So I actually currently live in a country which has this. Income taxes are correspondingly very low and public services are extremely good. So it’s not just that I would be okay with it, I am very satisfied with the arrangement, yes. You seem preoccupied with some kind of religious sanctity of your “savings account” without actually considering what the implications of such a policy are, that’s too bad.

Nope, not only is it not stupid, it is pretty much the best possible taxation system unless your explicit goal is to keep poor people poor and rich people rich.

Wealth taxes in Switzerland start at ~150k and include the family residence. And capital doesn’t flee. It’s a great implementation and income taxes are lower commensurately so that it works for people.

Yes, but you’ll only pay like a thousand a year on those savings, and your costs will go down to 30,000 thanks to improved infrastructure, healthcare, etc.

still half the price petrol has been in any normal country for years, lol

While there’s some truth to this, the perspective is all wrong. It’s pointless to hand wring about Russia when the reason they can do this successfully is that you can just buy elections in Western countries, and it’s convenient to distract from our home grown corporate/fascist movements. Sure Russia tries to support them because they are bad for Europe, but they can only do that because we allow such things in the first place. They would still exist without Russia. Maybe they would grow a little more slowly, but that’s it. Our unwillingness to confront the evils in our own society is the problem.

you don’t understand, Hamas was hiding in those cemeteries, do you want to support terrorism or what

No doubt, but murdering and forcing people out of their homes isn’t an appropriate way to deal with being persecuted. A religious document about some people millennia ago doesn’t actually give you any entitlement to someone else’s land. And from the very beginning, Zionism’s goal was to exclude Arabs from the region, based on plain racist hatred. Just because they were victims of antisemitism in Europe does not mean they couldn’t continue to perpetrate their own evils, and it’s notable that the antisemite leaders of the time wholeheartedly supported the Zionist project, as do by and large their descendants in the fascist movements of today - because it gets the Jews out of Europe and kills Muslims, they think of it as two birds with one stone. The only long term solution anywhere is for everyone to have equal rights, and it is wrong for Europe and now the US to export their apartheid elsewhere.

Animals sure, European settlers? No, that’s historical fact.

Real recognize real

You argue like Charlie Kirk. You think you have a clever gotcha and you can probably convince children with this, but there’s no meaning. People don’t read Newton when they study Newtonian mechanics either. Unless they’re particularly interested; of course they can get something out of it, but you’d never start there. It’s not weird to name a field after the person whose ideas kicked it off.

Why wouldn’t learning about politics in depth be like academic study, though? Learning about basically anything in depth is academic study. Sure, there are valid forms of investigation or knowledge which have been shut out from academia, but even if your preferred version of knowledge is more intuitive and experience based, eventually you’ve still got to share it with people and writing is much more efficient in reaching people than one-on-one.

Why is that weird? Marx wrote in the 1800s, quite a few things have happened since then.

hope they remember that their government fully supports this war

Yeah, pretty much. I think they’re really hoping for Syria, but I’m not sure they can achieve that, Iran is a much more unified country.

The goal is not to make Bush’s mistake of setting a goal that they can later be held accountable to.

The money they collect is the money we pay them minus the money they pay us. If we can’t pay them more the only way to get more is for them to pay us less. Gross simplification obviously. Then the typical strategy is to blame immigrants or Jews or whatever for the decrease in living standards, and crack down on anyone who tries to improve things.

Edit: this is sort of a meme-ified version of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall which is the real theory of how economic crises in capitalism come about and not really the same as what I’m describing here, but along some similar lines. It’s worth reading about from actual scholars in detail if you’re interested in that sort of thing.

Funnily enough the problem with capitalism is actually that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

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Just once I want someone to run on eradicatimg all religion and banning it’s practice.

Several socialist/communist countries have had some form of this as policy.