Tax Day Could Be a Breeze - The American Prospect I hate, hate, hate filing taxes. There is a better way.

Filing taxes in the U.S. is tedious, hyper-complicated, and easy to make a costly error. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Organizational Invention and Elite Transformation: The Birth of Partnership Systems in Renaissance Florence1 John F. Padgett University of Chicago Paul D. McLean Rutgers University The birth of a new form of business organization, the partnership system, in Renaissance Florence is examined closely in order to discover the social processes of invention in that extraordinarily inventive place. Stated generally, the processes of invention the authors discover there are transposition, refunctionality, and catalysis across multiple social networks. Specifically, political co-optation of cambio bankers in the aftermath of the Ciompi revolt induced the transposition of domestic guild methods to the international plane, thereby changing their purpose and their reach. Subsequent social absorption through marriage of these elevated bankers into the victorious political alliance infused partnership with the multiplex logic (and often money) of dowry, thereby reproducing partnership systems as an integral component in post-Ciompi republicanism. Medieval organizational logics of patrilineage and guild were transformed into Renaissance organizational logics of marriage and clientage. The origins of financial capitalism are partly rooted in this elite social-network response to class revolt.

Can we make this a thing again: Scholars of financial capitalism publishing papers about Renaissance Florence, with killer abstracts, in the American Journal of Sociology. Please.

Again: for any big liberal donor who wants to funnel millions into fixing this country's politics, the ROI on buying any struggling paper and simply tasking it with doing real reporting on local news is vastly higher than the same $$ given to some group that does mass ad buys every election year.

Supporters press for a DC memorial to Thomas Paine, whose writings helped fuel the Revolutionary War British-born Thomas Paine helped inspire the 13 English colonies to declare independence and form the United States of America.

See this article: apnews.com/article/thom...

Personally, I still find it bonkers that there are no Thomas Paine statues in D.C. today. (There is one sort of perpetually in the works, however.)

As I noted in response to another comment: the failure of the campaign, as you note likely due to longstanding neg. associations folks have with California, is not related to the substance of the campaign such as the messaging. A more effective campaign could simply be a 2024 rerun w/ a new messager

Either Harris did *try* to run a fairly culturally centrist and more economically populist campaign, as you note the Times ed. board is saying European candidates have done sucessfully, and failed due to other reasons, or she did not and Hobbes' claim is correct. The two things cannot both be true.

Which is quite probably true but also a different disagreement than saying Hobbes was wrong that the Times editorial board effectively wants the 2028 nominee to rerun the Harris 2024 campaign, but with a more credible manager. Your initial post was a frank declaration Hobbes was wrong on that point.

In my opinion, you can't agree Harris tried to run a centrist campaign and also categorically claim that Hobbes was wrong when he said the NYTimes editorial board wants the 2028 nominee to rerun the Harris campaign, while admitting the Times wants a "culturally centrist, economically populist" run.

Hobbes: "The New York Times Editorial Board yet again demands that Democrats run exactly the campaign they ran in 2024"

You: "Not true. They are pointing out that culturally centrist, economically populist approaches are working"

And "I agree with you that she tried to tack back to the center ..."

nominee to just rerun the campaign (as in the actions, the speeches, the campaign stops) that Harris run in 2024 but with a different non-Harris person on the stump and on the ballot.

My point is just that if you agree that Harris tried to run such a campaign in 2024... you agree with Michael Hobbes. Arguing that that campaign just failed because a Californian isn't credible enough on whatever metrics isn't a rebuttal to Hobbes' claim that the NYT ed board want the 2024 Dem ...

The persistence of the public perception of Democrats as left-y progressives who only care about so-called 'cultural issues' is not in fact really related to whether or not Kamala Harris sought to run a culturally centrist campaign in 2024.

"Harris was not seen as culturally centrist; she only counts as such on BlueSky."

Hobbes said that the Times is advising the Democrats run the same campaign as 2024 - was Harris running as a cultural centrist in 2024 or as a progressive hardliner?

Okay, fine, I was wrong on the vibecession.

Instead of using economic data to understand how people are doing, we should use their lived experiences. We should go around and ask as many people as possible what their experience is - how much money they have, etc. - and set policy based on that.

AI could destroy the labor market. We already know how to fix it. Stop overthinking this

On a similar note, see Matt Bruenig's piece for The Argument on how already tested policies can help abate any negative distributional consequences of AI.

www.theargumentmag.com/p/ai-could-d...

“So it's essential to remember: we're not stuck with the status quo. Shared prosperity is a choice, and we can choose to rebuild the wage standard for families across America.”

At this rate they'll be paying you to take it by mid May though, so just wait a bit longer

believed it was somehow a smoking gun, definitive proof solving the mystery once and for all.

I found the comments at the end of the article about how he "mistakenly" referred to himself as Satoshi just... thoroughly unconvincing. In that, it made me actively think less of the rest of the article because it seemed so obvious that that comment could be explained away and the author ...

What I mean by the above is that, if he had a shot, he would be polling much higher because he was on the general election ballot as the Democratic nominee as recently as 2024 so politically engaged voters know his name. Democratic voters in Maine evidently just don’t want him to be Senator.

Costello also ran against Angus King in 2024 and did oddly well for a de facto third party candidate (given that King was the real Democratic candidate despite being an independent and was supported by the state Democratic Party) but still just 10 percent of the vote — he’s not a wildcard to Mainers

Live Tax-Free and Die - The American Prospect After mining out state budgets for 50 years, conservative lawmakers across the country are now turning their pickaxes to local governments’ largest source of revenue: property taxes.

Cutting income taxes? That's not cool.
You know what's cool? Abolishing property taxes!
Sure they make up 70% of local government revenue and fund schools, roads, and parks. But do we really need them?
Here's @whitneycwimbish.bsky.social on the new conservative hotness.
prospect.org/2026/04/08/a...

I think groupchats effectively just are short-form text messaging, and the substitution is really for a more ‘private’ medium over a public one. (Ofc, see all the news stories about leaked groupchat messages.)

Just a heads up: Friday April 10, 7pm, I'll be doing a conversation about The Wage Standard with
@davidautor.bsky.social at Harvard Book Store.

You can put it on your calendar!
Link: www.harvard.com/event/arindr...

The Historically Unpopular War (The Opposition Report #12) Iran, DHS, corruption, and more.

“Because of the United States’ rediscovered willingness to invade first and ask questions later, and probably partly because we’re cutting funding for tested international organizations and redirecting it to Trump vanity projects, our nominal allies have kept drifting farther and farther away”

I wonder if it is related to the rise of the cooking spray

Much ado about marshmallows Good news, it’s s’more VAT nonsense

Another magic post from our resident VATfluencer @louisashworth.bsky.social, this time on the tax treatment of giant marshmallows. www.ft.com/content/eb37...

Or what Trump said about Buchanan when they both sought the Reform nom in 2000. Namely, “Look, he's a Hitler lover,” “I guess he’s an antisemite,” and “he doesn't like the blacks, he doesn't like the gays. It's just incredible that anybody could embrace this guy.”
archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes....