Trump eyes cap on charitable deductions

[haele]

13. Population Control. All dictatorships do it.

The authoritarian rule of thumb is that you can't maintain a dictatorship with more than 25 active adult citizens to each enforcer (< pre-teen kids, the disabled, and housebound elderly don't count).
Prisons work the same basic ratio, no less than two guards at any one time for every fifty convicts. So, if you have a standing police force of around 1 million, you can only have 25 million additional free-range "adult citizens" working and being active in the community.

Again, pre-teen kids, disabled people, and housebound/frail elderly don't count. So you can have about 20 million of those, the "dependents" who are either heading out of the citizen population through attrition, or being groomed to replace the active citizenry as part of the workforce.

So, in a GOP American Utopia, 1 million police and 25 million active citizens (preferably White, Christian, and relatively well off), 20 million dependent "citizens" whose wellbeing is paid for by the active citizenry is just fine. Make it a population of 50 million citizens, tops.

And equally "just fine" would be 200 - 300 million "disposables"; the rest of the population, left to either rot in jail, starve in the streets if they don't make enough money using their bootstraps, or otherwise live a life of furtive indentured servitude in the shadows of society, waiting to get thrown in jail if they act out or piss off their wealthy owners.

Haele