I am stunned to discover Cory was somewhat creative in quoting:
[I]f you’re not one of 65 million Americans with a criminal record… you may be part of the problem.
becomes
[I]f you don’t have a relative in jail… you’re not in the one percent.
That kind of changes… no, how do we say it… completely inverts the meaning of the sentence. I am stunned at this oversight and trust that Boing Boing will publish a correction tout suite.
Taft-Hartley, increasingly intrusive copymight laws, surveillance-state laws, bank bailouts, Keystone XL…
A “wealth” tax will probably never happen in the US. However, raising capital gains tax rates and graduating them to mirror ordinary income tax brackets would go a long way toward ensuring the 1% (and particularly the .1-.001%) pay something approaching thier share of taxes.
“a Captain should endeavor with every art to divide the forces of the enemy, either by making him suspicious of his men in whom he trusted, or by giving him cause that he has to separate his forces, and, because of this, become weaker.” – Machiavelli, Dell’arte della guerra
Fac et excusa; si fecisti, nega; divide et impera.
Banking regulation since the 2008 pseudo-crisis, which in fact has strengthened the guarantees given the “too big to fail” institutions. It imposes regulatory requirements which only the biggest banks can meet, while penalizing the smaller banks who do not have the same compliance resources available.
The proper approach would be: “Run your bank irresponsibly?? Then you — fail.”
Start talking about wealth taxes rather than income taxes, and I suspect you will see Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and the rest of the tech and entertainment industry start to slip quietly out of the progressive tent.
But you are correct to consider it as a possibility. The top 1% in income just do not have enough income to create a truly generous safety net state, put Social Security and Medicare on a sound actuarial basis, and start reducing our national debt. Not even if you take 80% of everything they get including capital gains.
In order to do those things through the income tax system, you have to drop down a couple of income cohorts, and get 30 to 40 percent more from everyone who earns more than $100K a year,
Capital Gains tax should be (much) higher than income tax, and sales tax and property tax should be replaced by local income tax. Also increase inheritance tax.
I have observed few, if any, cases where “more government power to regulate corporations” did not quickly evolve into “more legislator opportunities to get rich”.
It’s like you’ve actually read the article!
They’re a fairly new news group. They’re the owners of The Verge and Polygon.
This is the US we’re talking about. Baby steps, my good man.
That’s just silly. How many millionaires are there in the EPA? How many legislators have made millions from the Sherman Act? Who made money from the Sarbanes–Oxley Act?
The idea that all corporate regulation is just for legislators’ self-interests is just stupid, and prevents good legislation from being supported.
Anyone who wants entirely unregulated corporations can go live in Somalia.
I don’t want to live in Somalia. Nor do I expect you want to live in North Korea.
There are perfectly good reasons to regulate corporations.
For example, if they are dumping industrial waste into a river. Or, if they are refusing to deliver products which their consumers have paid for. Or, if they are shorting their employee’s wages.
We already have laws on the books which adequately cover those bases.
I’ve been in or around pretty much every “class”. I grew up firmly blue color middle class, ended up dirt poor and living on government assistance in the " ethnic" part of town. Me and my girlfriend just discovered that we are somehow middle class again (hooray? A single medical emergency could make us homeless.). My fathers business brings him in contact with the genuine international 1% (he works with mineral rights), and I can say that they are more different from the “middle class” than the middle class is from the working poor.
Furthermore, I would say class isn’t just wealth. I have lower class values, and still feel a bit awkward using my so-called (in this context) privilege to shop at Whole Foods. I’m technically middle class, but my mom is still on welfare living in roach infested hell-hole that she can’t leave because some arcane government bureaucracy, and she spends 80 hours a week fighting with case managers. I spent half my life in that situation. I find it perverse and offensive now to be painted as some sort of elite, as the “against us”. I still consider myself poor, even if some metrics don’t. I will consider myself poor as long as I remember what it was to be like to be inches away from homelessness everyday, and what it felt like to depend of charity and the government to eat. If I manage to be in the 1% someday (ha!), I probably will still be lower class.
You might be better off making your own categories of person, rather than assuming that other people’s “classifications” apply to you, and/or your family. The notion that one can and should measure your degree of success/attainment in life presupposes an unrealistic amount about you, such as that your goals and means are the same as those of others. Without knowing what people’s goals may be, there is no way to measure their achievement.
A quote that is probably apocryphal (I’ve never been able to find proof) is supposed to have come from Lee Iacocca when he was being interviewed in a press conference. A reporter started his question by referring to Iococca as a “rich man”, to which the response was: I am not a rich man; I am a poor man who now has a lot of money. There is a difference.
Exactly…
Did you read your comment that I was replying to? Those laws are examples of government regulations that don’t exist solely to line legislators’ pockets.
I get annoyed by hyperbolic claims that serve only to perpetuate the myth that regulations are bad.
The problem comes when those categories are applied externally. It was shocking to be “middle class” because I don’t see it. Yeah, I’m better off than some people (a lot of people, sadly) but we still spend a lot of time worrying. The only difference is were worrying about tomorrow and people like my mom are worrying about today, but the line between those are thinner than people think.
I’m also not sure what “middle class” means anymore. My parents could go on yearly vacations, take random classes, buy new cars, etc… We can’t do those because were to busy trying to maintain what we have. I suppose middle class felt permanent when I was young, but now it just feels like fleeting luck.
Much of this is because US politicians, pundits, and journalists use “class” in a distorted way, especially “middle class”, which they use to mean “middle income”, and “middle income” generally is defined to include people who are working full time, but are below the poverty line. This is effectively meaningless as a term of analysis, but more importantly, this usage displaces the usage of class as an analytic tool for modeling social structure. I suspect, somewhere along the line, this usage was introduced deliberately to induce this sort of confusion.
I try to remember to point out I’m using “class” in the Marxist sense (which is kind of like having to say “I’m using ‘theory’ in the science sense”, in a discussion of evolution) but for that to help, you have to understand a) what the Marxist sense of “class” is, and b) that the way journalists, etc., use the term is an incompatible usage.
Describing a person’s class position is not a moral judgment of that person. Nor is saying that a person is privileged. Saying that someone is middle class doesn’t even mean that things are going great for them. As I was saying, we’re in a crisis in which the middle class – in the Marxist sense! – is really under a lot of pressure. This was why the “99%” slogan was a good one: it’s genuinely the case that over the last few decades, conditions have worsened overall for everyone but the ruling class.
What I’m critical of was the political strategy implicit in insisting too strongly on the “99%” slogan. A core Marxist idea was that an extraordinary thing about the working class is that struggling for socialism is in its direct material interests – whereas it isn’t in the direct interests of the middle class, though it is in the indirect interests of everyone. The trouble is that since the role of middle class people is to act as intermediaries, they tend to interpose themselves as leaders in any social movement – but their material interests tend to lead them to favoring stability, over radical change.
It is important to note that people don’t always act according to their immediate material interests, and that material interests are complex and often contradictory, more so for individuals. To some extent, to talk about class in the context of political strategy is to talk about statistical abstractions. Individuals of any class would be welcome in a working class movement, so long as they accept and support working class leadership – and many middle class people do, as individuals.
