It\u2019s time for wealth redistribution. There, I said it.<\/p>\n
I know it\u2019s the third rail of politics, but I\u2019m not running for a damn thing, which makes me free to speak the truth. (Well, I am running for president of my neighborhood elementary school\u2019s PTA, but I\u2019m pretty sure I\u2019ll win easily since my campaign slogan is \u201cExtend the school day to 20 hours because we don\u2019t want to deal with those little monsters. You take \u2018em!\u201d . . . Well, I\u2019ll win as long as they don\u2019t find out I don\u2019t have a child.)<\/p>\n
Anyway, we desperately need wealth redistribution. And before anyone starts yelling something about Joseph Stalin, here\u2019s the part that\u2019s going to blow your mind \u2014 in the United States we\u2019ve already had wealth redistribution for decades.<\/p>\n
Fifty trillion dollars<\/em><\/a>\u00a0has been redistributed from the poorest Americans to the top one percent over the past several decades. That\u2019s right, a new study shows the richest people in the world have\u00a0stolen<\/em>\u00a0trillions from average Americans. To put this in easier to access terms \u2014 you know how mad you get when someone takes the last donut? Well, imagine that multiplied by 50 trillion. (Quick reminder: If you make $40,000 a year, it would take you 1.25\u00a0Billion\u00a0<\/em>years to make $50 trillion.)<\/p>\n The\u00a0new study reveals<\/a>, \u201c\u2026that the cumulative tab for our four-decade-long experiment in radical inequality has grown to over $47 trillion from 1975 through 2018. At a recent pace of about $2.5 trillion a year, that number we estimate crossed the $50 trillion mark by early 2020.\u201d<\/p>\n And to be clear, this money has been stolen from nearly every American. Had income distribution and buying power remained the same as it was from the end of World War II to 1975,\u00a0\u201d . . . the aggregate annual income<\/a>\u00a0of Americans earning below the 90th percentile would have been $2.5 trillion higher in the year 2018 alone. That is \u2026 enough to pay every single working American in the bottom nine deciles an additional $1,144 a month. Every month. Every single year.\u201d<\/p>\n The richest people in America are pilfering over $1,100 from\u00a0you personally\u00a0<\/em>and everyone you know\u00a0every\u00a0<\/em>single month of\u00a0every\u00a0<\/em>single year. Just imagine what each living soul in America could do with an extra $13,700 per year \u2014 how many people that would feed, how much less stressful their lives would be, how many fewer foreclosures there would be, and how many more people would get the healthcare they need. Yet every time the most modest tax increases are proposed on the richest Americans, or every time someone so much as mumbles about putting in a public jungle gym or putting in filters to take the metal chunks out of the water or fixing the holes in our bridges that are bigger than the ones in Maria Bartiromo\u2019s head \u2014 every time someone brings up these common sense solutions, the elites of our society (who own the media outlets and the levers of the state and the law enforcement and the courts) start screaming from their wine-soaked ski resort orgy balconies, \u201cThat\u2019s wealth redistribution! That\u2019s class war!\u201d<\/p>\n Meanwhile, most so-called \u201cprogressives\u201d tip-toe around this subject, saying things like, \u201cWell, we just want to slightly increase the taxes on the giant swimming pools filled with money of the wealthiest people. It would only impact people with billions of dollars, which is only a few individuals. We\u2019re sorry. We\u2019re so sorry to ask for this, Mr. Boss Man. Please forgive us.\u201d<\/p>\n Enough of the pussy-footing. It\u2019s time to demand true, full-on wealth redistribution. It\u2019s time to say to the billionaires, \u201cWe\u2019re taking your shit, and we\u2019re giving it back to the society you stole it from. We\u2019re taking your cars and your marble statues of your own ass and your boats that park inside your other boats and your emerald bathtubs filled with naked man servants and your inbred cross eyed ugly-ass\u00a0dogs<\/em>! . . . But you can keep your children. We don\u2019t want those sociopaths in training. But other than that, we\u2019re taking your stuff because this level of inequality is what most rational economists call \u2018fucking nuts\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n I will however give one caveat to make this go smoother. We only take back everything over $10 million. It\u2019s estimated that there are about 1.4 million American households who have over $10 million. So that means what I\u2019m proposing would impact less than one-half of one percent of Americans. The average American has never even\u00a0met\u00a0<\/em>someone with over $10 million unless they shook Jim Carrey\u2019s hand one time on a sidewalk in New York.<\/p>\n So we \u2014 the 99 percent \u2014 would take everything over $10 million from the people who have over $10 million. And we would give it out with the bottom 50 percent getting the vast majority of it. This means 99.5 percent of Americans would benefit from this redistribution of wealth. So, before you argue against this idea \u2014 Remember: you benefit. You would receive money. Because I promise there is no one with over $10 million reading this column right now, unless one banker accidentally clicked on this because it was next to the\u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/em>\u00a0in his Twitter feed.<\/p>\n Do you need more numbers to hammer home the point? The billionaires in this country have increased their wealth\u00a0by over $1.3 Trillion<\/a>, an increase of 44 percent, just since the beginning of the pandemic.<\/p>\n One out of every three people<\/a>\u00a0in America have had trouble paying their bills during this pandemic.<\/p>\n Nearly 15 million people<\/a>\u00a0have lost their healthcare coverage just since the beginning of this pandemic.<\/p>\n And if you are the one person<\/em>\u00a0with over $10 million reading this, don\u2019t give me that horse shit about, \u201cI worked for that money. I earned that money.\u201d No, no, no, no, you\u00a0did not<\/em>\u00a0earn over $10 million. I know you didn\u2019t because that\u2019s impossible. It\u2019s madness. It\u2019s Gary Busey inside Charlie Sheen inside Ted Nugent. Taking the laws of physics into account, there is no way you worked a\u00a0thousand times<\/em>\u00a0harder than a janitor or a sanitation worker or a nurse or a busboy or a fluffer or a fluffer\u2019s second assistant fluffer intern. It\u2019s physically impossible that you worked a thousand times harder than every \u201cessential worker.\u201d (Yes, fluffers are essential.)<\/p>\n What you did was merely take advantage of a system that is set up to exploit the vast majority of the society while most people don\u2019t even realize what happened. That\u2019s what you did because you\u2019re a sociopath. Indeed, most of the Americans with over $10 million are sociopaths. They would kick a puppy down a flight of stairs into the teeth of a wool thresher if it meant they could make an extra $1,000. But I will acknowledge that\u00a0not all\u00a0<\/em>of them are sociopaths. Some of them are relatively okay people working inside a breathtakingly corrupt system. So for the ones who\u00a0are\u00a0<\/em>sociopaths, why should we feel bad for taking their wealth \u2014 over $10 million \u2014 and redistributing it? (They\u2019re sociopaths after all. Lest we forget: they kick puppies.)<\/p>\n And then for the other ones, who are not sociopaths but still have over $10 million, they\u2019re not going suffer because at the end of the day, they still have\u00a0ten million goddamn dollars<\/em>! It\u2019s not like they\u2019d suddenly be scraping by, clothing their children with cardboard boxes painted to look like shirts and bow ties.<\/p>\n So the next time someone says to you, \u201cYou can\u2019t raise the taxes on the top 1% because that\u2019s class war. It\u2019s redistribution of wealth,\u201d don\u2019t respond the way most squishy liberals respond \u2014 \u201cUmmm, ahhh, errr, no, uhhhh, I\u2019m sorry.\u201d Instead respond, \u201cYou\u2019re damn right it is! I want redistribution of wealth. I want a nonviolent class war \u2014 because it has been done to the rest of us for the past 50 years at least. We have been exploited and abused, beaten down and defeated, kicked and slapped and scratched and drained and sucked dry and extracted and even burgled!\u201d (Oh man, do I hate being burgled.)<\/p>\n Now is our time to fight back against this terrible machine that has allowed this unbelievable level of exploitation. Screw this system that allows some people to have enough money to end world hunger (literally Jeff Bezos could\u00a0end world hunger many times over<\/a>) and yet never do it, while other individuals sleep on a bench hoping no one steals their one box of cereal in the night. To put my conclusion into more sophisticated academic language \u2014\u00a0Fuck that.<\/em><\/p>\n This is an abusive relationship, and it\u2019s time to get out.<\/p>\n The post It\u2019s Time for Major Wealth Redistribution \u2014 Yes, I Mean It.<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s time for wealth redistribution. There, I said it. I know it\u2019s the third rail of politics, but I\u2019m not running for a damn thing, which makes me free to speak the truth. (Well, I am running for president of my neighborhood elementary school\u2019s PTA, but I\u2019m pretty sure I\u2019ll win easily since my campaign More<\/a><\/p>\n The post It\u2019s Time for Major Wealth Redistribution \u2014 Yes, I Mean It.<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":291,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54471"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/291"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54471"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54471\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54472,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54471\/revisions\/54472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}