Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and the Wealth Tax
by Roman Berger and Thomas Piketty, March 2019
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2019/05/437468.shtml
Warren’s proposal earmarks a 2% tax on wealth between $50 million and a billion and a 3% tax on wealth over a billion. Between 1930 and 1980, top incomes were taxed at 81% and top inherited wealth at 74%. Obviously, this did not destroy American capitalism. Rather, it was more egalitarian and more productive.
Young Americans sympathize with socialism and emphasize the radical reforms under Franklin D. Roosevelt (New Deal) that rescued America from the worst economic crisis of the 1930s. The multipolar world requires new policies and new attitudes. The digital world similarly represents a gigantic change from the horse-and-buggy days!
Ralph Nader: Donald Trump is the most impeachable President in American History
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/05/03/donald-trump-most-impeachable-president-american-history?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR1HfgBj87vh-9TdauYh56BHL7uqo85iWhDm43rLRmCDAWq3vs8x84rmX3M
A comedian won the Presidency in Ukraine besting Poroshenko. Why not also in the US?
https://t.co/zTu2h578FY?fbclid=IwAR09H-c9Y6jQru6Dxho0xtGLIlCfy-rOX_h8QwHgY_zLLjDOdy2UHFijl7g
How to fix capitalism.
https://t.co/wXbwfDErNu
Corporations spent over $1 trillion in 2018 buying back their stock. $18 trillion was infused to bail out “too-big-to-fail” Wall Street banks. The financial sector is in intensive care and only kept alive by financial injections. Foreign capital pours into the US but the economy is tottering not booming.
Future generations are forgotten and not protected in our speculative economy. All personal and corporate success is based on state investments in schools, hospitals, roads, airwaves, food safety, water quality, and community centers.
The richest three Americans have more wealth than 160 million. Government investment should promote sustainable future-friendly areas but the Trump hoodlum/burlesque government is totally corrupt. Cutting everything but the military is a sign of greed and selfishness.
How can an economy be healthy when profits are shifted to tax havens and mammoth corporations pay no taxes and even receive billions in subsidies? Migrants and social security beneficiaries kept the economy alive in the outsourcing years!
Beware of statistical acrobatics where mini-jobs and part-time jobs replace real family-wage jobs and where a Latino who worked eight hours is counted fully-employed. Working Canadians enjoy 19 paid holidays. Imagine a country without Wall Street and the Pentagon!
more at http://www.citizen.org, http://www.academia.edu, and http://www.therealnews.com
Translator’s note – May 14, 2019
China’s $60 billion in retaliatory tariffs are a reaction to Trump’s additional $200 billion in tariffs. The higher prices will not begin until June 1. The new prices are like a wake-up call or writing on the wall that calls civil society to quarantine Trump and build an economy that does not only benefit the top 1%
The world laughs at the US when Trump calls all other nations “cheaters” and scoffs at caring, sharing and the social state as weaknesses.
“State intervention is required to counter the tendency for the planning system to inadvertently slip into recession. When giant firms don’t invest sufficiently, the state responds by increasing its own spending (aka expansionary fiscal policy.” (John Kenneth Galbraith, Economics and the Public Purpose). The system’s flaw is that it has no automatic mechanism which ensures that growth in different sectors is synchronized.
The market system needs the planning system which lacks self-correcting features. The Establishment conflates the corporate purposes of the planning system with the wider public purposes of society, best illustrated by the mantra that what’s good for General Motors is good for the USA>
more at http://www.truth-out.org, http://www.commondreams.org, http://www.citizen.org, and http://www.academia.edu