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On Monday we looked at a Thought Leader-ish attempt to explain how working full time on minimum wage in the U.S. ($7.25/hr, no benefits) could allow a person to meet expenses and – and!
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– even "build wealth." Let's talk a little more about that $7.25.

I keep no secrets about what I am. I am a soft, middle-aging, middle-income professional with an advanced degree and a mediocre salary that allows me to live comfortably because I have no dependents. I'm not the hardscrabble poor, nor am I Wealthy unless one compares my financial situation to that of a homeless person. Recently I was recreating with a similar person – 40s, professional, Doing Fine financially, urban – and we got to talking about minimum wage. Accounting for various forms of withholding, a $7.25 hourly rate translates (and we were/are spitballing here) maybe /hr in net income.

It's probably slightly less, and yes, a person earning this would qualify for things like the EITC at tax time, returning some of the withholding.

But set that aside for now. Let's say that depending on where one lives, an hour of work at minimum wage nets six dollars.

My friend said – and maybe this is the kind of thing that only soft, non-poor middle age types can say after years of being spoiled by middle income living – "If someone told me that if I sat in a soft, comfortable chair doing nothing for one hour they would give me six dollars, I wouldn't do it." And I never thought about this previously, but almost immediately I realized I felt exactly the same. If a stranger grabbed my arm and said "If you (insert literally anything here) for one hour I will give you $6" I would laugh and keep walking.

Perhaps a person in deep poverty would feel differently, but the point that hit me was how truly little $6 is. And I'd like to think it's not just very little money to us because we're middle income urban hipsters. It's just not much, period. It's two gallons of gas, or one McDonald's Value Meal in some low cost of living areas, or 1 thrift store t-shirt, or 3 hours of City of Chicago metered parking, or…you get the idea. Six dollars, to all but the totally destitute, would very quickly be judged in economic terms, "Not worth an hour of my time." It strikes me as at or below the amount of money one could make panhandling or collecting returnable aluminum cans for an hour or two.

Obviously nobody works for one hour in reality. But just as obvious is that minimum wage employees are not working full time (40 hours) in all but the rarest cases. Figure 30 hours per week using our $6 net figure and you are taking home…$180 per week. For those of you who are also fortunate enough to make something more than that, sit back and think about that for a second. I socialize with people who think nothing about spending $180 on dinner. If you think about minimum wage employment in terms of actual dollars, it's not at all difficult to come to the conclusion that regardless of whether one is comfortable financially or at the poverty line it would be hard to look at the prospect of working to bring home $180 per week and thinking, "What's the point?"

The minimum wage is adjusted in nominal terms maybe once per decade, and as soon as that happens time and inflation eat into it in real terms. The reality is that in 2017 it would net a quasi-full time employee an amount of money so small that no amount of barebones living could compensate for its lack of buying power. If the only thing you took away from the example above is "Ed is a bourgeois asshole," congratulations, you're not terribly bright. Being lucky enough not to have to rely on the minimum wage at this point in my life makes it more, not less, obvious how unacceptably low it is. The next time you are in a bar serving $12 cocktails and $8 pints, remember this and maybe you will learn something about how little six dollars means to you, too.

The present wave of write-ups about the filibuster being in peril is based on a fundamental flaw. The filibuster has been dead for years. This is just making it official.
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Democratic institutions don't run on rules – they run on norms, the most crucial of which is that you don't change the rules whenever you want to do something that isn't possible in a given set of circumstances. Once that norm goes out the window, then the rules no longer matter.

Perhaps the dumbest argument is that Senate Democrats should "reserve" the filibuster for some future nomination or bill. That is transparently stupid; if the GOP will "go nuclear" (a hack phrase if ever there was one) now they will be just as willing – a cynic might say "eager" – to do it in the future. And if the GOP is willing to do the parliamentary equivalent of firing an arrow, waiting until it strikes something, and then drawing a bulls-eye around it, then there is no use in getting into fifth-dimensional chess arguments about strategy. Once it is established that the rules can be changed whenever they are inconvenient, strategy is obsolete. Imagine a soccer match in which one team makes whatever it does on the field retroactively legal while the opposition tries to play by the traditionally accepted rules. Once the first team amends the rules to allow the use of tasers on defense and picking the ball up and throwing it into the goal on offense, it has ceased to be a soccer match in any meaningful sense.

The demise of the filibuster dates to the W Bush era and the appointments of Roberts and Alito. The much-heralded 2005 "Gang of Fourteen" consisting of quasi-moderate Republicans and some barely left of center Democrats was touted as a means of preserving the filibuster, but in reality it merely set the precedent that the Republicans are more than willing to change the rule whenever there is a chance that they will not get what they want. The "compromise" worked because Senate Democrats agreed to cave and vote Bush's nominees onto the Federal courts. Had that outcome not been engineered, the filibuster would have died right there. Since then the rule-in-force has been that either the GOP gets what it wants or it will change the rule. The practical consequences of that approach are no different than if the rule were simply repealed.

In the brief window in which Democrats controlled the Senate, the marvelously ineffectual Harry Reid imposed changes to the filibuster in response to Republicans' refusal to allow a vote on, well, essentially anybody appointed by Obama. This deft bit of strategy on Republicans' part ensured that the argument could be framed as, "Well Harry Reid did it, so…" What Reid did was no different in practice than what the GOP majority does now and had done in the past; the only difference is that the minority GOP called his bluff and forced him to make actual rule changes whereas Democrats in the minority are so eager to cave to Republican intransigence that McConnell and Co. never have to bear any political cost.

Is there any point to attempting to filibuster Gorsuch? Not much. Potentially the GOP could get some flack among the few people who pay attention to such trivialities for messing with the rule book to achieve partisan goals. But that talking point is likely to have currency only with people who already despise the current crop of Republicans. So, is there any point in not attempting to filibuster him? Again, not really. Filibuster him and the rule gets changed; don't filibuster him and the Republicans have successfully bullied them into compliance yet again.

You can tell the Democratic Party routinely gets out-maneuvered because so many of the decisions it is faced with boil down to, "It doesn't matter much either way." If that isn't the definition of Ineffectual, then what is?

The state of the world today has us all doing double takes at every news item that seems like it can't be real. As we are learning, the line between what can and can't be real these days is getting indistinct. But when someone posts an infographic called "Build Wealth on Minimum Wage" on March 30 – just before the official day of things that Aren't Real – well, a man could experience an existential crisis trying to figure out if it's serious or next-level satire.

Since the website that posted it has since removed all reference to it after a torrent of mockery, let us assume it was serious. Fortunately it is cached here and I uploaded the entire (large) infographic for your viewing pleasure as well. I wanted to make sure you realized I wasn't fabricating this.

Since these aren't ideal reading formats, let me summarize the key points.

1. Move to a cheap city. The author helpfully lists the 10 cheapest, highlighting places like Buffalo, Fort Wayne, Amarillo, Akron, Jackson MS, Detroit, and Shreveport.
2. "Find a place that costs less than $600/month for rent" – preferably "with utilities included"!!!
3. Eliminate your commute by getting a used bike (to ride to work in the winter in Buffalo or Detroit I guess)
4. Cancel cable
5. Don't eat out – "Elon Musk once ate on less than $1/day"!!!
6. Maintain a catastrophic health insurance plan to avoid being medically bankrupted
7. Shop at thrift stores
8. Do things for fun that are free
9. Invest your Extra Money
10. Make money in your "spare time" driving Ubers and whatnot

Some of this stuff is, admittedly, not horrible advice. When I lived on a very low income, paying for cable and eating out were the first two things I eliminated. I also put a moratorium on buying clothes, which is a bigger expenditure for most of us than we realize. But this is the kind of "financial advice" people get everywhere they look. Some people follow it, some people don't.

The basic premise of this Advice, though, is so stupid that it's hard to believe that any editor, even of a minor Financial Infographic purveyor, would sign off on it: Move somewhere it is cheap to live. Uh. A couple things here.

1. Moving is very expensive. I have done it probably 15 times in my life. Even loading the truck myself and unloading it myself on the other end, moving costs at least several hundred dollars for anyone who doesn't own a large moving van. Starting in a new location requires a lot of up-front cash as well: security deposits, "activation fees" for utilities, and so on.

2. His list of cheap cities are places with rampant unemployment and crime problems. It's a list of America's Crappiest Big Cities. Perhaps he should go check out the $500-600/month apartments in Jackson and Buffalo and see how livable they are. And how close they are (biking distance!) to anywhere one can work full time. Those cities are cheap because there are no jobs there and nobody wants to live there. People are leaving, and they are leaving for a reason. Why would anyone move there and expect to find work?

3. The assumption that anyone can get 40 hours per week of minimum wage work makes sense to someone who has never worked minimum wage jobs. I suppose you could cobble together multiple jobs to equal 40 hours, but you're not getting anything close to 40 at one job. In a dying city with a bad economy.

4. There are maybe two or three big cities in this country with sufficient public transportation networks (and weather suitable for biking at least some of the time) to allow residents to get by without a car. Going without access to a car in 99% of this country is close to impossible. You'll give back whatever you "save" from jettisoning a car in the jacked up prices you pay at Convenience Stores in food deserts where one finds things like $500/mo. apartments.

5. Cutting back on spending is good, albeit patronizing, financial advice, but the "budget" here assumes a person's spending is literally zero. That simply isn't realistic. Sure, a disciplined person can cut out the Meals Out and Costly Entertainment (movies, bars, etc.) but the idea of going years on end with nothing happening in one's life that would require spending money is quite stupid.

6. Even living this to-the-bone lifestyle recommended by the author with no spending and a mythical full time minimum wage job enables one to "save" a grand total of something like $3500 per year. Managing the infinitely unlikely feat of repeating this performance for five consecutive years, then, would result in saving up something like $17,000.

OK. That's not nothing. But it's hardly "wealth." Your five years of spartan living in a probably-dangerous apartment in a shitty place has left you with enough cash to buy a decent used economy car, pay maybe 1 or 1.5 years of tuition at a real institution of higher education, make a down payment on a really cheap house that will probably be in an area with a depressed economy, or something equally underwhelming. Maybe the real moral of the story is that no matter how ridiculously strict a person is about financial habits, $7.25/hr just isn't enough money to allow an adult American in 2017 to do much of anything except survive paycheck to paycheck in the very best scenario. And that's if you get close to 40 hours on the regular, which you won't.

Americans are terrific at learning the wrong lessons from looking analytically at poverty. Were this a satirical effort to show that someone earning minimum wage is in a no-win situation it would be brilliant. Instead we have yet another example of how clueless the Silicon Valley Thought Leader types are and how willingly they ignore the reality that the system they exploit so well is not sustainable in the long term.

Our health care system, with or without the ACA, is a mess. People disagree about the reasons it is a mess or what specific aspects of it are most problematic, but anyone can see this isn't working. The fundamental flaw is one thing that nobody in the Republican Party has the balls (being as male-heavy as it is in Congress, the gendered euphemism is appropriate here) to address.

On the surface it seems like the choice between a pure free market and a pure single payer system for health care would give us two options that both work as self-contained entities with very different consequences. A free market system would cost less for many individuals, cost more for others, and leave some people unable to afford health care at all. A single payer system would guarantee service to everyone but raise issues of overall cost (depending on how it were run) and how efficiently service could be provided.

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The problem in the U.S. is not that we have picked the wrong one of these options, but that we have neither of them.

The loophole that makes our system the enormous clusterbang that it is results from Republicans not having the courage to back up their tough talk on people who can't afford health care. As long as the law requires Emergency Rooms to take people irrespective of ability to pay, the system we use today is guaranteed to be an expensive mess. A system that requires people to buy insurance from a for-profit insurance industry or face a penalty is going to leave some people uncovered. Those people are going to get sick and get in car accidents just like everyone else.
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When they do, they end up getting services they have no intention of or ability to pay for. The costs get passed on to everyone else. This is why health care in the U.S. has been such a disaster – because we treat it like an industry rather than a social service.

The logical solution is to have a single-payer system in which people don't have to go to the ER when they have the flu because it's the only service provider they have access to that can't reject them for being uninsured and poor. The alternative, though, is for the Republicans to sack up and change the law that requires ERs to take uninsured patients.

If they really are committed to the idea of health care as a product, the provision of which is governed by the invisible hand, then go all the way. Tell people, "If you don't have insurance, the ER will leave you outside on the sidewalk and lock the door. Hospitals don't have to treat you anymore, even if you're comatose, until they determine what you can afford."

That's abhorrent, of course, but they don't seem to have any problem being abhorrent as long as they know that their poorest constituents can get into a hospital somehow (and then suffer under a mountain of medical debt they can't begin to pay back, which is a win for the debt collection industry). Nonsense. Take away the safety net. If you want a market in which health care is treated the same as any other product or service, then stand behind your ideology and let's do this for real. See how it looks in practice. Let people experience it. See how they like it.

It's the only way for Americans to make an informed choice, after all, on the merits of treating access to medical care as an issue of personal responsibility and a privilege one must earn.

CNN is reporting that the FBI has evidence of collusion between Trump's campaign and the Russian government. At this point we have no idea what that evidence consists of. If it is firm evidence, he is not going to last the year.

I know, I know. You've heard "This is the end of Trump" before. Too many times. But consider the following points before you disregard this, remembering that the argument is contingent on the evidence being firm and more than circumstantial.

1. "The GOP will never turn on him in Congress." Look, I know it doesn't feel like it – it feels more like an eternity – but Trump has only been President for sixty-one days. Nobody could realistically expect they would impeach him at the first hint of a scandal. They've stood behind him thus far, but "thus far" hasn't been very much time in this case. So…

2. Two months of constant damage control might be OK with the Congressional Republicans. After six months? Eight? Remember, members of Congress do not like wasting their time on things that provide them with no benefit, and that midterm election will be here before you know it.
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What they feel willing to put up with today may not be what they're willing to tolerate in six months. Remember Watergate; Republicans stood firmly behind Nixon, right up to the point where they didn't. If the tide turns, it will turn with dramatic speed.
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3. Trump has surrounded himself with a group of people (excepting family) who seem almost comically self-interested and ready to turn on each other in a heartbeat. There's no Ollie North ready to take a bullet for the old man. Some of his hangers-on look like they would squeal on their own mother under the slightest pressure.

4. It's Russia. Russia. Americans agree on few things, but almost everybody hates the Russians ("Alt-Right" dead-enders who recently discovered a deep love for Russia excepted).

The Russians are The Bad Guys. Sure, your core group of 20% of the population will defend Trump to the bitter end. Your McCain-style Republicans will end up deciding between a GOP president they never wanted in the first place and America's long-time rival and enemy.

5. The GOP realizes that an impeached Trump would be replaced with another Republican from whom they can get anything Trump can give them…except for constant headaches and bad press.

6. The most important point is that, as I've repeated to the point of absurdity, the Russia story gets worse almost by the day. Like clockwork, a new piece of Even Worse News for Trump comes out like clockwork every two or three days. There is no indication this is going to stop.

61 days is not long. Even a principled party with a sense of shame would stand behind one of their own for two measly months. Six? Twelve? Eighteen, which would run smack into next year's midterm elections? That they will indulge him for that long and potentially imperil themselves to defend a guy they don't like and didn't want in the first place seems questionable.

I don't believe this is the end. But I believe that what has been happening since December – new, incriminating revelations about Trump-Russia connections surfacing every few days – will continue to happen. It is like Watergate or any other scandal; it doesn't strike like lightning.

It builds like a wave, and sometimes it becomes big enough to do fatal damage when it finally hits the shore.

Many years ago I saw a judge at on academic panel making a great analogy in defense of laws that punish "sovereign citizen" and Tax Protester types for filing frivolous lawsuits based on their gibberish-level understanding of the law and a whole lot of nonsense they find on the internet.

Imagine that a man in attendance at an academic conference raises his hand to ask a question to a panel of astronomers. He steps to a microphone and asks if anyone on stage can prove that the moon is not made of cheese. Laughter ripples through the room. He smiles and waits politely for it to die down. "I am waiting for an answer," he says. Only light laughter this time, as everyone realizes that he might be serious. He waits. Someone on the panel will eventually say, with tenderness due a person who may not be quite All There mentally, that multiple space programs have flown to the moon and taken samples and conducted observational studies of the moon and ran tests that demonstrate, with complete confidence, that the moon is made of rock.

Still, the guy persists. No, that is all fake, nobody has ever been to the moon, and the moon is actually cheese. Now there is no laughter from the audience and the panelists are probably getting a little cranky. No, they say sharply, you are proposing a conspiracy theory. It is easily debunked and there are literally millions of pieces of information, freely available, that demonstrate the fact that the moon is a rock. "No, it is similar in color to cheese," he says. "Therefore it is cheese." What started out as polite amusement devolves into a general frustration at wasting time. Having politely played along for a bit, now they just want someone to drag this guy out of the room so they can get back to doing something more useful (or at least more interesting; useful might be a high bar for an academic panel to achieve).

Consider at this point the number of things our political system and government have had to devote time, money, and attention – all valuable and finite resources – to things Donald Trump insists are true that are not. Birtherism. Mass voter fraud. Having a record inaugural crowd. The size and historic nature of his victory in the election. And now this ridiculous two week long fiasco about being wiretapped. Despite the continued partisan nature of the reaction – at the Comey hearing on Monday the Republicans asked questions exclusively about leaks, ignoring the Trump-Russia ties more broadly – there is a sense of weariness from everyone involved at playing this game. In less than three months in office, even Republicans and people generally friendly to Republicans appear to have found this exercise useless and frustrating.

It was cute the first time, maybe. The birther thing didn't waste the time of members of Congress.
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Trump was just Some Guy back then. Now the need to respond to his fantasies and conspiracy theories eats into their time directly, time they would prefer to spend raising money, distributing the benefits of being in power, and passing some legislation. Every moment they have to devote to explaining with practiced patience to the President of the United States that, no, that thing he saw in the comment section on Brietbart is not actually true is a moment they have wasted.

Without a doubt there will be some new and equally baseless conspiracy theory from the White House before we know it, and the hearing that took place on Monday – not to mention the time the FBI was forced to waste "investigating" his delusions – will be repeated in the future. One certainty is that patience for playing a redundant and pointless game is not infinite, at least for an adult.
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A toddler will throw his sippy cup on the floor a thousand times just for the joy of watching you have to pick it up. At some point you simply stop giving it back.

It is a common negotiating tactic in any context to begin with an offer that borders on outrageous. If I expect to pay around $250,000 for your house, my first offer will be $180,000, yours will be something equally silly like $400,000, and after we haggle the price will end up right where we expect it to be.

Most people understand that in a process of negotiation, not every proposal is intended to be taken seriously.
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The budget recently proposed by the President shares some things in common with budget proposals from previous presidents; it has not a chance in hell of getting through Congress, as it turns out that even (or perhaps especially) Republicans love the gravy train of benefits and projects they can bring their districts. In short, the budget proposal from the White House often is kind of delusional unless one understands it for what it is – an exercise in position-taking. It's symbolic of the president's priorities and is as much an exercise in Public Relations as a serious proposal.

In that sense it isn't unique to this President to look at the proposal and declare confidently that it is DOA as even hard right Republicans are doing. What is unique, though, is that nobody in the White House seems to understand that their ludicrous proposal is indeed a ludicrous proposal.
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This is becoming one of the hallmarks of this surreal administration: They propose something without understanding that in our system the first proposal is not what you are actually going to get.

The belief that they can make whatever they want happen is rooted in the baffling insistence that 45 is some sort of Master Deal-Maker. In reality, he doesn't seem to understand even the basics of how a negotiation between two parties works with the ability of one of them (Him, that is) to bark out orders unilaterally. For all we know, he might not even fully understand that he can't make a budget without Congress signing off on it.

To the extent that there is any thought, strategy, or logic behind such a stupid proposal, it should be seen as a budget proposal designed to cause a shutdown. If I need to make you an offer on your house for some reason but I don't have any real desire to buy it, I can throw out the dumbest offer imaginable and declare it 100% firm and final. Perhaps – doubtful, but perhaps – someone in the Inner Sanctum sees a shutdown as the true goal and knows that Congress will oblige by making huge changes to the basic outline proposed by the White House.
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Then the standard "my way or nothing" response from the President will guarantee a lengthy shutdown. Incidentally, the Republicans have engineered two notable shutdowns and were wounded politically in both cases.
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For some reason they think shutdowns will increase their popularity, but it turns out that people tend to get pretty mad when things they depend upon stop working.

If engineering a shutdown is indeed the goal, then this budget proposal is a smart move. But something tells me that a lot of inmates running the asylum at the moment do not fully understand that this is not going to happen. To be on the safe side, if you feel the need to visit and federally funded institutions in the near future you might want to do it before May 1.