You put out headlines with trump in the title to get the clicks. This is what you’ve been signing up for and now you’re being replaced assholes.
This week, the White House sank to a new low on that front, holding a first-of-its-kind “New Media Press Briefing.” While inviting journalists from smaller, less established outlets to the White House is ostensibly a good idea, that’s not what the administration did. Indeed, instead of inviting actual journalists to the event, the White House populated it with a slew of friendly influencers who were all too happy to kiss the president’s ass and ask White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt the softest of softball questions. It was bullshit questions and bullshit answers all the way down.
Leavitt kicked the briefing off by bragging about the administration’s various “accomplishments” over the past 100 years, er sorry, I meant days. “As I promised at my first briefing as press secretary back in January, the Trump White House will speak to all media outlets and personalities—not just the legacy media who traditionally has covered this institution,” Leavitt said.___
I don’t know about a hard cap. Shelves and caps tend to inspire “creative accounting” just shy of fraud, and we can curtail runaway capital accumulation by just making the curve more aggressive.
A simpler solution is public equity. This is an idea I’ve been selling for a while so I have a spiel. Tap below if curious.
Public Equity
Public corporations should not be taxed based on declared revenue. Instead, a portion of shares should be owned by the public such that taxes are paid by dividends.
Also, any direct funding or “stimulus” from the federal government should purchase additional shares. The government’s failure to demand equity on behalf of its people when increasing their shared national debt to fund large corporations would be considered gross fiduciary negligence in any other funding scenario. For example, full bailouts should result in a controlling stake, i.e. nationalization.
It eliminates poverty, easily solves a truckload of difficulties we have taxing these corporations and their shareholders, promotes overall economic health, and is above all more fair to everyone, including the wealthiest.
Specifically:
- If shareholders are paid, taxes are paid. It would no longer be possible for a company like Amazon to have $0 tax liability while at the same time distributing revenue to its shareholders.
- It skips the “trickle down” step. Share appreciation is reflected directly and automatically in public equity growth, so if the paper wealth of the richest citizen increases, so does the paper wealth of the poorest.
- It prevents runaway capitalism, the situation we find ourselves in, where a government is too anemic to reign in corporate greed and the public servants within it too starved to resist corruption.
- It offers more direct control of inflation, since the Fed can simply not reinvest a portion of dividends paid on shares.
- It makes Universal Basic Income (UBI) trivially easy to implement, since what we are describing is essentially a universal pension fund that everyone has fractional shares in.
Most importantly WRT principle, it more accurately reflects the value afforded to every public company by the actual public; i.e., the society in which it operates.
Edit: forgot to mention UBI
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