Joe Did What? A Matter of Trust

Modification by Epic Games of a scene from the Peter Jackson movie, via The Verge.

From National Review tax expert Daniel J. Pilla ("Biden Gets More Aggressive With the Confiscation of Capital"), the most poetic description you'll ever see of a tax dodge: 

Trusts are used in estate planning as a means of putting the assets into the hands of a holder who is, so to speak, immortal. Families often put investment assets into trust to avoid probate, thus allowing the assets to continue to work and grow without the need to liquidate them upon the death of the owner.

Because trusts don’t “die” (or, to put it more technically, enjoy perpetuity of life, like a corporation), future generations can realize the benefits of income generated by trust assets but without the heavy hand of estate and gift taxes carving their way through the assets themselves.

Far from being a tax dodge, a beneficiary trust is a kind of beautiful alchemy, that gives your money eternal life! Protecting its integrity from the unseemly violence of probate! You may die, but your money lives forever, industrious and expanding, bringing happiness wherever it turns, not maimed and scarred by—well, yes, taxes, but not just because they're taxes. It's because they're heavy-handed taxes, kicking and slashing their way onto your deck like a pirate crew carrying cutlasses.

Pie

I don't know what this is but it has a Facebook page.

Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, Mystax Crustorum, has put out a Pi Day column almost a month early ("Is America Becoming a Four-Party State?") on

the most important fault line in today’s Democratic Party — the line between what I’d call “redivide-the-pie Democrats” and “grow-the-pie Democrats.”

and its bothsider Doppelgänger the Republicans are likewise

divided between a “limited-government-grow-the-pie” right — but one that wants to just let capitalism rip — and a “hoard-the-pie, pull-up-the-drawbridge” Trump-led far right [and t]he limited-government-grow-the-pie faction is itself split between the Never Trumpers — who’ve refused to prostitute themselves to Trump’s serial lying, cozying up to Russia and other madness — and those who’ve hitched a ride on Trump’s wagon to get their tax cuts, conservative judges and deregulation.

Personally, I'd say if your pie is growing you should in general discard it immediately.

To th' crack of doom

Image via oceanweb.net.nz.

Former New York Times columnist David Brooks ("The Trump Elite. Like the Old Elite, But Worse!") provides an interesting deconstruction of the concept of legislative verticality:

Legislation can be crafted bottom up or top down. In bottom up you ask, What problems do voters have and how can they be addressed. In top down, you ask, What problems do elite politicians have and how can they be addressed?

The "you" there being not the you and I who are reading the column—we're just eavesdroppers—but the legislation-crafters; it's "bottom up" when they see themselves as the elite deciding what the voters need, and "top down" when they regard themselves as the servants of the elite trying to figure out what their masters need. Where in the conventional picture we think of the elite as the "top" of a social pyramid and the masses as its support, Brooks has turned this picture upside down, with the elite at the bottom holding the structure up like Atlas supporting the sky, and the masses idling cheerfully above, which is a decent analogy for the classically conservative view, when you think about it.

And the legislators scurrying around the lower floors, depending on whether they themselves identify as elite or not, which is a Brooksian novelty, and one he might like to rethink—seems to me he'd be compelled to say liberal legislators regard themselves as the elite at the very bottom earnestly caring for the whole population, and conservative ones as the gentlemen-in-waiting on the ground floor keeping the true elite or 0.01% secure, as it sleeps like Smaug in the cellar, with its subterranean treasure.

Cheap shots and dancing dog fur

Hobbitonomics

I don't think the books ever really said,but what did Bilbo Baggins do for a living?
— Dr.ChristmasNorth! (@cindynorth1) November 28, 2013

Came up while I was en route to New Jersey keeping up with the twittericity by intellectual phone and thus unable to answer the question according to my usual thoroughly documented standards—because I can do a lot of stuff with my new phone but have not yet mastered the art of cutting and pasting URLs.

Anyway I'm now pretty confident, thanks to an essay in the Superversive which touches briefly on the economics of the Shire (it is mostly an extremely detailed account of the [jump]

Looking for a representation of Smaug that would capture his Germanic wormishness, I didn't find anything, but this, by Kihea, is satisfyingly fleshy.