Apologies for continuing the derail. Any discussion about capping and taxing generational wealth will have to extend to a massive overhaul of existing estate law as well as the current “death tax”. The wealthy use estate, probate, and trust law to maximum advantage to circumvent inheritance tax. I know y’all are way ahead of me on this topic, but felt compelled to point out that you are battling entrenched and well funded attorneys as well as tax law.
ETA: Inheritance tax could double overnight and it would have zero effect on my wealth.
Yeah clearly current estate law would have to go. I would expect estate law to be some of the densest and most ruled on areas of law. So many shitty rich people paying lawyers to squabble about money they didn’t earn lol. I mean those lawyers were doing something. I’d also expect that a lot of our ideas about how property is inherited have their roots in similar squabbles among European aristocrats hundreds of years ago.
I mean capitalism is designed to push resources towards the people who have demonstrated the ability to take those resources and make them grow. Some snowballing is kind of inevitable and even desirable (made a great restaurant? turn it into a chain of 25 restaurants!) but there’s no good argument even from a capitalist perspective for taking all of those resources and arbitrarily assigning them to some random person who shares a lot of DNA with them.
Capitalists like to talk about how important efficiency is to them. There’s nothing capital efficient about how we distribute inheritances. It’s probably one of the most destructive and wasteful things in the current system.
Right, or we can tax that money and know for sure that it’s going to fund healthcare or education or whatever. Like, you’re making the standard “why tax the rich, if you let them keep their money they’ll spend it charitably anyway” argument.
I also don’t find the argument of “this will be complicated, think of the trusts!” compelling. Seems to me that you can have a single piece of legislation that limits both trusts and estates. Obviously people will do everything they can to skirt those laws, but so what.
Welp, we’re too fat and slow to catch a middle-schooler, guess we just gotta shoot him!
Until we have a police overhaul, people need to stop calling the cops for things like this FFS. Cops only have one mode. They can’t change a lightbulb without shooting something or someone.
“Defund the police” has always been bad retail politics in terms of framing what is otherwise a good idea. Biden should respond by saying something like “What we really need is a stronger social safety net across the board, I am not focused on defunding police, I am focused on funding more XYZ for better, safer, stronger communities”.
Although I don’t agree with it, a belief that wars are regrettably necessary and that we should take care of The Troops is not inherently inconsistent.
That’s hardly the metric that should be applied. SMH.
The proper metric Is this: do the watchwords “defund the police” work getting peeps off their butts and into the streets, and into the direct action organizing meetings -vs- other alternative watchwords.
This is an excellent point but can that not be achieved and still have the eDems learn a few soundbites to deal with disingenuous attacks from the right? There’s no real reason for Biden to scream Defund The Police from a podium, but that certainly doesn’t mean he should be saying actually I’m gonna give the cops MORE money!
Can you imagine the hardon they would have for any sentence where they could jam some freedom variant and efficiency in?
Look I’m a capitalist… but I don’t be defending it in it’s current form. It’s fucked up beyond recognition and will remain so until it has some truly massive reforms.
I would define a capitalist as someone who owns and controls capital. IIRC, you work for a living.
Don’t sophist yourself into being a capitalist
PS there is no reforming capitalism. for the same reason there was no reforming slavery. our choices are abolition or the continued exploitation and degradation of the planet and our fellow humans.
I’m not (that’s NOT!) going out to bat for capitalists now, but there is clearly something in the broad sense of efficiency generally being a desirable thing that we all aim for, often unconsciously, in life, whether it’s taking the quickest route somewhere or finding shortcuts on our computers. This seems pretty hard wired into how we approach things imo.
The drive to greater efficiency in work can in theory lead us to large gains in freedom and quality of life, especially for the people at the bottom, by bots doing a lot of the more tedious and demeaning tasks that humans do.
The problem with the libertarian mindset and efficiency is that they think it’s the only factor to take into consideration and that everything else, including decent transport and health care systems, should be sacrificed on the altar of greater efficiency.
There were so many failures it’s hard to tell where it even went wrong. The lady explained to the dispatcher that the kid was unarmed, not violent, and not a threat, and police say they got a call about an armed violent suspect who was threatening people?
