14 ms·

Make Billionaires Pay Act

32 points by ToFab123 6y ago

Darmody 6y ago
He doesn't understand what wealth means or he does but he doesn't care and proposes stuff like this to gain votes.
42droids 6y ago
I am sorry to say this but if you want to tax the rich, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Look at the German taxation system and learn from it.
bitwize 6y ago
Come on, Sanders, don't puss out and stop there. How about: a 100% marginal tax rate on any wealth earned after personal wealth exceeds 1 billion dollars.
- gremlinsinc 6y ago
  Sounds good to me. This is what we really need. To ban billionaires from even existing.
bleah1000 6y ago
This bill on the face of it is pretty dumb. Most billionaires do not have liquid assets that are easily converted into money. In fact, most of the people's wealth increased due to their company stock price increasing. In order to pay these bills, the people would likely have to break sec laws to sell the stock quickly since there are all kinds of rules in this area. And if they get around that and are forced to sell large amounts of their holdings in companies, I imagine the stock market would crash, or have a local crash. And almost assuredly the stock wouldn't be worth nearly as much, so they would be forced to liquidate nearly everything they own to pay this tax bill. I also imagine these billionaires will find some loophole or simply sue the government and keep this in the courts for years while they figure out a way to nullify it. Honestly, this whole thing is a publicity stunt because the backers all know it has no chance of ever happening. Then they can pretend they care, and that they tried to do something. While in reality, they are doing nothing and never had any plan to do anything achievable.
- onetimemanytime 6y ago
  well, in theory they can hand their share in company stock to the govt, adjusted for any taxes or whatever. Based on the stock price of the days the bill is passed for example, or x days before. The government then sells or holds it, as it sees fit. That is not a problem, whether it should be passed it is. (I agree that this is a dumb law, taxes should not be a one off thing. If they need to be raised, do it but for all)
  - gremlinsinc 6y ago
    We need to move from income to VAT, and maybe land value tax. Then we'll have a much stronger baseline to pay for UBI and single payer. VAT would collect sales tax from everybody including immigrants, so nobody can claim they're mooching. Could make VAT more for non-citizens.
- sho 6y ago
  What a defeatist attitude. Instead of snarkily poking holes, where's your better solution? Because there has to be a solution. Inequality is reaching levels where it's dangerous. No, it is not good nor stable for 1% of the population to control 99% of the assets, and we'll get there soon enough. Redistribution will happen either by law or by knife and gun. This is not about who earned what or what was inconvenient for XYZ person. This is about the citizens of the country, supposedly equal under law, having no chance whatsoever of ever owning an equal part. It's about aristocracy, basically. And do we all remember how aristocracies end? Real life is not some computer model. In real life, if a father of 6 cannot feed or house his children he will not be satisfied by you saying that "well, Jeff Bezos outcompeted you!". There will be a redistribution. Our only choice is how it happens. This is an attempt.
  - babesh 6y ago
    It is not snarky to poke holes. It is snarky to call someone snarky for pointing out issues. You don’t always have to come up with a solution immediately. That would be stupid. Basic income via the printing of money. What do you think those $600 checks were? Inheritance tax. Make education at public schools and universities free. Reform government for greater efficiency.
leoh 6y ago
>Bill Gates: I’ve paid $10 billion in taxes. I should have paid more. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/2/27/18243183/bill-gates-foundation-reddit-ama-billionaire-taxes https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/2/27/18243183/bill-g...
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  Actually, Bill Gates should not have had the opportunity to amass as much money as he did because the US government should have broken up Microsoft a long time ago for anti-competitive behavior and abusing their monopoly positions dating back to at least the early 90's and maybe the late 80's. It is much better to aggressively enforce anti-trust than to increase the taxes afterward on the CEO's who benefited from such lax enforcement.
- _ph_ 6y ago
  Yes, over the time of decades during which he became the richest man on the planet, he probably should have paid more taxes. I fully agree that there might be more taxes, that should be collected. However this one-time grasp for a high amount of the actual possession in the form of stocks is just wrong on some many accounts. Stocks are only money (and consequentally taxable) when sold - forcing people to sell of large amount of stocks wouldn't only be detrimental to their companies, but would have the potential to crash the stock market.
- gabrielsroka 6y ago
  From TFA, from 2019 BC (Before Covid): > [Q] ”What do you think the greatest threat to humanity is at this moment?” > Gates: “There are some things that aren’t likely but we should worry about — nuclear bombs and bioterrorism (from nation states or terrorism), or a big pandemic. This is the 100th anniversary of the Spanish flu [which killed 50 million people] and if it came back the amount of travel would make it spread faster than it did last time.
Areading314 6y ago
This is a totally legitimate, efficient, and reasonable method of taxation. The persons involved are basically lottery winners, due to random and unjustified gyrations in the stock market, and will remain extremely wealthy after the tax is levied, barely even noticing the effect of this tax. The real question is whether or not the government will use the money for something productive, like infrastructure, or unproductive, like pointless wars.
- neilwilson 6y ago
  It isn't. Taxation is there for essentially one purpose - to free up physical resources to create public goods with. Billionaires don't have the physical resources required. Which means you either get to tax somebody else as well, or you get inflation. A nation with its own currency has no need of the money of billionaires. In fact it makes them out to be more important than they are to suggest you do. Beardsley Ruml explained this decades ago - Taxes for Revenue is an obsolete concept: http://home.hiwaay.net/~becraft/RUMLTAXES.html http://home.hiwaay.net/~becraft/RUMLTAXES.html Look after the unemployment and the numbers will look after themselves.
  - DeonPenny 6y ago
    This actually pretty good concept I never thought it like this.
  - cosmiccatnap 6y ago
    What if I told you that the fact that billionaires have no liquid assets is the problem to begin with. I would love to put every penny I made into the s&p but I have to pay about half of it in taxes, what makes them any different? They are playing a system and they pay people well who know how to play it for them but that doesn't fix the root problem that equity is tied up in the ultra rich and no amount of printing money or begging for trickle down will fix that. If you take care of the unemployment things DONT just take care of themselves. The fact that unemployment skyrocketed so easily during covid is a testament to how poor the quality of jobs were and how little companies and CEOs had prepared for a scenario like this because they simply rolled their money into investments and r&d which seems logical but the problem is that at some point you have to look at the middle class and inflation and ask what happened and the answer is clear as day, equity was to hedge funds. So now instead of someone being able to pay for a house and a car and secure a safe loan at a reasonable price they must pay and institution more money than they could possibly make to even have a chance of paying for a house but of course they won't be able to because they are also paying for the student loan and God help them if they have a medical condition on top of this. ...the rest will handle itself is exactly the kind of thing you say when you are looking down on the rest of the populous like ants instead of human beings that deserve a chance because crunching the numbers you will find every single time that the heart of keeping an economy strong and stable is to have a good middle class and lower the vast majority of the population out of poverty and even lower income so that they can be consumers to the market. Printing money and giving two shits about what assets billionaires have as liquid is not our damn problem, we do it every year and we can't beg the feds to bail us out when it's our mortgage on the line. Think how messed up that is that my mortgage company can ask for free money that delutes the value of the USD but we can't even ask for a months forgiveness over a worldwide pandemic from the same company that needed bailed out. I'm sure right about now tlyou are calling me nieve in your head for comparing people to companies but I think it quite nieve as a person to give them the benefit of the doubt they so desperately need you to buy into to keep this round about enslavement going. You are just an economist I think is the problem, but you don't understand that this is a problem that has been going on for a long long time, it's a power dynamic where the most powerful members of a society need to take as much value for themselves as possible and traditionally we dealt with it by burning down a palice and presenting a head to the people. I think this is quite a reasonable alternative to that considering the former isn't off the table.
narrator 6y ago
Meanwhile, you can create a billion dollars with a few keystrokes at the Federal Reserve. It's really about who has power to control the economy of the country: private individuals or the banks and the government. It used to be way over on the private individual side before the fed and the income tax flipped power over to the banks and the government side. Previously, you had Carnegie and Rockefeller running very large portions of the economy and the banks and government were much less powerful. Today it's govetnment borrowing and the banks that make most of the money. Yes, the banks create money. It's called fractional reserve banking and the money multiplier and it's all legal all totally out in the open. Keynesian economists will tell you that the banks are the most important organizations in the entire economy because they create money to increase aggregate demand. Meanwhile in China, the government prints money whenever it needs it and tells the banks what to do and who to lend to and they haven't had a credit bust since the 80s, even though The Economist has regularly been predicting one since the early 90s.
- HissingMachine 6y ago
  Much of the stock market rally was created by this "create money out of thin air" scheme, it all usually finds it's way to the stock market since you have to park all the extra money somewhere. And due to interests being at zero or in some cases negative, only safe places to park all that new money is either stocks or metals which again rises their stock markets and the price of commodities, making large stock holders gain even more. The current financial system is just broken.
  - babesh 6y ago
    There is also the realization that money is being devalued. Stocks in profitable and growing companies are more valuable than this money that is being printed. The companies are productive capacity. Not all companies and stocks are doing well. Just look at airlines, retailers, etc... They are the losers in the new economy.
Wolfenstein98k 6y ago
An obscene and thoroughly unconstitutional (Article I, Section 9) move. The wealthy pay an incredible amount of tax - Cuomo just said that a single percent of New Yorkers pay half of the entire tax take. That may be good and just - it may even be right to increase that share - but to slap a retroactive tax on their POST-TAX wealth is heinous. This is before we get into practicalities... if I recall correctly, nonpartisan modelling of Warren's wealth tax plan would've levied tax rates over 100% on certain people, and been incredibly inefficient (the cost of collecting the money, all said, negated a good portion of the takings... much more than any existing tax targeted at the wealthy does). Class war greed. It should be opposed. IMHO.
- verroq 6y ago
  They only got this wealthy because the Fed injected trillions into the stock market, pumping all of their holdings.
  - Wolfenstein98k 6y ago
    The Fed didn't pump that money into stocks, it pumped it into the hands of the citizens, many of whom decided those stocks were the safest place for it. I am one such person, though in a different country, who has felt these stocks are the safest place for a good chunk of my portfolio. What alternatives are there? There's no argument for taxing the heck out of people who lead incredibly successful (and safe, for investors) companies, just because they have managed to make that situation so.
    - verroq 6y ago
      > The Fed didn't pump that money into stocks What is Fed Open Market Operations? What is unlimited QE easing? Do you know how big the Fed balance sheet grew to prop up stocks?
- cosmiccatnap 6y ago
  If I gave them a 99% tax rate they would still be richer than almost any of us will ever be. At some point you are asking the question "is it ok if people starve to death if billionaires get to keep extravagant weath regardless of how they earned it?" And your answer is a firm "yes, I'm fine with their suffering and death as long as the economy is unaffected"
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
> Amazon and Walmart, for example, have both seen their stocks grow as Americans increasingly relied on their services during stay-at-home orders during the pandemic. Jeff Bezos through Amazon and the Walton family through Wal-Mart did more to help me and my family, and I suspect most Americans, get through the coronavirus than Bernie Sanders, Ed Markey, and Kirsten Gillibrand. Businesses that solve the massive logistics problems of operating in a pandemic and provided needed goods to consumers should be rewarded. I am not any worse off that Bezos' and the Walton's stock value increased because of this. In fact, I am better off.
- brabel 6y ago
  Both Amazon and Walton were not inventors of the technology you're thanking them for, they were just the biggest behemoths that were able to destroy most competition in those respective areas (in the US, at least) and take over the market. If they had been broken up due to anti-competitive behaviour years ago, you'd be much better off as can be easily verified historically in similar markets where this happened.
  - babesh 6y ago
    Amazon has advanced the efficient distribution of goods more than any company in the last 20 years. One day shipping, easy returns, subscribe and save, photos of the delivery, shipment tracking, etc... The reality is that it is just a lot better run than it’s competition.
kmlx 6y ago
i see low grade populism is still rife in the US...
- markdown 6y ago
  Low grade? Trump came to power through populism, so I wouldn't call that low grade.
  - Darmody 6y ago
    Well, this proposal is just as stupid as Trump saying he would cover the wall with solar panels. Actually if I had to choose, I'd pick the solar panels. At least it would provide some work and it wouldn't turn to ashes most US companies.
082349872349872 6y ago
The traditional way to make this project feasible is to give the billionaires (and maybe even a few aspiring multimillionaires; one mustn't be too picky in fundraising) a piece of coloured ribbon in exchange for their donations to their fellow citizens, as well as inviting them and their families (especially marriageable children) to an annual cell-phones-in-the-fishtank no-non-donators-allowed party celebrating their commitment to their nation. (TIL "Eat the rich" is attributed to Rousseau, not to Wells' Eloi/Morlock dynamic. I am disappoint. "Tax the rich" is apparently a 3rd rail in US politics. "Feast the rich", on the other hand, would use the carrot of exclusive membership — what Capitalist could resist such an incentive?)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

32 points by ToFab123 6y ago

He doesn't understand what wealth means or he does but he doesn't care and proposes stuff like this to gain votes.

I am sorry to say this but if you want to tax the rich, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Look at the German taxation system and learn from it.

bitwize 6y ago

Come on, Sanders, don't puss out and stop there. How about: a 100% marginal tax rate on any wealth earned after personal wealth exceeds 1 billion dollars.

gremlinsinc 6y ago
Sounds good to me. This is what we really need. To ban billionaires from even existing.

bleah1000 6y ago

This bill on the face of it is pretty dumb. Most billionaires do not have liquid assets that are easily converted into money. In fact, most of the people's wealth increased due to their company stock price increasing. In order to pay these bills, the people would likely have to break sec laws to sell the stock quickly since there are all kinds of rules in this area. And if they get around that and are forced to sell large amounts of their holdings in companies, I imagine the stock market would crash, or have a local crash. And almost assuredly the stock wouldn't be worth nearly as much, so they would be forced to liquidate nearly everything they own to pay this tax bill. I also imagine these billionaires will find some loophole or simply sue the government and keep this in the courts for years while they figure out a way to nullify it. Honestly, this whole thing is a publicity stunt because the backers all know it has no chance of ever happening. Then they can pretend they care, and that they tried to do something. While in reality, they are doing nothing and never had any plan to do anything achievable.

onetimemanytime 6y ago
well, in theory they can hand their share in company stock to the govt, adjusted for any taxes or whatever. Based on the stock price of the days the bill is passed for example, or x days before. The government then sells or holds it, as it sees fit. That is not a problem, whether it should be passed it is. (I agree that this is a dumb law, taxes should not be a one off thing. If they need to be raised, do it but for all)
- gremlinsinc 6y ago
  We need to move from income to VAT, and maybe land value tax. Then we'll have a much stronger baseline to pay for UBI and single payer. VAT would collect sales tax from everybody including immigrants, so nobody can claim they're mooching. Could make VAT more for non-citizens.
sho 6y ago
What a defeatist attitude. Instead of snarkily poking holes, where's your better solution? Because there has to be a solution. Inequality is reaching levels where it's dangerous. No, it is not good nor stable for 1% of the population to control 99% of the assets, and we'll get there soon enough. Redistribution will happen either by law or by knife and gun. This is not about who earned what or what was inconvenient for XYZ person. This is about the citizens of the country, supposedly equal under law, having no chance whatsoever of ever owning an equal part. It's about aristocracy, basically. And do we all remember how aristocracies end? Real life is not some computer model. In real life, if a father of 6 cannot feed or house his children he will not be satisfied by you saying that "well, Jeff Bezos outcompeted you!". There will be a redistribution. Our only choice is how it happens. This is an attempt.
- babesh 6y ago
  It is not snarky to poke holes. It is snarky to call someone snarky for pointing out issues. You don’t always have to come up with a solution immediately. That would be stupid. Basic income via the printing of money. What do you think those $600 checks were? Inheritance tax. Make education at public schools and universities free. Reform government for greater efficiency.

leoh 6y ago

>Bill Gates: I’ve paid $10 billion in taxes. I should have paid more. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/2/27/18243183/bill-gates-foundation-reddit-ama-billionaire-taxes https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/2/27/18243183/bill-g...

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
Actually, Bill Gates should not have had the opportunity to amass as much money as he did because the US government should have broken up Microsoft a long time ago for anti-competitive behavior and abusing their monopoly positions dating back to at least the early 90's and maybe the late 80's. It is much better to aggressively enforce anti-trust than to increase the taxes afterward on the CEO's who benefited from such lax enforcement.
_ph_ 6y ago
Yes, over the time of decades during which he became the richest man on the planet, he probably should have paid more taxes. I fully agree that there might be more taxes, that should be collected. However this one-time grasp for a high amount of the actual possession in the form of stocks is just wrong on some many accounts. Stocks are only money (and consequentally taxable) when sold - forcing people to sell of large amount of stocks wouldn't only be detrimental to their companies, but would have the potential to crash the stock market.
gabrielsroka 6y ago
From TFA, from 2019 BC (Before Covid): > [Q] ”What do you think the greatest threat to humanity is at this moment?” > Gates: “There are some things that aren’t likely but we should worry about — nuclear bombs and bioterrorism (from nation states or terrorism), or a big pandemic. This is the 100th anniversary of the Spanish flu [which killed 50 million people] and if it came back the amount of travel would make it spread faster than it did last time.

Areading314 6y ago

This is a totally legitimate, efficient, and reasonable method of taxation. The persons involved are basically lottery winners, due to random and unjustified gyrations in the stock market, and will remain extremely wealthy after the tax is levied, barely even noticing the effect of this tax. The real question is whether or not the government will use the money for something productive, like infrastructure, or unproductive, like pointless wars.

neilwilson 6y ago
It isn't. Taxation is there for essentially one purpose - to free up physical resources to create public goods with. Billionaires don't have the physical resources required. Which means you either get to tax somebody else as well, or you get inflation. A nation with its own currency has no need of the money of billionaires. In fact it makes them out to be more important than they are to suggest you do. Beardsley Ruml explained this decades ago - Taxes for Revenue is an obsolete concept: http://home.hiwaay.net/~becraft/RUMLTAXES.html http://home.hiwaay.net/~becraft/RUMLTAXES.html Look after the unemployment and the numbers will look after themselves.
- DeonPenny 6y ago
  This actually pretty good concept I never thought it like this.
- cosmiccatnap 6y ago
  What if I told you that the fact that billionaires have no liquid assets is the problem to begin with. I would love to put every penny I made into the s&p but I have to pay about half of it in taxes, what makes them any different? They are playing a system and they pay people well who know how to play it for them but that doesn't fix the root problem that equity is tied up in the ultra rich and no amount of printing money or begging for trickle down will fix that. If you take care of the unemployment things DONT just take care of themselves. The fact that unemployment skyrocketed so easily during covid is a testament to how poor the quality of jobs were and how little companies and CEOs had prepared for a scenario like this because they simply rolled their money into investments and r&d which seems logical but the problem is that at some point you have to look at the middle class and inflation and ask what happened and the answer is clear as day, equity was to hedge funds. So now instead of someone being able to pay for a house and a car and secure a safe loan at a reasonable price they must pay and institution more money than they could possibly make to even have a chance of paying for a house but of course they won't be able to because they are also paying for the student loan and God help them if they have a medical condition on top of this. ...the rest will handle itself is exactly the kind of thing you say when you are looking down on the rest of the populous like ants instead of human beings that deserve a chance because crunching the numbers you will find every single time that the heart of keeping an economy strong and stable is to have a good middle class and lower the vast majority of the population out of poverty and even lower income so that they can be consumers to the market. Printing money and giving two shits about what assets billionaires have as liquid is not our damn problem, we do it every year and we can't beg the feds to bail us out when it's our mortgage on the line. Think how messed up that is that my mortgage company can ask for free money that delutes the value of the USD but we can't even ask for a months forgiveness over a worldwide pandemic from the same company that needed bailed out. I'm sure right about now tlyou are calling me nieve in your head for comparing people to companies but I think it quite nieve as a person to give them the benefit of the doubt they so desperately need you to buy into to keep this round about enslavement going. You are just an economist I think is the problem, but you don't understand that this is a problem that has been going on for a long long time, it's a power dynamic where the most powerful members of a society need to take as much value for themselves as possible and traditionally we dealt with it by burning down a palice and presenting a head to the people. I think this is quite a reasonable alternative to that considering the former isn't off the table.

narrator 6y ago

Meanwhile, you can create a billion dollars with a few keystrokes at the Federal Reserve. It's really about who has power to control the economy of the country: private individuals or the banks and the government. It used to be way over on the private individual side before the fed and the income tax flipped power over to the banks and the government side. Previously, you had Carnegie and Rockefeller running very large portions of the economy and the banks and government were much less powerful. Today it's govetnment borrowing and the banks that make most of the money. Yes, the banks create money. It's called fractional reserve banking and the money multiplier and it's all legal all totally out in the open. Keynesian economists will tell you that the banks are the most important organizations in the entire economy because they create money to increase aggregate demand. Meanwhile in China, the government prints money whenever it needs it and tells the banks what to do and who to lend to and they haven't had a credit bust since the 80s, even though The Economist has regularly been predicting one since the early 90s.

HissingMachine 6y ago
Much of the stock market rally was created by this "create money out of thin air" scheme, it all usually finds it's way to the stock market since you have to park all the extra money somewhere. And due to interests being at zero or in some cases negative, only safe places to park all that new money is either stocks or metals which again rises their stock markets and the price of commodities, making large stock holders gain even more. The current financial system is just broken.
- babesh 6y ago
  There is also the realization that money is being devalued. Stocks in profitable and growing companies are more valuable than this money that is being printed. The companies are productive capacity. Not all companies and stocks are doing well. Just look at airlines, retailers, etc... They are the losers in the new economy.

Wolfenstein98k 6y ago

An obscene and thoroughly unconstitutional (Article I, Section 9) move. The wealthy pay an incredible amount of tax - Cuomo just said that a single percent of New Yorkers pay half of the entire tax take. That may be good and just - it may even be right to increase that share - but to slap a retroactive tax on their POST-TAX wealth is heinous. This is before we get into practicalities... if I recall correctly, nonpartisan modelling of Warren's wealth tax plan would've levied tax rates over 100% on certain people, and been incredibly inefficient (the cost of collecting the money, all said, negated a good portion of the takings... much more than any existing tax targeted at the wealthy does). Class war greed. It should be opposed. IMHO.

verroq 6y ago
They only got this wealthy because the Fed injected trillions into the stock market, pumping all of their holdings.
- Wolfenstein98k 6y ago
  The Fed didn't pump that money into stocks, it pumped it into the hands of the citizens, many of whom decided those stocks were the safest place for it. I am one such person, though in a different country, who has felt these stocks are the safest place for a good chunk of my portfolio. What alternatives are there? There's no argument for taxing the heck out of people who lead incredibly successful (and safe, for investors) companies, just because they have managed to make that situation so.
  - verroq 6y ago
    > The Fed didn't pump that money into stocks What is Fed Open Market Operations? What is unlimited QE easing? Do you know how big the Fed balance sheet grew to prop up stocks?
cosmiccatnap 6y ago
If I gave them a 99% tax rate they would still be richer than almost any of us will ever be. At some point you are asking the question "is it ok if people starve to death if billionaires get to keep extravagant weath regardless of how they earned it?" And your answer is a firm "yes, I'm fine with their suffering and death as long as the economy is unaffected"

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

> Amazon and Walmart, for example, have both seen their stocks grow as Americans increasingly relied on their services during stay-at-home orders during the pandemic. Jeff Bezos through Amazon and the Walton family through Wal-Mart did more to help me and my family, and I suspect most Americans, get through the coronavirus than Bernie Sanders, Ed Markey, and Kirsten Gillibrand. Businesses that solve the massive logistics problems of operating in a pandemic and provided needed goods to consumers should be rewarded. I am not any worse off that Bezos' and the Walton's stock value increased because of this. In fact, I am better off.

brabel 6y ago
Both Amazon and Walton were not inventors of the technology you're thanking them for, they were just the biggest behemoths that were able to destroy most competition in those respective areas (in the US, at least) and take over the market. If they had been broken up due to anti-competitive behaviour years ago, you'd be much better off as can be easily verified historically in similar markets where this happened.
- babesh 6y ago
  Amazon has advanced the efficient distribution of goods more than any company in the last 20 years. One day shipping, easy returns, subscribe and save, photos of the delivery, shipment tracking, etc... The reality is that it is just a lot better run than it’s competition.

kmlx 6y ago

i see low grade populism is still rife in the US...

markdown 6y ago
Low grade? Trump came to power through populism, so I wouldn't call that low grade.
- Darmody 6y ago
  Well, this proposal is just as stupid as Trump saying he would cover the wall with solar panels. Actually if I had to choose, I'd pick the solar panels. At least it would provide some work and it wouldn't turn to ashes most US companies.

082349872349872 6y ago

The traditional way to make this project feasible is to give the billionaires (and maybe even a few aspiring multimillionaires; one mustn't be too picky in fundraising) a piece of coloured ribbon in exchange for their donations to their fellow citizens, as well as inviting them and their families (especially marriageable children) to an annual cell-phones-in-the-fishtank no-non-donators-allowed party celebrating their commitment to their nation. (TIL "Eat the rich" is attributed to Rousseau, not to Wells' Eloi/Morlock dynamic. I am disappoint. "Tax the rich" is apparently a 3rd rail in US politics. "Feast the rich", on the other hand, would use the carrot of exclusive membership — what Capitalist could resist such an incentive?)

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]