Welcome

I'm serious about this.

I have some ideas, but I'm sure that there are more ideas out there, and some of mine are probably wrong. Please contribute what you can in comments, and I hope this can become a group project with contributors, guest bloggers, and regular commenters.

I'm not going to let this be a Red/Blue battleground. That topic bores me, and it's covered extensively elsewhere. The party in power may seem to take more of a beating, but that's because their governing actions are the most topical. The trend to wealth concentration at the top continued without pause through periods where both parties have had a dominance of power.

I also don't want this to become a haves and have-nots battle. That's something that reasonable people can disagree on. It relates to the topic here because the a tilted playing field tends to make one's position on the field permanent or worse, but I'm not inherently opposed to the idea that innovation, hard work, complying with the rules, and sacrifice can be rewarded.

The topic here is the rules. Specifically, the ones created and enforced by all forms of government.

Carried Interest is one such rule. If I understand it, and I think I do, individuals operating funds who share in the fund's profits, pay taxes on that profit share as if it was profit on their own investment. None of their money needs to be invested, and they have no risk of losing money if the investment goes the wrong way, but they still get the rewards of tax incentives designed to encourage investing. That seems wrong, but being wrong is not enough to get it featured here. It needs to tilt the playing field so that a class of individuals on the high side of the field tend to stay there, and a group on the lower side of the field as less chance of gaining ground. I will argue in detail that it does that, and if it holds up I'll put it on a list.

The idea is that 1000 little tilts, individually insignificant, add up to a major tilt that makes the USA something different than the land of opportunity.