Do tax cuts for the wealthy really help the overall economy and "trickle down" to everyone else? It's not a trickle question. David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Limberg of King's College London examined 18 developed countries and did the math. "Per capita gross domestic product and unemployment rates were nearly identical after five years in countries that slashed taxes on the rich and in those that didn't, the study found. But the analysis discovered one major change: The incomes of the rich grew much faster in countries where tax rates were lowered. Instead of trickling down to the middle class, tax cuts for the rich may not accomplish much more than help the rich keep more of their riches and exacerbate income inequality." 50 years of tax cuts for the rich failed to trickle down. (Maybe it just takes 51 years to fully drip.)

+ NYT: How the Economy Is Actually Doing, in 9 Charts. Not into charts? Here are the words: "These indicators also show that some people are already getting left behind in an uneven recovery as others feel few impacts, or even flourish." (That's the economic story of 2020 in one sentence.)

+ WaPo: Nearly 8 million Americans have fallen into poverty since the summer.

+ Meanwhile, Congress is still working on a stimulus deal. Those seem to take a lot longer than tax cut deals for some reason.

"This is what is called a supply-chain attack, meaning the pathway into the target networks relies on access to a supplier. Supply-chain attacks require significant resources and sometimes years to execute. They are almost always the product of a nation-state. Evidence in the SolarWinds attack points to the Russian intelligence agency known as the S.V.R., whose tradecraft is among the most advanced in the world. According to SolarWinds S.E.C. filings, the malware was on the software from March to June. The number of organizations that downloaded the corrupted update could be as many as 18,000, which includes most federal government unclassified networks and more than 425 Fortune 500 companies." Thomas P. Bossert in the NYT: I Was the Homeland Security Adviser to Trump. We're Being Hacked. "The magnitude of this national security breach is hard to overstate."

"No vaccine will be widely available to the American public for months, and in the meantime, overwhelmed hospitals across the country are caring for more than 110,000 coronavirus patients – a staggering figure that has more than tripled since September." In the US, there were confirmed 247,403 new cases on Wednesday and 3,656 Americans died of the coronavirus in a single day.

+ NPR: "The Food and Drug Administration says that some of the vials of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine being distributed throughout the U.S. contain extra doses and the agency is encouraging hospitals and clinics to use the additional shots to speed up the nationwide immunization campaign."

+ Tyson Foods Fires 7 Plant Managers Over Betting Ring On Workers Getting COVID-19. (This is pretty sick, but the truth is that America has been gambling with the lives of meat plant workers throughout the pandemic.)

"Infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle aged with no conditions etc. have zero to little risk….so we use them to develop herd…we want them infected." Politico: Trump appointee demanded ‘herd immunity' strategy, emails reveal. (Or why having no plan may have been less deadly than carrying out some of the proposed plans.)

+ "Everyone wants to describe the day that the light switch flipped and the C.D.C. was sidelined. It didn't happen that way. It was more of like a hand grasping something, and it slowly closes, closes, closes, closes until you realize that, middle of the summer, it has a complete grasp on everything at the C.D.C." NYT: Trump Appointees Describe the Crushing of the C.D.C. (When this is over, we need to take a hard look at why so many government institutions were so crushable and then figure out how to fortify them with laws, not just norms.)

"The French president attended a number of high-profile events in recent days, including an EU summit. Following his diagnosis several other European leaders, including the Spanish PM, said they would self-isolate." French President Emmanuel Macron is the latest world leader to test positive for Covid-19.

"More than 30 states filed an antitrust suit against Google on Thursday that demands a breakup of the search giant, accusing it of abusing its control over online search to squeeze out competitors and make inroads into new markets such as home speakers. The suit — the third major antitrust complaint against Google since late October, and the second in two days — adds to the mounting government effort to rein in the world's biggest tech companies." More than 30 states file suit demanding breakup of Google. The law going after big tech is shaping up to be one of the big stories of 2021.

+ "Facebook further escalated its long-brewing fight with Apple this week, launching a second round of full-page newspaper ads Thursday charging that new Apple privacy measures will hurt small businesses. At the same time, Facebook is backing developers in a lawsuit against Apple's app store policies." (Big tech companies are so big that the only thing that can threaten them is other big tech companies.)

"They threatened to kill my children, parents, siblings, and me if I did not report to the police and testify at trial that I saw Walter and the other two men set the fire ... Everything I told police, and everything I testified to at trial relating to my witnessing the setting of the fire, was a fabrication ... As far as I know, Walter had nothing to do with this crime." Imprisoned nearly 40 years, a Michigan man is freed after a witness recanted her story. Forty years. Holy hell.

"This is the heart of the case against bare-knuckle criticism: The problem is not the presence of negativity but the object of that negativity. The insult-comic style trains critics to channel their scorn toward minor errors rather than major iniquities, breeding a bipolar prose that lambasts rude hosts and greasy sauces with apocalyptic intensity yet says little to nothing about rapist chefs and unfair labor laws. In other words, pugilist prose offers an idiom of flamboyant irrelevance. This is a voice with strong words for small matters but polite silence for serious concerns—a voice that will not speak truth to power but only to cauliflower." Death to the Negative Restaurant Review. Theodore Gioia with some very interesting takes about slapstick restaurant reviews. I recognize some of these techniques from social media discourse and the parallels are giving me a stomach ache.

"Drawn to the irresistible stink of the droppings — the fresher the better — the bears would first take a careful whiff, then initiate a gentle rubbing with a cheek. They would next immerse themselves in an unbridled full-body tussle in the dung, before meticulously slathering themselves with their paws to ensure all their exposed bits were covered." Why Are Pandas Covering Themselves With Horse Manure? (Layperson's guess: Because it's f**king 2020.)

Monopoly now accounts for nearly one-third of all global board game sales, largely thanks to Hasbro's own expansion strategy. The Hustle: How a real-life monopoly made Monopoly the world's biggest board game. (Landing on a hotel at Park Place is the closest most of us have to traveling in months...)

+ How PEZ evolved from an anti-smoking tool to a beloved collector's item.