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Comment by gedpeck | Hacker News Reader

I sincerely hope this gets enacted. It would be great for states like California to stop subsidizing states like Louisiana.

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I was thinking the same, I live in one of those states too.

But I expect if not done with great care, we will be in for a real bad economic ride.

Edit: The more I think about this, this could morph into a Federal Sales Tax, keeping or reducing the Income tax (for the rich of course) as it makes its way through.

Indeed we will but I think we are past the point of having a long term stable republic. Stuff like this bill and withholding aid to California normalize in liberal states the idea that secession is a possibility. We are entering in an era where it is going to be more than just crazy right wing nut jobs that talk secession.

It doesn't really have to be that way, does it? Yes, they're very loud right now, but what's preventing a set of (non-MAGA) voices from presenting a coherent counter that includes concern for efficiency and effectiveness, but still with, you know, united states.

It's almost like there's a lot of lead in DC water, since the level of discourse hardly rises above nutty...

I’m a liberal and I favor secession. It doesn’t have to be this way but it is this way now. There are major power imbalances. Neither chamber of Congress has proportional representation. Several times in recent elections the Presidential candidate with the majority of the votes did not win. In my mind the American Republic died when the insurrectionist leaders didn’t go to jail.

> In my mind the American Republic died when the insurrectionist leaders didn’t go to jail.

That was the point where I stopped investigating Republican positions. Their subsequent actions have demonstrated that it was a waste of time in trying.

"Arguing with an idiot is like playing chess with a pigeon. It’ll just knock over all the pieces, shit on the board, and strut about like it’s won anyway."

This quote feels pretty much what's happening in DC these days. And if one side is being a pigeon, there's nothing the other side can do to force them to work together.

And the worst part is being a pigeon is effective in this day and age of social media. Until the voters actually value mature leadership, we're deadlocked into this shit covered chessboard.

Trump's plans to prevent California from receiving disaster relief are only the beginning; the Republicans will spend the next four kneecapping blue states while trying to move the country towards Gilead. I'd favor secession if I lived in California; they're the 5th largest economy in the world and can definitely survive independently.

Morph into a federal sales tax? This bill literally proposes one

Yes, but eliminates Income Tax, I added that the Income tax will be kept, maybe in a reduced manner.

Unless you abolish all federal welfare of all kinds, the rich states' people are going to subsidize the poor states' people. California doesn't need Louisiana, but almost every state east of the Rockies does. Because that's where the Mississippi River ends. And where huge amounts of oil and natural gas are harvested.

After Katrina, when I got power back, I read people online complaining vehemently about how high gas prices were. Meanwhile, I'm sitting in my house with one path out of the neighborhood that is clear of trees on the road, and no gas because there's no power to the pumps. Lucky me, I had filled up our cars as it was coming in and wasn't scheduled to work for several days after it hit.

My daily drive to get ice (which was being trucked in; it was August in the South) was the only thing I used the cars for.

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