Austin Frerick

Every Beltway insider who read the DWT predictions for the last couple of months-- once I started seeing the WI-01 internal polling numbers-- that Ryan would retire, rolled their eyes.

"Democrats don’t know how to use this rhetoric politically, since they haven’t really paid attention to the politics of commerce for decades. They are starting to learn."-Matt Stoller

The Republicans seem to have gotten away with passing Paul Ryan's egregiously class warfare tax scam-- even if the newest polls show most American voters hate it. A Gallup poll released this week shows that a majority of independent voters (56%) oppose the tax bill, as do 87% of Democrats. Only 16% of Republicans disapprove of it.

I feel like Austin Frerick, the former Treasury Department economist running for Congress in the Des Moines-based Iowa seat (IA-03), has become a friend aside from just one of the Blue America-endorsed candidates. I feel like I learn something every time I talk with him.

The earliest inheritance tax I could find was a 5% levy on inheritances of estates that went to people other than the deceased's grandparents, parents, children, grandchildren, and siblings towards the end of Augustus' reign. Receipts went to a fund to pay military retirement benefits. In the U.S. the first inheritance tax was passed in 1898-- but only 75 cents on each hundred dollars of an estate worth over $10,000.

If you follow Austin Frerick, the Blue America-endorsed candidate for Iowa's 3rd congressional district on Twitter-- and you should: @AustinFrerick-- you are probably already familiar of the term Second Gilded Age or New Gilded Age. This morning Austin, a former Treasury Department economist, told me that "The 1st Gilded Age lasted from the 1870s to about 1900.

Tonight I want to talk about the SIFI Threshold, That';s because I had lunch with my old friend Roberto Rodriguez-- former congressional candidate and later special assistant for legislative affairs to the Secretary of the Treasury (Geithner at the time). So what's SIFI? Don't worry, I didn't know either til Roberto explained it over a bowl of pasta.

On Friday, Trump appointed right-wing crackpot and OMB Director Mick Mulvaney acting director of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. But there already was an acting director.

Open Secrets lists 10 commercial sectors as the biggest bribers of Congress Members so far this election cycle. The worst, as it always is, cycle after cycle after cycle: the Finance Sector. There is no sector more indicative of pure corruption. So far this year they've handed out $44,717,034 to Republicans and $36,641,128 to Democrats.

We tend to think-- and for good reason-- that anything the Trump regime does, is wrong. And in most cases, that is a good rule of thumb to follow, But not in the case of blocking the AT&T merger. No doubt Trump is meddling in the Justice Department antitrust case because of his petty vindictiveness, but blocking the merger between AT&T and Time Warner is good policy.