Which is much of the reason I think it’s a sound strategy to avoid employment. Just do what work needs doing around you. And if it helps people, they will help you in return. And, if not, at least you did the right thing.
Using money which is controlled by sociopaths is a losing strategy.
And who will vote for Hillary in the general.
The strength of the German economy is often put down to the Mittelstand - small to medium sized companies which are large enough to be required to comply with regulators but not so large that they can throw their weight around and which account for some 70% of output.
Because the alternative will be Rubio.
I think you’re deluded about the history of the Democratic Party. But anyway, I suppose a big vote for Mr. Sanders might put the Fear into the Democratic Party establishment, so that they will be less willing to destroy Social Security and Medicare for the next few years, just as Occupy Wall Street did. However, Mr. Sanders is not a socialist, whatever he says; he is a Welfare statist and the point of the Welfare state is to prevent socialism by buying off the working class with sufficient goodies to keep them quiet. It is not any kind of permanent solution because Capital (that is, the people who own it) will still be in charge, and they will start to rescind the Welfare state as soon as the crisis passes. They will continue to carry on their depredations at home and abroad because that’s how they got to be what they are. If you want any permanent improvement you are going to have to think about moving beyond capitalism.
Problem is, there is not enough income in the top 1% to even balance the current federal budget, much less establish a better social safety net, even if you tax them at 100.00 percent. The IRS data which demonstrates this is readily available.
So there are two other options. Option one is to actually confiscate a chunk of the 1% percenters’ wealth, rather than taxing income. This would pull in a helluva lot of money. It also will not keep Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Tom Steyer, Richard Branson, and the rest of the “pull up the ladder, I’m aboard” crowd on your side.
Are you ready to go that route?? I look forward with interest to seeing this model being rolled out by Sanders, or any other Democrat.
Option two is to also drastically increase taxes on the middle and upper middle classes. This is how the European social democrat systems work. Here’s a good recent article:
Excerpted for the tl;dr crowd:
Denmark also has:
A 25 percent value added tax — basically a form of sales tax
A 180 percent tax on car purchases
A carbon tax of about $13 per ton of CO2
Income taxes that are high on the middle class as well as the rich, with effective rates averaging in the 35 to 48 percent range.
Want to go that route? I look forward with interest to seeing this model being rolled out by Sanders, or any other Democrat.
I’d like you to explain how owning stock pumps money into the economy. Seriously. Because it doesn’t work the way you think it does. Are you willing to learn something new today?
The Vox article does not load for me, but your tl/dr sounds fine for me - I would pay the higher taxes compared to Germany to get the level of social security Denmark provides.
Per opensecrets.org, as of today Hillary has gotten upwards of $600,000 from megabanks, Rubio somewhat less than $50,000.
I’ll not count the several millions donated to the Clinton foundation by Goldman, Barclays, BoA etc. as we don’t know at this point how much of that may have been diverted to Clinton’s personal use.
I’m good with taxes on capital (instead of capital gains), already mentioned it upthread.
Also good with Scandinavian levels of taxation if it comes with Scandinavian levels of state provision.
Maybe I should have looked harder for jobs in Norway instead of moving to the US 
And Rubio will just be a Koch puppet. I’ve made my problems with Clinton clear in the past, but any Democrat, even Clinton, will be better than a Republican. Yes, it’s only a relative thing. Yes, I’d rather neither. But no candidate not from those parties can get elected.
There is also option 3, as demonstrated in 1789 France and 1917 Russia.
Otto von Bismarck and Winston Churchill did not introduce welfare because they were secretly socialist, they did it because there was a real risk that they would end up executed by communist revolutionaries. Some of the 1% are aware of this but there are still too many of them who would rather keep all their wealth rather than their heads.
I’m sure that many would, and that’s a conversation I would not object to having. What I object to is the falsehood that we can afford to have a Denmark style system if only the 1% would pay more.
Until they suddenly didn’t. You know they called that the Reign of Terror where they went after people like plumbers and farmers too, right, not just the royals?
So, any Democrat running for national office who advocates either confiscation of wealth or doubling the taxes on the middle class can count on your vote.
As I said elsewhere, I’m fine with openly having this conversation in the course of an election campaign. But do not hold your breath.
I don’t have a vote, but I’d support a move towards Scandinavian style systems.
Yes, and when the Bolsheviks had killed or exiled all the 1 percenters and utopia still didn’t arrive, they started going down the economic ladder. After only a few years, anyone who owned a cow was considered an enemy of the state.
But higher taxes for the top 1 % in the US could yield surprising amounts.
I don’t think those demanding that the 1% (hell, the ten or twenty percent, etc.) pay more taxes are advocating only that and nothing else. Rolling back the U.S.'s ridiculous military budget, for instance, tends to be an accompanying demand.
Which is exactly my point. It is more sensible to have higher taxes than to have violent revolution, but what happens when you have low taxes and a lot of desperate people who think they have nothing left to lose?
Pretty much. It isn’t just one thing we have to accomplish to create a sound, stable safety net. And we can even start incrementally. You don’t have to gut the military, you put it on a ten year plan that moves budget from the DoD to education, at 2.5% a year.
Ramp up investments in infrastructure with a ten year gradual increase on capital gains (which would end up directly employing us).
Expand medicare/medicade to, at a basic level, provide preventative care for all citizens by way of a gradual increase in income taxes in higher brackets.
It won’t be an immediate utopia, and heck what I wrote above is less adventurous than the New Deal, but I think it can happen.
