@tracyalloway I keep going back to @hassankhan point. Politicians love to fetishize R&D and science. But for some of the most cutting edge technologies, what's unique is not the scientific breakthrough per se, but simply the ability to coordinate supply chains and manufacturing ops at scale.
This is also something that @danwwang talks a lot about, the unduplicable, tacit knowledge that can only come about from doing something and getting better at doing it over and over and over again
@danwwang You can't solve these problems just by throwing money at them. And you can't just hire the #2 person at ASML or TSMC or whatever and think they'll give you the secret sauce.
Anyway, I think people will really like Monday's episode with @crmiller1 on ASML.
BTW, one of the cool things we learned in our discussion with @crmiller1 is a crucial component to one of these ASML EUV lithography machines is a mirror that is the smoothest surface in the world. haythink.com/news/detail.as…
Speaking of Carl Zeiss -- the maker of the smoothest surface in the world -- hello. Probably gotta be a future subject of an episode. (I think @lhamtil is the only person I've seen on here talk about this stock)
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I know we're never supposed to admit when we're wrong or that we've changed our minds. But I agree now, after much twitter banter, that asset holders have been among the huge winners over the last year. So I agree it's time to start taxing capital gains the same as normal income.
We should also seriously consider getting rid of 401Ks, 529 and related plans. If you're fortunate enough to have money to spare and invest in the stock market, why should you be then further rewarded with a reduction of your tax bill?
Obviously, none of this will solve the problem entirely. The wealthy can still generate income by borrowing against assets (as opposed to selling them) so in those instances, we should go with @interfluidity plan of taxing such loans as normal income.
@GoddessofGrain Angie knows this stuff so well, and is a fount of insight.
I hadn't thought about, for example, how the booming housing market makes it harder for farmers to acquire land, driving up their costs, and therefore the price of food bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
@GoddessofGrain Also just like everyone else right now, farmers are worried about the future availability of part supplies (like a belt for their tractor) so are attempting to build up their buffers.
@markets Trump bailed out the airline industry and now airfares are subdued.
Trump didn't bail out the rental car industry and now rental car prices are soaring.
Bailouts work and are good if you don't like inflation.
And of course the entire PPP program helped untold number of small businesses from going out of business by "winterizing" their operations. That's crucial supply side capacity we have today, with demand having returned in such a robust manner.
For CPI day in today's @markets newsletter, I wrote about how basically no matter how you slice it, the last 18 months have been a big W for workers and economic policymakers.
@markets As I note at the end, the best months for "real" take home pay (income minus inflation) have been the months where we sent out more checks to people. So if you're worried about declining real incomes, then you should support more stimulus and UI.
@markets There are nearly 20 million Americans who have gone from unemployed to employed since the depths of the pandemic. Their hourly wage growth, therefore, is infinity% over that time. If you're talking about negative real wage growth, you're ignoring the labor market's biggest story.
But unlike $DOGE, it has a fast moving development roadmap, its own decentralized exchange, NFTs, and advanced smart contracting capabilities.
And of course it's WAY cheaper nominally.
Of course, nominal cheapness was for awhile $DOGE's big selling point over Bitcoin and Ethereum.
But it's hard to maintain a cheapness as a sustainable edge, when it's trivially simple for any new project to just add a few zeroes to the total supply.
@markets Somehow we're in a situation in which a record S&P 500, a rapid labor market recovery, a surge in household wealth, surging demand for consumer goods, rapid wage gains (particularly at the low end), manufacturers working non-stop is being depicted as evidence of a policy mistake.
@markets Anyway, it's not like MMTers designed the fiscal response. And in retrospect, you can always come up with some things that could have been better. But the economy is booming, despite the pandemic. Robust fiscal policy looks to have been more than vindicated.