Government is bigger than 350M people and all the businesses combined. No rich person or company can control EVERYTHING, make laws, etc.
I am TYPICAL of Libertarians. 10th amendment: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. The Constitution was quite precise about what powers were delegated to the United States and those were few, SMALL government, and how to amend it to handle situations where new technology (or whatever) needs to be dealt with. Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3: Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct. The number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative; and until such enumeration shall be made, the State of New Hampshire shall be entitled to chuse [sic] three, Massachusetts eight, Rhode-Island and Providence Plantations one, Connecticut five, New-York six, New Jersey four, Pennsylvania eight, Delaware one, Maryland six, Virginia ten, North Carolina five, South Carolina five, and Georgia three. Article 1, Section 9 No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken. Before the 16th amendment, 1913, the federal government could not tax the citizens directly. No income tax, no sales tax, no nothing. The feds could tax the states and the states had to pay the tax, but not the people directly. It was meant to be only enough to pay for the military and post office and the things ENUMERATED in the constitution. It was even questionable that we should have a standing army at all. That's what this country operated under (Libertarianism) until 1913. How you can possibly think the way things are always was the way things were is amusing at best.
Libertarian Party proposals encourage charity. https://www.lp.org/issues/poverty-and-welfare 1. End Welfare 2. For every dollar you donate to a charity, you get a dollar of tax credit 3. Get government out of the way of job creation and growth 4. Reform education: free market and FULL choice for parents and kids to choose the school they go to.
So the top 1%'s charity will replace Social Security, health insurance, public parks, the space program, regulations protecting our food, you name it. Oh yeah, that won't reduce the bottom 99% to serfdom. Like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, you want to move civilization backward 500 years. Rich conservatives have propagandized against every revolution since, while Democrats or their equivalent parties have produced all advances.
Advances. That's good for a laugh. Ponzi schemes, not enough money for all these advances, "retirement" in poverty, destruction of public education, incarceration rates that are an outright embarrassment, and the list goes on and on. Sadly, when all this has been proven failures and the doubling and tripling down on these failed policies, you'll get us into a war to end all wars to kick capitalism back into gear. You claim to be an accountant, good at numbers. How many $50-billionaires are there? If we confiscated 100% of their wealth, and all the millionaires and on up, how much of Obama's debt would it pay down? Better yet, what fraction of a year's federal budget would it cover? You are Don Quixote, tilting at windmills. You act like your list of massive expenses at the cost of millions' well being is a good thing. It ain't.
I'll do part of your homework for you. These are all there are in the world. China has more $billionaires than the USA, so maybe you get 1/2 of the dollar figure from Americans. So you've already spent 3x their net worth in less than a decade. Once you've stolen everything from them, you're really close to broke. Insolvent as you accounts put it.
The graphic above is deceiving. The Koch brothers amassed $68B in a lifetime. Cuba's GDP is the value of all the goods and services produced by Cuba in a year. Progressive Obama has taken your allowance. Government should tax a percentage of GDP and Progressive economics has killed 1/3 of our GDP growth. Smaller allowance in the future. The interest on the debt buys the Cadillac of space programs, and plenty of money left over. PER YEAR. How he and Progressive theory have hastened our demise will be obvious if interest rates rise only modestly, still remaining below historical norms. After paying the Ponzi scheme recipients their poverty level incomes and the interest on the debt, there won't be any money for space programs or public parks. Or even a modest defense. Anyhow, good luck spending that $768. That kind of money will vastly improve everyone's standard of living. $768 might buy a decent TV. Good luck if it breaks.
So charity from the rich will replace the Ponzi scheme that is government. At the end of the work day, if I want to go to a park, I'll beg the boss to build a park. The only thing Libertarianism has going for it is its catchy name.
You act like people did a whole lot worse before the Ponzi scheme. Or that there were no parks. Social Security is the Ponzi Scheme. The rest of government is just a drag on hundreds of millions of people's well being. In spite of $4 trillion of government money to spend, I see a couple dozen homeless people every day. Not the same ones. Just on the street, or begging for money at stoplights. Multiply that by 50,000+ cities and towns. Bernie Sanders was interviewed by the New York Daily News editorial board. Faced with reasonable questions, he came out looking like the clown he is. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blog...about-but-didnt-in-that-daily-news-interview/ Nine moments in the Sanders conversation left me agape. From his own plans for breaking up too-big-to-fail banks to how he would handle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to dealing with the Islamic State, the man giving homegirl Hillary Clinton a run for her money seemed surprisingly out of his depth. Daily News: Okay. But do you have a sense that there is a particular statute or statutes that a prosecutor could have or should have invoked to bring indictments? Sanders: I suspect that there are. Yes. Daily News: You believe that? But do you know? Sanders: I believe that that is the case. Do I have them in front of me, now, legal statutes? No, I don’t. But if I would…yeah, that’s what I believe, yes. When a company pays a $5 billion fine for doing something that’s illegal, yeah, I think we can bring charges against the executives. Daily News: I’m only pressing because you’ve made it such a central part of your campaign. And I wanted to know what the mechanism would be to accomplish it. OMG https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...retty-close-to-a-disaster-for-bernie-sanders/ This New York Daily News interview was pretty close to a disaster for Bernie Sanders Daily News: So if you look forward, a year, maybe two years, right now you have ... JPMorgan has 241,000 employees. About 20,000 of them in New York. $192 billion in net assets. What happens? What do you foresee? What is JPMorgan in year two of ... Sanders: What I foresee is a stronger national economy. And, in fact, a stronger economy in New York State, as well. What I foresee is a financial system which actually makes affordable loans to small and medium-size businesses. Does not live as an island onto themselves concerned about their own profits. And, in fact, creating incredibly complicated financial tools, which have led us into the worst economic recession in the modern history of the United States. Daily News: I get that point. I’m just looking at the method because, actions have reactions, right? There are pluses and minuses. So, if you push here, you may get an unintended consequence that you don’t understand. So, what I’m asking is, how can we understand? If you look at JPMorgan just as an example, or you can do Citibank, or Bank of America. What would it be? What would that institution be? Would there be a consumer bank? Where would the investing go? Sanders: I’m not running JPMorgan Chase or Citibank. ADVANCES. Yeah, right. I see 241,000 newly unemployed from just the one bank.
After the New York Daily Clinton Wall Street News did a typical editorial board interview, then persecuted Sanders in their paper for giving typical answers, I read the whole transcript. I found nothing out of the ordinary. His answers were just fine. Every candidate says that while laws may not be in place to achieve goals, he will try to get them passed. Or, he says that the law already exists, but is not being vigorously enforced. Sanders answered that Obama's Attorney General could have pursued Wall Street after the Bush debacle, but didn't, and that a Sanders Attorney General would be tougher on them. But the Clinton Wall Street Daily News wanted him to answer with the exact statute and code section. Bernie did just fine in that interview. Not that it has anything to do with either science or Libertarianism.
They asked him some not so hard questions that he couldn't answer about things he promises in his stump speeches. Then they published the whole transcript. What a terrible way to do journalism? You can't pass a law and then indict someone for past crimes. It's an ex post facto law and forbidden by the constitution. That pesky piece of toilet paper to you guys. LOL
They ask him, how will the giant banks change their organization charts to please you. He answers, it's none of my business. I don't run the companies. So the paper ran headlines saying that he had no answers. If he had answered them in detail, their headlines would have said that he didn't know his place as President, that he planned to micromanage the big banks. He couldn't win either way with the stupid questions, so he declined like a pro.
it's his policy to break them up. He has to understand what it means for the banks if he gets his way. What a bonehead. This is the same New York Daily News that's calling for impeachment right away if Trump is elected. http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/impeach-trump-article-1.2549541 Impeach Trump Ready? It’s not too early to start.
1) There were no parks, just plantations for us serfs to serve you rich guys...the historical inventors of Ponzi Schemes. 2) All of us 99% will be homeless, begging for you 1% to get a charitable deduction by throwing us a bone. 3) Waaah. He didn't know the exact code section and statute. Instead, he'll sick the Attorney General on existing laws, and have Congress negotiate new laws. Is this process new to you and the Daily News?
Why? It's not his problem what happens to bad guys after he stops them. When they can't invent bad instruments like derivatives, they will make less money and lay off some employees. Duh...and waaah. You and the Daily News feign frightened shock over the outcome of fighting bad guys on Wall Street.
1) There were parks. The first park in America was the Boston Common, established in 1634. How many years before FDR was that? You're the math guy. 2) I'm not 1%, not even close. I'm just not envious of those who are. 3) He's going around accusing people of committing crimes. It might be useful if he had a clue about what crimes were committed. He's clueless.
