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White House Embarrassingly Holds 'Press Briefing' Full of MAGA Influencers (gizmodo.com)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.___

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 day ago (1 children)

With every month that passes, a conviction grows in me: "Billionaires shouldn't exist."

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Without a doubt, I say there should be a cap on personal wealth, say 1 billion, because I can't really see why one person would ever need more than that to live comfortably. Then every dollar made over that goes straight to the federal government.

Essentially a new income tax bracket for only the wealthiest of individuals that is permanently set at 100%

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

I don’t know about a hard cap. Shelves and caps tend to inspire creative accounting just shy of fraud, and we can achieve the same effect with an accelerated scale that curtails runaway capital accumulation.

What I would be most interested in seeing is the introduction of public equity. Corporations of course benefit hugely from public services/infrastructure but often are directly funded by the US government. Any venture capital group or bank funding these companies would demand equity in return, yet the government doesn’t ask for equity on behalf of the public. The average citizen is offered only a share of the increased public debt.

And it’s not pocket change we’re talking about. Even if one only counts the larger stimulus budgets of recent history, they can match them to historic share prices and just track the growth and dividends of those shares as the returns compound over time. They would find that it’s a sizable stake in these companies that the public is owed (and a controlling stake in the case of full bail-outs, meaning decision-making power).

Taxes are definitely important, but easier to side-step or postpone for large public corporations, who have many options for how they represent their finances. Equity on the other hand is far simpler. It’s cumulative, so as long as the correct percentage of shares are transferred, future taxes are guaranteed paid, and more importantly they can no longer finagle a $0 tax liability while at the same time distributing revenue to shareholders, because the public is a shareholder. And the growth of that equity increases public wealth in step with the market. That way the average citizen always has a baseline stake in the economy, a birthright entitlement, which might better reflect the actual value offered to a company by the public.

Edit: forgot to mention, this is a rather direct pathway to Universal Basic Income (UBI), which is often criticized for being difficult to get off the ground. One of the coolest features of Public Equity is that if instead of reinvesting dividends you send them to shareholders as a distribution, you now have UBI.