Losing 10 points in a year is pretty radical change. About the same change as term 1, but it did rise after that. I'm not so certain it's rising this time between the dozen Watergate level scandals in the wild.

----

Now, under the surface, the makeup of the approval is more polarized than ever. D's started abysmally and sunk to single digit levels. R's started 90 percent and fell some 4-5 points in comparison, but is still extremely high. The real dips really come from the fallout of Independents cratering like a rock. Maybe I need to review more polling numbers, but that sort of split was truly eye opening. The Independent numbers definitely suggest that there's some voter regret at work in such a short time

I love how this goes from “there’s no evidence wealthy move” to, when presented with evidence wealthy move, “well, ok, I’m not convinced this is a net loss for society”

Keep moving those goalposts

What an absolute pathetic hill to die on. You have the riches to fund entire industries, explore the whole world or even beyond, to please any hedonistic pleasure you have... but many chose to do one of the 3 unthinkable things in modern humanity.

- government lobbying for tax codes and loopholes, made specifically to benefit them

- abuse of various systems like H1B's and even SNAP (e.g. Wal-Mart) to subsidize their lack of payment to american taxpayers

- extracting value from public research (funded by taxpayers) and creating private products for sale. Sometimes they may even try to patent such breakthroughs for themelves despite public invention

- engaging in dark patterns and anti-competitive, anti-union behavior to extract wealth in ways that would potentially be proven illegal... had they not paid off the judges

- Performing untold of, actually illegal grifts (cases like SBF are only the tip of the iceberg)

And at this rate we may have to throw in "abusing funds to protect against the most heinous criminals imaginable".

Need I go on? There's pratically no such thing as a billionaire who earned their net worth.

how about not protecting child diddlers as a bare bones start? That's not even the "on the ground" bare minimum; we're still stuck in the hole.

But let's try to meet 1% of the way first and take baby steps, okay?

That's why I'm a socialist and I would invite anyone who thinks things might not be going in the right direction to consider that as well.

Your earlier statement, in which you claim that “money doesn’t effect result” followed by a useless distinction of high or low info elections. You’re really trying to dance a fine line of nonsense here.

“ We find a positive and statistically significant relationship between campaign expenditure, campaign contributions and winning probability.”

From the same article you posted and the first academic journal result if you Google “studies on how money influences elections”.

Why do you think that?

The goal of a borrowing tax would be to prevent someone with a a $200 mil stock portfolio living off the "buy, borrow, die" strategy and not home equity loans on mere middle class millionaires.

Capital gains, for example, on a primary residence already have an exclusion of a certain amount. There's no reason a borrowing tax can't kick in only after one has let's say 10mil in assets or securities.

Heck, you could even exempt primary residences regardless of value, so you should be fine

edit: here's an explanation of the buy, borrow, die strategy for those who are interested https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyBorrowDieExplained/comments/1f26...

(it's not the working class)

You have the order backwards. This is their exact strategy; spend decades breaking government then have the breakers say "see? government is broken!". Lack of functioning democracy got us Donald Trump.

Why do you think this year they are so gung ho on trying to disenfranchise voters for a midterm? Because they know they are cooked if democracy starts to work again. If nothing else, Mamdami's 6 weeks show exactly how a "government that works for its people" can work. Let's keep pushing for that.

You think you are reducing the influence of the rich, but you are actually just raising the price of entry. A millionaire can donate to a PAC and buy TV ads, but a billionaire can buy or start a newspaper, TV station, or social media network. What are you going to do then, tell the newspapers what they are allowed to print?

if the government exerts less democratic power, money will still exert too much capitalist power

The biggest example of this in the US is the health system that is more expensive and has worse outcomes than other countries. There is a huge and growing gap in the us between ultra wealthy and the rest of the population and it is a virtuous circle for the ultra wealthy with their ability to spend unlimited in politics.

HNW don’t have their net worth sitting in a pool of cash like Donald Duck as much as Reddit would like to believe. Its property, company stock, any unrealized gains in different equities, etc.

to have to go through the administrative burden of valuing all that, and then attempting to liquidate at some reasonable market value just to pay one time levy (allegedly lol) is insane, and will rightfully be challenged in court

Perhaps the billionaire can't buy your willingness to do something, but they can very much affect the material world around you, and therefore, you.

If you rent they can probably find a way to kick you out of your apartment. If someone around you _is_ willing to take an order, influencing what people around you do very much influences you. If they want something from you, and you're not willing to sell it, there will be people willing to steal it, etc.

Money very much is proxy of power. Perhaps not everything can be bought, sure. But money gives you operational range to attempt to impose your will when it doesn't.

You're answering a comment saying money is power by saying that it isn't if it's not used?

Even if the billionaire doesn't pay you, they can pay someone else to force you to do what they want.

Answer: because they're stupid.

The ones who weren't stupid were impossible to herd to the polls, or at least a lot more difficult. As a result they were outnumbered. Any system that removes the influences you cite will leave the same stupid voters in place, ready to fall for the next con man who comes along.

The problem isn't the money. The problem is the power. I'm tired of giving stupid people so much power over my life.

Yes. Because they did not take their fair share. I'm all for proper audits (not whatever Elon Musk pretended was "fraud waste and abuse" last year).

If nothing truly comes out of it, cool. Maybe we need more laws for that. And apparently wealth taxes are popular.

https://www.cityandstateny.com/policy/2025/11/new-poll-shows...

>if it even passes, will surely be challenged on Federal and State constitutional grounds.

Will it be sanity if they lose and the tax is upheld?

I already said that they will file lawsuits no matter how they legislate, so nothing in my comment was actually addressed.

Insteas you're just trying to make me emphathize with a billionaire for some reason. Meanwhile, I'm almost 3 years out of my last W-2 job that I was laid off of because of these billionaires. My sympathy is gone. Tax the rich.

It has actually been scientifically proven otherwise in crowd theory : with the right setup, the crowd is more effective to take a good decision that the top1 best decision maker.

Exemple : a crowd playing chess may beat the top1 chess player, even though the crowd individually cannot beat him.

Voting should be done without anonymity, online. One should be able to either vote for everything manually, or delegate the vote to any other person.

If some change is supported by 100% of the voters it should be implemented immediately. But if smaller percent supports the change, then there needs to be a vesting time (e.g. 10 years for 60%, infinity for 50%+1).

This allows people to either trade support for policies (i'll vote yes for your initiative if you vote for mine, or give me money), or to get high level of support locally and try out various laws on local level.

The same site that manages voting should also show detailed budget of city/state/country, where people can see where their taxes are being spent and should be able to redirect the money they have paid.

And that goes to the heart of the matter, that corporations aren't people, no matter what some court or law says. And they should be heavily restricted on speech. (I include spending money on political adverts and similar.)

Humans can commit crimes worthy of the death penalty. Wells Fargo shouldn't exist due to their decade long fraud. Nor should United Health Care, for actively denying humans their health coverage until the humans died. Or countless other cases.

When a company gets "killed", and all assets get assigned to the wronged, I'll start to believe they are humans. Haven't seen that yet. Likely won't ever, in the USA.

Parts of the US is mature enough to implement a similar system as Switzerland, which has a superior form of democracy.

And what costs are we talking about anyhow? Tax shortfalls for local government? Decades later that has been rectified through other taxes and funding mechanisms and we still get new roads and schools in california. Housing costs increasing? I would say the fact that cities today are zoned within a few percentage points of present population levels (vs zoned for 10x present population levels pre 1970) is the actual source of that sucking sound from the chest.

The civil court system is basically a way for wealthy people and corporations to use money to silence and/or coerce behavior out of less wealthy people. If Elon Musk or Larry Ellison woke up one day and decided to sue me, and defending myself would cost 100X my net worth, I'm probably just going to give up and do whatever they want me to do.

Well the "real" cause is economy. Trump had a strong economy in term 1 until COVID. If you weren't affected by the China trade war (and many in the red states arent), you could ignore the day to day politics and think "yeah Trump is great!"

But "economy" is too generic, and I feel that phenomenon is more attributed to "ignorance".And the comfortability to remain ignorant and fall for the spin telling you "things are good". That all feels to stem from education.

Is ignorance stupidity? Sometimes. They go hand in hand.

So given the government will still collect taxes for every foreseeable year, I ask you, what impact would it have if we used it not to fund the government but to pay down some of the debt?

1. I see that being 14 trillion. That would in fact fund the government for a year. even for 2 years.

2. taxes aren't about achieving perfect equality. But it's in part to incentivize people to not hoard wealth and spend it in the company. Few of the busnesses in the 50's/60's paid close to the tax brackets they had back then (Which would give modern billionaires a heart attack, despite that being "the times to return to).

There are other parts of your scheme that are also spectacularly bad ideas, but let's just deal with this one for now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

There is no foolproof system that can guard against it, however declaring 'rights' and delegating the responsibility to protect them to the judiciary at least is a mitigation.

And I did engage with the real point. Even if it WAS 14 trillion dollars, that wouldn't fund the government for 2 years. And then what? Why is the solution for government bloat and inefficiency always just taking more?

Except they weren’t. Those lovely 90% tax rates from the 1950s everyone on Reddit loves to bring up weren’t really paid by anyone. The effective tax rate paid after the loopholes and deductions was much lower, closer to 40%

The representative democracy has a problem with delegates not faithfully representing the people they are supposed to represent. It allows politician to be elected by campaigning for issue X which is popular with majority, then do Y and Z that almost no one wants, and then campaign again on other party undoing X, leaving people no way to communicate that they want X and not Y Z.

Social media have greatly increased the impact of this instability, the only way to improve situation is adding some elements of direct voting that would improve efficiency of communication between people and the government.

No one in this thread have suggested to completely replace everything with direct voting, and yet many people vehemently argue against that. Meanwhile there is a much more interesting discussion: how to make cooperation between people more efficient using the new technologies that we have.

Yes, thanks for reiterating my main point.

Now if we use that same mindset and apply it to a wealth tax...

Hence my main point. Taxes aren't all about extraction of money, they also help to nudge people to do things they normally wouldn't do. So nudging them to actually help the area they are in is really powerful.

Or they can leave. If so: good. Make room for those who do want to innovate and not extract money from the people (and more beach space).

Not all billionaires are "job creators", especially given the actions taken the last few years. That's why some of the legitimate "millionaire flights" that do happen don't necessarily impact the way that's predicted on paper.

A planned economy under direct democracy would be at least as bad as a planned economy under a representative democracy because the average voter has even less knowledge about economics and business than a government planner.

The best thing about direct democracy is that, unlike representative democracy, we don't have it and therefore cannot instantly think of its flaws.

The average person reads under a sixth grade level, cannot perform long division, and quite possibly couldn't tell you how many years have passed since Jesus was born.

Whether a direct vote is appropriate for an issue depends on which is a greater danger: the corruption of a politician, or the ignorance and flakiness of the average voter.