Because the super rich decide policies
Because they don’t own the means of production, and the opposition has a monopoly on violence.
Over 70% of voters want universal healthcare. About the same amount want a higher minimum wage.
About 90% of Democratic voters want universal healthcare, more than half of all independents want the same thing, and even a huge amount of Republicans want universal healthcare (around 40%).
Even so, D&Rs can’t be bothered.
(yes yes, I know, BoTh SiDeS so I must be a secret Nazi bot, etc. you got me)
Nobody in politics really cares for voters. They just tell convenient lies, and once you dropped your vote into the ballot box, you stop to exist for them again. You are just the annoying necessary means to lift them up to the pork barrels of political bribery.
Do you have some action plan to fight that?
For the US, this would require removing companies from political actions, and channeling private political donations to a neutral handler that limits those to a certain maximum amount.
Because the rich bribe our politicians. Legally.
We REALLY need to normalize demystifying the rebrand of bribery as ‘lobbying’. There’s a reason that term has power, cause people alreayd learned the dangers of it, and the corruption it breeds.
Title should be: ruling class makes it as difficult as possible for the rest to tax them
Because 90% think they’re in the top 10%, and the top 10% think they’re all 1 step from being the next musk.
They’re all deluded be capitalism.
Because they’re using some of their money to keep us from holding them accountable? And that they have probably run the numbers to find that it is cheaper to do this than to just… Pay the taxes.
Some things that would help:
- A wealth tax. Their wealth will continue to grow exponentially, but at least a portion of it could be harvested to reduce the deficit.
- Taxing capital gains the same as ordinary income. Making money from investments requires no effort, and it blows my mind that wage income is taxed more heavily.
Trying to get exact numbers for wealth to tax it is near impossible especially in ultra wealthy areas with their own ways of hiding it Anyone who suggests touching capital gains will be accused of attacking peoples retirement at least in the US 401ks have replaced most other forms of retirement benefits
Im surprised there aren’t more Georgists in this day and age when we have so much bogarted land and empty luxury apartments
Probably because the foundation of georgism became fundamentally irrelevant with the invention of the microprocessor.
Summary since the Access top this page has been denied:
Most Americans support higher taxes on billionaires due to concerns about inequality and concentrated wealth, yet federal and state efforts to implement such taxes have largely stalled because of political influence, legal complexity, and fears of capital flight (wealthy moving their money outside the US).
Is this actually a legitimate question they’re asking?
It’s the most obvious answer on earth. The people making the laws don’t work for the voters anymore. They vote for the donors.
It can be more complicated than that. My governor just signed into law a state income tax on anyone making a million or more. (We have no other income tax, everyone pays a regressive sales tax.) All the poorest people in the state are mad and they are collecting signatures to repeal the millionaire tax, because they think this new income tax will “trickle down” to anyone making $100k or less. They are absolutely convinced of this, even though new laws would have to be passed for that to happen. And this is a blue state.
Are they actually all the poorest people in the state, or are we talking like a doordash grandma situation where they hire some people to dress up like regular working class folk for an afternoon?
Well the politicians are rich and don’t like hurting themselves. And they like earning money or getting richer.
The superrich own the media.
And the politicians.
Question answered. No further comments needed. Part of growing up is realizing the “democracy” we live in is just a mask for fascism.
A good chunk of current democracies are actually open market oligarchies.
And they also run fake competitions where they promise to give a million dollars to people for voting a certain way, but really the winners were predetermined the whole time…
/thread
Because America was founded with a bunch of horse sniffing half-literates for a general populous and the only thing that’s really changed is the number of horses to sniff.
i know this is a link to that other site, but this old post has a link to the full essay as published in 1980.
https://old.reddit.com/r/asimov/comments/6616rh/a_cult_of_ignorance_by_isaac_asimov_1980_via_pdf/
Why not just link to the essay
I’ve used this quote a lot over the years. One of the far right posters liked to “retort” by saying it’s better than being a pseudointellectual (directed at me), LOL!
Nice to get immediate confirmation of the validity of the quote.
💯
Yup. To the conservative mindset, the notion of having aspiration to bettering oneself, etc. == “pseudointellectual”. I cannot tell you how many conversations I’ve had from people that did not go to college and did not plan to go to college about how all those “college people” are. Also, calling someone an “intellectual” is considered an insult among conservatives. Calling them a pseudointellectual is spicing it up, LOL.
I still remember a conversation with an in-law where his literal mic-drop line (he thought) was to huff, “yeah, but YOU went to college!” He literally believes that going to college somehow taints a person. He has said as much, explicitly. He doesn’t want his kids going to college, either, because he thinks it will ruin them/turn them against him or whatever, with the “woke mind virus”. FFS.
Long article to say “the rich are in charge”
That’s not the full answer though, since a similar phenomenon appears in much less oligarchic systems.
While the rich also have a disproportionate influence in those systems, it wouldn’t be enough without the assistance of the racism and spite of the average voter.
Why do we think they’re less oligarchic? It’s a classic principal-agent problem. Representatives are generally for sale.
Less corrupt systems than the one in the US can and do exist.
I might be assuming too much of what you meant by oligarchic.
An oligarchic system is one where political power lies predominantly in the hands of a small privileged elite. But it’s not a binary concept, the current US system is less oligarchic than it was in the 19th Century, or the Venetian Republic for example. What did you mean?
