Sometimes, the inspiration doesn't come until a bit late

[jducoeur]

So this weekend's music was mostly off of Kate's father's playlist, and it happened that Janis Joplin came up a couple of times. That seems to have percolated in the back of my brain, because this came out in the middle of the night:

Lord, won't you buy me the Pre-si-den-cy.
I think I deserve it, since I'm a Romney.
And it will ensure that I remain tax-free.
Oh, lord, won't you buy me the Pre-si-den-cy.

Lord, won't you buy me a house painted white.
I know that it's small, but I'll try to pack light.
To earn it, I've made sure my wings are quite Right.
Oh, lord, won't you buy me a house painted white.

Comments

[jducoeur]

Yes and no. I agree that the rules are badly written, but that is, in and of itself, apparently due to a fairly interesting example of regulatory capture.

The system provides *extremely* strong incentives for the rich to do everything feasible to influence elections in a way that favors their tax situation. (Mostly in small ways -- buying influence to get loopholes written in -- but sometimes in larger ones like the big capital-gains cut some years back or the current top-end-bracket fight.) That's a larger-scale game, which has been playing out over the course of decades. Along the way, it's done no small collateral damage to the system as a whole, admittedly as just one of a collection of problematic tweaks.

Mind, I'm not positing any grand conspiracies or anything like that -- it doesn't require anything more than rich people acting in their own self-interest, with each step entirely legal. But from a system dynamics POV, such things can gradually unbalance. That appears to be the case here, and I suspect that the rebalancing won't be pretty. (Historically, it tends not to be.)