Fifty Years of Tax Cuts for Rich Didn’t Trickle Down, Study Says

Yes, because I actually pay my bills?

We do not live in your utopia. What exists, exists. and those bills need to be paid. How do you suggest they get paid. Try to answer without trying to look intelligent by belittling me. Show me how intelligent you are by answering the question.

Ok. So, you don't know. You're just making shit up and blaming the left when shit falls short of your expectations.

Who's the idiot? That would be you.

Your bumper sticker wisdom has grown tiresome after 20 years.

Who are you to call someone an idiot when you can’t articulate or defend your position aside from a one liner before you run away from the discussion (still waiting for you to give ONE policy position of AOC you find idiotic, just FYI)?

Instead of wasting my time typing up and providing links about church bureaucracy, corporate bureaucracy vs civil service bureaucracy and who exercises control over each I’ll pull a Lanz and just make a snarky retort and fade away.

The Sinaloa Cartel and the United Way are both run by humans so...

Most of the time there's no point debating. Especially with a mutton-head like Jenee. Besides, the snarky one liners are fun.

no one cares what you think, any more.

So the perfect recipe for government just so happens to be that laid out in your Constitution?

Convenient one might say.

No, it's far from perfect. It's not bad, but it's not perfect. But the Constitution not only lays out what the government can do and how it's structured, but it also says what the government may not do. An important point.

So I am told.

It does, however, seem to be a cop out.

If there is any question that requires addressing simply defer to the Constitution then deride anyone with an alternate viewpoint as stupid, ignoring the irony that they thought their position out for themselves rather than relying on wisdom received from the long dead and mindlessly revered.

Your Constitution is the stumbling block preventing you from getting anywhere near the still imperfect standards of living, health and equality enjoyed in nations a fraction of your size. That you will not question the wisdom of this adherence is disheartening.

So you'd prefer a government operating under no set rules, making shit up as it goes along?

You are aware of where Spot lives right?

And their ‘constitution’?

what the hell is a society of law and not people?

We had a Constitution many years back.

It did little to improve the lot of the serfs, much as yours is doing little to protect you from a global pandemic, keep you safe from violent crime, provide even near parity with your peers on healthcare, prevent the kind of deep social injustices leading to violence on the streets or do anything to help your ever growing army of starving, unemployed and homeless.

A few centuries after the Magna Carta we had us a civil war to make some small inroads into the injustices prevalent in our society. Still not perfect but ironically it led to many of the civil reforms you inherited from us.

A police state?

With robot police?

One where there's rules everyone is expected to abide by regardless of how important they think they are. In other words, the Prince has to obey the same rules as the janitor.

You could have phrased that much better in the first place.

Came across as somewhat authoritarian to say the least.

Sorry, "laws and not men" is a fairly common phrase in the writings of the founding fathers. I'm kinda used to seeing it.

you mangled it real good.

A quick google seems to paraphrase this as "we are government of laws and not kings/despots/trumps."

more on current usage.

The Founding Fathers recognized the importance of restricting the power of government in order to protect the rights of the individual. But I have to wonder what they'd make of a world where there are a number of corporations with more wealth and reach than what the British Empire had at the time of the Revolution. Would they rejoice in a corporation toppling a government in order to protect that corporation's interests? Or where employees of a corporation could sit in the offices of members of Congress and write legislation that they knew would pass and benefit only those corporations? What would they make of a government that granted immunity to corporations so they didn't have to spend a small percentage of their profits on measures that would prevent the premature deaths of people?

Please. People like Lanz do not care about stuff like that. They only care about quotes that affirm their position. They do not take into consideration the entirety of what the founding fathers envisioned.

Individual liberty was important to the founders. But, as per the prejudices of the times, that generally meant the landed gentry. The view seems to have been that property owners had skin in the game and "mere" laborers did not. But there was also recognition that the lower classes could elevate themselves, and indeed some did. Alexander Hamilton, for example, came from a pretty disadvantageous background, tho his case may not be a fair example given his massive talents and ambitions. Washington himself married and maneuvered himself into the upper echelons of Virginia polite society.

So you acknowledge the Constitution is at least partially outdated?

I just love the way only a couple of lines into that link it claims "we are unique", "held together by an idea", "held together by the Constitution", as though multicultural nations and national constitutions don't exist elsewhere, or the US is anything but deeply divided.

Yes, which is why the document includes provisions for amending it. As has been done multiple times over the last two and a half centuries.

Therefore it cannot be relied upon to always be a guide?

What if the rule is:

Princes will always be Princes and Janitors will always be Janitors.

How would that be a good thing?

How many times over the last half a century?

Oh, just once? And that was the HUGE change of not allowing Congressional salary raises to be implemented in the session they passed in*.

That one fundamentally altered the government.

Guess nothing in the US or world has changed since then that would require actually altering our government.

Either that or the system was built on the premise that getting a supermajority multiple times in multiple arenas was much easier when only people who could vote were a few hundred thousand land-owning white men clustered on the eastern seaboard instead of a couple hundred million in a multi-ethnic, continent spanning global empire. So the structure build by them for them might not be practical now. And now passing an amendment is near impossible which is why all progress has to go through the Supreme Court reinterpreting the Constitution. Which in fact ends up stretching it to the point of debasement. But whateves. Nothing to be down about it. Just the way it is and will always be....

*Fun fact: The 27th Amendment, the only amendment to be ratified in the last half a century was originally submitted to the First Congress along with 11 other amendments. The first ten were ratified quickly and became the Bill of Rights.

As opposed to what? Mob rule? "Pure" democracy, which means 51% of the people can totally fuck over the whole country with one bad decision? Still waiting on someone to come up with a better system than representative democracy.

When you say "pure" democracy, do you mean a system where every piece of legislation is put up to a plebiscite, or something else?

You weren’t expecting an actual response were you?

Well no shit. Trickle down economics has been dead since the Macarena. What's next? A paper on how much bullshit Global Cooling was?