2026 Mid-Term Elections

[TV and credit cards]

<perfectly legitimate argument snipped>

Question: Why are you schilling yourself for the massively wealthy? Do you think you will be one of them someday?

Question: Why are you shilling for the Bolsheviks? Do you think they will include you in the Politburo someday?

Question 2: Do leftists have any arguments that are not, ultimately, ad hominem?

Do rightists have any arguments that are not, ultimately, slippery slope?

Yep. That’s the thing. If we’re going to go after a guy hard because he has more than me; how do I know that I’m not next?

We can make laws and set regulations in place. That's a thing.

 

[ZiprHead]

You received an increase in value.

Did you 'recieve' the car as an investment, for it's resale value? Most folk get cars to drive em till they wear-out, you expect them to devalue. Should you get a tax return for it's wear n tear.
Every car has 'value' in it's usefulness. It has monatery value only if sold. Till then any increase in value is just a pipe dream. Just someone's opinion, not an increase in actual money.

Most people do not buy Aston Martins in order to drive them until they wear out. I suspect that most people who buy Aston Martins purchase them assuming their value will hold, long term or perhaps increase.

Now, if you are talking about your average SUV or sedan pick up, you’d likely be correct. People drive them until they feel it is no longer worthwhile to keep them going. That’s what we do in our family.

Actually most luxury cars fall in value a little faster than regular cars. The used market is very small.

 

[ZiprHead]

<perfectly legitimate argument snipped>

Question: Why are you schilling yourself for the massively wealthy? Do you think you will be one of them someday?

Question: Why are you shilling for the Bolsheviks? Do you think they will include you in the Politburo someday?

In case you haven't noticed, there's a helluva lot of Americans that are hurting. Many just one car repair from being homeless. While at the same time the right wants to take away programs that help the average person to finance huge tax cuts for the wealthy and big corp.

Question 2: Do leftists have any arguments that are not, ultimately, ad hominem?

Pretty cheeky of you to accuse me of only using ad hominems when you edited out my other points that were not ad homs. Not a good look on you.

 

[ZiprHead]

She disagrees. I'm hung up on it because it seems painfully obvious to me that people trying for taxation levels sufficient to eliminate billionaires aren't doing it for the sake of extra tax revenue -- a guy who gets to a billion half way through the year and is prohibited from making any more is going to go on vacation rather than agree to work for nothing, so actual tax receipts will go down when the tax rate is hiked up that much. So they're motivated by a wish to hurt their outgroup, not by a wish to accomplish anything positive for anyone. I don't think pure harm is an appropriate goal for government policy.

Tax rates are and should continue to be progressive. Someone who has an income of $1B would still have an income of $90M if they paid 91% income tax without loopholes.

I have zero respect for anyone who cannot manage to get by on that.

Fred Phelps had zero respect for anyone who cannot manage to get by without gay sex. To ban people from doing stuff we should need a better reason than that they can get by without it.

...
THAT undermines our democracy and what is turning our country into a kleptocracy.

In a democracy when the people want a government service they're supposed to vote to tax themselves to pay for it. What's turning our country into a kleptocracy is our culture of getting services by voting to tax someone else to pay for it.

Bullshit. That's not what is happening. It's an incredibly stupid thing to say while the Right is actively working to cut back services to pay for tax breaks for the wealthy and big corp. If you cannot see that I cannot help you.

 

[ZiprHead]

I was pretty clear about my reasons for believing we need to take the wealthy especially the uber wealthy more.

Yes -- you appear to perceive them as your enemy so you'd like the government to treat them as its enemy.

Wow! Taxing someone is treating them as an enemy. There's your whole attitude in a nutshell.

And you criticize other for ad homs.

 

[Toni]

We’re all subsidizing Bezos, if you want something to complain about.

Are we? Because buying from a company is not the same as subsidizing the part-owner. You are not subsidizing Piggly Wiggly (or whatever the grocery store you guys have in your neck of the woods - rural areas around here often have Piggly Wiggly) either when you shop there.

And Musk who seems bent on producing as many children he doesn’t raise ( in his case that’s a good thing).

Presumably he does pay a lot of child support for them though. The taxpayer is not subsidizing his kids. Unlike some guy who has 14 kids as well but all his baby mamas are on SNAP and Medicaid.

Well, actually we are subsidizing Musk. SpaceX lives on government contracts, and Tesla would have had a tough time finding a place in the market without electric car and Powerwall subsidies.

We’re also subsidizing Bezos but yes, more baldly, we are subsiding Musk. Not to mention paying him directly Abd giving his little band of minions fee reign to decimate government t agencies and collect the personal data of everyone who pays taxes in the US. Talk about a gift!

 

[Toni]

We’re all subsidizing Bezos, if you want something to complain about.

Are we? Because buying from a company is not the same as subsidizing the part-owner. You are not subsidizing Piggly Wiggly (or whatever the grocery store you guys have in your neck of the woods - rural areas around here often have Piggly Wiggly) either when you shop there.
...

Of course we are. We are subsidizing any employer who pays employees so poorly that they must supplement their income by food stamps, Medicaid, and other poverty relief measures. We are subsidizing them by increased number of children who need to go to subsidized daycares, Head Start programs, be in Medicaid, or free lunch programs, etc.

That's religious catechism, not economic reasoning. If a guy does not have the skill set to increase any employer's revenue enough to cover the cost of supporting himself and his family, he has a problem. When an employer buys the guy's labor at fair market value, she's solving part of his problem for him. If you solve part of somebody's problem, that does not magically make his whole problem your problem. You might as well claim his food stamps are a subsidy to his grocer because the grocer doesn't sell him $500 worth of food for the $200 he can earn himself.

We also are subsidizing all corporations by building infrastructure: roads, water and sewer, utilities, etc.

Corporations pay corporate income taxes that help finance that infrastructure. You haven't shown the tax revenue is less than the cost of providing the service.

We are especially subsidizing corporations every single time they are given tax breaks when they decide to build another store or warehouse in any community.

Corporations, like most other economic actors, shed positive externalities that they don't get paid for into their economic ecosystems by the boatload. The reason local governments offer tax breaks is because they want those externalities. That's only a subsidy if the externalities are insufficient to make up for the lost tax revenue, i.e., if the local government officials made a bad deal. Local officials are sometimes stupid or corrupt, sure, but often they offer tax breaks because it's a good deal for their community.

We are subsidizing them by allowing mega corporations such as Amazon and Walmart to underpay their suppliers and by cornering the market after they’ve drive out more local retailers —at which point they are free to charges they want and supply what they choose. When people have few choices about where and what they can buy because other options have been eliminated, we have helped create that situation by subsidizing corporations that do not, in fact, need the subsidies to survive or thrive.

This is off the top of my head.

Overall, Amazon and Walmart have increased people's choices enormously.

Did you swallow whatever Loren drinks and now must rely on denigrating any argument t against which you cannot defend by calling it religion?

This is ignorant even for you. You can snatch some verbiage off of AI all you want t but that dies t mean you actually understand the terms or their usage or basic economics.

You have not shown how corporations DO pay enough tax to offset their demands for new infrastructure not their use of existing infrastructure.

What is this bullshit elitist corporate worshipping crappoloa about it being workers fault that local entities allow Walmart to wipe out local businesses leaving local people little choice about their employer Abd then criticizing the workers for not offering enough value to the corporations?

Corporations exist to provide goods and services to people—and profits to shareholders, of course. Which would not exist without people wishing to buy what the corporation sells.

People do not exist to benefit corporations, increase their profits or to benefit shareholders.

 

[Elixir]

As for how it compares to a billionaire's use, we'd have to take it item by item.

Sure, if you are determined to portray something like equal use.

They use Medicaid, emergency rooms for non-emergency medical problems, social services, food stamps, EITC, and public parks and sidewalks as homes more than a billionaire would.

Billionaires don’t use emergency rooms, they tie up entire wards of hospitals if something ails them. They don’t use public parks. If they so desire they have their own parks and the public is verboten to use them. But that’s not strictly “consumption” so it never enters your equation.

Medicare, could be the same. Roads, less.

See above. Direct use - less. Consumptive use - vastly more.

Public schools and police protection, that's going to depend on how you measure it and I'd expect estimates to vary wildly.

The dynamic in play in ‘Murka conceals billionaires’ consumption of “public” assets, largely by privatizing what was once accessible to the public - but that effect is never accounted for.
Poor people don’t claim thousands of acres as their own, or used”public” airports and associated infrastructure for their private travel, or public harbors for their yachts …
You argument sounds like someone saying Richard Branson is a lot thinner than the obese homeless person on TSwizzle’s doorstep, so he must consume a lot less.
Examples can be constructed but the underlying structure is where the inequality mostly resides.

Billionaires use public assets more through influence, ownership, and tax treatment than through direct day-to-day consumption. They can shape public systems to their advantage, rely on public infrastructure and services at scale, and routinely capture more of the benefits from commons that everyone funds. Of course you can come up with myriad examples of shit poor people consume that rich people don’t, but that’s a distraction, and does not begin to match the scale. Poor people eating all the ramen noodles doesn’t cancel out billionaires getting preferential rates on mega-loans.

 

[bilby]

The dynamic in play in ‘Murka conceals billionaires’ consumption of “public” assets, largely by privatizing what was once accessible to the public - but that effect is never accounted for.

It's been going on for a long time. As described in the well known 18th century quatrain by that prolific author, Anon:

They hang the man and flog the woman,
Who steals a goose from off the common,
But leave the greater rascal loose,
Who steals the common from the goose.

 

[Harry Bosch]

<perfectly legitimate argument snipped>

Question: Why are you schilling yourself for the massively wealthy? Do you think you will be one of them someday?

Question: Why are you shilling for the Bolsheviks? Do you think they will include you in the Politburo someday?

In case you haven't noticed, there's a helluva lot of Americans that are hurting. Many just one car repair from being homeless. While at the same time the right wants to take away programs that help the average person to finance huge tax cuts for the wealthy and big corp.

Question 2: Do leftists have any arguments that are not, ultimately, ad hominem?

Pretty cheeky of you to accuse me of only using ad hominems when you edited out my other points that were not ad homs. Not a good look on you.

Nevermind