(May 4, 2015 at 7:11 pm)wallym Wrote:You know how you make that bottom 10% disappear? Pay them livable wages. And who said we can live without big business? None so drop it. If the top 10% paid more in taxes and invested in workers, the workers would be less dependent. But when you have billionaires like Nick Hanauer telling his own class they are fucking up, sorry, you have no case.(May 4, 2015 at 3:47 pm)Brian37 Wrote: The rich and the right have given the real welfare queens, like banks and Wall Street, and big oil and Walmart all the free tax cuts the rest of us have to make up for and want to do so by raising taxes on the rest of us and gutting things like social security and medicare and veterans benefits.
The practical issue that remains unspoken for political purposes is that the we (the US) need corporations and rich people. And we don't need poor people. In fact poor people are bad for the country. If the bottom 10% disappeared, it would be great for the country (practically speaking). If the top 10% disappeared, it'd be a crisis.
While a lot of money and politics is bullshit and people being bought off, there is also the part that a Corporation can go wherever they want. They aren't like Joe Schmoe in Tulsa who's options are staying in Tulsa, or maybe moving to Oklahoma City. They are not American. They are global, and globally, the US has to compete for them.
Similarly, a billionaire isn't the same as Joe Schmoe either. Because they can put their Billion dollars wherever they want. And the US has to compete to have them do things in this country with it.
But the key point is that the US does not have some magical patriotic claim to all the wealth and jobs in the world, which is the attitude of most of us American peons.
And we are not the center of the planet, never claimed we should be. But we are not going to get involved in a race for cheap labor worldwide either, that doesn't benefit anyone accept the top. The worlds rich need to invest everywhere to reduce poverty EVERYWHERE.
Then there is this.
So on top of Nick Hanauer and Buffet and economist Robert Reich and this.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22...Uf-4c5he_0
