That's fine. If we had a form of government with less veto points the popular policies would get put in place & funded and it would be hard to undo them.
I suspect the willingness and the policies go hand in hand.
On one hand, it’s fun to point and laugh, but when have Americans ever gotten their moneys worth on spending that isn’t defense or vulgar tax and cash transfer? And even with the former the benefits are too diffuse for most people to notice until there’s a catastrophic failure
We are not a serious people. People want the programs they use funded, the ones they don’t use to be cut, and they want someone else to pay for it all.
It's just fucking stupid, because if everyone paid taxes with little-to-no profit incentive for those running these programs, you'd pay a lot less and get a lot more!
Depends. Bernie's M4A plan would cost the poor 4 x more while the rich got huge savings. He wanted a NHS type service, NO independent systems such as university hospitals, with no choice of docs. ACA was infinitely better for PATIENTS and Bern hates it.
I work 50+ hours a week across multiple jobs and I still can't afford insurance for my wife and me. So, the ACA, while it has helped tens of millions of Americans, isn't exactly a resounding success.
Depends a lot on what state you are in. That's Trump's legacy - screwing it all up. I'm in CA where it works for the vast majority including, til now, immigrants. Every homeless guy in my backyard where they live has insurance. Every working person has it. Use CA single payer sliding scale until DJT
Astute. The American dream -- all the goodies with none of the prices. And yes, so much goes back to the narrative that politics is bad, all politicians are evil and bureaucracies lie, cheat and steal.
I think we should all pause for a moment and acknowledge the fact that we're approaching the centennial of our country's leadership maliciously pivoting into sabotage and propaganda programs meant to divide people who came together to demand change.
My theory is we've been shifted culturally to being 'consumers' instead of citizens or workers. And a consumer's only obligation is to take/use things.
if this is true, focusing on Govt as Service Provider seems like a more persuasive message than the revolutionary cosplay, and an important part of success is making the govt very good at providing service
Not to be a broken record about Bernie, but his promises were always pie-in-the-sky fantasyland stuff, and a lot of people (especially young people) bought it because they thought Bernie winning would mean they would get free stuff without work for the rest of their lives.
that twitter post from like 2020 where someone said americans have been trained to admire rugged individualism so much that being asked to share any sort of community responsibility feels like oppression was dead on.
Gets more real by the day in my experience. The second someone in charge said "you're no longer required to wear a mask" they flew off of those faces, and any idea of solidarity with the disabled is seen as infringing their rights, it's maddening
No so sure, part of the problem is that the uber rich, to avoid any tax whatsoever, manage the media to ensure that any tax on them is portrayed as a tax on the 99.99 % of citizens
Look how quickly Biden's liberal pardon/clemency policies got derailed by complaints about all the people he "should not have" applied it to. By people who swear they support decriminalization and/or more lenient sentencing.
I dunno, the judge who was
taking millions in kickbacks for (wrongfully, egregiously) sending juveniles to private detention centers, ruining 1000s of young lives by saddling them w/ criminal records, subjecting them to violence & lifelong psychological damage DEFINITELYshouldn’t have been pardoned
You should be glad he wasn’t pardoned then. And thanks for illustrating perfectly that progressive criminal justice reform polls well until people start diving into the gritty details.
I think progressives are 1000% behind justice reform for people who were not in positions of power and grossly abused that power. Which is 95% (making that number up but seems accurate) of non-violent offenders in our jails and prisons
“Who were not in positions of power and grossly abused that power” is subjective in many ways. The kind of discretion you have to build into a reform for some but not the ones I don’t like just ends up reinforcing the inequities that already exist.
And there is outrage and blowback every time a criminal benefits from reform (though, tellingly, not when they benefit from corruption). And that’s one of the reasons it’s so hard to get reform despite it being “popular.”
Yeah, it was a bunch of people who thought clemency meant pardoning when all it meant was people not getting the death sentence anymore but will still spend the rest of their lives in federal prison
"I want affordable housing and substance use treatment... somewhere else, that doesn't lower my property values or expose me to people who make me uncomfortable"
I want all of it! I pay a shit ton in taxes already and still have to pay for healthcare. I’d rather my money go towards social good rather than rich executives
Big government is tough when everyone thinks they’re poor. Because you think in terms of being mostly on the receiving end of the redistributive side of taxation and bigger government. More people have to understand they can and should pay more in taxes.
It's why I roll my eyes when people say they're "socially liberal but fiscally conservative." So you want to pretend you care about people but not actually spend any money to do so?
JD Vance's brilliance, IF he is able to pull it off. Will be in helping craft social welfare programs that disproportionately benefit households headed by White heterosexual married men with kids. If he can do that he can get the political momentum from his base to increase corporate taxation to pay
for those programs. It's because social welfare programs are perceived as disproportionately benefited non whites and single mother headed households that the majority of white voters are resistant to increasing taxes to pay for the programs.
This is honestly a great example because the majority of gun owners DO properly store them and would generally support additional regulation, but you add in a gun industry that doesn't want its customers to have barriers to entry, and a culture war fueled by pro-gun rhetoric, and you get America.
This is also a startling statistic: “In 2015, one-third of all households with children contained firearms, 21% of which contained at least 1 firearm that was both loaded and unlocked…approximately 4.6 million children lived in a home with loaded and unlocked firearms.” (Article linked below)
Yeah, I also secretly kind of not so secretly believe that Americans are suffering from mass Munchhausen’s by proxy syndrome and really want to just kill their children, but not in a way that they could be blamed for or suffer any real consequences for.
They want to be treated fairly and with respect while getting to treat everyone else as slaves. Reagan really gave this line of thought room to breathe
A far cry from "ask not what your country can do for you"
Feeling like I'm drowning as the "reach out" friend. Got told recently "wow you were busy for a while" when I didn't reach out to make plans with a friend for months. I told them I wasn't busy, just tired, and they could also reach out. They laughed and told me no.
to go french here
• pleasure is the value we experience and like, when we do not have to sacrifice anything. “Free feeling energy”
• enjoyment is the value we experience when we enjoy sacrifice itself, for the sacrifice changes something over time, space, or the other.
If you say that your area is a hell hole that isn't worth trying to save, or that you need to get away from ASAP, then you've already given up on making the world around you better. Yet this is the attitude of every high school graduate
We need to love the places we live in to make them better
Good example going on is urban white democrat NIMBYism. The 2030 census is going to be a beauty because people in LA, Chicago, NY etc don't want to build low income housing in their neighborhoods.
I think a lot of this is downstream from the idea that people don’t understand when they’re well off. So they don’t understand: they should be paying more in taxes. Yes, the very rich need to as well. But more Americans can/should pay more than think they can/should.
I was raised to always try to make things better than you find them (or, if nature, leave it just as it is). I grew up believing that was the norm in American society. The disillusionment still stings.
"you don't have to call your friends but they have to be interested in you." "you don't have to show other people respect but they have to respect you." "you don't have to help provide for the common good but the common good should be there for you"
I call this ignorance of the laws of spiritual/social physics - people are ignoring that every action (ignoring friends, being disrespectful, not making personal sacrifice) has an equal and opposite reaction
It's wild to me as a HS teacher, I am one of very few who clearly communicate to kids that if I'm not earning their respect, they are not obligated to give it. It's a corollary somehow - because teachers show their students almost no respect/trust but expect it by default, so the model is not great.
It also feels like people refuse to feel any sort of accountability for their actions and twist any sort of accountability into a BS argument about government overreach. Congestion pricing, camera enforcement of speed limits, generally acknowledging uber eats is a luxury.
I feel like this is heavily the result of increasingly atomized culture by the internet, economic/work structures, needing cars to go places, collapsing social institutions, etc. (that was only accelerated by the pandemic). Feeling obligated to people requires actually being present/around them
I think it goes hand in hand with an economy that seems to want all the benefits of having an ultra productive reliable labor force without providing the benefits too
my most liberal "friend" told me, of the overly-chatty hygienist at our dentist, "i just tell her i don't want her to talk." when i replied with shock, she said "you're paying for a service, you should get what you want." like, okay, but also, that hygienist is ... a human being? with ... feelings?
same friend also told me "i don't have the emotional bandwidth for this right now" when i expressed a fear, on a group text thread, for the safety of one of my children. simply not replying was always an option! but she chose to weaponize that therapy-sounding language. we're no longer friends. 😔
I had one dental hygienist who had Fox on all the time and talked politics while cleaning my teeth. I didn’t appreciate that and felt like she was holding me hostage to her political views. In general it’s better to leave politics out of service/business interactions.
According to some folks you’re “demanding emotional labor” if you expect ppl to be kind and polite to others…yet the same folks will claim that ppl are “toxic and abusive” if others are not kind and polite to THEM.
- beliefs they glean from social media “mental health content”
I don't know if I want that. Social responsibility connects you to other human beings and grounds your brain in a set of more concrete relationships. The obverse example is the extremely wealthy person who exists outside of normal social bounds and slowly goes insane.
I think we're seeing a rejection of society as a concept across the entire political spectrum, unfortunately. Sometimes justifiably (if you've been savaged by modern civil society), but mostly as a tantrum or a way of satisfying an intense modern hedonism.
It's sprt of a loop. It both reflects existing opinion and forms new opinion for people who don't have much of an opinion about how they're supposed to relate to society. They then go on to reflect their own anti-social opinions via social media, and so on.
I just blocked a woman when she directly refused the idea of working class solidarity in favor of being able to complain righteously and in a derailing manner.
Perhaps this malaise is the natural consequence of a nation being told for decades that government is awful, following the rules is for suckers, greed is good, you are the only one who can look after you, and that you can pull yourself up by your own bootstraps?
“Love thy neighbor in an abstract way but not if it requires action or irl kindness and please see Appendix A for a list of neighbors you don’t have to love”
I guess that depends on our definition of “worst.” A girl I knew in college said she knew her bf was a keeper because he held her braid out of the way when she was vomiting from severe food poisoning. That seems a fine “worst”. If it’s glossed as “when I’m having a narcissistic wrong rock…
….meltdown” maybe mot so much. I does seem like lot of people on the ‘net either think this, or have some kind of dumb idea that this is done kind of worthwhile “test”, as if life doesn’t give you enough BS already.
It just seems like the Prisoner's Dilemma keeps popping up everywhere these days - "the more you take for yourself, the better you do personally" vs. "the more everyone contributes, the better everyone does", with a majority who choose the former giving up on the idea doing better with the latter.
There are corners of Reddit where people are *extremely* speedy to tell people to permanently cut off anybody who doesn’t do absolutely everything exactly the way they want. There’s a fantasy of friends and family where everybody does whatever you say and you do only what you feel like doing.
That’s not to say some people should not be dumped — they should! But I see the same thing you’re talking about phrased in the language of toxicity and therapy and so forth.
Yeah I think most of the romantic relationships where people suggest dumping really do need to be dumped, but they will jump to dumping family so quick in a way that will probably make a lot of people lives worse
Not just Reddit, all social media. I honestly think it was an op - encourage people to break social ties with their families and friends and they’ll be more vulnerable to outside influence. The people who change your mind are the ones you are close to.
The people in that Reddit remind me of my narcissist mom, who permanently cut of all support, aid, compassion, empathy, and human decency to any who do not worship her and obey her every whim, but she refuses to go no contact, she needs total contact and total control and domination over others.
My mom also wants complete and total unquestioning support, but she also never wants nor needs to give anything in return, because she does not deem herself entitled to aid her own children.
It is normal behavior in control freak styled narcissism, which the right-wing encourages to men and mothers.
Yes! I have seen this attitude pervasive on TikTok as well. There are so many people promoting this idea of cutting everyone out of their life who doesn't align with them perfectly.
Right. I absolutely support the idea that you can cut off people who are doing you harm. But there’s a way certain people talk about “going no contact” as if it’s a very casual part of handling relatively ordinary conflict that comes from people having different habits and preferences.
Corollary to that is people self-diagnosing mental health disorders to support the idea that everyone owes them special treatment as a way to avoid all discomfort and responsibility. Social media seems to spread it.
It reminds me of the discussion about boundaries that bubbles up regularly within communities here that boils down to "Your discomfort is not automatically someone else's problem to fix." Sometimes it is, though many times it's yours to fix. Knowing when to identify that is a key skill to have.
I think a lot of this comes from the backlash against obligation culture going too far. Obligation culture is ALSO bad taken to extremes, but there’s a healthy middle ground in “you don’t owe your time and energy to specific individuals just because they want it/they’re related to you/etc but (1/2)
(2/2) you DO owe it to society to contribute your fair share toward keeping society functioning-“which includes things like paying taxes, “-and you owe reciprocity to the individuals you choose to have close relationships with” which includes helping your friends move sometimes.
A lot of people are justifiably sick of being taken advantage of by people who invoke the idea that they have an “obligation” to do something for that specific other person, and instead of learning to set healthy interpersonal boundaries, knee-jerk into “I’m gonna aggressively refuse to help anyone”
There are other cultural factors at play but I do think part of this is growing up feeling, frankly, like other people and institutions are just there to take from you and you get nothing back.
I think the reason people feel this way is that is what they are being told to believe by a slick marketing campaign funded by corporate interests that want to own public services.
The declining faith in social systems isn't *unfounded*, its just a really pernicious trap because it leads to a situation where people want to see the goods *before* they'll start rebuilding any of the trust necessary to pay for them.
"Higher taxes for better roads, schools and parks" only works if you believe that better roads, schools and parks are even possible and a lot of people have lived for a long time watching everything public decay around them.
"You never have to apologize for the hurtful things you say or do (because you are a Trauma Survivor), but everyone has to apologize to you (because other people's trauma isn't relevant)"
In my lifetime, we've gone from Kennedy's inspirational "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country" to the Trump-inspired "Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country can do for you."
I really feel like this is the natural progression of how America has been going since the Civil Rights Act passed in the 60s, fueled by Reagan in the 80s and made real by Trump in 2016, with a bit of social media algorithmic poisoning to boot.
Every ragged step towards equality for minorities or for children or LGTBQIA+ people or poor people or *anything* has been met with an equal and opposite correction by well off white people. Every time. You can set you watch to it at this point.
Yeah, pretty much--"I'm not going to participate in society unless it validates my belief that I'm a superior type of person to the unwashed/deviant/subaltern"
I think what makes me so angry about this kind of thinking is that the values being rejected are deeply conservative. My dad and I used to go to these Catholic men’s group meetings. What did we talk about? Not “manliness,” not how to get swole, or make money. It was all about service to others.
I don’t miss all the stuffy oppressiveness of organized religion, but it definitely provided, at least in some circles, a positive framework for masculinity, and a deep and rigorous one at that.
I recently read FIRE WEATHER by John Vaillant (good book) about the Fort MacMurray fire, and these firefighters who waded into inferno monster conditions all spoke, later, of this idea of being of service, of helping, of protecting. The antithesis of Trump and his inner/outer circle.
my (currently estranged by my choice) brother telling my aunt early in COVID that he wasn’t responsible for the health of others and thus wasn’t publicly masking.
A truly great society starts with the civic piety of all of its participants and understanding by them that their actions are both the model of and will become the end result of what they seek.
In Chicago, my home city, the right wing mostly white folks who live up north or in the southwest side want to pay no property tax, no sales tax, no income tax, no wealth tax. But they expect city run public services to be top notch. It’s a cognitive dissonance that allows them to antagonize…
It allows them to antagonize and villainize left wing organizations in the city who, for all their numerous faults, are actually fighting for higher taxes on the wealthy and shared responsibility for public services
Atlanta has this problem. All the white folks north of Buckhead want the tax money that comes with the City of Atlanta but not public transportation for fear of undesirables having easy access
I do wonder if there’s sometimes a connection between this & the constantly increasing cognitive burden of a scam-based economy. There are so many exploitative demands on people’s time, energy, & money that they can’t opt out of - the fatigue & irritation of that can spill over to reachable targets.
Though (on a higher order) things are built like that because of a cultural sense of entitlement to extractive greed, so I guess it’s ultimately a self-perpetuating death spiral
It’s honestly hard for me to discount impact of Trump just being this living embodiment of “I’m going to get mine and don’t owe anyone anything” and the example he has been setting for 8 years
Which def ties back to the scam culture b/c he’s like scammer in chief
We, as the working class, owe no more than is already taken from us. Not only in taxes but especially in the value of our labor that is ravaged by the wealthy.
We give enough. It should be their turn.
That chart says it all. America used to do a far better job of sharing the wealth. Now we create billionaire oligarchs who want to cut taxes even more. It should not take a genius IQ to see what has been going on since Reagan sold people on the dumbfuckery of trickle down economics.
We live in an economic age and are all independent agents. Though neo liberalism helped legitimize this idea it's origins are older, perhaps much older, in Vienna.
I think this may be an overblown reaction to our relation to the ruling class in recent history - the social contract has seen some seriously diminishing returns the last 50 year's, and meaningful engagement as citizens barely exists unless you're rich.
It's wild to me how this intersects with the nostalgia for when the USA was "great;" e.g. during WWII people had to use ration stamps to buy butter.. I can't imagine the tantrums something like this would spark today, especially among the people pining for the good old days.
No, I don't! I come from a long line of marines, who do what's necessary with no expectation of a thanks. Fortunately for me, that chain was broken because my Pa is a Vietnam vet who forbid me from joining. So, while I don't see this in my home I share your frustration with it everywhere else.
interesting thing is you can see this on both the left and the right. conservatives talk a big game about the importance of "social cohesion", but they will still take any chance they get to undermine it.
I would argue that a huge shift in the right within the last 25 years is their abandonment of their residual beliefs in obligation and an embrace of ‘I do what I want’ moral nihilism in all things. Restricting other people’s freedom is increasingly seen as freedom to oppress not imposing obligations
“Your body my choice” and “protect the unborn” may support the same policies and both be rooted in misogyny but they have different overall attitudes behind them.
Obligations are for other people. Trumpism is the ultimate embodiment of a babyish attitude pervading much of culture: *you* must serve me and take care of me on demand, I needn't pay for it or depend on your consent.
Obligation is inherently against the idea that it's all about oneself, which is what our culture teaches and has taught more or less since the 1950s. It's always about *my* wants, *my* desires, *my* choices at the expense of everyone else. This is not a recipe for the common good, but its abolition.
“My grandmother said hello how are you to me and I responded that I do not appreciate people asking me these questions, now my family won’t come to my dog’s birthday party; am I the asshole??”
It's the upshot of coming from nothing—the vacuum allowed us to imagine a wildly different future for ourselves, but we lack the shared peasant-suffering history that allows older, more homogenous countries to compel solidarity.
"We don’t pay as many formal taxes as they (Europe) do, but when you bring in payments we are compelled to pay and that are deducted straight out of our paychecks just like taxes are, it really does not look that much different, at least as far as labor taxes are concerned."
Unfortunately, we may be about to experience collective suffering. It will be on a global scale if Trump really presses the "nuke the world's largest economy" button.
It feels like something that should have a term of art.
It's NIMBY when there's objection to new housing development or infra. It's capitalism and greed when they'd pave your favorite community theater to do it.
There is a belief that the government can do socialism in a society without a communitarian ethic. It is, strangely, a mirror of conservative belief that the government is some alien entity imposing on the people instead of a creature of it.
I refused to believe when I heard for the first time that voting in the US is not mandatory. No wonder things are as they are right now, with all the sane moderates staying at home and only the loonies and useful idiots coming out to vote.
This is everyone's de facto belief. But when spoken it's always framed in the form of "We should have this form of society that's totally fair objectively and just turns out by chance to exempt my personal duty."
Makes me think a little about fare evasion discourse. Whether or not you think the fare is equitable, it’s a big part of keeping the transit system working. Public goods require social trust and civic engagement to work, so it would be counterproductive to defend behaviors that undermine them.
To push back on this, I don't think public goods need to necessarily be funded by their own use (in fact the idea that a public service that doesn't "pay for itself" isn't worth having is how right wing forces have disrupted library funding for example)
My argument wasn’t so much that public goods need to be funded by use so much as that to the extent they are, those who advocate for that public good shouldn’t support shirking that obligation as a form of protest. I just don’t really differentiate between fare evasion and tax evasion here.
I don't *really* want to get into it bc I think this argument is just semantic, but one big difference btwn fare and tax evasion is that richer ppl pay more taxes and ppl who don't make very much money sometimes get a tax return — I'd wager that fare evaders often do it out of a kind of "necessity"
one thing i think about as far as what the tax base needs to be for robust public services is how much it takes to run a single institution. our neighborhood k-8 school costs about $12m/yr
I could be wrong and feel free to correct me, and speaking only as an American, but I figured we have all the money and resources available already. All we gotta do is shuffle some spending around, I mean, look at the damn defense budget.
look, I just wanted atomized low-trust socialism in my big, cheap house that only goes up in value. we could have this if Dems finally ran someone who knew how to talk to the white working class.
The Left was far worse about it than mainstream voters. In CA my organization helped enroll people some of whom never had insurance. The affordability and gratitude were palpable. Only the snotty RW and LW sneered at it.
I love the way the left wants to re-nationalise some industries but have no inclination to pay for it
I think the definition of that is theft!
And universal benefits like higher pensions paid for by the mega rich, which wouldn't produce enough year on year
"I want my Medicare. I want my Social Security. I want sales tax waived on my food. I want a 17.5% or less marginal income tax rate. After all my deductions. Including the mortgage interest deduction on my big-ass house. I want a massive military and good roads. Oh, and a pony! I want a pony!"
"The government needs to make my life have meaning and purpose. It needs to make sure i can find the woman I WANT. And the damn gov needs to stay out of our private lives and stop telling us how to live."
which is probably largely bc cost of living is already so expensive and the ways taxes are handled feels unfair & onerous bc of how capitalism & government have been run for generations, no one imagines fairness or generosity as conceivable possible outcomes
I was part of DSoc for years back in the 70s. Todays' self styled Dem Socialists do nothing, demand free stuff all the time. They all detest working people and their culture, and think they're messiahs without having a clue how work is done. Not one bit of policy ever, but lots of pontificating.
Of course it is, but the cosplay "socialists" embrace that way of life while advocating for revolution etc. They don't get, because they don't read, that come a real revolution, they're kulaks. They also think they'll stream the bloodshed online, craft beer in hand.
But I do better with short works. I’ve been frustrated by these people cause they lack the solidarity and compromised positions required for power and goal attainment under a democracy.
I mean it won’t really matter post-AI when all you need is basic income and bots doing everything. Unfortunately we won’t have that either because asking people to do the bare minimum of not voting for the evil fascists is apparently too high a bar
A lot of people also seem to think the 2 they 'voluntarily' pay (everyone needs healthcare so hardly voluntary) for our current healthcare system is smaller than the 1 they'd be forced to pay through taxes
"but who will pay for it?" they say, simultaneously refusing to ask who will pay for the tax cuts billionaires and their corporations receive year after year
You can’t have nice things if you are not willing to pay for it. And sometimes, wealthier people have to pay for nice things for poorer people. You don’t like seeing homeless people? Then you have to fund shelters, affordable housing, and job training programs.
It's always been that way. The difference between the left and right is that the left thinks if they have it, everybody should, and the right thinks if they have it, nobody else should. In their minds, they "earned it," and sharing reminds them it's a digital good.
They would rather not have any of it if brown people will benefit as well. Urban planning, public transport, public schools were all fine as long as segregation and Jim crow were around.
Yeah we’re going to have to tax everyone, but taxing larger personal concentrations of capital higher so they can be obliterated is necessary to fulfill vital policy and governance goals.
All I want is to nostalgically go back to the tax brackets of the 1950s/1960s. Isn’t that what all the republicans want? To go back to the good old days?
Very much in the "Necessary but not sufficient" category of things we need for a stable social democracy. Even if we took all of Elon's wealth, thats barely 20% of 1 year of Federal spending. Which is an insane amount for him to have, but only goes so far
Everyone will have to pay more upfront cost but far less on backend costs. Except billionaires, who will be wiped from existence as a functional entity
Like combine that with reduced defense spending (1-2% honestly) and yeah, maybe my tax burden will double, but I’m cool with that for all the good shit we can do as a result
The ground may have shifted since but I remember when they tried to scaremonger about raising minimum wage with “YOUR PIZZA WILL COST 14 CENTS MORE!” and collectively society was like “yeah that seems fine”
People who are born into a system that treats them well have a hard time believing that better things are possible. Capitalism has been around for a blink of our species' eye but somehow it's taken as both the default and the optimum.
the word “just” has a variety of meanings. “we can just tax billionaires” means “if we merely add that to our existing repertoire of tricks”, for example, not “if we throw everything out and only tax billionaires”
I think of universal healthcare costs coming out my paycheck like I do a 401k. It’s not a tax, it’s an investment in my future. And I’ll be able to afford it (easily) since the insurance mafia is no longer shaking me down for $20k a year.
We need to tax billionaires a lot more. And also we have to raise taxes on the middle class if we want a social democracy. "Just" raising taxes on billionaires while leaving everything else as is will not raise sufficient funds.
I’ve tried explaining to these folks that billionaires are a finite resource. Like if we seized Jeff Bezos’ entire net worth, it would pay for about one month of universal healthcare in the U.S.
I think we should try taxing billionaires and see what it funds, *before* raising taxes on the people who are already struggling.
But, we can reevaluate that & phase in more social services as we increase funding revenue for them over a few years, it doesn’t all have to happen perfectly at once.
Yet the share of tax revenues paid by the top 1% went… up. How did that happen? Hey maybe those mythical super high tax rates of the 60s weren’t actually that high once you account for all the deductions?
I wonder how they built a functional social democracy in the 1930-60s that created such prosperity for so many by taxing the wealthy and corporations exponentially higher rates than today
Depends on what country you are talking about because the US has never been a social democracy and countries that are did this and also increased taxes on the middle class by a lot.
I'm not sure its replicable. to get 1955 you first had to pass through 1914, 1916. 1919, 1922, 1929, 1933, 1939, and 1945, then of course 1948 so it may not have been worth it unless you were born in 1949.
Yeah I mean major safety net expansions, electoral reforms, and social reorganizations sometimes emerge out of utter catastrophes. And with the US's system of veto points the catastrophe would have to be great indeed.
We absolutely need to tax the crap out of billionaires because they are destroying our democracy. And! you can do good things short of social democracy. the ARPA CTC expansion was ~110 billion/year and cut child poverty by ~40 percent. That is not an enormous expenditure.
I feel like any policy changes should start this way to get everyone on board and then slowly build in the “ok everybody contributes” part as overall QOL is improved
Or my favorite....we can cut military spending!. Guys we spend 3.5 percent of GDP on the military and 18 percent on the safety net. Germany (not even as far as we'd like to go) is 2 and 25 percent. The math don't work.
It is kinda funny that most Americans, or at least most left of center Americans, will say the military budget is too high, but would be VERY UPSET if they saw conflict on their phone or shipping lanes would be disrupted for any reason anywhere.
I mean: cut military, police, and prison spend to Scandinavian levels, you're at over half a trillion / year in savings. That's not enough to recreate their safety net, but it's enough to fund *large* demonstration programs to show government can help people rather than traumatize them.
I should be clear that there are big impactful things we could do that fall short of a Scandinavian safety net. We could do the ARPA CTC expansion for ~110 billion/year. And a major UI expansion + Job Seekers Allowance or HC as an entitlement for around that much too.
Not 100% solid on the math, but I argued with my siblings that cutting DoD fraud & waste would free up a TON of $$ for the things they wanted, wouldn't come close to cutting DoD budget like many say they want to, and we would STILL need to spend more on defense. Tough argument to do.
It gets even more fun when we see how embedded the MIC is into maintaining communities and severe cuts to it would bankrupt entire towns without spending equivalent in the cuts (or perhaps even more spending) in long term investment to help these places.
I'm not saying 'don't cut the military,' just I hope people understand that that action comes with a lot of domestic pain and domestic pain loses in social democracies.
We would have to spend a lot less on the safety net if we didn't have an economy that systematically emisserates people and inflicts externalized costs (including MASSIVE health costs in the form of pollution) on the bottom quartile, all in the name of making the rich richer.
I also wonder how much of the need for a safety net arises from inequality itself: eg. what would otherwise be a living wage job isn’t anymore because ultrarich people have distorted the market for basic necessities (esp housing) so completely.
Only since I became ecologically literate did I realize the extent to which most of our social ills arise from inefficiently maximizing extractive systems.
I don’t think of it as predistribution but as ceasing to pre-emptively impoverish people.
Yes we should do both of those things and also taxes have to go up on most people. It's not in bad faith and I'll ask you to not to assume the worst about me without evidence thank you.
If funding social services could be done by just taxing the wealthiest people in society, Europe would have done so 80 years ago. Not only would only taxing billionaires not provide enough funding, the wealthy are notorious for tax avoidance. Hardly a reliable funding stream.
This is exactly what the New Deal in the US did. They raised taxes and created the most prosperous generation the human race has ever experienced.
Then Nixon changed course and put industry back in charge.
Depends on what you mean by public services. We can do a bunch of good things taxing rich folk (not just billionaires...rich more broadly defined) but if you want Sweden-levels of safety net you won't be able to raise enough revenue that way. Will need broad-based (on most people) taxes.
If we look at the top 5 billionaires in the country, their total assets per the Forbes 2024 billionaire list is something like $0.95 trillion; this would pay for about one year of Medicare at current funding levels.
I work in oil and gas in Canada. Suncor is a huge Canadian oil company with 10,000 employees. They make enough money to pay each of their employees $1 million dollars a year, and still make a profit.
This makes sense considering "then what?", after billionaires are taxed out of existence
Let's make a sustainable plan. Not just "it sounds cool, delicious retribution, benefits me right now but who gives a fk about future gens cuz I got mine."
Right like I dont get the people who are mad about the math here. The fact is we all bave to pay higher taxes. Its like okay maybe I will still be broke (or be slightly more broke) but also I will have healthcare and food and may be able to save for needed items. Thats still a net gain.
Working at a corporation during budget season, there’s invariably talk about shared services & ‘taxes’/funding being like peanut butter; $ is spread out to pay for things needed across the company.
So of course it needs to happen with government.
it doesn’t have to be the income tax though. the income tax can be for clipping the wealth and income distribution. other taxes can finance social democratic benefits, eg VAT. for financing, you need a tax that hits the middle class. for shaping the distribution, you don’t.
if only there was a term for populism that embraced left-wing aesthetics and policies but reacted negatively to actually implementing those policies, instead chosing reactionary individualism with a revolutionary coat of paint.
People took “we are the 99%” sloganeering seriously and literally, now they actually believe everyone can have everything they could possibly want for free if we just soaked the 1%.
This is why we're never getting social democracy in America. It would require raising taxes on middle class people. Even Bernie didn't really discuss this.
That's good it was in his plan. I wish he had talked about that some more. We're gonna need to prep people for tax increases if we ever want universal healthcare/college, etc.
If we're talking about some number of Trump voters, I think they'd much rather be rich. They truly believe that they could be wealthy if 'the other' guy' would stop preventing them.
That's the entire problem for any attempt at their education.
That’s a false dichotomy. We can have a fairer wealthier country without heavy taxation, but successive governments of all stripes have chosen to enlarge government to try to solve problems ( or buy elections ).
The size of the public sector is a massive drag on the economy.
Big problem with trying to do left populism in the States is that tons of normies believe in a completely contradictory worldview. “Goods would be cheaper if we deported immigrants and brought manufacturing back” is something you hear a lot from people and in my experience that worldview-
is held together by the anti-corporate cynicism that is allegedly evidence of a leftist inclination. Chemicals in the food, greedflation, anti-elitism, all that stuff serves to create a belief system where the price of goods is fake and made by corporations rather than being the result of economic-
Yeah, a friend pointed out to me recently that, in a lot of ways, Marxism *won* the intellectual war. The idea that the capital-owning wealthy is a discrete class whose goals are opposed to the other classes is something most people grasp intuitively.
factors. This belief is really problematic for trying to grow the welfare state and even more problematic for trying to achieve some our loftier ambitions on immigration and climate change. Probs a good thing we have so many non-voters in the US actually
They would rather lose thousands in gains if it raised their taxes, even a litte. The contradictions continue undressed, and the issue will continue to compound bois. Either shoulder to shoulder in solidarity or in the trenches of their wars.
Ppl see the issues caused by 50 yrs of right wing policy, they complain & protest, then think voting for an even further 2 the right politician will solve those same issues. It's like taking ex-lax to treat diarrhea. Or treating lung cancer by starting to smoke. It's insane. I just hope ppl wake up.
Yeah basically. Another example is how people want better services but without immigration to provide the workforce, or higher taxes to provide better wage incentives for domestic workers. You can’t square that circle for a lot of people.
Whenever I hear someone say they’re socially liberal but fiscally conservative, it always makes me shake my head.
So, you want tons of things that encourage equity in society; you just want the Tooth Fairy to pay for it. Got it.
There are some (rare) consistent libertarians who want people to be able to do what they want if it’s not hurting anyone (social liberal policy liberal), it then also want a minimal government, financially everyone is on their own.
I don’t think it works well, but it’s not completely dishonest.
I hear that, occasionally. I countered that mindset early by posting a giant “WHAT IF EVERYBODY DID THAT?” sign in the classroom.
It came up again the other day regarding leash laws.
Reasoning: Why are you mad? His dog is behaving very well without a leash.
Rebuttal: *Taps the sign*
$2 says they vote Republican nine times out of ten.
The health of their own pocket book will always come first.
Why should they pay? The wife wants a backyard pool, and private school is expensive. Some mystical being will emerge from somewhere to magnanimously fix all the stuff that’s broken.🙄
Which is what the whole DoorDash thing shows “yes I know this whole thing is based on underpaid gig workers forced to buy their own transportation w no safety net, but you don’t understand how *tired* my white collar spouse and I are at the end of the day, we can’t pick up takeout on the way home”
Keep thinking about this article. A program is universally popular and in high demand fails bc tl nobody wants to pay what it costs. The true legacy of reaganism is hobbling good programs to prove the government can't do them.
people think the reason to tax billionaires is to fund social programs. this is wrong. the reason to tax billionaires is so they don't buy governments. you have to fund social programs by taking everyone.
They need to take the loopholes out of the tax code which billionaires & multimillionaires use to avoid paying taxes. It’s not just the tax rate. They avoid paying taxes by using the loopholes in the tax codes to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.
They benefit the most from government funded infrastructure & investments which is how they became so rich—many like Elon Musk made the majority of their money from taxpayer funded subsidies that funded their businesses.
I think it’s worse than that, people (especially men) want left-wing policy but NOT if it makes them feel or seem less manly and tough. They could probably come around on taxation if only this bit was accounted for
Comments
I suspect the willingness and the policies go hand in hand.
Well that's the core of your problem.
Choosing not to squabble is a form of rebellion.
This isn't sustainable, but people don't care as long as they get a rebate check every year they file state taxes.
It’s the fundamental attribution error all the way down.
Not to be a broken record about Bernie, but his promises were always pie-in-the-sky fantasyland stuff, and a lot of people (especially young people) bought it because they thought Bernie winning would mean they would get free stuff without work for the rest of their lives.
"I support universal healthcare. But I don't want to be paying for [prisoners/immigrants/those people/those services]."
taking millions in kickbacks for (wrongfully, egregiously) sending juveniles to private detention centers, ruining 1000s of young lives by saddling them w/ criminal records, subjecting them to violence & lifelong psychological damage DEFINITELYshouldn’t have been pardoned
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/14/kids-for-cash-judge-biden-pardon
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2789269
Tl/dr: ppl seem to really hate their kids
They want to be treated fairly and with respect while getting to treat everyone else as slaves. Reagan really gave this line of thought room to breathe
A far cry from "ask not what your country can do for you"
reveals this,
and how we see less of one aspect of law in English Words past 1600s, roughly
well that is the problem / impasse
• pleasure is the value we experience and like, when we do not have to sacrifice anything. “Free feeling energy”
• enjoyment is the value we experience when we enjoy sacrifice itself, for the sacrifice changes something over time, space, or the other.
*unsacrificed and immediate
**the thing we sacrifice to get the other thing
We need to love the places we live in to make them better
…for the in-group, anyway. The out-group has responsibilities, of course.
“I want Medicare for All to cover my ICU hospitalization for Covid pneumonia!”
- beliefs they glean from social media “mental health content”
I just recognize it's impossible
Now I'm no fan of horseshoe theory but it's hard not to see the obvious similarities.
It’s not ‘transactional’ that your romantic partner expect you to actually be kind to them
And it made me miserable. But I tried to live by suspecting everybody of falsehood & malice.
And in the end i had to stop it cold & go back to Girl Scout virtues.
We are a selfish, greedy people.
It is normal behavior in control freak styled narcissism, which the right-wing encourages to men and mothers.
There's really nothing to it.
I simply tell you what to do
And you do it!"
-Shel Silverstein
https://youtu.be/gcKqAhLeM-4?si=svh8OscAVHRZlQ5N
Which def ties back to the scam culture b/c he’s like scammer in chief
We give enough. It should be their turn.
I'm not saying it's a *good* American cultural value, but it's definitely an American cultural value.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ig3pcF-M4LI
For example,
When they're ideologically opposed, they're "banned"
When they're ideologically aligned, they're "censored"
It seems the only difference in common usage is whether you agree with the decision.
It's NIMBY when there's objection to new housing development or infra. It's capitalism and greed when they'd pave your favorite community theater to do it.
Anything you don't like is "woke".
And so on with so many of these accusations.
It's why the obvious solution to the deficit never comes up.
We don't do it because a poor person might eat.
the trickle-down-cynicism effect of decades of trickle-down-economics
I think the definition of that is theft!
And universal benefits like higher pensions paid for by the mega rich, which wouldn't produce enough year on year
*offers to learn more*
But I do better with short works. I’ve been frustrated by these people cause they lack the solidarity and compromised positions required for power and goal attainment under a democracy.
Im on SSI… government is important
No one wants anything but “BURN IT
ALL DOWN.”
No we can't. I mean we should but you can't build a social democracy that way. Sorry you are going to have to chip in and pay up.
ok.
"not like that."
But, we can reevaluate that & phase in more social services as we increase funding revenue for them over a few years, it doesn’t all have to happen perfectly at once.
While we’re at it we can cut the military budget before raising taxes on poor people, too.
🤔🤔🤔
That will anger the hawks in the party who also side with Trump.
It's impossible to cut lots of military waste (except so called 'woke' stuff) while whining wanting to make the military 'strong' again.
Iirc Medicare is about half of this spending, but the point holds.
The problem is it isn’t just the rich who have to pay more tax.
always good finding someone i enjoyed following on the Other Site
Apples/Oranges
I don’t think of it as predistribution but as ceasing to pre-emptively impoverish people.
We can AND SHOULD tax billionaires more.
We can AND SHOULD reduce military spending, much is wasteful anyway.
Will we reach nirvana? Maybe not, but we may at least be able to see it from where we get to
Your absolutism is easy to see thru
https://bsky.app/profile/socio-steve.bsky.social/post/3lf3p3zahtk2t
Single payer has an deflationary bias because it just replaces bank lending & saves money at the same time.
Take M4All.
Taxes would go up, but premiums/copays/out of pocket will go way down, leading to net savings for most.
Businesses will save TONS on HR staff reductions, leading to savings at the till.
Everybody wins.
But we can't have it.
Why?
Framing.
But believing that billionaires are untouchable is how you build an authoritarian oligarchy.
Why do you believe we can't pay for public services by diverting funds from the 1%?
Then Nixon changed course and put industry back in charge.
Let's make a sustainable plan. Not just "it sounds cool, delicious retribution, benefits me right now but who gives a fk about future gens cuz I got mine."
I don't even have kids but I still care
look at my leftists dawg, we aint ever materially improving anyones lives.
Urban density has a big impact on the cost of providing services but is often completely forgotten in policy discussions.
So of course it needs to happen with government.
That coupled with the out in the open purchasing of power post-Citizens United ruling, and yeah people want a functioning society but don't trust govt
That's the entire problem for any attempt at their education.
The size of the public sector is a massive drag on the economy.
Personal observation?
Some unlinked polling?
Nothing at all?
"Increasingly obvious" and "a lot of people" are Trumpian rhetorical devices.
How do I know? Well, "some people are talking"
Fucking read
So, you want tons of things that encourage equity in society; you just want the Tooth Fairy to pay for it. Got it.
I don’t think it works well, but it’s not completely dishonest.
It came up again the other day regarding leash laws.
Reasoning: Why are you mad? His dog is behaving very well without a leash.
Rebuttal: *Taps the sign*
The health of their own pocket book will always come first.
Why should they pay? The wife wants a backyard pool, and private school is expensive. Some mystical being will emerge from somewhere to magnanimously fix all the stuff that’s broken.🙄
The top 10% of earners pay about 75% of total Federal taxes, by the way.
And back up your numbers?
The American aversion to both personal and communal responsibility is kinda amusing and bemusing at the same time.