It’s true what they say: politics makes strange bedfellows. I have sympathized with some very unlikely people over the years. Gloria Allred, a hardline-feminist activist whose career never recovered from defending fathers cruelly and criminally wronged by Los Angeles then-mayor Gil Garcetti. Gaddafi of Libya, a tyrant murdered for trying to stop GAE’s creation of Islamic terrorist organizations. Ralph Nader, a busybody do-gooder who got sabotaged by his own supporters because he refused to join the ascendant Totalitarian Hive. Saddam Hussein, who after being defeated twice by supposedly-Christian GAE, turned out to have hired & protected Christians because we were the best choice for a stable Mideast government. Pornhub, because they’re being persecuted by the Churchians (and now Mormons) for their insistence that the male sex drive is legitimate. Visa Corp, for their now-decades-old Shadow War against the banksters.
(The reason GAE is pushing CBDCs is because they’ve failed to Converge the credit card industry. I bet one of its holdups, is that Visa & peers could still function as an anonymizing middlemen for transactions.)
And briefly, Bernie Sanders, who found himself on the wrong side of his own Socialist Paradise. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly for a Socialist, he failed to learn from his experience on the receiving end of his own agenda.
The envious gonna envy.
Bernie Sanders calls for income over $1 billion to be taxed at 100%: ’People can make it on $999 million’
h ttps://fortune.com/2023/05/02/bernie-sanders-billionaire-wealth-tax-100-percent/
By Chloe Taylor, 2 May 2023
Longtime wealth tax advocate Sen. Bernie Sanders has argued that all earnings above $1 billion in the U.S. should be confiscated by the government.
In an interview with HBO Max’s Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace, the Vermont senator was questioned about his long-standing view that billionaires should not exist.
“Are you basically saying that once you get to $999 million, the government should confiscate all the rest?” he was asked—to which Sanders responded: “Yeah.”
“You may disagree with me, but I think people can make it on $999 million,” Sanders added. “I think that they can survive just fine.”
One billion dollars is just a number on a ledger. A statistic without context. His implicit appeal is punishing successful thieves, but his suggested method for that is itself, literal thievery. I can make myself a billionaire just by loaning me a billion dollars. It’s called fractional-reserve banking.
There was a time I would have instantly dismissed Sanders’ idea. Wealth is not a crime and poverty is not a virtue.
That being said… who gets rich in the context of a kleptocracy? Not the honest men of business. Not the bankers who refuse the Ticket.
His idea is obviously not the solution, not when Uncle Sam is the worst offender. It’s just another word spell to trick voters into impoverishing themselves. But, it gives me the opportunity to suggest a BETTER way to exterminate the pirate class. No crime needed!
Sunlight.
Just delete all legal entities from existence. No more corporations, no more foundations, no more trusts, no more endowments, etc. Money and property can only be owned by specific, designated humans. THEN we can discuss what to do about “the billionaires”… if that really does mean the pirates, once they have no place to bury the booty.
Sanders has long touted the idea of imposing much higher taxes on the wealthiest factions of U.S. society, proposing a wealth tax in 2019 when he was running to be the Democratic candidate for the 2020 presidential election.
What happened after Sanders crossed the Lizard Queen was probably his last chance at a moment of clarity. It didn’t take.
Under his [previous] proposal, a married couple with a net worth of $32 million would have paid a 1% wealth tax, while wealth over $10 billion would have been taxed at 8%.
“Under this plan, the wealth of billionaires would be cut in half over 15 years, which would substantially break up the concentration of wealth and power of this small privileged class,” Sanders argued during his campaign.
I stiff scoff at Sanders’ suggestions (not the idea) for going after plutocrats because he’s not addressing the usual plutocratic tricks. “It’s not MY money, it’s my incorporated trust fund’s money” or “it’s my dog’s income, I just manage it for him” or “I signed the Giving Pledge so it’s not really my money anymore” or “I’m a Congressman, I could confiscate my own money but why?” or worst of all, “only billionaires have to pay the tax, hello hyperinflation!”
When we get the chance, we need to bring back the humanity of business. All the current mess of mergers, acquisitions and vulture capitalism is because there are no actual owners. It’s all paperwork anymore. Middle managers who make entire careers out of “leadership of whatever”.
Make sole proprietorships great again!
Bernie will let me drive his hundred thousand dollar plus sports car and stay at the lakeside dacha in the spirit of egalitarian equity?
You have to be one major cluster to get thrown out of a commune and that really is historic.
You could tell the true believers that Bernie has never voted against any war or the MIC but they don’t have enough attention span for it to register.
BTW-How did Bernie go over to the CCCP during the height of the cold war and get drunk and sing songs with the comrades in the 1980’s at the end of the soviet egalitarian workers utopia?
Politico last May referred to Bernie as “a three-home-owning millionaire with a net worth approaching at least $2 million.” Bernie acknowledged to the New York Times his millionaire status. Among his latest homes is one he and his wife Jane bought with cash, $575,000, in the Champlain Islands, where they summer together. Graced with 500 feet of Lake Champlain beachfront, this is Bernie’s dacha on the Black Sea.
In addition, Bernie and Jane in 2009 dropped $405,000 on a handsome Colonial home in Burlington, Vermont. The socialist couple wasn’t finished with the land grabs. They forked over $489,000 for a row house in Washington, D.C.
(H/T-PK & Spectator)
A relative who claims to be a socialist was grilling me recently “How can you not support a wealth tax on the uber rich?” And my answer “Because the people taxing the uber rich will be other uber rich getting more rich off of it.”