Bring the Hammer Down on the Rich

Enough fucking around.  Time to knock the motherfuckers down and keep them down.

Kathleen Geier explains that all the minimum-wage hikes in the world won't solve the fundamental cause of income inequality: the obscenely rich have all the money.

What then must we do? The answer is clear. Rather than letting the market work its magic, as Yglesias would have it; or addressing inequality solely through “bottom up” policies, the way San Francisco has been doing, the city — and America — has to start looking at inequality from a different angle: from the top down. The hammer needs to come down on the corporations and the one percenters, hard. We need to crack down on their rent-seeking activities, eliminate the special protections they enjoy via unreasonable patent and intellectual property protections, wipe out their undeserved public subsidies and unfair tax breaks, dramatically increase marginal tax rates, and institute a tax on all forms of wealth. These people have too much money, which gives them too much power, and it is poisoning our society and our political process. The bulk of their money needs to be taken away from them, for the sake of the public good.

She concludes:

.... enacting such dramatic changes will not be easy. But just because these reforms are not politically feasible right this minute doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be talking about them. That’s the first step. Progressives should start pressing for these changes right now. You never know when opportunity might come knocking and we might stand a fair chance of enacting them.