I agree, but I’m sure that won’t happen for two reasons: the Democrats will not do it because they’ll want “the nation to heal”, and because Trump will pardon every one of those assholes before he leaves office.
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Not to drift too far off topic, but I was around for Nixon. It cost the Republicans a few election cycles, but everyone forgot, enjoyed the Redford movie and moved on.
This will be no different. It started started with Gingrich, evolved into Trump and will likely mutate again, as viruses are prone to do. Populism is. That’s why we have a Senate…well, that’s what Madison and Hamilton said…
Back on topic, I’d deport Newt Gingrich to Eswatini
Sadly you are probably correct, and even if it happens, well, here we are a mere 80 years after Nuremberg and history is repeating anyway. I just think something substantive will help cement this regime in the national conscience as a shameful wound and will make us resistant to it for a longer period. Just as it was taboo for Germans to even have a decent standing army until recently, and even then it was less because of authoritarian impulses returning than because of the shift in world power from the US backing out of effective and reliable participation in NATO.
If I ran the US, I’d sort out the idiots spamming this forum.
You mean sort them into categories? Isn’t “Idiot” already a category?
Well I don’t need to run the US for that, that’d take a few minutes. I mean sort them “right out”. I’m watching Mayor of Kingston, it may be raising my testosterone levels…
We talked about minimum wage. Should there be a maximum wage?
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IMO, absolutely both a maximum wage and a maximum net worth.
CEOs often earn hundreds of times more than the average salary equivalent of their workers. There was a time when it was a far less extreme multiplier. I don’t remember when or what exactly but it was something on the order of 50 or 60 years ago and it was closer to like 10x. I think 10x is plenty for a “maximum wage” for top leadership in a corporation anyway. It would potentially be tricky to delineate how far down from the very top that would apply, how it would apply to smaller companies like sole proprietorships, but it would be worth hammering out.
People forget that at the end of WW2 the top marginal tax rate was 94% and it stayed in that general neighborhood for a long time. We used to get along just fine without the ultra-rich.
They also forget that a marginal tax rate that high is part of a progressive tax and doesn’t apply until you’re already earning, let us say a very comfortable amount of money in the current year.
As for maximum net worth, there is a point beyond which you can’t possibly have more actual “stuff” that you have time to enjoy or interact with, or that would provide more actual security in your dotage. I’d guess that charitably that’s probably something like $20M currently, as a starting point for debate. Others have suggested something more permissive like simply “billionaires should not exist”, hence, a net worth of over $1B would be forbidden. We could direct excess personal net worth to things the government used to do for the disadvantaged, like the now-defunct USAID, or to nonprofits of the rich person’s choice provided there can be not even indirect personal gain for the individual, like some contrived charity they founded that exists to indirectly feather their nest.
Of course just as the 94% top marginal tax rate was pecked away at for decades until it’s now something like 39%, and far less for capital gains (passive income, which a lot of the ultra wealthy mainly get their $ from), all the above suggestions are subject to political erosion over time. Two generations from now people will forget why we did it or why it mattered. I don’t know how to solve that problem.
Billionaires can afford good accountants and lawyers and will find a way to stash their income and wealth in offshore tax havens. A lot of them are already doing this.
its not even that hard. most of their “pay” isn’t “income” so it isn’t exposed to income tax
The government has (or used to have) pretty good lawyers and accountants too, some of them even served in congress and wrote laws that can’t be gotten around. Enforced by the IRS. There is the barest chance that we may have an opportunity in coming years to rebuild better from the ashes and undo all the loopholes that have been installed since the middle of the last century. I agree it’s a long shot.
That’s why I referred (admittedly, obliquely) to passive income and capital gains taxes. Those can be reformed too.
Sometimes I think we have been conditioned to a lot of learned helplessness around stuff like this and we reflexively come up with 342 reasons why a thing shouldn’t even be attempted instead of looking at the 3,975 reasons why it SHOULD be attempted.
This is how the rich fucks want us to think. When enough of us stop thinking that way, things will change. If and when.
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I assume we’re talking about the United States…a country founded by rich men endeavoring to avoid tax obligations. Mark Twain once said, “It is not worthwhile to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man’s character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible,”
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The crookedness in the system is built in at every level. You aren’t going to fix this by passing a few reform laws. This kind of change you are speaking about would require bloodshed at a scale we haven’t seen here in 150 years imo.
It’ll either require bloodshed, or hitting rock bottom like we did in the Great Depression. I think the latter is more likely.
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