by Ender
I’ve come to believe that the very existence of American billionaires is a travesty and they should be taxed at such a rate that they no longer exist.
And I say this as someone who loves capitalism and thinks everyone should strive to make an honest living a best they can. It’s just, if your economy has billionaires, something is out of whack. Or, if you want to be even more nuanced about it — if your economy is producing billionaires that pay little or no taxes, something is seriously wrong. Wrong to the point that it’s immoral.
But this is simply an impossible idea in modern, peaceful America. But if there was a civil war, ahh, then you could probably pull it off. So, given a Second Civil War is the high risk, high reward option (with autocracy being the other) I would propose that if we have to have a civil war (which I hope we won’t) that we simply seize the assists of billionaires to fund the war effort.
And, yet, all of that is very fantastical. Any war — civil or otherwise — is not something anyone controls. And, let me be clear, there is a good chance that your side won’t win if there is a civil war. So — don’t start a civil war.
If the only other option we had wasn’t autocracy, but, say, a new Progressive Era, then that would be a peaceful way to soak the rich to the point that the U.S. Government could be solvent and we could go about our business without lurching from crisis to crisis.
But, obviously, Republicans like all that instability and they don’t want to fund the government unless it helps them get re-elected. To the point that they vote against popular laws, then take credit for them!
The point is — the United States is probably careening towards a massive political reset caused by a Second American Civil War. If we’re going to bomb ourselves into oblivion, we might as well start thinking about how we’re going to fund it.