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- cross-posted to:
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- [email protected]
Abigail Disney, Brian Cox and Valerie Rockefeller among signatories of open letter condemning inequality
More than 250 billionaires and millionaires are demanding that the political elite meeting for the World Economic Forum in Davos introduce wealth taxes to help pay for better public services around the world.
“Our request is simple: we ask you to tax us, the very richest in society,” the wealthy people said in an open letter to world leaders. “This will not fundamentally alter our standard of living, nor deprive our children, nor harm our nations’ economic growth. But it will turn extreme and unproductive private wealth into an investment for our common democratic future.”
The rich signatories from 17 countries include Disney heir Abigail Disney; Brian Cox who played fictional billionaire Logan Roy in Succession; actor and screenwriter Simon Pegg; and Valerie Rockefeller , an heir to the US dynasty.
I slightly disagree on one point: They should be lobbying the people directly, not the politicians.
The issue isn’t voters…
The issue is anyone that wants to tax the rich can’t make it out of a primary, because the rich (individuals and corporations) give an insane amount of money to candidates who won’t tax them.
Bernie almost managed to do it off voter donations, but then the DNC had a lawyer tell a judge that they can influence a primary as much as they want, even to the point of ignoring results.
Right now our political system cares more about money than votes.
But like Bernie has been saying for decades:
To fix the system, we need to win thru the system. Then change it.
We can only do that with huge donations, because that’s the only thing the people running both major parties care about right now.
Our entire political structure is based on getting as much donations as possible.
So if these people want to help, their money matters a lot more than their words or even votes.
citizens united will prove out to be the nail in our coffin of democracy.
Yes. True. Why?
When you answer that question, you’ll understand my argument.
Those donations are spent trying to influence public opinion toward a particular candidate. The candidates need that to happen, so they can get elected.
We don’t need particular candidates to be elected. We need public sentiment to broadly support taxing the rich.
We don’t need Bernie preaching to the choir of progressive Democrats. We need American voters asking candidates of every party, of every ideology, and at every level, for higher taxes on the rich.
We need a series of ads where a billionaire just looks in the camera and says “Hi, I’m Warren Buffett. I spent more on this ad than I paid in taxes last year.”
That’s it. Simple, concise, inarguable. The rich are so rich they can take out ads for the sole purpose of explaining how rich they are and how little they pay in taxes.
We need every candidate either supporting extensive taxes on the rich, or being forced to explain why all these billionaires are on TV bragging about how little they pay in taxes.
It costs more to convince people to vote for a bad candidate than a good one.
And after the first term it’ll cost even less.
That’s pretty basic advertisement stuff, the worse your product, the more you need to spend on advertising and marketing.
So why don’t we try supplying a good product people want without spending 100s of millions convincing them to want it?
After 2016 and 2020, I reject that premise.
Your analogy is rather confusing.
Are “products” the candidates? Or are they issues? Are they the voters? Are you saying the issue “tax the rich” is a bad issue?
I can’t seem to glean any meaning from your arcane language. Can you restate it directly, without resorting to analogy?
What I think is that my idiot Republican neighbors are never going to vote for a progressive Democrat. I think my idiot neighbors will support Warren Buffett’s “Tax the Rich” plan, but they will wildly oppose that same plan if it comes from Bernie Sanders.
I think my idiot Republican neighbors would generally reject a candidate who argues Buffett needs the tax breaks that Buffett says he doesn’t need.
I think a rural Republican candidate would do well in their district to take tax breaks from rich, city-dwelling billionaires, and give them to farmers and ranchers.
I think that if the only way to get a “tax the rich” plan is by electing progressive Democrats, we will never have a tax the rich plan.
But, if the issue is put to the people directly, Americans across the spectrum will easily support it.
What results did the DNC ignore? I’m a big Bernie fan, and I voted for him in the primary, but he lost.
That’s not what I said.
To phrase it another way:
The DNC said it’s not a problem to put their finger on the scales, because if it came down to it, the primary isnt binding.
The party can just say “nah, we’re running someone else” and the judge agreed that would be 100% legal because political parties are private institutions and can nominate anyone they want to.
They haven’t explicitly done that. Yet.
But it should be concerning and no one has been calling to change it.