Cheaper just buying the presidency

A major talking point of conservatives is that there is no problem cutting the social safety net because charity will pick up the slack. If the rich were taxed at rates that people are now calling for they would have less money to give to charity. So we had better cut their taxes.

Except, as Hunter of Daily Kos notes, the rich give very little to charity.

Warren Buffet managed to give nearly 4% of his wealth (gifts of $3.4 billion), Bill Gates managed to give 2.6% ($2.5 billion), and Michael Bloomberg gave 1.5% ($0.77 billion). The rest of the top 20 richest gave less than 1%, several gave less than 0.1%.

All of them gave to charity much less than they would have to pay under the proposed annual wealth tax.



A quote from candidate Elizabeth Warren that fits with my discussion of her in yesterday’s post:

Some people have figured out you know it’d be a lot cheaper to spend a few hundred mil just buying the presidency instead of paying that two cent wealth tax.

A.R. Moxon tweeted a long thread about billionaires and their take on the election. They’re getting nervous about Elizabeth Warren and are thinking about how to fight back. Moxon’s major point is that means they believe Warren and her anti-billionaire message has a chance to win. Billionaires see her as a feasible threat. They much prefer Joe Biden because he is pro-billionaire. They don’t care if Biden can win because the nasty guy is also pro-billionaire. A win either way.

So they are spreading messages (and they certainly have the resources to do so) that muddy Warren’s message. One of those is a message that candidate Mayor Pete Buttigieg is saying: It doesn’t work to have college tuition free for everyone because that means free for millionaire’s kids. Says Moxon:

"Anti-billionaire" doesn't mean "only some people should get access to public goods."

That's the billionaire's game. They win that game, and they'd love us to play it against them.

"Anti-billionaire" means "all these public goods are citizenship rights available to EVERYONE."

To say "we won't invest in public goods because *billionaires* will use them, too" is a pro-billionaire message.

Again: it is a *pro* billionaire message. They don't care about benefiting from public good. They care about not paying taxes.

A reminder: billionaires don’t want to pay taxes because they don’t want the government to fund programs that benefit anyone but themselves.

We're all interconnected and interdependent on one another. Government is how we manage that fact.

Billionaires wish to become immune to any responsibilities to that fact through wealth. They call any attempt to force them to acknowledge that fact "class war."

They call it war.

Speaking of Mayor Pete … Shannon reports that he

hired as his senior campaign adviser an operative who is infamous in NY for working for Dems whose primary goal is protecting conservative corporate interests in order to gain/maintain power.

Some of said operative’s favorite tactics are presenting the candidate as a progressive while working to block progressive issues, pitting different marginalized groups against each other to sow distrust and infighting, and sometimes straight up racist or anti-Semitic attacks.

That Mayor Pete would hire a person with that kind of reputation disqualifies him in my opinion.