As read by George Hahn. https://www.profgalloway.com/earners-vs-owners-2/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Hey, this is Peter Kafka. I'm the host of Channels, a podcast about technology and media and how they're both changing all the time. And this week, I'm trying to figure out how Donald Trump is changing the media in Washington, in the courtroom, and in the boardroom. On to help me figure it all out is Sarah Fisher, the excellent Washington-based media reporter for Axios.
That's this week on Channels, wherever you get your favorite podcast. Scientists find weird kinds of life all the time. And normally, they can run experiments. If I hypothesize, life can live in bleach. Well, I can get bleach and see if life lives in it. But what if the weird thing about the life they find is that it lives for millions of years?
Time! I don't have any control over that. I can literally do nothing with time. This week on Unexplainable, intraterrestrials. Aliens on Earth, deep beneath the seafloor. Follow Unexplainable for new episodes every Wednesday.
I can't prove, and neither can anyone else, that a computer is alive or not or conscious or not or whatever. I mean, all that stuff is always going to be a matter of faith. But what I can say is that this emphasis on trying to make the models seem like they're freestanding new entities does blind us to some ways we could make them better.
So how can we make artificial intelligence better? That's this week on The Gray Area. New episodes every Monday. I'm Scott Galloway, and this is No Mercy, No Malice. We talk about tax policy through the lens of rich versus poor. We should also discuss earners versus owners. Earners versus owners, as read by George Hahn.
It's tax season in the U.S. 60 million-plus Americans' taxes are so simple, the IRS could process them automatically and just send a bill or refund check. Instead, the average American spends $270 and 13 hours filing their taxes each year. Spoiler alert, the IRS is the least popular federal agency. Last month, Doge came for the tax man.
Half the IRS workforce, 90,000 people in total, is reportedly on the Green Mile. Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress are inching closer to extending Trump's 2017 tax cuts. This is good news for the wealthy, i.e., owners. Lowering tax rates and decimating IRS enforcement capabilities is stupid. We get $12 back for every $1 given to the agency. but it's only a misdirect.
We talk about taxes and enforcement when the real juice is the tax code. Our tax code exacts a high price on earners, and the price is even higher when enforcement is rendered a paper tiger, as the shortfall is either added to the debt or used as a pretext for cutting Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other programs.
As Warren Buffett once said, there is class warfare in America, quote, but it's my class that's making war, and we're winning, unquote. This post was originally published last May, but the war remains the same. Owners are crushing it, earners are getting crushed, and the battlefield, aka the U.S. tax code, continues to be a weapon of mass distraction.
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