Tax the rich: It's the right thing to do and it's popular

Tax the rich: It's the right thing to do and it's popular 

Part of the rule of law is that there are rules. Sometimes, people abuse the rules. The ugly part was that people make trades that may look bad to get things passed. Doing this was an informal rule - which is now being resisted by than the holier than art thou GOP. Members are actually working against the interests of their states to please the fringes of their party and a few authoritarian donors (don't call them libertarians). 

Church doctrine will not help the debate. Church politics might. Progressive bishops need to shame their brethren into shaming the GOP into supporting the Biden budget. The main spending provisions improve childcare benefits and make permanent child tax care benefits, both of which will directly decrease abortions. As a bonus, they will force employers to pay higher wages rather than using the starvation of children as a means of getting people to work. 

Bezos pays a decent wage. It is the working conditions necessitated by the nature of the work that are the problem. It is no longer his problem, however. He is leaving active management. The process needs to be engineered such that the job is more easily accomplished with bathroom breaks thrown in. The true solution is ownership

In the same way, in order to raise taxes on the rich, they must see a personal reason, apart from duty, for doing so. Inequality among the top 10% of incomes is where the debate must be. In the race for higher incomes, we need incentives to stop running.  Ownership is the answer here as well. And greed. A greed based solution will bring the wealthy into line. If not for them, then for their children who are accumulating debt certificates which will become worthless.

How much one owes on the debt is a function off of income taxes paid. There are two parts to paying higher tax. One is higher rates. The other is higher income. If less rich people have higher income, they will owe more of a share of the debt. If only the rich are paying taxes it is because they have too much income, which raising both tax rates and the minimum wage will correct. The more they pay in tax, the less benefit they get from transferring the income of workers to their own pockets.

Radicalizing the masses will not help. Marxists have been trying for more than a century. You cannot vote in equality. As long as racism and sexism can be employed, the working class will always be divided. Nurturing the belief that the Democratic Party is too woke or that abortion bans are just around the corner keeps half the working class in bed with those rich who like their money just where it is and their workers hungry. The workers have been made to agree.

Bezos flying to space is advertising. It is a way to get rich people to give his company (not him) money so that the technology of space flight can be improved enough to be cheaper. It is better to use the high tech sector to build space industry than new ways to kill us all. The whole system for private space was worked out at Goddard in the 1980s, partially sourced by an external policy paper given to one of the engineers by a classmate on how to privatize space to get the aerospace sector out of the war business. The war business drives inequality more than Bezos.