jobs, the Hatch Act of 1939 that forbid the politicization of all civil service jobs, along with the states and municipalities in their own way tampered down the means of doling out the spoils to political supporters. This coincided with the beginning of the end of high voter turnout.

Ending the personal and communal means by replacing it with this seemingly bloodless systems that would not provide favor or privilege to the individuals of a constitutency does harm in that the former caused the individuals at the bottom to have face-to-face relationships with their local government. If government services were generally seen as insufficient or that enough of the constituents had similar problems that went unaddressed their local party bosses would be cast aside for someone else who could give it a go. By evolving political decisions up to the elite it closes off buy-in that the masses have in the system. If you had a problem with garbage pick up because the ward boss’s nephew who runs the town’s sanitation department is a screw up, then that ward boss's party would be voted out. With our modernized civil service the problems are by design to be too dispersed for any one political actor to solve, yet become standardized so that the similar interests can benefit without the constituencies ability to be heard. Instead of the ne'erdowell nephew, the constituent can choose between one of two or three garbage services but no other personal relationship or democratic means to have concerns addressed. Citizen has been transformed to a customer; a participant in government has been made passive. The solution to democracy isn't market dynamics and limited competition (because unlimited competition is anathema for profit maximization), but to have means that the people can exert their will even at the detriment of profit.

The spoils system was far from perfect in even being responsive to the popular will of the people, but it was at least acknowledging that the will of the people was the general thrust of the purpose of the government and not just a means to discriminate the great unwashed masses from the aristocrats who, to paraphrase George Orwell, equal but more equal than the majority.

The spoils system was the means of which machine politics gained and retained power and was at it heights for most of the 19th century and was weened off from in the first half of the 20th century to our current system of national parties that have more similarities with corporate entities than the political clubs/Grange halls/labor unions/and other organizations that were the base of the spoils system. On the micro scale the ward boss of a certain political stripe would need to deliver voters to the polls in order to dole out jobs and benefits from the municipality, on the macro scale the individual who's on the top of a pyramid of nesting smaller political organizations could be transactional with candidates for the president to get federal jobs and contracts from the federal government. The obvious downside is that the government is not seeking out competency or efficiency, but rather it's to ensure that the wheelers and dealers can extract their pound of flesh, so how can I make a case in favor of this corrupt system?

If one sets the goal to be efficiency and competency then the spoils system cannot deliver the goals, but if it is democratic feedback that each compartment of the political machine has a personal relationship with their respective constituency and aggregates the will of that constituency up the system it becomes apparent why it would be more beneficial than technocracy or corporatized political system that by design ignores the hoi polloi and their popular will. A technocratic system would bestow the policy decision making power to an authority of their particular field of expertise and despite the majority may want the “wrong answer”, the correct policy is implemented. Similar to the corporate system that has some class of individuals who were successful in business and so have been deemed to be the authority of public policy because they've demonstrated their merit by divine selection of the invisible hand of the market and so therefore all of the market losers who didn't succeed, don't need to be listened to, or they have been heard through the extremely limited scope of choosing between the competing political brands. These two systems, technocracy and corporatization, are the current dominant means that politics are determined by in the US. There are still spoils system characteristics that continue to hang on, but no one could say that it still is the dominant determination as to what the government does today nor has it been the case since the Pendleton Act of 1883 that set up non-partisan civil service for some federal jobs, the Hatch Act of 1939 that forbid the politicization of all civil service jobs, along with the states and municipalities in their own way tampered down the means of doling out the spoils to political supporters. This coincided with the beginning of the end of high voter turnout.

Ending the personal and communal means by replacing it with this seemingly bloodless systems that would not provide favor or privilege to the individuals of a constituency does harm in that the former caused the individuals at the bottom to have face-to-face relationships with their local government. If government services were generally seen as insufficient or that enough of the constituents had similar problems that went unaddressed their local party bosses would be cast aside for someone else who could give it a go. By evolving political decisions up to the elite it closes off buy-in that the masses have in the system. If you had a problem with garbage pick up because the ward boss’s nephew who runs the town’s sanitation department is a screw up, then that ward boss's party would be voted out. With our modernized civil service the problems are by design to be too dispersed for any one political actor to solve, yet become standardized so that the similar interests can benefit without the constituencies ability to be heard. Instead of the ne'erdowell nephew, the constituent can choose between one of two or three garbage services but no other personal relationship or democratic means to have concerns addressed. Citizen has been transformed to a customer; a participant in government has been made passive. The solution to democracy isn't market dynamics and limited competition (because unlimited competition is anathema for profit maximization), but to have means that the people can exert their will even at the detriment of profit.

The spoils system was far from perfect in even being responsive to the popular will of the people, but it was at least acknowledging that the will of the people was the general thrust of the purpose of the government and not just a means to discriminate the great unwashed masses from the aristocrats who, to paraphrase George Orwell, equal but more equal than the majority.

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