Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

[Testy Calibrate]

He created all that value, he's not taking it from anyone.

Eh? I was completely unaware tha he worked with no employees at all. That’s a remarkable accomplishment. Kinda like the sweatshop owners, right? Solely responsible for all created value, and not a single iota of exploitation (theft) of the contributions of others.

How did he find time to engineer between scrubbing the factory toilets and changing the lightbulbs and filing the taxes?

His idea, his value.

That is a very stupid argument. The reason conservatives are fucked in the head is this kind of all or nothing concept. Ideas without labor are daydreams. We reward creativity and industriousness with money as a society because it is valuable. But it is society which allows that activity, and society which makes it possible. We allow it. It is not a natural right. All we need to do is decide that the law is illegitimate and start up with the guillotine and that's the new history. It has happened many many times already.

 

[barbos]

She is extremely smart, and almost always right. Better still, she owns and corrects her mistakes. She is among the best of the millennial generation and will do them very well.

I don't know, It was one redunkulous mistake which makes me doubt claims about her smartness.
She clearly has no idea about what a trillion dollars is. She won an election, that does not make her smart.

 

[Canard DuJour]

Take, for example, SpaceX (...) He created all that value, he's not taking it from anyone.

Eh? I was completely unaware tha he worked with no employees at all. That’s a remarkable accomplishment. Kinda like the sweatshop owners, right? Solely responsible for all created value, and not a single iota of exploitation (theft) of the contributions of others.

How did he find time to engineer between scrubbing the factory toilets and changing the lightbulbs and filing the taxes?

Not to mention NASA and millennia of cumulative knowledge, without which he'd be strapping wings to his arms.

 

[Harry Bosch]

His idea, his value.

That is a very stupid argument. The reason conservatives are fucked in the head is this kind of all or nothing concept. Ideas without labor are daydreams. We reward creativity and industriousness with money as a society because it is valuable. But it is society which allows that activity, and society which makes it possible. We allow it. It is not a natural right. All we need to do is decide that the law is illegitimate and start up with the guillotine and that's the new history. It has happened many many times already.

Yea, this is why people don't trust Socialists (with a capital S). I'm not going to ask your permission to start my own company. I'm not actually totally against a wealth tax if it's needed for the public good. I favor infrastructure spending. I support a larger safety net, better cheaper public schools, increasing opportunity for others, and etc. But I differ sharply with people who want to punish achievers for their wealth. If you want to punish entrepreneurs, they'll just move to countries that more value the economic development and jobs that they create.

As an aside, if increased taxes were needed, I'd favor increased estate taxes.

 

[Canard DuJour]

Since we don't know what their true income was how can we know what rate they paid??

FFS, we know their rate they paid on their taxable income and the effective rates are calculated using their declared income (which is not their taxable income). There has never been a time in the USA where all income is declared and taxed. So, using your reasoning, it is always impossible to compare effective tax rates.

We can never know it precisely for this very reason. However, these days there's little in the way of loopholes that keep it off the return. Back then you could drive a truck through the loopholes.

Talk about clutching at straws

The same holds across the OECD, both time-series and horizontally : the higher marginal and corporate tax rates do not appear to hinder growth. High levels of inequality appear to hinder growth. The idea that true tax rate differentials are/were all the opposite of the apparent ones is beyond ridiculous. The idea that the US is unique in that respect is ridiculous and would, in any case, just make the US an outlier.

 

[barbos]

Take, for example, SpaceX (...) He created all that value, he's not taking it from anyone.

Eh? I was completely unaware tha he worked with no employees at all. That’s a remarkable accomplishment. Kinda like the sweatshop owners, right? Solely responsible for all created value, and not a single iota of exploitation (theft) of the contributions of others.

How did he find time to engineer between scrubbing the factory toilets and changing the lightbulbs and filing the taxes?

Not to mention NASA and millennia of cumulative knowledge, without which he'd be strapping wings to his arms.

Musk is no engineering genius, he is a businessman.
I am pretty sure that it was not even his idea, it's just he is the one who decided to look into it seriously.

 

[ZiprHead]

Since we don't know what their true income was how can we know what rate they paid??

FFS, we know their rate they paid on their taxable income and the effective rates are calculated using their declared income (which is not their taxable income). There has never been a time in the USA where all income is declared and taxed. So, using your reasoning, it is always impossible to compare effective tax rates.

We can never know it precisely for this very reason. However, these days there's little in the way of loopholes that keep it off the return. Back then you could drive a truck through the loopholes.

Examples?

ETA: And when were those examples removed?

 

[laughing dog]

Since we don't know what their true income was how can we know what rate they paid??

FFS, we know their rate they paid on their taxable income and the effective rates are calculated using their declared income (which is not their taxable income). There has never been a time in the USA where all income is declared and taxed. So, using your reasoning, it is always impossible to compare effective tax rates.

We can never know it precisely for this very reason. However, these days there's little in the way of loopholes that keep it off the return. Back then you could drive a truck through the loopholes.

So what? We know that the effective tax rate on declared income was higher back then that it is now. You need to show that undeclared income ("loophole" income is declared and then subtracted from declared taxable income) was high enough back then to make a difference

 

[SimpleDon]

It remains striking to me that anybody could convince themselves that it's possible for any individual to deserve millions or billions of dollars, for any reason. To believe somehow all that money rightfully should belong to him because of something he did to earn it. As if one person could do anything so important all on his own to be entitled to that much money when the opportunity cost of retaining all that money is to deprive others of necessities.

Of course, I think most people are dimly aware that's all nonsense. According to this view, the ballooning rise in profits since the 1970s is the natural outcome of certain individuals becoming exponentially more worthy of wealth, doing more and more of whatever they had been doing to deserve it before, while the entire working class made no improvements whatsoever to their worthiness. That's the logical implication of thinking all those riches are rightful, deservedly the property of the few people who have them.

None of that can be defended because what happened is that wealth was generated in the same way it always is under capitalism, through exploitation. So, in a very real sense, there has always been ample justification to "get those bastards", because they never earned most of the money they possess.

It has been said that our mixed-mode capitalism is a terrible economic system but it is better than any other that we have tried. All of the alternatives from communism to the libertarian wet dream of the self-regulating free market require a change in basic human nature. Only our current economy seems to be suitable for the people that we have and not for the people that we wish that we have.

The problem of who gets what from the economy is not just a problem with capitalism, it is a problem under any economic system. Like all economic systems, capitalism has no inherent mechanism for determining the income distribution in a society. It is a matter decided in society by a combination of traditions and government policies.

If the workers control the society and the economy by complete control of the government, the workers end up too highly paid. If the capitalists control the government, they end up with too much of the pie. Likewise for the military or the corporations or the bureaucrats or the bankers or the rentiers. The best that we can do is to try to balance the competing interests with an eye to needs and contributions. But the devil is in the details.

As in all things we can do is to determine what we want to do and then we can decide how to do it. For example, I don't believe that if we put it to a vote that many people would vote

• to maintain poverty
• for health care so expensive no one can use it
• to move our industries to China
• to direct as much income and wealth as possible to the already rich by suppressing wages as much as possible to increase profits

But these are all of the things we are currently doing. Why? The vast majority of the country work for wages, aren't already rich and live paycheck to paycheck. Most people live in fear of losing their jobs, whether to illegals or to the Chinese or to random layoffs to clear out those deemed to be redundant or deadbeats.

 

[Derec]

She is extremely smart, and almost always right. Better still, she owns and corrects her mistakes. She is among the best of the millennial generation and will do them very well.

Is this meant to be ironic? Poe's law in the age of trump is murder

 

[Derec]

She is extremely smart, and almost always right. Better still, she owns and corrects her mistakes. She is among the best of the millennial generation and will do them very well.

I don't know, It was one redunkulous mistake which makes me doubt claims about her smartness.
She clearly has no idea about what a trillion dollars is. She won an election, that does not make her smart.

Maybe she confused long and short scales. No, that would make it even worse.

Probably just clueless.

 

[thebeave]

Marty Feldman had crazy eyes and was a socialist as well. Must be a thing. Its too bad he's long dead. He and AOC could have hooked up and had beautiful, crazy-eyed babies together.



From his Wikipedia page:

Politically, Marty Feldman has been described as an "avowed socialist"[20] telling one interviewer "I'm a socialist by conviction, if not by lifestyle"[21] and another "I'm a socialist from way back, but in order to pay my back taxes I have to live in America to earn enough money to pay the back tax I owe to the socialist government that I voted in."[8]

 

[Loren Pechtel]

His idea, his value.

Actually I am having a hard time trying to understand how giving thousands of people a chance of employment and incomes is exploitation. Certainly not when compared to the alternative. Anyone who has tried to start their own business understands how fucking much harder and more time consuming for less income and much less security that is. But then maybe I don't have the business skills necessary to make a fortune starting a business. I was quite thankful for having the opportunity of a job when I finally decided running my own business was damn hard so got a job in a corporation for more income and much less hours of labor.

There seems to be an assumption that if one person has more than another, then that person must have exploited the other. Silly, but there you go.

It's the logical result of leftist thought. They consider everyone to be equal other than circumstances. Thus if you have less you are a victim, if you have more you are an exploiter. (The right makes the opposite mistake, they figure if you have less you are inferior, if you have more you are superior, circumstances don't matter.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

She is extremely smart, and almost always right. Better still, she owns and corrects her mistakes. She is among the best of the millennial generation and will do them very well.

I don't know, It was one redunkulous mistake which makes me doubt claims about her smartness.
She clearly has no idea about what a trillion dollars is. She won an election, that does not make her smart.

I think it's pretty clear she's smart. The problem is she lets her faith overrule her reason--same mistake as the right. It's not just one mistake, it's her doubling down on the mistake rather than admitting she goofed. That's why this is such an issue.

 

[lpetrich]

Responding to someone who tweeted that she and Sen. Warren have different ideas on taxing the rich,
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "¿Por qué no los dos? … "
"Why not both?"

 

[lpetrich]

I wrote this some time before AOC became prominent. But it does seem much like her style.

One girlie-magazine publisher even proposed taking nude pictures of Kalna, Ilmuth, Kurati, Khessini, Nerith, and others, and publishing them as "Girls of the Solar System". One of the Message Committee forwarded it to the Contact Committee, and Kalna composed a response.

"Although we are flattered by your curiosity about our bodies, we must respectfully decline. We are not into exhibitionism, and our bodies are so glorious-looking that you would faint. Only kidding about that last part. Seriously, even if we were exhibitionist enough to want to distribute nude pictures of ourselves, we would not want to distribute such pictures to the people of your world. All too many people would consider it a terrible scandal, including many people who like to look at such pictures. We also would not want such pictures to be the property of any one publisher. But since you are so desperate to have pictures of us, we will send you some."

She included pictures of herself and Ilmuth in jumpsuits.

 

[PyramidHead]

There seems to be an assumption that if one person has more than another, then that person must have exploited the other. Silly, but there you go.

It's the logical result of leftist thought. They consider everyone to be equal other than circumstances. Thus if you have less you are a victim, if you have more you are an exploiter. (The right makes the opposite mistake, they figure if you have less you are inferior, if you have more you are superior, circumstances don't matter.)

Can you all please just acknowledge that Marx was a person who wrote things, and that reading them might help you not look like dopes with ignorant comments like these?

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

There seems to be an assumption that if one person has more than another, then that person must have exploited the other. Silly, but there you go.

It's the logical result of leftist thought. They consider everyone to be equal other than circumstances.

I'm always glad there are people around to tell me how I think.

 

[Elixir]

There seems to be an assumption that if one person has more than another, then that person must have exploited the other. Silly, but there you go.

It's the logical result of leftist thought. They consider everyone to be equal other than circumstances.

I'm always glad there are people around to tell me how I think.

Yeah, that's a lofty value. Made even more so by having third party confirmation.

 

[Derec]

I hope they are successful.
Some Dems float idea of primary challenge for Ocasio-Cortez

AOC, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar need to go the way of Cynthia McKinney ...