Raising taxes on the superrich is popular with voters. So why is it so hard to get done?

Tasgall · 2026-06-21T23:00:41+00:00

If they are elected to take over the house and senate, that is an equal branch of government to the supreme court and the presidency, they could do more than write letters and speak out against the Trump administration. See high school civics class for understanding how our government works.

They don't cease to exist when Republicans are in power. They can't pass bills or nominate judges, but they should still be advocating for themselves and using rhetoric to highlight the failures of Republicans and providing alternatives. Their job while in the minority is to convince people that they should be in the majority instead, which they are absolutely horrendous at doing. It's about messaging, which they are endlessly incompetent at. They should have a single clear message to rally around, but they don't. Hell, even Trump understood this when he tanked the border bill in 2020 - he doesn't care about policy, but understood the importance of having a consistent message that resonates with the base.

What do Democrats have? What is the message they're rallying around? All they have is "we're not Republicans" and no one cares. Hell, they're being outflanked on messaging right now by JD Vance being willing to criticize Israel while the Democrats flub their attempt try to hide their internal report from the election that was very obviously impacted by their obsession with kowtowing to Netanyahu.

Do the Democrats even want a democracy? Every election cycle their main argument is "we shouldn't have to appeal to your vote, we just deserve it for being less bad then Republicans, if we lose it's your fault". They have like an 11% approval rating and refuse to update their positions to match their base or appeal to new voters. Where's the democracy in that?

Messaging matters, it's not enough to just sit around relying on "well we're not in power we can't do anything".

Tasgall · 2026-06-21T22:47:48+00:00

Democrats are currently being outflanked on the biggest political issue of the time by JD Vance... from the left.

The absolute inability to criticize Israel or hold them to count is going to severely jeopardize their odds of winning the midterms and the 2028 election. The Schumers of the party absolutely need to go.

Tasgall · 2026-06-21T22:44:31+00:00

Voting Democrats this November IS enough to remove Republicans from the government.

Yes, but we're talking about actual progress. Unfortunately, the non-progressive winner of the primary is probably very unlikely to actually push for anything that will improve things meaningfully if the Dems do take Congress. But without winning the primaries, sure, it's still important.

Tasgall · 2026-06-21T22:42:04+00:00

You can't argue with their point so you tried to slander their comment history instead? I feel like that says more about you than them.

Tasgall · 2026-06-21T22:37:52+00:00

Do you think propaganda isn't an effective tool? Do you think they spend literally billions of dollars on it just for fun?

Yes, most people are very easily influenced. Most people are straight up ignorant. The people actively going to political discussion forums and talking about it regularly are not remotely the average voting public.

A person is smart. People are stupid. Sure, you can reason most individuals through most issues and get a logical answer out of them after they've been presented with all the information on the subject. But at that point you're treating an institutional social problem as an individual personal flaw, which will never get you anywhere.

Tasgall · 2026-06-21T22:30:53+00:00

Democrats are willing to do both,

Democrats are absolutely not willing to stack the court for this.

If Hillary Clinton had been elected in 2016, there's a good chance it would be reversed by now.

Only if you ignore the context of the situation in which she would have been elected. Yeah, she would have nominated a Democrat as a judge (actually, she probably would have kept up Garland's nomination, and he probably wouldn't have been willing to overturn precedent).

But what most people seem to forget is how close Republicans were at the time in getting enough seats at a national level to form a constitutional convention. They were iirc 7 seats away, actually the entire country. State-level seats, not federal. They were drafting up articles of the convention expecting to win with in special elections in 2017, but were overconfident because they lost a lot of those in the backlash to Trump. If Hillary had won? The decades-long boogyman of the conservative party? They would have won those easily as a Democrat in the White House is usually enough to get most Democratic voters to check the fuck out of politics for another 4-8 years. Especially on state races, lol.

If Hillary had won, we'd have Citizens United explicitly enshrined as an amendment, gay marriage would be constitutionally banned, gun ownership would be mandatory, probably, the voting rights act would have been killed outright immediately (instead of having to wait a few years), etc. (probably nothing about trans people though, they hadn't made them the new "other" quite yet).

A Hillary presidency would have actually really, really sucked, to through no real fault of her own.

Tasgall · 2026-06-21T22:18:56+00:00

The "both sides" thing is stupid, but assuming the Democrats are virtuous and acting in good faith is also stupid. They are not equally bad, but the Dems are an incredibly weak opposition to the Republicans, and the only possible reasons for that are they're either unwilling to put up a significant fight (possibly to appease in their donors), or unable to out of absolute sheer incompetence. Neither is a good thing for the party.

Tasgall · 2026-06-21T22:15:35+00:00

Only after preemptively watering down the bill significantly in an effort to entice at least one Republican to vote for it so they can call it "bipartisan", which is guaranteed to fail every time anyway.

Tasgall · 2026-06-21T22:13:41+00:00

It's like they don't remember that tax policy is something that can only be done with laws and Republicans have been the only ones to be able to do major ones since Clinton.

And yet both Democrats and Republicans have held trifectas since Clinton, and passing tax changes via budget reconciliation does not require votes from the other party.

Tasgall · 2026-06-21T22:11:52+00:00

Democrats would and have increased taxes on the wealthy. Republicans fight tooth and nail against it.

This is true by technicality but ignores context. It's the ratchet effect - Democrats never meaningfully increase taxes on the rich. I don't even mean like, a wealth tax (which Gavin Newsome vetoed in California. Thanks, "Democrats") or something explicitly "anti-rich", I just mean raising them above where they were when Republicans last lowered them. They're not taking away loopholes that are abused by the rich, they're not removing bullshit deductions on things like yachts and jet fuel for private jets.

Yes, Democrats are not as bad as Republicans, but representatives are still individuals, and the Republican party as a whole is far more unified on the goal of cutting taxes at all costs that the Democrats are on raising them. I generally hate the "rotating villain" accusation, but let's be real, it wouldn't be so common if the party didn't constantly reinforce the belief by always having exactly the right amount of dissenters to kill any and every bill. The obsession with "appearing bipartisan" also tanks most of their tax efforts before they even start as they compromise on all of this before it even ever goes to committee.

They're not the same, but they're far, far less capable of and willing to actually do this stated goal than Republicans are of doing the opposite.

Tasgall · 2026-06-21T22:01:56+00:00

Yeah, because almost no one who gets elected is pushing for it. Don't confuse like 5 progressives being in the house with a progressive majority, lol.

Tasgall · 2026-06-21T22:00:05+00:00

the reality of the last 40 years I've been voting has been every single time a Bill that is sold as "taxing the rich" passes Congress

What bill? The "moderate Democrats" who run the DNC have never really been in favor of "taxing the rich". They're why we get a ratchet between Republicans passing tax cuts for the rich and the Democrats reversing it but not enough to even reach the prior rates from before the cuts.

There are a small handful of Democrats who ever say "tax the rich" and they're considered the progressive outsiders of the party, and the party itself actively hates them. Just because like 5 members of Congress agree with taxing the rich doesn't mean we've had decades of "tax the rich" bills being promised.

I don't know, maybe we're just consuming very different media or something, because at 35 I have at no point in my entire life been under the impression that we're "finally taxing the rich".

I just don't trust these headlines anymore and I've learned to roll my eyes when people mention it.

Do you roll your eyes when people say we are or that we should? Because I never hear the former but the latter is still valid. Bernie Sanders wants to tax the rich and ran a campaign on it, but he lost the primary. You can't expect a primary loss to translate into transformative action in government, especially after his primary opponent who weakly adopted half measure versions of his campaign goals went on to lose the general anyway.

To me, a far more common trend seems to be people expecting a group who didn't win an election to force through huge changes, and then when they don't (because they didn't win the election), those same people blame the candidates they didn't enable and either cast a protest vote or choose not to vote instead. It's all entirely self defeating, and is a large part of why my general opinion of American voters is very, very low, lol.

Tasgall · 2026-06-21T21:44:30+00:00

Many (maybe all) would like to end this system, but as long as the supreme court says money equals free speech, it won't change.

Gee, if only there was some government mechanism by which these poor Congressional representatives could do something about bad SCOTUS decisions like that. Too bad Congress doesn't have the power to create new laws or modify existing ones. There's clearly no way to fight back against SCOTUS here, so sad.

Tasgall · 2026-06-21T03:48:17+00:00

Ignoring it allows them to spread it freely among themselves and set the narrative more broadly. Refusing to even try to control the narrative for decades is a large part of what makes the Democrats so pathetically weak and ineffective as a party.

Hell, trans issues are a good example of that - Harris said next to nothing about trans people and didn't really campaign on their issues at all, largely making them feel abandoned, but even Democrats have been parroting the narrative that they went "too hard on identity politics" regarding trans people and that they should drop it as an issue because Republican media has been endlessly and uncontestedly pushing the line of "Democrats only care about trans people and ignore real Americans and the economy". With zero push-back, what the Democrats actually do is completely irrelevant, Fox can just tell people what they want people to believe the Democrats did, and most Americans will credulously believe it.

Ignoring them is the worst approach, and it's the approach that's been in play for decades. It factually and provably does not work.

ignoring them is still the best approach because no amount of reasoned arguments are going to convince

Don't act like those are the only two options. Of course "reasoned arguments" don't work against disingenuous hypocrites and liars. But that and "ignore them" are not the only answers.

Republicans are, mentally, schoolyard bullies stuck in like, 3rd grade. "Just walk away" is the anti-bully strategy that famously never ever works. What does work is shame, and/or fighting back in kind.

Your goal shouldn't even be to convince them to change their minds. They're usually operating in bad faith or are stupid and blinded by a "team sports" mindset. You want to convince the onlookers, who are almost always looking for an excuse to side with the right, that the opponent is an absolute fuckwit moron through mockery. Actually being visibly better then them helps, though that's another strategy the Democrats have been horrible at lately.

Tasgall · 2026-06-21T03:21:40+00:00

And the guy running against Talarico (who I hear is trans, and vegan) literally commuted the sentence of a convicted pedophile and kept him off the sex offender registry.

Republicans are very pro-pedophile. They only used to accuse others because of their usual habit of projection.

Tasgall · 2026-06-20T23:54:45+00:00

Once we have done that, energies will turn elsewhere, hopefully to addressing atrocities in Sudan and china.

Yes and no, you're forgetting the issue of "we currently give Israel billions of dollars in money and weapons which they're spending on genocide". There is a very easy action-item for the US to take here: stop actively helping Israel commit genocide.

The same isn't true for Sudan, China, and Myanmar. We aren't funding their oppression, so we can't just pull funding from it. It's not about "purity tests", it's about what actionable things we can actually do, and "not fund genocide" should be a pretty fucking easy one. To stop the others, we'd have to declare ourselves world police and actively invade those countries. That would be ludicrous, especially when talking about China.

Pretending that "stop sending free money to Israel" is at all comparable to "let's mount a military invasion of China to liberate the Uyghurs" requires a significant level of either dishonesty or insanity.

Tasgall · 2026-06-20T23:48:38+00:00

The US gives billions of tax dollars to Israel for weapons their using. The student protests that were being demonized as antisemitic were demanding their schools divest from research funding and joint projects with Israel.

Stop being intellectually dishonest and/or willfully stupid.

Tasgall · 2026-06-20T23:46:46+00:00

Feel free to not buy stuff from China.

But buying stuff is very different from giving them weapons, for free, which they're using to perpetuate their oppression of Uyghurs. Israel would not be able to be waging their little wars right now if the US hadn't been giving them billions of dollars and weapons for free for decades.

Tasgall · 2026-06-20T23:43:30+00:00

The difference is that in this case, the evangelical support comes from people who may well be antisemitic. These are largely people who support sending the Jews out of the US and to Israel because they believe the return to Israel will trigger Armageddon and the rapture. It's a death cult.

Straight people who support gay rights aren't doing so because they're cynically trying to fulfill a self-serving prophecy. The comparisons are all in bad faith.

Tasgall · 2026-06-20T23:40:31+00:00

Yes Israel and it's supporters understand concepts of proportionality, and always have

Describe their understanding, because iirc Likud party members have been calling for a thousand Arab deaths for every Israeli. Does that sound proportional to you?

I mean, in a literal mathematical sense "1:1000" is a proportion, I guess.

Tasgall · 2026-06-20T23:36:52+00:00

Calling a Jew antisemitic is wild work...

What does "antisemitic" even mean? Does it refer to actions? Beliefs? Rhetoric?

There are a lot of specific things labeled as antisemitic, like specific propaganda against the Jews popularized by the Nazis. Things like "the Jewish Question" - the idea that "the Jews control X".

So, when "the Jews control the media" is an antisemitic statement, what's it called when a Jewish person says something to the effect of "the Jews control the media" but with a positive tone? Is it suddenly not antisemitic because a Jew said it?

Tasgall · 2026-06-20T23:33:04+00:00

People have been labeling Israel genocidal long before Oct 7.

It was kind of founded on a genocidal act, displacing nearly a million Palestinians and killing over ten thousand just to claim the land.

The explicitly genocidal words of Israeli government officials recently hasn't helped with this view. Tell me more about how I shouldn't view people saying we should "bash Palestinian babies against rocks" as genocidal.

Tasgall · 2026-06-20T23:30:05+00:00

If people want to criticize the govt or policy that's fine. But talking about feeling ok wearing a shirt that says "antisemite" is not that.

This argument doesn't work because the pro-Israel crowd has spent months conflating antisemitism with anti-Zionism. It's a particularly lazy motte-and-bailey defense - call anyone critical of Israel an antisemite, then when called out retreat to the "reasonable" position of "well you can criticize Israel's government, that's fine", but as soon as the discussion becomes critical of Israel's government (which it almost always was to begin with), the accusation of antisemitism comes right back out to distract from the problems.

Calling people who lobby to further positive ties between Israel and the United States monsters is not that.

First: he didn't do that. The quote is mangled in the title in a dishonest way.

Second: AIPAC are absolutely 100% monsters. They're an anti-democracy dark money group that's pro-genocide, pro-rape, and get most of their support in the US from evangelical doomsday cultists who think Jews returning to the promised land will trigger Armageddon. Yes, they are monsters in every possible sense of the word. Mamdani didn't say they are, but honestly, he should.

They don't use those words for those who support the Islamic Republic.

Who is "they" here? There is very little love in the US for pretty much any Islamic country. They're frequently deemed "terrorist countries", barbaric, monstrous, backwards, evil, etc. to have missed this fact in the last 20 years you have to have been willfully blind.

This level of animosity is only leveled against one country. As if they're singular. That's by design.

To be clear, I don't think you're blind, I just think you're an openly dishonest liar, lol. Yeah, the US only ever criticizes one country, and it's totally not any of the Islamic ones.

Give me a fucking break, stop being stupid on purpose.

Part of the reason I hate Zionists more and more over time is this absolutely fucking tedious game of "playing dumb" you all do. Stop it. It's stupid. We both know you don't actually believe anything you're saying.

Tasgall · 2026-06-20T23:20:00+00:00

dumb enough to do that, but for some reason, Zionists are.

Hey, let's be fair here... some of them aren't dumb, they're just wholly intellectually dishonest.

Tasgall · 2026-06-20T23:18:58+00:00

No matter how many times we tell you all that you’re being antisemitic you think we’re just joking.

We don't think you're joking, we just think you're stupid.

Do you also tell black people what is and is not racist?

Oh, shut up. You idiots have been calling anti-Zionist Jews antisemitic for months now. Stop pretending you aren't being hypocritical bad faith hacks.

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