So you’re just doubling down on what if this and that.

Yeah and those laws are great for keeping people who want to age in place in their homes. Unfortunately they aren’t the norm. Usually it’s just a discount but it still goes up.

I’m not going to “finely enumerate and spell out the letter of the law in hundreds of variations” for you.

Income and wealth taxes also have hundreds of variations and fine tunings. Saying I have to invent a whole new system on my own right here and now or else I’m not serious is not serious.

No, that’s how American K-12 schools are funded. That and infrastructure. Which is why poor areas have worse schools and roads; and police from outside their tax area. Which is both a great way to punish the poor in the old school protestant fashion and force them out the second the wealthy want their land.

And you know exactly what I mean by paying in his entire life.

Finally, paying half your income on property taxes is not financially sustainable. It’s ridiculous to me that you would even pretend it is.

It’s as fine tuned a proposal as, “tax property”.

We could always, also tax the wealthy. This is not fictional. Retired people in the US are facing a crisis as they’re priced out of housing because their social security is fixed and housing prices are skyrocketing.

The fact that schools are funded by the surrounding area is crap and needs to change. He’s retired with a social security income. He paid into the system his entire life already. Telling him he must sell and move out because he’s not wealthy enough is exactly what we should be working against. It’s a system by the wealthy, for the wealthy.

Have the rich actually pay taxes. Use that.

It’s based on wealth that matters for rich people. For the average person it’s extremely regressive. We’re telling people that they must sell and move if they aren’t rich enough. There are better ways to tax people and assets in the 21st century.

We could also just pay for education differently.

Property taxes do hit retired people differently though. Taxing based on what the government says your land is worth instead of your income is absolutely meant to create opportunities for real estate agents and developers at the expense of the people living there.

I keep trying to tell people classical liberals were bastards. There’s this perception that just because we can vote that means we can’t be the bad guys. It’s an ideological catechism that actually fits with the above picture. If Fascism is just whenever mass suffering and death is perpetrated but also World War 2 non voting systems run by strong men then it gives the modern person living in a democracy permission to stop paying attention. After all they can vote and their guy would never.

We need to get this through people’s heads, stop putting flashy words on human rights violations and start holding leaders accountable. Because a culture of not being accountable is how you get actual Fascism.

So the thing is classical liberals were (and are) capable of a lot of damage without Fascism. Fascism is a specific ideology. Not the suffering people are capable of creating. It’s important to understand that your normal democracy is perfectly capable of creating mass suffering.

At that point my hand qualifies.

You’re confusing aesthetic preference with fetish.

And it’s still not good, and far less frequent than what Asian women endure in the West.

A new constitution is a really bad idea until we can do a lot more organizing. Conservatives have been practicing for a convention for at least 20 years. If we called one right now they’d steamroll the liberals and we’d have an actual king again.

Yeah I never claimed this would be easy. It’s all predicated on people showing up. Because of course if we just sit there and go, “oh dear, someone should do something.” Nobody is going to do anything.

No, in the USA States have a limited form of sovereignty. They elect their own officials and hold all powers not expressly given to the Federal Government. So while the President has some law enforcement agents, most of them are actually employed by the State Governors and Counties/Cities. The Governors have a Secretary of State that is also elected who are responsible for running all elections in the state.

So if Trump tried to make an Executive Order that only Republicans could vote, (this is meant to be an extreme example, it would backfire hilariously in real life), the states could legally ignore it. However if Congress passed that as a law and the Supreme Court upheld it then the states would be legally bound to prevent anyone not registered as a Republican from voting for federal offices.

The thing is the Republicans don’t have enough of a majority to just pass any law they want. So it’s very unlikely there will be an extreme voting law in the next 2 years. So if federal agents showed up trying to enforce an Executive Order from Trump it is highly likely they would be arrested by the state or city police for interfering in voting.

I’d like to speak to your manager, I was promised a sonnet about the love of pumpkin pie and all I got was bigotry.