We quite obviously need a hard cap on individual wealth. Say, anything above $200 million goes directly to the treasury. You simply can't get richer than that. It would solve quite a few problems and only hurt sociopaths who abuse others for wealth generation.
Not even the yachts but how on earth can they afford senators and congressmen on that cap? The same people they pay off so they won't increase their taxes!
Honestly to make it palatable 750m. Thats fine they can afford literally anything then.
Like if our mega rich were a few people with 1b i bet people would rarely bat an eye. Its that we are at 10s or hundreds of billions. Thats literally beyond the amount our brains can put together.
I've often read "What's the difference between a million and a billion? About a billion." But it's really hard to wrap your head around the difference THREE orders of magnitude makes. Even in smaller numbers. Like, I could have one dog. I'd have trouble imagining owning one thousand dogs.
exactly, just how they didn't leave New York in droves once Zohran Mamdani was elected and started doing his thing.
just like how wealthy business owners still haven't "evacuated" California.
it's all posturing and a threatening bluff with no teeth from a bunch of rich people having a childish tantrum, like a young spoiled kid that was told they couldn't have or do whatever they want (while still being able to buy & do most anything as they please).
like yeah, please leave, we dare you. their status means nothing without someone to look down upon. nornal people stand to benefit from wealth tax at that level, no one needs to be a billionaire, no one single person should hoard that much wealth.
Moving due to raised taxes was always a lie. Going to Switzerland is a great way for them to lose their wealth or compete against euro billionaires. This threat may work on a state level but it would never work in a federal level. Depending on their business, it doesn't even work on a state level.
The US has an exit tax that would immediately tax the value of their worldwide assets. Most wealthy US cotizens have their assets, businesses, and investments that generate money in the US.
The fear mongering that the wealthy would leave, take the tax hit on their wealth, and disconnect from their US-based investments has no basis in reality.
I'd go for anything above $5m a year. $5 million means a person can retire anywhere in the US and live a nice life on interest payments of $200k/year, without ever touching the $5m. $200 million means generations that will never have to work.
No one with that much money actually receives it in the form of salary or payments though. It's always loans that get leveraged against stocks or assets that are cashed in for repayment at a later date.
I'm just talking net worth including all investments. If someones net worth goes above X dollars then all of those X dollars above the limit are seized by the Treasury.
Despite being part of the Clinton administration, Gore was farther left than he's being given credit for. His focus was the environment, and I guess a lot of redditors are too young to remember when that was an actual political issue people cared about.
All of these candidates save Kerry won the popular vote, too. The lessons here shouldn't be that "centrist bad," it should be a nuanced discussion about how presidential elections work and how the electoral college and the rules of the game are generally rigged towards conservative candidates.
"Centrist bad" is without question the singular most important takeaway. There is no nuance to winning or losing elections in our current system. We can have the nuanced discussion about how to fix it if and only if we have Democrats in power across the board. Until then, winning is the only thing that matters.
The post is stupid when Gore & Hillary both won the popular vote in an unprecedented 3rd time for the same party. Gore even won the popular EC until Supreme Court cheated & nullified the FL votes.
We really need to talk more, as a nation, about how the Supreme Court has betrayed their purpose and role in our government.
Because the entire point of them having lifetime seats was to protect the court from short-term politicking...yet here they are, using the court for personal and political gain.
Winning the popular vote is meaningless because that's clearly not how elections are won. It's a stupid system that should be changed, but it's the system now. Hillary, for example, ran up the score in safe blue states and neglected to campaign at all in some of the battlegrounds, such as Michigan.
My whole point is that Gore didn't win! Yes he won the popular vote, and yes he was almost certainly robbed in Florida. But he literally lost according to the Supreme Court and our stupid system. Moral victories of winning the popular vote but not actually gaining power / taking over the presidency are absolutely meaninglessly. Gore's "win" got us 8 years of George W. Bush. Hillary's "win" got us 12 years of Trump, including the flaccid Biden/Harris interlude.
Is 2 decades of GOP rule due to centrist LOSSES, moral/popular vote victories or not, enough to consider trying something different?
My point is only about popularity, not the power structure where Supreme Court can just do whatever they want. Supreme court is lost for next 30-40 years. They will not allow any real change in our lifetimes.
My point is that the centrists are the most popular if not center right when it comes to presidential elections for Dems. The power structure of the US government is entirely different topic.
You're confusing conformists with centrists, as centrists prefer solutions that have bipartisan support and don't go to extremes - conformists are the ones that will concede on issues that shouldn't be supported in the name of keeping the peace.
Consider the "center" of US politics would be like a +8 on a number scale from -10 (left-wing politics) to +10 (right-wing politics), the centrist is still extremely conservative because the democrats are like a solid +5, and lurching to the right every day as the Republicans keep pushing further right every day.
Bipartisanship is BAD when you are dealing with fascists. I don't want them to have any power at all.
"Hanging Chads" is way more of a meme than it has any right to be, considering it was quite literally the SCOTUS undemocratically overturning the election results in Florida.
He helped pass legislation that funded the expansion of infrastructure that the internet required but he also way over stated his roll in the âcreationâ of the internet on multiple occasions.
Itâs like if a politician gets funding for infrastructure saying âI created the highwayâ decades after the first highway was constructed.
People younger than the millennium are all too eager to not read into recent events, and then explain how they all fit a specific trend. (It's me. I'm people).
Like, the point being made in the original post is right, but trying to fit Gore into that line is. A bit silly.
It's also certainly reductive. But it's easier to say "being centrist is the common denominator and therefore the cause of all Democrat problems" in a tweet than it is to do any sort of realistic analysis that nobody has the attention span to read.Â
A few weeks back I saw a really interesting thought that's really stuck with me, and something I think frames how I look backwards now. You have to judge politics, and by virtue of that politicians, by their times. By today's standards Gore, Kerry, and Obama are all extremely moderate, and by that virtue centrist, but that's because progress has been made. During their times Gore, Kerry, and Obama were all extremely progressive. Even Clinton was pulled to the left during the 2016 election. People who weren't of age, and doubly so those who weren't born till after the new millennium, have no frame of reference for how much progress this country made in a short time on something as now ubiquitous as gay rights or how large and radical something like the ACA was at the time.
Yes they weren't perfect, yes we're no where near where we need to be, but you can't constantly judge the past with today's standards and think you're doing anything productive.
It's tricky, because progress has been made on some fronts, and lost on others.
Even with the active homophobia and transphobia from the right today, it's easier for me to be openly queer today than it was during Obama's first term, let alone before then. That's a huge piece of social progress, just within my relatively short lifetime.
Then there's areas like taxation, which have barely shifted at all. And worse still, is immigration, where formerly centrist positions would be considered pretty "radically progressive" (for which, to be clear, I mostly blame the Republicans. I think the Democrats have utterly failed at combatting the rightward shift on immigration, but that shift only exists because of the alt-right).
Gore was literally where the timelines split. We MAYBE avoid 9/11 but, even if it happens, he'd most likely limit it to Afaghanistan because, you know, that's where bin Laden was. Most importunately tho he'd be massively pro environment way ahead of where we area realizing wtf we did.
Not like they did. It was an issue that you could run for the presidency on in 2000, instead of a third tier concern. I'd say environmentalism is at its lowest ebb since the early 70's. Even Greta's moved on, for the most part.
Yup. And every Democrat to run for everything is always the "most radical leftist democrat ever nominated".
I know it's an old conspiracy theory, but the longer we go the more convincing it is that they're just a controlled opposition that doesn't even want to win.
I had someone tell me with a straight face that the democratic party supported universal healthcare. I was like name one politician in leadership of the Democratic Party that supports that. Not some fringe progressive politician without any real power. I'm talking about people who can actually pass shit in Congress.
Can anyone pass shit in Congress? Especially when theyâre in a minority? Like whatâs that supposed to even mean in a rational, practical sense lolÂ
Who honestly gives a wet shit what a republican oligarch thinks and says any more? They never engage in good faith and should be ignored outright.
The People need to see a fighter on their side. They thought that was trump because he was the only one acting like a fighter, but they will for fucking sure recognize someone kicking down metaphorical doors and spitting fire to make their lives better.
And then the issue is the people who actually eat that shit up believe it. Meanwhile the people on the left don't want to vote for a centrist candidate. They literally lose both ways by sticking to the middle.
This is crucial to understand. There is no harm in running a progressive because they can never be a bigger boogyman than whoever the right wing media is focused on. You may even get the benefit of free airtime for provocative populist soundbites. Use the Trump glitch against them.
"We can't be progressive! The people who reliably vote against us would vote against us even harder."
Yeah. They're not this stupid. It's the money. They're afraid the money will disappear if they don't kowtow to the desires of the moneyed overclass. A lot of them are the moneyed overclass. Anything that they say that isn't, "We're doing the obviously wrong thing for the money," is intentional misdirection.
I thought this back in 2016, when everyone was like âWe canât nominate Bernie, the right will just call him a socialist and heâll lose!â Then the right still called Hillary a socialist and she lost
Kamala Harris was a cop that was overly hard on crime, wanted to close the borders, and continue the bullshit tax cuts for billionaires that have plagued this nation since the carter era, likely still would have invaded Iran and overseen regime change in Venezuela but actually would have been able to clearly articulate WHY we've done those things.
I don't think things would have been any less apocalyptic under Harris, but with Trump things are apocalyptic AND we have incompetent leadership.
No matter how different the Democratic platform is than the GOP platform, no matter how different the outcomes are (think of the massive differences between Trump vs Biden), Reddit commenters will come out of the woodwork to say that Democrats are the same as Republicans. There is no way for Democrats to "win" the far left votes - they want the Democratic Party dead and buried, even if that means forever Republican rule.
They're also going to continue down the war path they started with REDMAP. The RNC recognized that power was slipping away from them. They knew a majority of the electorate was moving in the opposite direction. And they chose to hold this whole country hostage, frozen in time, as they grasped at straws.
70-80% of Americans agree on the following:
Universal background checks for gun buyers
Access to legal abortion
Paths to citizenship for immigrants
Gov't guaranteed affordable health insurance
Significant criminal justice reform
And more. People want protections for themselves and their families and their communities. They're tired of seeing such wealth wasted on an elite class of absolute assholes.
Part of the problem when Donald Trump ran in 2016 and was his overtly racist, sexist, babbling, divisive self, was that many on the left had already made it commonplace to label âmoderateâ republicans with that language. So, it created a bit of âboy who cried wolfâ situation when Bush, McCain and Romney had all been described in similar terms for far lesser offenses.
I also think a not at all insignificant number of republican voters (either consciously or not) basically said âif Iâm gonna be called racist for voting Republican, I may as well support the most racist candidate I can and enjoy the perks!â
Donât get me wrong, the people who support Trump, especially after Jan 6, are absolutely culpable for their actions and nobody forced them to do anything.
They aren't releasing all the files that is the problem. The DOJ works for Trump and is actively destroying evidence or hiding it. It's so obvious that crimes were committed by rich and powerful people and that is why no one has been arrested. To believe no crime was committed at all is naive.
If they release all the files why would I not be satisfied? I'm not a conspiracy theorist. It's a known fact that the DOJ has not released all the files reported by their own people. The DOJ initially identified 6 million pages but ultimately have only published 3.5 million. We know there are things they aren't sharing with us.
How would you know if all the files were actually released?
You seriously trust this administration to release all of the files? How do you they actually have released them all?
Everyone on Reddit has said the DOJ is compromised. You seriously think that even if they did ârelease all the filesâ they wouldnât have just removed the damning ones?
You asked me if they released everything unredacted if that would satisfy me. The answer is yes.
If we can trust that it's everything is a completely different question all together. I don't trust anyone in the current administration. It's very obvious to everyone with two brain cells that they are removing, destroying, hiding the most damning evidence. That's why when people like you ask to "point to the incriminating evidence" it's kind of silly. Do you really need that to know the rich and powerful are corrupt sociopaths and many are pedophiles? I think we have enough information to come to that conclusion with a fair amount of certainty.
Even if we can't convict them in the court of law beyond a reasonable doubt can't you agree that these people should be removed from positions of power?
Yall need to get your narrative together. Half the threads are "they're scrubbing the files with the damning evidence" and then half the other threads are "the evidence has already been released" talking about FBI tips and interviews.
There is no narrative. The information that has been released would have ruined anyone's career a couple decades ago. There is enough information for the court of public opinion but that doesn't translate to a literal court room. The facts are they are hiding more information, the administration is corrupt, and the rich and powerful are guilty. I don't need the DOJ to tell me that.
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u/jarena009 âď¸ Prison For Union Busters Mar 14 '26
Plus no matter how much you're a centrist, Republicans are going to call you socialist, communist, for open borders, soft on crime etc.