#346 / Power Hungry

 

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Pictured is "power hungry" Sam Altman - just in case you don't immediately recognize him. Back in late September, Anissa Gardizy, a reporter for The Information, wrote an article in which she said, in virtually her first line, "Artificial intelligence is hungry for power at a scale that defies belief." I am presenting the entire column, below, since you'd otherwise have to pay to read it. 

Those bent on developing "Artificial Intelligence" are really asking us, as human beings, to sacrifice virtually everything to which we are now committed, in order to bring profit-making success to a venture that proposes to eliminate massive numbers of human jobs, and that wants to dare the fates, represented by the danger of Global Warming, as it does so. Massive amounts of money are involved, and to the extent that our money represents "opportunity" (and it does), what Altman and his acolytes suggest is that we forego all other dreams and hopes, and build a system that will replace us, functionally, and that will expose the World of Nature to a massively increased likelihood that water and land resources will be depleted in the effort to construct an alternative to human intelligence. 

Power hungry? Maybe that's one way to put it. 

Or Power Mad (as in "insane").

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Special Report Series

By Anissa Gardizy

Welcome to the first edition of The Information’s newsletter on AI infrastructure. In the coming months, we’ll cover the data centers, chips, networking and energy that power AI.

Artificial intelligence is hungry for power at a scale that defies belief.

Last week, OpenAI and Nvidia said they would work together to develop 10 gigawatts of data center capacity over an unspecified period. Inside OpenAI, Sam Altman floated an even more staggering number: 250 GW of compute in total by 2033, roughly one-third of the peak power consumption in the entire U.S.!

Let that sink in for a minute. A large data center used to mean 10 to 50 megawatts of power. Now, developers are pitching single campuses in the multigigawatt range—on par with the energy draw of entire cities—all to power clusters of AI chips.

Or think of it this way: A typical nuclear power plant generates around 1 GW of power. Altman’s target would mean the equivalent of 250 plants just to support his own company’s AI. And based on today’s cost to build a 1 GW facility (around $50 billion), 250 of them implies a cost of $12.5 trillion.

“We are in a compute competition against better-resourced companies,” Altman wrote to his team last week, likely referring to Google and Meta Platforms, which also have discussed or planned large, multigigawatt expansions. (XAI CEO Elon Musk also knows a thing or two about raising incredible amounts of capital.)

“We must maintain our lead,” Altman said.

OpenAI expects to exit 2025 with about 2.4 GW of computing capacity powered by Nvidia chips, said a person with knowledge of the plan, up from 230 MW at the start of 2024.

Ambition is one thing. Reality is another, and it’s hard to see how the ChatGPT maker would leap from today’s level to hundreds of gigawatts within the next eight years. Obviously, that figure is aspirational.

Then again, OpenAI’s fast-rising server needs surprised even Nvidia executives, said people on both sides of the relationship.

Before the events of last week, OpenAI had contracted to have around 8 GW by 2028, almost entirely consisting of servers with Nvidia graphics processing units. That’s already a staggering jump, and OpenAI is planning to pay hundreds of billions of dollars in cash to the cloud providers who develop the sites.

To put it into perspective, Microsoft’s entire Azure cloud business operated at about 5 GW at the end of 2023—and that was to serve all of its customers, not just AI. (Azure is No. 2 after Amazon’s cloud business.)

Bigger Is Still Better

Data center developers tell me most of OpenAI’s top competitors are asking for single campuses in the 8 to 10 GW range, an order of magnitude bigger than anything the industry has ever attempted to build.

A year and a half ago, OpenAI’s plan with Microsoft to build a single Stargate supercomputer costing $100 billion seemed like science fiction. Barring a seismic macroeconomic change, these types of projects now seem like a real possibility.

The rationale behind them is simple: Altman and his rivals believe that the bigger the GPU cluster, the stronger the AI model they can produce. Our team has been at the forefront of reporting on some of the limitations of this scaling law, as evidenced by the smaller step-up in quality between GPT-5 and GPT-4 than between GPT-4 and GPT-3.

Nevertheless, Nvidia’s fast pace of GPU improvements has strengthened the belief of Altman and his ilk that training runs conducted with Blackwell chip clusters this year and with Rubin chips next year will crack open significant gains, according to people who work for these leaders.

In the early days of the AI boom, it was hard to develop clusters of a few thousand GPUs. Now firms are stringing together 250,000, and they want to connect millions in the future.

That desire runs into a pretty important constraint: electricity. Companies are already trying to overcome that hurdle in unconventional ways, by building their own power plants instead of waiting for utilities to provide grid power, or by putting facilities in remote areas where energy is easier to secure.

Still, the gap between company announcements and the reality on the ground is enormous. Utilities by nature are conservative when it comes to adding new power generation. They won’t race to build new plants if there’s a risk of ending up with too much capacity—no matter who is asking.

‘Activating the Full Industrial Base’

OpenAI’s largest cluster under development, in Abilene, Texas, currently uses grid power and natural gas turbines. But other projects it has announced in Texas will use a combination of natural gas, wind and solar.

Milam County, where OpenAI is planning one of its next facilities, recently approved a 5 GW solar cell plant, for instance. And gas is expected to be the biggest source of power for the planned sites, this person said.

To accomplish its goals, OpenAI and its partners will need the makers of gas and wind turbines to greatly expand their supply chains. That’s not an easy task, given that it involves some risk-taking on the part of the suppliers. Perhaps Nvidia’s commitment to funding OpenAI’s data centers while maintaining control of the GPUs will make those conversations easier.

Altman told his team that obtaining boatloads of servers “means activating the full industrial base of the world—energy, manufacturing, logistics, labor, supply chain—everything upstream that will make large-scale compute possible.”

There are other bottlenecks, such as getting enough chipmaking machines from ASML and getting enough manufacturing capacity from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which produces Nvidia’s GPUs. Negotiating for that new capacity will fall to Nvidia.

Predicting the future is notoriously difficult, but a lot of things will need to go right for OpenAI and its peers to get all the servers they want. In the meantime, they will keep making a lot of headlines in their quest to turn the endeavor into a self-fulfilling prophecy (emphasis added).

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Image Credit:

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/sam-altman-wants-250-gigawatts-power-possible

#345 / I Am Happy That I Brush My Teeth Alone

 

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You might well ask yourself what prompted my topic for today - and why a photo of the actor Jennifer Lawrence is posted just above. Hang on, I'll get there in a moment! 

Let me begin my blog posting today, however, by revealing some personal information. I do not brush my teeth as I stand before a large mirror, with my wife next to me, brushing her teeth as I brush mine. I brush my teeth alone, and having now read a recent edition of "The Interview," spotlighting Jennifer Lawrence, let me say that I am very happy that this is my way of doing it. 

According to an interview with Lawrence, published by The New York Times Magazine on Sunday, November 9, 2025, Lawrence "regrets everything she's ever done." That includes, apparently, among many other things, her engagement in competitive tooth brushing.

"Competitive" tooth brushing? Yes! Among other things she revealed in the interview published in The New York Times Magazine, Lawrence tells us that she is "competitive" about tooth brushing, though not about acting:

Amy Adams, who was in Russell’s “American Hustle” with you, said: “Jennifer doesn’t take any of it on. She’s Teflon.” I didn’t, but I really felt like with David [David O. Russell, who directed both Lawrence and Adams in "American Hustle"] that [this] was his way of communicating in a non-BS way. I never felt like he was degrading or yelling at me. If he didn’t like something, he was just like: “That was terrible. Looked like [expletive]. Do it better.” And that was a very helpful conversation. I’m not sensitive. I don’t know how you can be in this industry. 

Well, Amy Adams said that she cried on set. When she talked about you being Teflon, she said that for her it was hard. Maybe he was harder on her than he was on me. I don’t know. I mean, yes, of course I’m sensitive. I’m really sensitive. I don’t know. I was about to say, we’ve had this entire conversation about how sensitive you are. I’m so sensitive. I can’t believe I just said that. That reminds me, I had a conversation with a girl the other night. She was like, “Oh, I’m the middle child with two brothers.” And I was like, “I’m the middle child with two brothers!” And we talked about it passionately for five minutes. And then I was like: “I’m the youngest. I’m sorry.” [Laughs] I guess I don’t mean anything I say. Do you still want to continue interviewing me? Absolutely. OK. 

Maybe you’re less sensitive about acting? Yeah, I’m not sensitive about acting. I’m not competitive about acting. My husband is always amazed because I am so competitive. When we play tennis, I throw my racket, I scream, I rage. I can’t do a puzzle. I make eye contact with him when we’re brushing our teeth sometimes because I’m like: “I did it a little bit longer than you. Did you notice that?” (emphasis added at the end of this last paragraph).

I am not against "competition." I love to watch the Warriors play basketball, and to read about how the San Francisco 49ers are doing, sometimes against great odds, the way I'm getting it. Competition has a real role to play in our society - and certainly in our political, social, and economic life. 

However, as I always like to say, "we're in this  together." Ultimately, "collaboration," not "competition," is what is necessary for social, economic, and political success, which is why I am happy that I am not getting into any bad habits in front of my bathroom mirror!

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Image Credits:

https://variety.com/t/jennifer-lawrence/

#344 / It's Called A "Blue Book," Baby

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For awhile there (about thirteen years), I was a college professor. Actually, let me clarify that. Students sometimes called me "professor," but I was actually only an "instructor," or an "adjunct." Still, "professor" or not, I enjoyed teaching at UCSC (the University of California, Santa Cruz), and I took my teaching responsibilities seriously. What I mostly taught was the Legal Studies "Capstone" course (LGST 196). That course, as I taught it, was titled, "Privacy, Technology, And Freedom." 

I was just leaving my teaching position at UCSC as the A.I. ("Artificial Intelligence") revolution emerged, but I definitely saw the potential of A.I. to make "learning" superfluous. Why bother to try to learn anything when your laptop, or your tablet, or even your cellphone, gives you access to more knowledge and insight than you are ever likely to be able to uncover yourself? 

Below, I am including the full text of an article from the May 24-25, 2025, edition of The Wall Street Journal, which came with the following headline: "The Old-School Way To Beat CheatGPT." Online, that article has a different title. Click right here for the online version, knowing, though, that you may find yourself confronted by an access-denying paywall.

The article I want to bring to your attention, reproduced in its entirety, below, focuses, in large part, on the business of making "Blue Books." For me, the interesting thing about the article wasn't its description of the Blue Book business, but its disclosure, made clear in the article, that bonafide college professors are grappling with the problem that "Artificial Intelligence" poses for them, in the context of their efforts to "educate" their students. 

Knowing about Edward Bernays, and what he did, and what he thought, and the significance of his work, is far different from knowing how to utilize a computer program that may provide a long discussion of Bernays, as the computer program responds to a command to produce a student essay focused on "Big Data."

The "Blue Book" solution wouldn't have worked very well in a course like the "Capstone" courses I taught, because the whole purpose of the "Capstone" course was for the student to do individual research and then write a long, in-depth essay, properly footnoted and supported by the student's research. This is a task easily accomplished by A.I., perhaps taking ten or fifteen minutes from the initial command to the A.I. program to the student's receipt of a completed essay. In LGST 196, the students had, basically, ten weeks to accomplish the task, and I was generous in allowing extensions. 

In my experience (both "personally," and as a "professor"), I have found that if someone wants to be able to "think," and then write, about compelling issues, that person must decide that her or his own thoughts are more important than either (1) providing the "correct" answer to a posited question or (2) putting one's own name to an essay about the topic at issue that will receive a high grade, thus facilitating her or his acceptance to a graduate school, or law school. 

No A.I. program, or helper, will ever teach you how to "think." And using such A.I. helpers as are now available, and which will become ever more available, will actually teach you how not to think, how to "accept" what you are being told by some authority that is not even "human," though an authority that is certainly "human-adjacent." 

Real friends and lovers aren't reliably found on Hinge, or Tinder. Online substitutes for education are bogus. Want to learn to think about our human condition, with the intention of then doing something about it, with the intention of doing something in real life that could change the world?

If that is an objective with which you would identify, forget about A.I. Start writing down your own thoughts. Take notes. Revise them frequently. Keep thinking! You could try writing a daily blog. Or, you could use one of those Blue Books. They're said to be pretty cheap!

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The Old-School Way To Beat CheatGPT

Ben Cohen

When this year’s college graduates first arrived on campus, there was no such thing as ChatGPT.

They had to use their own brains for math homework, econ problem sets, coding projects, Spanish exercises, biology research, term papers on the Civil War and the Shakespeare essay that made them want to gouge their eyes out. 

Now they can just use artificial intelligence.

Students outsourcing their assignments to AI and cheating their way through college has become so rampant, so quickly, that it has created a market for a product that helps professors ChatGPT-proof school. As it turns out, that product already exists. In fact, you’ve probably used it. You might even dread it.

It’s called a blue book.

The mere thought of that exam booklet with a blue cover and blank pages is enough to make generations of college kids clam up—and make their hands cramp up.

But inexpensive pamphlets of stapled paper have become a surprisingly valuable tool for teachers at a time when they need all the help they can get. 

All of which explains how a paper company in Pennsylvania has unexpectedly found itself on the front lines of the classroom AI wars.

Most blue books for sale in campus bookstores and on Amazon for 23 cents apiece are made by Roaring Spring Paper Products. The family-owned business was founded more than a century ago in Roaring Spring, a small borough outside Altoona that has become the blue-book capital of America. The company now sells a few million of these classic exam books every year and all of them are manufactured in the U.S., said Kristen Allen, its vice president of sales and marketing.

And yes, I asked her if everybody makes jokes about Dunder Mifflin [link added] when they find out she works for a paper company in Pennsylvania.

“Nobody,” she said. “It’s weird—and it’s sad. I love ‘The Office.’ ”

Roaring Spring sells all the paper products you could possibly imagine: composition books with black-and-white marble covers, yellow legal pads and notebooks in every color, style and ruling. It also makes custom notebooks and folders with college logos, a crucial part of its business.

But the most fascinating part of the company’s latest catalog is page 63, where you can find more than a dozen products like Stock Item No. 77516: exam books with blue covers. There are blue books in different sizes, page counts and order quantities—and there are green blue books with recycled paper.

Allen has a keen understanding of why colleges still want Roaring Spring’s blue books. After all, she has children in high school. 

“I thought people just used AI for big things,” she said. “But no, they use it for everything. Which is pretty terrifying.”

It also happens to be pretty good for business. This new golden age of blue books is not something that anyone would have predicted a few years ago, when remote school put them on the verge of extinction. But after sales tanked in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic, they have picked up in recent years because of AI cheating.

The company declined to provide specific numbers on its blue books, so I asked public universities across the country to pull data from their campus bookstores.

Sales of blue books this school year were up more than 30% at Texas A&M University and nearly 50% at the University of Florida. The improbable growth was even more impressive at the University of California, Berkeley. Over the past two academic years, blue-book sales at the Cal Student Store were up 80%.

Demand for blue books is suddenly booming again because they help solve a problem that didn’t exist on campuses until now.

It might feel like ChatGPT came out yesterday, but students who were freshmen when it was released in 2022 will be seniors next year. That means they’ve had access to the most powerful cheating machines ever made for basically their entire time in college. And they have come to rely on ChatGPT. One of the most remarkable things about the product’s explosive growth is that ChatGPT traffic declined in each of the past two summers—when students were not in school.

Only now are schools catching up. In math classes, students are being asked to leave their phones behind when they go to the bathroom during exams because OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini make calculators look like abaci. In humanities classes, professors who understand the mind-boggling capabilities of AI models don’t bother assigning traditional papers anymore.

“It’s a pointless exercise,” said Stan Oklobdzija, a Tulane University assistant professor of political science. “It’s like going to the gym and having robots lift the weights for you.”

Not long ago, teachers could simply grade the words on the page. Now they can’t be sure where those words came from. Kevin Elliott, a lecturer in the Ethics, Politics and Economics program at Yale University, learned this for himself in a seminar he taught this past semester, when he assigned a take-home essay and received a few papers with made-up quotes from famous philosophers. “Smoking-gun evidence of AI,” he says.

For their next assignment, he asked students to write essays and come to his office to discuss them, and those oral exams revealed which students really grasped the material.

Then he busted out the blue books for their finals.

The first part asked students to identify passages and explain their significance. If they see the phrase “forced to be free,” for example, they should recognize that it’s an idea from Rousseau and compare it with theories of Locke and Hobbes. The next part was an in-class essay. The students were given the prompt in advance so they could prepare, but they weren’t allowed to bring their notes, which meant they actually had to think about how they would fill the empty pages. The only way to ace the test was to do the work themselves.

It worked so well that Elliott is sticking with blue books next year.

But even professors who have gone analog to defeat the latest technology are deeply conflicted about it. Many of them believe students should be using AI to get smarter. It would be stupid not to. These tools will be a part of their lives and knowing how to use them effectively will be an important advantage in their future workplaces. 

“They will use ChatGPT all the time for all sorts of things, and that will make them more efficient, more productive and better able to do their jobs,” said Arthur Spirling, a Princeton University professor of politics who gives proctored blue-book exams. “It is strange to say you won’t be permitted to do this thing that will be very natural to you for the rest of your career.”

That’s only one of the problems with blue books. Another is that absolutely nobody likes them.

These bound paper booklets have been torturing both students and professors for as long as they have existed. In the 1800s, when Harvard University began requiring written final exams, a professor named Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles was so vehemently opposed to everything they represented that he staged a protest: He burned them unread.

Prof. Sophocles may have been the first but he definitely was not the last person who felt the urgent need to light a blue book on fire.

These days, there are students in college who were born after the iPhone. They aren’t used to writing on paper—and it shows in their penmanship. To call it chicken scratch would be an insult to poultry.

Last year, Oklobdzija allowed his class to use laptops for exams so they could type responses and he wouldn’t have to decipher handwriting that looked more like hieroglyphics. He asked them to obey the school’s honor code and made them promise they wouldn’t use ChatGPT. Then one of his teaching assistants took a picture of a student using ChatGPT.

“So,” he said, “blue books it is.”

When he told his class this year, he was surprised by their reaction.

“The students didn’t revolt as much as I thought they would,” he said.

And before they cracked open Roaring Spring’s blue books, they saw a phrase trademarked by the paper company on the cover: Use your imagination.

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Image Credits:

(1) and (2)  https://www.wsj.com/business/chatgpt-ai-cheating-college-blue-books-5e3014a6

#343 / When We Are Not Proud Of Our Government

 

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The following letter appeared in the Monday, December 8, 2025, edition of The New York Times:

To the Editor:

A country with all the wealth in the world that doesn’t provide health care to all its citizens. A country that cuts off SNAP benefits and makes children go to bed hungry. A country that blows boats out of the water with no proof of anything, killing everyone aboard. A country that denies climate change reality while every other country in the civilized world tries to combat it. A country with a death by gun problem so massive we’ve come to normalize it instead of fixing it.

I could keep going, but it’s too depressing. Proud to be an American I am not!

Scott Jaynes

Meriden, N.H.

I want to agree with Scott Jaynes that his list of depressing realities is... depressing indeed. Let me also affirm that his listing does name some very genuine "realities." He is not off base! However, I want to suggest that when an American citizen decides that the government has gone off track, the proper response is not to become "depressed" and "withdrawn." The proper response is to take action to change the realities which we deem unacceptable. A friends of mine - who certainly would share Mr. Jaynes' views about the things that our government has been doing (or not doing) - has recently opined that it is "time to give up the myth that we can really change things by voting!"

I disagree - with both Mr. Jaynes and my friend. This is not a time to give up and withdraw from politics and government. It's time to gather together with friends and associates and to reallocate our time to change the depressing realities we are all reading about, every day, in newspapers and online. 

Our system of self-government requires us to get involved with politics and government ourselves. If the government is operating in a way that makes us proud, maybe there is no reason to spend a lot of our personal time working on "politics," and seeking to influence our government. But if things are not going in the right direction, as many of us have concluded that they aren't, then that is the time to get more involved, not less, and to do everything possible to insist upon the political and governmental changes that need to be made. 

Voting is included in what needs to be done - though I completely agree that voting is not enough. To use a phrase that has always stuck with me, voting is "necessary but not sufficient." Protests, walkouts, boycotts and buycotts, and "No Kings Day" demonstrations (and other such activities) are truly called for, but they, also, are not enough. Ultimately, we need to make the people who have been elected to represent us actually do what we want - and if they won't, or don't, we need to get rid of them, and put into office people who will, truly, represent us, and who actually do what we want them to. 

The fact that our governmental system provides us with a mechanism to make sure that this can be accomplished (and voting plays a prominent role in that) is what should make us all proud. 

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Image Credit:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/07/opinion/love-for-america.html

#342 / POGO

 

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"POGO" is short for "Project On Government Oversight." POGO is a national, nonprofit organization focused on "good government." If you click the link, you will be transported to POGO's website, where you can find out more about the organization. 

Here is POGO's brief statement of purpose, copied from the POGO website: "We investigate corruption and abuse of power in our government, exposing systemic problems that endanger our democracy." One of POGO's recent investigations documents how lobbyists tied directly to our current president keep providing their clients with "no bid" contracts with ICE. 

I have supported POGO for many years, and thought it would be good to provide an endorsement of POGO's work. I do endorse the work that POGO does, but I also want to comment on the first couple of sentences in one of POGO's recent fundraising appeals - a fundraising appeal I received during the first week of November: 

Dear Gary, 

You believe in an America where government serves the people, not just the powerful few. Where your tax dollars are spent wisely, not wasted on fake emergencies and political stunts...

POGO is certainly correct about that. I definitely want our government to respond to the needs of everyone, not just "the powerful few." More than that, though, I want us all to realize that our idea of "self-government" requires us to realize - requires us never to forget - that "we, the people" ARE the government. We need to realize that we're not just "customers," who should be satisfied with "good service." It is easy to get confused about "self-government" when the focus turns to the kind of "services" that the government provides us.

We do need good service from our government, but the way to get that result, in a nation committed to "self-government," is never to forget that our whole idea of "self-government" is that we "run the place." 

 

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Image Credit:

https://www.pogo.org

#341 / The Moon Gives Light And It Shines By Night

  

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"... I scarcely feel the glow..." 

That first line in this posting, just above, is how Bob Dylan continues the lyric that I have made into the title to what I am writing about today. The words I am quoting are coming from Bob Dylan's song, "When The Deal Goes Down." If you click the link just provided, you should be able to hear Dylan sing that song. I have provided the complete lyrics at the bottom.

Lots of Dylan's songs are appropriate for a Sunday review and comment. Dylan's "religious" sentiments, rather than his "political statements," are what draw me to his music most forcefully. In the song featured here, the always equivocal nature of our human existence is what comes across most clearly to me. Dylan says, for instance, that "tomorrow keeps turning around" (so true!). And he sings that "we live and we die [but] we know not why." This, too, is true, or so I think. I think Dylan's statement, here, is better than all those too boastful statements often made (in churches) on Sundays. If we think we really know "why," we had better reevaluate!

If we are lucky, and if we "keep on the sunny side," perhaps - to quote another wonderful song - we will, in the end (and hopefully before then), find some way to "forgive" all those who need forgiveness. This may include God, depending on how we feel about things, but it absolutely and certainly must include ourselves, and our parents, and our friends, and virtually everyone we have come in contact with in this equivocal life - a life that can be counted on to bring disappointments and disasters to us all. 

"When The Deal Goes Down" is just another Bob Dylan "statement of faith," or so it seems to me, which means that I think that Dylan is singing it out  to that "First Mover," and "Creator" - that person whom we will be meeting up with (Ojalá) "When The Deal Goes Down," for us.

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When The Deal Goes Down

In the still of the night, in the world's ancient light
Where wisdom grows up in strife
My bewildering brain, toils in vain
Through the darkness on the pathways of life
Each invisible prayer is like a cloud in the air
Tomorrow keeps turning around
We live and we die, we know not why
But I'll be with you when the deal goes down

We eat and we drink, we feel and we think
Far down the street we stray
I laugh and I cry and I'm haunted by
Things I never meant nor wished to say
The midnight rain follows the train
We all wear the same thorny crown
Soul to soul, our shadows roll
And I'll be with you when the deal goes down

The moon gives light and shines by night
I scarcely feel the glow
We learn to live and then we forgive
O'er the road we're bound to go
More frailer than the flowers, these precious hours
That keep us so tightly bound
You come to my eyes like a vision from the skies
And I'll be with you when the deal goes down

I picked up a rose and it poked through my clothes
I followed the winding stream
I heard a deafening noise, I felt transient joys
I know they're not what they seem
In this earthly domain, full of disappointment and pain
You'll never see me frown
I owe my heart to you, and that's sayin' it true
And I'll be with you when the deal goes down

Copyright © 2006 by Special Rider Music

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Image Credit:

https://mauijmphotography.com/our-shop/moon-glow-fantasy/

#340 / Fork Some Over

 

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In a New York Times article published on October 31, 2025, Patricia Cohen explored the idea that we might "tax the rich," and impose a "tax on wealth," as inequality has widened and as government debt has risen. Cohen points out that this is not really a new idea, and that a tax on wealth was actually imposed by colonists in Massachusetts, in the 1600's, prior to the establishment of our current government as a democratic republic. The idea of a wealth tax continues to be discussed. Click the link below to read what Cohen has to say. Cohen's article in The Times is titled, "Should A Wealth Tax Compel The Rich To Fork Some Over?"

I, personally, think that our elected representatives should, in fact, both explore and implement a tax on what Senator Bernie Sanders calls the "billionaire class," and specifically enact a tax on "wealth." I would like to suggest to anyone reading this that any such action would not, in fact, be an illegitimate way to use our collective political power - and should not be characterized as taking something away from those who have legally "earned it," to provide benefits for people who have done nothing to deserve them. In other words, I would like to persuade anyone reading this blog posting that a responsible tax on wealth is neither unfair nor unjustifiable.

I often say in my blog postings that we are "in this together." If we are - and I think it is clear that this is absolutely true - that means that we will all either live (or die) together. Accepting that premise means that our government is not only empowered to address our common problems, and our common possibilities, but that this, in fact, is the fundamental reason for establishing our government in the first place. Our government has been established to take any appropriate action to accomplish what our democratically-elected representatives decide will benefit the nation as a whole, and this can certainly include a "tax on wealth," as long as no provision of the United States Constitution is being violated by any such governmental action.

"Taxes," including taxes on property, and taxes on income - and lots of other taxes, too - have been challenged as "unconstitutional," and have, after such challenge, been found to pass constitutional muster. Claims have been made that a person's income or property belongs solely to the person who is earning, or who has earned (or inherited) that income or property, and that letting the government take away something of value that is owned by someone, to benefit others who didn't do anything to contribute to the property or income being taxed, is not really "fair," and is prohibited by the Constitution. Such claims have been rejected by the courts. 

Of course, what is constitutionally permissible can only be put into practice if our elected representatives vote to do so. Lots of people don't think that a "tax on wealth" would be fair, or would be a good thing, as a matter of policy, and so the elected representatives of the people may well choose not to enact a "wealth tax." In fact, in general, it is pretty hard to get elected officials at any level of government to "raise taxes," because so many people believe that doing that would not be fair (in general, and to them, specifically).

However, what if a majority of our elected officials did decide that it would be appropriate to enact a tax on wealth? Presumably, the elected officials doing that wouled be representing a majority of the population, who elected them - but any such tax would, of course, be controversial, and there would undoubtedly be lots of "compromises," to arrive at a specific program to "tax wealth" that a majority of the elected officials would support. 

So far, this discussion has really been by way of background. Let's address the proposition that the majority of us should demand that our elected representatives take action to establish some sort of system that would require "the "wealthy" (which we would have to define, specifically, of course) to "fork some over," and to provide some part of their wealth to be used to benefit the public generally, and specifically to benefit others who are not wealthy. 

Frequently, any proposition to do something like this is called "socialism" by opponents, or even "communism," with these labels intended to suggest that taxing "wealth" would be contrary to everything we have always "believed in," here in the United States, and that taxing wealth would contradict everything that has "made this country great." Opposition to Zohran Mamdani, just recently elected as the Mayor of New York City, revolved around this very debate. Mamdani wants to fund projects (like free busses, and free childcare) that can only be funded if those who are "wealthy" are required to "fork some over." A very significant majority of the voters in New York City decided that they liked the idea. So, is that idea "fair"?

I would like to advance a single example, to discuss the "fairness" issue, but one that is well-known by almost everyone who lives in the United States of America - if not everyone who lives everywhere else in the world, too. I speak, here, of Amazon, and of Jeff  Bezos, a billionaire who is credited with inventing what has turned out to be an incredibly profitable business - online commerce. According to Wikipedia, Bezos is "the third richest person in the world." As an incidental comment, let me say that while Jeff Bezos is given the credit for inventing and advancing Amazon, as though he did it all by himself, I think that much credit is also due to Bezos' former wife, MacKenzie Scott. Because of the success of Amazon, Scott is also very wealthy, but unlike her former husband, MacKenzie Scott is taking steps to give her money away. She is already "forking some over." Jeff Bezos won't do that, though, unless we pass a tax law to make him contribute.

Let's stipulate that Bezos is properly the individual most responsible for the development of Amazon and its fantastically profitable business - though not forgetting my shout-out to MacKenzie Scott helping to come up with the idea, and then expanding and developing it into the monumental and hugely profitable enterprise it is today. Bezos got rich! He deserved it!

But who else has contributed to the immense success of Amazon, and has thus contributed to the wealth that Amazon has produced? Amazon employess have, of course - and it's my impression that many (not all) have been very well compensaged for their contributions. But what about YOU? You have, and I have, and everyone who has used Amazon has contributed to the wealth that Amazon has produced. Amazon is a pretty clear example of the general truth that it is not only those who own a business who help make that business economically profitable. Those who patronize the business do so, too. 

Bezos (and MacKenzie Scott) deserve to be richly rewarded for their creativity, and hard work - as do all those others who have helped make it a success - creating something truly new, and making a fundamental change in our commercial world. But we really are "in this together," and no such success would exist without us - we who patronize Amazon!

Consider the word "commonwealth," which the dictionary tells us means "a nation, state, or other political unit." Our wealth, here in the United States of America, really is, in the end, and when we think about it, created "in common." 

We are, in fact, and not just theoretically, "in this together," and that means that it is wholly proper and "fair" for us to decide how best to mobilize the wealth of the nation to benefit all those who are and have been involved in its prosperity. 

There is nothing "unfair" about taxing the wealth of the wealthiest people in the world in order to make them to "fork some over" to provide health, education, and welfare for those who live here, too. 

We are "all in this together," remember. We really are!

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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/31/business/economy/wealth-tax-france.html

#339 / MAGA: Identity Politics For White People

 

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David Brooks is an opinion columnist for The New York Times, and he is telling "leftists" that Trump has "stolen their game." That advisory, in fact, is the title to Brooks' October 30, 2025 column:

Hey, Lefties! Trump Has Stolen Your Game

Clicking the link, just above, will take you to Brooks' column, paywalls permitting, of course. 

In general, Brooks' point is that critiques of society popular with what he calls "a group of mostly left-wing activists," have now been appropriated by persons whom Brooks labels as "conservatives," and these formerly "left-wing" critiques of society are now being used to "destroy the left." 

Here is a line from Brooks' column that struck me quite forcefully:

 

MAGA is identity politics for white people

Using the definition found in Wikipedia, "identity politics" is politics based on a person's so-called "identity" - that "identity" being equated to factors like "ethnicity, race, nationality, religion, denomination, gender, sexual orientation, social background, political affiliation, caste, age, education, disability, opinion, intelligence, and social class." With that list, I am quoting from Wikipedia. Personally, think "economic status," or "wealth," should be added to that list, though maybe Wikipedia thinks that "social class" and "wealth" are essentially the same thing. 

As you will perhaps note, Brooks employs "identity politics" himself, in distinguishing "the left" from the "conservatives," with whom Brooks is often thought to be associated, by reason of Brooks' views on various public policy and "political" matters.

I am urging my friends - and all those reading this blog posting, friendly or not - to avoid what Brooks is doing, and to stop using categories like those listed by Wikipedia as a way to distinguish the "good guys" from the "bad guys," or to distinguish "our side" from "their side," to phrase it a different way. I have argued against "polarization" before, and more than once, and defining someone by their "identity," however that term is defined, is to ensure that polarization will prevail, and that the real function of "politics" will be made more difficult, or even impossible.

We live, as I frequently note, in a "political world," and we are inevitably "in this together." "Identity politics," however defined - by whatever factors are used - really claims that we aren't in this together. Rather, our political positions and opinions are held to be defined by our "identity." 

We are all different, and we all have different ideas about what might be a good thing for "the group" - all of us, collectively - to do. If politics is all about "identity," and if a person's "identity" is a defining statement about what they will believe, or are willing to do, then coming to some sort of compromise and agreement, given all our differences, is made immensely harder, and possibly impossible. How can "leftists" ever come to agreement with "MAGA"?

The recent and long-running shutdown of Congress exemplifies the problem. In the House of Representatives, at least at the moment I am writing out this blog posting, "party" seems to be the only characteristic that counts. "Party" is held to define the "identity" of all those elected from all over the nation - who were elected to represent the local constituents who put them in office. If "party" is really an accurate way to define the "identity" of the members of Congress, and if we are all really defined by our "identity," we are, automatically, precluded from coming to an agreement with those whose "identity" is different. 

Efforts at "extirpation," not "engagement," eventuate when we see our politics as driven by "identity," and specifically including those occasions when a person's "identity" is thought to be the same as that person's political "party." I would like to suggest that we all ought to drop defining ourselves, and others, on the basis of a "party" affiliation, and ask our elected representatives to start representing us on the basis of "imagination" and "possibility."

What do all those "party" people - from both "sides" - think might be done?

The opportunities are plenary. Let's use our imaginations. Let's see if it might be possible to "make a deal."

In other words, to say it one more time, our "possibilities," which actually define the nature of reality, are totally defeated by the "identity politics" that says that one's "party" (or any other "identity" definer) is all that ultimately counts.

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Image Credit:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/30/opinion/trump-conservatives-progressives.html