The Healthy Dose Of Economic Liberalism You Need This Week
A midterm coffee break to remember why we should all vote for Democrats.
If we actually ran America like a business the way Republicans say they want, we’d immediately fire a bunch of red states and kick them out of the Union for bad performance reviews in most metrics of societal success, and for not adding much value to the corporation in profits (taxes).
The person buying a yacht with another yacht inside, and a helicopter pad, and a full-time crew of dozens is a bigger societal parasite than the person buying a steak on his birthday with food stamps.
From the environment to healthcare, and from education to labor rights, you’re getting screwed while billionaires race to become trillionaires.
Progressive taxation is the logical, rational, moral, modern way a democracy doesn’t self-destruct.
America needs to tie the minimum wage to the cost of living index and inflation. The minimum wage has not increased for a decade, while the goal of a healthy economy is for inflation to go up about 2% every year. Every year for 10 years, America’s minimum wage earners have gotten pay cuts.
Menial labor still deserves a livable wage. Just because some labor is considered “unskilled” doesn’t mean people aren’t skilled at it. Your daily life depends on laborers at grocery stores, farms, warehouses, retail shops and restaurants. It is imperative our society has janitors, sanitation workers, clerks, truckers, drivers, furniture movers, security guards, etc. Modern civilization is impossible without these people regularly doing their jobs.
The Republican economic strategy is to combine bureaucratic incompetence, budget cuts, regulation cuts, and social Darwinism to ruin every service the government provides at cost so that Republicans can then privatize those services and cut taxes for the robber barons who take over those services and immediately start cutting corners, jacking up prices, and leaving out every person and community that is unprofitable. Let’s take the Postal Service, for example. What private company is going to consistently lose money delivering mail for just a 60-cent stamp to all the rural Republican voters who live in the middle of nowhere with less population density than farm animals? None. They’re going to cut rural areas out of their service zones, or start charging way more than a 60-cent stamp. Then the new CEO of the privatized Postal Service will give himself a huge salary increase for being a genius and saving the company so much money. The biggest insult to injury in American politics is that so many Republican policies and proposals disproportionately hurt their own voters. Liberals living in cities will still have cheaper mail, just like they have better access to healthcare, education, public transportation, high-speed Internet connections, governmental services, etc. It’s only Democrats who want to use taxes to ensure these benefits extend out of cities where they’re cheap and scalable to all Americans even where they’re expensive and logistically complicated.
The gun stuff, the Bible stuff, the racism stuff is just a distraction to make you feel good about how your life is not getting better. If you vote for Republicans and you’re not rich, you’re screwing yourself.
Higher taxes or pay higher wages: billionaires have to pick one. Republicans need to stop letting them pick neither.
Education gives the best return on federal investment. The next American generation is the ultimate startup.
For the idiots throughout the political right: social security is not an entitlement. It is a national insurance plan seniors have paid for their entire working lives.
“Who is going to pay for it?” “Something for nothing!” I hate these sentiments. How about we don’t start another war in the Middle East? Bam, just paid for college for everyone! How about we stop cutting taxes on already rich people? There, just bought healthcare for everyone!
Higher estate taxes, please! If you’re dead, you don’t need any money anymore, and if you’re rich your kids are probably douchey enough already!
New rule: no tax cuts for the rich unaccompanied by raises in the minimum wage.
Here’s a reminder that the big banks have successfully privatized their profits and socialized their losses many times.
If a too-big-to-fail company or bank needs a bailout, or recurring bailouts, or needs perennial subsidies, that company shouldn’t exist privately. If the government decides that a company is absolutely a vital industry, then it shouldn’t be a private enterprise giving out massive salaries repeatedly paid by taxpayers. A governmental bailout should mean that taxpayers own the company. It’s our money.
Donald Trump is the perfect personification of how a privileged rich kid gets to advance always upward in life without having any of the socio-economic adversity that develops actual talent, empathy, or real merit. He took bailouts from his dad, refused to follow the law, stiffed his employees and contractors, bribed gatekeepers and prosecutors all along his journey, sued everyone everywhere, and even screwed over his own family. Trump is not a success story, he’s a disturbed folk tale of deranged avarice.
If you can’t afford to pay a higher minimum wage, you don’t deserve to be in business. Give up, and sell your company because you’re not a success. There is nothing more entitled than refusing to pay a livable wage so you can pretend you’re a business owner.
GO VOTE
Thanks for your eyeballs!
-Dash MacIntyre
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