Asked for an idea that could “change the world,” billionaire venture capitalist Tom Perkins told an audience at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on Thursday that Americans shouldn’t be able to vote unless they pay taxes and that the wealthy should have more votes.He should rather have called attention to the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution, which the monarch and aristocracy were separated from their heads for their hubris. It's a much more apt metaphor than the Holocaust, which is an affront not only to the Jewish people but also to humanity. There simply is no parallel as Perkins claims. It's talk like that that confirms suspicion of sociopathy.
“The Tom Perkins system is: You don’t get to vote unless you pay a dollar of taxes,” Perkins said. “But what I really think is, it should be like a corporation. You pay a million dollars in taxes, you get a million votes. How’s that?”
The audience laughed at the idea, though CNN Money notes that the billionaire did not indicate that he was joking. Afterwards, he suggested that he was being purposely controversial, “I intended to be outrageous, and it was,” he said, adding that the comments “make you more angry than my letter to the Wall Street Journal.”
Last month, Perkins used a Holocaust analogy to describe his concerns for the safety of the top 1 percent of income earners, writing, “I would call attention to the parallels of Nazi Germany to its war on its ‘one percent,’ namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the ‘rich.’”
AlterNet
How One Billionaire’s Idea To Give Rich People More Votes Is Already In The Works
Igor Volsky, Think Progress
4 comments:
The idea is moot. They already have total control over policy and the way the country works. Tax cuts for the rich, austerity, privatization, entitlement "reform," unionization, deregulation, wages, taxes on capital, law enforcement, criminal justice, etc.
Don't let the laughs fool you. The formal dependence of political rights on property rights characterizes most of human history. These guys are serious. The transformation of the global economy into a new feudal order is well underway. So far the forces of democracy have not fought back effectively. And the cause of democratic equality is further weakened by the confluence of neoliberals, libertarians and others who are often actively hostile to democracy: the former because democracy challenges systems of elite control and knowledge class privilege, the latter because being governed by anybody, even a community of political equals, threatens the libertarian's precious, narcissistic individual autonomy.
The ignorance of history among our pampered and mentally enfeebled modern consumer-serfs, and the tough legacy of human struggle for equality is profound. The time is approaching when the believers in democratic government are going to have to fight again for their place in the social and political order and for human liberation and dignity. They are going to have to fight to wrest control of political and social institutions from the plutocrats who are every day consolidating their control over those institutions. They are going to have to discover new forms of solidarity and political organization, and then put on their big boy and big girl pants.
Shame on the Commonwealth Club for giving that man a forum.
On second thought, let's go with his idea, but make it such that people get votes according to the amount of tax they pay as a percent of overall wealth.
The poor would have near infinite numbers of votes. Billionaire vote share would be infinitesimally small.
They pretty much have their way without recourse as it now stands.
The idea that the amount of tax one pays should determine the number of votes captures the ruling elite's disdain for democracy.
Another iteration of the ever popular poll tax.
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