Forum Post: The Shit Show Apocalypse
Posted 5 years ago on Jan. 6, 2019, 4:20 p.m. EST by agkaiser
(2552)
from Fredericksburg, TX
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
Marginal income and capital gains tax increases will help the economy and relieve public debt. They won't do much to alleviate concentration of wealth that's the sword in the heart of our economy and community. They will make it harder to get rich but will do little to relieve oppression by those who are rich. We need limits on ownership.
The obvious answer is wealth and inheritance taxes at very high rates above a generous deduction and zero below the [to be] determined limit.
Does that sound idealistic to you? Maybe. The reason to aim for such an egalitarian goal is realistic. The course the human race is on right now is self destructive. And the morons running this shit show are too goddamn stupefied by selfishness and greed to see it!
Yeah, but those idiots will just ridicule the idealism of the proposal, while the thought they may be doomed [by their self inoculation against perceiving their errors] can never enter their tiny little minds.
''The obvious answer is wealth and inheritance taxes at very high rates above a generous deduction and zero below the [to be] determined limit." BINGO & Tax Corp.Profits too! +FYI:
https://www.salon.com/2019/01/04/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-proposes-70-percent-tax-on-mega-rich-to-pay-for-green-new-deal/ by Shira Tarlo &
https://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/good-money/standing-rocks-surprising-legacy-a-push-for-public-banks-20190102 by Deonna Anderson also ...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-28/veterans-pay-high-price-as-lenders-push-cash-out-home-loans furthermore, note ...
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-wells-fargo-mortgage-modification-20190101-story.html +
Finally see https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/its-time-to-bring-back-the-corporate-death-penalty/
fiat lux et fiat justitia ...
Paul Krugman agrees with Ocasio-Cortez' idea to re-implement a 70% tax bracket on the wealthy. Keep in mind it was once as high as 90% and remember, he has a nobel prize in economics.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/07/ocasio-cortez-is-right-democrats-should-talk-about-raising-taxes-rich/?utm_term=.376f09435058
"As Paul Krugman argues, “when taxing the rich, all we should care about is how much revenue we raise.” That’s because you can increase taxes on the wealthy, especially the super wealthy, without harming them in any appreciable way or changing their economic decisions. It’s not as though a Wall Street banker making $30 million a year would have to alter his lifestyle if he had to pay an extra million in taxes next year. So “the optimal tax rate on people with very high incomes is the rate that raises the maximum possible revenue.” Finding that optimal top marginal rate is a technical question, but economists that Krugman cites put it at over 70 percent."
"A century ago the nouveau riche were disparaged by those who inherited their money. Entrepreneurs sought social acceptance by passing themselves off as rentiers. Today, the relationship has now been reversed: the rentiers and inheritors style themselves entrepreneurs. They claim to have earned their unearned income.'' - from:
Nice to see that even Paul Krugman can see the truth re. ''wealth and income'' these days. I append the article above with a strong recommendation that U re-read it & share intensely - especially with friends & family, as so many dots are exposed & joined there! Ever heard of the ''Mount Pelerin Society''? FYI ...
veritas vos liberabit ...
I think too there is an even deeper issue of mindset. We have a compassion crisis in America or I rather should say on Wall Street. How we as individuals view suffering as well as how we view ourselves.- Some people aren't honest with themselves. Self deception is easy even in the most observant minds. Sharing takes honesty and practice. For the wealthy policy makers and powers that be - they seem to lack the imagination or will to try on those shoes of the meek and consider that in fact life can be and is hard for a majority of people despite that it has not been quite so difficult for them nor are they willing to see that success isn't the measurement for hard work many people work their asses off climbing the tree and never reach the fruit sometimes through no fault of their own. Success is more than mindset - it includes many variables. Then of course they deceive themselves about that believing they worked harder than they really did. "Other people are always responsible for their own plight" etc. without stopping to think about the endless scenarios and things that go wrong or the domino effect. Then there are those who believe themselves to be more compassionate than they actually are in reality. I'm reminded of the pigs too at the end of Animal Farm getting theirs and forgetting the plight of those they championed until they got their own level of comfort and security. And so we have things like this in America:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/brief/289660/jerri-clark
And in countries with no socialism you have no infrastructure or even running water. Water is a luxury and private commodity around much of the world. Frail elderly trudge through the forest gathering firewood to heat heavy buckets they haul from wells back to their ramshackle shacks.
Yes there is "a compassion crisis in America or I rather should say on Wall Street" & it won't cure itself without a mobilization of US' 99%! It's been done in the past & so, can be again!! Because WTF is the option otherwise?!!! Thanx for your heartfelt reply elf and the very moving contents in your link & yes ..
''mental illness should never be a crime'' & as Mental Health overlaps with US Prison Policy...
see https://truthout.org/articles/us-prisons-are-building-databases-of-incarcerated-peoples-voice-prints/
& https://truthout.org/articles/seven-reasons-why-the-us-s-new-mental-health-law-is-dangerous/
and in compliment https://truthout.org/articles/is-climate-change-impacting-your-mental-health/ ?
spero meliora ...
Deficit of trust and the betrayal of trust is the central issue. Socialist undertakings such as the provision of clean drinkable running water require trust of the other partners as well as the quality of the result achieved collectively.
New York City used to occupy only lower Manhattan. As its population grew and water-borne diseases broke out, it went socialist to solve the clean drinkable water problem. Another great socialist breakthrough was New York's building the subway system. One may not appreciate how important socialist undertakings are for the greatness and well-being of a society until one goes without them.
The problem with Socialism is that there are demagogues who used its attractive attributes to sucker their populace to give them power to dictate and abuse. They break the trust of their people. Who lives in luxury and grandeur in these countries? Not the common people! I see many leaders fattened in multiple senses usurping and abusing power around the world while their people stay gaunt and live in paupery. I prefer people having their own free choice to eat themselves to death than be forced to starve themselves to death. Rulers of these countries amount to hostage takers. We know how we deal with hostage takers.
We must liberate Greater America, by force if need be. Greater American Civil War will be greater than the American Civil War. Make America Greater America! Start the war to unify Greater America. Declare Global Emergency. People have the illusion that they had defeated the U.S. when we withdraw our troops. The truth is that the U.S. does not want to occupy other peoples for long but we have the global order which gave us and the World unprecedented prosperity to maintain. Only the U.S. has so many military bases around the world to assure global trade security. Few countries aside from the trade-dependent island nations understand the benefits of global trade security. The collapse of the global trade security will start land-whaling anew.
You may wonder why I am so involved and concerned with "international" issues. It's because we are all connected. Why should I care about the Jewish problem on the Arabian Peninsula? I didn't like my Sunday brunch transition from orange juice to Tang to no juice to no more Sunday brunches. I didn't like our home being broken into and ransacked. I didn't want my neighborhood to be burnt to a warzone pulp. My ancestors' breakthrough epiphany was likely this: We shall conquer and destroy. Dogs and wolves are one, we hunt. "Sterilize, sterilize! All imperfect lifeforms must be sterilized."
New York City, the murderous Braavos, (whose terrible neighborhoods do correlate with the color darkness of the skin but that's a societal simple-minded artificial linkage via racial discrimination; I couldn't see how melanin by itself could have caused this except through White Colonialism "justifying" its oppression with the idea of racial superiority; the whole skin color thing has already oscillated a few times -- is it cool to be light-skinned, bronzed, or ebonied? Wealth and power are always considered cool! Why did Ivanka Trump learn French? Haley's Comet's re-arrival and the erroneous astrological belief linking the comet to the 1066 C.E. Norman Conquest led to the coolness of the French-speaking ruling élites in England: "Parlez vous français ou anglais?" ) is not politically "Red" for a very good reason.
Following "Red" political philosophy was not conducive to growing prosperous for most people. If one looks at the federal revenues of the U.S.A., the "Blue" states contribute much more than the "Red" states, no doubt partly due to the reverence for education (akin to Germany's which was playing catchup to Great Britain's industrialization but the very word "kindergarten" in English coming originally from German shows German principalities' high valuation of early childhood education which eventually made them into an educational, urban, land-of-ideas, and industrial powerhouse -- from knowledge, power.) Yes, the "Red" states are Retarded alright. I figured this out when I was living in some of them. Blatant as well as insidious systemic racial bigotry, infantile hallucinations of "a Higher Power," praying (people had prayed for millennia so where did that get them, huh?) to an "omniscient (why didn't God just wipe out the Evilness if He "knew it all?") and omnipotent God (at least as powerful as our do-nothing posturing U.S. Congress, for sure,)" aversion to building social infrastructure, guns, Guns, GUNs, pipe bombs from racial supremacists ( Mitt Romney's getaway mansion/lakehouse state in frontier Yankeedom, New Hampshire, has duty-free booze, ammunition and gunpowder products for general sales -- my first look at the Boston Marathon Bombing videos of the immediate bombing aftermath's dark K2S potassium sulfide {non-military-grade explosive since smoke tells enemy where to attack} smoke made me mutter, "Oh, no, it's New Hampshire gunpowder!" because of Newtown Massacre's Mom Nancy Lanza's connection to New Hampshire, which is the closest-to-Boston general sales source of non-military-grade explosives in fireworks. The perpetrators of the bombing turned out to be culturally whiplashed youth from/near a restive war-torn region of the Russian Federation. Where did Nancy Lanza acquire the gun culture that eventually blossomed into a bullet in her face and the Newtown Massacre in Connecticutt in which kindergartners galore were murdered in their Sandy Hook Elementary School? Yep, it's New Hampshire. From guns, deaths. Substitute U.S.A. for "Nancy Lanza," airplanes flying into the World Trade Center buildings and the Pentagon for "a bullet in her face..." See a pattern? It's the [White-supremacist] culture, not physical location! New Hampshire is in a predominately "Blue" neighborhood but lily-white in skin colors -- belief generated reality; comet astrology influenced Ivanka to learn French ) and Bible's supremacy ("right-to-lifers" advocate for the survival of the illegitimate fetuses from rape and incest so that the victims can spend a lifetime in a love-hate torturous mental state, obviously to help preserve the seeds of the criminals from the patriarchy of "Rapture") just got to my nerves eventually so I reached escape velocity and exercised my federal U.S.A. right to move away.
I don't mind people following their "religion" but if it starts bleeding over to social development and improvements, I'm out of here! I know what I want for myself and my people. Be it Socialism, Capitalism, Communism, or whatever it's called. It doesn't matter what the core actually is or what it is called, what matters is the force field it generates.
My "thoughts and prayers" are with everyone on this dot. You all have the sympathy and empathy from [the empty cavity at] "the bottom of my heart." May God be with you all. Allahu Akbar!
Shittoad's Shalom!
Ancient Rome had this wealth inequality problem for about a century before its republic changed into an empire. I've discovered that the most important ingredient to success is bottom orientation, controlling the sphincter muscles between our legs. We the children must face the facts, rub out the rubbish, the sooner the better, before it festers. B2B.
Testicles will serve as soldiers' play-marbles. It's not just conquered women's nipples. A kindergartner said to another one, "Hand me a rubber." The art of the deal is now obviously the art of the steal and will become the art of the steel. Remember Des[s]ert Shield? Stormy Daniels. The art of the eel.
"Are you for Hillary or for Trump?" is the WRONG question for the President of the United States to ask. The CORRECT question is, "Are you for the United States Constitution which I swore the Oath to uphold?" We don't need the Presidential Election of 2016 if we wanted a partisan in charge. The Election was for ELEVATING a candidate to the Office. If it was hacked by Russia, the responsibility is on the F.B.I. before, during, and after the Election. Firing the former F.B.I. Director was a terrible move. Barring U.S. Press coverage of the subsequent meeting with the Russians and the undeliberate and arbitrary passing-on of Top Secret/Special Compartmented Information from an ally made it virtually certain that there was at least self-perceived collusion with Russia or even traitorous deed(s). The U.S.A. began as the OPPOSITION to the arbitrary tyrannical rule of a King. U.S. Citizens cannot hold hereditary title (Sir John Templeton and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex lost it.) If you study the history of our cultural forebears, the English/Anglo-Saxon people, the ancient tradition is to CHOP the head off or SLIT the throat of a king or a nobleman who was found to be wanting or maybe worthy to be sacrificed to the gods to placate their wrath on the Land, refuse to kowtow to anyone (which caused the clashes with the Imperial Chinese Culture and led to the Rape and Shame of China which even today still rages in the South China Sea,) be tried by peers in a jury, be presumed innocent until proven guilty (hence bails,) and uphold the Law of the Land. Stonehenge, Magna Carta, Hyde Park... I won't ever pledge allegiance to an American King of the United States!
Yes, 70% or 95% marginal tax rates did not slow the greatest prosperity our country and probably the world has ever seen. But it's only enough to slow down those trying to join the club. It does little to slow those who have already amassed wealth and live on capital gains and dividends.
Without denigrating AOC or Krugman, Milton Friedman and other libertarian morons had Nobel's in Economics. The economics Nobel is not a real Nobel prize. It's part of the shit show.
Highest tax bracket chart from 1913 to 1918. Fascinating.
https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/historical-highest-marginal-income-tax-rates
1932-1935 63%
1936-1939 79%
1940-1941 81%
1942-1943 88%
1944-1945 94% HIGHEST
1946-1947 86.45%
1948-1948 82.13%
1950 84.36%
1951 91%
1952-1953 92%
1954-1963 91%
1964 77%
1965-1980 70%
1982-1986 50%
And it drops from there.
And the rich on Wall ST have gotten richer boom or bust since it started coming down while the rest of us and our government has gotten deeper in debt to them!
We should emphasize what benefits we would gain by collecting and spending the increased tax revenues. Due to the willful blindness of our leading politicians who already have one foot in their coffins (having reached or closing in on their life expectancies so they don't care except for their payoffs by the fossil-fuel retardry,) my first priority is to address anthropogenic climate change earnestly rather than dithering (Obama tightened regulations on carbon emissions but our Shittoad-in-Chief's regime reversed them.)
If we were to condense all the air above one square inch of Earth's surface all the way up into outer space (such as to the Moon) to the density of milk, how many gallons of milk would we have? Less than two!
The atmosphere doesn't contain much air. How many pounds of fossil fuel does a typical person burn in a day? Definitely more than sixteen pounds or two gallons at milk density in total of gasoline, heating oil, and coal and natural gas for electricity.
We have a problem so humongous that people may not grasp the implications. Before New Orleans was drowned, there had been predictions in the Scientific American and Popular Mechanics magazines of what the worst possible disaster in the U.S. could be after the Indian Ocean Tsunami. It happened as predicted. Bushit was probably "praying," and dozing off, but NOT reading or comprehending, much like our Shittoad's enforced regime: "God save my kiddie butt!" How much I wish that Her Majesty Queen Elisabeth II could hand off a bit of Her sense of Duty to our Shittoad-in-Chief!
Then after the drowning of New Orleans by Katrina and Rita, it was New Jersey and New York's turns to get the pee of Irene. I wasn't surprised that New Jersey would suffer because when I was a teenager "fresh off of the Boeing-747 jumbojet and -707 jet," I saw the weirdest and widest drainage ditch that I had ever seen. I saw green grass growing on both sloping banks. There was a divider in the middle of the drainage ditch. The banks and the divider were as straight as an arrow. Americans are nouveaux riches, like beautiful lawns (so that we can pretend, for our social status symbol, that we are sexually frustrated landed-gentry English aristocrats working off our testosterone steam on 18 holes on unproductive-and-non-farmed but well-manicured lawns,) and have nothing better to do, so we grow green green grass in the yards, front, back, and all around and on the sloping banks of the drainage ditch. Having eaten some humongous American apples and oranges, I had already grasped the idea that "everything is BIGGER in America" (I didn't know of Hair Little Finger back then) so I sort-of dismissed the straight and wide ditch simply as "From ruler-straightness, America gets the HIGH sewage-discharge flow rate" because "America CAN SHIT bigly!" but I had NEVER seen a divider in the middle of my childhood shantytown's drainage ditch. I wondered, "What's it for?" Then I noticed that there was a rubber raft in the distance being rowed down the drainage ditch. I thought to myself, "Americans are very BORED people so they seek recreation right in their neighborhood sewage drainage ditch but.. hmm, didn't they have Moms who had taught them about hygiene? Especially cholera!" I remembered that the U.S.A. sourced the penicillin that had saved my Brother's life so I expected that Americans should KNOW about hygiene. Then the rubber raft was rowed towards and reached an island. A person climbed out from the side of the island onto the top of the island. "Whaaaaat? In America, do people live semi-submerged in islands in a sewage drainage ditch?" Yes.. the ditch's name was the "Garden State Parkway!" I saw greenery and so much pee. I was expecting a garden salad to materialize from them.
The people in the Garden State are very law-abiding citizens being jammed towards campaign-financing compliance by the likes of Chris Christie via Bridgegate traffic-training sessions so they park on the Parkway and drive on their driveways.
It's not so elsewhere in the U.S. where a street does go somewhere. For example, across the Hudson River from New Jersey, Canal Street which used to be a drainage ditch of lower Man-heeft-ding, ends up in the "Holland" Tunnel. It's absolutely geographical and historical poetry! Ahhh, Herr Freud-e.. epi.. glans'.. coördinates.
New York fared terribly under the fury of Sandy. I had never even dreamt that Manhattan could be flooded from 34th street on down like that but it was. The most financially important district of the U.S. was inundated, with electricity knocked out, being dark, cold, and immobile. Just about everything except dirty (yeah, imagine wildly and it's real!) water became in short supply: little gasoline, no electricity, no light, no heat... To this very day, although Wall Street had gotten its communication back with newly installed optical fiber equipments, the landline equipments of the plain-old-telephone-service were corroded after getting wet from the salty floodwater so the pootinium-modulated voice quality has deteriorated enough to alarm a feline. Some high-rise buildings in lower Manhattan went without electricity, water, elevator service, and even heat for months. It was urban-sky camping for some global élites! Yes, this can happen to anyone even if one is making a million dollars every year so let us address it together and head off the coming catastrophe. People feel helpless, hopeless, and kill themselves a lot more after their homes have been flooded.
Fetanyl manufactured in and smuggled in from Red China makes our drug addicts kill themselves. Yeah, a fullscale trade war is the best protection for our people. It will sink Red China's uselessly propping up the DPRK when its own economy crashes due to the U.S. stopping to buy from it. We were only a few months away from being nuclear-blackmailed by the DPRK. Everything towards that end should be assumed having been continued (though without the flamboyant saber-rattling testings) in the fake deténte so in the ensuing uncertainty, we must go for a nuclear war, the earlier the better while following the proper diplomatic protocols, no starting up with a time-of-day or international-date-line blunder though. Heeding Gen. MacArthur's advice regarding fighting a ground war in Asia, let the U.S. Navy aviators drop a few Ruthie boobies to take out the illegal artificial islands first once the World's largest and second largest airforces and the most powerful navy have taken up their general stations. We know the source of the arrogance of Red China's military force so knock it out early. We must finish "the Forgotten War." I figured out why I had forgotten about it but it can no longer be forgotten!
中国共产党否认人造岛屿有任何军事目的。 The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) blatantly lied to the U.S.A. so let the World judge and we can carry out the sentence.
Here CCP comes. This was why the U.S. had sought to withdraw from the INF Treaty signed with the former Soviet Union; it didn't include Red China. CCP started the new Arms Race. Of course, Russia which inherited the INF Treaty, is in a Great Position to take over the restive (against the CCP's ethnic and cultural invasion; the Russian Empire/Soviet Union/Russian Federation had centuries-long experience governing many ethnic groups so the Uighurs won't be a shock as long as they don't get the Han invasion and lording over them) but still worthwhile ( there's potential there -- much mineral wealth such as coal and oil [the Russian Federation has much oil but Xinjiang's warmer and gaining more non-renewable resources is good] ) northwestern part of China should the U.S. and China go to war with each other. India can take over Tibet. Japan needed Manchuria enough to take on China before WWII so with CCP's militarized islands cutting off sealink, Japan and gaunt DPRK folk (start a weight-loss resort?) can get food from Manchuria as dead Chinese need not eat. KPops from ROK, but not DPRK, induced tens of millions to join "the A.R.M.Y!"
As commanded by Poseidon, when the sea comes to claim your lifestyle, livelihood, domicile, friendships.. if you have nowhere new to go to, what else can you feel but depressed?
Unwilling and unable to extricate themselves from where they had found happiness, my parents died wedded to the murderous Braavos, never having visited the Pounding Laundry. I suspect their not having visited there was a deathbed regret for them. Home is a state of mind. Whether an asylum seeker, a nomad, or a pirate, home is where "the heart is."
ok - I'll elaborate for you. The errors are the iterative failures to recognize: "Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit!" You can't make something from nothing.
Perpetual motion of money as in compound interest on investments, loans, even the profits on mercantilism and material production by employees or anything other than employee or community owned non profit enterprises will concentrate wealth and stifle real economic growth until the bubbles burst and the imaginary triumphs of the elite classes disappear in a mist of expanding vapors.
Then, instead of seeing that the system of individual profits (appropriated from collective work of others) they call capitalism or "free enterprise" that's perpetrated by financial and other elites is what caused the crash they just start doing the same thing again and again. They won't let themselves know that capitalism can never work for the long haul. Our economy is doomed by idiot elite classes that do the same things over and over and expect a different results. Our business and political leaders are the proof of Einstein's theory of insanity.