I like the WH40K bunnies! I'm sure the Emperor approves...
On tax cuts - seems self evident, tbh. The macroeconomic environment/sector-specific economic circumstances are likely to dominate tax changes so completely as to make tax changes imperceptible.
So, sure, if the economy is hot, cutting taxes might ADD to industrial investment and corporate spending as companies use the extra funds to take advantage of the supporting environment. But in a recession or tepid environment? What would YOU do, if you were a CEO? Take the tax cuts and build your cash reserves/pay down debt, to lower your leverage?
At least, when it comes to VAT and/or personal income taxes, you can hope for a counter-cyclical effect. But corporate taxes? Unlikely... And no one ever started a company because corporate taxes dropped one or two points...
A hot economy is the very worst time to cut corporate taxes without raising personal income taxes to prevent an increase in the deficit. [In a non-hot economy it would still be bad, but not AS bad.]
"Contra-cyclical" spending and taxation are nice features of pro-growth fiscal policy. After all, when the Fed adjusts monetary policy to promote more or less aggregate demand, someone has to respond to the change. Why not the federal government, too?
If government were simply maximizing and redistributing income it WOULD be countercyclical. Low "recession fighting" interests rates from the Fed would mean more activities passing NPV tests. And "relief," transfers to people especially hard hit by recession, above all the unemployed would have the same effect. What I'm skeptical about is fiscal policy trying to fell some guestimated output gap.
A few years ago, I was consulting for a state department of public health and one task we had was addressing maternal mortality. I tried to explain that the increase was largely due to changes in measurement, and you’d have thought I told them their baby was ugly. Complete inability to understand data, but lots of feelings.
Noah, slightly off topic from this post but you mention frequently the unrest of the 2010s. I want deeply to believe that the period of unrest is somewhat over but the truth is from where I am it seems so much worse. Things like the Project 2025 (assuming Trump is reelected) and others seem designed to keep the period of unrest going on. Does this worry you at all?
I feel like what he may point out is that at the moment, unrest has dramatically abated, not that the conditions for continued unrest doesn't exist. If things continue as they currently are, there is a strong chance that we get to move into an extended period where we aren't "shellshocked" from the recent unrest, whereas at the moment we're still a little jumpy from what the country just went through. It takes a while to bring your guard down.
But I'm sure Noah is worried about unrest returning, but is optimistic that we're past it for the moment.
Are the two maternity charts from 1999 and 2020 supposedly measuring the same thing?
A number of countries had significant changes (e.g. >10%). Canada apparently rose from 2.4 to 8.4., an increase of 250%! That would have to be a change in measurement that far outstrips the US'.
With such wild swings and a wildly outlying South Korea, one suspects that we can't draw comparisons between countries at all: variances in measurement method appears to be greatest determinant of individual countries' results. Ff that's true, then those graphs are not useful for their intended purpose.
"Living paycheck to paycheck" could be (and often is) defined as spending essentially all of one's income and not saving much of it. Technically, it means that the level of liquid savings (e.g., cash in the bank) can cover only a small faction of one's expenditures.
What this kind of definition suggests is that "living paycheck to paycheck" is a function of both the income level and the spending profile. Therefore, you can have people making, say, more than $100K, who feel they live paycheck to paycheck because they heavily depend on their paycheck to meet their spending commitments (which could include fancy gym memberships, tuition at private schools, etc). Missing just one paycheck would have a major impact on their lives.
My wife claims we live paycheck to paycheck because we spend so much money on our real estate investments that our cash reserve is not growing. Meanwhile we max out our 401ks. It’s all very much a matter of perspective.
Thanks for the explanation on the pay-check-to-paycheck myth. I consider myself rather informed, but have fallen for this narrative. I do feel there are a lot of people in my generation (GenX) who got caught up in the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses consurmerism we developed in the 90s and 00s and are finding themselves with no savings, lots of debt, and a buch of crap. Many come from working class backgrounds and were raised with that mentality. I loved having a 401k and personally being in charge of investing for retirement, but moving away from pensions without properly educating my generation (or the Boomers that preceded us) on basic personal finance concepts is going to be a big issue in the next 20 years or so. But, maybe that is a false narrative too. Would love to hear more facts on this topic.
Hmm, I wonder if the "median" bank account really means what it implies... It doesn't account for how much goes out each month - maybe that level of buffer is needed to pay each month. It doesn't account for debt load or likely medical bills... The size of an ER visit cost is gigantic compared to that median. And it also doesn't account for distribution - good chance this isn't a symmetric curve...
Loved the analysis on the negative news issue. My thought on this for a while has been that it's both the death of local news / the hyper focus on national news.
The stat that first gave me this thought a few years ago was how violent crime is half of what it was in the 1980s, and yet everyone I asked, or any post I saw online was people complaining about how much more dangerous the world is today. The incongruity of this struck me as odd.
The internet and national news seems the best explanation. Hypothetical example: Thirty years ago, you had this idea of your town being a sleepy place with low crime, and everyone had that memory of the one time that guy murdered his wife 6 years ago. All you read or watched news wise was the local paper and the local evening news. Occasionally you'd tune into the nightly NBC broadcast and listened to Paul Harvey on occasion. So, you knew of bad crime issues elsewhere in the country, but your hometown was safe.
But the internet has now made every town local to you. Of the tens of thousands of towns across America, the rare murder story, mugging, or domestic violence assault everyone knew about is hitting the front page of national news or social media constantly. No need to wait up to 24 hours for the news cycle to mature before you read about it - details about the event are hitting your phone's notification bar within an hour of the event. You now have this sense that so much more is going wrong in the world and you feel less secure due to it, even though, statistically, you're twice as safe today as you were back in the time where you felt safer.
Couple that with the incentive that news companies have to tell sensational stories, or stories that make people angry to drive engagement, and now the well is poisoned even further. Feels like a prisoner's dilemma at this point. First news agency to opt out of the negative sensationalism dies at the feet of the others unless they join it in changing their rhetoric.
Also, with the contraction of local news being profitable, we're seeing a lack of local reporters who can do local journalistic investigations. Feels like local accountability is contracting.
Not just national vs local: it’s the business model of media companies competing in a 24-7 news cycle. It started with cable news in the 90s. The internet and smartphones amplified it.
Karl, one of the issues you touch upon -- the death of local news -- reminds me of a phenomenon noted during a journalism panel about a year before the pandemic.
There's an economic region called the Media Belt, and it consists of four areas of the country: New York, Washington, Los Angeles and the Bay Area. It's much like the Sun Belt or the Rust Belt. These four regions are so much alike among themselves but so different than the rest of the U.S. The news industry as a whole is in secular decline -- print, radio, TV, cable and online. The only places the news industry is going sideways, rather than declining, is in the Media Belt. This is where the jobs are and the money made in media. Coincidentally, media are viable in the Media Belt because they are "service industries", in service to finance (New York), entertainment (L.A. and NY), politics (DC) and technology (BA, but also the tech communities in the other three).
Search engines and social media largely determine the decision-making and resource allocation to what gets covered. Algorithms are biased toward economic, political, entertainment and tech topics most relevant to people living in the Media Belt, where most media are both produced and consumed.
Can't agree enough. Talk to most folks and their understanding of the frequency of adverse events is usually way way out of sync with reality. Humans aren't good at estimating relatively rare events in the first place. The great example that I see all the time is "child abduction" - this relatively rare (but still horrible) event is picked up by the media and played up over and over. I know parents who are scared to death to let their children roam at all because of this....
Lots of other examples - and yet folks underestimate the danger of driving a car or several other common things.....
This started even before the internet with the non-local media as Karl noted - but much stronger with the internet and social media. Everything feels "local" when it isn't.
There might be a glimmer of hope with newsletter platforms like this one. Despite its executives failing the Nazi Bar test, Substack overall provides a platform for the kind of journalism corporate media is failing to produce. Beyond the plain-facts reporting, you've got writers doing muckraking, explanatory and investigative stories that educate as much as report on the goings on day by day.
This writing is also not limited to conventional journalism reporting, either. There are authors who are writing news and also informing with essays.
Two I recommend off the top of my head are James Fallows and Judd Legum's Popular Information.
Fallows is an old-school ink-in-his-veins journalist who has seen it all and done it all. He has worked as a White House speechwriter and is a nonfiction author. He's also a pilot, and whenever there's an aviation incident, like the Boeing 737 MAX door plug blowout, he'll explain stuff to you that you never thought possible.
Legum is a progressive, so you go into Popular Information knowing his team's biases. He is also a lawyer, so his articles are like legal arguments, taking down his opponent's narratives and producing more receipts than CVS.
Wonderful news that American maternal health is probably improving rather than declining. Unfortunately, it's another example of why so many Americans distrust experts spouting statistics. So often, those statistics are revealed a few years later to be flawed.
Actually, the problem is NON-experts spouting statistics. :)
That said, one would think that agencies that produce data would be sensitive to the effects of changes in methodology and collect enough data around the point of change to take the change into account. We should not have to depend on retrospective analyses by outsiders to uncover such an obvious flaw in the data on maternal health.
Counter to this, at least if we include state departments of public health, I have personally seen the experts be completely incompetent when it comes to managing data.
It’s sad, but all the best data analysts work in the private sector trying to optimize potato chip pricing or something. The people in public health are... nice people with big hearts.
Indeed. The COVID pandemic showed up the limitations of PH officials straying into fields in which they have no expertise: design of cost effective responses to the PH challenges they identify. CDC/FDA failed to provide individuals and policy makers witht he tools they needed to take optimizing decisions, trading off costs and benefits of alternative NPI.
The U.S. is especially bad because of our "states are the laboratories of democracy" credo. The U.S. had 51 concurrent COVID-19 policies and protocols, with each state speed-running guidance of the federal agencies and their own public health authorities.
Since SARS-CoV-2 spread itself throughout the world, you could gather a global tally of nations and how they did on infections, deaths per capita and excess deaths. The nations that did well on low infections, low deaths per capita and low excess deaths all had combinations of civic restrictions, abundant resources and robust data collection. Something else that helped big-time was a unified, clear policy chain of command.
The U.S. had a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure "Here are 51 possible strategies for staying alive," not to mention the cohort of Americans who chose Option 52: Everything is a plot against you and you MuSt dO YoUr oWn rEsEaRcH!!1?!"
With better CDC messaging (including on how to integrate local information with information being provided by CDC, I don't think state level policies would have been a problem. In fact even state level policy making was too aggregated. It was really only at a local level that really optimal NPI could be implemented.
If you had states that followed the guidance of the Great Barrington Declaration, COVID containment efforts were doomed.
Dr. David Gorski, an oncologist, surgeon and researcher, wrote several explainers on the Great Barrington Declaration and why what he calls the "let 'er rip" strategy would have made the pandemic worse.
It goes beyond messaging. The U.S. would not have had a successful COVID policy but for the CDC and FDA. There was no enforcement mechanism and no clear chain of authority, though medical professionals and researchers were coming to a consensus despite battlefield conditions.
Side note: please keep writing about how dysfunctional SF politics are. I love the city, but chronic, unsolved problems beg for systemic solutions. Not sure what or how. (Less power in the board of supervisors?) Maybe you can figure it out!
Please link to the transcripts of podcasts. If one wants to engage with the substance of what is said and not just the vibe, a transcript is necessary. [Can you ask GPT-4 to listen to the podcast and provide a written summary?]
We need to give some recognition to the original battle bunnies: The Long Patrol. They were often understrength and always hard pressed, so they couldn't always make it to the battlefield on time, but whenever they did show up, you knew things wouldn't go well for the vermin.
Their tireless commitment to defending the weak, their willingness to face any foe on any field, and their good cheer under the most adverse conditions was an inspiration to little me, and made me want to be better. It still does.
I do not believe very many economists ever believed that cutting corporate taxes AND increasing the deficit would stimulate growth. There are good theoretical reasons -- distortion in the corporate income tax system -- to believe that shifting from taxing corporations to taxing (higher) personal incomes would lead to more efficient use of capital and avoiding increased deficits would lead to more investment.
I like the WH40K bunnies! I'm sure the Emperor approves...
On tax cuts - seems self evident, tbh. The macroeconomic environment/sector-specific economic circumstances are likely to dominate tax changes so completely as to make tax changes imperceptible.
So, sure, if the economy is hot, cutting taxes might ADD to industrial investment and corporate spending as companies use the extra funds to take advantage of the supporting environment. But in a recession or tepid environment? What would YOU do, if you were a CEO? Take the tax cuts and build your cash reserves/pay down debt, to lower your leverage?
At least, when it comes to VAT and/or personal income taxes, you can hope for a counter-cyclical effect. But corporate taxes? Unlikely... And no one ever started a company because corporate taxes dropped one or two points...
So sick of the warhammer fantasy erasure in online spaces these days...
TBH, I am far more of a WFRP fan than a WH40K one but, yeah, fantasy got a cult following but no grand recognition like 40K does.
Also- these are clearly fantasy bunnies.
Holding guns?
I don't see any guns. Where?
There are more bunnies in the PS section that look straight out of Warhammer 40k.
A hot economy is the very worst time to cut corporate taxes without raising personal income taxes to prevent an increase in the deficit. [In a non-hot economy it would still be bad, but not AS bad.]
That's why I mentioned it being pro-cyclical.
Generally speaking, it's one of the main economic job of the government to be contra-cyclical... :)
"Contra-cyclical" spending and taxation are nice features of pro-growth fiscal policy. After all, when the Fed adjusts monetary policy to promote more or less aggregate demand, someone has to respond to the change. Why not the federal government, too?
If government were simply maximizing and redistributing income it WOULD be countercyclical. Low "recession fighting" interests rates from the Fed would mean more activities passing NPV tests. And "relief," transfers to people especially hard hit by recession, above all the unemployed would have the same effect. What I'm skeptical about is fiscal policy trying to fell some guestimated output gap.
GPT4 clearly reflecting the internet's obsession with WH40K.
You'd think a battle bunny would have some ear armor, but what do I know?
Maybe bunnies have insensitivities I don't know about. For example, horses have no feeling in their manes or tails.
Their feet, too. They used to make key chains out of rabbit feet. Supposed to be lucky (not for the rabbit).
Exposing the naked ear is essential for intimidating your enemies
hmm . . . mebbe!
Ear wounds are seldom fatal
A few years ago, I was consulting for a state department of public health and one task we had was addressing maternal mortality. I tried to explain that the increase was largely due to changes in measurement, and you’d have thought I told them their baby was ugly. Complete inability to understand data, but lots of feelings.
"Complete inability to understand data, but lots of feelings."
Now do police shootings.
Noah, slightly off topic from this post but you mention frequently the unrest of the 2010s. I want deeply to believe that the period of unrest is somewhat over but the truth is from where I am it seems so much worse. Things like the Project 2025 (assuming Trump is reelected) and others seem designed to keep the period of unrest going on. Does this worry you at all?
I feel like what he may point out is that at the moment, unrest has dramatically abated, not that the conditions for continued unrest doesn't exist. If things continue as they currently are, there is a strong chance that we get to move into an extended period where we aren't "shellshocked" from the recent unrest, whereas at the moment we're still a little jumpy from what the country just went through. It takes a while to bring your guard down.
But I'm sure Noah is worried about unrest returning, but is optimistic that we're past it for the moment.
Where is the rest of the unrest? Maybe it's just resting?
Are the two maternity charts from 1999 and 2020 supposedly measuring the same thing?
A number of countries had significant changes (e.g. >10%). Canada apparently rose from 2.4 to 8.4., an increase of 250%! That would have to be a change in measurement that far outstrips the US'.
With such wild swings and a wildly outlying South Korea, one suspects that we can't draw comparisons between countries at all: variances in measurement method appears to be greatest determinant of individual countries' results. Ff that's true, then those graphs are not useful for their intended purpose.
"Living paycheck to paycheck" could be (and often is) defined as spending essentially all of one's income and not saving much of it. Technically, it means that the level of liquid savings (e.g., cash in the bank) can cover only a small faction of one's expenditures.
What this kind of definition suggests is that "living paycheck to paycheck" is a function of both the income level and the spending profile. Therefore, you can have people making, say, more than $100K, who feel they live paycheck to paycheck because they heavily depend on their paycheck to meet their spending commitments (which could include fancy gym memberships, tuition at private schools, etc). Missing just one paycheck would have a major impact on their lives.
My wife claims we live paycheck to paycheck because we spend so much money on our real estate investments that our cash reserve is not growing. Meanwhile we max out our 401ks. It’s all very much a matter of perspective.
Thanks for the explanation on the pay-check-to-paycheck myth. I consider myself rather informed, but have fallen for this narrative. I do feel there are a lot of people in my generation (GenX) who got caught up in the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses consurmerism we developed in the 90s and 00s and are finding themselves with no savings, lots of debt, and a buch of crap. Many come from working class backgrounds and were raised with that mentality. I loved having a 401k and personally being in charge of investing for retirement, but moving away from pensions without properly educating my generation (or the Boomers that preceded us) on basic personal finance concepts is going to be a big issue in the next 20 years or so. But, maybe that is a false narrative too. Would love to hear more facts on this topic.
Hmm, I wonder if the "median" bank account really means what it implies... It doesn't account for how much goes out each month - maybe that level of buffer is needed to pay each month. It doesn't account for debt load or likely medical bills... The size of an ER visit cost is gigantic compared to that median. And it also doesn't account for distribution - good chance this isn't a symmetric curve...
Loved the analysis on the negative news issue. My thought on this for a while has been that it's both the death of local news / the hyper focus on national news.
The stat that first gave me this thought a few years ago was how violent crime is half of what it was in the 1980s, and yet everyone I asked, or any post I saw online was people complaining about how much more dangerous the world is today. The incongruity of this struck me as odd.
The internet and national news seems the best explanation. Hypothetical example: Thirty years ago, you had this idea of your town being a sleepy place with low crime, and everyone had that memory of the one time that guy murdered his wife 6 years ago. All you read or watched news wise was the local paper and the local evening news. Occasionally you'd tune into the nightly NBC broadcast and listened to Paul Harvey on occasion. So, you knew of bad crime issues elsewhere in the country, but your hometown was safe.
But the internet has now made every town local to you. Of the tens of thousands of towns across America, the rare murder story, mugging, or domestic violence assault everyone knew about is hitting the front page of national news or social media constantly. No need to wait up to 24 hours for the news cycle to mature before you read about it - details about the event are hitting your phone's notification bar within an hour of the event. You now have this sense that so much more is going wrong in the world and you feel less secure due to it, even though, statistically, you're twice as safe today as you were back in the time where you felt safer.
Couple that with the incentive that news companies have to tell sensational stories, or stories that make people angry to drive engagement, and now the well is poisoned even further. Feels like a prisoner's dilemma at this point. First news agency to opt out of the negative sensationalism dies at the feet of the others unless they join it in changing their rhetoric.
Also, with the contraction of local news being profitable, we're seeing a lack of local reporters who can do local journalistic investigations. Feels like local accountability is contracting.
Not just national vs local: it’s the business model of media companies competing in a 24-7 news cycle. It started with cable news in the 90s. The internet and smartphones amplified it.
Karl, one of the issues you touch upon -- the death of local news -- reminds me of a phenomenon noted during a journalism panel about a year before the pandemic.
There's an economic region called the Media Belt, and it consists of four areas of the country: New York, Washington, Los Angeles and the Bay Area. It's much like the Sun Belt or the Rust Belt. These four regions are so much alike among themselves but so different than the rest of the U.S. The news industry as a whole is in secular decline -- print, radio, TV, cable and online. The only places the news industry is going sideways, rather than declining, is in the Media Belt. This is where the jobs are and the money made in media. Coincidentally, media are viable in the Media Belt because they are "service industries", in service to finance (New York), entertainment (L.A. and NY), politics (DC) and technology (BA, but also the tech communities in the other three).
Search engines and social media largely determine the decision-making and resource allocation to what gets covered. Algorithms are biased toward economic, political, entertainment and tech topics most relevant to people living in the Media Belt, where most media are both produced and consumed.
Can't agree enough. Talk to most folks and their understanding of the frequency of adverse events is usually way way out of sync with reality. Humans aren't good at estimating relatively rare events in the first place. The great example that I see all the time is "child abduction" - this relatively rare (but still horrible) event is picked up by the media and played up over and over. I know parents who are scared to death to let their children roam at all because of this....
Lots of other examples - and yet folks underestimate the danger of driving a car or several other common things.....
This started even before the internet with the non-local media as Karl noted - but much stronger with the internet and social media. Everything feels "local" when it isn't.
There might be a glimmer of hope with newsletter platforms like this one. Despite its executives failing the Nazi Bar test, Substack overall provides a platform for the kind of journalism corporate media is failing to produce. Beyond the plain-facts reporting, you've got writers doing muckraking, explanatory and investigative stories that educate as much as report on the goings on day by day.
This writing is also not limited to conventional journalism reporting, either. There are authors who are writing news and also informing with essays.
Two I recommend off the top of my head are James Fallows and Judd Legum's Popular Information.
https://fallows.substack.com/
https://popular.info/
Fallows is an old-school ink-in-his-veins journalist who has seen it all and done it all. He has worked as a White House speechwriter and is a nonfiction author. He's also a pilot, and whenever there's an aviation incident, like the Boeing 737 MAX door plug blowout, he'll explain stuff to you that you never thought possible.
Legum is a progressive, so you go into Popular Information knowing his team's biases. He is also a lawyer, so his articles are like legal arguments, taking down his opponent's narratives and producing more receipts than CVS.
Wonderful news that American maternal health is probably improving rather than declining. Unfortunately, it's another example of why so many Americans distrust experts spouting statistics. So often, those statistics are revealed a few years later to be flawed.
Actually, the problem is NON-experts spouting statistics. :)
That said, one would think that agencies that produce data would be sensitive to the effects of changes in methodology and collect enough data around the point of change to take the change into account. We should not have to depend on retrospective analyses by outsiders to uncover such an obvious flaw in the data on maternal health.
Counter to this, at least if we include state departments of public health, I have personally seen the experts be completely incompetent when it comes to managing data.
It’s sad, but all the best data analysts work in the private sector trying to optimize potato chip pricing or something. The people in public health are... nice people with big hearts.
Indeed. The COVID pandemic showed up the limitations of PH officials straying into fields in which they have no expertise: design of cost effective responses to the PH challenges they identify. CDC/FDA failed to provide individuals and policy makers witht he tools they needed to take optimizing decisions, trading off costs and benefits of alternative NPI.
The U.S. is especially bad because of our "states are the laboratories of democracy" credo. The U.S. had 51 concurrent COVID-19 policies and protocols, with each state speed-running guidance of the federal agencies and their own public health authorities.
Since SARS-CoV-2 spread itself throughout the world, you could gather a global tally of nations and how they did on infections, deaths per capita and excess deaths. The nations that did well on low infections, low deaths per capita and low excess deaths all had combinations of civic restrictions, abundant resources and robust data collection. Something else that helped big-time was a unified, clear policy chain of command.
The U.S. had a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure "Here are 51 possible strategies for staying alive," not to mention the cohort of Americans who chose Option 52: Everything is a plot against you and you MuSt dO YoUr oWn rEsEaRcH!!1?!"
With better CDC messaging (including on how to integrate local information with information being provided by CDC, I don't think state level policies would have been a problem. In fact even state level policy making was too aggregated. It was really only at a local level that really optimal NPI could be implemented.
If you had states that followed the guidance of the Great Barrington Declaration, COVID containment efforts were doomed.
Dr. David Gorski, an oncologist, surgeon and researcher, wrote several explainers on the Great Barrington Declaration and why what he calls the "let 'er rip" strategy would have made the pandemic worse.
https://www.respectfulinsolence.com/2022/04/29/the-great-barrington-declaration-never-would-have-worked/#
It goes beyond messaging. The U.S. would not have had a successful COVID policy but for the CDC and FDA. There was no enforcement mechanism and no clear chain of authority, though medical professionals and researchers were coming to a consensus despite battlefield conditions.
Yeah, I read that story as “Don’t worry! We just have the worst statistical collection and obesity rates in the developed world. Everything is fine!”
can you make solarpunk battle bunnies who are protected by remote drones
Side note: please keep writing about how dysfunctional SF politics are. I love the city, but chronic, unsolved problems beg for systemic solutions. Not sure what or how. (Less power in the board of supervisors?) Maybe you can figure it out!
The latest insane story:
https://apple.news/AgFtgAUezS0KsTZuaxBChHg
San Francisco is a wicked problem. Its problems are unsolvable.
Please link to the transcripts of podcasts. If one wants to engage with the substance of what is said and not just the vibe, a transcript is necessary. [Can you ask GPT-4 to listen to the podcast and provide a written summary?]
I use Matter for this, but wish it was standard practice to provide transcripts for these types of podcasts.
It should be a standard for accessibility's sake, for the deaf/hard of hearing as well as for learning disabilities.
We need to give some recognition to the original battle bunnies: The Long Patrol. They were often understrength and always hard pressed, so they couldn't always make it to the battlefield on time, but whenever they did show up, you knew things wouldn't go well for the vermin.
Their tireless commitment to defending the weak, their willingness to face any foe on any field, and their good cheer under the most adverse conditions was an inspiration to little me, and made me want to be better. It still does.
https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Long_Patrol?so=search
I do not believe very many economists ever believed that cutting corporate taxes AND increasing the deficit would stimulate growth. There are good theoretical reasons -- distortion in the corporate income tax system -- to believe that shifting from taxing corporations to taxing (higher) personal incomes would lead to more efficient use of capital and avoiding increased deficits would lead to more investment.
https://www.bmj.com/content/379/bmj.o2499
You can curate your social media with positive news by following people who spread it.
https://x.com/johnrhanger/status/1747209736926159018?s=46