It is no secret that the political left here in the U.S. has been pushing for more socialist policies and a widening of the social safety net.
The terms used to describe economic policy have been twisted into completely different meanings than they originally had. At one time the thought of denying food and basic shelter to anyone would have been deemed sociopathic, but now we see even children so deprived from a failure of the most basic social contracts that should be a requirement to being deemed civilized.
This is the result of assigning false labels, such as socialism, to those processes. There is no major nation on earth where the means of production is owned collectively by the workers, only varying degrees of government control over production and their benefit to workers or capital. America has been enthralled with the falsehood of capital having its best interests in mind since the '70s - '80s. By any serious extension of logic, that is now failed to the point of tragedy.
And as much as the political left espouses “eating the rich”, it is often the middle and working class, desperate to put some distance between themselves and those “beneath” them, that fight the hardest to prevent change that would elevate them all.
"Eating the rich" may make good political rhetoric, but it doesn't explain how one supports a society once the meal has ended. Depending upon the rich to "fund" the economy means assuring that they can remain rich enough to do so going forward. It is a wildly mixed message and simple enough that even the least literate voter can get it.
This message will continue to fail, regardless of how popular the messenger might be, as long as we make the incorrect assumption that our government requires funding from the private sector via taxation. It doesn't, and never has. In fact. it is the federal government that "funds" the private sector, not the other way around. Tax receipts are deleted upon meeting the debt that created them and new dollars are spent into existence for all federal spending.
After all, if they had to keep a job they may not have liked in order to have access to health care, why should everyone have health care free at the point of service? A wider social safety net blurs the line between the indigent and the working class from an optics standpoint.
This, I believe, is only true when those working have the impression that "they" are footing the bill. If it could be shown that everyone could have free healthcare as a right of citizenship without creating a cost burden and higher taxation I really doubt that any but the most rabid libertarians would continue to object to it.
The federal government, as the monopoly issuer of our sovereign currency, can afford anything it can resource from the private sector, regardless of current or past revenue positions. With an infinite amount of currency available, "funding" spending is no longer a valid purpose of taxation (or borrowing).
The best way to deal with excessive wealth is to make it irrelevant to the public purpose. I guarantee doing so will see their taxation rates escalate drastically when they are no longer seen as necessary.
