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Opinion
Democrats, Call Them Names—But Do It Right
Rather than focusing on personal insults, Democrats should be using labels like “Pro-Cancer,” “Job-Killers,” “Anti-Constitution,” and “Healthcare-Cutters” to tar congressional Republicans.
Mar 30, 2025
Democratic politicians have begun trying to vent voters’ anger at their opponents by calling them names. Minnesota Gov. and former vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz recently called DOGE head Elon Musk a “South African nepo baby,” presenting him as an entitled foreigner. Similarly, U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett attracted attention by calling Texas Governor Greg Abbott “Governor Hot Wheels.”
This name-calling may feel good for Democrats, but it just repeats the mistake of the recent past. Democrats lost the 2024 election due to their inordinate focus on President Donald Trump’s personal flaws, controversial statements, and criminal record as well as by offering a vague, bland policy agenda. What is needed now is a focus on policies—not personalities—though name-calling may still be a key tool, if they do it right.
Rather than focusing on the personal, Democrats should be using labels like “Pro-Cancer,” “Job-Killers,” “Anti-Constitution,” and “Healthcare-Cutters” to tar congressional Republicans. These may sound harsh, even outlandish. But they are true, highlighting in only a few words how Trump and Musk’s actions (and congressional acquiesce to them) will harm Americans in ways that matter to them.
The main objective right now should be not only hitting hard, but hitting smart—and saddling Republicans in Congress with the worst effects of Trump’s agenda using concise, aggressive terminology.
Only through a wave of sharp, crisp, and memorable verbal attacks on all Republicans to raise awareness of the most unpopular ill effects of Trump policies can Democrats force them to either distance themselves from the president or fully own his agenda. Think of the effectiveness of the Republican phrase “death panels,” a slanderous label used to describe the Affordable Care Act that helped contributed to the Democrats’ big loss in the 2010 midterms only two years after former President Barack Obama’s historic 2008 victory. Unlike “death panels,” labels like “Pro-Cancer,” “Anti-Constitution,” and “Job-Killers” have the benefit of being true.
Any Republican politician who has not vocally opposed Trump’s massive, multi-billion dollar National Institutes of Health cuts to institutions researching treatments for cancer, heart disease, and other illnesses should be label as “Pro-Cancer.” It is not unfair, it is a fact—if you are a politician weakening researchers’ ability to find cures and treatments for cancer, you are on the wrong side of the war against cancer. Opponents of Trump could theoretically form a broad base of opposition by forming local groups with names like “Cancer Survivors Against Cuts” to pressure Republicans in Congress to stand up and protect these funds. Even if the effort fails, as it likely will, these labels might prove potent against Republicans in 2026. This national issue can easily be framed locally given that every state has universities facing major cuts, and in many states and congressional districts, these universities and their health networks are among the top employers.
On that note, Democrats should be labeling Republicans as job killers, and not only because of the tens of thousands of federal workers Musk’s DOGE has fired, or because of the many jobs lost amid hiring freezes at universities (affecting whole university towns) and by businesses facing tariff uncertainty. Democrats can connect Musk’s interest in AI and self-driving cars to the fact that he and others in the Trump orbit, despite their ostensible opposition to job outsourcing, are more than happy to use technology to kill jobs. Job-killing congressional Republicans should be tied as closely as possible to Musk and anything unpopular about his business empire simply because of all they do to enable him.
To borrow a phrase used recently by Jamelle Bouie to characterize Trump’s policies, all Republican enablers of Trumpism should be considered “Anti-Constitutional” for supporting an assault on the separation of powers. Similarly, repeatedly calling congressional Republicans “Healthcare-Cutters” would call attention to the massive Medicaid cuts in next year’s budget and how they will affect regular people, which many Americans—including some who rely on Medicaid—seem to be unaware of amid these busy news cycles.
This name-calling may strike some as rude or radical. But being rude never seemed to hurt the Republicans, and right now, the danger for Democrats isn’t looking radical—it is looking weak. Moderates, and even some conservative voters, will have more respect for Democrats who are not feeble and can confidently call out Republican policies that will harm their lives. If they want to present themselves as more moderate, Democrats can frame themselves as “Anti-Recession Activists” and “Constitution Supporters.”
Many Democrats are refraining from going on the offensive, instead apparently waiting until enough conservative voters suffer from the economic pains of Trump’s policies. But the country cannot afford to wait. The main objective right now should be not only hitting hard, but hitting smart—and saddling Republicans in Congress with the worst effects of Trump’s agenda using concise, aggressive terminology. Democrats—liberals, progressives, moderates—are fighting for their way of life. It is time to act like it.
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A Different 'Abundance Agenda': Avoiding Delusions and Diversions
If there is to be a decent human future—perhaps if there is to be any human future—it will be fewer people consuming less energy and creating less stuff.
Mar 30, 2025
For the next few weeks, the buzzword in US debates on the liberal/left about economics and ecology will be “abundance” after the release of the book with that title by Ezra Klein (New York Times) and Derek Thompson (The Atlantic magazine).
The book poses politically relevant questions: Have policies favored by Democrats and others on the political left impeded innovation with unnecessary red tape for building projects? Can regulatory reform and revitalized public investment bring technological progress that can solve problems in housing, infrastructure, energy, and agriculture? The book says yes to both.
Those debates have short-term political implications but are largely irrelevant to the human future. The challenge is not how to do more but how to live with less.
All societies face multiple cascading ecological crises—emphasis on the plural. There are many crises, not just climate change, and no matter what a particular society’s contribution to the crises there is nowhere to hide. The cascading changes will come in ways we can prepare for but can’t predict, and it’s likely the consequences will be much more dire than we imagine.
If that seems depressing, I’m sorry. Keep reading anyway.
Rapid climate disruption is the most pressing concern but not the only existential threat. Soil erosion and degradation undermine our capacity to feed ourselves. Chemical contamination of our bodies and ecosystems undermines the possibility of a stable long-term human presence. Species extinction and loss of biodiversity will have potentially catastrophic effects on the ecosystems on which our lives depend.
Why aren’t more people advocating limits? Because limits are hard.
I could go on, but anyone who wants to know about these crises can easily find this information in both popular media and the research literature. For starters, I recommend the work of William Rees, an ecologist who co-created the ecological footprint concept and knows how to write for ordinary people.
The foundational problem is overshoot: There are too many people consuming too much in the aggregate. The distribution of the world’s wealth is not equal or equitable, of course, but the overall program for human survival is clear: fewer and less. If there is to be a decent human future—perhaps if there is to be any human future—it will be fewer people consuming less energy and creating less stuff.
Check the policy statements of all major political players, including self-described progressives and radicals, and it’s hard to find mention of the need to impose limits on ourselves. Instead, you will find delusions and diversions.
The delusions come mainly from the right, where climate-change denialism is still common. The more sophisticated conservatives don’t directly challenge the overwhelming consensus of researchers but instead sow seeds of doubt, as if there is legitimate controversy. That makes it easier to preach the “drill, baby, drill” line of expanding fossil fuel production, no matter what the ecological costs, instead of facing limits.
The diversions come mainly from the left, where people take climate change seriously but invest their hopes in an endless array of technological solutions. These days, the most prominent tech hype is “electrify everything,” which includes a commitment to an unsustainable car culture with electric vehicles, instead of facing limits.
There is a small kernel of truth in the rhetoric of both right and left.
When the right says that expanding fossil energy production would lift more people out of poverty, they have a valid point. But increased production of fossil energy is not suddenly going to benefit primarily the world’s poor, and the continued expansion of emissions eventually will doom rich and poor alike.
When the left says renewable energy is crucial, they have a valid point. But if the promise of renewable energy is used to prop up existing levels of consumption, then the best we can expect is a slowing of the rate of ecological destruction. Unless renewables are one component of an overall down-powering, they are a part of the problem and not a solution.
Why aren’t more people advocating limits? Because limits are hard. People—including me and almost everyone reading this—find it hard to resist what my co-author Wes Jackson and I have called “the temptations of dense energy.” Yes, lots of uses of fossil fuels are wasteful, and modern marketing encourages that waste. But coal, oil, and natural gas also do a lot of work for us and provide a lot of comforts that people are reluctant to give up.
That’s why the most sensible approach combines limits on our consumption of energy and rationing to ensure greater fairness, both of which have to be collectively imposed. That’s not a popular political position today, but if we are serious about slowing, and eventually stopping, the human destruction of the ecosphere, I see no other path forward.
In the short term, those of us who endorse “fewer and less” will have to make choices between political candidates and parties that are, on the criteria of real sustainability, either really hard-to-describe awful or merely bad. I would never argue that right and left, Republican and Democrat, are indistinguishable. But whatever our immediate political choices, we should talk openly about ecological realities.
That can start with imagining an “abundance agenda” quite different than what Klein and Thompson, along with most conventional thinking, propose. Instead of more building that will allegedly be “climate friendly,” why not scale back our expectations? Instead of assuming a constantly mobile society, why not be satisfied with staying home? Instead of dreaming of more gadgets, why not live more fully in the world around us? People throughout history have demonstrated that productive societies can live with less.
Instead of the promise of endless material abundance, which has never been consistent with a truly sustainable future, let’s invest in what we know produces human flourishing—collective activity in community based on shared needs and reduced wants. For me, living in rural New Mexico, that means being one of the older folks who are helping younger folks get a small-scale farm off the ground. It means being an active participant in our local acequia irrigation system. It means staying home instead of vacationing. It means being satisfied with the abundant pleasures of this place and these people without buying much beyond essentials.
I’m not naïve—given the house I live in, the car I drive, and the food I buy from a grocery store, I’m still part of a hyper-extractive economy that is unsustainable. But instead of scrambling for more, I am seeking to live with less. I know that’s much harder for people struggling to feed a family and afford even a modest home. But rather than imagining ways to keep everyone on the consumption treadmill, only with more equity, we can all contribute ideas about how to step off.
Our choices are clear: We can drill more, which will simply get us to a cruel end game even sooner. We can pretend that technology will save us, which might delay that reckoning. If we can abandon the delusions and diversions, there’s no guarantee of a happy future. But there’s a chance of a future.
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The Ultra-Rich Have Exploited Our Tax System Long Enough—Make Them Pay!
Funny how these same apologists for our richest don’t have much sympathy for ordinary Americans who lack the “wherewithal” to pay for medical care, adequate housing, and other necessities.
Mar 30, 2025
The most gaping loophole in our tax law? The tax-free compounding of gains on investments.
This classic loophole enables the two most lucrative inequality-driving income tax avoidance strategies. The first, buy-borrow-die, allows wealthy Americans to avoid income tax entirely on even billions in investment gains.
These wealthy need only hold on to their appreciated assets until death. What if they need cash before then? They merely borrow against the appreciated assets, typically at very low interest rates.
Are rich Americans, including billionaires, truly unable to pay tax on their investment gains before they sell the assets yielding those gains? Wanna buy a bridge?
The second avoidance strategy, buy-hold for decades-sell, lets wealthy investors pay a super low effective annual tax rate on investments that appreciate at high rates over long periods of time. These investors typically experience decades of compounding gains without taxation.
The effective tax rates involved in this second strategy won’t reach buy-borrow-die’s zero tax, but may in some cases get as low as a 4% effective annual rate. A 4% effective annual tax rate would have an investment with a pre-tax growth rate of 20% per year enjoying an after-tax growth rate of 19.2% per year.
Congressional apologists for the ultra-rich on both sides of the aisle regularly claim that their wealthy patrons should be entitled to endless tax-free compounding of investment gains. Without this tax-free compounding, the argument goes, our richest wouldn’t have the “wherewithal to pay” tax on their investment gains before their assets get sold. U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) invoked this tired canard at a recent Senate Finance Committee hearing.
Funny how these same apologists for our richest don’t have much sympathy for ordinary Americans who lack the “wherewithal” to pay for medical care, adequate housing, and other necessities. Average wage earners, under current law, can’t even wait until year-end to pay Uncle Sam their taxes. Those taxes come out of each paycheck, wherewithal to pay or not.
Are rich Americans, including billionaires, truly unable to pay tax on their investment gains before they sell the assets yielding those gains? Wanna buy a bridge?
Let’s start with the easiest case: a publicly traded investment that can be sold in smaller units, an investment in stocks, for instance. Say Rich, a wealthy investor, buys 1 million shares of Nvidia at $100 per share, and those shares, by year’s end, increase in value to $120 per share.
Our investor Rich now has a $20 million gain. If that annual gain faced a 25% tax rate, Rich would have a $5 million tax liability. To raise the cash to pay that tax, Rich could sell off 41,667 of his shares, leaving him with 958,333 shares, now worth just under $115 million.
That doesn’t seem very painful.
Now, let’s say Rich didn’t want to sell any shares. He could instead just borrow $5 million against the shares to pay the tax.
Or what if Rich had bought a parcel of land instead of Nvidia shares and, for whatever reason, having him borrow to pay tax on his annual investment gains didn’t turn out to be feasible?
Still no problem for Rich. For gains on illiquid assets, Rich could defer the payment of tax until he sold the assets, but the tax could be computed as if it accrued annually. How might this work? Say, for example, that Rich’s $100 million parcel of land grew at an annual rate of 10% for 20 years, at which point he sold it at its appreciated value of $672,749,995.
Had Rich paid tax at 25% on his gain each year, his rate of return would have been 7.5% per year, and after 20 years his investment would be worth $424,785,110.
The $247,964,885 difference between his sale price and the value of his investment with its actual rate of return reduced by the tax paid would be his tax liability upon sale. Payment of that amount would leave Rich with the same sum, $424,785,110, had he been able to sell a small share of his parcel each year, to pay the tax on his investment gain.
Put another way, Rich would be left with the same amount using this tax computation as he would if he sold his parcel each year, paid tax on the gain, and reinvested the remaining proceeds in another parcel.
And if Rich died before selling his parcel? His income tax could be determined for the year of his death in the same fashion as if he’d sold the parcel for its fair market value at the time of his death. Or, in the alternative, his inheritors could step into his shoes and pay the same tax when they sold the parcel as Rich would have had he survived and sold it at that time.
The bottom line: If we closed the tax-free compounding of investment gains loophole, some situations might exist where the immediate payment of tax on investment gains could pose a problem. But we can address those situations by deferring payment of the tax until investments get sold and accounting for the tax-free compounding in the determination of the tax.
These problematic situations, in other words, don’t justify leaving a gaping loophole in place.
So the obstacle to shutting down buy-borrow-die and buy-hold for decades-sell has absolutely nothing to do with ultra-rich investors lacking the wherewithal to pay taxes. That obstacle remains the politicians in Washington, D.C. who lack the wherewithal to summon the courage to make our rich pay the taxes they owe our nation.
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Nostalgia Won't Lead the US Out of the Trump Mire
The anomie and gloom that characterize the public mood as fascism threatens to attain consolidation and crush all dissent cannot be remedied by backward steps into the immediate neoliberal system that gave rise to Trump in the first place.
Mar 30, 2025
George Packer recently wrote an Atlantic piece that cleverly situated the Trump regime within a familiar Orwellian framework.
According to Packer, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), and other slavish Trump sycophants have become comically ridiculous (Packer references Henri Bergson's theory of comedy) in direct proportion to their ability to absurdly and mechanically mimic President Donald Trump's perspective with the same rhetorical mannerisms that they had employed mere months ago to argue the exact opposite point of view. "Without missing a beat" they once spoke skillfully on behalf of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and now (in robotic fashion) they laud Russian President Vladimir Putin. They are stooges of the moment, laughable figures right out of the pages of 1984.
As Packer sees it, the old order of American NATO alliances had "made the past eight decades uniquely stable and prosperous in modern history." In his view the U.S. descent into realms of Orwellian mendacity originates with the antics of Trump and his lapdogs. Packer does not trace the U.S. embrace of dystopian culture to, say, renaming the U.S. military juggernaut the Department of Defense—an example of Orwellian deception far more confusing than playing a game of musical chairs with global alliances.
The schism between liberals and progressives hinges on whether or not one views Trump as an aberration, or a preordained end point of systemic failure.
Packer's calculus proposes that the danger of Trump stems from his power to humiliate and control his underlings in such a fashion that only he retains the ability to speak his mind, while all of the lesser accoutrements of the MAGA-sphere are reduced to being mechanized puppets.
I worry that many mainstream liberal pundits have made fascism into a Trump-centric formula—liberals like Packer betray nostalgia for past glories of American democracy and the world order that the U.S. largely controlled after WW II, and dominated almost completely after the Soviet fall. Like most instances of political nostalgia, this view depends on a myopic distortion. The uniquely prosperous and stable eight decades that Packer lauds were eight decades of war, regime change, colonial extraction, and—notably—eight decades of gathering extinction, environmental degradation, and skewed wealth.
We can either see Trump as a fracture in time, a great misfortune, a lightning bolt from hell intent on destroying a formerly beneficent arrangement of policies and alliances, or we can alternatively see Trump as a representation of American values—a mirror of the culture we created. The schism between liberals and progressives hinges on whether or not one views Trump as an aberration, or a preordained end point of systemic failure.
By the same token we might raise a skeptical eye at Packer's revisionist assessment of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his passive discomfort as an extra in the theatrical meeting with Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Zelenskyy:
He sat mute throughout the Oval Office blowup while his principles almost visibly escaped his body, causing it to sink deeper into the yellow sofa. Having made his name in the Senate as a passionate defender of democracy and adversary of authoritarianism, he must have suffered more than others from the inner contortions demanded by the new party line—they were written on his unhappy face.
I have far more curiosity about the inner contortions that George Packer employed to rehabilitate Marco Rubio—a stick figure neocon with predictable views on corporately inflicted climate overheating (he doesn't believe in it), gun control (he doesn't believe in it), and abortion (he doesn't believe in it). The one thing that Rubio believes in with undeterred passion is war, and this, in Packer's view, makes him a "passionate defender of democracy and adversary of authoritarianism." Apparently, Rubio's enthusiasm for giving the authoritarian genocidaire, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a blank check for all the bombs of his dreams has no effect on Packer's assessment.
Rubio's constricted body language during the Trump-Zelenskyy showdown seemingly provides Packer with the pretext to assume that Republican capitulation to Trump conceals, in at least some instances, an internal moral crisis. It may be that Rubio had some sort of confused hiccup, a moment of puzzlement, as the story line shifted on a dime, or it may be that Rubio recoiled at his passive role, his mandate to be a mute walk-on in a drama that might have been more persuasive had he been excluded.
Packer gives himself license to fantasize about the allegedly tortured inner life of sycophants, and that troubles me. If we overly humanize Trump's henchmen and speculatively envision them as ambivalent victims of Trump's alleged mystical powers, we miss the seriousness of our predicament. U.S. politicians have been morally castrated as a matter of structural design, for, at least the eight decades of my lifetime. Trump can't be blamed for the vacuous surrender to corporate schemes that U.S. politicians dependably perform. Give Trump credit for exploiting the soulless dregs that he has surrounded himself with, but he did not drain the humanity from Marco Rubio. The moral desert that comprises the center of the former Florida senator resulted from a drought that long preceded Trump.
I believe that we have two real choices—capitulation or revolution.
Packer concludes his piece by asserting that the public view of the Russian-Ukraine conflict has not followed the narrative plot that Republican politicians newly embrace. The public still reviles Putin, and two-thirds of Americans (according to polls that Packer cites) want to continue to arm Ukraine. In Packer's view, America's public approval for arming Ukraine "might be America's last best hope." This misses the larger issue—how did the U.S. become a rapidly consolidating fascist country with politicians (centrist Democrats, neocons, libertarians, MAGA loyalists), all playing their preassigned bit parts?
The true masters of the system, the military industrialists and the corporate profiteers, lose nothing if the U.S. shifts alliances. The public support for Ukraine is little more than a lingering reflection of recent media perspectives. The public is always at the mercy of mass media and corporate control of information. In a country that has spent more money on military spending than the nine leading global competitors combined, the U.S. public still fails to react with alarm. Militaristic propaganda is at the heart of public control, and there are not even vestiges of antiwar passion detectable within the congressional body.
The anomie and gloom that characterize the public mood as fascism threatens to attain consolidation and crush all dissent cannot be remedied by backward steps into the immediate neoliberal system that gave rise to Trump in the first place.
A proposed withdrawal into the recent past of former President Joe Biden, or even former President Barack Obama (if it were even possible to do so—it isn't), condemns the public to accept a retreat into familiar safety—a set of governmental policies that the late David Graeber attributed to "dead zones of the imagination."
Graeber noted that:
…revolutionary moments always seem to be followed by an outpouring of social, artistic, and intellectual creativity. Normally unequal structures of imaginative identification are disrupted; everyone is experimenting with trying to see the world from unfamiliar points of view; everyone feels not only the right, but usually the immediate practical need to recreate and reimagine everything around them.
A true resistance to fascism would involve something more powerful than fatuous dreams about an idealized past. After all, superficial fantasies about the virtues of the past are Trump's shtick. I believe that we have two real choices—capitulation or revolution. The option of stepping meekly into the immediate past, as Packer proposes, will excite almost no one. This is a time—taking inspiration from David Graeber—for recreation and reimagining.
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