Bill sponsor:
Tom Davis (R-VI12)
Bill cosponsors:
Danny Davis (D-IL7)
John McHugh (R-NY23)
Henry Waxm (D-CA30)
Passed with unanimous concent both in the house and the senate
https://www.congress.gov/congressional-record/2006/12/08/house-section/article/H9160-2
Worth a shot anyway.
He does have more money than one person could ever acquire in a society worthy of the name. And the general fact that we can survive trillions of dollars being captured by the ultra-rich shows we could definitely survive diverting those dollars to actual useful purposes.
But the thing to watch out for with this argument (that Bezos or Buffet could afford to pay for X) is that while the problem is clearest at the billionaire end, the solution has to be at the regular-people end. Cos, for Bezos to actually spend $150bn in cash (or pay it in taxes), someone would have to buy Amazon from him at its sticker price, which itself still relies on the existence of a thriving ultra-rich class. If every billionaire did the same thing at once, none of them would actually be able to raise a fraction of the cash theyâre supposedly worth. So the solution has to be to fix all the leaks that let people become billionaires in the first place â labor exploitation, shitty tax structures, lack of public services, rent-seeking etc.
I understand that you realise this, and talking about billionaires is just a shorthand, but that shorthand makes it very easy for assholes to misunderstand (or deliberately misrepresent) âbillionaires shouldnât existâ as âletâs kill the winners of the American Dream to pay for communist gulagsâ.
I was thinking just recently, the GOP can be very simply understood as nothing more or less than a campaign to destroy the US government. Sure, they love the flag (and that other flag), because meaningless bits of cloth are the one part of it they donât openly seek to destroy. To them, Turmp and McConnell at their worst are doing a good job, because their job is to prove the whole thing doesnât work, by making it not work.
(And, per @gatto, they have no shortage of Democrat allies, at least when it comes to the business-related part of their agenda)
hey, i ordered postal worker costumes for both of my dogs, donât look at me.
âAnd youâve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels ⌠upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and youâve got to make it stop! And youâve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless youâre free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!â
Works both ways.
Do you suppose the proximity of that to the November election is just a coincidence? The U.S. mail is how many (most?) absentee ballots are cast, how everyone receives their sample ballots, how candidates in local races get their messages out to voters, and part of how larger organizations coordinate their get-the-vote-out drives.
Gee, I wonder if faultering postal service right before an election could affect one set of voters more than another.
I mean, you could also just take it from him. I like that plan.
Back when Italians were discriminated against my ancestors worked there for a couple generations and made a decent salary, it makes sense that trend of those treated poorly elsewhere found a welcoming culture. A lot of Americans think of it fondly for exactly this reason. We remember history.
(Rumor has it in my family grandpaâs career stalled because he promoted the best people and not all of them were white but thereâs no proof sadly.)
But that was my point â you couldnât just take it from him, because he doesnât have $150bn in cash. If billionaires literally had swimming pools filled with gold, redistribution would be easier, but â for that very reason â they donât. (Except, to some extent, royalty-type billionaires)
When you read that someone âhasâ however many billion dollars, that doesnât reflect a sum of money that could theoretically be spent on something useful. Itâs more like a record of how much money has been irreversibly flushed down the shitter of inequality.
Thatâs fair, although my counterpoint to that argument is always that while it may not be $150bn if you just started snagging countries thereâs a lot of value locked up in what they have. To sort of drag it back on topic: Amazon has a logistics and warehousing system which is as far as Iâm aware completely unrivaled in the world. That could do a lot of good if you started using it for not-evil 
We can rescue the USPS. Buy stamps everyone.
Nice try. But those of us who lived through that time and were paying attention remember that the GOP-majority congress was holding the whole existence of the USPS hostage. The 2006 bill was the best deal Dems could get in keeping the USPS alive at the time. When a lawmaker contributes significant amendments to a bill, they get listed as a co-sponsor. And a big part of the problem with it is that it irrationally requires the USPS to fund health benefits through private insurance rather than utilizing Medicare, which would reduce the burden by 2-4x.
Meanwhile, there is bipartisan support for eliminating most of the burden of the 2006 law. The repeal passed the House in February:
Well sure, Iâm all in favor of nationalizing industries.
(Some of them, anyway. I dunno if Amazonâs infrastructure would actually be that much of a prize by the time you gave its employees basic rights and stopped subsidizing it with Ponzi schemes and anti-competitive practices)
Some of your best friends are postal workers? 
But one of the most egregious things Iâve seen recently is someone calling for the privatization of the post office because of the way they fund their pensions. Basically arguing that no business would do that, and so a private post office would profitable.
Are you being sarcastic? I think youâre being sarcastic, but in these trying times it is hard to tell.
Thank you for asking and sorry, apparently forgot the /s tag.
They â in costume â could fetch your paper⌠and with authority. 
?
I was trying to post a rebuttal to â%100 faultâ of one of the two teams by posting evidence that both teams took part in the law. I would not call that a try, I would call that a fact.
The terrible law and itâs passage, the first attempt to fix the USPS since 1970, lays at the feet of both parties who did nothing of substance for 40 years to save it.
Iâm guessing when you watch a movie where someone is abducted by a serial killer and forced to drive them around to commit murders, that the kidnap victim is just as guilty as the serial killer who kidnapped them? Because that is what happened to Congress in 2006 with that law.
