You talking about what happened in North Carolina? Or someplace else? That is indeed some scary shit.

-CW

Well, I'm not going to get that pessimistic quite yet!

:-)

-CW

Ooo! Good point about the $17/hr and legal weed thing!

Just had to say that...

-CW

It's the age-old "divide and conquer" strategy. The rich have used it throughout history to keep the lower classes from banding together against them. Point to one group and say "THEY're the reason you are poor!" and encourage the fight, that's all it takes.

In America, it has usually boiled down to what LBJ said:

If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.

These days, it's slightly different, but still the same.

Ask the Irish about "playing the Orange card"... divide the Catholic poor from the Proddy poor and they'll never notice they're *both* getting screwed by the robber barons....

Takes many forms, but is always the same: divide and conquer.

As for your salient points on wealth v. income, I would say, yeah, you are right. The entire concept of "capital gains" is the heart of that, at least in our tax code. Other countries don't differentiate at all. You make money, it is income, period. You make it earning a wage, you make it investing in stocks, you make it selling a house, it's all income. It all gets taxed at the same rate, period. There would be the *first* step in injecting equality in taxes between wealth and income in America -- make the tax rates the same. right now, capital gains gets taxed at roughly HALF of income. That's obscene, right there!

Also a factor: I always kinda wondered why even Democrats were so solicitous about people making between what I would call "a decent middle-class wage" and the truly rich were so sheltered. Remember Joe Biden's promise "not to raise taxes on anyone making $400,000 a year!"? And that is *per person* -- a married couple, that would mean 800K a year. That is NOT what I would call "middle class." It's either "wealthy" or at the very least "upper middle class." But then I heard one little snippet and understood...

Those people -- say, the people between $100K income and like $800k income -- are the biggest donors (by dollars) to the political system. They don't have as much as people like Musk, but there's a whole lot more of them. Considering that factor explains a lot (especially the cap on Social Security taxes).

-CW

OK, I gotta say, I like that one! Short, sweet, to the point...

:-)

-CW

to catch and kill stories he didn't like?

To smear his opponents with false stories and de facto put Trump on the "front cover" of everyone's feed via the use of algorithms.

Great post! Warren was my favorite, too, back in 2016. She is still one of my favorite Democrats because she is willing to take the time to educate people on how our tax money works and what we need to do to make it work better for ALL of us.

I think one thing we need to focus back on is gutting the Citizens United ruling that allows the rich to dump as much money as they want into our elections. Most people dismiss the potential damage that can occur because they believe the money will go toward more political marketing for the candidates and will have little effect on the vote. We all encounter the never-ending campaign ads and do not think they change too many minds concerning how we will vote. But that money is not limited to mailers and TV ads… and it is the other places that this money can go that we should be most concerned with.

Imagine the damage that could be done in a purple state — where either party could end up winning the election — by an infusion of money that pays for a pilot program to offer those in assisted-living housing up to $1000 for participating in their program. Those that participate will make $250 for signing up to receive a mail-in ballot from the state. Then they will be assisted by the program in filling out the ballot. They will be given a print out of how they want their ballot to be filled out for review, and if everything is correct, they sign the ballot and those running the program mail it in for them. The residents are given $750 for participating as long as they sign a nondisclosure agreement that they won't tell anyone about the program or they will be forced to re-pay the money they were given.

A housing project that had always voted for Democrats suddenly flipped and voted Republican. This changed the district from Democrat to Republican, which changed the state from being Blue and made it Red. Don’t think something like this could take place with how our elections are run? Sorry, it already has taken place. Back in 2012. It should be noted that it was not caught by the state or local authorities. It was a reporter who noticed that a housing project went from having one or two absentee ballots in past elections suddenly had 40 in that election. His investigation caught Republicans buying and changing the mail-in ballots to give them the election. $40,000 could be the cost for giving Republicans the election. Musk had no issue with offering $1 million to buy votes. Thanks to the pandemic, having 40 mail-in ballots requested from a housing project does not raise suspicions. What happened in 2012 could happen and no one would suspect a thing.

Where do you think all of the money Musk gave to Trump’s campaign was spent??? Why did Trump keep saying that he did not need people to vote for him in order for him to win this past election?

Tesla stock down, popcorn stocks up...

It's that cheap Chinese hat; he puts them on by putting it on... among other things, of course.

Another large part of Donald Trump's success is Democrats running a woman against him in a country full of uneducated misogynists... twice. No, I am not lumping the majority of men in that category, but I'd be outright lying if I said this country isn't full of undereducated aggrieved males who genuinely believe they're superior because of their gender (among other things).

Still waiting for someone to write the article regarding the way Trump used Xitter in the 2024 election the same way he used the National Enquirer in 2016.

Reaganism it’s the root of our problems.

I admit I am continually baffled at the Democratic Party's inability to ride the economic inequality issue to continual electoral victories. Ever since Reagan the bottom 80% or so of the electorate has been getting shafted economically, primarily through the tax cuts for the wealthy that prevented any enlargement of government programs to help people out who needed help.

(It was a revelation to me to read Piketty's 'Capital in the Twenty-first Century' which shows how closely taxation policy tracks society-wide economic inequality, not just today but for many centuries in the past.)

Elizabeth Warren - my fave in the 2016 contest, alas - has built her career on, among other things, trying to help people understand that the tax money we need and can get if we vote for it is not on incomes, but on wealth itself. Wealthy people don't even think about 'income', that is, on "how much they make each year." They're not salaried, they're not paid wages, unlike the rest of us. They pay themselves whatever they need, out of the interest income on their vast amounts of wealth: savings, investments, property, shares, etc.

Can that money be taxed? It's far, far more money than would ever be realized by even a 100% income tax at some high bracket number. As she has noted, it's hard, but it can be done if the government really wanted to do it. It's the same as a 'property tax' which every homeowner is familiar with on the local level, and it's legal and constitutional. The problem is that wealthy people 1) don't want to pay taxes on their wealth, and have ways of letting politicians know that; and 2) know how to shelter their wealth so it's not obviously theirs and taxable even if the politicians refuse to cave.

Her main point, I think, is one of education. Most everyday people don't have a lot of wealth, and they think in terms of income when it comes to federal taxation. The Democrats' constituents aren't clamoring for a reasonable wealth tax because they don't very much understand how different it is from a higher income tax rate. And they don't understand that 99% of the money of rich people, the so-called 1%, which is in the multi-billions of dollars, is not in the form of income and can't be taxed by just "raising taxes".

In your piece today, you're pretty clear that it's the 1% - the liberal 1% to be sure, but still - that are funding the Democrats' effort this week to refine the Party's message. And of course, by the above analysis and your conclusion as well, the Party can't commit to real economic redistribution to combat inequality because "we can't afford it" on the government's current tax schedule. But we could afford it, if the 'liberal' 1% at least would concede that a wealth tax both makes sense and is doable if the electorate and its representatives would commit to such a program - and all the resulting programs that it would pay for.