A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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I think Joe may not run. He should have run last time.
T 
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We asked our sample two questions about why they think some people are rich and other people are poor.
The differences between the parties was stark. Fully 93 percent of Democrats said the poor lack opportunity, while 77 percent of Republicans said they lack initiative; 83 percent of Republicans said rich people work harder, while just 9 percent of Democrats said that. Independents supported the Democratic position on both questions: They said the poor lack opportunity by 58-42 and that the rich have advantages of birth by 61-39.
When asked how much of the wealth the top 1 percent should hold, a plurality of 26 percent of our sample said 20 percent. (The real number is 90 percent.) Personally, I am striving to make that number larger than 90 -- I'm going for 99% of all American wealth to the richest 1%. I'm not seeing any real, tangible resistance to my arbitrary goal, except from the Democratic Party.
Much more at https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/52/the-democracy-poll-americans-
and-the-economy/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Personally, I am striving to make that number larger than 90 -- I'm going for 99% of all American wealth to the richest 1%. I'm not seeing any real, tangible resistance to my arbitrary goal, except from the Democratic Party.
Science would argue with you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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After Obama, Democrats need a new theory of change. Pete Buttigieg thinks he’s got it.
The central lesson of Obama’s presidency, Buttigieg argues, is that “any decisions that are based on an assumption of good faith by Republicans in the Senate will be defeated.” The hope that you can pass laws through bipartisan compromise is dead. And that means governance is consistently, reliably failing to solve people’s problems, which is in turn radicalizing them against government itself.
“You can only go so long with this divergence that we have between the center of the American people and the center of the American Congress,” Buttigieg says. “Donald Trump was not exactly a corrective, but he was a consequence of the fact that people watched their government drifting further and further away from them in terms of what it would deliver.”
Buttigieg’s response — one that you also hear from 2020 hopefuls Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Gov. Jay Inslee — is to restructure government so that popular majorities translate more cleanly into governing majorities. He’s discussed eliminating the Electoral College, scrapping the filibuster, and remaking the Supreme Court so each party nominates the same number of justices and vacancies become less “apocalyptic.”
There’s nothing new about a Democratic candidate promising to fix the system. Obama ran on similar themes in 2008. House Democrats opened their session by passing a sweeping package of good-government reforms. But once Democrats take power, concrete policy change, with the immediate benefits it promises, tends to win out over the abstractions of procedural reform. It’s easier to run for reelection bragging about a tax cut than about weakening the Electoral College.
Obama’s presidency, in this respect, was typical. Once he was elected — and understandably, given the economic freefall — fixing the system took a back seat to moving legislation through the system. Obama stabilized the financial sector and expanded health insurance to tens of millions of people, but he left the corrupting influence money plays in our politics untouched.
What surprised me while talking to Buttigieg was his insistence that he would prioritize political reforms over policy wins. “This is the difference between somebody who’s thinking about 2024 versus somebody who’s thinking about 2054,” he says. “To me, yes, it’s worth it because we’re talking about setting the terms of the debate as they will play out for the rest of my life.”
More at www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/4/4/18290753/pete-buttigieg-berni
e-sanders-filibuster-electoral-college-supreme-court
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Indiana Jones finds Donald Trump's hidden treasure trove of tax returns.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Ten years ago, the tax agency formed a special team to unravel the complex tax-lowering strategies of the nation’s wealthiest people. But with big money — and Congress — arrayed against the team, it never had a chance.
The IRS tried to take on the Ultrawealthy. It didn’t go well. The Top 0.5% underpay $50 billion a year in taxes and crushed the IRS Plan to stop them.
The tax lawyer who out-maneuvered the IRS is Charles Rettig, then a high-powered tax lawyer and today President Donald Trump’s IRS commissioner. Enforcement against the wealthy is now the weakest it has ever been.
More at www.propublica.org/article/ultrawealthy-taxes-irs-internal-revenue-ser
vice-global-high-wealth-audits
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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What’s wrong with letting wealthy people solve the world’s problems?
There are strict limits to the kind of solutions that powerful “change makers” will entertain. They don’t want to pay higher wages or taxes or sell better products.
See, for example, Jeff Bezos’s recent behavior. Last June, the Amazon founder and richest man in the world — who has been widely criticized for underpaying workers — resisted a tax on major businesses in Seattle that would fund affordable housing, threatening to cease construction on new building in the company’s hometown. The city walked back the tax. Then Bezos announced in September that he would pledge $2 billion to supporting organizations that address homelessness and preschool education. In this way, the founder gets to deduct his charitable donation, shirk paying additional business taxes, and come out looking like a generous fellow and responsible citizen.
He wins. Society loses.
A 40-year narrative of business people and entrepreneurs as social geniuses is crashing because US president Donald Trump has flamboyantly discredited the idea that a businessman might be especially equipped to run government.
More at https://qz.com/1586242/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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lol
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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It’s been more than half a century since Republicans were willing to cross the aisle to vote for progressive legislation. So here’s the only theory of change that matters:
1) Get a Democratic majority in both houses.
2) Ditch the filibuster.
3) Pass whatever legislation is acceptable to the 51st most liberal senator.
All you have to do is take a look at the past and ask what Democrats needed to pass big liberal legislation and the answer suddenly becomes easy: big Democratic majorities in Congress. That’s it. It’s what made the New Deal possible, the Great Society possible, and Obamacare possible. Its lack is what killed Bill Clinton’s health care plan. There are, it’s true, a few counterexamples of big things that were passed on a bipartisan basis: the Civil Rights Act, the Clean Air Act, ADA, the 1986 tax reform, and a handful of others. However, nearly all of these were passed under Republican presidents and all of them were passed more than 30 years ago.
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/04/theory-of-change-is-disarmingly
-simple/
www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/the-fury-and-failure-of-donald-
trump-w444943 
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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The less-than-500 counties that Hillary Clinton carried nationwide encompassed 64 percent of America’s economic activity as measured by total output in 2015, Mark Muro and Sifan Liu found in their analysis of the 2016 election results. By contrast, the more-than-2,600 counties that Donald Trump won generated just 36 percent of the country’s output.
America’s political system is structured to advantage sparsely populated areas over densely populated ones. To the extent that more areas are seeing populations stagnate and even decline, and more economic growth is concentrated in the fastest-growing zip codes, political turbulence is to be expected.
“Our Country,” President Donald Trump says, “is FULL!” America isn’t full.
America is growing more slowly than at any time since the Great Depression.
www.vox.com/2019/4/9/18300621/donald-trump-immigration-population-amer
ica-full
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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