He was here having people in Beverly Hills pay up to $100k to have dinner with him. He gets to use the money for his campaign - and I bet the government spent more on getting him here and back than he collected - but then that’s different money.
I think it goes beyond pure avarice and moves into premeditated sabotage of the environment that will cause the instability that will make (what’s left of the) world wide authoritarianism feasible.
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Amazon really can’t go anywhere. Some companies are flexible, but they aren’t. Maybe they can move HQ offshore, but they have almost 300k employees in the US and they need to be here.
Or they’re just banking on being dead by the time the shit hits the fan.
This is the answer… it’s also the reason why climate change isn’t a partisan issue among younger people. We know we aren’t dodging this bullet. I’m freaked out about it and I’m in my early 30’s. If I was ten years younger I’d be even less chill. Meanwhile the Boomers can pretend like it isn’t even real because they know for a fact they won’t be personally impacted.
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When I’m in my darkest place and I have my conspiracy hat on I think about this often. I wonder if that small cabal who really run the world know for certain that it is really really fucked (usual suspect is climate like duh) and they are accumulating the money needed when the shit really does hit the fan to protect themselves. Why worry about the leaders being reasonable managers when its a hopeless course. And an added benefit is corruption makes stealing easier.
Pretty much everyone is ruining the atmosphere because it means more money in their pocket or makes them more comfortable. Why should the billionaires be any different?
We need a significant carbon tax and we need it ASAP. We can’t keep waiting to do at least the easy stuff that will barely impact anyone.
Obviously a significant carbon tax is politically undoable… unless we hand out the revenue we raise as a weekly UBI, in which case the poor/middle class will make small adjustments to their lives that reduce their overall carbon footprint (because that stuff becomes much more expensive and there are substitutes available) and have additional spending power left over.
We need carbon emissions to = money in millions of cells on millions of spreadsheets ASAP so that collectively we at least get all the low hanging fruit picked within a couple of years.
I can tell you that your business will see a big bump from coal and natural gas power becoming significantly more expensive.
Sometimes I get scared by the fact that if he’d just shut up, most people wouldn’t notice all the terrible.
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I would be pretty mad if Twitter shut Trump down honestly. It would do real damage to Democratic turnout in 2020. As it stands now young people are going to show up in record numbers because every single goddamn day this dude triggers us for the lols.
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One problem, is that it doesn’t take a lot of money to avoid the worst of climate change impacts.
https://twitter.com/NatashaBertrand/status/1174364504618164224
Which is a drop in the bucket compared to the money he’s paying himself stateside at his properties there.
Yeah, and this is why a carbon tax, while good, isn’t enough. Like banning incandescent light bulbs would do a lot more than trying to drive up energy prices to the point that someone can’t afford to run an incandescent light bulb. Emission and mileage standards for cars are similar. A carbon tax could move the market in the direction of fuel efficiency, but there’s a ton of income inequality and any reasonable hikes for one group of people will leave a lot of others with enough money to still be ok with their SUVs.
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Banning incandescents, lol. Trump administration just released rules to roll back standards so they’re cheaper. Fucking madness. Major utilities in court saying bring back the Clean Power Plan. Automakers in favor of vehicle standards he’s rolling back. Wfffff
SUV’s aren’t remotely close to the top 100 list of easiest things to fix about climate change… although a 100 dollar a ton carbon tax would raise gas prices roughly 1 dollar per gallon, and that’s just burning the gasoline and nothing to do with producing/refining it which is where a lot of the emissions happen. I wouldn’t be surprised to see gasoline prices go up 2 bucks a gallon.
The last time gasoline prices were that high SUV’s popularity dropped like a brick from the sky as I recall.
100%
Not really, they own a lot of stuff that won’t move to other jurisdictions, not and be able to deliver stuff to Americans.
Recent data from 2017 puts America fifth on the list of economic freedom (ie Most capitalist) after Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand and Switzerland.
How is that even a thing?
I think a lot of people make a mistake of conflating laissez-faire capitalism with economic freedom and I think Adam Smith would agree. He wrote like one line about the invisible hand and railed against monopolies and the nefarious doings of capitalists for hundreds of pages in The Wealth of Nations.