Biden Is Breaking Campaign Rule No. 1. And It Just Might Work.

jeffw@lemmy.world to politics @lemmy.world – 87 points –
Opinion | Biden Is Breaking Campaign Rule No. 1. And It Just Might Work.
nytimes.com
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The rule is apparently not to raise taxes, and the plan is to raise taxes on billionaires.

If politicians represented the masses it would always have been done. But legal bribery means that they represent their donors instead.

Typically when the masses agree on something it does not happen unless it also benefits the rich

See paid family leave, universal background checks on gun purchases, hell, women’s right to bodily autonomy?!

This is why I have a modicum of respect for Bush Sr. He promised no more taxes on the campaign trail and then when he was in office he realized that in order to balance the budget taxes needed raised. He did this knowing he wouldn't win a second term.

Look into his life before running for President; you'll lose the respect right quick. Also his father financed the literal Nazis (though in his defense pretty much every American with money was supporting the Nazi party pre-1940).

2 things.

  1. I've been paying attention to some of this since I was young so I do know quite a bit about his history.

2). Did MODICUM go the way of literally?

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/modicum

Remember, according to Zoomers if you do anything other that full throatedly hate something, you must love and support that thing. No in between.

And this is why we are fucked as a country, even if Biden holds on to the Whitehouse. Instead of working inside the system we have and trying to change it for the better, it's all or nothing. Biden sucks because he has been upholding a very very long policy of supporting Israel, regardless of how we feel about it. Only a handful seem to grasp what happens and did happen when you let perfect be the enemy of good. I'll give a hint, we got 4 years of an orange menace

Much more likely explanation: He was lying when he made the 'pledge'.

Do you not know about the republicans and tax cuts? They do their damndest to lower taxes for their corporate overlords at the expense of programs that not only act as a safety net but also tend to have a positive ripple effect on the overall economy.

Nope. Dude didn't lie about not increasing taxes, he was one of the last guard of old-school repubs who actually did what was best for everyone, especially when he took the big seat.

I mean it's a pretty simple logic. The economy is strong but people don't feel like it's strong because it's only strong for those of the top. It's that way because we spent the last 40 years cutting taxes for the rich, destroying regulations and economic safeguards, getting rid of safety nets, and allowing for the wealthiest to abuse the system. Why wouldn't saying we want to fix that problem be the right course? Uprooting ancien regimes is the one thing liberals and leftists tradionally agree on.

Repeal the Trump tax on the lower and middle class, tax the rich even more.

And say that. Campaign on repealing the Trump Tax. Do both, you jackasses.

They don’t want to do that though because it personally benefits them.

They also don’t really care about winning this election, just ensuring to deliver on Biden’s big donor promise: nothing will fundamentally change. Dumbasses that they are, the Dems are once again severely underestimating Trump and his capacity to win, and capacity for mayhem. They probably think the “worst” he’ll do with another term is more tax cuts which benefit them.

I see a lot of ‘tax the rich’ pushes, but I’m curious on how. It’s not like billionaires get a normal salary, so I wonder what it actually is - is it taxing assets over a certain value or something?

I worked for a family office in Switzerland and the “salary” from the company to our owner was an entry level salary for compliance/presence purposes. He couldn’t care less about that being taxed.

Yes, a wealth tax over a billion dollars is a proposal now. Biden's not doing it though, but 1% to 2% could raise a lot of money. Although it would require legitimate property valuations. That's hard if people just lie about their real estate like Trump was convicted of.

Also taxing capital gains over a certain amount at higher rates would help billionaires have a fair tax burden. It makes no sense to tax you a greater percentage than the owner you worked for. Above a million in capital gains should be taxed as income.

No I'm not afraid of money leaving the country. If they want to leave the most productive and profitable country on earth, that's more money for us.

That’s hard if people just lie about their real estate like Trump was convicted of.

If they lie and inflate their property values, they get taxed more. Sounds like a win to me!

He was sued for underpaying taxes by undervaluing his property. The lies for overvaluing them on bank documents haven't been charged yet. That's a federal crime.

The Swiss actually has wealth tax, depending on canton. I believe though a lot of it is negotiable- if you’re super wealthy, I think you can agree a fixed amount per year with your canton (state).

In my canton you’re exempt from it if you have less than $250-300k in assets or something like this. And it ranges from something like 0.20-1% I believe.

At least tax loans that use stock and other "untaxes assets" as collateral as realizes gains.

Also it is kinda weird that normal people pay taxes on properties but assets like stock portfolios are not taxed.

Remove the cap on social security taxes (160k), and the program will be fully funded in perpetuity.

Implement a wealth tax on those with, say, over 10 million in assets.

Increase the corporate tax rate to 50%, and remove all loopholes allowing them to offshore earnings.

Remove the cap on inheritance tax, as this is one of the primary drivers of wealth inequality today.

These would be a good start.

Make every post office a bank. The bank then gives out loans to local co-ops.

Federate the co-ops with an organizatio like Mondragon.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

Stop coddling these faceless mega corporations. Since they are SO efficient, they wont need any breaks from the government. Invest in the people, not a 1%ers off shore bank account

This is the best summary I could come up with:


Such staggering accumulations of wealth are made possible in large part by the fact that America’s federal tax burden is so comparatively light.

Now President Biden, behind in many polls and with an economy that is objectively strong but politically unpopular, is hoping to boost his re-election bid with a policy idea that would once have been almost unthinkable: For this portion of the population, at least, he is vowing — almost gleefully — to raise taxes.

For a Democrat with low job approval ratings and precarious poll numbers on his handling of the economy, it’s a shocking rebuke to conventional wisdom — and practically an invitation to critics to call him a tax-and-spend liberal.

Howard Jarvis and his followers, mostly older white property owners, pushed for the ballot initiative known as Proposition 13 because they were, in their words, mad as hell that their rising taxes would help educate immigrant families.

In the 1960s, George Romney, Mitt’s father, regularly turned down his bonuses from his auto executive job, perhaps in part because his marginal tax rate would have been about 90 percent.

“You could be talking about the Mets versus the Dodgers,” the former U.S. Representative Steve Israel of New York recalled, “and good Republican operatives would be able to weave in tax-and-spend.”


The original article contains 1,229 words, the summary contains 214 words. Saved 83%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

In the 1960s, George Romney, Mitt’s father, regularly turned down his bonuses from his auto executive job, perhaps in part because his marginal tax rate would have been about 90 percent

If this is true he's a fucking idiot. 10% of $x is better than $0. More likely the reason was that the bonuses pushed him over some threshold so he lost some other benefit, making it a net loss, or he negotiated some alternative compensation mechanism that had reduced or deferrable tax liability.

Life Rule No. 1 is don’t continue to make the rich richer while the middle and lower class is suffering. And Biden isn’t doing shit about that one.

no it wont lol

the best campaign strategy would be to stop financing a genocide that is making nazis blush

Foreign policy is always really low on the list of voter priorities. Also, "Nazis blush"? Come on. That's fucking ridiculous.

It's comparable to Nazis in that both are genocide, but the comparison begins and ends with, "and the Nazis were way fucking worse." Which is fine. It doesn't have to be a competition for it to be a bad situation that you want to do something about.

I mean it's also comparable to the Nazis in that the ideologies are almost exactly the same (the whole the Chosen People TM must remove the subhumans for Lebensraum rhetoric specifically is so close it's not even funny) even if the scales are different because Israel needs to do the absolute bare minimum to save face on the international stage.

I don't like the comparison to the Holocaust for the same reasons you said, but comparing Israel to Nazis has a lot of merit.

Edit: Also foreign policy tends to be low on voters' priority list, except when genocide or other large-scale crimes against humanity are involved. It's easy to forget this because Israel has controlled public perception of the conflict for a long time, but Americans have a decently long history of being very much not okay with genocide (when they're not the ones committing it). You'll see this today in progressives dropping Biden over Gaza; normally it'd be more than just progressives, but Israel has controlled public opinion for so long (and so successfully tied their existence to US Christian death cults' eschatology) that it's still only a limited segment of the total population.

if the nazi comparison is only bad because the numbers arent there yet, then i have bad news for you....

What are you trying to say?

that genocide is a bad thing.

the apologia for it on this thread is pretty disgusting tbh

I mean of course, but "just" doing genocide doesn't make you a Nazi. There are many non-Nazi genocides in history, so picking the Holocaust in particular needs to have some merit and it doesn't here. If anything this is more resembling of the Native American genocide, only with modern weaponry.

it looks pretty similar to nazis, same kind of propaganda and rhetoric, same kind of justifications and all...

listen to yourself man. but but nazis did the same, but way more!

its preposterous this even has to be a reasonable comparison.

the fact its foreign policy is the problem, i get it. it may be why all these voters are EAGER to vote for far-left joe biden. as long as he pinky promises to tax the rich, for realsies this time.

you get he could stop this trolley at any time, right?

It's too late to feign offense at quantifying atrocities. If you're going to compare them, which you explicitly did, yes the Nazis were worse and wouldn't blink, much less blush, at Israel's treatment of Palestinians. Without question.

You think people don't know what they're getting with Biden? We absolutely do, and there isn't a single comparison by which Trump comes out ahead. That includes treatment of Palestinians.

The choice between Biden and Trump is an easy one.

so you think taking offense at a genocide is.... fake?

the nazis are blushing again my man, your attitude is similar to that of germans in the 20s and 30s, and you might as well be one of them. no wonder you seem to not understand why people don't want to support a genocide.

MLK was right, you guys are just nazis painted blue. you dont care as long as you can still afford your hamburguers, and feel yourself superior for "choosing" the blue fascists instead of the red ones.

let me be real with you: your refusal to get up your fat ass and actually do something about it will bring you to higher body counts than the nazis, because the numbers seem to be all you care about.

This isn't even a good faith argument. I can tell because you just make up whatever straw man you want and argue against it.

oh no. hating genocide can't be in good faith, right?

no need to make up strawman when you gleefully say pretty fascist things to me with what i assume is a straight face.

If Nazis did way more, they wouldn't be blushing.

Magicshel is countering your extreme exaggeration by putting it into perspective.

you guys seem to be offended by the comparison.

the fact you are not offended by the genocide, instead by being called out on it, yeah there are nazis blushing out there.

It’s bad, but “making nazis blush”? Let’s not blow things out of proportion by downplaying the holocaust. This doesn’t touch the Third Reich, Armenia, Cambodia, Mao, or Stalin. On one hand, genocide is genocide, but the scales are way different.

It is of a lower scale than the Holocaust, because Israel is being held back by the international community. Most places in Gaza are either already in famine or will be soon at this rate. If Israel has its way the scale will match these genocides (as a proportion of the population of course). I do agree that comparisons to the Holocaust are exaggerations and therefore unproductive, but let's not forget that the real genocide is just starting.

that the real genocide is just starting

yes. the comparison is apt, thats exactly my damn point.

israel wouldnt be able to do anything close to what its doing right now without US weapons and money.

The comparison will be apt if Israel succeeds, but fortunately it hasn't yet. "This has the potential to be as bad as the Holocaust" and "this is as bad as the Holocaust" are different statements and mixing them up only hurts the cause.

i said it was makong nazis blush. which it is.

does a genocide has to be super successful for us to be able to compare it with another?

i said it was makong nazis blush. which it is.

That would normally be read as: This genocide is worse than the Holocaust. This is why people are taking issue with it.

people should be taking issue with the fact its happening at all.

instead i got this drivel that "voters dont mind!" or some shit

instead i got this drivel that “voters dont mind!”

Yeah that's nonsense. Voters absolutely do mind, as they should.

Yeah it is happening, too bad.

But putting this all on Biden means your entire rant is going to push people away from Biden, making Trump more likely to win. And Trump literally said they were going to make it even worse.

So you are essentially pushing Trump because it is a 2 party system. And Palestine will get genocide even more because of it.

That is why you are getting downvoted.

trump is very likely to win regardless, nobody in history has ever managed to vote away fascism.

even if he doesnt, your actual overlords seem keen in making it happen anyway, as evidenced be the current state of affairs right now

sure lets argue the genocide is not too bad....

this is the response you bothered to type out here? not even the usual "he is the lesser evil!!" or something

sure stalin killed trillions somehow so we have some room to kill a few palestinians here and a couple more mexicans there and still look good for this years election cycle

Thanks for putting words in my mouth! Maybe try rereading my comment?

Once more for the people in the back: “Genocide is genocide, but the scales are incomparable”

oh yes, its just a little genocide, not much! you surely cant compare it with nazis!

what harm does it do?

sure those other genocides cant compare with our finesse and compassion with the gazans or mexicans over this last century

ever notice how the outwardly fascist conservatives love it? just a coincidence, our guy is blue not red!

Oof, reading is not your strong suit, eh?

dunno but pretending not to be a closet nazi sure doesnt seem to be yours.

the shoe seems to fit perfectly for you. mentioning nazis really got you going to defend your precious octogenarian maniac.

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If you think Israeli genocide is a bigger problem than the wealthy then I got a bridge to sell you.

You are just doing the elites dirty work which is to get Biden out and get a psycho pos Republican in.

I do care about the genocide but you can’t take the tools of the wealthy away when they can just buy more elsewhere.

Take their money now and see the results. It works. The world gets better because the psychos go broke.

Didn't know Israel was putting everyone on trains to be gassed like a convyerbelt

no need, gaza is already ethnically cleansed.

which seems to be the objective of genocidal maniacs doesnt it?

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