I don't "disagree" with the eventual direction you hope to get to (with sovereign wealth funds and such). My gut feel is that they would be great idea at a very small scale, but would distort the market too much at the massive scale necessary to actually change societal habits. I don't quite have any data driven research to back this gut feel, while you *do* have solid data points that it works at a small scale.
For this post, please allow me to change focus to the other premise you used to arrive at your eventual point - where I *do* have a dispute backed by solid data.
With respect, I disagree that we have two sides per se. We have two political factions whose rhetoric of course differs greatly, but whose leadership policies differ little when it matters, i.e. when their faction is in power. Both are corporatist to their core. I see zero chance of changing that, but in the end I don't think it's even necessary to. When your political system is focused on preserving and protecting the interests of corporate elites, I would think it obvious that you want to have your interests structured to be the same as corporate elites.
Let me pick the last two legislative achievements of the elephants and the donkeys. The donkey's did Obamacare. Did that do wealth transfer from americans to the billionaires? Or, in general benefited the Americans?
I downloaded "NHE Summary" spreadsheets from the cms.gov website -
https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/NationalHealthExpendData/NationalHealthAccountsHistorical.
After some number crunching, this is the year-over-year growth rate of the national health expenditure?
1997 6% 2008 4%
1998 6% 2009 4%
1999 6% 2010 4%
2000 7% 2011 3%
2001 9% 2012 4%
2002 10% 2013 3%
2003 9% 2014 5%
2004 7% 2015 6%
2005 7% 2016 5%
2006 7% 2017 4%
2007 6% 2018 5%
Do you notive how Obamacare bent the growth rate curve? This is *exponential* improvement - in money that was saved for all Americans.
(~5 to 6% growth is still not sustainable since it is > GDP growth. much work is still needed. But the direction of what the "corporatist donkey's" - as you might call them - achieved is pretty clear here).
Now let's talk about the latest tax reform. That essentially "stole" $2Tln from my children's generation, with 80% of that of the loot going to the top 1%, and the vast majority of *that* to the billionaire class.
Which way did that wealth transfer happen in that case, in your opinion? From Americans to billionaires or from billionaires to Americans?
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I am fully aware of how "corporatist" the donkey's are. Joe Lieberman was representing me in the Senate when he killed the public option for Obamacare. If that was driven by a concern that "too much of a good thing too fast" can produce too many unforeseen side effects, especially when he had 50k+ constituents who relied on medical insurance companies for their paycheck - that would be a legitimate legislative action. Based on his history, however, I suspect it could as well have been driven by his "corporatist" nature and some quid-pro-quo. There are many such "corporatist" examples from Clinton years (what of the "prison reform" that put tens of millions of $$ in the hands of private prison companies, with a perverse incentive to imprison as much as possible to goose up the profits).
But you are still left with donkeys who sometime, may be by mistake, do pro-American things, and the elephants who have ALWAYS been anti-American without fail for the past 50+ years.
Is there any specific reason you need to boil things down to black and white??