The Socialist Spectacle

The Clinton faction dominated the Democratic Party during the 1990s, while Bill Clinton enjoyed the powers of the presidency (and boy, did he enjoy them) as well as the early 2000s, when Al Gore's loss was presumed to be the result of a stolen election that would be righted by Hillary Clinton's return to the White House when she had established herself in national politics via a partial Senate term. In fact, as we all know, the Chicago machine stole a march on them and supplanted them during the Obama years, reducing Hillary to second-tier; and then she lost in 2016 in spite of all efforts by the media and the various urban machines to carry her over the wall. Since then, the remnants of that faction have been less important but are still consulted by members of the press. 

One such, Mark Penn, decided yesterday to go against the DSA faction that is now emerging as a challenge to the whole Democratic establishment. 

At the same time, there is a move to reconsider -- that is, condemn -- the Clinton faction and its legacy. Yesterday's Washington Post featured a piece by a Foreign Policy editor containing a charge that Bill Clinton was personally responsible for destroying welfare and for paving the way for DOGE-style efforts to further shrink the safety net.

For those of us who are not New Yorkers, the discussion about 'pied-à-terre' taxes sounds arcane. Obviously I have enough French to recognize that this means 'foot on the earth,' but in taxation it's a technical term whose meaning is obscure if you don't look it up. I did so. The concept is that wealthy people often respond to the difficulty of commuting to the downtown office (or downtown shopping) by renting a small space within the city that they can use to sleep in so they can do their travel in non-rush hours. Allegedly this reduces the amount of affordable housing for ordinary people because the wealthy can bid the price up for such spaces to something higher than regular folk can afford; so, taxing these spaces could drive the wealthy out of them so that poorer people could rent them. 

The poorer people would presumptively not be subject to the tax because they don't have another home somewhere else, which is a precondition for the tax applying. The DSA approach to this presumption is to reverse it, dragging almost every person who owns any residential property into the tax and then forcing them to prove that it shouldn't apply to them. Thus, unless you win your appeal and/or lawsuit -- who can afford New York city lawyers, especially when almost every homeowner in the city will need one? -- you'll be subject to this ruinous tax.

Between that and the grocery store scam producing bread lines, NYC will be an educational spectacle for a few years. Hopefully people have the right mindset to be educated.