Unless Maduro was somehow actually deposed BEFORE the US mil came into the country, or at least into Maduro's residence, Trump just changed the standing international order of centuries to allow kidnapping of heads of state
So, Putin could now legitimately go grab Zelenskyy for "crimes", or Xi could go grab Trump for "crimes".
This so-called administration is insanely bad at thinking ahead.
>>"Here's what I want: an off switch. A single setting that says "this child cannot go online, communicate with strangers, spend money, or download anything without my explicit permission." Instead I get a maze, complex enough that when something goes wrong, I'm at fault for a tooltip I didn't hover over, a blog post I didn't read, a submenu I didn't find. Maybe that's by design. Maybe it's neglect. I don't know. "
When it happens only a few times, it might be neglect. This is absolutely by design.
And think again if you think any large corporation (beyond a few isolated individuals who will not be employed there for long) has any actual concern for your safety, or to get anything right beyond an appearance of safety and plausible deniability for the inevitable harm caused by their dark patterns.
The only winning move is not to play. Don't play and write about how awful it is. Send them the only message that they will hear. Stop giving them your money.
> Send them the only message that they will hear. Stop giving them your money.
Second order effects of this solution are not great either - being outside of the smartphone world means you're... outside. Network effects quickly push you out of social groups without neither you nor the group doing anything mean, it's just group dynamics.
The real issue is the device and services come in a package which cannot be separated or compartmentalized. It's basically impossible to say 'this device cannot access youtube/pornhub/...' because there's a million ways to get around restrictions.
I’m not sure why some are struggling to understand this. A single "godmode" checkbox would only be possible if every element, the marketplace, the hardware, and the payment rails, were inside one ecosystem. The Switch is Nintendo, Minecraft is Microsoft, the credit card is Visa, and so on. There are simply too many moving parts, making a single killswitch nearly impossible to orchestrate.
Building 29 separate settings with confusing and overlapping effects is less work than making a single setting of: [Local Only]?
Seems to be a much larger amount of work to design, implement, and support a more-or-less dozen-step customer journey that does NOT work than just implementing a few switches. And that goes even if the switch must be designed-in from the beginning by designing operation for local-only operation.
Surely, implementing a simple block-all-strangers to send-to-bitbucket all communications attempts by accounts not already on the whitelist is easier than all these overlapping settings described?
Unless it is explained how building a much more complex system is easier and lower-cost than a simpler system with fewer controls, the default conclusion is it is intentional.
>>It is not a dark pattern, it is just "what is the minimum we can do to sell this without doing the curation work?"
Even if for the sake of discussion we treat it as laziness, a dark pattern created by accident is still a dark pattern. The customer is no less screwed into doing something they do not want and the company does want.
> Building 29 separate settings with confusing and overlapping effects is less work than making a single setting of: [Local Only]?
The 29 separate confusing overlapping effects is by design. A single "local only" switch would (so long as that switch is enabled) lock out all manner of potential future revenue and recurring rents, which these companies very much want to see hit the balance sheet.
So the 29 separate confusing overlapping settings is designed to frustrate you to the point that you allow what they want from the start, the ability of the device to generate future revenue (via both of one time sales and recurring rents on rental sales).
>>The 29 separate confusing overlapping effects is by design
>>designed to frustrate you to the point that you allow what they want from the start, the ability of the device to generate future revenue
And this explains why they are willing to do all the extra work to do it.
It is not even close to accidental or lazy — there is nothing accidental about the intention or going to the extra cost to build those dark patterns to screw the customers.
At the end of the day if the MTX group says no, it doesn't happen. Sales is always the most powerful group in an organization, sometimes even overriding compliance if they can get away with it.
>> Building 29 separate settings with confusing and overlapping effects is less work than making a single setting of: [Local Only]?
Yes, absolutely. 29 separate overlapping settings likely match up precisely to arguments in various APIs that are used. On the other hand, what does local only even mean? No wifi? No hardwired connection? LAN only? Connection to the internet for system updates but not marketplace? Something else? All with a specified outcome that requires different implementation depending on hardware version and needs to be tweaked everytime dependencies change.
Having a separate setting for unconditionally disabling all wireless communication would be helpful. The other stuff you mention can be separate settings if it is useful to have them. (A setting to unconditionally all disable wired connections is less important since you can just avoid connecting it.)
Let's start with this: Design the architecture so the core system works fine locally. Features requiring Internet connection are in separate modules, so they can be easily turned on/off, and designed so they are still primarily local.
E.g., store all current status locally and if requested another module sends it to the cloud, instead of cloud-first.
E.g.2, install updates by making a pull of all resources and then doing the update instead of requiring continuous communication.
Allow user control with options to completely shut off, whitelist, blacklist, etc.
Simple design decisions up front to make a software package meeting the user's local needs first, THEN allowing controlled access to the internet, under the USERS' control, instead of designing every feature to contact your servers first and compromising both usability and control at every step.
Nonsense. The amount of wealth hoarded by the top 0.1%, 1%, and 10% has vastly expanded in the past decades, while the percent of all income and wealth held by workers has been gutted.
That alone shows the top earners are not being taxed enough.
If they were losing wealth and portion of income, you might have an argument. But they are not and you do not.
The top 1% earn 22.4% of ALL income (AGI). [0]
The top 1% held 30.8% of all US wealth in 2024. That amount has grown from 22.8% in 1989.[1]
>> the top 0.1% of households in terms of wealth held 8.5% of the nation's wealth in Q3 1989. By Q2 2025, that had risen to 13.9% For the rest of the top 1%, the percentages rose from 14.3% to 17.1% over the same period. So the wealthiest top 1% now holds more than 30% of all wealth. Those gains came at the expense of the less-wealthy household categories, all of which lost ground on a percentage basis. The bottom 50%, for example, saw their share fall from an already low 3.5% down to 2.5%. [0]
NONE of this is because workers have somehow become worse
ALL of it is because those at the top have become more greedy, and have been enabled by craven politicians of a particular party who support that.
> Nonsense. The amount of wealth hoarded by the top 0.1%, 1%, and 10% has vastly expanded in the past decades, while the percent of all income and wealth held by workers has been gutted.
> That alone shows the top earners are not being taxed enough.
Is your reasoning that the amount of household wealth and income at each percentile should hold roughly constant over the years, as if this is some law of physics?
The point is: the absolute values are bad the direction and magnitude of change indicates it is getting worse.
The distribution of wealth is already vastly suboptimal, heavily skewed to the most greedy 0.1%-5%.
When the most wealthy society in the history of the planet still has large portions of its population living one missed paycheck or one illness/accident away from being destitute, or being already destitute, while a few at the top have orders of magnitude more wealth than they can spend in a lifetime, something is deeply wrong.
The change numbers show this already the case nearly four decades ago, it has gotten worse.
So yes, the glib argument that "the 1% already pay 90% of federal taxes..." is just as spurious as it is vacuous.
Not only does it ignore the reality of wealth and income distribution that the taxation is far below the misallocation, it also ignores the fact that Federal Income Taxes are only a small portion of our total tax burden, and the poor and middle classes pay vastly more of the other taxes such as sales tax, gasoline and road taxes, fees, etc. IOW, you are cherry-picking, and badly.
>>How do you or anyone else know what's optimal and what's misallocated?
Start with basic empathy and a simple sense of fairness.
No one here is saying everything should be even close to equal, and I certainly am not. But as many philosophers have pointed out through the ages, you can see how ethical a society is by how it treats its lowest members.
Seriously. Anyone who fails to see something is deeply wrong, when the most wealthy society in the history of the planet has half of it's people barely scraping by, while a tiny elite hoard orders of magnitude more wealth than they can spend in a lifetime, is morally blind.
So start there. When the system is producing this well-documented result, the wealthy are most definitely not paying enough taxes to support the society that enabled them to earn their wealth.
>>Income tax is roughly ...
Yes, and you are appearing to be deliberately obtuse by focusing only on specific federal taxes and ignoring the TOTAL tax burden which is what counts when measuring which people are supporting society and which are extracting more than a fair share. And ignoring the proportion of income and wealth that sector takes vs what they pay in taxes.
When hedge fund managers bringing in $billions and Warren Buffet pay lower rates than their secretaries, something is deeply wrong.
Again, a simple sense or empathy, ethics, and fairness can be your guide. These are evidently foreign concepts to you, and I recommend you look into them.
> when the most wealthy society in the history of the planet has half of it's people barely scraping by
Real median household income has been steadily rising over the past few decades; it's up nearly 20% over the past 20 years[0]. American median disposable income is the highest in the world[1] that isn't a tax haven or a petrostate. Mississippi, often panned for its poverty, has a higher median household income than Germany, often considered the strongest European economy.
Now, you might point out that the CPI gets fudged in a way that doesn't fully capture the costs of living that these figures are adjusted for; I'm sympathetic to that argument, but the numbers are what they are, and the numbers do not support your claim that half of America is "barely scraping by".
> while a tiny elite hoard orders of magnitude more wealth than they can spend in a lifetime
I'm not sure what your operating definition of "hoard" is. There are no Scrooge McDuck vault full of gold coins. The ultra-rich's net worth is based on ownership of companies that often times were founded by them (granted, some people inherit, though not as many in the US as in more egalitarian nations[2]), and is a fictitious figure based on the number of shares they own multiplied by the last-traded price per share. There is no world in which they could actually liquidate those shares to get the number of dollars that are thrown about.
And those companies are almost always publicly traded and owned by heaps of other people, retirement funds for middle-class workers, and whatnot; and generate value to the purchasers of the goods and services they provide. I'm not sure where in this picture comes hoarding.
> Warren Buffet pay lower rates than their secretaries
Warren Buffett paid $23.7M in federal income tax alone over five years[3]. A hypothetical secretary living in Omaha, NE making $300k would have paid $69k in federal income tax in 2025, with another $30k or so in payroll and state taxes. In five years, Buffett paid to the federal treasury alone 237 years worth of income, FICA, and state taxes that this well-paid secretary would have!
Besides, when publications talk about "lower rates" of the ultra-rich, they're always comparing taxes paid on their income against the rise in the valuation of the stock that they own. It's comparing apples and oranges to come up with sensational figures.
> the wealthy are most definitely not paying enough taxes to support the society that enabled them to earn their wealth
The society that is a necessary but not sufficient condition of earning that wealth.
> focusing only on specific federal taxes and ignoring the TOTAL tax burden
Are you claiming that there exist some other taxes through which the working masses are shouldering above their "fair share", whatever that may be, of the burdens of maintaining a functioning society? What taxes are those, exactly? Do you think if you added up all the sales, property, income, FICA, estate, etc. ad nauseam taxes that the average American pays, we'll actually discover that the unsung hero of taxation is someone making $50k a year?
Some estimate that the average American will pay roughly half a million dollars of taxes of all kinds through their lifetime, out of a lifetime earnings of about a million and a half[4]. So Warren Buffett in five years of federal income tax alone (not counting any other taxes he paid) paid as much as almost fifty average people would have over their entire lives in any taxable domain. Jeff Bezos over the same five years, nearly two thousand average lifetimes' worth. To me, it's hard to make the argument that the likes of Buffett and Bezos aren't paying enough.
> a simple sense or empathy, ethics, and fairness can be your guide
Countless millions of people have been immiserated by those preaching empathy and fairness, just in recent history. I prefer to deal in what works in the real world to enrich the lives of the average among us; and as it turns out, systems that let rich people be result in better median outcomes than systems that confiscate and punish.
What is your fair share? Moreover, what is your fair share of what somebody else worked for? How much of the earnings of a waitress, plumber, doctor, Fortune 500 exec, and Elon Musk is due to you, personally, as your empathic, ethical, and fair share?
Sure "Real median household income has risen" and other nice stats exist. And much of the society looks like they're OK. But the reality is this is extremely brittle.
There is near-zero buffer for about half of the country's people. Only 55% of adults have enough savings to cover 3 months of expenses, and 30% could not cover it by any means. 37% of people cannot even handle a $400 surprise expense out of savings, 18% can't even handle a $100 expense! Only 48% could handle a surprise $2000 expense, which is a ar breakdown or a ride to the hospital. [0]
Seven percent of adults did not have enough money to eat at times in the prior month. [0]
28% of adults went without some kind of healthcare because of the expense, and 17% are carrying medical debt. [0]
You can quibble about the exact threshold of what counts as "scraping by", if you have to worry about your next meal, worry about whether you should go to the doctor, worry about being wiped out if your car breaks down or you have a minor accident, you are scraping by. And whether that applies to exactly half, sixty percent, or "only" one third, it is too much. The wealthiest society in the history of the planet should be able to care for all of it's residents.
>>operating definition of "hoard"
Of course there are not Scrooge McDuck vaults, and they are entirely unecessary for the activity of keeping for yourself amounts of wealth that are orders of magnitude more than one could possibly spend in a lifetime.
It doesn't matter how you got it, once you are past $20-$50million, it is not about personal wealth or lifestyle (the interest alone at $25mm is over $4,000 per day); it is hoarding wealth for power, and at the cost of the rest of society
>>Warren Buffett paid $23.7M in Federal Income Tax ... 237 years worth of [secretary's taxes]
Yes, and his reported $125million income reported was 416X the secretary's pay, and the $24Billion wealth gain over the five years was 16,200X the secretary's 5-year earnings. We can take Warren at his word when he says he's paing lower rates.
>> society that is a necessary but not sufficient condition of earning that wealth.
Exactly. I'm glad we agree. A sound soceity is a NECESSARY condition to earning the wealth. We don't see many even millionaires coming out of low-tax states in East Africa, but they way you type scream about taxes one would expect them to be minting trillionaires.
>> deal in what works in the real world
Yes, we agree. I am not proposing any kind of -ism, only making a system that is fair for all and produced the most broadly prosperous society in history, specifically the US system based around a very broad middle class.
>>systems that let rich people be
I am not suggesting not letting rich people be rich, and certianly not confiscating or punishing; I'm suggesting a system that will actually have MORE people be rich
>>what is your fair share of what somebody else worked for?
OK, what is the billionaire's fair share of the labor stolen from workers paid exploitation wages?
When 20%+ of WalMart's full-time employees qualify for Food Stamps because we allow them to pay poverty wages, those billionaires do not have a business model, they have an exploitation model. They owe their employees a living wage, and they owe the rest of us the taxes they failed to pay to cover those food stamp benefits. They are stealing from all of us.
>>What is your fair share? How much of the earnings of a waitress, plumber, doctor, Fortune 500 exec, and Elon Musk is due to you, personally, as your empathic, ethical, and fair share?
Mine? I'm already above the threshold. OUR fair share is a fair system requiring EVERYONE to contribute, and contribute enough that the least among us have food, housing, healthcare, and education without undue worry. The entire society, especially the rich benefits when everyone is operating at their best potential, not primarily worried about being one slip from the ditch.
And while we still have income taxes (I actually think they should be eliminated in favor of transaction taxes, see other posts), the hedge funders should be required to pay tax on their millions of "carried interest", and capital gains taxes should be realized in ANY event where stock is utilized at it's current value, e.g., as collateral for a loan, not only when it is sold.
A lot of other detail, but it is not good to see the country which was the greatest in history with a large middle class slide backwards into a new corporate feudalism by allowing the rich to excessively hoard the wealth of the nation that made them rich. The irony is that the more wealth becomes concentrated, the harder it is to be and stay wealthy -look at any nation with a few rich in their gated communities - it declines for the rich even more than the poor.
Interesting I discovered two new-to-me temperature symbols (℃ and ℉), but couldn't find the Alt-0176 ° generic degree sign that shows up on the MS Character Map app. I also found the There Exists symbol ∃ !! I'd been seeking for years; it was so useful since finding out about it in college logic courses... This will be even more useful when the Alt-code fields are all filled in! Thanks!
The solution is to stop taxing human labor/income and to start taxing every financial transaction, from buying a piece of candy, a computer component, a service, a house, a data center, or a share of stock, etc.
Just the volume of Equities + TRACE fixed income/structured + munis + real estate is over $200Trillion. A mere 3% tax on those would put the $6T US budget in large surplus. Add $1.7 Quadrillion of ovrerall payments and a 0.3% tax on transactions (yes, $3 per $1000) would also put the US budget in surplus.
All of it would also involve far less tracking and bureaucratic overhead, and indeed far less govt intrusion into people's lives (i.e., not digging into every source and amount of income).
Also gains on sales of things like stocks and commodities should be taxed proportionally to how briefly they are owned, with an asymptote approaching 100% for HFT.
YES!! I've long thought the tax rates on cap gains should be extremely progressive with holding time, ranging from 99%+ for sub-second holding (HFT) to sub 5% for decade+ holding periods. This would also effectively eliminate the utility of basis reset on inheritance, since the rate for multi-decade holding goes so low.
Also a great idea I saw recently is to treat any encumbrance of a capital asset as a realization event. For example, early investors in a company holding stock may have $millions in unrealized gains. Those gains are 'realized' and taxed on sale of the stock. However, if they take a loan using the stock as collateral, it is not taxed because there is a matching obligation to repay the loan and the stock ownership doesn't change (except in a default). Such loans should be taxed as a realization event, since they are pledging the stock at its current value, not its comparatively microscopic original purchase value.
How not; wouldn't it be straightforward to have tax rate tables based on transaction size? E.g., transaction <$10=0, <$100=0.1%, <$10k=0.2%, <$100k=0.3%, <$1MM=0.4%, =>$1MM=0.5%, with restructuring payments to avoid taxes to carry heavy penalties.
Not many poor people will be making million-dollar+ transactions, and it seems like taxing ALL transactions will help make the rich pay their fair share, as their money tends to have low velocity relative to consumer goods, but they still do a lot of transactions.
EDIT: Also it should have zero taxes on necessities such as food & non-luxury clothing, similarly to how current state/local sales taxes work.
Also, if there is sufficient tax rate and income to do UBI to above poverty level, wouldn't the need for a progressive tax structure become obsolete?
When you say transactions, what are you thinking of? I was thinking of your usual VAT/GST - in that case any sort of progressive tax would be hell for small businesses (or large ones) to implement.
If you’re talking about banks taxing financial transactions, that’s something I haven’t really thought through- it would have some interesting side effects and work arounds.
I like the simplicity of a flat consumption tax combined with a UBI - I’m not sure how politically viable it is, though.
I'm not sure how politically viable it is either — the wealthy owners of congresspeople will scream like they are being murdered.
I wasn't thinking of any kind of VAT, where you need to subtract out your cost, etc.; that is a mess! Just a straight shaving off the transaction. The idea is to spread it over so many transactions the rates are so low it isn't worth bothering to work around.
For example, if you try to structure a $1million house purchase into ten %$99,999 payments to get from 0.5% down to 0.4% rate, you will save a grand total of $1000, hardly worth it considering there should also be laws with strong penalties for such structuring.
A major benefit of a class action, especially for complex cases, is that the costs of prosecuting the lawsuit are spread over many plaintiffs. Pursuing an individual lawsuit in federal court can cost well into six figures, which is not a good bet if your potential recovery as a single plaintiff is in the same range. And that is assuming the large corp you are suing doesn't do the usual tactic of burying you in papers, spurious motions, and every trick in the book to run up your costs in money and time.
Class actions bundle those costs for 'all plaintiffs who are similarly situated' and the judgements are also for all plaintiffs at once, so class actions are where large companies can be properly stung.
This is also why so many companies put clauses in their contracts that you agree to forego any possibility of participating in a class action.
So, if you are subject to a systematic malfeasance by a company, the best route is a class action; they've already got it setup that you'll almost certainly fail trying an individual action, unless you have very deep pockets and close to a decade of free time.
Of course attorneys can take on individual cases on contingency and make viable a case where the plaintiff lacks the spare six-figures of costs to even start the case.
That does NOT mean there is no effect beyond "case valuation".
Attorneys cannot simply take every case on contingency, and when the [potential reward]/[cost] ratio is not sufficient, the attorney must pass, and no suit will be filed.
Class Action literally makes it POSSIBLE
This is especially true where small-dollar harms are being done, but at scale of millions, where ripping off consumers is systematic, or where harms such as pollution affected many.
"This is especially true where small-dollar harms are being done, but at scale of millions, where ripping off consumers is systematic, or where harms such as pollution affected many."
All of these particular things seem exactly like the job of a state AG, or other form of regulator, vs private lawyers.
Political dysfunction aside, of course.
I'd personally rather the state AG and various consumer-friendly regulators of, say, california, have the billions of dollars going to the class action attorneys in that state.
Remember that class actions were not created to enable any of the things you cite. They were judiciary-created as a means of simple judicial efficiency (and requiring all affected plaintiffs to be grouped together). As such, outside of "they were there", it's not obvious why they are a particularly good way to solve the problems you give.
In case you think i'm particularly anti-consumer, i actually think LLC's should not exist and shareholders should be responsible for harms again. Which would likely obviate a lot of the practices class actions were suing over in the first place.
>>seem exactly like the job of a state AG, or other form of regulator, vs private lawyers. ...Political dysfunction aside, of course.
And there's the rub — most regulators and AGs will have some political leaning, and ALL of them have limited resources and will be unable to pursue every case, so many cases with great merit will go un-prosecuted.
For all of warts of class actions, that is an overwhelming benefit — a private class action, or latent threat thereof, can bring pressure where an AG or regulator will choose not to, or just lacks the budget and/or bandwidth to pursue.
And yes, making it easier to 'pierce the corporate veil' and create a stronger direct liability, including jail time, for officers, directors, and shareholders for intentional actions and omissions could do a lot to reduce harm of corporations.
He engineers perceptions, finance, and govt funds, not technology. Every report and available evidence shows he is barely technologically astute, nevermind genius; the accomplishments of his teams are despite him not because of him.
Which is why a better description would be: The Greediest Man On Earth.
> Every report and available evidence shows he is barely technologically astute, nevermind genius; the accomplishments of his teams are despite him not because of him.
In particular, nothing that comes out of his mouth regarding AI makes any sense.
And still, people listen to him as if he was an expert. Go figure.
His latest bullshit was about Tesla cameras and fog/rain/snow - on an investor call, no less - "Oh, we do photon counting directly from the sensor, so it's a non-issue".
No. 1, Tesla cameras are not capable of that - you need a special sensor, that's not useful for any real visual representation. And 2, even if you did, photon counting requires a closed "box" so to speak - you can't count photons in "open air".
I just don’t get it? Do people hang off his every word just because he’s rich? What are they expecting for this worship… it’s not like he’s going to start throwing $100 bills to people because they agree with him on Twitter
Seen from the other side of the Atlantic, I've regularly felt that the US is rather prone to hero worship, see e.g. the passion dedicated to presidential candidates, former presidents, billionaires, but also how the main characters of pretty much all American biopics I recall can't ever be wrong.
If my observation is correct, I guess what we're witnessing with Musk could be a case of hero worship – and in any narrative in which Musk is a hero, he's of course right.
> Both SpaceX and Tesla are accomplishments if you consider where their competitors are.
CATL, BYD, and other Chinese manufacturers are absolutely killing it at Tesla's expense, Because their markets have actual, sharp-elbowed competition requiring actual innovation.
It takes a lot more effort to be first. When they were making the roadster, who else was interesting in BEV?
For SpaceX, who is landing rockets for reuse?
With all due respect, China at this point does seem to only get in when the early adoption is done. Then they just throw state money at the problem to catch up. They might be innovating now but they left the hard work to someone else
> China at this point does seem to only get in when the early adoption is done.
China started strategic planning on renewable energy in 1992. You're sorely mistaken if you think China intends to merely "catch up" - they are gunning to be the leader, and have the fundamental research to back the aspirations.
> For SpaceX, who is landing rockets for reuse?
Just Blue Origin. Commercial space is new and inherently has little competition; SpaceX is rightfully a pioneer. Traditional government space programs in Europe, the US, Russia or China were never cost sensitive on national security payloads, or prestige manned missions - maybe a bit on the science missions. China - like the US and few other countries with the research, industrial and GDP foundations - can go from zero to one in any field it chooses to prioritize[1], and has done so on a manned space station - which may be the only one in orbit come 2030.
1. Underestimating an adversary is one way to get nasty surprises. The US is currently playing catch-up on hypersonic glide weaponry.
Perhaps money alone is not a reliable factor, and there are certainly confounding variables, such as poor people having low access to healthcare including contraception and education about options and how to use it.
More important than money is economic security, the ability to expect a reasonable long-term access to a sound source of income.
Having to worry whether you'll be laid off next week and not be able to get new work, and have that worry be constant over a decade is a real discouragement to having children.
Having a stable situation in life is vastly underrated, and not easily measured by current net worth or income.
Maybe think for a second from the perspective of a couple or woman who WANT to have children. The problems they face in today's economy where both people need to work full-time just to survive are huge, and it seems even crazier to add the time and money costs of a child, let alone several.
The way to change all of that has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with economic and labor policy
Society decided it was OK to have the top 1% control 27% or all wealth and the top 10% control 60%, and allow companies to pay wages so low that a person working full-time cannot even get out of poverty, so 25%+ of the workers at the largest employer qualify for food benefits (and the employer even gives employees seminars how to get benefits), while the leaders/owners of those companies rake in more billions every year.
Society decided it was OK to make sure health care is expensive, incomplete, and bankrupting for any unexpected event.
Society decided it was the mothers who are responsible for all childcare and provide only minimum assistance for critical needs like prenatal care, and day-care.
You want more babies? Make just a few changes
Change requirements so corporations are required to compensate their employees merely the way the original US minimum wage was specified (including in the 1956 Republican Party Platform): So a single person working full-time will earn enough to support a household of four including housing (mortgage/rent), food, healthcare, and education. Recognize that the companies trying to exploit their workers by paying less so their full-time employees need govt benefits to feed themselves are the ones exploiting welfare, and do not have a viable business model, they have an exploitation model.
Add making healthcare sufficient and affordable for all, including children and support for daycare and the time and effort to raise children.
Change those things, and instead of a couple looking at making an already hugely insecure future even more insecure by having children, they would see an opportunity to confidently embark on building a family without feeling like one misfortune or layoff could put them all in the street.
Do you have a citation that the US federal minimium wage ever had the objective that "a single person working full-time will earn enough to support a household of four" because I can't find it in the Wikipedia entry[1] or other top level search results. I also don't see this idea in the 1956 Republican Party platform[2]. At best from reading a few other sources it looks like at its peak in the late 1960s it would have been enough to keep a family of three above the poverty line (though that hardly implies they could afford a mortgage and higher education).
> a single person working full-time will earn enough to support a household of four including housing (mortgage/rent), food, healthcare, and education.
Here’s the problem - some people will still make the choice to have ‘get ahead’ by having both partners work. They will then use their relatively greater economic power to get better housing and more stuff. So others will join them, and they will bid up housing (because it’s the most important thing) until we’re back to where we started and even those who don’t want to do that now have to.
It’s a sorta tragedy of the commons situation.
The only real solution there is for governments to look at social housing, and also to try to produce A glut of house building.
Because until we have one or the other (or both) people will just keep bidding up accomodation to the edge of what’s affordable on two incomes.
Simpler "fixes": Prevent corporations from owning single family homes and don't allow anyone to own more than one single family home.
It'd crash the housing market, making homes MUCH more affordable, immediately. As corporations—who currently own 25% of all single family homes in some markets—are forced to sell off their inventory.
They could still own multi-family dwellings, just not single family homes.
The wealthy would just build multi-family dwellings for themselves, owned by corporations (that they own), and rent them to themselves. So it wouldn't really interfere with their rich lives much.
Yes, there will likely be that phenomenon, but will it occur faster than the approx 2% level of optimum inflation?
>>The only real solution there is for governments to look at social housing, and also to try to produce A glut of house building.
Creating a universally-available baseline lodging situation for everyone is certainly a public good that would yield a LOT of benefits from eliminating homelessness (benefiting not only the homeless but also everyone who their problems affect) to promoting family stability.
Whether the best way is to incentivize a glut, subsidize social housing, or just provide a housing stipend for anyone in need, another system, or some combination of all-of-the-above should be subject to study and experimentation.
Evidently, the requirement for democracy in the US to survive is for the people who failed to vote for the only viable alternative to Trumpism must feel the suffering they are happy to visit on others, and so recognize that voting for "my team" incompetence is a bad idea.
The suffering is only beginning. It takes an insanely long time for large systems to show effects of bad decisions. Usually the party that has wrecked the economy in every presidency for the last 50 years benefits from the lag and the party of recovery gets blamed, putting the wrecking party back in power. Perhaps this round of the wrecking party will be too effective, and blame will go where it belongs.
So, Putin could now legitimately go grab Zelenskyy for "crimes", or Xi could go grab Trump for "crimes".
This so-called administration is insanely bad at thinking ahead.
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