Every dollar in Bernie Sanders’s proposals is matched by a corresponding dollar raised in revenue — it’s all accounted for.
For example, the $75 billion/year College For All plan will be paid for by a tax on Wall Street speculation, while the $100 billion/year Rebuild America Act will be paid for by taxing corporate offshore income.
Socialists will ban private property!
Bernie Sanders is a DEMOCRATIC socialist. He believes that our current economic system isn’t doing enough for poor and middle-class Americans and that democratic change is needed to create a more fair and just America.
But this isn’t radical or scary! Many of the programs instituted by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson that we take for granted today — such as Medicare, the 40-hour work week, the minimum wage, and Social Security — can be considered socialist programs.
He’ll tax us all into homelessness!
If you’re one of the 1.5% of Americans making more than $231,450 a year, your marginal tax rate will go up slightly — money you earn above $231,450 will be taxed at 37% instead of 33%.
If you’re one of the 0.6% of Americans making more than $500,000 a year, your marginal rate will go up from 39.6% to 43%. Above $2,000,000 the rate will be 48%, and above $10,000,000 the rate will be 52%. These are tax increases that will only affect the very, very wealthy.
On the other hand, the vast majority of Americans will see significant savings when factoring in tax and healthcare changes under Bernie’s plans.
He’d never win vs the republicans!
Bernie has a better chance in the general election than Hillary would have:
Bernie performs better than Hillary does in all hypothetical match-ups against Republicans in poll after poll (2.4% better against Trump, 4.6% better against Cruz, and 1.5% better against Rubio, on average).
Bernie significantly outperforms Hillary in surveys of independent voters, and with 30-40% of Americans identifying as independents, they will play the deciding role in the general election.
And Bernie has a big lead in favorability, with a +10% net favorability rating among all Americans, compared to Hillary’s -10% net favorability rating. No presidential candidate has ever won with a negative favorability rating.
Republican controlled congress won’t let him do anything!
Bernie is actually well-known for his ability to compromise to get things done without sacrificing his values. In the House, he was known as the Amendment King, and passed more amendments, addressing exclusively progressive goals, than any other legislator, by forging cross-party coalitions.
He has earned respect from Republicans ranging from John McCain to the ultra-conservative Jim Inhofe. If any Democratic president can reach across the aisle to work with a stubborn Republican Congress, it’s Bernie Sanders.
Bernie wants to expand health care coverage, not get rid of it!
Obamacare has made things a lot better, but it’s only a step in the right direction: Americans are still paying more for healthcare than any other country, and more than 10% of us still don’t have health insurance.
Bernie’s Medicare-for-all proposal will do just what it says — provide coverage for every American citizen, while saving the average American family $2000—$4000 per year.
As if we’re the entitled ones because we want a fraction of the wealth we create to be spent on making our lives dignified and comfortable.
You entitled right wing types can’t see a millimeter past your own narcissism and greed.
You don’t think you owe anyone anything, but news flash, you do.
We’re only alive because of each other. The very thoughts in your head are in a language you did not invent. You made very likely nothing in your life. How much stuff in your life says made in China on the underside?
We’re in this together, and as much as you want the toy box of life all to your spoiled self, eventually you’re going to have to grow up and learn to share like a big boy.
You people call us entitled while you parrot talking points penned for you by the biggest parasite class in all of human history.
We’re not buying your bullshit anymore.
If you won’t share your toys with the other children, the adults will take them away. You can try to understand or you can have a tantrum.
Either way, as responsible adults, we’ll treat you with the compassion your toddler mind clearly isn’t yet capable of. Maybe in a couple decades you’ll be an adult, or maybe you’ll self destruct before then despite our best efforts.
But unlike you, I welcome you to the human family and wish you a better time than I had, even if some of my tax money pays for it. Because that’s the adult thing to do. The right thing.
Even obnoxious children deserve a better future.
They say we’re generous with other people’s money and that we just want free stuff. Well, apparently it’s equally easy to be greedy with other people’s money. Where do you think the 1%’s massive wealth came from?
You’re buying into the lie. Wealth extraction is not wealth creation. Your masters aren’t even job creators. As if working to death to make money for them is a privilege in the first place. But no they can’t even share that much.
Trickle down is a lie. The 1% is a bloated tick on the economy of humanity. Wall Street is a fraudulent casino where the losses are paid for in public blood. And congress is its inept gridlocked public relations division.
They say we just want free stuff. But no one believes that lie. Not even you. Do you think they’ll reward you for being a good little drone just because you repeat the lie?
This isn’t about free anything, it’s about getting some say over how all that money the 1% stole from us is spent.
We’re not even going to take what you’ve already got. We’re just going to limit how much more you can take.
No more subsidies, no more tax loopholes, no more high frequency trading without a tax, no more banks big enough to hold the global economy hostage, no more off shore tax havens, no more revolving door appointments, no more 76,000% return on lobbying investment, no more purchased elections, no more immunity for executives, no more stolen pensions, no more lead in the water, no more pretending the ocean isn’t rising, no more bombing random countries for a stock bump.
Your time has ended.
Free stuff. What a giggle.
Does that look free to you?
We already paid for everything we’re demanding, and frankly you fops can never pay us back for the lives your greed has already destroyed and ended.
You’re getting off easy with peaceful reform.
We’re unrigging the system. And you should thank us for saving you from your own greed. Because I assure you, you’d like the alternative even less.
You have a very simple choice and I’ll explain it with someone else’s words.
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” ~JFK
Some whine about the violence implied and to them I say, playing the victim now? I didn’t even know crocodiles had tear ducts.
The ones in favor of an entire economy built on extortion playing the victim card. Because mah profits.
Have you ever looked at history? Do you know what usually happens when wealth concentrates like this?
Your masters are literally killing us by the tens of thousand ever year, at least. And you have the pampered balls to whine about threats.
What a laugh coming from a social Darwinist tough guy. Where’s that fitness now? Already looking for someone to tattle to?
Your masters have made it clear they’ll never stop. They’re like the lunatics in Dr Strangelove worrying about a mine shaft gap.
Even if we were literally their slaves they’d still obsess over ways to spend less and make more till the sun ran out of hydrogen.
They will not stop until stopped. That is blatantly obvious. They could have switched over to nuclear power decades ago and halted all greenhouse gas production. France showed the world how it’s done. But they are too lazy and spoiled and above all pathologically greedy.
There’s two ways to stop them. One is peaceful and political.
The other? Well, assuming people will not be slaves and yet we continue down this path of making substantive reform a fantasy, I ask you, what’s the outcome?
What would you do to avoid having 20 years of your life cut off because some patent holder decided you weren’t profitable enough to live?
Would you peacefully watch your child die to protect stock growth this quarter?
Don’t act like I’m being violent. And don’t act like you’re tough. You people are cowards. Intellectual terror is your defining trait. That’s why your masters imprison more people than China. That’s why they spend more on the war machine than the bulk of the planet combined. That’s why they live in gated communities defended by private security companies. That’s why they arm their racist shock troop police like a literal army and send them to ring and mace every protest into silence. That’s why they tap our phones and amass enough data on us to make the Stasi look bored and sloppy.
They know the alternative and they know they can’t stop themselves. Avoiding violence is our goal. Not yours, and not theirs.
Bernie Sanders is a democratic socialist. He believes that our current economic system isn’t doing enough for poor and middle-class Americans and that democratic change is needed to create a more fair and just America. But this isn’t radical or scary! Many of the programs instituted by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson that we take for granted today — such as Medicare, the 40-hour work week, the minimum wage, and Social Security — can be considered socialist programs.
In this analysis, I’d like to focus on one of the directions that conservatism has gone a-wandering. But note first: I’ll try to do this without taking a single position that could fairly be called even slightly left-of center – by the old standards at least. My entire critique will be from what used to be a completely conservative perspective. You’ll know this by the historical figure whom I cite above all others.
About $59 billion is spent on traditional social welfare programs. $92 billion is spent on corporate subsidies. So, the government spent 50% more on corporate welfare than it did on food stamps and housing assistance in 2006.
Extremely informative and eternally relevant documentaries on the science and application of crowd based volition manipulation first called propaganda and later rebranded as “public relations.”
The money for Sanders’ platform can easily come from eliminating the costliest entitlement programs for the top 1 percent and multinational corporations. Here’s a breakdown of the most superfluous giveaways to the rich and how much they cost the rest of us:
We can know some things about life in advance. Truisms and cliches. But steeped in truth nonetheless. It might be wise to try and draw up a list of the most qualitatively important ones and then build a worldview around obviating them that wouldn’t cost a culture its fitness for extreme long term survival.
A quick example is the notion that hindsight is 20/20. The lesson there is not to shrug and endure, but to think about the future, but to try and see the world in such a way that it’s ok to go back and admit you made mistakes, if that’s all that’s keeping you from being happy or better off.
We have this misguided intolerance of mistakes where we share the impossible effort of never making them. Instead we should be honest with ourselves that mistakes will inevitably be made and try to profit from them.
They can be compensated for. Not erased, but at least leveraged towards the future. Don’t try to avoid them wholesale, as that’s a fool’s errand, but to embrace the utility they may provide. Embrace the liberation that brings.
This doesn’t make you devoid of culpability for lousy choices, but it prevents you from doubling down on bad bets trying to pretend you never bet in the first place. (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Sunk_costs#Loss_aversion_and_the_sunk_cost_fallacy)
If your intentions were good from the beginning, if you at no point were trying to hurt or exploit anyone, if you made the best and kindest decision available to you at the time, then why should you feel any regret or accept any blame?
Only if you knowingly made a decision that had to be utterly correct and could have been avoided, or was malevolent in some way, should you embrace any feeling of wrong doing.
This speaks to the lack of wisdom in vengeance. The best decisions more or less are in my opinion the ones that permit adaptation up to and including being rescinded.
So don’t hurt people, because you can’t unhurt them later if you’re wrong. Don’t disable anything you can’t repair if needed.
For starters I reject the term “hardcore” as it sets up a false dichotomy. It implies casual gamers are “soft” which in a community of 99% males means weak. I prefer the term tryhard because that’s what they do and what they want to force everyone else to do. To try hard. To be punished for failing to try hard.
Quite simply the problem with them is that it’s not enough for them that we openly admit the high points of a given game. If we complain at all, if we don’t obsequiously adopt their bizarre work ethic mentality towards gaming in its entirety, they literally act like we’re a bad people.
Casual gamers on the other hand are perfectly fine to let tryhards play however they see fit without judgment. What I judge, is being judged. In this sense tryhards need to effing relax.
If you complain about a game being too hard they say “It’s supposed to be hard.” They respond as if you’re complaining about chess being hard. Never mind that chess by definition is ultimately the most casual of games. That doesn’t stop international competition chess from being a thing.
Chess is how it should be done. I can play any variant of chess I want. The tryhards have no power there. The less power you give them the better a game, and the game’s community is.
Catering to tryhards is a mistake because, as with chess, catering to casuals would not prevent them from enjoying fierce competition gaming, it would only prevent them from having the power to deny casuals the same right to play and enjoy.
Catering to tryhards makes people like them feel justified in literally hating people like me. This does not occur in casual game communities. It is a direct boot camp, cultist, Stockholm syndrome style reaction to a hateful unforgiving game setting.
There is some seriously dark psychology in play here. Tryhards behave a fair bit like religious extremists or fascists of some stripe. No joke. I firmly believe if they had the option of hurting me and getting away with it over this ideological difference, they’d do it.
But see, I wouldn’t hurt them. Casual gamers generally wouldn’t, expressly because they are casual. Honestly, even if I had a magic button that would just low voltage zap them, I wouldn’t even do that.
What I am opposing is the effort to make a game into a religion. Which is what tryhards more or less do. They elevate this stuff to religious extremes and the devs encourage it for the money and the rabid worshipful fan base.
They are cult builders and that’s clearly bad. IPL abolition would solve this problem because it would suddenly be legal to reinterpret and translate the holy texts, by which I mean it would be legal to fork the code.
They often say we have plenty of easier games to play, as a prelude to telling us take it or leave it, stfu or gtfo. But they have the overwhelming majority of other games to go play as well. Again, this is part of the problem.
A badly coded game is a “challenge” too, and plenty of inept devs hide behind “challenge” as an excuse for being lousy coders. (Evil Dead on the Dreamcast springs to mind. Worst controls ever I think.) Ease of use in the application market on the other hand is usually an indicator of skill. Not so for game devs. Because of tryhards.
There are tryhard equivalents in the software community too, to be sure, plenty of Linux types get all miffed and ideological about not making GUIs or clones and the like, but they aren’t as common as the gamer version by any stretch of the imagination.
Hard core gamers and games are unilaterally exclusive. They’re like the gaming version of racists. The games which cater most to tryhards, are also not coincidentally, the most rigid and unchanging. The most resistant to modding and inclusiveness. The most brimming with smug hate in the communities. The most rife with the sheer loathsomeness of greed and obsession when money is on the table, as in the case of Starcraft and Counter Strike.
On the other side, a causal game with a nice open mod system could be as hard as you want it to be without excluding others wholesale. (Again, see Chess.)
In short: Give casuals what they want, and we can all play how we like. Give “hardcore” gamers what they want and only they can play how they like.
Obviously, our desires are the more inclusive and more ethical. Tryhards should be ashamed of themselves by any rational ethical measure.
Everything I ask for in any game would be implemented ideally as an option/setting. My wishes being granted would not impact tryhard play at all. Casuals are not the problem here. Tryhards are.
Addendum 2016-01-24 0608 AM:
It is a constant source of rage for me because I see in them mirrored the same psychologies that allow some of humanities most shameful actions.
The entire software market is a toxic meme in my view. The notion that one can own an idea to me is dangerous lunacy on it’s face. And these people are the shock troops of that lunacy.
Ever since the early 90s when I washed up on the shores of the Internet in IRC chat, it amazed me that the first thing I found in what was essentially a shared lucid dream, the concept of hierarchies.
When I found out that rooms had operators that were literally placed above everyone else in the name list, I was floored and instantly began asking why?
“Oh well it’s to prevent this abuse or that.”
“Then why not bake that into the code of how rooms work?”
“*awkward silence followed by ban for violation of rule 32f/b Never Question Ops*”
Tryhards in any debate almost always first fall into an attack pattern of “Are you too stupid to read the rules?” Followed by “It’s just a game, the devs own it, you should be grateful for the opportunity to lick their boots, because other devs are even worse.”
And that shit sounds wayfamiliar out here in the real world. When business owners first objected to the civil rights movement it was on the exact same private property my yard my rules argument.
Everyone sane and ethical scoffed, but virtually no one scoffs in the gaming world at the exact same logic. Gamers have no rights, and tryhards defend this lack of protection with all the vehemency of the Tea Party Movement.
I swear the gaming/software market has deep seeded the youth of America with these toxic memes and it’s all we can do to keep up on weed patrol at ground level.
Update:MLK agrees with me. I obviously had no idea or that would have been the core of my argument.
Update: Just imagine what a UBI would do in this context:
http://www.thenation.com/article/new-jim-crow/
Original Essay: On the subject of reparations, I have something to say that I haven’t heard anyone else say.
Context.
1. Assume that people of color are oppressed to this day because of the damage done by slavery.
2. Assume the point of reparations is to address that early damage.
3. Assume that others profited and continue to profit unfairly from that oppression.
Ok. So, you want to address this in an economic way that’s fair and viable and ethical.
I think a progressive tax and a UBI (unconditional basic income) accomplishes that goal. And it has the added bonus of not being by definition racist in the way that affirmative actions are. This seems counter intuitive but here follow along for a second. After all if it’s not a special effort made in favor of a specific race how can it qualify as reparations? In the same way that a given policy can disproportionately impact a given race without having to expressly specify a race anywhere within it. The same way a flat tax disproportionately hurts the poor despite being by definition totally even mathematically.
A UBI provided baseline income would have diminishing improvement effect as you climb the economic ladder. Hedge fund guys are not even going to notice the tiny bump in income their UBI check would provide, thus the fairness price paid in letting rich white guys collect the same reparations check as descendants of slaves, is offset by the fact that by the very virtue of being rich, there is no effective improvement to their lives.
Also it will be offset by the fact that on balance they’ll be paying way more then they are getting expressly because they are overly wealthy.
This means a UBI by definition is a smart bomb for poverty. It self selects and self adjusts its impact by the very metric we all agree on is the metric of most relevance: degree of poverty.
A UBI check to a homeless man is literally life changing. So to of anyone else economically crushed for any reason, including damage done by systemic racism of the present or the past. The more damage done, the more a UBI will help. Automatically and instantly the people most aided are those most currently crushed. And as they rise, the help done diminishes until they reach a point of economic sufficiency where they begin paying into the system instead of extracting from it.
The more oppressed a group actually is, the more the UBI helps them over others who don’t need it. No bureaucracy required. No debate over who gets what is needed. No one decides.
The only debate is how much to give, and at what rate to tax. That’s all. Two figures.
The other end of the spectrum is the progressive tax to pay for it. In this context a progressive tax is as much a smart bomb as the UBI is. It has the opposite effect as you go up the economic ladder. The more advantage you are granted for any reason up to and including profits from systemic racism, past or present, the more the progressive tax will take from you, and the more you can afford to have taken from you without impacting your actual quality of life.
Quick note to cutthroat types. Your days are numbered.
You monied types have two choices psychologically, buy the job creator style myth of the owner class, or watch your own ethics callous over from repeated abuse.
History is on my side. The march of history and the ascension of humanity has always been away from brutality and so called social Darwinism. What is the thing that Europe, and the United States, and China have in common? Confederation. They were all essentially separate nations or states that learned that it’s better for everyone to work as a team.
We have been on a steady march, along with the rest of life, towards unity, because it works.
From amino acids to Pando, from Lucy to the United Nations the clear and obvious fact of life is that working together pays better than screwing eachother over and making excuses about it.
The Ayn Rand crowd only exists because the rest of us permit it. You may well live out your life as an exploitative agent in the meantime, as many corporate apologists and Horatio Alger types will, because clearly it’s a slow march and we have a long way to go, but don’t pretend for a second that’s the future because it is quite obviously the past.
The only thing that would give your kind a substantive future would be a catastrophic setback.
600 Words on Why You Should #FeelTheBern
