Bernie Sanders is who you seek. He's the only one with a plan to help lower middle class and poor America. Clinton and Doucebag could give a rat's ass about that demographic.
This country isn't about left and right anymore, it's about rich and poor. The problem is that the conservatives keep protecting the rich from the taxes they owe, whether they know it or not. I've never understood how somebody making less than $40K actually goes along with the idea of tax cuts for the wealthy. It doesn't get any dumber than that. To their credit, the conservatives have used that "welfare case" angle very well over the years. But the more people are falling into that category, the less effective it will be.
And we don't have time to be "nice" about politics anymore. Now you have a jackass in Trump stirring up all the racial shit, and we really have a tinderbox. Should be an interesting fall.
Originally Posted by: DakotaT
Problem is,Troy, Sanders' is an
idiotic plan. It simply won't do anything but make the situation worse than ever. You do realize that wealth is mobile, especially for those with a great deal of it, right? Sure, ultimately, you can appropriate the Trump Tower and other pieces of real estate if you want, but that'll be a drop in the bucket compared to the portable wealth that can flee the country as easily as the drug lords can get cocaine past the border going in the other direction.
You'll still have a bunch of "millionaires" to soak, but aside from the occasional real estate baron like Donald Trump, you won't get much more wealth from the billionaires to share around. And most of the "millionaires" will be successful small businessmen with 50 employees or less. Or retired farmers.
The going rate for the bottom end of Iowa farmland right now is probably about $5k, which means a million dollars will get you a 200-acre farm; and it's pretty darn hard to support a family on 200 acres even with the best Iowa land. So, if the sources of capital go offshore to avoid Bernie's revenuers, and Bernie's revenuers can't keep poor people out and rich people in, even with the likely ratcheting up of border control expenditures and reducing even more civil liberties, exactly how is the "common man" with a great idea going to finance that idea?
Forget about the fact that socialism has been shown not to work again and again. Forget about the fact that the reason most of Western Europe has been bankrupt for a couple decades is their failed experiments in "social democracy," "incomes policies (i.e., redistribution and regulation)", etc.
Forget about the fact that the rich people's wealth is not yours or mine or Bernie Sanders. It's theirs.
Just run the numbers and you'll see that actual re-distribution of the 1% in an way that actually keeps productivity net of administration costs the same (much less allows it to increase).
Especially if you ask yourself why it is that people who haven't had an entrepreneurial idea equivalent to your bee business in their life manage to leave their home states for a career of "public service" as an elected official inside the beltway, a place with one of the highest average costs of living in the entire country, and retire with wealth in seven or eight figures?
I have no doubt that there are lots of worthless, unproductive people among the one-percenters (including the two remaining Democrats and one remaining Republican candidate), people whose wealth if it were all appropriated and redistributed today would have no negative effect on the economy. And (apart from the small problem that taxation is theft) I have no problem with you taking all of the money away from the Donald and Paris Hilton and Tom Cruise.
The problem is, apart from the attention-demanding conspicuous idiots, it's really hard to tell which individuals among the 1% are worthless idiots and which are people whose entrepreneurship and hard work has quietly created 10 or 100 or 1000 jobs and the sustained growth rate that made America the richest country in the world. People who will be at least as likely to take their entrepreneurship and their hard work and their jobs to some other place outside our borders.
Oh, and even if you and Bernie were somehow able to separate the entrepreneurial from the worthless among the wealthy, and so concentrated your appropriation/re-distribution/taxing efforts, you'll still fail.
Why? Because the idiots can still afford to pay top legal wages and will sue in your liberal courts complaining about discrimination and equal protection and due process and all the rest. And so instead of the money going to the "poor" or the 99%, you'll just replace entrepreneurs with rich (and otherwise useless) $2,500/hour lawyers in the new 1%.
Personally, I could care less about whether you get your wish and Bernie becomes the next President. To my mind, any of the Remaining Three (and the 565 on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue that serve with them) will supervise an economic and moral disaster for the United States. The only difference is going to be the particulars of the disaster.
So, go ahead and have fun, Troy or anyone who thinks one of the Three Clowns is better than the other two. Have fun, anyone who thinks that we'd be better off with one of the three than with an empty Oval Office for awhile.
Me, I'm going to celebrate the fact that somehow, the American experiment, managed to outlast over two centuries of attempts by communism, socialism, populism, Progressive-ism, social democracy, income taxation, the regulatory state, Democrats, and Republicans to replace it before finally expiring at the hands of Know-Nothings and nobodies like Obama, Bernie, Billary, the Donald, the Affordable Care Act, the LGBT revolution, and almost all of those on the SCOTUS in the last fifty years.
And perhaps lament the fact that the failures of our godforsaken educational system over the last three generations means we simply can't find rich and powerful guys the equivalent of Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin, or poor yet brilliant entrepreneurial guys, to save ourselves from ourselves.
The Experiment is over. To steal a phrase from a good friend of mine, at this point, we're just re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Or to steal another metaphor, trying to put lipstick on a corpse.
And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
Romans 12:2 (NKJV)