Fuck high tax rates. The government should stay out of things not specified in the constitution. Cut government spending and all the fucking free shit giveaways. Close the border and deport ALL illegals. You cannot have open borders AND a welfare state without destroying the country. (Their plan) The war on poverty has done nothing but create more poverty by killing the nuclear family.
$100k- 200k per year was a good salary back in the 60’s but now, due to inflation, it is middle management and technical professions. I will not live my life and bust my ass for the sole benefit of society. I work for my family’s benefit. I volunteer to help my community. Take my ability to benefit my family away from me and then I won’t do fuck all. I would burn my shit to the ground before I will let it be given to someone who didn’t earn it. I am not the only who believes this way. WHO IS JOHN GALT?
The current term is “quiet quitting” and it’s going on all over. Though it would have been nice for some guy named Galt to walk into my office and give me (and a few million others) The Talk, we know the powers that be would track him down and deal. But with this rash of quiet quitting, there’s no central figure. The current administration and their lackeys have demoralized workers to the point that they just leave.
The question now is, once the nation is lying in ruin, will the key workers somehow get re-moralized and put things back together? I somehow doubt it.
And as that is going on, vax damage will become public knowledge, and MSM will blame Trump for operation warp speed, complete with pharma coming out and stating, he pushed them to bypass safety and protocol testing.
This is a pretty good scenario. It’s a slightly complex sequence of events to pull off as a practical plan, but at least it somehow makes sense. As a back-up plan, they can let Trump win and shank the economy during the lame duck months.
Who could this dark horse Democrat be? I have no idea. The Democrats don’t seem to have any up-and-comers. Plenty of bizarre radicals, but very few 40-50-ish moderates.
I can’t “quiet quit”. I am not built that way. I will keep busting my ass up until I see the situation has no good outcome then I will just decide to stop and go become a hermit. I have my hermit location all picked out.
Interestingly, most of my friends who are still in the military are making their exit plans now. They are either dropping retirement paperwork or making plans to get out after this enlistment. People know in their gut something big is coming and are making plans.
This is my first thought as well. If only you’ll keep us in power, we can do this great thing you want. And then they won’t, of course. It’s Lucy holding the football for the Charlie Brown voters yet again. Raise the minimum wage! Codify Roe vs Wade! Medicare for all! End the carried-interest loophole! Etc.
Republicans do this as well, but it seems more consistent and blatant from the Dems.
Similar thoughts when I saw that Biden agreed to a debate. It scared me…because it means they know for sure either Trump or Biden won’t be around to actually do it.
A few thoughts re Chris’s question " What exactly were they trying to accomplish or signal here?”
Perhaps it is more provocation than policy …
Or there is another power base in the wings to replace those apparently getting the boot…
Or it’s a feint, meant to distract from something else …
Or, Team B. are True Believers, Ideologues who are convinced doing the ‘right thing’
Somehow, it has become more and more popular for people to think they “deserve” to live well without having to work hard or create actual value. It is an evil thing.
Here is another possibility. Clearly Biden is aging and it’s pretty obvious for the world he is not the one in charge. What if they want to replace him with say Newsom or someone else. This tax proposal would give his masters a huge reason as well as the support needed to spontaneously put someone else on the ballot.
The only thing you’ve done with that reply is make an ass out of yourself with that angry rant and you would have been better served stepping away from the keyboard.
There was no mention from me of globalism/open boarders being a good thing - I am totally against open boarders - so why you brought that up i would have no idea.
The fact of the matter was that taxes were far higher before - and so chris’s insinuation that taxes were super low until more recently is wrong and he should have compared tax rates over years. To be credible, you have to properly represent things and with marginal income tax rates, and he didn’t.
By the time people got up to 60%+ their incomes were high for the time considering inflation/costs and the taxes were and still are bracketed → so it was only a small chunk that was very heavily taxed.
I was merely suggesting that taxation is not a bad thing if the money is used responsibly to benefit the country and is necessary to deal with energy resource depletion issues if you want to have an electricity grid and be able to get around the country. Private sector will not invest without a fast enough return on investment.
You have nuclear power as an artifact of the manhattan project, a government project. (if only they went straight for developing civilian nuclear power and didn’t develop nuke weapons that no one should have)
Oddly enough you never mention military spending - aka blowing tax dollars and borrowing murdering people over-seas. But sensible safety net is evil even though more federal tax $$ have been used to start unnecessary wars. Bush blew more than 1 trillion on iraq alone.
Which means it’s entirely ideological and has nothing to do with reality.
The funny thing is if these extreme libertarians got sick, couldn’t work, had no other option would be using ssi-d or other form of welfare and medicaid rather than starve or die. Think that sort of stuff only happens to “other”, it is their fault and can’t happen to them when it can happen to anyone.
They drive on roads built with public tax $$ too - driving is one of the most subsidized activities on earth.
This is not at all what a well functioning safety net is supposed to be about - being lazy and living off of others.
It is to give a second chance, temporarily getting a hand-up and get stabilized and be able to lift self out of poverty.
It is also about preventing homelessness, starvation and death for anyone who can’t work.
Evidently the programs have been poorly designed especially perpetuating a cycle of poverty - I think if people should lose their assistance if they have children when on it - doing that is deplorable.
Too bad governments want a cycle of dependence to control people, otherwise there would have been reform a long time ago.
Fourth possibility: taxation of the rich addresses inequality. I would like to believe that somebody in power here actually cares about that.
I don’t trust any US politicians but who’s in power now is not necessarily the global north. Who is calling the shots here is unclear: the internationalists, the sustainable goals bunch, the Mckinsey/WEF types, the really rich people on a yacht somewhere who belong to no country, the Chinese?
I do not trust that ‘their’ goal is benign. And ‘they’ are certainly not smart enough to manage our complex system even though they think they are. In fact, nobody is smart enough to execute The Plan; that’s ecology 101.
As Ursula Leguin writes: “The ends justify the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.” Or as Whitney Webb suggests, everything ends up looking like the movie Brazilia.
Person to person charity is a good thing. State sponsored programs that make you comfortable being poor at whatever it is you are doing is something else entirely.
In a free market society, poverty is created because society doesn’t want to give you money for the value you produce. In a normal world, this would be a signal that you need to do something different.
For the sad few who are fully disabled, with no family, friends able to help them, I do wonder if we are fixing things on the net if we collect taxes so that our conscience need not be pricked over the plight.
If you are able bodied and choose not to work, it’s not my desire to pay taxes so you can stay that way.
Yep, that’s exactly what my link was describing (when Bass was in the Obama WH). I remembered hearing someone back in 2005-06(?) describe the problem of the US approaching a point where the foreign debt interest would grow beyond what could be repaid. (held primarily by China and Saudi Arabia at the time).
Several years later, I remembered hearing that anecdote about killing the US dollar to make the debt worthless. I couldn’t wrap my head around what that would actually entail until things started creaking and popping.