(Obama is so far the only US president born after 1946)
Encourage younger voters and politicians. Remove the current age limits as we're obviously not using them. Make state positions something a young person can live on, right now they have to keep their job and hope the boss is ok with them campaigning for months to just do a short legislative session.
Change campaign laws, Citizens United has shoved so much money into the system, we campaign for months, reducing the effectiveness of elected incumbents and winnowing out the candidates who can't fund raise the entire time.
Uncap the House, they passed legislation in the 1920's to limit their number to 435. Meanwhile they are now granted staff based on the population of their state. We now have more legislative staff than we would have Representatives if we kept to the original 30,000:1 that George Washington did the first presidential veto to keep.
Similarly the concern over billionaires are overplayed. They’ve got too much skin in the current game to destroy the current game.
Nope it’s the millionaires. It’s the underemployed educated elite. Those are folks who will destroy a country for their own marginal gain.
I have often heard people talk about how Capitalism keeps the middle class in check by having a large number of people in poverty but it seems to me like a large number of middle class people feel that they are living in poverty.
There's a billionaire in the White House who's hosting billionaire guests on the regular, there was a line of billionaires behind him at the inauguration, and a temporary trillionaire living in the White House for a while and shredding every agency that had power to regulate him.
Wrong. The billionaires want the public focused on the low-end millionaires, who largely have no more control over policy than the poorest pensioner or laborer, while the billionaire-class and their willing enablers destroy the society and environment to their own benefit.
It's just a different spin on the ages-old strategy of dividing the non-ruling-class and pitting them against each other. The one thing the billionaires want to avoid is a unified public coming for their wealth and influence.
Personally I prefer to avoid "Reign of Terror" (1) or similar situations where a "unified public" wantonly destroys the ultra wealthy. That revolution was led by educated elites clerks, lawyers, etc and not by commoners. The peasants were pawns.
> the low-end millionaires, who largely have no more control over policy than the poorest pensioner or laborer, while the billionaire-class and their willing enablers destroy the society and environment to their own benefit.
Billionaires wealth may need curbing, in particular unlimited mergers. However in my estimation it's the millionaire class level actively destroying the economic foundations of the west, not just the USA.
It's CEOs like the ill fated Brian Thompson worth only tens of millions who made those millions by driving exaggerated profits and share price at UnitedHealth. It's Jim McNerney former CEO at Boeing who drove up share prices by gutting engineering that made himself a centi-millionaire.
Meanwhile SpaceX and Tesla made Musk a trillionaire, but you don't need a Tesla. Similarly for Bezos or Zuckerberg's products.
However food, healthcare, education, etc are all continuously increasing their profit margin's at the expense of everyone else and their companies/brands. For example Dorito's market share plummeted recently after they kept driving up prices to over $7 / bag.
Regardless of who's actually at fault, if the low-end millionaires were to publicly and materially side with the remaining middle class, working class, poor, and indigent, their combined influence would be irresistable - which is basically what you said, I'll admit. But my point is that the millionaires are the last holdouts. Everyone else is ready to party.
If every American with a sub-8-figure net worth held back their property payments for 6 months, they could collectively have anything they asked for. Anything.
That'd not affect the federal government. It would however hurt schools & teachers, garbage men, police, etc as property taxes largely go to city and county governments which run those services.
Nitpick: At a certain level of millions, below a billion, this is also true, however. But it makes for a longer / worse soundbite.
Repeated radical cashectomies, until wealth inequity is decidedly pro-democracy.
Alas, from the little I've read about both reform (new legislation) and revolution (new constitution), the wealthy elite squirm thru, never truly losing their power advantage. (Probably because any new agenda still needs to be capitalized.)
eg The Nordic model worked pretty well for a while. But weren't durable enough. Allowing the Wormtongues to undermine it all, one millimeter at a time. Opening the door for another cycle of revanchism.
"But incentives."
The aftermath of this is an authority (still deriving its power from the will of the people) that's shown that it will keep you housed and with food on the table, and still able to access education and creativity and community and healthcare, and all you have to do is keep working like you always have and give up your exceedingly remote chance of one day being an oligarch or living on Mars. The elite are terrified that we'll realize how good of a deal it is.
It's always funny to me how threatened the sockpuppet brigaders are by small posts like this. They really can't stomach the idea getting even the littlest bit of traction.
Well, I'll say it again: capital redistribution is our way out of this. Our elite can stomach only owning one or two houses and businesses in exchange for saving the entire system from collapse.
We wouldn't even be having this conversation had capital shared the surplus (profits) with labor.
There'd be no oxygen for Sanders, AOC, DSA style proposals (the very modest, proven, and just slightly left-of-center Nordic Model) had the corporatists simply honored The New Deal and Great Society social contracts.
Alas, the "free enterprise" types want the whole pie.
> That’s why we need to tax billionaires into oblivion. The solution isn’t to make them immortal in the hopes that this somehow makes them benevolent, it’s to ensure nobody has that kind of power in the first place.
1) blame the “bourgeois” for a problem the government created.
2) “tax the billionaires into oblivion” sounds a lot like seize their capital and destroy their class.
3) “it’s to ensure nobody has that kind of power in the first place.” Except for the government who obviously exercises the power to tax them into oblivion. In a socialist regime, no one shall oppose the power of the government.
2) "Destroy their class" only in the sense that there wouldn't be billionaires. They'd have to make do with a paltry $999 million, the horror. I'm not proposing to kill rich people or put them in camps. I'm not even proposing the absolute horror of making them work for a living. I'm just proposing that there should be aggressive taxes that prevent their wealth from growing to the point that it gives them absurdly outsized power in our nominally democratic system.
3) Yes, but this is, again, not socialism. The idea that the government gets power no private citizen can have is fairly basic and runs across ideologies aside from the more extreme sorts of libertarianism or anarchism.