Exhibit A of how you can’t blindly believe whatever left-wing nonsense you read on social media. There has NEVER been any such thing as an EPA requirement for public water utilities to test for microplastics in drinking water. The claim is complete fiction. As a matter of fact, the technology to test and treat for microplastics in drinking water is still in development. Too much fake news out there trying to dumb down Americans. In the meantime, however, for the first time ever, the Trump Admin just added microplastics to the Contaminant Candidate List.
@DanFriedman81 Now that I think about it, a single line in The Force Awakens could fix the whole sequel trilogy.
"I thought Stormtroopers were clones?"
"They were, but the new Emperor is an idiot. We need to bring back the old Emperor."
Meta, and fixes so much. "Fix" might be a stretch tho.
@DanFriedman81 The crazy part is that the throwaway lines in Star Wars became plot points in the sequel trilogy, but the sequel trilogy couldn't be bothered to add a single throwaway line explaining the change.
Ro Khanna built his little morality cathedral on the idea that wealth inequality is some national sin requiring government punishment.
Then Grover Norquist walked in, flipped on the lights, and pointed straight at the altar.
You first, Congressman.
That’s the kill shot.
Not because $11.6 million is the whole debate. Not because one check solves federal spending. But because it exposes the entire wealth-tax racket for what it is: a sermon for other people’s wallets.
Khanna wants the state to stalk accumulated success like a repo man with a badge. Your assets. Your business. Your investments. Your unrealized gains. Your family holdings. Your illiquid property. All of it tossed onto the government scale so bureaucrats can decide how much of your life’s work they feel entitled to this year.
And they call that justice.
No, that’s not justice.
That’s envy with a spreadsheet.
That’s confiscation wearing a charity-shop halo.
That’s politicians who benefited from capitalism trying to kneecap the ladder after they climbed it.
Silicon Valley didn’t become Silicon Valley because some federal tax ghoul audited ambition into existence. It was built by risk, capital, failure, obsession, invention, and reward. The wealth-tax crowd shows up after the engine works, throws sand in the gears, and congratulates itself for caring about the workers stranded on the side of the road.
Grover’s envelope did what a thousand policy papers couldn’t.
It forced the preacher to face his own gospel.
If Ro Khanna believes wealth confiscation is moral, he doesn’t need a law.
He needs a pen.
Cut the check, Ro.
Or admit the revolution was always scheduled to begin in someone else’s bank account.
(article below)
@stjeanp@davepl1968 For decent name brand headphones, you can usually buy replacement pads. (And usually off brand replacements, if you're going through them a lot). I've kept up my Soundcore Q45 that way.
I appreciate the direct response, Congressman @RoKhanna. You've raised a real question, so let me answer it seriously.
You're partly right, and I'll grant it fully: the Founders who established a government to protect individual rights performed an achievement no inventor can match, because they built the precondition for every other achievement. Jefferson and the framers created the framework of liberty. Lincoln preserved it and extended its promise to those wrongly denied it. On that we agree. The statesman who secures freedom is a hero of the highest order.
But notice the distinction that matters. Those men are great precisely to the degree they protected liberty, not to the degree they exercised power. The Founders' greatness was in handing power back. Lincoln's was in ending a violation of rights, slavery, the gravest in our history.
That is why FDR doesn't belong with them. He did the opposite. He expanded the state at the expense of the freedom the Founders secured: seizing gold under threat of prison, attempting to pack the Court, building the apparatus that treats your earnings as the government's to allocate. He used power; he didn't restrain it.
And here is the deeper point. You frame it as Rockefeller and Musk versus the statesmen, as if they compete. They don't. The statesman's whole purpose is to protect the conditions, namely individual rights, in which the producer can create.
The Founders, along with Locke and Aristotle, built the house. Musk, Rockefeller, Bezos, and Vanderbilt are examples of what free men do inside it.
If you fully understood the principle of individual rights, you would be fighting against men and women like Warren, AOC, Sanders, and the rest of these collectivist statists in both parties, instead of advocating ideas that deprive individuals of the very rights you claim to honor.
The reason anyone gets insanely rich is almost always because of the stock market. It certainly how @elonmusk did.
And the reason they get rich from the stock market, is because 150m Americans decided they wanted to own shares of stocks directly, or through their retirement plans, or through other approaches as a way of building their net worth and trying to create a better life for themselves.
One Hundred Fifty Million Americans. About 60% of adults.
Effectively believing that @elonmusk and many billionaires could make them wealthier and help them achieve a better life.
If you want @elonmusk , and most billionaires to no longer be that rich, convince those 150m to sell their stocks, funds, ETFs whatever.
Of course you would wipe out the net-worth of most of those people, and everyone else’s savings, as the markets crashed and brought down the economy and created the worst depression we have ever seen.
Alternatively
There are ways to improve healthcare access and eventually make it available to all.
To start -
If you want @elonmusk and all billionaires to improve healthcare for everyone , ask them to stop doing business with the enormous healthcare conglomerates and to work directly with transparently priced care providers.
It’s the behemoth HC conglomerates that make HC so bad for so many. (Check my timeline for more detail)
Removing them would push the cost of healthcare down for everyone. Their corporate decisions impact our healthcare cost and availability.
Of course if they do that, not only would our HC costs go down , and the quality of care for their employees and the entire country go up
But
They would see their corporate cash flow increase dramatically and we would have more millionaires, billionaires and maybe even another trillionaire when that cash flow moved from the big health care conglomerates to their bottom line, so would the net worth of the 150 million American adults that own public stocks
Capitalism is better than socialism because 150m Americans can influence exactly what happens in this country.
Oh yes, I remember that Bond film where the villain decarbonized the auto industry, brought fast internet to everyone on the planet, and helped paralyzed people interact with the world again.
the US federal government spends $7 trillion a year, but a one-time confiscation of $1 trillion dollars from Elon Musk will allow us to solve all the world’s problems