Not sure new taxes is enough...

We need some much more honest talk about how money works within our economy soon if we're going to turn around some of the political idiocy we see from both parties.

We need to rethink the whole way we organize ourselves around material gain. If you look at the components of wealth and measure the interactions, it’s pretty apparent that we can figure out better, fairer, and simpler (maybe) ways to organize our approach. All that’s required is that the small minority that has most of the stuff give up a significant chunk of said stuff. Sadly, the list of volunteers for the role of “giver-upper”, while growing, is small, and the amount of energy (and money, of course) used in efforts to reverse that karmic flow is substantial.

This is made more complex when, every couple of generations, the group of people that believes most strongly that the group of people who control the majority of a society’s assets deserve to do so (and those making the rationalization are closely aligned to the wealthy in terms of membership), that group pushes conditions of wealth inequality past sustainable levels - and the system collapses. As we’ve gotten more efficient at implementing markets, we appear to have a bevy of government/regulator/market-related professionals who have deluded themselves for years with concepts such as “equilibrium’ who cannot help but think it must have been something, anything else that explains what happened.

What happened really isn’t in denial. Repeat after the me:

The Banking System in the US and the EU, plus the UK and some of the Scandinavian countries, crashed. Strictly by letting the industry run according to the best tenets of the prevailing economic wisdom of the time:

o The Rich got Richer and fewer.

o The Poor got Poorer … and so did everyone else in the middle.
And then,

BOOM

The world's economic structures crashed. Nothing worked as it was supposed to.
And we still don't talk about how it happened. Some do, to be fair. But they're kept off to the side while the Players try to control their information. It's a really strange place we live in.

* * *

Every time I think I am amazed at the state of political dialogue in this country, something else happens that reinforces my previously held analysis and its resulting mix of disgust, chagrin, and wonder at how the old barriers to information managed to wash out on a wave of technology and leave a lot of people on the beach who had apparently been swimming sans trunks for quite some time.