Tag: socialism

A Contract For Americans (4/10)

Infrastructure – The Job That Keeps On Paying Off

You know, if we return to the tax policies that produced a surplus back in Clinton’s day, THIS would a good place to spend that money.

Roads, bridges, tunnels, levees, dams, water treatment facilities, sewers – all this stuff is falling apart.  We need a LOT of construction workers making decent money working on these projects – and they’ll spend their salaries, growing the economy futher, aka “The Multiplier Effect”.  The Congressional Research Service recently published a report stating that a 1% of GDP increase in public capital investment would increase labor demand by 1.13% in the short term – these would be those “good jobs at good wages” stuff that politicians like to talk about.

And there’s no lack of places needing that kind of money.

The American Society of Civil Engineers produces a Report Card on the state of our infrastructure. And in this “Best Nation On Earth”, what do you think we score?

At the time of this writing, a paltry “C-“. In the time that the ASCE has been doing this (2017 to the current 2021 report), we’ve gone, overall, from a “C” to a “D” to a “D+” before we improved to a “C-” last year. You can read the entire report here.

It’s pretty pathetic when our BEST grade is a “B” in Rail infrastructure. But that just grades what we have. It’s hard to grade something that doesn’t exist – like high-speed passenger rail the way you see it in Japan, France, China, Germany, Italy, Spain, etc.

Our other grades? Here they are by category:
D-: Transit
D: Dams, Stormwater, Roads, and Levees
D+: Aviation, Hazardous Waste, Inland Waterways, Public Parks, Schools, and Wastewater
C-: Energy, Drinking Water
C: Bridges
C+: Solid Waste
B-: Ports

So what will it cost?

On page 7 of the Executive Summary (here) it says that our total needs are just.shy of $6 TRILLION and that $3.35 Trillion is funded, leaving a gap of $2.5 Trillion – but this IS over the course of 10 years (2020-2029, based on current trends). So that $2.5T gap is really around $250 Billion per year. That sounds like a lot until you find out that the Federal Budget includes between $700-$800 Billion EACH YEAR for the Defense Department and Social Security is laying out over $1.2 TRILLION each year.

How would we pay for it?

The original three trillion dollar proposal that the Biden Administration put out had several line items. In addition to the additional tax revenue from the benefits of infrastructure improvements there were 4 categories of “offsets”:

  1. $640B from High Net Worth Individual tax increases: 3.8% net investment income tax increase ($250 billion). 5% surtax on income over $10 million and 8% surtax on income above $25 million (230 billion). Expanded limits on business loss deductions (160 billion).
  2. $325B from Health Care changes and cost reductions: Reform Part D Medicare drug coverage, cap drug price growth and allow targeted drug price negotiations ($160 billion). Repeal drug rebate rule enacted by the Trump administration ($145 billion). Lower disproportionate share hospital (DSH) payments to qualifying hospitals serving large numbers of Medicaid and uninsured individuals beyond 2025 (20 billion).
  3. $180B from “Additional Revenues”: Fund the IRS to reduce the tax gap ($130 billion). Reinstate oil superfund taxes and impose a methane fee ($20 billion). Expand nicotine taxes (10 billion). Reform tax treatment of retirement accounts ($10 billion). Other receipts ($10 billion).
  4. $825 from Corporate taxes: 15% corporate minimum tax on large corporations earning more than $1 billion in profits (raising $320 billion). 15% global minimum tax and reform international taxation (raising $280 billion). Levy a 1% surcharge on stock buybacks, which is the amount that companies spend to repurchase shares (raising $125 billion). Enact other corporate tax reforms (raising $105 billion)

There’s about $2T there and it doesn’t raise a penny on most people. And before you talk about the corporate taxes being passed on, that’s not the government. Corporations are making record profits – meaning profits unlike ANYTHING they’ve seen in history. If they hike prices – remember – the taxes are on PROFITS – so they are saying “We need to keep our billions so we’re hiking our prices”.

Remember. Back when our infrastructure WAS the best in the world, the top marginal tax rate on the wealthy and corporations was 91%. So I don’t believe for a minute that hiking taxes a few percent is going to cause an exodus. It didn’t happen before when the same threat was made. After all, they pleaded for the Trump tax cuts saying it would create jobs and it simply didn’t. The money went to CEOs, for stock buybacks enriching shareholders, and even foreign investors. Shouldn’t have been a surprise. That’s what happened with the Bush tax cuts.

Think of it in fantasy terms. “Listen – if we just give the dragon more money for his hoard, SURELY he’ll invest it and we’ll all prosper!”.

Yes, collecting taxes to spend on infrastructure IS “Socialism”. But the best definition I ever heard of Socialism is:

We, The People.…

The Contract For Americans

It’s so easy to be against something – anything. What should we be FOR?

When the Democrats were in power some years ago, I criticized the Republicans for being “the party of ‘no'”.  Didn’t matter what the issue was, whatever the Democrat’s position was, the Republican position was “no”.  They never said much about what they were for, just what they were against.

Now that the Republicans are in power, the Democrats are, at times, doing the same thing.  I’ll give a little slack to them because of the incredible array of things they have to say “no” to all the time – it’s like a never-ending circus with rapid-fire monkeys being shot out at us at a rate that is truly bewildering.  Before anyone can produce a well-reasoned and articulate response to whatever Trump has tweeted or whatever some other Republican has said or done, there’s another piece of idiocy that needs to be addressed.

So what can the Democrats do?

I suggest they take a page out of the Republican’s book and do something the Republicans did very well when THEY were in this situation.  Back in 1992, the GOP was on the wane.  Bush Sr. failed to get re-elected to the Presidency and Bill Clinton moved into the Oval Office.  The Democrats were on a roll as the economy was recovering from Bush’s recession.  In 1994, however, the Republicans came storming back.

Why?  They produced “The Contract With America”.  A list of eight reforms and ten bills that they promised to immediately initiate, should they be elected.  This gave the public something concrete and simple to understand.  Quite frankly, many people on both sides of the aisle could agree on many of the provisions.

The Democrats today are on their heels – winning small special elections, but nobody has emerged as The Next Big Challenger to President Trump.  This year, we have the mid-term elections where every member of the House of Representatives is up for re-election.  As unpopular as Trump and the Republicans are, for reasons that could take up an infinite number of blog posts, I don’t get a sense of what Democrats are FOR – other than being more reasonable.

So here’s my idea.  The Contract For Americans – and highlight the fact that this is for THE PEOPLE.  Put it in the form of a Top Ten list (after all we have some pretty short attention spans) and make an easy sound bite to explain each of the proposals.  Mind you, these are my proposals – though I think the Democrats could use them.

The Contract

1) Taxes – Returning To What Worked

The immediate repeal of the “Tax Cuts And Jobs Act”, passed last year by the Republican Congress and signed into law by President Trump, which is slated to return us to Trillion Dollar Deficits.  This was bad from the get-go as all the enormous corporate tax breaks are permanent while the minuscule individual cuts are temporary.  Add to that the fact that people will have to pay taxes on their other taxes (like state income, property, sales, etc) and on the alimony that they paid to an ex-spouse and you have a bill that was targeted AGAINST Americans.

Not only will these bogus cut be reversed, but tax rates will be restored to what they were in the 1990s when we were actually running a governmental SURPLUS.  If not for the policies under George W. Bush (tax cuts, wars, Farm Bill, Prescription Drug Bill), they were predicting, in 2001, an elimination of the entire Federal Debt by 2010.

2) Medicare For All – Save Money On Our Biggest Bill

Right now, the United States spends over $10,000 per person on health care. However, we spend $5,790 per person (including partial benefit enrolees) on Medicaid.  Think about that for a minute..  We pay about HALF the amount for health care for our citizens who are, by and large, requiring the most health care.  Our Medicare spending pretty much parallels the average spending for OECD countries – take a look at the second chart in the first link up there.

So how about Medicare-for-all?  Think we can’t pay for it?  Well we’re already PAYING more than double so we’d be SAVING money!  ….and we could END the abomination that ONLY exists in THIS country known as “Medical Bankruptcy”.

We need to examine whether or not the profit motive should be paramount in health care.

Also, keep this in mind – we pay more for the same prescription drugs compared to other countries.  WAY more..  You can look at per-capita spending. You can look at drug prices themselves.  Even if it’s just next door in Canada.  You could look at India.  You can look at Europe.

That we allow this profligate spending for the benefit of health insurance and drug company shareholders is stunning.

3) Public University Education For All – Trade Schools Included

This was an idea that started to gain traction when Bernie Sanders started promoting it.  Free tuition at public (not private) universities.  Radical?  Not if you live in Europe.  Germany and several other countries offer their citizens free university educations (sometimes there are some small fees).

But what about here?  Would it work here?  IT ALREADY HAS.

California used to offer free tuition to it’s in-state students.  This was their policy until the 1970s.  Some colleges in New York were also free – again, into the 1970s.

Sanders said we could pay for this program by instituting a 0.5% tax on stock trades.  How much would that be?  Well, it could raise $350 BILLION per year over the next several years.  That pays for a LOT of college.  And the impact?  You’re talking about $5 for every $1000 worth of stocks, bonds or derivatives traded.  A small price to pay to have more engineers and doctors paying into Social Security versus “gig economy extras”.

4) Infrastructure – The Job That Keeps On Paying Off

You know, if we return to the tax policies that produced a surplus back in Clinton’s day, THIS would a good place to spend that money.

Roads, bridges, tunnels, levees, dams, water treatment facilities, sewers – all this stuff is falling apart.  We need a LOT of construction workers making decent money working on these projects – and they’ll spend their salaries, growing the economy futher, aka “The Multiplier Effect”.  The Congressional Research Service recently published a report stating that a 1% of GDP increase in public capital investment would increase labor demand by 1.13% in the short term – these would be those “good jobs at good wages” stuff that politicians like to talk about.

5) Ending the wars – Military Common Sense

$5,000,000,000,000

That’s Five Trillion Dollars.  That’s what the post 9/11 wars have cost us through FY 2016 and, with interest on the debt included, we’re looking at $8T by 2053 if we don’t change our ways.

To link it to the previous subject – fixing everything on the list from the American Society of Civil Engineers would cost $3.3T.  The ASCE is only too happy to list the details here.

You read that right.  For less than half the cost of blowing things up and pissing off people all over the world, we could have more employment, better public facilities, smoother roads, stronger bridges and so much more.

In addition, we need to actually listen to our military leaders sometimes and remember what the military is for.  It’s for defending the country – not a jobs program for defense contractors.  For example, we have to stop buying tanks and other equipment that the armed forces do not want and do not need!

6) Legalize Marijuana and Reform Prison Policy

As of July 2017, Colorado surpassed over a billion dollars in tax revenue from legalized marijuana.  Washington is now looking at over a quarter of a billion dollars per year.  Canada just legalized it and the citizens there want the tax revenues to go towards their national health care system instead of anti-drug campaigns.

Now look at the fact that whites and blacks use drugs in almost the same percentages, yet blacks are arrested FAR more often.  This mass incerceration is expensive and racist.  Drug offenses make up 46% of the federal inmate population.  We could save a lot of money (and ruin far fewer lives) with legalization.  After all, alcohol is legal..

Which brings up the second part of this subject – the prisons themselves.  Private prisons are an abomination.  What started out as a way to save money has become a horror.  Private prisons contract with the government and have minimum quotas on the number of prisoners.  This means the state is guaranteeing a certain number of prisoners to the private company.  This means the state has a vested interest in keeping people in prison – regardless of crime or guilt.

And they’re not even saving money.  In Arizona,  for FY 2010, the average per diem cost was $48.42 in public prisons vs. $53.02 per day in privately operated facilities.  In 2013, the nation’s largest private prison operator had a profit of $300M on revenues of $1.6B (about a 19% profit margin).  This money went from taxpayers paying for the prisons to the CCA shareholders.  Is that something we want to be doing?

If I were emperor, private prisons would be banned.

7) We’re Not Coming For Your Guns – Understanding the Second Amendment

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” – United States Constitution, 2nd Amendment.

“Back in the day”, ‘well-regulated’ meant ‘well-trained’, meaning you knew how to not only fire, but maintain your weapon.  The “Militia” was anyone who was available to answer the call to arms.  The people were meant to have the right to own guns in that context.

But, just as the Constitution has provisions for for denying certain rights to people under certain conditions, gun rights should be no different.

It should be the default position of the government that a citizen over the age of majority should be allowed to have a firearm.  However, the government should also be able to show good cause as to why someone should NOT be allowed to exercise that right.  The mentally ill, convicted felons, spousal abusers – they all come to mind.

I find it fascinating, in a depressing way, that today’s conservative thinks that a convicted felon, upon release from prison, should NOT have the right to vote but SHOULD have the right to have a gun restored!

“Well regulated” could be considered analagous to what we do with driving – you have to study up and take a test to prove you can handle exercising your rights.  If you do something bad, like driving drunk, those rights are removed.  And let’s not forget the militia part.  Ok, so we don’t all have to enlist in the Army or National Guard – but consider how the military handles the situation of allowing their people to have firearms.  It’s not like they hand out pistols at the induction hall.

8) Constitutional Amendment: Corporations Are Not People – Removing Money From Politics

“Corporations and other artificial entities that are created by laws of the States and the Federal Government are not considered persons or citizens of the United States.” — my proposal for a 28th Amendment.

Corporations are not people.  It’s as simple as that.  I will not believe they’re people until Texas executes one.

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision said that corporations have free speech rights.  This has resulted in a flood of dark money corrupting our political process.

Then there was the very famous Hobby Lobby case which said a corporation actually had religious rights and could deny contraceptive coverage despite the mandate of the ACA that required helth insurance plans to cover contraception.  This despite the fact that the 401(k) program that is available to management invests in and profits from companies that manufacture contraceptive drugs, including the abotifacents that Hobby Lobby’s owners INSISTED were the reason for denying health insurance coverage to their employees.

Hobby Lobby doesn’t go to church.  The people who own the company do.

Corporations should not have “free speech” rights.

They are not “people”.  This should be obvious.

9) Social Security Reform – For Your Economic Future

In 2037, the Social Security Trust Fund’s surpluses will be exhausted.  At that point, they will only be able to pay 76% of planned benefits.  As of this writing, that’s 19 years from now.  I’m supposed to retire in just over 12 years.  If I live to be 75, I’ll be in the generation that sees this promise broken unless we do something.

So what can we do?

Well, there’s the “FICA cap”.  What this means is that Social Security and Medicare taxes are only assessed on the first $128,400 of income (for 2018).  After that, you “get a raise” in that FICA taxes are no longer collected.  This only applies for ‘normal’ income. Anyone who gets their income from dividends or stock options (like the 1%) doesn’t pay this tax on those ‘earnings’ at all.

If we removed the FICA cap, we could fund Social Security for another 60 years!  That’s a powerful argument.

Social Security has been the single-most successful anti-poverty program in the history of the country.  It needs to be fixed, not cut as Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and the Trump-led-Republicans would do.

10) Living Wage – For Your Economic Present

They (the GOP) told us that the tax cuts were going to result in more money for workers.

They lied.  I’m shocked!  Shocked, I tell you!

Guess where the money went?  A lot of stock buybacks and dividend hikes – meaning more money for the corporate owners.  Before it was signed into law, various think tanks predicted that 12-13% of the ‘windfall’ would go to workers, so it wasn’t exactly a surprise that corporations would benefit.  Compared to what happened, that would have been good.  The reality?  3.3% of the tax cut windfall went to employees by one scorecard – $6B out of $177B.

Corporations never went to kindergarten so they don’t know how to share.  So what can we do?

Gradually raise the minimum wage to $15.  Companies that pay their people well have lower turnover, higher job satisfaction and lower expenses.  In addition, putting more money in the hands of poorer people spurs economic expansion because they SPEND the money – they don’t stash it away in the Cayman Islands.  The argument that a higher minimum wage results in more unemployment has been disproven these days in Seattle, and that’s nothing new as history has shown.

Besides – if your company requires its workers to live below the poverty line and be eligible for federal and state welfare programs to feed them so that the owner can make a profit – that business shouldn’t exist.

But what about others?  How about limiting the deductibility of executive compensation to a certain multiplier of the company’s average worker’s salary?  Since 1965, the ratio of executive salary to worker’s salary has gone from 18 times a worker’s pay to 220 times a worker’s pay.  This is patently ridiculous.  Let’s say, for round number’s sake, that we set a policy of 100x worker’s pay for executive pay.  If a company wants to pay the executives more, they would have two choices.  Either hike worker wages to raise the threshhold, or lose the deductibility of the excess compensation and pay the taxes on that money (in addition to the income taxes that the executive will pay).

“Trickle Down Economic Theory” doesn’t work.  Thinking that a corporation will rain its largesse down to the people is thinking of the most naive kind.  A corporation has no soul.  You generate economic growth by people wanting to buy more goods and services.  With more money, people buy more things – as opposed to stashing their money overseas.

Finally

The Republicans are great at staying on point and hammering said point home – even when it’s wrong.  But in today’s “sound bite” mentality, people aren’t into reading position papers or the official Party Platform planks.

Take these ideas and make quick commercials about each proposal – like a continuing story (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, etc..) and show the people how we all benefit.

As long as we have the vote, it’s never too late.

 

Why is “Socialism” a dirty word?

In the United States, are we even taught what “socialism” means? Here are some examples.

It’s been a little hectic around the house lately and I haven’t been writing.  My kids were up for a while, ran a couple of races and I’ve been dealing with a blizzard.  So I thought I’d take a step back from specific stuff about current events and Trump.  Specifically, I’d go back to a bit of a debate on a word that has become supercharged with emotion-inducing meaning: socialism.

Now, I’ll be the first one to admit that I was raised with the idea that “socialism = communism” and, well, we were fighting against communism all over the word, weren’t we?  But, the older I got, it seemed that definition wasn’t quite as true as it was cracked up to be.  After all, we were supporting our NATO allies in Europe and they were freely electing Socialists and Social Democrats all over the place!  Yet, they still had the free enterprise system complete with private corporations and the governments there didn’t own everything, like they did in the Soviet Union.

This got me to looking a bit closer at examples of socialism.  And we have a lot of examples here at home (in the United States).  Former Presidential candidate and Senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, came up with a line that I heard at one of his rallies that struck me…  Bernie is a self-described Democratic Socialist.  He said that socialism can be summed up in three words:

“We, The People”

It’s right there as the first three words of our Constitution.  “We, the people…”

So today we have a President who’s closest advisor (Steve Bannon) advocates the elimination of government.  Seriously, that’s what the “deconstructing of the administrative state” means.  It means getting rid of the administration or oversight of the country.  That got me to wondering what it would mean in practice.  I wanted to look at exactly where socialism has manifested itself in our government and what the consequences of eliminating that “administrative state” would be.  What follows is not a complete list, but it’s longer than what many people might immediately think of.  Much of this was inspired by a post I recently saw that claimed it’s original source as a 1917 “American government” textbook, 1948 edition

Protection: Direct

Law, police and courts.  All funded by ‘socialist’ taxes.  Without it, we have no adequate protection of life or property.

Military.  Funded the same way.  Without it, we pretty much have no country.  We wouldn’t have survived our first skirmish with the British in 1812 without a military.

Health

There are a lot of items in this category.

  • Water and sewer systems: We don’t have cholera outbreaks or other diseases spreading through our cities because of socialist water and sewer systems.
  • Food inspection.  You’ve heard of beef recalls and we just had cheese from raw milk in New York kill 2 and sicken more.  Libertarians believe that “market forces” would control this.  They’ve yet to explain how having less oversight means more safety.
  • Public health systems.  Everything from public hospitals to the Centers for Disease Control.  Remember that it was protocols developed by the CDC that kept Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever from spreading in the US and even led to a vaccine for it.  Without it?  Disease spreads unchecked.
  • The FDA can be, at times, controversial because of some of the things they’ve let on the market.  But, on the whole, the fact that we no longer have “snake oil salesmen” touring the country and preying on the public is a credit to their work.  Sure, we still have unregulated “supplements” with the “This product has not been evaluated by the FDA…” disclaimer (where they claim it’s not meant to treat any disease at the end of the commercial where they’re telling you the diseases it’s supposed to treat or cure), and it can use some reform, but let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Education

Public education is one of the things that has made this country great.  The idea that everyone is entitled to an education means that everyone has an opportunity to succeed.  Without it, only the wealthy can afford to send their kids to school.  Without it, we end up with child labor.  Without it, there’s a corollary with public libraries which would mean that libraries would be private and demand membership fees.

A hundred years ago, graduating high school was an accomplishment.  Today the discussion has shifted to college degrees.  50 years ago, you could get a decent paying unskilled labor job.  Automation is pretty much making that extinct.  Nowadays you need a college degree.  A free public university education is not a new idea, not even here in the United States.  It used to be a reality – but not anymore.  Bernie Sanders has a plan to place a 0.5% tax on stock proceeds to pay for public university education.  But, in order to work, that would have to be in concert with some method of controlling tuition which has far outpaced inflation for several decades.

Without it, we’ll be a second-rate nation.

Transportation

  • Private mud roads vs. the interstate system.   It was way back in 1811 when the idea came for federal funding of roads.  That was when “The National Road” was authorized.  Nowadays, we call most of what it was by it’s later name “US-40”.   The original road was built from 1811 to 1834 – so this isn’t exactly a ‘new idea’.  We passed the law authorizing the federal road system in the 1920s (giving us all those “US” roads, including the famous “US-66”) and the gas tax came soon after.  Eisenhower (a Republican) saw the need for more and better roads and created the Interstate Highway System and paid for it with a $0.04 gas tax.  Every time you hit the road, you can thank the “socialist roads” for making it possible.
  • Anarchistic air travel vs the FAA.  Imagine what the skies would be like without the FAA.  Air travel would never have ‘taken off’ like it did.  Without the “traffic cops” guiding planes through the skies, even landing a plane would be a game of ‘chicken’ as multiple planes would try to beat each other to the runway – if they didn’t collide in the air first.
  • The same holds true in other transportation areas..  Regulated railroads vs. the dangerous free-for-all we had in the 1800s.  Engineering standards for dams, bridges and tunnels.  All from people getting together and setting down some rules.

Environment

I’m old enough to remember the environment back in the 1960s.  Thanks to the EPA, the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, we don’t have rivers burning anymore.  We don’t have cities shrouded in toxic smog.  Are you too young to remember that?  Take a look at China and what a day in Beijing looks like.

I’m old enough to remember clear-cutting forests vs. forestry management.

You don’t have to be as old as I am to know about overfishing.  I’ve watched, over the years, as fisherman have complained about catch quotas AND reduced fishing stocks.  Someone has to protect the oceans because private industry certainly won’t.

Business and Labor laws

  • Monopolies – Does anyone remember when the Republicans broke up monopolies?  That would be way back in Teddy Roosevelt’s day.  He knew what unchecked monopolistic power did.  Today, we’re actually restoring those monopolies.  The last big monopoly that was broken up was AT&T.  The explosion of new services and reduction in prices was legendary.  Now the “Baby Bells” have been buying each other (and their cellular companies) and getting dangerously close to monopolies again.  We’re down to 4 real cellular companies (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile).
  • Securities markets – How about insider trading?  Our socialistic laws now prevent people from trading stocks based on “inside information” that the public does not have access to.  Take a look at all the rules companies have to follow now in order to “go public” – so that they’re not just scamming investors.
  • Banks?  Remember them?  Remember 2008 and the banking crisis when we got rid of the laws preventing the mixing of commercial and investment banking?  What happened?  The commercial banks gambled in the investment markets and we all know what happened.  Who could have predicted that?  Anyone who was alive in the 1980s when the S&L (Savings & Loan) crisis hit.  From 1986 to 1995 fully 1/3 of all the savings and loan institution in the US failed.  Money lost by depositors: $0.  Cost to the government to bail them out: $132 billion.  Surely they’d learned their lesson so as not to invest in bad properties anymore, right?  Cost of 2008 bank bailout: $700 billion for TARP.  Total cost?  Try nearly 17 TRILLION dollars.  Or maybe it was *29* TRILLION.  Or was it $13 trillion?  Truly staggering numbers.
  • Minimum wage.  “Socialism” brought us that.  Before that we had child labor and slave wages.  And if you think it was never supposed to be a living wage, well, history and FDR say otherwise.
  • Dangerous working conditions vs. OSHA.  People today are too young to remember how it used to be.  Look at documentaries on old railroads.  Crawling around on top of a boxcar on a moving train in a storm isn’t exactly safe.  Look at the labor movement in the auto industry in the 1930s and how many people died on the line.  Early surveys suggest that only half of all workplace deaths resulted in any compensation for the families.  Corporations just figured fatalities into the cost of their business.  (Is it any different today – look at GM and the decision on their ignition switches.  Ten years, 124 deaths, countless injuries before they were forced to recall a part that would have cost pennies to fix before the fact.

Relief

Back in 2007, now President Trump said he LIKED the housing crash because it gave him opporunities to buy properties on the cheap – capitalizing on someone else’s misery. Imagine the “opportunities” the wealthy could have if we cut back or eliminated:

  • Unemployment – lose your job, lose your house!
  • Social security – Get old, lose your life savings and your house when you can no longer work!
  • Medicare / Medicaid – Get sick, lose your house!

And don’t think I’ve failed to notice how pensions can now be balanced by nuking pensioner benefits instead of fixing the funding – and Congress now allows it.  Of course, the fact that Wall Street lavishes bonuses on their bosses while cutting pensions is almost considered “normal” these days.

Liberty

Trump’s call to beat up protestors, his opinions on women are well chronicled, to say nothing of Muslims (because of terrorism while being silent if the terrorist is white).

Trump may end up being the worst thing to happen to civil rights as his ludicrous, unsupported claims about 3-5 million illegal votes may result in laws to further disenfranchise legal voters.

Civilization

The very definition of civilization is rooted in socialism.  Humans are social creatures and we are far better together than separated.  There’s nothing wrong with having a debate on just how much socialism to incorporate into a government.  But Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief aide made a very famous quote saying Trump’s appointments were to deconstruct the administrative state.  Think about that for a minute.

Trump is actively working to destroy the government.