Only Little People Pay Taxes

Review of "The Second Estate", by Ray Madoff, about how the rich have excused themselves from paying taxes.

"A system that requires someone who earns $100,000 to pay almost 30 percent in payroll and income taxes while giving another person who inherits $10 million a free pass is indefensible."

As we head into the nation's birthday, we should take stock of how we are fulfilling its founding propositions and promises. There have been good and bad times, and one has to say that the current time, while generally prosperous, is extremely fraught. A psychopathic (and rich) demagogue is President, and the good will and respect we have spent these centuries building around the world is being rapidly squandered. Internally, the Republic is being gnawed by any number of ills, but one of the deepest is extreme inequality. Paul Krugman has commented on this a bit, comparing our current moment unfavorably with the Gilded Age. Despite the Occupy movement and glimmerings of democratic socialism, the rich are lording it over the rest of us more blatantly and destructively than ever.

Everybody loves money, but the rich have a special, and frankly dysfunctional, relationship. There is never enough, and always too much in taxes. When they are in power, tax cuts and cuts to the IRS. When they are out of power, complaints about the "death tax", and heavy political spending by cloaked groups to get back into power. And all the time, they invest prodigiously in the "wealth management" industry, whose job is mostly to cheat the government and avoid taxes. This is not civically enlightened, nor edifying, behavior. But since the rich have the levers of power, (being the first funding filter for all political candidates of either party), they have been successful getting what they want. As Madoff explains, the rich have by this point almost entirely excused themselves from federal taxation, putting the whole burden on labor income. As the saying goes, what is criminal is not what is illegal, but what is legal.

The first step was setting the capital gains tax rate to roughly half of the labor income tax rate, with a max of 15% for long term gains. This is excused in many ways. Much of investment gains come from inflation. Corporate profits are already taxed, thus this is "double" taxation. Or, that capital investment is just great and deserves lower taxation to drive economic growth. Or, that they raise taxes eventually, after they supercharge economic growth! Etc., etc. Obviously, these are all excuses, disingenuous at best. For the recipient of capital gains, they are income in the form of money, pure and simple, and they are gains on top of whatever they had originally invested. And these gains are unearned, in the sense that no work/labor was done- merely waiting. How that makes it somehow more deserving of love from the tax system is hard to understand. There should be a uniform tax rate for it all. 

The next step is inheritance, which is currently tax-free, as the estate tax is more or less a dead letter. It applies only to very large estates, and only to those dumb enough to not evade them through trusts, etc. This takes unearned income to a whole new level. No work was done here at all, other than being born to the right people. Nothing is earned or contributed to the country or economy. Inheritances should be taxed at the normal income tax rate, period. Not only are inheritances free, but their cost basis is stepped up to the time of death, so that redemption is now pain-free for the heirs, in terms of capital gains taxes. One could hardly imagine a less equitable arrangement.

Madoff then describes one unholy intersection of investment and inheritance, as the borrow-and-die technique. Rich people can let their investments sit untouched till death, so that their heirs get the whole amount, tax-free. In the meantime, they can take out loans from banks (having plenty of collateral) to live from. Such income does not apparently count to the IRS as income, and thus they can leave the debt to their heirs, who can pay it back with easy money when the time comes. All tax-free.

Additionally, Madoff goes on a lengthy discussion of charitable giving, which in the hands of our current rich has been degraded into a font of power and control, with very little giving. While the money given can not be taken back, (generating enormous tax deductions), there few rules about how rapidly, or how beneficially, the money needs to be given out. The rich now routinely set up donor-advised funds (DAF), which allow them to exercise ongoing control over investments, over the "charity", and over rate of disbursement. Not only that, but control can pass to heirs, establishing an aristocracy of putatively charitable pots of money, in addition to the non-charitable pots they are already getting. These points are all separate from the routine, and perhaps purposeful futility of most philanthropic giving, and the trend of cloaking political organizations (frequently dedicated to further reductions in taxes) in charitable garb. 

Thus the current tax system makes a mockery of this country's founding principles, and creates the mortal danger of an unbridled and perpetual aristocracy of wealth, increasingly influential over the political system. What is the solution? Bring all income under the same progressive income tax system- inheritances, capital gains, lottery winnings, wages, winnings, ... everything. And apply payroll taxes (that is, the funding streams for Social Security and Medicare) to everything as well. 

The US deficit is getting into dangerous territory. Social Security and Medicare are not fully funded past the next decade. What this book makes clear is that there is plenty of money to fund everything. What we are lacking is proper knowledge about the true state of play, and the courage to tax everyone equally from the income that they receive. The idea that, as cited at the top, income earned by the sweat of one's brow should be split with the government, while income that floats down unearned from a will should not be, is insulting to every working person and to the very idea of work. 

For, to take a step back, what is the point of having a society and an economy? It is not to enshrine an undeserved hierarchy of unjust power in hereditary perpetuity. It is to motivate everyone to work towards the common good. There are many kinds of work, but evasion of taxes and political corruption are probably not what count, to most people, or to our founders. It takes unstinting work to make a great society, and if the culture and rules don't foster that work, decline is inevitable.

• A fellow crank agrees with me.
• Let's kill Social Security!
• Let's make America ungreat!
• A new vampire squid.
• "Certainly we do the opposite of what Biden did"

From Icebox to Hothouse, and Back Again

Better modeling, by including the biosphere, retrodicts more of Earth's dynamic climate history.

Climate change, while ignored by the current administration, is not ignoring us. The Earth is warming well past where it has been for millions of years. But before that? While the planet has generally had stable climates, they have varied substantially through time, and have gone through occasional catastrophes. There was a little ice age, in the middle of the last millennium, thought to have been caused in part by the depopulation of the Americas due to European diseases. The ensuing regrowth of forests covering the Americas drew down CO2 from the atmosphere and cooled the climate. But more to the point, there have been far more severe episodes, both of heat (the end-Permian extinction event) and cold (the Sturtian glaciation of the Precambrian). All of these arise from CO2 levels, as CO2 is the master controller of heat in the atmosphere, thanks to the greenhouse effect. (As it is on Venus as well.) 

For example, the end-Permian extinction is thought to have been caused by unusual volcanism in what is now Siberia. Over a mere 100,000 years, this poured an estimated 26,000 petagrams of CO2 into the atmosphere, causing its concentration to shoot up to about 2500 ppm (parts per million) and temperatures to shoot up as well, killing off 90% of all species. What we are doing now is much faster, though admittedly in early days. We are pouring roughly 11 petagrams of CO2 into the atmosphere yearly, which has raised CO2 concentrations from a preindustrial 280 ppm to 427 ppm today. It would take us another one to two thousand years to cause a 90% extinction event!

A bedrock of our climate thermostat is the silicate cycle. Since the vast majority of carbon on earth is locked up in rocks, (carbonates of silicon, magnesium, and calcium), not in the biosphere, it is rocks that have a dominant effect. Volcanoes belch out CO2 in huge amounts. That CO2 slowly eats away at rocks that are exposed, re-forming carbonate compounds that are weathered off and back into the ocean. Where these compounds (with those built by shelled animals of all kinds) are gradually deposited on the sea floor and subducted back into the Earth's crust. Some of those carbonates are reduced at depth and brought forth again by volcanic activity. The more CO2 there is in the atmosphere, and the warmer it is, the more weathering happens and thus the faster CO2 levels are brought back down. That is the elegant thermostat that has kept Earth at mostly mild temperatures through its long history. 

However, this is a slow thermostat, taking hundreds of thousands of years to equilibrate. Unusual events, like an asteroid impact, prodigious volcanism, or the advent of human ingenuity, can make a mess of things way faster than the silicate cycle can deal with in its slow, grinding way. Many subtler influences can also come into play, like cycles in the tilt of the Earth towards the Sun, or continental arrangements that lead to particular patterns of ocean circulation, can create variations such as ice ages. A recent paper brought out peculiar influences from the biosphere that can also affect, and even destabilize, the thermostat on longer time horizons

The oceans are responsible for roughly half of photosynthetic productivity, and they are also where the carbonate minerals get buried. So how they react to changes in the atmosphere are very influential in the whole cycle. These authors ran half-million-year simulations of climate perturbations while including not only the silicate cycle, but also reactions by the biosphere and especially the phosphorous cycle, which has a strong influence on biological productivity. It turns out that when the atmosphere has lower levels of oxygen than we do today, (as was the case during the Precambrian epoch), high CO2 levels cause long-term rises in biosphere productivity and also in phosphate recycling out of the ocean floor. The extra phosphate increases biological productivity even more, and thus causes CO2 drawdown to persist past where the silicate cycle would level out for the long term. The result can be a rebounding ice age after a hot phase. 

Model results over 500,000 years, showing rebound from an injection of high CO2 at year 10,000. A shows concentrations of CO2 over time, B shows O2 concentration, and C shows sea ice, which goes to zero at first, the rebounds sharply, especially under the blue condition of 0.6 times current oxygen concentration in the atmosphere. It shows how exquisitely sensitive the climate is to CO2.

These models make some sense of the Precambrian climate cycles, which had a few dramatic swings that went through so-called snowball Earth phases where the entire surface of the planet seems to have iced over. The silicate cycle naturally came to the rescue eventually, spewing enough CO2 from volcanoes to overcome the snow / albedo effects of all the ice and cause a rebound hot phase. Between the rising oxygen levels and the extreme climatic swings, the stage was somehow set for the rise of animal life, leading the so-called Cambrian explosion, though there was a fair amount of simpler precursor animal live in the Precambrian.dd

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adh7730

A schematic of the proposed cycle, with CO2 coming in from vulcanism (red) and being disposed of by various means, first and foremost the silicate cycle (blue). OC = organic carbon, P = phosphorous/phosphate, OCpetro = organic carbon weathered out of sediments, coal, limestone, and other geologic formations. Thus, the brown color shows this paper's additions to the classical silicate cycle.

While it is just a modeling paper, models are what we think and do in science. It is nice to have laboratory confirmation for areas of science (like molecular biology) that permit it, but historical sciences, especially those pertaining to whole planets as systems, have to be more forensic and speculative. This new model is a refinement on the basic silicate cycle, and thus seems a strong improvement on what has heretofore been a science of more or less back-of-the-envelope estimation. And judging from this new model, the authors propose that the next ice age is not being put off indefinitely by our profligate emissions, but rather that organic burial feedbacks will bring it closer (than 400k years away) with additional overcooling thereafter!

• Medicine is toast. "MIRA outperformed physicians in diagnostic accuracy and made guideline-concordant, medication-safe and appropriate admission decisions."
• A death sentence for US science.
• Revaluing trash.
• Apparently, fungi in the ocean are a thing.

Vindman on Russia and Ukraine

Not enough appeasement, or not enough deterrence?

I have been watching the Harry Potter series of films, a decade or two after first reading the books. Aside from being extremely entertaining, they show Rowling to have been weirdly prescient about the moral dilemmas only developing as she was writing, and now flourishing in grotesque fashion. How large sectors of supposedly civilized populations can be attracted to blatant racism. How cruelty, destruction, and contemptuous corruption can likewise become an attractive political brand. How corrupt powers corrupt the truth first, and then replace merit with lickspittle devotion among their followers, with predictable consequences. What seemed comically phantasmagoric has now turned into our day-to-day reality, with phones taking the place of wands.

It is not only relevant to US political scene, but also internationally, in the turn taken by Russia from a struggling post-Soviet democracy or at least quasi-democracy, back to an imperial emperorship under Vladimir Putin. After sending clouds of misinformation into the West, he started attacking Georgia and Ukraine with dementors, trying, without success so far, to squeeze the soul out of his "little brother". 

Alexander Vindman has something to say about the matter, in his new book, "The Folly of Realism". Vindman came to fame through his testimony against Voldemort, -er, Trump- during the first impeachment hearing, which revolved around corrupt conditioning of aid to Ukraine to get false political testimony against his foes. Vindman was on the NSC, and had participated extensively in Defense department and White House policy development around the changing conditions in Ukraine and Russia. His book recounts the long historical road that led to the current Ukraine war, and the many missteps by the US that are now part of that history.

The question is about US policy around the catastrophe in Ukraine- what was the US role in it? What should our policy have been, and what should it be now? The "realism" in Vindman's title refers to the foreign policy school that foreswears idealism. It says that we should ignore any sympathetic feelings about democracy or independence for Ukraine and recognize that Ukraine was always going to be in Russia's sphere of influence and not get tangled up in its defense. Under this reading, our policy mistake was to lure Ukraine towards the West with empty promises of joining NATO and the EU, while our paramount interest was actually in maintaining a stable relationship with Russia so that no one starts World War 3. 

On the other hand would be a more values-based, idealistic approach. Under this reading, our promises were not wrong, only our unwillingness to back them up. It is patently obvious that neither Russia nor anyone else is going to use nuclear weapons in these kinds of conflicts- that would be self-defeating when the aim is to gain territory and population (or even to defend one's own population, when pitted against other nuclear powers). In all honesty, having nuclear weapons is more of a prestige thing at this point than a real factor of military strategy, let alone tactics. But to give Putin his due, he used them with consummate skill, rattling the nuclear saber at critical times to cow the West and particularly the US from intervening in Ukraine, much to our shame.

Idealism posits that our interests are inextricably linked to our values. There are no durable and dependable international relationships without shared values, and we should be extremely grateful that, at least up to the current administration, the liberal West has had a solid core of shared values that undergird our entire collective security structure. Thinking that we can pursue "interests" that conflict with those values is chimerical and tends, as we are seeing in the current administration, to sell out and destroy exactly what is most valuable to us on the international stage. 

But perhaps even worse than the philosophical differences within the US policy establishment that led to the schizophrenic and catastrophic approach to Ukraine was the inattentive way we sleepwalked into it. Emblematic of this is Obama's "reset" with Russia. Even after Putin had declared that the loss of the Soviet empire was the most catastrophic event in the last century, even after Russia attacked and set up a simmering conflict with Georgia for trending democratic, even after Russia had spent years pumping offensive and destabilizing propaganda into its enemies in the West, Obama was anxious to get Russia off his plate and initiated the reset. This was a policy of turning a blind eye to all the geopolitical trends that clearly showed that Russia was not going to be a democratic partner to the West, but was, on the contrary, heading rapidly in the opposite direction, despite the window dressing of Dmitri Medvedev. More specifically, it failed to recognize that Ukraine was in mortal peril from these trends. The prior president Bush had declared that his ultimate goal was to bring Ukraine into NATO. But no plan was offered, no timeline or support was given, even while Russia's apoplexy over the prospect was, to those who were paying attention, growing by the year. 

Current status of NATO. Whatever the rhetoric, the new eastern European members of NATO are members in order to defend themselves against Russia. The whole point of NATO is to unite Europe defensively against Russia. Naturally, Russia takes this as an insult, but the history is self-explanatory, as is the same historical reasoning in case of Ukraine. As long as Russia takes no responsibility for its many past crimes, and its current lies, offensive behavior, and ongoing crimes, there can be no question of reversing this fundamental relationship.

The reset ignored all this and assumed, as we all did, that a new war in Europe was inconceivable- whatever complaints Russia had would be raised in some appropriate forum. During this time, Russia was carefully playing its cards for Ukraine, using Paul Manafort to dress up its proxy, Viktor Yanukovych, electing him president, and getting him to cancel progress towards joining the EU. Unfortunately, in 2014, the Ukrainian people wised up to the direction all this was going, and ousted Yanukovych in a popular uprising, sending him fleeing to Russia. Immediately thereafter, Russia extracted its pound of flesh, invading and taking over Crimea, and for good measure starting a war in Eastern Ukraine, to be kept on the simmer. 

All this should have been foreseen by US policy makers. But instead, they had their reset, with a few temporary benefits weighing against the disastrous direction portended by Russia's actual policies and intentions. If the US model for Ukraine was the same as for Belarus, we should have been honest about that and not promised any future relationship or alliance such as NATO. We should have clarified that Ukraine was in Russia's sphere, and tough luck.. they would have to deal with the neighbor that nature had dealt them. On the other hand, if we truly valued the independence of Ukraine and its civilized aspirations, in light of its being in its own right a very large country, both in area and in population, then we would have put more effort into deterring Russia rather than appeasing it. 

Ukraine was not ready for NATO membership- that much was understood. We can see by the example of Hungary how dangerous it is to have backsliding, regressive and frankly traitorous countries within the alliance. Ukraine's democracy was by no means ready for full membership. In light of that, the US should have offered a direct security relationship, as the Georgia war played out, to put teeth behind our desire for Ukraine to remain independent and work out its own relationship with democracy and with Europe. The point was not to influence the government or people of Ukraine, but simply to deter Russian meddling. For by this time, the truth was visible- that Russia wanted to rebuild its empire / sphere of influence, whether its neighbors wanted to be assimilated or not. The race was on, between the gathering strength and determination of Russia to recover "its" former possessions, and its neighbors' growing sovereignty and ties to Europe. 

One might ask.. how is this model different from Vietnam? Wouldn't this have tied us to a corrupt government that would have been fatally impaired, politically speaking, by taking assistance from the US? Wouldn't Ukraine have come to rely on our security crutch, while thumbing its nose at Russia and miring itself ever deeper in corruption and dysfunction? I think the differences are significant. Firstly, the Ukraine war had not happened yet. We would be deterring, not trying to repel, an attack. Secondly, the ultimate prize of European integration remained as a more significant goal, quite beyond any bilateral relationship with the US. It is clear that the people of Ukraine were quite strongly motivated in that direction, and part of that was gaining a functioning liberal political system.

As a Ukrainian by birth, Vindman was and is appalled by the path to war, some of it paved by the US. He is casting about for historical counterfactuals and alternative paths, and, given the dysfunctions of our own political system, those are hard to come by. Perhaps preventing the first election of Donald Trump would have been significantly more productive than any policy adjustments farther back in time.  But I have to agree that our split-the-difference approach to Ukraine, which was initiated in the Bush administration, was fundamentally in error, and was a temporizing solution (which the Obama administration fatally continued) to a problem that turned out to be far more urgent than was anticipated. Though it should have been anticipated.

• Are we second-rate yet?
• There's something about postmodernism... 
• War is now IT.

Strides in Cancer Treatment

A new paper shows that CART therapies can be unleashed against solid tumors.

We are finally in the payoff period in the decades-long war on cancer. Slowly, painfully, precision approaches are being developed to treat specific molecular lesions in ways that are superior to the old blunderbuss kill-everything approaches. At first, these treatments had only marginal effects, at astounding costs. But increasingly, the effects are lengthening and cures are in sight in some forms of cancer. One unexpected area of revolutionary progress has been immunotherapies, which in various ways help our immune systems attack cancers. It turns out that many cancers have tricks to hide from the immune system, and once those tricky dampening molecules are circumvented, dramatic reductions are possible. One paper recently described an anticancer vaccine made up of a witch's brew of targeting molecules, cancer antigens, and adjuvants, that achieves strong anti-melanoma action.

Another one of these immunotherapies is CART, or chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy. T cells have a receptor repertoire, just as B-cells do, which target things to be attacked- foreign pathogens, diseased states, etc. at molecules called antigens. One problem in cancer is that the cells are, originally at least, our own, so they mostly evade immune detection by having few "foreign" antigens. But there are nevertheless some antigens, comprised of normal molecules that are out of place (such as DNA found outside the cell) and "neoantigens" that are proteins expressed from the mutations in cancer cells. Additionally, as mentioned above, cancer cells express additional molecules (PD-L1) that can dampen even the immune response that does get generated by these few cancer antigens. So, the chimeric part of CART is taking the patient's own T-cells and engineering some of them to express new anti-antigen receptors that are relevant to the patient's cancer. Perhaps there is a mutant fusion protein that the cancer depends on. Perhaps the cancer displays an unusual surface molecule. Perhaps the tables need to be turned and PD-L1 targeted. There are many possible targets. 

CART therapies have, to date, been mostly directed at blood tumors. Solid tumors have extra protection in their micro-environments, and have not been good targets, though they necessarily have blood supplies and thus exposure to systemic T-cells. A recent paper blows open this field by revealing a magic molecule that plays a very significant role in the structure of solid tumors- the urokinase receptor. The urokinase plasminogen activator receptor (uPAR) is heavily expressed on senescent cells and many solid tumors, but rarely expressed elsewhere. Indeed, its expression correlates with tumor aggressiveness. Plasminogen is a protease that is sort of a cleanup crew for the circulatory system and body generally. It breaks up blood clots, and digests follicle tissues allowing ovulation. It encourages wound healing and discourages fibrosis- the buildup of scar tissue. However, in the cancer setting, the same activity seems to encourage fibrosis in a sort of constant wound healing state. Reviews in this field are rather confused about the direction of action. But one thing is clear- uPAR has myriad signaling activities relevant to tissue repair and immune activation that are not all dependent on the uPA (plasminogen activator) and plasmin activation system. Indeed, it is expressed not just in cancers, but in many other fibrotic settings.

A wide array of proteins are assessed here for their expression in a cancer tissue sample. uPAR is in red at the upper left. The matrix on the right shows the correlation of expression in a wide variety of cell types and tissues, like cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs), monocytes/macrophages (Mo/Mac), and with the protein fibroblast activation protein alpha (FAP).

The authors sought to target CART cells against uPAR, principally as a targeting device, since this marks many solid tumors and correlates with metastasis and rapid cancer progression, in addition to inflammation and fibrosis. While only tested in mice, the results were remarkable. 

"CAR T cells targeting the D2-D3 domain of uPAR display broad antitumor activity in xenograft, syngeneic, and patient-derived models, including in adjuvant and combination settings, supporting the concept that targeting conserved malignant cell states can enable therapeutic strategies that transcend tumor type. ... our prior work shows that uPAR CAR T cells targeting senescent cells remodel fibrotic tissues, and, as shown herein, this remodeling is associated with CAR T cell infiltration and cytotoxic activity. Similarly, parallel work demonstrates that uPAR CAR T cells exhibit potent efficacy in glioblastoma models and can co-target supportive stromal cells."

This is to say that these CART cells target not only tumor cells, but the surrounding solid tissues (stromal cells) that they rely on. That is the key to defeating solid tumors. It also indicates that other autoimmune and fibrotic conditions may be addressable with this therapy as well. 

Treatment effects from the CART therapy in mice, against several tumors. The red graphs are controls, and the blue graphs are treatments. Top is the tumor volume over time, while at bottom is survival of the mice over time.  Lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD), lung squamous cell carcinoma (LUSC), high-grade serous ovarian carcinoma (HGSOC), and pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC).

The results of treatment of xenografted human ovarian tumors into susceptible mice, at 3 weeks, bottom. On the left is the control, while the other two sets were treated with CART cells against uPAR.

The authors note that relapses were seen occasionally, but that in these cases, the uPAR target was still highly expressed. That suggests firstly that it is difficult for tumors of these targeted types to do without uPAR, and secondly that something else went wrong with the tailored CART therapy, other than that its target went away. Perhaps future work can enhance its penetration or activity. The researchers also strained to make their model systems as human-relevant as possible, using cancer tissue transplanted (xenografted) from human cell lines, human CART cells, and mice with transplanted immune systems from humans. This work is thus not only a scientific breakthrough of the highest order, but is a technical tour de force as well. It also ends up with a variety of patent declarations and commercial ties, indicating that this breakthrough is being fully milked by its inventors and commercialized at breakneck speed.

One major problem with this mode of therapy is that CART cells require a great deal of engineering. First, antibodies against uPAR were developed in mice or other species. Then the genes from those immune systems were recovered from those mice, to get the precisely recombined gene that expressed the antibody with highest binding activity against uPAR. Then that gene, hooked up to new transmembrane and intracellular domains, (specially selected to activate the T cell they will be put into), was introduced into a transformation vector and put into the T cells collected from the diseased mice. In humans, this treatment routinely runs a half a million dollars. It is incredibly ornate, and one expects that gene therapy will someday allow the patient's T cells to be directly modified in the body, without all the collection and laboratory work, (which takes months), given a high-quality gene encoding the antibody fragment that is generally applicable- not tailored to a specific patient.

• The example of Spain.
• AI does insurance... as you would expect!
• AI is not what it is cracked up to be. And way more expensive than it has to be.
• Japan is surprisingly willing to keep importing fossil fuels, despite exchange rate degradation.
• Renewables and batteries have stabilized California's grid and made electricity cheaper.
• Map of where electricity has gotten more expensive in the last year.
• How other animals deal with inequality.
• What economic warfare looks like.
• Can we survive the internet?
• Electric cars are good for everyone.