Recently, an old friend of mine asked the following How much of this is hyperbole? From an outsiders perspective much of the USA (news, politics, entertainment, ..) is loaded with hyperbole. Facts & intellectual discussion seem to be obscured by emotions and extremes. in response to a post linking American Democracy Will Die in 150 Days and having the following lead: There is only one issue in this US election: Fascism vs not Fascism.

I was watching the reopening protests the other day (yes, I write a bit slow, this post is about the reopening posts not the police protests) and noticed that many of my friends, mostly, but not entirely, those who don’t live in the USA, were rather shocked by the scene. So, I thought it might be useful to write up a little of US culture and why some people might look at the lock down as an existential issue requiring lobbying to return to work.

If you’re interested in political history (or just current affairs viewed through the lens of a political historian) haven’t come across Heather Cox Richardson, I highly recommend her daily summaries. Specific to this one, it’s worth remembering that we still have an election running and, it seems that the Republican Party is intent on using the pandemic as a way of magnifying their power. In this case, we have primary elections which really should be either postponed, moved to vote by mail or otherwise have significant allowances for the pandemic.

I was having a conversation with a friend about tax rates and the idea that we should go back to higher rates (say, what was done in the 1940’s and 1950’s). I’ve seen a lot of confusion about what this means and what kind of effect it has on the amount of money you keep at the end of the day. So, I wrote up this table showing the tax rates from 1944 (paid in 1945) and then converted 1944 dollars to 2020 dollars to build a comparison table.