Month: August 2026

How I’ll Probably Vote

/ Rich Wilkins / Leave a comment

Poor Danny got stuck with me on his list. I feel for him, I’ve been there. Asking someone to volunteer who is repulsed by your ticket’s existence is hard. I don’t make it better.

So I am decided. I won’t be voting for Bob “Crooksy” Brooks. No way, no how. The best part is this is just the stuff that can be sourced. This guy said way worse that just can’t be verified. A man who steals from his family is not fit for any office. A man who failed to purchase workman’s comp insurance for his employees calling himself a “working class hero” is a joke. I won’t vote for Mackenzie, despite personally liking him more, because he voted for Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill.” That is disqualifying.

I’ll be voting for Senator Lisa Boscola and Jeff Warren for the State House. Both are solid, normal people who will fight to make life more affordable for us. I’m decided there.

As for Josh Shapiro? Whatever. What has he done? Shorty worked hard on building data centers and passing school vouchers, while SEPTA funding, property tax reform, and adult recreational weed legalization went nowhere. What’s the point of high approval if all you want to do is take it with you to South Carolina in January? To be fair, he made the smart decision to Xerox the Wolf budgets and maybe add the inflation rate to the numbers. I guess he also fixed twenty yards of road in Philly too one time. Get shit done, right? Still, the guy is basically competent and kept the state from going off course in his first term. Stacy Garrity is incompetent and has bad ideas. Nobody needs her as Governor.

If the Democratic Party wants to embrace Bernie Sanders style politics, they’ll lose votes. Not as many as they should, because the GOP is a cult, devoted to the dumbest, most fat, grotesque beta in America, and that has to hurt more. But it’s uncomfortably close.

There are Better Ideas than a Wealth Tax

/ Rich Wilkins / Leave a comment

Well, the bad and losing ideas of the 2020 Democratic Presidential primaries are making a comeback and we can’t get rid of them. The newest returnee? The wealth tax. The long and short here? The idea is you’d tax the actual wealth and estate values of rich people instead of just their income.

It seems overwhelmingly likely that the current Supreme Court would invalidate a wealth tax under the Fifth Amendment. If somehow they didn’t, the issue with the tax is fairly simple. How does you deal with illiquid billionaires vs. liquid billionaires? What happens if you have billionaires selling off stocks and assets in a rush to have the cash for the tax? There’s a ton that can go wrong- assuming it ever even clears the courts.

There’s a better way that makes sense and would probably build more public support. Create more brackets, make them lower, and eliminate or dramatically cut write-offs. If someone proposed making people who earn over a million dollars *actually* pay 25%, rather than claim every write-off known to man and pay nothing, the public would probably support it. Maybe you don’t like the 25% number, fine, pick your number. If your complaint is that rich people don’t pay, take away the write-offs and shield regular people from the hits under lower rates like 5 or 10%.

It’s true that increasing wealth concentration under the ultra wealthy is a real problem. Sure, you can do a windfall tax, and that probably is good at some high number, but that number is not a million dollars in 2026. Everyone would be better off with a legitimately simple, straight forward graduated income tax with simple brackets that are lower. Collect more revenue and make things simple. Only conservative ideologically crazy people would complain. That would be actually a good thing.