We don’t tax billionaires to fight the national debt. We tax billionaires to fight BILLIONAIRES.
(But whatever gets us there I guess.)
I should probably have mentioned:
The main point of the post is that despite the connotations of the word “debt”, retiring the debt would be a disastrous mistake.
Even running multi-year neutral (or surplus) budgets would probably cause a recession.
And that’s not a weakness of the US economy, it’s just how fiat currency works.
I’m fairly convinced that what makes a lot of the US population right wing is a lack of understanding of what that means.
My dad (long time conservative but can’t get on the trump train which is good at least) thinks that “tax the rich” means people like high end doctors and surgeons. People who are absolutely in the top 1% but like “has a nice weekend car and maybe a lake house” not people making millions of dollars per month or week (or more)
“The difference in wealth between a surgeon and a billionaire is about one billion dollars, it’s the billionaires that need to pay more taxes, they pay a smaller % than you.”
How the the story of the nurses who pay more tax than Bezos didn’t result in a landslide for progressives, I’ll never understand.
More as a percentage* than nurses.
That’s one of the arguments my dad makes too, depending on the source he pays like 1-2% in taxes on a given year which was over a billion dollars last year.
Propaganda is a helluva drug
Yeah, it’s hard for the human mind to comprehend how much money a billion dollars actually is and neither of the two major political parties in this country want to expand it to them
Natural result of the massive and constant effort to make the Republican party seem less insane than it is that’s undertaken by both political parties for some reason
The medias are normalizing the pathological behaviours from the GOP. That false requirement to be unbiased in the face of the most serious breach to the constitution is what got us here.
Not all ideas are worth consideration and mainstream medias are failing to understand that.
“failing to understand that” oh they’re aware, it’s just they’re all large companies with motivations to keep the far right in power.
True, but it’s not the secretive conspiratorial type of motivations, it’s the “make money; make numbers go up” motivations. Corporate news are owned by billionaires for a reason- naked power. Your rag might lose money but the spin they make can help everything else.
Honest, truthful reporting is, by nature, kind of boring to the average person. Hence all reporting has to be pumped up, juiced with outrage or horror or astounding details somehow. Making it inherently dishonest.
And there is no such thing as an objective point of view.
I don’t think that helps, but public opinion of the media is pretty low and fewer people are reading the news all the time, so I don’t think that explains it.
The real problem is that the average person who doesn’t think about politics much and assumes the truth is somewhere to the left of what Republicans are saying and to the right of the Dems constantly hears Dems like Schumer Jeffries Pelosi Hoyer etc. talk about how we need to strengthen the border and fund the police and other stupid shit like that, and it ends up making things like the suspension of asylum rights and giving billions of dollars of taxpayer money to for profit organizations seem like a reasonable middle ground.
e; … buuut, I also feel compelled to point out that the one place I was able to find a recording of this town hall was through a “news” channel that was actually founded by this lawmaker, so the media environment is not not a problem I suppose
If you include social media algorithms as “news” the point still stands. TikTok, Facebook, Twitter all want right wing in power.
The
Civil rights activistSJW cringe compilations were literal Russian propaganda to get malicious and stupid people to reject the civil rights movement.
Wait till you hear what rich folks say about that plan!
https://patrioticmillionaires.org/
(Spoiler: A lot of them agree)
Warren Buffet has been pointing this out for at least 20 years. Bill Gates for at least 6. It’s crazy how the most famous billionaires haven’t moved the needle.
If they agree then why aren’t they lobbying these politicians?
They are.
“So your proposal to solve (the debt) is to tax the rich?”
“So your proposal to solve the empty gas tank is to put gas in the tank?”
“So your proposal to solve the dog getting out of the yard is to repair the fence?”
“So your proposal to solve the problem of not being able to see is to put on your glasses?”
Bro. It’s the most obvious solution. It also has the added benefit of being the only one that’s proven to work.
Being a representative whose mind doesn’t immediately jump to that solution is like being a truck driver and not immediately jumping to the solution of slamming on the brakes when you’re speeding toward a red light: it’s not a difference of opinion or policy, it’s dangerous negligence. Why are you holding meetings about this? If you’re dedicated to not slamming on the brakes, just try swerving into the daycare playground or whatever your twisted idea is. Don’t hold a town hall asking for a rubber stamp on plowing through the toddlers, and definitely don’t act surprised when your constituents react in horror and propose using the brakes instead.
What response was he expecting??
“TAX THE RICH!!!”
“So your solution is to tax the rich?”
“Oh… Well now that you put it that way… No I guess not.”
The district’s gone red for twenty years. So, yes.
It’s so stupid, it could wrap around to being unbelievable. If only I hadn’t seen so much stupidity in such a small time, that is.
I mean think about it guy you’ve been cutting taxes for the Rich for 50 years and the debt has gone up remarkably. It ain’t rocket science.
From 1980 to 2008 there was a perfect correlation between whether a Republican or Democrat was in the oval office and whether the debt was blowing up insanely or actually being paid off (Clinton, the lone Democratic President during that period, actually had a budget surplus the last two years of his Presidency). Unfortunately, it was still impossible to get Republicans to believe that the ballooning debt wasn’t the Democrats’ fault - “tax and spend liberals” etc. etc. Then Obama joined in the “deficits don’t matter” parade as did Biden, and now you can’t even use actual facts to try and convince people that Republicans are as far from being “fiscal conservatives” as it’s possible to be.
Tax the rich!
…And we voted in the wealthiest man in history and a narcissistic luxury hotel magnate, who openly touted a regressive tax plan, to do it?
Somehow they’ve been convinced that the lower/middle class pays taxes so migrants and other minorities can live like the people they elected and Republicans are the ones fighting to protect them from Democrats who want all their money.
Whom also has a factual history of being a con man, rapist, adulterer, and outright horrible person.
Makes perfect sense to some, I’m sure.
Video I found: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/mUwdNOCenco
I’m sure whatever he said after that clip ends was in effort to gaslight that crowd into thinking taxing the rich is somehow a bad thing.
We now have 5 decades of solid evidence that trickle-down economics don’t work. Anyone still claiming the contrary is either a) delusional or b) rich.
BuT thEYRe jOb CrEAtOrs!!!
ThEYrE pHilANthrOPists!!
INovAtIOn! ThEYrE iNnovATorS!!!
I loved the “job creators” argument because it is super easy to disprove.
If my company that has one employee makes twice the profits off the same number of orders as it made last year Im not hiring anyone because I don’t need to despite being able to afford it. What would make me hire someone else is the volume of orders increasing past the point where I can fill them hence the customers are the job creators.
And customers are created by average people having disposable income. Want jobs created? Tax the rich and spread that to the working class. EZPZ.
Working class working directly for other working class instead of corpos and billionaires is the wealth class’s worst nightmare because it makes it obvious to the average person nobody needs a wealth class, and they are leeching from society without doing anything productive for civilization.
Right?
This came up in another thread but folks were talking about how the rich don’t even like build libraries and theaters anymore. They don’t even pretend to care. They just build bunkers and yachts.
Plus let’s not forget that wages are an expense and thus a tax write-off for a business.
I wish I could see the rest though. I would love to hear where he went sure that.
Wont take long until they reintroduce taring and feathering.
The dipshits will continue to vote GOP, don’t worry.
I’ll tax the rich!
He’s a socialist!!
How about “where’s the whole video, where’s the whole video”. I like where this was going, but would love to see where it went. I can’t find it. Anyone have a link to the entire thing?
I’m not sure if it’s the full town hall, but the one thing I was able to find that was more than a few minutes long was this video titled “Republican Town Hall LIVE | Congressman Mike Flood NOT Afraid to Listen to his District”
https://www.youtube.com/live/GW2hRMYVhjQ
https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=GW2hRMYVhjQ
That title seemed a little biased to me, so I looked up its Wikipedia page, and guess who founded News Channel Nebraska?
So, yeah, it’s entirely possible there was some deceptive editing or some other nonsense, also it’s entirely possible that video will disappear if their founder decides it’s bad for him to have this out there
How long do you think it will take, that trump ist making the words “Tax the Rich” a illegal pharse because i dont know … Maybe terrorism or some other stupid cause for that phrase?
Why not tax those that can afford it?
Because I might be rich someday, and if that happens I’m going to want even more money. Or something like that.
That’s many Americans in a nutshell.
It’s why they’re racist and anti-LGBTQ, too. They think if those groups gain any power they’ll use it the way bigots would. The way bigots do.
They’re all temporarily embarrassed billionaires confused about the order in which they’re supposed to climb and kick the ladder.
Don’t worry bud, it’ll trickle back down to them.
It’ll trickle back down to Flood, sure. But that’s as far as it’ll go.
I wonder if we could make any headway arguing that taxes were automated trickling down. We had the rich, and we all benefit from things like roads.
The rep after the cheers “Wee Woo, Wee Woo!!!”
