Within the R party there once was a real divide between the Tea Party then later the MAGA voters, versus the country club / business owner “Anyone (R)” voter. They both voted the same way, albeit for very different reasons.
Good bet most of the R Tesla owners came from the second subset of Rs. Now that musktrump has shown its true colors that latter group has a severe cognitive dissonance problem. The former subset does not.
Except that the muskrump agenda is highly favorable to the rich. No dissonance needed.
All three Republican owners of Teslas I know (I know four Tesla owners well enough to know their political feelings) are 100% Musk fans. All three are business owners as well, but also racists, homophobes, egomaniacs and pathologically greedy.
The one who isn’t a Republican bought it before the first Trump administration.
I don’t think we should assume trade wars and tariffs will be good to the rich. Their money is in active assets, and they need a functioning economy to grow.
I wouldn’t call myself rich, but I do have enough money invested to be very concerned.
Now imagine having 10 or 20 million dollars teetering on the precipice of a 1930s style Death Ray Depression.
Everyone is losing right now – rich, middle class, and poor – but that won’t continue forever.
Who do you think will come out as the winners and losers after 4 years of muskian policies?
I think the intent is to help the rich, sure.
But I haven’t seen a scenario in which utterly wrecking the economy is good for the rich. Part of how they get rich is by collecting money from the rest of us. We have to have money for that to work.
I’m all ears if you’ve got a proposed mechanism, but I’m quite sure the Buffets, the Johnsons (of J&J fame), the Dimons, the Rockefellers, etc. are not super-thrilled right now.
It’s not that they won’t be OK, but if you have $200 million in markets, real estate, art, and companies you’re still going to take a hit if things go sideways.
It may be only the top 1/4% (or so) who are excited about bringing the US economy down.
There’s plenty of evidence that some of them are advocating for a new feudalism, in which the 99%+ live in desperate poverty and the Lords at the top, well, live like Lords.
Billionaire ‘mini-countries’ exist and are being advocated for; wikipedia seems to have a decent list of them (which can be seen on this linked page):
All this would pretty much leave out the top 10% or so (economically) of Americans, who will suffer along with the rest of us as Trump continues to destroy the USA.
Oh no, I have no mechanism. I think it will be an abject failure. But for someone of that mindset, trickle down economics is like a religious belief.
Note - it’s not the tariffs and drastic cuts that directly lead to money for the rich. It’s the upcoming tax cuts which are “now possible because of all the money we saved by slashing government, and all the money we made off the tariffs.” Again, I don’t think it works, but a large percentage of rich Republicans do.
Eta: as @Sherrerd says, it’s not the top 10% who benefit. It’s waaay smaller than that.
OK, but I still need a mechanism by which 329,000,000 people allow themselves to be owned by roughly 800,000 people. In a nation with hundreds of millions of guns.
Don’t get me wrong, (Note, this is the Pit), I’m sure Elmo and Zuck stroke it every night to the idea, but you need more than 1/4% to be stakeholders to subjugate the remaining 99.75%
You’d think so, yet here we are.
How is that not the situation we’re currently in for certain definitions of ‘owned’?
These sort of libertarian utopias have been tried before and tend to go tits-up quickly because the organizers tend to have no idea how to actually manage a city and because there’s precious little territory out there that isn’t already claimed by a sovereign state that doesn’t care for rich foreigners showing up and claiming they’re above the law.
Hopefully this one meets the same fate.
But, but… they intend…
I’m “tech talent” but while I think my ex-wife is a “hot girl” she’s quite unconventional looking. She’s not winning beauty contests and has a large, broken nose. She is astoundingly good at her job, though, which is possibly the skill set this dipshit should be looking for.
I guess we are straying off topic, so I will shut up. Unless I get a chance to emigrate to this emerald city “somewhere in Europe”…
Elmo is reading your DMs now.
AGILE FREE SPEECH ABSOLUTISM!
There is also the problem that while one might think that life would be better if there were no rules or regulations so you can do what you want, it unfortunately also means that everyone else can also do what they want, and they, like you, are self entitled assholes.
It’s been tried in Grafton, New Hampshire, with less than stellar results.
There’s a book about it: A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear. Can recommend.
No need to set CyberFucks on fire, as they are busy destroying themselves.
We even already have a dedicated Pit thread to Cybertruck Unscheduled Self-Disassembly.
Elmo apparently just found out that the government has the power to issue currency, because he’s rambling to Ted Cruz about “magic money computers that make cash out of thin air”.