Shame!

Dystopia

In the worlds biggest economy

Thom, I certainly concur with you regarding the decisions being made by the Trump administration and the self-described “conservatives” who have the votes to dismantle the nation’s safety net of social welfare programs. These programs have been necessary because our systems of law and taxation have their origins in an ideology that secured and protected privilege rather than equality of opportunity.

The source of inequality in the United States is not a recent occurrence. It goes back to the founding era and the design of the U.S. Constitution. The North American colonies ruled by Britain were colonies granted to a landed elite of families and aristocrats. Independence from Britain did not lead to the elimination of landed privilege in the new United States. Those leading citizens who met in Philadelphia to forge a new system of government had no desire to change the fundamental systems of law and taxation that had enabled them to inherit large landed estates subject to minimal taxation. To fund government they imposed taxes on commerce and tariffs on imported goods.

Fast forward to the early 20th century and the “progressive” effort to begin to tax incomes of the wealthy. That was at the core of the individual income tax as initially designed. Only those with relatively high incomes was subjected to taxation, on the sound observation that much of this income is unearned, derived as “rents” associated with the ownership of land and land-like assets (e.g., licenses to monopolize frequencies on the broadcast spectrum, and licenses to exploit natural resources that have an inelastic supply provided by nature).

It was the American political economist Henry George, who, in the last two decades of the 19th century, made the case for bringing an end to landed privilege by changing the way revenue is raised to pay for public goods and services. George’s analysis proved that it was possible to create a full employment society, one in which there would always be more jobs looking for workers than workers looking for jobs. Eliminate all taxation, he argued, replacing taxation with societal collection of the potential annual rental value of all locations, all natural resource-laden lands, and all other natural assets with an inelastic supply.

Henry George’s perspectives are receiving renewed attention, not in the United States (except by some cities as restructuring of local property taxation) but in the United Kingdom. After years of studies by economists, by public policy think tanks by the Labour and Green parties, it seems possible that enabling legislation might be brought forward to a vote in the House of Commons. The latest political figure to endorse the measure is former prime minister Tony Blair. He and other leaders in Britain might be recalling that none other than Winston Churchill campaigned for the taxation of Britain’s land as a young man. In a 1909 speech he declared that while the monopoly of land was not the only monopoly or the only source of unearned wealth, but the monopoly of land was “the mother of all monopolies.”

We in the United States desperately need to a high level of public discussion the analysis of our economic system’s shortcomings offered by Henry George over a century ago.

U would like to copy and paste Thom's rant on Joe the republican is not a self made man. Heard it for years and would like to forward on to republican friends. Thank you Thom been listening to you since air america and lost you for a couple years when Clear Channel shut down KPOJ progressive radio. A supporting member of XRay FM

@#26. Your first couple of sentences says it all. Private money is just that and it applies to all sides of the political aisle.

Glad you put the Koch's in the same class with Soros, Steyer, and Bloomberg.

We need to find out who, how, why, and where the military industrial spy complex is laundering all of those missing billions. We know Cheney got massively rich off all the for profit global death and destruction.

If you think our system is less corrupt than Putin's Russia, better guess again.

Reliable word is out that Pompeo won't do a god damn thing to stop the Russian interference in the midterms....that from Rex Tillerson. T-Rex's words.."we can't do much about it" Why would they do anything about it? Putin supports their fascist cause which will lead to our economic collapse.

The expectation of perfection is a diversion to steer people away from the joke of neoliberalism. People who are constantly getting down on themselves for falling short of the neoliberal ideal of personal capitalist virtue will be to occupied to have the resources to question the tenets of the system that they work in, because they might ultimately realize that the entire system is far, far from perfect, that it may just be a dysfunctional and pathological economic system. It's the old strategy of getting people to blame themselves for falling short of expectations when they are working in a system that is itself to blame.

History keeps repeating itself and the Republicans (that should be Democrats) keep falling for it and voting for it. How many times does it take. Huge tax cuts for the wealthy + massive increases in Defense Spending = Recession.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/ann-jones/is-this-country-crazy_b_6451880...

@#19

Instead of German women spending £87 on a pair of anti-rape pants, wouldn't just wearing an inexpensive Angela Merkel mask accomplish the same thing?

George Soros: I won’t ‘butt out’ of Brexit politics

Financier George Soros has vowed not to “butt out” of supporting a campaign to keep the U.K. in the European Union because Brexit is a “tragic mistake.”

The Best for Britain campaign came under fire last week from newspaper articles in the Telegraph and Daily Mail for accepting £400,000 in funding from Soros’s Open Society Foundation. But Soros has hit back in a comment piece for the Mail on Sunday, citing his past as a refugee and his foundation’s work promoting democracy.

The people of Britain voted for Brexit. They voted to leave the European Union. Yet people on the left refuse to accept it, much in the same way American leftists refuse to accept the fact that Trump won the 2016 election.

Left wing billionaire George Soros is even working to reverse Brexit.

Politico reports:

George Soros: I won’t ‘butt out’ of Brexit politics

Financier George Soros has vowed not to “butt out” of supporting a campaign to keep the U.K. in the European Union because Brexit is a “tragic mistake.”

The Best for Britain campaign came under fire last week from newspaper articles in the Telegraph and Daily Mail for accepting £400,000 in funding from Soros’s Open Society Foundation. But Soros has hit back in a comment piece for the Mail on Sunday, citing his past as a refugee and his foundation’s work promoting democracy.

“I am a proud supporter of Best For Britain, a group that wants Britain to remain a member of the European Union. I consider Brexit a tragic mistake,” he wrote.

“Prior to Brexit, Britain enjoyed the best of all possible worlds: it was a member of the European Union without adopting the euro.”

He said he viewed the decision to hold a referendum on EU membership as a mistake. “Egged on by unscrupulous agitators, people use [referenda] to express their dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs rather than contemplating the consequences.

The people decided. That should really be the end of it.

I guess it's ok for him to stick his wealth where it doesn't belong.

Oh, and the people of Hungry would like to see him strung up.

The capitalists are blaming working class pay raises for the market downturn. In other words they're worried about the rise of a middleclass once again....the threat of Democracy looms heavy on their tiny Fascist brains.

Anthropologists claim that for the last 20,000 years, our brain size has been shrinking. We've supposedly lost about a tennis ball size portion of our brain. They've offered a lot of theories as to why. One of which is called the "Idiocracy theory". According to this theory; back then, only the strong and mentally adaptable survived. Back then, we were in tune with our surroundings and living in harmony with it, we wasted nothing! The ebb and flow, and struggle for survival, kept us both mentally and physically sharp.
Also, according to this theory; there's been a slow but steady "dumbing down" of our species since the last ice age. As our life as a species slowly and steadily got easier, then no longer did only the strongest and smartest survive!
Maybe...
Maybe, Neoliberalism isn't the cause? Maybe its just one of many symptoms, of the already deteriorating mental capacity of humans?

"Chuckling"...Who the fuck knows!?!