{"id":3015,"date":"2012-12-09T11:27:11","date_gmt":"2012-12-09T16:27:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/?p=3015"},"modified":"2012-12-09T11:51:10","modified_gmt":"2012-12-09T16:51:10","slug":"tax-the-rich-a-video","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/tax-the-rich-a-video\/","title":{"rendered":"Tax the Rich – a video"},"content":{"rendered":"
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[youtube=www.youtube.com\/watch?v=S6ZsXrzF8Cc]
\nYou really should watch this video. It explains in clear, simple terms the argument of the billionaires and the rest of us. I like it because – while it’s simplistic – it is succinct and presents its argument in a powerful story. It also clearly underscores the very polarized US arguments about both taxation and wealth.<\/p>\n

This was commented on the Daily Kos <\/a>as well. Amusingly, it was immediately pounced upon by the rightists\u00a0as “socialist” propaganda. Sean Hannity, talking head for the uber-right Fox News, was apparently “outraged<\/a>.” It was titled\u00a0“Villifying\u00a0$uccess.”<\/p>\n

That they would associate success with money (the $ sign) identifies the basic flaw in their argument. Money, in their simple minds, is merely a measure of itself. Unless that money has contributed beyond mere accumulation – created jobs, built economies, served a greater good such as education – it’s merely a measure of greed. So the video vilifies greed, not success. A person can be successful without accumulating millions or even billions of dollars.<\/p>\n

That’s a typical conservative canard – the idea that any challenge\u00a0to unrestrained (laissez faire) capitalism or suggestion of taxing the wealthy is a socialist plot to enslave America. The real villain here is not money per se, but how a series of US governments has failed in its responsibilities to oversee and manage capitalism. They have allowed the money to shift from productivity, manufacturing, creativity and jobs to the gambling system called Wall Street. They have allowed shareholder profits and executive salaries and benefits to become more important than jobs, local economies, businesses and overall wellbeing. It’s a sad condition when the CEO of Wal-Mart, Mike Duke,<\/a> makes more in one hour ($16,827) than his typical employee makes in a whole year (average annual wage in the US for a Wal-Mart employee: $13,650).<\/p>\n

For the ultra-conservatives, any <\/em>attempt to rein in the excesses of capitalism is to raise the spectre of that political Cthulhu\u00a0– socialism, a truly misunderstood word for most Americans. There is an irony here, since the US oligarchs are mostly living in states of entitlement not unlike\u00a0that of Stalin’s and Khrushchev’s and Brezhnev’s politburos under Communism. Communism may have fallen as an economic system, but its class system still thrives in modern America.*<\/span><\/p>\n

These conservatives believe the market – that is, the economy – will best regulate itself, much the same way your cat will choose the best vet for its care, or your children will choose the healthy, steamed and unsalted broccoli over the sugar-saturated, heavily advertised junk food for dinner. But if you associate success with mere wealth (as, it seems, many conservatives do), then the greedier\u00a0the person, the greater his or her success. And thus you get the mess the US economy is in, with jobs going overseas in order for CEOs to be\u00a0able to afford another yacht, with home foreclosures for the the\u00a0recently-unemployed middle class while billionaires thrive after having gutted the factories and sold off the assets (Mitt Romney for president, anyone?).<\/p>\n

Okay, that’s another simplification, but one only needs to look at the economic figures to see how crazy this has become. Capitalism is a wondrous system for growth, but it needs the government’s hands on its rudder to keep it off the shoals of madness. And it’s been without a captain for many decades now, at least in the USA. In most other Western nations, at least a modicum of control has been provided (Canada, for example, avoided the worst of the recession not by being smarter than Americans, but because we have more stringent controls on our banking and financial sectors).<\/p>\n

So government intervention helps capitalism, helps strengthen it, helps build economies, by preventing the excesses it is capable of, from happening.<\/p>\n

The Young Turks throw in this comment about the difference between cutting services and social support versus taxing the rich, with some counterpoint:
\n[youtube=www.youtube.com\/watch?v=CMkEPZ4KmFw]<\/p>\n

And James Galbraith, of the LBJ School of Public Affairs, makes some cogent points about the US economy in this video:
\n[youtube=www.youtube.com\/watch?v=2I5VPuMmjRI]<\/p>\n

~~~~~<\/span><\/p>\n

*<\/span> The other irony is that many of these conservatives claim – rather loudly – to be Christian, yet they act in a very un-Christian, even anti-Christian manner, towards their fellow Americans – again like the politburo.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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[youtube=www.youtube.com\/watch?v=S6ZsXrzF8Cc] You really should watch this video. It explains in clear, simple terms the argument of the billionaires and the rest of us. I like it because – while it’s simplistic – it is succinct and presents its argument in a powerful story. It also clearly underscores the very polarized US arguments about both taxation and wealth. This was commented on the Daily Kos as well. Amusingly, it was immediately pounced upon by the rightists\u00a0as “socialist” propaganda. Sean Hannity, talking head for the uber-right Fox News, was apparently “outraged.” It was titled\u00a0“Villifying\u00a0$uccess.” That they would associate success with money (the \u2026…… click below for more \u2193<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11,7,96,219],"tags":[85,61,95,63,241],"class_list":["post-3015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-federal-and-provincial-politics","category-film","category-social-order-disorder","category-us-international-politics","tag-economy","tag-politics","tag-republicans","tag-us-politics","tag-video"],"a3_pvc":{"activated":true,"total_views":5581,"today_views":0},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3015"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3015\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3028,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3015\/revisions\/3028"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}