"Free" is a pet peeve for me. "Publicly funded" is more accurate.
"Free" is a pet peeve for me. "Publicly funded" is more accurate.
"Free stuff" is a characterization meant to be insulting. The stuff I pay taxes for is not free, and I would a thousand times rather spend my tax dollars on health care and infrastructure, for example, than on endless stupid wars and unnecessary payoffs to big business and billionaires.
Cannabis generates lots of revenue.
It doesn't cost the government any more money to subsidize gay marriage than straight.
Universal health care would be much cheaper and more efficient than what we have now, if it were managed as well as, say, Social Security. We pay twice as much for substandard care as any other first-world country.
I’m guessing that over the next few years the question “How do you intend to pay for that?” will generate a mighty torrent of creative wordsmithery, sublime spin and desperate distraction among progressive policy promoters.
“It’s an investment that will pay for itself.”
“We’ll make the rich pay. It won’t cost you a thing,”
“Denmark!”
“We owe the money to ourselves.”
“Those other guys borrow money too.”
“We’re trying to save humanity here! There’s no time to argue!”
"Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every, every minute?" Emily Webb, Our Town
www.silententry.wordpress.com
Upping the marginal income tax rates and finding a way around the Constitution to implement a federal wealth tax will not begin to raise all the additional trillions in proposed new spending. Neither will reducing the military to impotence or eliminating your least favorite law enforcement agencies.
If the Democrats want to promise eliminating fossil fuels and rehabbing everything with a roof in ten years while simultaneously providing a massive menu of new benefits, they should be honest about the cost involved to average Americans, not just the hated 1%.
So I guess we didn't have an extra two billion to gift to the oligarchs, eh? Let's reverse that blunder at the earliest opportunity.
I heard a pundit recently suggest that we would need to eliminate progressive taxation and credits and enforce a mandatory rate of approximately 50% on every worker, regardless of income.
That seems about right to me. If you were to add a wealth tax on top of that, it would have the added benefit of eliminating income disparity within just a few years which seems to make it a political no-brainer.
"Things should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler." ~ Albert Einstein
You know we talk about the pros and cons of socialism a lot and I think your post outlines my biggest problem with it. Your line of thought assumes that those two billion didn't belong to the oligarchs to start with, that all income belongs to the commons and we desperately need a just arbiter to dole it out fairly. That's such a crock.
"Things should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler." ~ Albert Einstein
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