Local governments are starved for money, and almost all of their funding comes from local property taxes, that is, normal people. So, these mega-rich are allowed to get unboundedly wealthy, while normal people have to pay to keep society running as a minimal level. The mega-rich's money, as well as corporations', needs to flow back through the system. It does no good to let it concentrate so heavily and ultimately do nothing while it sits there.
But I disagree in that I think we absolutely should avoid it because a larger federal government has been heavily correlated with less local funding (so much so that the SALT deduction was once a thing). It's given rise to globalization and large multi-national conglomerates. It creates a situation where power & money is too concentrated.
Once you start looking into the ideologies of people like the Koch brothers, Robert Mercer and his family, Peter Thiel, Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, Sheldon Adelson, Ronald Cameron, Steve Wynn, and others, you start seeing very weird and strange beliefs that are incompatible with a functional society. The primary thread is that these people do not care about others. Just look at the Koch brothers' political donations and the businesses they run. Is it then any surprise why the Republicans might not care so much about climate change and policies to mitigate it?
We have one extremist political party, and then the other, somewhat incompetent, party spends all their energy fighting back against the extremism of the other.
A certain Republican sect literally tried to overturn the presidential election, threatening to hang the vice president, killed a capital cop, ransacked the capital, and only one Republican had the guts to vote against the president. Then that same party will decry people marching for human rights and supports violence against those groups. The Republicans are the same party that supposedly stand for small government but are hell bent on telling people what they can do with their own bodies and forcing religion to be taught in public schools. Republicans' reaction to mass shootings is more guns, while they are the ones that block any investigation into why these are happening or preventing people that should not be buying guns from buying guns. I happened to drive across the country during COVID. You could tell the Republican states from the amount of masks being warn. The Republicans blocked a third supreme court nomination by a two-term president in Obama that was 10 months ahead of the presidential election, meanwhile they rushed a third supreme court appointee by a one-term president just two months before an election, throwing out every reason they used to block Obama's nomination. These are all extreme positions that don't have analogs in the Democratic party.
> have no interest in discussing real solutions
Mind pointing that out? In fact, I've elaborated quite a decent amount. I'm not sure what you've brought to the discussion other than just stating disagreement and making bad faith statements. You are free to contribute or elaborate on what you mean by the Republican party not being extreme.
The solutions I believe that could help things are: increasing tax on the wealthy, limiting the amount of political donations including to interest groups and think tanks (i.e., get private money out of politics and government), abiding by separation of church and state, and increasing primary and secondary education.
- womens rights have been thrown back 50 years
- a legitimately won election was almost overturned by a violent mob incited by Trump at the time
Have the Democrats ever incited a mob to violently overturn an election?
The fact that people like Trump, Greene, Boebert and others with extremist and narcissistic values can rise to power / influence points to major systemic failures, which eventually destroys democracy if not stopped.
How do you avoid those destructive people rise to power?
I agree with that, but they could just, you know, lower taxes on the lower and middle class to balance it out.
I’m a US tax payer since less than a decade. My experience is that I pay a significant portion of my incomes to taxes that only marginally benefit me or folks around me.
Recent uptick of direct distribution is nice.
But a leadership in the stewarding of the land would be tasteful and send the right message IMO.
It’s fascinating to see the Western European countries I’m familiar with being blinded by the economic might of the US but not realizing how little the average citizen benefit from it.
However it might be interesting to explore an option that required people who own a stake in a company that has grown beyond a certain size to be required to siphon off some of those shares to employees over time in a way where it was not conducted on the open market and would not affect share price.
I also question whether corporate entities should be allowed to own shares and what the benefits are of that. Should private investment firms be allowed to accumulate massive stakes in public companies?