It would be better to take their money and have the government do these things. That way, the rest of us have some say in how that philanthropy is exercised. If that’s socialism (and it is) then it’s better than what these sociopaths offer.
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Heh… That’s funny!.. Oh wait, you’re serious. Let me laugh even harder.
Seriously tho, if he loses the nomination (especially if Warren or Sanders wins the nomination) he strikes me as the type who will take his big bag of money, go home and pout.
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'k:
O I have a chronic medical problem and the new drug is so expensive that my for-profit insurance company says I hit my lifetime cap so now I have to pay for it out-of-pocket (and the diversity of philanthropic efforts in medical research isn’t going to help me anyway)
O I have a chronic medical problem that can be treated with current medical technology but the cost is so expensive that my for-profit insurance company says I hit my lifetime cap so now I have to pay for it out-of-pocket (and the diversity of philanthropic efforts in medical research isn’t going to help me anyway)
O I have a chronic medical problem that can be treated with current medical technology but my wife’s new insurance company says it’s a previous condition so I’m not covered (and the diversity of philanthropic efforts in medical research isn’t going to help me anyway)
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The way I see it, Democrat => Alien, Republican => Predator, and not the other way around.
Because … never mind, just because.
Well, I guess you don’t know me, and I didn’t /s my comment: but I assure you, it was made with the utmost cynicism.
Oh, btw. 30 million to someone who has 50 billion is like 60 bucks to someone who has $100000. IOW, he is spending what, to him, is chump change, to fuck everything up. I expect nothing less.
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While that explanation is all too plausible, we should hope it’s not just that. Putting the 0.001% in a mass grave might feel good for a day or two but it doesn’t help much in the long term unless there’s also a genuine reset of our ideas about social justice, the role of the state, labor rights and so on.
My concern is that there’s more support for angrily beheading Jeff Bezos than there is for just taxing the fuck out of him. Because while we’re waking up to the horrors of capitalism we’re not necessarily rooting out the decades of capitalist programming that’s still festering in our own brains.
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Here’s the problem with taxing billionaires:
So long as they remain billionaires, they will continue to use the power granted by that wealth in order to undo any attempt at limiting their power.
Taxing oligarchs only works if you tax them to the point that they are no longer oligarchs. You don’t need to remove their heads, but you do need to remove their wealth.
Or, in other words, seize the means of production.
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Reichtum macht frei
You need more than taxes, much more. Anti-monopoly, anti-trust legislation that is actually enforced must be enacted.
And the Federal reserve must not use potential wage inflation as the only metric of inflation. Currently asset inflation caused by cheap money is not considered any sort of inflation at all, but the obvious result of market pricing, but any decline in unemployment that results in wage pressure is unacceptable and interest rates will be raised. That’s the whole concept behind NAIRU, and it is the Fed’s main worry (besides ongoing overnight bailouts).
Probably some sort of national industrial policy would need to be enacted also. Outsourcing and offshoring has a massive wage deflation effect and importing cheap goods while investing out of country only leads to importing unemployment.
Taxing them does have the potential promise to make them much less politically powerful, so three cheers to that.
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I’d track it back a bit further than that:
Nixon. Southern strategy, war on drugs, beginning of modern mass incarceration.
Then the collapse of the USSR leaving the USA as the sole imperial superpower, then 9/11 and the revival of US militarism, then the mass looting of the GFC, then Trump.
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The general prosperity in the U.S. during anomaly managed to mask that gap for about 20-25 years, at least to the extent that inequality wasn’t in the mainstream American discourse as it’s been since 2008. During that time, the wealthiest 1% could still afford to take their time looting and consolidating gains, but after the Great Recession and especially after Occupy started discussing it openly, the hoarding and ladder-pulling was stepped up.
That also helped mask the end of the anomaly. I personally peg the end at some point between April 2000 (Dotcom 1.0 bubble bursts) and 9/11, but by 2008 anyone operating from a position of good faith and education couldn’t deny that the post-war party was over for all Americans.
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The Plutes for plutocrat.
Just a reminder that the English word whore can be translated in French by pute.
So, is a ‘plute’ a pluocrat whore ? Or a whore for the plutocrats?
To be clear, is that the percentage that is evidently just going to keep on voting Republican no matter what, or some other fraction?
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The former, although they’re present in every electorate: a combination of right-wing bigots, suckers, fantasists and ignoramuses. The number cited varies between 25% and 30%, including in this well-known (half-)joking example:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Crazification_factor
The “Know-Nothing” bit is something I started using to describe that percentage during the Cheney Regency, in tribute to their connection with this American party as well as their ignorance:
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Only if you happen to have some familial, financial, or political connection to the rich.
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Well, yeah, what I was driving at is that there may be more people who’d agree with “let’s kill Jeff Bezos” than with “let’s enact policies that render Jeff Bezos a mere millionaire”.
The actual details would definitely be more complicated than waving a magic tax wand but I don’t think that’s a reason not to investigate what’s possible.
Interesting fact:
If you work 40 hours a week for 45 weeks a year and you are able to put 18.000 dollar under your mattress for every hour you work, you still aren’t a billionaire after 30 years of doing so.
I wonder if billionaires consider a salary of more than 18.000 dollar per hour to be fair pay.
edit: miscalculation
Yeah, the fairy godmother concept of health care.
Except that so many of the them seem to be evil fairies that push destruction of the environment and/or destruction of democracy and their ideals of nasty brutish libertaryanism and religious zealotry that would make Handmaid’s Tale seem like a sitcom.
Koch Bro “philanthropy” might have doomed everyone.
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you will find endless examples of people online crying “Crazification factor!” when 20-30% of people do something — anything — the speaker doesn’t like, or are even polled as holding an opinion they don’t like.
Surprisingly, I don’t believe I’ve seen that line before. How intriguing, that an extremist minority viewpoint may be dismissed as a simple statistical aberration rather than being given serious, weighty consideration and thereby wildly disproportionate promotion. Sounds kinda nice.
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The thing is, despite Rogers claiming the Crazification Factor was a joke and despite people using the term lazily, that rough 27% figure comes up again and again with eerie Pareto-like frequency when it comes to people supporting an extremist viewpoint. The problem is that a position or opinion supported by a minimum 25% of a sample is going to get serious and weighty consideration by the corporate media and by zentrum politicians no matter how reality-challenged or distasteful it is.
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