What is wrong?

[Prophet 451]

78. I might quibble with the numbers but agree with the gist

I think cutting the military budget in half, all at once, would mean actually making teh lives of individual troopers worse. I DO think that a reduction of, say, 20% can easily be done without affecting the squaddies in the slightest.

I don't think people should go hungry. In fact, I think the US safety net for the poor is a laughable, pathetic joke. The very, very first thing I want my government (and I'm British, BTW) to be doing, before even defence, is providing a real safety net for the poor, sick and old.

I agree that people should have jobs that pay a decent wage. I've been advocating for a while that the federal minimum wage should be moved up to $13 an hour or thereabouts on the grounds that, assuming a 40-hour work week, it takes $13 an hour to keep a family of three above the federal poverty line. That said, I'm told that the poverty calculation is lacking so I think it should be re-calculated, the new minimum wage moved to (poverty threshold for family of 3 / 50 weeks a year = X; X/40-hours = Y) $Y an hour and then pegged to teh rate of inflation or the CPI, whichever is higher..

Income inequality is not immoral in itself but becomes immoral when it gets to a certain level. What I mean is, an income inequality where the poorest person has, say, 10% of what teh richest person has is not immoral. However, when it gets to a thousand or ten thousand times as much, it then becomes immoral.

The wealthy DO need to pay more taxes. Hoever, the wealthy also own your entire media complex so good luck getting any ki8nd of positive press on that.

Corporate criminals SHOULD be held accountable. In fact, I'll go further: If corporations are now people, then they should have to pay personal taxes and can be put to death (shut down) when they have committed an especially heinous crime.

SOcial Security SHOULD be made stronger. And the most direct way to do that is to scrap the cap on contributions.

I don't know what's wrong with having different idea than the GOP. There seems to have been this decision made by the party PtB during the Reagan years that Democrats would only win if they essentially became Republican-lite on economic issues. And that led to Clinton's horribly misguided welfare "reform" bill and leads to the Obama admin pushing the TPP.

The reason no-one talks about getting money out of politics is two-fold. Firstly, again, the wealthy own your entire media complex. Secondly, you got it in your OP. Everyone currently there got there because they courted campaign contributions (which are really just bribery) from very rich people and their corporations. The only way you can stop that is to go to fully public funded elections but see the first point, your wealthy own all the media.