A one-time 5% wealth tax would bring Silicon Valley’s billionaires’ wealth back to where it was just 31 days ago, on September 7.
When it was “just” 178% higher than on January 1, 2023.
They’d rather let 3 million people lose their health insurance than let that happen.
Graph here: https://cabillionairetracker.org/
Rather than paying their fair share of taxes, Sergey Brin, Pether Thiel, and Patrick Collison prefer to spend tens of millions to manipulate the vote.
Stupefying levels of greed and lack of civil-mindedness.
$45 million in a week: California’s wealthy aren’t holding back to try to stop ‘billionaire tax’
All credits to Gabriel Zucman
I’d attribute this to two main factors:
The wealth inequality we’re dealing with has a higher ceiling (and higher floor) than the wealth inequality in pre-revolution France. We’re poor and hurting financially, but most of us are still able survive day-to-day without viscerally feeling the effects of our poverty.
The internet keeps us apart. Pre-internet, people built communities, coalitions, and armies much more effectively because they weren’t so isolated in their homes, and so paralyzed by screens.
EDIT: the advent of suburbanism & carcentric infrastructure is another factor that keeps us more isolated than past populations have been. People used to live right alongside each other and their communities used to be walkable. The most disadvantaged among us (and therefore the most personally motivated to mobilize) are also the most limited by carcentric infrastructure.
Two people in my extended social network have died of curable health issues in the last 30 days.
I’m very sorry for your losses. I suspect that my own quality of life has been severely affected by undiagnosed curable health issues, and I’ll be genuinely surprised if I make it into old age.
Capitalism has murdered and continues to murder countless human lives.
They also had the advantage of surprise which you can’t really have with everything being tracked
And ruthless efficiency
True, it is much harder than it used to be to catch the oppressor class off guard.
But given how hard they work to discourage us from even nonviolently protesting, I suspect that they understand that once we truly collectively achieve class consciousness, it’s over for them.