Progressives need to argue for raising taxes on the sale of assets and eliminating corporate tax loopholes as part of the argument for spending money

As progressives argue for more spending it is also important to explain where we think the money should be coming from to support that spending. The failure to do so is what makes people not want to support progressive’s ideas since most people think we need to have the money before we spend it. Therefore progressives need to offer a revenue plan that will support the spending proposed. We should argue that this spending can and should be supported by increasing taxes on earnings from buying and selling investments rather than on earnings from work. We should spend as much time talking about revenue aspects as we do talking about the spending proposals we want to pass. This is necessary in order to make the spending proposals acceptable to most Americans.

One of the biggest problems with the way our tax code works is that it taxes earnings from wages at a higher rate than money earned from making investments. If this were not the case there would be lots more money available to take care of the problems we have deal with issues like our lack of infrastructure spending.

There is absolutely no legitimate reason to have the tax code set up this way. The argument that some people make for tax code being set up this way is that the money that people use to make investments is earned at some point through work and taxed at that point as well. In reality this is often not the case. Lots of investment bankers and hedge fund managers are taxed as if the money they get is investment money rather than earnings from work. It is also true that lots of rich people make all their money through investments and never work for the money they use to make the investments. In many cases they received it from rich relatives. You could organize a tax system structured this way that would make clear that money working people are saving for retirement or for other important purposes would not be subject to this increased taxation of income from investment. Some of these issues would also be addressed through increasing taxes on inherited income itself in order to make clear that there is a difference between working people’s savings and investments and income are trying to reach.

It is important that in asking the country to spend more money on our priorities that we make a strong case for where that money can come from. If progressives want other Americans to buy into progressive priorities it is necessary to propose a funding mechanism to support this spending. The other important source should be making sure that corporations pay their fair share. There is a belief however that America is less competitive in a global economy because corporate taxes here are higher in other countries, whether or not this perception is true or not it has a lot of traction with the American people so I think you have to argue that you can increase taxes on corporations without actually changing the rate structure. This does seem to be true since despite the high rate structure many major American corporations pay little or nothing in corporate taxes. We need to get rid of the tax breaks that make this possible and thereby make sure that large major corporations pay their fair share and smaller businesses don’t lose out as a result of these changes.

I also think that progressives ought to actually also support the notion that to spend money we need to have that money available rather than continue borrowing more all the time. I don’t understand how people who want the country to spend more money would be so unwilling to talk about the need to raise that money in order to spend it. But that is the position lots of progressives take by failing to ever talk about where the money should be coming from to support the spending. Because there are real answers to these questions it seems like progressives need to address those questions as part of the argument on behalf of the spending.

We should try to limit Amazon’s control of the Internet marketplace

I think we should all be trying keep Amazon from completely controlling or trying to control commerce on the Internet. We will all be much better off if there is not one company that has so much power over Internet commerce transactions. They have cornered the market on the number of things from electronic books to basic transactions which they control through people’s use of Amazon prime which provides users lots of perks in the way of music and video access as well as free shipping the shipping. Amazon is now working on applying the same techniques to taking your a number of other parts of the Internet commerce market including the sale of crafts items that are now being handled most of the time through a service called Etsy. There are some other services that provide free shipping but they can’t match the other perks that Amazon has the resources to provide.

I think that our current antitrust laws do not really work in the context of Internet commerce. The current approaches is a based on the notion that corporations and organizations can never act in concert or collude. In the context of the Internet smaller organizations need to collude to overcome the way some big Internet-based corporations like Amazon work to take over the market from these other smaller entities. I think that in this day and age there is a level of collective action that smaller corporations and organizations need to have available to them to fight back against the Amazon and some of the other major Internet providers. It is really primarily an Amazon problem at this point, because none of the other large Internet providers have developed the other capacities that Amazon uses to gain its advantage. There are only so many movie, music and book services that any single consumer is going to join and these are the kind of services Amazon now uses to gain its advantage. Clearly others will try to develop this capacity over time.

Our economy has never before been able to be so totally controlled by one organization in the way that it is controlled by Amazon today. I think the only way to deal with the situation is to allow smaller businesses to collaborate in some manner to take some of this power away from Amazon and the other really huge retailers operating on the Internet.

I’m sure that a lot of consumers think that having one company that can do everything for them in terms of the marketplace seems like a good idea but before long it’s going to start to be clear that this kind of market control actually makes things more expensive than the long run. That is true because of the inability of others to compete in the market. Given that virtually all commerce will soon start to shift to the Internet this situation is going to continue to get worse for consumers as Amazon owns more and more of our business and drives out most of its competitors.

It is time for progressives to stop worrying about conservatives using the same tactics we use and focus on the message rather than the medium.

Progressives need to stop trying to keep people, organizations and corporations out of conversations. In this regard, I mean both people and corporations that are affected by a government decision should have the right to participate in the public conversation about that decision. This is entirely different from the notion that corporations should be treated like people when it comes to basic rights. Most progressives seem to want to argue that corporations shouldn’t even be allowed to participate. In decisions that affect them and their shareholders .The current place where this issue is raised is in respect to climate talks where currently efforts currently underway keep polluters out of the conversation .I don’t think that progressives should be arguing keep people and corporations out of the climate talk because of what they will have to say. Instead, people should just be arguing that what they are saying is untrue or wrong rather than spend time making the argument that they should not be able to participate all. A lot of conversation on progressive websites suggests that this is not the case and that a lot of energy is being spent on keeping people out of the conversation rather than making the argument that there contributions to the conversation are wrong.

Similarly, progressives need to stop trying to get people not to file lawsuits in order to resolve issues in their favor. People and movements that have used this technique and gained a lot by filing lawsuits should understand that that this is everybody’s right and that it’s a much better way to try to resolve our differences than the available alternatives like fights and warfare. If it’s a Corporation rather than a person who filed the lawsuit that’s fine too. Since corporations have the right to file lawsuits to get what they want just as people do in this country. Many of the lawsuits that progressives have brought have been brought in the name of organizations rather than people. So the notion that corporations can do this as well is not a unique notion and not one that progressives should fight against.

As a former legal aid attorney who brought lots of class-action lawsuits against government entities I feel quite strongly that suggesting that anyone should be discouraged from doing this is a terrible thing for progressives to do. We should not complain about the use of the forum but should rather just take on the actual message it’s being used to support. Complaining that anyone should not be allowed to use any method that is legally appropriate, particularly means that we use ourselves suggest that we are not our positions are strong enough to succeed on the merits. In bringing a lot of these kinds of lawsuits we used organizations as well as individuals as plaintiff’s and it is important to do so in order to can keep the lawsuit going if some of the individuals disappear or don’t have legitimate claims.

I feel the same way about use of the filibuster which I think should be allowed not complain about even when we don’t agree on the actual challenge being offered. I think the filibuster is a useful tool for the opposition to be able to use to ensure that they have some way to participate in the debate going on in Congress than they are out of power in both bodies. I know that progressives think they gained ground when they got rules passed that limited the ability to filibuster but to me it seems like it was really a loss and a bad choice to argue for these changes. To my mind the real problem with filibusters in recent years was that to engage in one region actually have to take any real action. It filibuster should require you to actually stand and talk which no longer seems to be the case.