Campaigns and events are hard to predict but were one held today and Hillary were to run against Trump she would lose by even more votes.
What 2018 will bring is impossible to predict but, once again, the mass media are, to my mind, still missing the boat. They just do not understand how much they are held in contempt by the "deplorables" who will speak again in 2018.
The mass media live in their boomerang cocoons and hear what they want to hear and see what their eyes show them. Because they are paid extraordinary salaries they think they are relevant. They could be relevant if they were faithful to the dictates of their profession but their biases cannot be ignored and are there for all to see.
Give Americans a reason to support an underdog and we will every time. The mass media are busily engaged ,on a daily basis , in making Trump the underdog with their constant attacks, smugness and biased fake reporting. They are incapable of seeing this because they are blinded by their consummate hatred of the man who dos not fit their presidential mold and whom they fear is showing them to be what they are - a relic of the past.
Our Republic needs the fourth estate as an ombudsman and that is the role the mass media should play and mostly once did. Then many were acquired by large corporations in need of profits and ROI and thus became/were turned into entertainment centers. When you turn off your listeners and readers they will turn you off as many have begun to do. Caveat Emptor.
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A father daughter team write op eds. (See 1 and 1a below.)
With respect to Bari's opinion piece, I remember a bar b q restaurant in Birmingham, which had been there for years, decided to repaint and clean itself up and was out of business in less than one. It lost its character and smell and though it had been sanitized no one ever died, that I recall, from going there when it was dingy. There is something good abut tradition but millennials would not understand this nor would football kneelers or progressives. To them new is always improved unless it is not.
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This is more than you probably want/need regarding the new tax law's estimated impact from several macro view points. (See 2 below.)
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The P.A's response to Trump/Haley's unsubtle threat. (See 3 below.)
Amb. John Bolton, who will be speaking at The Plantation Club, Feb 19, is in favor of what Trump and Haley said. If U.N votes mean anything, other than theater, there must be consequences. Now let's see what Trump does in regard to foreign aid to those who vote against us.
Haley has been superb at The U.N. Bolton would be a sound and wise addition to our State Department. He would add some concrete to our softer less believing stance which seems in contrast to Trump's approach and view.
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Dick
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1) In Praise of Ticket Scalpers
My guy, ‘Matt,’ has a dynamic pricing algorithm in his head.
By Lou Weiss
Pittsburgh
Few occupations are as market-oriented as reselling tickets. The profession is an old one, going back as far as gladiator contests in the Roman Coliseum. Like many old professions, it doesn’t have the best reputation. That’s unfair. Whether helping housewives to see “Hamilton” or working the mean streets outside a sporting venue, these hardy folks add value by making markets.
The internet has disrupted almost every business, and scalping is no different. The constant fluctuations with which a scalper deals are not unlike dynamic pricing of airline tickets, whereby fliers pay different prices for the same seats. He just does all the calculations in his head.
I’m a third-generation Pittsburgh Steelers fan tasked with managing my family’s Heinz Field seats. Negotiating with relatives about who gets to use the tickets for which games requires intuition and delicacy. Pro tip: Taking preseason tickets increases your chances at getting consequential late-season games.
This past weekend brought the New England Patriots to the ’Burgh. With one of our group in Florida, another in a luxury box, and the weather calling for rain and cold, it fell to me to dispose of four unused tickets. I listed them below their market value on the official Steelers/Ticketmaster ticket exchange. Their fancy-pants algorithms couldn’t make a match, so I went old school.
Let’s call my ticket buyer Matt. (I can’t use his real fake name, as he considers any use of his nom de scalp a violation of intellectual property.) Matt claimed he remembered me from a previous transaction and opened up. He complained that amateurs were making his life harder than it needed to be. The rise of bar-code smartphone tickets and home printouts has him frustrated. Nobody knows anymore what’s real or what the guys at the stadium gate will accept.
For these reasons, Matt wanted only what I had—real-deal paper tickets. Before paying me, he whipped out a laptop to check I wasn’t passing off elaborate forgeries. A little bird told me the $165 tickets I sold him for $350 went the next day for $460. I call that a respectable markup. I’m allowing for his overhead, which included a warm coat, good sneakers and the laptop.
Like many businessmen, Matt is a risk-taker. When he buys tickets, he’s betting they will sell. If the inventory doesn’t move, the price gets cut. His preference is to play arbitrageur. Ideally the resale is already arranged before he lays out any cash.
Matt is a hustler. He has to be. He’s put one daughter through law school and a second is currently in premed. This whole disintermediation trend has him considering early retirement, but if you’re looking for a few good seats on the visitors’ side near the 45-yard line just a few rows below the club level for the New Year’s Eve game, you’ll find Matt on Pittsburgh’s North Side.
The Steelers are playing the Browns, so the action outside the stadium is likely to be more exciting than what goes on inside.
Mr. Weiss is a carpet salesman.
Appeared in the December 21, 2017, print edition.
1a) Op-Ed Contributor
My Favorite Movie Theater Is in a Dingy Basement
By Bari Weiss
The best movie theater in the world is in a dingy basement on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The worn seats are painful. There are probably bigger screens in half the apartments in the complex above the theater. And forget Fandango; the theater barely has a website. You want to buy a ticket? Get in line.
The line consists — at least before 9 p.m. — almost entirely of patrons who qualify for a senior discount. This goes a long way to explaining why lox sandwiches are sold at the concession stand. The carrot cake remains a mystery.
You don’t go to Lincoln Plaza Cinemas for the sort of amenities in abundant supply at the Loews five blocks north. You don’t go for the crowd, which a brilliant Yelp reviewer described as “beyond the usual Woody Allen neurotic into Todd Solondz deranged.” You go for the movies.
Or at least you did.
Last weekend came the news that New Yorkers dread to hear about the few remaining independent businesses we love: The landlord declined to renew the theater’s lease. It’s set to close at the end of January. As endings go, this one’s a bit too on the nose given this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year.
When Daniel and Toby Talbot opened the theater in 1981, Mr. Talbot told this paper: “What these five screens represent is a supplement on a year-round basis to the New York Film Festival, which runs for two weeks a year only.” Fellini’s “City of Women” was the first movie screened.
I’d never heard of the New York Film Festival and, despite the heroic efforts of my father, had never seen a Fellini film, when I started going to Lincoln Plaza. That was in 2003, the year I moved to New York to start college.
In those dark, dreary rooms, I have seen some of the movies I’ve loved the most next to the people about which I can say the same.
In 2005, Jenny dragged me to “The Squid and the Whale.” I sobbed next to Ariel during “The Lives of Others” and was speechless after “Notes on a Scandal” with Kate. Benjy and I saw Joan Rivers for the first time in a 2010 documentary about her. This kicked off an annual pilgrimage to her stand-up sets in midtown. The documentary “Searching for Sugarman” started Jay’s Rodriguez obsession — we listened to him incessantly and shlepped to Newark to see him in concert.
Sometimes I go alone. The rugelach I sneaked in from bakery next door to eat during the mind-bending “Embrace of the Serpent” was the only thing that made me sure I wasn’t actually hallucinating. I was one of four people in the theater at a late-night showing of this year’s “Step.” It felt like being let in on a secret.
After the announcement of the closing, a spokesman for Milstein Properties, which owns the property and jointly operates it with the Talbots, tried to calm outraged moviegoers, explaining that the theater requires “vital structural work” that “cannot be completed while the space is in use, and will begin now that the cinema’s lease has expired.” Once the work is done, the spokesman said, “we expect to reopen the space as a cinema that will maintain its cultural legacy far into the future.”
But the regulars aren’t interested in another movie theater.
A petition drawn up by Jeremiah Moss, who runs the blog Vanishing New York, calls on Milstein Properties to ensure the space remains a cinema; to guarantee it will remain “accessible to its current clientele”; and to keep the Talbots in charge of choosing the films. “We do not want a mainstream multiplex chain nor a luxury ‘hipster’ cinema here.” As of Monday evening, it was approaching 3,800 signatures.
If the past is prologue, Lincoln Plaza Cinemas will go the way of so many other places in the city that were once called institutions. Doubtless the new theater will serve better popcorn. It might even show many of the same films.
But there’s something about the dissonance between the shabbiness of the setting and the splendor of the screen that made Lincoln Plaza Cinemas so singular. You still have a few more weeks to see what I mean.
Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) is a staff editor and writer for the Opinion section.
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2)
Now that we have a final bill rather than a mere "agreement in principle," let's step back and consider some implications of tax reform.
There are three reasons to be pleased and one reason to worry.
Win: Less-destructive federal tax code
There are several provisions of the tax bill that will boost the economy, most notablydropping the federal corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. Slightly lower individual tax rates will also help growth, as will provisions such as the expanded death tax exemption and the mitigation of the alternative minimum tax.
How much faster will the economy perform? There are several estimates, with microeconomic-based models predicting better outcomes that Keynesian-based models. Here are some findings from two market-based models.
From the Tax Foundation:
From the Heritage Foundations:
And here is an estimate from a partially market-based model at the Joint Committee on Taxation:
And here is an estimate from a Keynesian-oriented model at the Tax Policy Center:
For what it's worth, the market-based (or microeconomic-based) models are more accurate since they are based on the impact of tax-rate changes on incentives to engage in productive behavior.
That being said, proponents of tax reform should not expect Hong Kong-style growth. First, this is only a modest version of tax reform, not a game-changing step such as asimple and fair flat tax. As George Will opined today, "On a scale of importance from one (negligible) to 10 (stupendous), the legislation might be a three."
Second, keep in mind that fiscal policy only accounts for about 20 percent of a nation's economic performance. And if taxes and spending each account for half of that grade, policymakers in Washington have positively impacted a variable that determines 10 percent of America's prosperity.
That may sound discouraging, but even small differences in economic growth make a big difference if sustained over time. As I noted in 2014:
Win: Pressure for better tax policy in other nations
I consider myself to be the world's bigger cheerleader and advocate of tax competition. I've even risked getting thrown in jail to promote fiscal rivalry between nations. And I've written several times about how this tax reform package is good because it will encourage better tax policy abroad (see here, here, and here).
I'll bolster my argument today by sharing some excerpts from a Wall Street Journaleditorial.
Another German think tank reached a similar conclusion.
And how will it change the setting?
First, a caveat. The German study looked at the likely impact of a 20-percent corporate rate, so keep in mind that updated numbers to reflect the 21-percent rate in the final deal would look slightly different.
Second, the corporate tax burden in the United States is still going to higher than the European average, even after the 21-percent rate is implemented. Here's a chart from the German study and I've highlighted the current U.S. position and the post-tax reform position ("US_20%_Dep" is where we would be if "expensing" had been included).
Third, even though the reduction in the corporate rate is just a modest step in the right direction, it's going to yield major benefits.
And here's another chart from the study. It shows that it will be somewhat more profitable for U.S. companies to compete abroad, and a lot more profitable for foreign investors to put money in America.
Win: Pressure for better state tax policy
As I've repeatedly argued, getting rid of the deduction for state and local taxes is a very desirable policy. On the federal level, it's good because that reform frees up some revenue that can be used to offset lower tax rates. On the state level, it's good because politicians in high-tax areas will now feel a lot of pressure to lower tax rates.
Or, if you look at the glass being half empty, they'll feel pressure not to further increase tax rates.
The Wall Street Journal has a new editorial on this topic, asking "how much will they have to cut income-tax rates to retain and attract the high-income earners who finance so much of their state budgets?"
The mere possibility is caused great angst in some circles.
Though only a select slice of taxpayers will be impacted, and some of them are in red states.
But the ultra-high-tax blue states are the ones that will really feel the squeeze to lower tax rates.
Loss: Failure to restrain federal spending puts tax reform at risk
Now that we've looked at three reasons to be optimistic about tax reform, let's close with some grim news.
Republicans could have produced a far bolder tax reform plan had they been willing to restrain spending. That didn't happen.
 Instead, they only were able to produce a tax bill that featured a very modest - and temporary - amount of tax relief.
And because they were constrained by the budget numbers, many of the provisions impacting individuals are sunset at the end of 2025.
It's not just a question of not doing the right thing. Republicans are actually making matters worse on the spending side of the budget. They are busting the budget caps and doing a lot of so-called emergency spending.
All this will come back to bite them when it's time extend (or, better yet, make permanent) the provisions that are scheduled to expire. The bottom line if that it's impossible to have a good tax code with an ever-growing burden of government spending.
* The Joint Committee on Taxation estimate is for the House-passed version of tax reform. An estimate of the final bill hasn't been released, though it presumably will be similar.
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