Okay, here’s where we’re at. We’ve got a gigantic flotilla of combat ships over in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Iran, blockading Iranian ports to keep Iran from shipping oil through the Strait of Hormuz. Trump recently reinforced the flotilla with a third carrier group involving the USS Theodore Roosevelt, accompanied by an amphibious strike group including 2,000 Marines on the USS Malkin Island. The U.S. already had 50,000 troops in the region.

Back in Washington D.C., Trump somehow managed to find the time to get off his Qatari flying palace Air Force One to take a briefing in the White House from Chief Pentagon Poohbah Pete Hegseth and CENTCOM commander Admiral Brad Cooper, who has been in charge of Trump’s disastrous war on Iran, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine. You can guess what they talked about: plans to attack Iran right after the midterm voting next week.

Missing from the briefing was Lieutenant General Brett Sylvia, Director for Strategy, Plans and Policy, the Pentagon’s highest ranking war strategist and planner. Where was Brett? Well, 24 hours before the big war planning briefing at the White House, Hegseth fired him without cause. Just up and, you’re outta here, dude, as he has with about 20 other high-ranking generals and admirals since he took office last year.

The firing of General Sylvia was a head-scratcher until today, when news of the Iran war planning meeting leaked, along with extra news about General Sylvia – that Hegseth had fired him for leaking classified information to the press. But that’s not all. Late this afternoon, the White House leaked to two of its pet reporters at Axios that General Sylvia had admitted leaking secrets to the press.

Then it was revealed that the case against Sylvia has been referred to the Department of Justice for investigation and prosecution. Generals and other officers in the military who are suspected of committing a crime are normally investigated by the Civil Investigative Division and are subject to court martial under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Hegseth obviously does not trust that a court martial of General Sylvia within the military system, where he would be tried by a jury of his peers, would find him guilty. Trump wants his lap poodle at the DOJ, Todd Blanche, to handle railroading General Sylvia.

Caught in the middle of this Hegseth clusterfuck was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Caine, whose office yesterday issued a statement thanking General Sylvia for his 32 years of service. “We wish him and his family the best as they graduate to new opportunities and the next chapters of their lives,” the statement from Caine’s office said. In his job as head of Pentagon planning, General Sylvia had reported directly to General Caine.

By early this morning, Caine’s office had formally retracted its statement of thanks to General Sylvia. His biography has been removed from the Pentagon website of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. General Sylvia was appointed to his Pentagon job by former Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. General Sylvia, by the way, has made no such admissions of leaking classified information to reporters or anyone else.

As usual, the left hand in Hegseth’s Pentagon doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. Four-star generals don’t usually thank someone for their service and then retract the statement and erase them from Pentagon records within 12 hours.

General Sylvia as a two-star held one of the Army’s most prestigious jobs: Commander of the 101^st Airborne Division. Other commanders of the 101^st have gone on to promotion to four stars and some of the top jobs in the Army, such as commander of Army forces in Europe or even commander of NATO or Chief of Staff of the Army. General Sylvia had been seen by Pentagon watchers as on that escalator to military success. He was what they called a “go getter” in the Army.

Until he wasn’t. I’ll give you two guesses what happened here. General Sylvia clearly wasn’t on board with another round of bombing Iran. We have no way of knowing what the plans are for this bombing campaign if it happens after the elections next week, but I’ll bet we’re going to see strikes on civilian targets and increased civilian casualties. General Sylvia may have registered his opposition to the plans that were presented by Hegseth to Trump at the White House today. Not only did he have to be fired, he had to be discredited. So, they threw the leaking charge at him and then leaked his alleged “confession” to Axios as a final stab in the back. The whole thing was so rushed, they were stepping on each other’s feet. When Trump was asked about the charges against General Sylvia today, he referred to him as a woman, saying “she’s going to have big problems.”

This is who started the war with Iran to begin with, the man who tanked the nation’s economy, sent prices skyrocketing, and wouldn’t be able to tell the Strait of Hormuz from the fairway on the 6^th hole at his Doral Golf Club. Neither he nor Hegseth are fit to shine General Brett Sylvia’s combat boots.

So next week, when we’re reading stories about Iran firing salvos of missiles and drones all over the Middle East in response to new U.S. bombing, knocking out oil wells, natural gas facilities, refineries and international airports, not to mention hitting U.S. military bases that are still in the region, you’ll know who did planning, and who is responsible for the disasters that follow. General Sylvia, fired and facing bogus Hegseth-generated charges, will not be among them.

Leave a comment

Share

Give a gift subscription

Just in time for Halloween, I’ve recounted my summer 2026 trip to Edinburgh, Scotland and the dark history of body snatching in the picturesque capital city for Undark Magazine. Body snatching is what it sounds like – in the 18th and 19th centuries in the United Kingdom, mainland Europe, and the United States, a dark market for bodies and body parts emerged to support the burgeoning field of medicine and anatomical study. 

Today, body snatching is a thing from the past. But there are undercurrents that run through our organ donation and whole-body anatomical gift programs that demand we keep looking at this oft-macabre industry. One question continues to haunt us: who decides what happens to your body when you’re no longer here to speak for yourself? 

I try to answer that question and provide the full story behind body snatching, anatomical gift programs, and what health policy could do to protect the deceased in my piece. 

You can read more here.  

Forbes magazine has just published its annual list of the 400 wealthiest Americans, who this year hold a total of $8 trillion in wealth. It’s a gobsmacking amount of money, but we also live in a world where trillions are not unheard of. Here are a few thoughts and perspectives.

The promised Social Security benefits under current law exceed the projected inflows of revenue by about $29 trillion over the next 75 years, according to the actuaries. The promised Medicare benefits under current law exceed the projected inflows of revenue by about $60 trillion over the next 75 years. So if the US government somehow had an extra $8 trillion to play with, it could address either about one-quarter of the Social Security underfunding or about one-eighth of Medicare underfunding–but not both. My first point here is just that while US wealth held by the wealthiest is enormous, it is not an unlimited amount; indeed, the existing promises already made by just these two programs are much larger.

However, there’s no question that US wealth has been growing fast than the economy as a whole. This figure shows the ratio of wealth-to-GDP in the US since about 1960.

From the 1960s up through the 1980s, the ratio of total US wealth to the GDP was roughly 4–that is, with some fluctuations, total assets rose in proportion with the size of the economy. But in the the 1990s, this changed. There was a burst of stock market wealth in the 1990s and a burst of real estate wealth in the early 2000s, and in 2007 on the eve of the Great Recession, wealth was 4.9 times the size of GDP. After the Great Recession, the wealth-to-GDP ratio fell back to the historical level around 4. But a few years later, driven particularly by rising stock prices (which have risen almost six-fold since 2010), wealth-to-GDP took off again, topping out at a multiple of 5.5 in late 2021 and 2022, then sinking a bit, and now apparently pushing to a new high.

This pattern affects how one thinks about the rising inequality of wealth. If the wealth-to-GDP ratio remained the same over time, but the top 1% or 0.1% had a larger share, then the wealth gains at the top would come at the expense of wealth at the middle and the bottom. But with a rising wealth-to-GDP ratio, it’s possible for absolute quantity of wealth at the middle and the bottom to remain much the same, even as the quantity of wealth rises at the top. One might object that both scenarios are unpleasant, and I wouldn’t argue the point too vehemently, except to say that the two scenarios are unpleasant in different ways and with different implications.

The Federal Reserve now runs a website with detailed breakdowns of wealth data, updated quarterly. This figure shows the share of wealth held by different groups. this is household data, so with 134 million or so households in the US (and an average of 2.5 people per household), the top 1 percent consists of 1.34 million households. That top 1% held 8.6% of total wealth in 1989, and how holds about 15% of total wealth. Meanwhile, the bottom 90% of the wealth distribution held 77.2% of total wealth in 1989, but now holds 68.3% of total wealth.

This figure shows the types of assets held by different groups: again, remember that the number of households represented by the first bars, the top 0.1%, is only one-ninth as large as the second bar, and both are much smaller than the bars that follow.

The next figure shows the same data, but instead of presenting it in dollars, it shows the share of assets held by each group. What’s interesting here, I think, is that those at the top of the wealth distributino are more likely to hold assets in the form of stocks and “unincorporated businesses.” hare of assets held by each group. Those further down the distibution hold a greater share of wealth in real estate.

There are a number of proposals out there for wealth taxes, but in my own mind, it seems significant that a number of European countries that tried wealth taxes then repealed them. One common problem is that exemptions and exceptions start getting built into the law: for wealth held by the family farm, for wealth in other family businesses, for historical properties, for family heirlooms, for works of art, and so on and so on. Another problem is how to value wealth that isn’t being bought and sold in the market, and yet another problem is what happens when wealth is held in other countries. I’ve discussed here some more practical alternatives to a wealth tax, like focusing on the rule that allows the value of assets to be “stepped up” at death, so that heirs do not pay tax on earlier capital gains (see here and here). Indeed, just rolling back the US estate tax rules to 2004–which was hardly a time of confiscatory taxation–could raise about $100 billion per year in revenue.

The post Snapshots of the US Wealth Distribution first appeared on Conversable Economist.