My read of that is basically her doing an economic “Hey, I support the troops too!” I would not classify you as a capitalist for the sake of this discussion since you’re presumably in favor of an amount of government intervention and ownership that would get you labeled “socialist” by any hypothetical political opponent. It’s certainly a loaded term that confers much more than, say, the percentage of state MoP ownership you might theoretically support.
Interesting. I think $5 million seems unduly stingy just given the prices of large capital goods. For example, a Ford manufacturing facility costs (apparently) around 5 billion to produce and can employ something like 6,000 people (Google). With a wealth cap of $5 million, you need significantly more investors to make something like that happen. Maybe that’s a good thing? I honestly don’t know how math like this works out, but it seems like something you should be able to model and stress test for different central bank interest rates. But I raise the point because capitalists often raise the high cost of large capital goods as an argument in favor of capitalism as a system.
In case it isn’t clear, I’m envisioning a socialist economy with a government-controlled central bank as sole currency supplier that sets interest rates and determines the rate of currency-supply expansion. I’m taking as a given that this entity would have to be able to calculate in tandem with a socialist legislature of some kind, which would be responsible for budgeting and taxation (which would ideally use direct democracy as its primary voting mechanism, with ballot questions presented to the votary public by a proportionally representative elected legislature).
There would still be plenty of institutional money out there, just more individual accounts.
A 5 million dollar wealth cap is probably low. Wealth caps as high as 100M would still have almost the entire desired effect IMO.
We don’t have to go fully to where Piketty recommended and in real life the higher the wealth cap the easier it is to get it done.
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It will never get done. This is just a utopian chat. May as well talk about the wealth cap in the Star Trek universe as far as practicality goes. Raising the top tax bracket 5% might be a good realistic goal. Imo.
We might be doing 4% in MA. Polling looks maybe ok so far, but who knows.
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It’s a sad reflection of the scale of the problem that while we debate the morality of someone being allowed to have $x00,000,000 while there is so much suffering in the country, it would take a comparatively tiny action (ie raising marginal rates slightly or closing loopholes) to alleviate much of said suffering.
On a global scale, this is not true. But nationally, we could do so much more if we simply allowed the very rich to have slightly less.
I don’t think this is entirely true if you just look at the "poor"ish in the US, but if you just look at the very very poorest people, the homeless, it is something that could be very dramatically improved. But if you think the average person (including the average Democrat) in the US wants to solve homelessness by providing housing, you don’t have your finger on the pulse of the people.
Dramatically reducing homelessness + MFA + social safety net that keeps people above subsistence would not require a wholesale restructuring of the class system, or anything close to it, and would make it much less icky to have a class of people who live in $50MM+ residences.
The problem is that Republicans, and lots of randoms and Dems as well, believe that there is a certain justice in the poor suffering and the rich having disgusting amounts of money.
I’ll be voting for this, obv.
Also I just wanted to add that I think the concern among many of us to engage in Star Trek math reflects a need to develop a consistent rebuttal to those who argue that socialism isn’t functional, that socialists can’t calculate or don’t understand supply and demand, or that there’s no working model of socialism. Having a theoretical platform that works on paper is important, I think, from a rhetorical standpoint alone, since these people are already shutting their eyes to real-world examples (e.g. Nordic-style social democracies, UBI trials, social safety nets more generally, Utopian communities).
Whoops they said the quiet part out loud except online
It’s been pulled of course but someone archived it before
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