Love how he thinks the idea of taxing the rich is so ridiculous that merely repeating it back to the audience is a counter argument.
We really need to get the money out of politics.
“best I can do is a tax cut for those making over $250k”
To him it’s ridiculous because they give him so much money. He can’t fathom another point of view.
why just politics? punish them for, you know; destroying the world and taking so much of all our lives.
edit: if they push us so far that the common person is down for taking real action, make sure it can’t happen again.
It’s a hilarious failure to gaslight an entire town hall by himself.
The reason Luigi is so popular with Americans is because he is a microcosm example of the Sociopathic Oligarch’s worst nightmare - The average American rising up to literally KILL the wealthy. He is just one man with one victim, but what if he were multiplied by hundreds, or thousands, or millions?
The way black people felt about OJ, is now being felt by all working class Americans toward Luigi. So the wealthy, and the system, want to punish him harshly as an example to the rest of us, while we are plotting ways for him to escape punishment.
When the people are demanding a reasonable solution, and they are dismissed by the goverment in favor of punishing Americans in order to benefit the Sociopathic Oligarchs at our expense - AGAIN! - the Free Market will find an alternative, and nothing frightens them more than the threat of Luigi’s Solution catching fire, and becoming a trend.
Can you expand on how it’s comparable to OJ? The guy killed his partner. To me, that’s much different.
OJ didnt kill his partner, he killed his ex-wife, but that’s not the point.
The point is that in both cases, the killer and the victim have taken on symbolic roles for different segments of society. In OJs case, he represented black citizens, especially those in LA, who had been brutally, systematically discriminated against by the LAPD for decades, while his white victim became symbolic of white crime victims at the hands of black criminals.
In Luigi’s case, he has come to represent the people who have been systematically discriminated against by corporations in general, but especially by the breath-takingly corrupt health care insurance system, while the corporate serial-killer CEO has come to represent the Sociopathic Oligarchs and amoral trans-national corporations who ruthlessly, sociopathically exploit every hard-working American. Obviously, the Sociopathic Oligarchs dont share the same perspective. Like all ultra-wealthy, they think that they are the victims, and that poor people get ALL the breaks.
It should be noted that neither set out to be a symbolic example for American society, or at least OJ didn’t. He was a fucking dickhead, who had the world by the balls, and just threw it all away in a stupid jealous rage, probably exacerbated by steroids.
Luigi may have hoped he would kick off a movement, and he has, but we don’t know what his motivations truly were because he’s not admitting to anything, as he should. He still has a chance to get acquitted based on his face not being seen in the murder video. That alone is enough for a juror to claim reasonable doubt, so he should keep claiming his innocence.
The bottom line is that we, as a society, apply these symbolic roles to these people, outside of their control. Those that deliberately try to set off a revolution, usually fail, like Charles Manson trying to touch of Helter Skelter (his designation for a race war) with his mass murders. Other examples of those who have been assigned symbolic societal roles include Trayvon Martin/ George Zimmerman, or the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, etc.
Excellent point! I feel like Americans don’t like to understand that practically everyone in the U.S. is working class now. If you cannot quit your job tomorrow and live off of passive, savings, and residuals you are working class. The system is designed to facilitate this, with spartan social safety nets and lack of pensions. It’s shit-tier by developed nation standards.
What’s that other quote, ~“it only takes 3.5% of the population to generate massive change”? Obviously I am being flippant in this specific instance, but America is a failed democracy and empire in decline.
There is hope, but it requires taking back the power by direct action.
Mark Penn and Malcolm Gladwell (and many others, im sure) have both written about micro-trends, and how it takes such a small amount of the population - 2 or 3% - to reach a “Tipping Point,” and force major change.
Its the reason the Conservative Propaganda Machine works so hard to keep us so confused and at each other’s throats. They know that if even 3-5% of the population turns on them, they are royally fucked.
Nah I say we make some cuts to the capitalists
I’d rather see Elon spend life in Solitary Confinement. It would be the ultimate irony that the same government he did his best destroy takes away his freedom for life.
He should have it worse than the average prisoner though. Padded white cell with nothing in it, and maybe he has to wear a straight jacket on the weekends. He’ll also only eat Nutraloaf.
So if we give him an always-on TV with access to any given news-media, does he see the world and despair that he isn’t out there ruling over a happier people? Or does he read it that everyone out there are fools and only I can fix this?
Not that it matters outside his fluffy 12x12.
I think the ultimate punishment for all oligarchs and fascists is to live with nothing but their own thoughts as a stimulus. They took the gift of their mind for granted and poisoned it with greed, misinfo and hate. Let them live in it
Napoleon kept getting out
counterpoint: it would only be worth it as long as an audience finds it interesting. make sure none of his kids reproduce, just because he would hate that. hit him where it matters. everything he cares about; tear it down. make sure he’s forgotten, the genes he loves do not propagate, etc.
No his kids should be allowed to live their lives, Musk free. Odds are that they are victims too, and would like to distance themselves from their pathetic father. Vivian should be able to have a kid of her own, whatever the means, if she believes she can be a good parent.
What are we North Korea now?
uh, well… I can’t exactly say “no” as honestly as I might have a year ago. and it’s kind of his fault.
Nah it aint worth the government resources
For, you know, government efficiency and all.
Yes, efficiency >:3
DOGE. Department of Government Executions?
I’m down for this. I think we need to make cuts in most areas of society, but I have no objections to starting in government.
you know; austerity.
Thing about a class war is it only works as long as you can subdivide the lower classes and make them hate each other.
Even the GOP base has figured out that the boot on their neck belongs to the rich, probably thanks to Elon’s haphazard culling of govt employees, specifically veterans, while preserving funds that benefit the rich.
Say what you will about conservative voters, but when something is obviously harming them specifically they will go after it, and Trump’s administration has finally blundered enough to wake at least some of them up.
class war […] only works as long as you can subdivide the lower classes and make them hate each other.
That’s not how class war works, that’s how they try to prevent class war, ie war between classes.
I think they mean that’s the tactic used by the wealthy in their part of the class war.
It’s the same story with the status-quo-protectors vs innovation-seekers no?
First party just wants to stay put so everyone who thinks like them are already in the same camp. (zero vector)
Others side agrees that vector of “politicial compass” must be non-zero but they don’t agree on the direction so the net effect is 0, status quo.
Finally they know who their true enemy is
Tax them or eat them.
If they refuse to tax them, I say we EAT them.
We should. Every year, during tax season, we should take the richest person (or company, fuck it) and redistribute 50% of their assets. Pay for UBI with it, fund social services, etc. Then we build a statue in their honor in the hall of “greatest winners”.
Wood chipping the rich and their lineage is faster. Could even make them go through a water slide and end in the wood chipper.
No last words. No quotes. Simply cleaning an infection as indifferently as the maggots stuck to the side of the trash bag you toss out.
What about their legs? They don’t need their legs
I say we cage them in cuba and let them eat each other.
You know how some Chinese provinces eat frogs? I want my millionaire done like that, but I want to be the one who salts them.
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)
Your dad thinks that people earn money by working for it. In other words, he’s what would be a normal person in a socialist society.
All you have to do now is teach him what capitalism is.
“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.
Which is hilarious. That percentage should be around 40-50% if not more.
And at one point it was pretty close to that in many parts of the West. For as much as American conservatives want to go back to the 50s socially, they don’t seem keen on bringing back the fiscal policies of the time…
Propaganda is a helluva drug
The top 1% make roughly $600k per year, or probably more significantly (as not all rich people get “income”), a net worth of $11million according to this article
So yeah, maybe some doctors are in that category, but it’s probably just the real big earners.
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
Public opinion of the media going down is also driven by the right wing. Hell, I don’t think the media minds it, given that most of those companies also have stakes in other shit that’ll, at least in their minds, benefit from a corporatist government.
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.
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.
That sounds like our economy is being held hostage by billionaires. “You can’t take money from us, it’ll make things worse for everyone”. Bullshit - they’ll try to make things worse for everyone but we don’t have to let them, which is exactly the point.
They are saying we need to target where the debt comes from not that we need to bend a knee to the billionaires.
We do use fractional reserve banking whether its a great system or not and so to not trigger a depression or recession we need to be aware of not triggering a deflationary period which would occur by having a surplus in the budget. Instead of excess spending on military we should be investing/spending excess in public infrastructure like health care, mass transportation, and education which have means of generating wealth beyond resource extraction from other nations during war.
They are saying this is a two pronged issue, we need to tax the billionaires but we also need to make sure we still target the right critical investments of public infrastructure with our government spending if we are to see any benefit from it. Otherwise we end in a deflationary period where while you did tax the rich you also delfated the currency making each dollar worth more. I.e they become millionaires in name with the same value as the billionaires they were before all while wages become depressed and the wealth gap gets even worse.
“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.
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.
Damn this is so on point. This is exactly what’s happening. They love us fighting each other. God forbid we all come together and Luigi the rich.
Makes perfect sense to some, I’m sure.
Whom also has a factual history of being a con man, rapist, adulterer, and outright horrible person.
Literally which one
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.”
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.
He thought he was talking to temporarily embarrassed millionaires
The district’s gone red for twenty years. So, yes.
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.
Their major misstep is failing to purchase every major social media outlet in the country like the conservatives have.
No, their major misstep is spreading Corona through 5G.
Will my phones 5G performance improve if I get another booster? What if I stand near that guy that got 217 COVID-19 vaccinations?
Wow, I initially upvoted thinking this had to be a joke, but the recent influx of trolls (from reddit is my first guess) made me think twice and check your history. Yeesh. Vote revoked. Fucking weirdo
For example
(Yes I’m showing my reddit age by using imgur)
They might not be a troll. They might just be an idiot.
If they agree then why aren’t they lobbying these politicians?
For every billionaire that agrees, 99 other billionaires disagree. 1 billionaire isn’t gonna win a fight against 99 billionaires
Edit: And also because they are Millionaires, much less influence lol
They are.
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.
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.
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.
Wont take long until they reintroduce taring and feathering.
I wish I could see the rest though. I would love to hear where he went sure that.
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.
