Almost certainly not. The relevant use of the term “person” is in the 14th Amendment, and the Framers of that particular Amendment almost certainly weren’t thinking about those types of companies when parsing their language for that text.
There’s no way to address this without changing the Constitution, IMHO.
Other countries have very different elections because they: i) are Parliamentary systems; ii) have much smaller legislative districts (about a fifth the size of ours); iii) have the ability to impose limits on speech that our government does not (restricting spending, requiring discounted airtime for candidates, etc.); or iv) massive public funding of elections. Most of those things we can’t do without a Constitutional Amendment, the others are politically impractical.
I don’t share the “all hope is lost” view, because I don’t think much has changed. That’s not pollyannish about the potential for corruption in the modern system, but just cynicism about the same extent of corruption at any other prior point. The rich and powerful have always had the ability to gain the favors of politicians by being the ones to help them get elected. That kind of power exists in all times and places, and it’s almost impossible to eliminate it. That’s why the Founders didn’t even try - their remedy was to have a big national government to try to set that power against itself, but making the government too big for any one “faction” to get a hold of it.
In a way, it’s almost a little better that we have the current system than prior ones. Yes, someone like a Tom Steyer can come in and write a big check and distort a race. Is that a major improvement over having a Carmine DeSapio or Richard Daley? I mean, maybe - because there are lots of people who can write those kinds of big checks, while the old rich and powerful held their power by having control over political assets that couldn’t be duplicated by a new entrant.
But again, there’s no easy answer. Our problems are caused by having a Presidential system, districts that are so big that only paid media can win, very strong speech protections, very weak public funding of elections, weak political parties, and technological advances that allow people to build political operations from scratch with nothing but money. I don’t think there’s any changes that can be made within that system that will disempower the wealthy.
I disagree. People have figured out the loopholes, and they are weaponizing them. Plus, the “unwritten rules” are no longer being honored (ref: the current administration). It has become clear to me since the rise of these people a lot of rules were unwritten, but honored. No more.
So we’re doomed to become a plutocracy. Kinda sad.
I think that conflates corruption generally with the specific, “I can help get you elected to office if you do what I want” corruption that campaign finance laws specifically are intended to address. The former can be addressed without implicating the First Amendment, obviously, while the latter is more tricky.
My point is that latter type of corruption has always been with us and will always be with us, even during the “best” times of campaign finance regulation. Enforceable campaign finance laws don’t remove the ability of the wealthy and powerful to help get people elected - they simply shift the way that it’s done. Instead of a wealthy person writing a check, it’s the union head or the newspaper chain owner or the evangelical leader or the Chairman of Fox News being able to call up their politicians with the threat/promise of their organization helping or hurting their campaign chances. Or the NRA or “The Groups” or all the other organizations that very openly and expressly will barter their support in exchange for pliant elected officials who do what they want.
You can’t take the politics out of politics, even if you can take the money out of poltics. And again, one benefit of having that politics move through money rather than the other channels of power is that lots of different people with different politics have money, so you have some opportunity to set power against itself. Which is really the only way to check it.
the bill begins with the premise that corporations lack rights and exercise only those privileges granted by statute.
Seems faulty from the start. The state attempts to strip away things like the 1st Amendment, the 4th Amendment, the 5th Amendment, to name a few - in entirety..
If this is legal, then a state has the right to seize corporate property without trial or due process.
The state tries to get around this by:
following the full revocation of every entity’s powers, the bill re-grants those powers, but withholds the power to engage in “acts that constitute election activities or ballot-issue activities.”
But again, the entire premise is faulty. If the state has the right to take away Constitutional rights, the fact that they then regrant them also means that the state can again take them away in the future.
This law should fail every single court challenge it will face.
DeSantis has increasingly embraced that message as he pushes a sweeping overhaul of Florida’s property tax system, arguing that wealthy snowbirds, investors and owners of luxury properties should shoulder more of the tax burden so that homesteaded Floridians can pay less — or eventually nothing at all.
“Tax someone rich. If some billionaire from Brazil is buying, tax them. Good, that’s fine with me,” he said last week. “I’m looking out for the Floridians here.”
From the project report:
" In addition, neither decarbonization nor sufficiency can be financed and politically sustained without a drastic reduction in inequality of income, wealth and power, both between countries and within them."
I’m curious, not having read the quite lengthy report, how does one make for a “drastic reduction in inequality” between Canada (GDP/capita of $57,000) and Eritrea ($650)?
The bottom 50% of earners in the U.S. account for 3% of all tax revenue, Bezos told CNBC, adding, “I think it should be zero.”
“You have a bunch of people in this country who are doing really well, but you have a bunch of people in this country who are struggling,” Bezos said. “Some people talk about making the tax system more progressive. How about we start by having the nurse in Queens [who makes $75,000 a year] not pay taxes?”
Several states have proposed additional taxes on their richest citizens in recent years, including a “billionaires” tax in California that has faced pushback from wealthy residents. Former California resident Brin opposed the one-time, 5% tax on state residents with assets of at least $1.1 billion, arguing he fled the Soviet Union in 1979 and that he doesn’t “want California to end up in the same place.” Peter Thiel was among the first billionaires to exit the state because of the proposed tax, followed by car loan magnate Don Hankey, former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and DoorDash cofounder Andy Fang. Some federal lawmakers recently proposed tax cuts for lower earners, including Sen. Corey Booker, D-N.J., whose proposed “Keep Your Pay Act” calls for the first $75,000 of income to be tax-free.
The bottom half of taxpayers had an adjusted gross income of nearly $54,000 in 2023, according to the Tax Foundation, citing the most recent IRS statistics. By contrast, households in the top 1% earned at least $676,000 of income that year.
The tax code could be amended to raise the tax rate on the top 10% earners making the tax code more progressive.
Or the nation could cut its spending by 3% rather than hiking the tax on the high income taxpayer…ROFL like that could happen.
There’s not enough capital chasing AI and rockets and crypto which are the engines of job creation so we need to cut capital gains taxes to encourage investment in these innovations and create jobs.
For 2026, a single person forswearing wage & salary income and living off qualified dividends and capital gains can earn a bit over $65,000/yr in the 0% bracket, a married couple, double that.
It’s time to gift that same 0% rate to folks who work for a living.
Actually, all income should be treated the same. There should be no ordinary income threshold for cap gains taxes, for example. And I’m one who is benefiting from it, as I paid zero on cap gains this year (I kept ordinary income low enough this year).
It’s the sorts of income that rich people earn that gets special treatment. Poor people don’t have to worry about cap gains, or qualified dividends (in general). Rich people don’t generally get W2 wages, but poor people do. And rich people mostly benefit from a stepped-down basis. The tax code is written so rich people don’t pay much. That’s what needs to change.
We need more tax revenue, not less. As is evidenced by our ballooning deficit and debt.
But big money is purposeful political corruption. Many countries do not allow corporations to bribe the candidates.
Being a lawyer would be more noble if the central issues were discussed.
Beyond the purpose of bribing individual politicians, the public has limited to no say between elections. The governing bodies are a closed system that do not represent our country’s interests.
We could debate what those interests are. The focus on corporate interests are destructive of those interests at just about every turn.
I have an aversion to the idea that more than half (when you included non-earners) of all citizens having no skin in the game, so to speak. The lack of association with what we pay and what we get only gets worse the more we remove people from the pool of those we pay. It also likely exacerbates the mentality around those that pay getting to decide how it is paid.
They (those not at poverty level or lower) don’t need to pay a lot, but they should pay something on a federal level.
Doesn’t change my calculus. SS and Medicare taxes are to pay for future benefits. Income taxes are to pay for everything else.
I would even argue that I would rather see payroll taxes reduced for that group (thus making SS/Medicare more progressive for them) than an elimination of their income taxes.
Paying taxes is a shared experience and a shared responsibility. If I paid no taxes, what care do I have how the money is spent? It doesn’t cost me anything.
Hawkwin
Who wonders how taxpayers would behave if we received gross income and then had our taxes deducted from our bank accounts the following business day.
