politics

It might have been from Twitter or somewhere else, but awhile back someone said something akin to after someone passes $999 million, take the rest for the public good and give them a trophy that says "I won capitalism." I think it's a lovely idea.

This is such a juvenile take that I thankfully put down when I grew out of highschool. It's people like you that make any sort of discourse completely exhausting. You're suggesting a path that inevitably leads to full on bloody revolution which would result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands in armed conflicts across the country. That's not even getting into the likely tens of millions that would die due to supply lines of medicine being disrupted, the horrible toll it would take on geopolitics, the power vacuum that invites far worse than the GOP into power. It's this warped sense of thinking that lets fascists into office because people stop voting against them since they feel it's pointless when it's clearly not as this last midterm showed. Michigan is already leaps and bounds better than it was and that's from a single election cycle. We can change the system without revolution, because we're already doing it. Go outside, get involved with your local politics, and vote. The changes are already happening.

Then you also need to look at more than just “wealth cap” and “tax the rich”, because wealth inequality comes from more than just “the rich hoarding everything”. Both of those would help, and it’s a great start, but we need to look at other factors that contribute to the same issues - otherwise, all the money is just gonna stay in another rich crook’s pockets.

Take modern urban infrastructure. The reason there’s tons of urban sprawl, ghettos, and urban decay in the US, for example, is because of all the shitty laws the US has about parking minimums (the reason why malls need to have large parking lots) and how the auto industry abuses loopholes in environmental standards and laws to allow light trucks (SUVs and the giant pickup trucks) to… well, exist. The US also doesn’t really like doing mixed zoning despite the improved economic performance, and we tend to have huge streets that act like roads - so to basically reach a destination (a street), we have to drive there (like on a road). We can’t really walk or cycle or even use public transit in some areas.

And all of that is actively contributing to the wealth inequality because it gets incredibly expensive to live near where work is, and in order to afford something that is remotely in the same area, you tend to be pretty far away. Far away enough to require a car that you need to purchase in the first place, so you effectively need to somehow have money before you can consider driving to the place where you can make money. That’s just one tiny aspect of a very big and very problematic picture. Don’t just stop at “DAE THINK WE SHULD TAX DA RICH”, actually advocate to solve the underlying problems themselves so that we can tell our government what to do with all that money.