I feel like focusing on poker - where Mason is wrong but "both sides are bad" is actually legit - is a mistake here, especially compared to the absolutely ridiculous claims in the op about the imagine trumpian economy or, far more importantly, the fact that he manually types a signature on every post of an internet forum. Those are the real issues guys.

UM

The cult of personality surrounding Trump is just unreal to me. Guy has spent his entire life cultivating an image as a reality TV buffoon and yet people will project anything they want onto him: he'll legalize online poker, he's great at math, etc. etc. Same thing with the stonerbros who were shocked to find Trump cracking down on legalized weed.

I guess I can understand falling for a personality cult if the guy is actually charismatic, but how the **** do you become emotionally invested in someone who's such an obvious fraud?

Mason's behavior in this thread is disgusting.

Nobody pisses off librards more than Trump.

lol

Yeah definitely weird how certain folks supported a third party when it was the only one trafficking in overt racism. Then those same people happily shifted to the GOP when its candidate for president was overtly racist.

I like to look for the best in people so I think Mason is just doing a masterful job of trolling and rustling up everyone's jimmies because no one could actually be that stupid.

400 posts of trolling-induced irrelevance is the best thing about him? I think I'd prefer to believe he's just ignorant.

He certainly rustled a lot of jimmies in this thread

Mason is going to die never knowing how ****ing stupid he is.

I worry the Politics forum could become a casualty in all this. Once Mason realizes he's not gonna change anyone's mind on Trump - suppressing dissent is the next best thing. Mat wants to get rid of it anyway.

Personally it would be a godsend for me as even driving to South America can't seem to pull me away from this stupid forum. But as an ominous sign of where this country is headed it would be very depressing.

Guys, I don't see what the big deal is. I am sure that Mason knows that Aldeson, despite being toxic for online poker, only has a limited influence on the Republican party as a whole, and as such while he may have a big sway on Trump, he won't impact Congress much, which is where we will need to see the requisite changes for increased online poker anyway.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/...ns-2018-402098

Oh.

I love how that tweet shows the exact moment Mason pivoted from hating Adelson to forgetting his name and ignoring all mentions of it. Cognitive dissonance is a *****.

yup. He responded to so much itt except the multiple questions to accept a response article posted in 2+2 mag.

Amazing. Here's exactly what I wrote in my Publisher's Note for this month's magazine:

and this hasn't changed. The more disposable income there is, the better poker will be.

Mason

The Laffer curve is a concept that has been written off as wrong by circa everyone.
Tax cuts do not lead to increased revenue. Sorry.

Hi Huehuecoyot:

This point is correct. There's so much hatred in this forum, that's it's difficult for many of the posters to think about the future. The only way poker will become legalized in more states is if both Republican and Democrat legislators vote for it, and the main reason many of them will vote for it has to do with state budget issues than whether they think that poker is an okay activity.

I actually agree with this. If you're not in favor of the policies that Trump promotes, then my advice is to vote for who you think is best. However, I also think that many of the serious poker players who participate in this site will be better off the next few years because Trump got elected than Clinton. And this has to do with the many economic policies that the Trump Administration is doing different from what I believe a Clinton Administration would have done.

This is not the way I understand this. First, whether Obama's stimulus spending was good or not, it was eight years ago and has in my opinion little effect today. But I, like Rand Paul, am concerned about the large deficit the new budget bill is creating.

However, there are two arguments for this deficit:

1. The military needs the additional spending and to get the Democrats to agree with this other projects were also funded.

2. The tax cut will drive economic growth and the increased growth will reduce the deficit.

While I buy the argument for No. 2, it's a gamble and certainly is not a sure thing.

Whenever I see a statement like this, my recommendation is to look at socialist countries. Cuba, Venezuela, and North Korea are probably good examples. What you see are a small number wealthy people, often associated with the powers of government, and everyone else is dirt poor and as Milton Friedman use to say, "living in grinding poverty."

While it's certainly true that there are extremely wealthy people in capitalist countries, there's also a large middle class which live pretty well. And there's a reason for this. Capitalism is the only system that creates wealth, and because of it, many people, as the years go by, get pulled up to a higher standard of living. I'm a very good example.

And one other thing. Many people in the United States, who are on the lower end of the pay scale, do not pay federal taxes or they pay very little. Thus a tax cut won't affect how much they pay in taxes very much. But it will affect the people who have the money to invest, and this will benefit those on the lower end of the pay scale.

Mason

Perhaps this is something that we need to look at. The purpose of this website, which we have stated many times over the years is vigorous debate and a little bit of fun. But when looking at much of this forum, I don't see this. What I do see is hatred, and lots of it, and that's not what 2+2 should be about.

Mason

Post it here so we can at least see it.

That's not the way I understand it. While I'm not an economist, I did have a career as a professional statistician and this can be thought through statistically, and it goes like this.

1. If the tax rate was zero, no taxes would be collected. I think that's obvious.

2. If the tax rate was 100 percent, no one would work or bother with a business, so again no taxes would be collected.

3. But taxes are collected. So this means that there is some point between a zero tax rate and a 100 percent tax rate where the amount of taxes is maximized. (It's actually more complex than this due to things like state taxes, exemptions, deductions, and so on.)

4. So the idea is to find the tax rate that maximizes total taxes collected. Usually this means cutting taxes, but it could certainly mean raising taxes if the tax rates were very low. And also, keep in mind that when the change in tax rate takes place, if it does grow the economy which increases total tax revenue, it doesn't happen immediately.

Mason

I have no plans to write any more on this topic in our magazine. But my Publisher's Note is usually sort of a last minute thing that is often driven by the current poker news. So it's certainly possible that at some time in the future I might readdress this issue.

If someone wants to write a response article to what I wrote, I'm not the one who makes the decision as to what articles are accepted for publication. That is done by our magazine editor. See this link for how to go about submitting an article to us for publication:

https://www.twoplustwo.com//magazine/contribute.php

and if the article is well written in a proper professional manner, and our magazine editor accepts it, then it's fine with me. And if it's accepted, we do pay a fee of $200 to the author for publishing it.

Mason

Sorry, but no. That's the napkin work of Laffer, you're parroting there, but in the real world, you almost never maximise tax revenue by cutting taxes. It's a fallacy of the Reagan era, but it has been debunked just about a million times.
Your assumptions in points 1 to 3 are, of course, correct. But your conclusion does not follow from those assumptions.

First, while perhaps similar to Laffer's original work, I didn't parrot anyone. To me this is simple straight forward application of mathematical statistics.

By the way, when running our business, we used a similar approach to many of the things that we put a price on. Here's an example which you wouldn't think of. Years ago, there was going to be the opportunity to get many of our books translated into various foreign languages. What we did was contract with a foreign language publisher. They would translate the book, publish it in their country (or any place else where their language was spoken), and pay us a royalty for each book that was sold.

But we had a problem. There was no way we would know if their book counts as to how many they actually sold were accurate. So we reasoned it out this way.

1. If we asked for too low of a royalty rate, the counts would probably be honest, but we would not make much money (and this includes our authors).

2. If we went with a very high royalty rate, there would be incentive for the particular foreign language publisher not to give us accurate counts and again we would not make much money.

3. So the idea was to come up with a royalty that would be between the two and where we should still get an honest count.

So when you say that the Laffer conjecture was debunked a million times, while there might be people on a different end of the political/economic spectrum who object to it, I can't take you seriously since this idea appears in so many different places and always leads to the same conclusion.

On a slightly different note, you may want to read my psychology book where I talk about the differences between the real world and the probabilistic world, why people often get confused when they deal with things based on probability which can only go from zero to one, and often come to the wrong conclusions. Notice that since the tax rate can go from zero to one hundred percent, it's the exact same thing.

And one last thing. If you object to my mentioning the Reagan Tax cuts, why don't you pretend I said the Kennedy Tax Cuts.

Mason

You're free to object all you like. empirical observation does not support your conclusion and there is a wide consensus that Laffer was wrong. It's not some fringe leftist group of researchers objecting.

Also, when I say it's a fallacy of the Reagan era, it is because it is literally a fallacy of the Reagan era (namely the idea that lowering taxes increases tax revenue. It usually does not.)