Ilk Ilk Ilk Ilk

Dude, you can't say Ilk, It's elitist and that's why they voted for trump. The death of democracy is on you now.

This seems like a good opportunity to thank Kurtster and his ilk for their support in the ongoing f*cking over of America by the current cruel and utterly clueless Administration.
 
Job well done boys!!
 
Go grab a beer ya knuckleheads!

This seems like a good opportunity to thank Kurtster and his ilk for their support in the ongoing f*cking over of America by the current cruel and utterly clueless Administration.
 
Job well done boys!!
 

This feels a bit like someone sitting in one of Titanic's lifeboats  and shouting "ICEBERG!"

Regarding the tax discussion....I'm 99% sure you wrote about the Buy, Borrow, Die strategy.  There's an article about it in the New Yorker recently, but it's paywalled.  It's available on Apple News too (where I'm reading it).

Beyond the strategy, they list some pretty compelling facts for change:

Much of the debate around American tax policy focuses on the income-tax rate paid by the very wealthiest Americans. But the bulk of those people’s fortunes doesn’t qualify as income in the first place. A 2021 ProPublica investigation of the private tax records of America’s 25 richest individuals found that they collectively paid an effective tax rate of just 3.4 percent on their total wealth gain from 2014 to 2018. Musk paid 3.3 percent, Jeff Bezos 1 percent, and Buffett—who has famously argued for imposing higher income-tax rates on the superrich—just 0.1 percent.

Larry Ellison, a co-founder of Oracle and America’s fourth-richest person, has pledged more than $30 billion of his company’s stock as collateral in order to fund his lavish lifestyle, which includes building a $270 million yacht, buying a $300 million island, and purchasing an $80 million mansion. A Forbes analysis found that, as of April 2022, Musk had pledged Tesla shares worth more than $94 billion, which “serve as an evergreen credit facility, giving Musk access to cash when he needs it.”

This strategy isn’t as common among the merely very rich, who may not have the expensive tastes that Ellison and Musk do, but it isn’t rare either. Liscow and Fox calculated that the top 1 percent of wealth-holders, excluding the richest 400 Americans, borrowed more than $1 trillion in 2022.

Trillions of dollars per year in untaxed wealth...while the rabble fight over the scraps.  In Musk, you have a guy not paying taxes at all talking about the damage that inefficiency is doing to the country.  The same country that created the infrastructure and systems that allowed him to become so wealthy.

and Nick Hanauer: 

I have a message for my fellow plutocrats and zillionaires and for anyone who lives in a gated bubble world: Wake up. Wake up. It cannot last. Because if we do not do something to fix the glaring economic inequities in our society, the pitchforks will come for us, for no free and open society can long sustain this kind of rising economic inequality. It has never happened. There are no examples. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state or an uprising.

Politicians have learned that there is no consequence for giving away public funds. Unfortunately, that is all under the 'spend' side of the ledger that will need to be fixed someday.