Countdown to a Free America

[Eric the Green]

(04-21-2018, 08:15 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(04-20-2018, 12:09 PM)Another Xer Wrote:

(04-20-2018, 09:30 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(04-19-2018, 08:17 PM)Another Xer Wrote: I stopped at "(Hillary's) a member of the axis of evil."

I'm sure you can do better.

It's an Internet Forum!  Hyperbole is a given.  Rags had plenty of good points you chose to ignore for semantic reasons.  Just address this: how do we get from here to some measure of equanimity?  We don't need absolute equality in all things, but we need a system that prevents the very few from taking it all, and leaves room for people to be people, not robots.

The first thing we have to do is raise taxes on wealth.  Capital gains, dividends, and estates.  People focus on income taxes because it's what they know about, but the taxes that the ultra-wealthy people pay are capital gains, dividends, and estates.  That's why people like Mitt Romney pay a tax rate of 15% - 20%, while hard working educated professionals pay double that - the professionals are paying income taxes.  They vote Republican because they think the Republicans are protecting their taxes but they are wrong.  Nobody is looking out for hard working educated professionals.  They are the big cash-bag that the plutocrats in charge use to fund government.

1. Capital gains and dividends should be taxed at the same rate as income.  The counterargument is that lower taxes on capital helps generate investment - I don't see any basis for that.  It's just an argument served up by the wealthy to serve the wealthy.  It's certainly not true in the current environment where the wealthy have so much money they don't know what to do, and are inflating all kinds of assets in search of yield but they can't find productive investment because the middle class is broke.  Tax it.
2. Use the money to fund infrastructure jobs across the country.  Get people working again and rebuild this country.
3. Change to singlepayer health insurance that covers everybody.  All available data on this from other countries shows it should lower costs, rather than raise costs.  Our for-profit system is the most inefficient in the world.  Too many middle-men. 
4. Raise the minimum wage, incrementally, and with geographic disparities taken into account.  

To me, that is a start.  It may solve 20% of the problem or 50% of the problem or 100% of the problem - I don't know.  Enact it and reassess in a few years to see what, if any, additional steps need to be taken.

You get no argument from me on this.  In fact, it's the only viable alternative from the left.  But here's the rub.  The SJW faction will cry foul and simply won't support that agenda.  I don't have the foggiest idea how to bridge that gap, because many of the social problems have an economic base.  

You only missed two issues I wish to add: basic competence and climate change.  Without the first, nothing gets done ... much like today.  The second is existential, but under the radar for now.  It needs to be emphasized.  Transitioning to clean energy has an economic benefit too, so that should be non-controversial.  Of course, it is.

And gun control may be a viable issue too, if young people press for it. It's certainly been needed for a long, long time. But persistent American mythology has kept us connected to the gun.

Of course, not everything can be done all at once; that's true. Income taxes also need to be raised on wealthier people. Things will roll once the 2020s get going.

I have no concern that the SJW faction will cry foul over any of this. It's what they want too. They just want to make sure that their groups' interests are also protected from injustice, which is a very real concern, and which itself causes a lot of the economic inequality. We all need to see that it's all connected; then the "gap" is bridged without any doubt. Trickle-down, give-breaks-to-job-creaters nonsense-economics cannot exist without appealing to the fears and prejudice of those who don't want to pay for others' government welfare benefits. And the "others" that they mean, are the same people whom the SJWs speak up for.