The exact same folks who Bernie is going to raise taxes for, mind you. He won't really be able to do anything against the 1% (since they own the Congress, and will continue to own it), but upper middle class represents an attractive target for a cash grab to pay for all those nice free rides he's promising to the poor.
> but upper middle class represents an attractive target for a cash grab to pay for all those nice free rides he's promising to the poor. TIL first world social services are "nice free rides promised to the poor."
The free-market capitalism that you are espousing, requires a ‘cash grab’ —or distribution- to function or else it is completely incompatible with technological advancement.
Looping structures allow programs to increase output and efficiency on the supply side, enabling startups to undercut company's reliant on manual labor. Advancements in tech allow a single person to run an automated script that does the work of thousands of manual workers (while greatly reducing the risk of human error). However, increased efficiency on the supply side decreases the value of human labor, which consequently decreases purchasing power across the board in every industry where a manual process is replaced. The more industry's that are efficient, the fewer customers capitalists can offer their products and services too. Capitalism can’t work unless there is some degree of a 'free ride to the poor', because the wealthy cant generate revenue if there isn’t a middle class to sell their products to. Its in capitalists best interests to have the poor become the middle class—i.e., because no one can create marginal revenue if there is no one to sell things too (or the value of the good being sold deflates).
Without a strong consumer market there is no incentive for anyone to do anything in free market capitalism, because there is no incentive to do something that cannot create enough marginal value to meet ones material need, and because we are all finite beings reliant on external goods to persist, one cannot create value without meeting their material needs.
Would it not be a more preferable for a centralized structure to provide everyone with the basics, so everyone could study what interested them and add value to society as a whole. If the govt invested say 60k in each individual, a greater # of people be able to work on advancing the quality of life for our species, finding new worlds to inhabit, and generally speaking — adding marginal value to the way we spend our time. Instead of minds thinking about physics, and how to improve things, minds are thinking about how to survive. Is this state of affairs not a huge deadweight loss of humanity’s time? A Sanders administration would hopefully be a small, necessary, and peaceful step in the logical direction.