Musk owes me a pygmy goat and an aardvark:
1 Like
Wow you are letting loose here! Since nobody ever said he was other than the person who sarcasticly changed the title of the thread.
How do you define this? Have you read any of his books? Have you looked into what he tried doing with his non profit? Or is anyone who recognizes problems and tries to fix them an opportunist?
You don’t think it’s obvious the Dems have not listened to why people don’t vote for them? Guess what, it’s economics.
If you look at his twitter feed people think he spends to much time talking about social issues. He gets accused of virtue signalling all the time yet he continues to speak out on social issues.
The rest of your post I don’t reallly understand. I don’t really know if you are trying to be funny or if you are on some type of substance.
Your problem with a VAT is the rich won’t pay it?
The VAT can be tailored a lot of ways including charging more for luxury items and you can exempt staples.
I’m on record of saying the VAT is not the way I would try to fund UBI but it would end up being a direct cash transfer from the rich to the poor anyway you look at it.
Also he never claims that his ideas are brand new or visionary. He literally is stealing ideas from other countries that work well and wants to implement them here.
I’ve never heard of the term tanky. You all are to smart for me obviously.
Are there people who non-ironically embrace the label of “tankie” and make it their own?
This is not that much different than saying increasing the minimum wage will make Taco Bell raise prices - although it would raise the tenant portion of Section 8 rents by $300/month if it were counted as income.
No. They call themselves Leninists. The only people who like Stalin are…most Russians. He’s very popular nowadays and it’s from the right.
If Chapo rose in popularity due to Chapo, does that mean that the Chapo folks use it derisively towards some socialists they dislike or positively towards some of their fans?
None of the above.
Yang has the most cult-like support of any Democrat. Have you read any of Boredsocial’s posts on this forum? That is why its fitting that the Musk thread became the Yang thread.
As for him being an opportunist, I don’t know what to tell you. That he is a politician isn’t sufficient? I hope it goes without saying that Yang is far from the worst out there, Its just few things annoy me more than some form of “no actually my guy is a different type of politician from the others” with “type” having little or nothing to do with ideology.
I think you just kind of made my point for me. If its so obvious its economics there’s no reason to pay any mind to what these people have been fed by right-wing media about democrats being obsessed with policing gender pronouns or whatever.
I want boomer diner patrons to vote democrat. I want QAnon people to vote democrat. I want disaffected young men very concerned with ethics in video game journalism to vote democrat.
To the extent that is possible, its through providing economics justice. Doing that doesn’t require listening to whatever racist or misogynist grievances they have.
My problem isn’t with a VAT. Its with how Yang presents the VAT as being a unique means of collecting taxes from the wealthy. I’m absolutely convinced Yang’s use of the VAT in his platform stems to a degree from two things: relatively few people have any clue what a VAT is–and even among those that do, many couldn’t describe it in meaningful economic terms–and the perception/truth that existing/previously used taxes are easily avoided by the wealthy. In the realm of politics, that may be par-for-the-course and even smart. Just don’t piss on my leg and tell me its raining.
“How do we pay for it?” is virtually never a question that needs answering. “It” can be paid for the same way everything else is: the wealth within the wealthiest political jurisdiction in the history of the world. If “it” is a program to help the lower classes, the cost is a pittance.
Wait a minute. A VAT can be tailored so that certain wealth demographics end up paying very little of it and certain wealth demographics end up paying the bulk of it? Ponder that for a few seconds and you might begin to grasp why I’m skeptical of Andrew Yang as America’s technocrat savior.
3 Likes
Going from my experiences on Twitter Tankie-ism is largely about imperialism.
The US and UK are imperialist (true) and every action taken in their national interests is imperialist (less true…but ok whatever). Putin’s Russia, the PRC government, the Assad regime et al are opposed by the US/UK and therefore are incapable of imperialistic actions (definitely not true) and citizens of those countries and their neighbors who oppose such regimes are all pawns of the CIA (absolutely insane).
If you think the Hong Kong protests were controlled by the CIA and or MI6, you might be a Tankie.
If you thought Belarussians who seemed to be chanting “we want liberty” were actually chanting “Radio Liberty” at a protest last Summer because they were all CIA and it of course makes sense for CIA agents in Belarus to openly broadcast that they are all CIA, you might be a Tankie.
https://twitter.com/MarkAmesExiled/status/1294972508135993344
It’s just amazes me on a left forum we criticize someone who says the free market can’t fix these problems so we need govt to make huge changes.
HeS oPpOrTuNiStIc.
If anything he is a little naive.
Also the idea we don’t need to reach out to people who use to vote Dem until their jobs and towns became decimated is…well let’s just say you are either extremely privileged and don’t understand how poor people live or just an elitist asshole.
Also Yang is on record saying he would tailor the VAT to make it as less regressive as possible including excluding staples.
If the standard we are using is we should not try to pass taxes because the rich have to much power I guess we just need to throw up our hands and give up.
And he doesn’t present the VAT as unique. He says European countries already fucking do it.
I think the dynamic is that there is a temptation to categorize every policy proposal (and the people that suggest them) as Not Left Enough and therefore Morally Wrong. And I’m actually kind of sympathetic to that perspective, the US literally needs to be dragged to the left all the way from fascism so there’s a lot of ground to cover before things get Left Enough. But that whole dynamic also echoes some of the discourse with, say, libertarians claiming that nothing is ever Free Enough. Its just clearly self defeating in practice.
I’m sympathetic to that point of view as well but short of a violent revolution all we can do is try to make changes within the system.
I just don’t understand how we expect someone to sell a new tax to the American people who have been brainwashed to thinking taxes are inherently wrong.
I have an idea - lets talk about how Amazon pays zero in income taxes and they would have to pay millions of dollars in taxes as soon a VAT is implemented.
The point isn’t that I think Yang would structure the VAT to benefit rich taxpayers. I would trust him that, in general, he wants them to pay a greater portion.
Its that much of the argument in its favor collapses if the VAT could be put in place by President Yang, tailored to limit the burden faced by the poor but then kept in place by a subsequent government ultimately to be tailored with again but now in favor of the wealthy.
That the wealthy are able to avoid paying their share of taxes is a political problem, not a policy problem.
A corporation, being an inanimate collection of contracts, assets and liabilities can’t pay taxes any more than it can eat a steak. People pay taxes. An across the board VAT is universally recognized as a regressive tax. Yes, it can be tailored to alleviate that, but to do so requires the same political conditions that would prevent the tax burden on the rich being reduced via taxes we currently have or previously had.
I never said that Yang has suggested or stated that the US having a VAT would be unique. I used the term unique to describe how its presented as being un-tailorable which contradicts the defense against it being regressive. I’m a UK citizen. I know what a VAT is.
I may very well be guilty of this but I think I’ve laid out an argument–or at least attempted to–that UBI could end up a tool for the right depending on the conditions that is implemented in. Perhaps that’s a dumb line of thinking and I’m wrong, but its clearly distinct from simply believing that its insufficient to reach my preferred level of wealth redistribution.
I don’t think its in dispute that there’s a fair amount of support for or interest in UBI from people who see the abolition of the minimum wage and worker protections as being economically just. Rather than seeing that as “see, even people who disagree with me completely agree about this” I think we, as the left, should be very cautious about that not being the road a UBI program leads us towards.
You really said that Yang inspires the most cult like following… on a board that has more than one example of the toxic Bernie bro stereotype.
And a proposal for taking ~15% of GDP and redistributing it as UBI is a ‘tool of the right’. I don’t know dude you need new sources because you sound like an idiot.
Yes, the Yang supporters I’ve been around use language about him that I don’t hear from Sanders supporters, even the ones who fit the “toxic Bernie Bro” mold.
You can say plenty of Sanders supporters are assholes, fine, but that’s not at all what I’m saying about Yang supporters. So umm, great point I guess.
LOL
3 Likes
As we celebrate today, let’s see what MLK had to say on the subject.
Sounds like MLK and I are on the same page. Apparently, Dr. King was a inveterate tanky who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
4 Likes