The problem is that this needs to be funded by the rich, and I'm talking about all those people who aren't paying their fair share of taxes. But the GOP took that off the table, so now, the right is correct, there's absolutely no way we can pay for this. An investment like this needs to have billionaire tax dollars involved, a lot of billionaire tax dollars. For reference:
This month, ProPublica revealed that American billionaires essentially do not pay taxes, and within hours the White House had awkwardly promised no fewer than four federal investigations into the identity of the individual who had alerted the news organization to this fact.
Petition urges Jeff Bezos to blast into space – and stay there
By Thursday, a North Carolina congressman was demanding the FBI director explain why he hadn’t made any arrests or at the very least, “executed any search warrants or raided any offices” in the international manhunt for the leaker.
By the weekend, demands for justice on behalf of America’s parasite oligarchs had unified the Republican party like nothing since perhaps the phrase “public option” was a thing you heard on cable television. Politicians from Susan Collins to the author of the infamous North Carolina “bathroom bill” both grilled law enforcement officials testifying in their committees about the website’s “illegal” violations of mega-billionaire privacy.
Fox News screamed about Twitter’s double standard in enabling sharing of the ProPublica revelations despite blocking an earlier New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. At least 19 senators signed angry letters demanding the investigations they had been repeatedly assured were well under way. (Senator Mike Crapo alone released three separate statements to this effect.) The ranking member of the powerful ways and means committee told the Hill on Friday that the revelations had dealt Democratic proposals to add an additional $8bn to the annual IRS budget – which was meant to help with tax law enforcement and compliance – “close to a death blow”.
Meanwhile, the Democrats hardly had a better response. The billionaire tax avoidance story warranted nary a mention on the Twitter feeds of the four founders of “the Squad” aside from a retweet from AOC. And so the only elected officials who seem to have read the story ProPublica president Richard Tofel had framed as “the most important story we have ever published” were the ones calling for the feds to ransack the ProPublica offices.
But the worst part of the whole saga was the realization that ProPublica’s bombshell revelations would probably have received more attention during the presidency of Donald Trump. ProPublica carefully chose the six billionaires whose tax returns it chose to single out for specific scrutiny, and several of them – Jeff Bezos, George Soros and Mike Bloomberg – are so loathed by conservatives it would have been impossible for a Trump-era Republican party to respect their constitutional right to dodge taxes. The scarce press coverage of the fact that billionaires have not only paid virtually no taxes, but that they have also added to their net worths in recent years, makes the four-year media obsession with former president Donald Trump’s tax returns feel like a partisan crusade that was never about a genuine commitment to ending billionaire tax avoidance, but just scoring points against Trump alone.
Fifteen years of tax return information on thousands of plutocrats is one of the biggest stories of the decade. And yet … crickets
www.theguardian.com