What America Really Needs is a Formal Caste System

This is brilliant. But it doesn't go anywhere near far enough.

Let's have separate classes of citizenship to accurately reflect the separate economic classes we already have. Then maybe the need for the not-top classes to rise up and defeat the social parasite classes will finally become obvious.

Because the non-rich will be a lower class of citizen, we can eliminate all forms of publicly-funded support for them. After all, the real citizens will all be rich, and will have no need for food stamps or unemployment compensation, or public education, or municipal drinking water, or toll-free highways. The people who do need those things will be a lower class of citizen and therefore not entitled to the benefits of rich-people citizenship.

Or we could approach the class designations from a different direction: according to your actual value to society. Not your claimed magical ability to create invisible jobs, as rethuglicans claim for their obscenely wealthy parasite masters. But your actual, tangible, daily contribution to making life for your fellow Americans just a little more tolerable.

By that measure, the highest citizenship class with the most citizenship benefits will be awarded to garbage collectors, farmworkers, janitors, waitstaff in diners, nurse aides (the ones who change bedpans and bathe the bedridden), social workers, probation officers, grocery stockers, daycare workers, firefighters, beat cops, special-education teachers and plumbers.

The lowest citizenship class, the one that bars voting, would be assigned to people who live off inherited money or interest on investments, corporate CEOs, lobbyists, consultants, celebrities who are famous for being famous, defense contractors, fossil-fuel industry executives, public relations hacks, televangelists and all media purveyers of thumbsucking conventional wisdom.

And revoke citizenship altogether for everyone who dares to claim that some citizens are more equal that others.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....