Political Memes

Then it's time to unmake the man.

That's why we need a national wealth cap. Forget the tax. We need a maximum wealth. You simply are not allowed to have more than a certain amount of money. We need bounded capitalism. Capitalism can be a very useful system. It has a lot of merits over central planning. But in any kind of machine or system that humans devise, when is it ever beneficial to let any parameter increase to infinity? Let an engine spin too fast, and it will tear itself to pieces. Build an irrigation system that delivers an unbounded amount of water, and your crops drown. A well insulated house heated by a powerful furnace can bring comfort. Let it burn an arbitrarily large amount of fuel, and you will be cooked alive in your own bed. No system that humans design for our needs and comforts works when one of its core values is allowed to increase without bound. Inevitably this throws the whole system out of balance and leads to disaster.

And what is our economy and society if not an elaborate machine? A way of distributing resources, assigning work, etc? Allowing people to earn different amounts of money is a very useful thing. It encourages people to produce useful goods and services. It encourages innovation. It incentivizes getting an education and contributing to society. We're not perfect at any of these. Market mechanisms have many flaws. But our system does have a lot of merit over simply assigning everyone the same flat wage for all work done. It is useful to allow people to accrue modest fortunes. But that useful mechanism, completely unbounded? It unbalances society and tears us apart.

1000x the median household income. We set that as the maximum allowable fortune. 1000 times the average family wage. That I believe is the place to set such a cap. This would be approximately $80 million. This is so much money, that even the highest paid wage workers - people like brain surgeons - if they work a long career, choose to live in a literal cardboard box on the sidewalk, and invest every penny they make? They would struggle to reach that cap before they die of old age, even if they live very long lives. The only way to earn more money than this is to earn your wealth primarily by taking advantage of the labor of others.

Any money earned beyond this? Taxed at 100%. And at some point above this cap? Simply having that amount of money becomes a criminal offense. I want to make it a felony for someone to have a fortune over $1 billion. Mandatory minimum 20 year sentence for secretly amassing a fortune over $1 billion. Make Bezos and Musk give all their money away, flee the country, or blow their fortunes on the single greatest party in the history of the human race. Frankly I would be OK with any of these outcomes. But they cannot be allowed to retain these strategically dangerous fortunes. They have declared war on the rest of us. And it's time we started responding in kind. We must wipe out the billionaires as an economic class entirely.

"There should be no billionaires" is not just a slogan. It is a concrete policy we could choose to enact.

true, plus he would still cut programs just to give himself, or the defense budget more money, and his personal SS force.

The Big Beautiful Bill isn’t really a tax cut. It is mostly comprised of deferred taxes. They only slashed a trillion from the budget. The rest is financed through increased debt.

The BBB will add over 3 trillion to the deficit which the public will pay one way or another.

Either higher taxes down the road, increased inflation or through higher interest rates… Most likely a combination of all three. But it will be paid.

Democrat made it clear what they stand for

Their meltdown over Mamdani is pretty damning

New parties are useless at the federal level so long as elections are First-Past-The-Post. Even the Ross Perot's Reform Party in 1992 and 1996 only served as a spoiler for the Republican party, and his was an immensely strong attempt at forming a new party, featuring a reasoned platform which Perot showcased with charts every night on television.

This is why Musk's America party is laughable, even if he really, really meant it, and offered a platform of sound governance.

While Sanders caucuses with the Democratic party, and they make him sit at the kids' table with AOC and the other Socialist Democrats, he has been able to get a lot of legislation in or blocked with skilled use of Senate procedure.

But the current situation is well beyond even his powers of procedural mischief. We can't rely on officials or left-wing news media to save the US from oligarchy and eventually monarchy.

Violent or non-violent, we'll have to do it ourselves, and it's almost certain that if we pressure them nonviolently (say with massive demonstrations or with a general strike), then Trump will try to do January 6th once again, probably with more guns and explosives. He'll certainly bring out his ICE Stormtroopers (now in fancy armor) and try to invoke the military.

So we need to expect a fight, and preferably do what the lords did with John of England, make it super clear that he is out-manned and out-armed and will be given no quarter, if it comes down to violence. (Even the Magna Carta took a few tries)

27+ dead little girls at Camp Mystic has shown us it's ugly already, but non-violence makes it more difficult for bystanders to dismiss the resistance as terrorists. (FOX News, etc. will paint us as terrorists anyway.)

I don't know how we get to an organized general strike at speed (usually it takes years, and we don't have years), and there are groups like indivisible that are trying. I don't know if it's enough, especially once ICE gets its massive infusion of equipment, manpower and fancy trenchcoats.