BeautifulMind ♾️

Late-diagnosed autistic, special interest-haver, dad, cyclist, software professional

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • The US is monetarily sovereign and can always issue enough currency to meet any demands upon it.

    Yes. When congress appropriates funding and it’s signed into law, the effect is that the US Treasury spends that money into existence. The mechanism, of course, is that Treasury directs the fed to issue bonds to create the money, and when you pay taxes that money doesn’t go into an account Congress can spend from, it goes back to the fed to zero out the bonds used to create it.

    Of course, if we continue cutting taxes the way we have, that will eventually balloon the amount of currency in circulation and that can be problematic if it’s untethered to reality


  • I think the biggest problem isn’t the tax rate, but the fact that the billionaire class can circumvent the tax system entirely

    That’s only possible because they’re allowed to buy influence in the system to make it allow for that. In reality, the other threats (they’ll take their wealth to other countries and leave us poor) are bluffing; most of their wealth isn’t portable. Also in reality, most of the policies they demand (and get) aren’t democratically popular, they’re only viable because they spend so much collective money on propaganda and think tanks to get people thinking the money will trickle down or that without them as ‘job creators’ all will be spoiled or lost.

    It’s bullshit, and it only works because we let it work. Apparently we need to move in hundred-year cycles between letting the titans of industry squeeze everyone dry before we remember to assert public power to prevent that




  • there are a lot of birthrights which are increasingly only available if you have money

    This is the logical consequence of the anti-new-deal/anti-desegregation/anti-civil-rights jurisprudence that turns on capital supremacy and property rights trumping the notion that the state has an interest in protecting any other sort of right; it’s something the capital supremacy folks have always wanted but which the desegregation crowd finally joined in on when they thought they could get segregation back by backing capital’s ability to smuggle discrimination under the skirts of its property interests.

    When you look at the White Flight phenomenon and correlate it to the widespread disappearance of public 3rd places, When you notice that state colleges and universities lost funding and started hiking tuition shortly after desegregation meant black and brown people could attend them, it sure looks like Americans were faced with the decision to have desegregated public wealth or no public wealth, they chose the latter



  • This has been a thing the mobile carriers (AT&T in particular) have demanded of handset makers- that they give the carrier the ability to lock down the tether feature so they can sell an upcharge on your plan (or a piece of hotspot hardware they can charge you a whole separate line for) so that they can un-cripple it and pretend they didn’t take that away to begin with. This ought to be regulated like the taking-away-of-the-feature-in-the-phone-you-paid-for that it is.