Because they bought the government.

- is a form of sociopathic mental illness, currently unrecognized by any professional psychological association or governing body I know of.

It's classic addictive behavior we've seen over and over. I've come to realize that getting wads of money function on the brain like heroin or coke. You get a high and then want more, you want that high so bad you'll hurt people to get it.

by giving them tax cuts it will trickle back down. They been telling this lie for 100 years.

Demand create jobs. There will always be investors capitalizing on the demand.

Feed the horse more oats and the sparrows will have plenty to eat. Reagan changed the name to trickle down.

The income multiplier declines as income increases these schemes can't work.

They are happy to screw unto others, if it makes them mammon.

Republi-cons. I love it!

Plus some of the Democrats as well. That kind of campaign contributions etc. buys billionaires a lot of tax cuts and deregulation. The only way to stop this is a Constitutional amendment for publicly funded elections, from dog catcher to president, along with banning professional lobbying. Get money out of our government.

I think the 24/7/365 campaigning is also what is helping to make people crazy. Limit the campaigning time to six weeks or something.

This was one of FT's "Lunch with the FT" features, with this interview taking place at Altman's Napa Valley farm house, where he's spent much of his time since he and his husband welcomed their first child via surrogacy. Altman offered to cook lunch - a simple vegetarian meal - for the journalist instead of going to a restaurant where he'd be pestered by selfie seekers.

But he still reminded the journalist - FT editor Roula Khalaf - that as OpenAI CEO, he has the most important job in the world.

Not surprisingly, she writes that she found Altman "brimming with confidence" and "radiating ambition" and "convinced of his own destiny."

He's gone from thinking AI is as important as the Industrial Revolution to believing that the "explosion in creativity" from AI makes it more comparable to the Renaissance. (Note: Generative AI like OpenAI's is FAKE creativity via mashups possible only because OpenAI stole as much of the world's intellectual property as it could, and the theft continues, with OpenAI's bots scraping some websites as much as several hundred times a day.)

Altman, ever the company hypester,.tells her "people are saying" their most advanced models are "genius-level intelligence.". (People are saying otherwise, too.)

She asks Altman about recent questions on his company training AI on copyrighted intellectual property, including art from a Japanese anime studio whose founder has made his contempt for AI art clear. Altman tells her " compensation for artists may be required" (her words, not necessarily his) but he'd prefer to release the tools first and then "find answers to the questions that arise" (again, her words). And this is standard Silicon Valley "move fast, break things, steal things, pay the best lawyers whatever's necessary so you won't have to pay for what you broke and stole" business philosophy.

He compares AI art to the invention of the camera, a BS comparison. (Cameras capture reflected light from a real subject in front of them, and artistry and creativity are involved in choice of subject, lighting, angle, editing, etc. AI does a sort of shopping-with-keywords exploitation and mashup of stolen photos and artwork and their descriptions - often grotesque mashups - and the AI user and pretend artist can generate images of something with just a name, like a Latin species name, without having any idea what that object looks like, as long as the name and related image(s) were ripped off for the AI's training data.)

(and so forth . . . )

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100220304330

Our tendency as broad thinking Dems to is want to talk to and fix everything. We can't keep trying to win on 50 platform points, however worthy they may be. We win as the GOP did, on a few key issues that the voters care enough about to come out and vote for. But GOP is beholden to the donor base. Money into politics is the ultimate cause of erosion of our democracy.

Why don't Congressional Democrats make Congressional Magats own giving 7 trillion dollars to billionaires?

Where is the debate about not giving the tax cuts?

By those who actually follow CSPAN.
We as a society treat Congress as a joke anyway, yet complain they do nothing.
Have you contacted your congresscritter recently? Laz calls our senators and congressman every week talking about what's on the docket and how it affects our neighborhood and city -and their politics. Laz understands enough about history and economics to make his points.
They know where he stands. Because he talks to them and makes sound arguments.
And he calls them when he thinks they did something right.

Chris Murphy and Maxwell Frost are currently barnstorming Florida. Two things about that: 1) the Medicaid attack and tax cuts are front and center, but it's town halls- they talk about memecoins, the rule of law, and whatever else comes up; 2) cover your ears- the MSM has given their tour minimal attention- they give equal or greater coverage to Kash Patel in Vegas or Trump's latest word salad.

Why don't the Dems do this? Why don't the Dems do that? Let's not forget that they are the minority in Congress. We can change that.

meanwhile our democracy disappears and the last election was stolen.

to limit government spending[1][2][3] by cutting taxes, to deprive the federal government of revenue in a deliberate effort to force it to reduce spending.

“We tend to forget that Republicans were not always the party of tax cuts,” Prasad explained. “When President Ford wanted to cut taxes in the 1970s, it was conservative Republicans who were against. Within a few short years, what it meant to be a Republican completely changed.”

The Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, the largest tax cut in U.S. history, from its inception in the mid-1970s to the passing of the law during Reagan’s first year in office marked the beginning of this philosophy.

Significant tax cuts are a distinctly American phenomenon. In contrast to other countries, the United States is unusual for maintaining a low level of tax revenue as a percentage of GDP, despite the rise of GDP over the last several decades.The U.S. can learn from a European-style tax policy that embeds progressive policies into a system that also promotes businesses and encourages economic growth. BUT NO, NO, NO that would help the average American citizen - that would be so Anti...America First.

Central governance.

Starve the beast is now a sweet old fashioned idea.

Not sure who/what is driving this? The GOP Congressional leaders do not appear to be smart enough to plan this as a strategy and no doubt the GOP POTUS's are not - Reagan, Bush, Bush, Trump....no way.

Of his wankings.

I refuse to say writings.

JD Vance, Musk, Thiel and others are the ones driving the boat with this stuff. Trump is literally just the front man (think Squid Game).

Poor and working class don't bribe enough

There is no empathy in them, just greed. They will always want more.

Some of them are dangerous and need to be in prison.

'nuff said.

Because so many voters are sheep and want to be told how to think. The GOP is quick to always be the first to publicly define their version of the so called reality of a situation. In addition to beating the Dems to the megaphone, they also send out their shills to all the media outlets. In the world of influence its first come, first believed. By the time the Dems respond the mindset has become firmly planted and is hard to remove. It happens continuously over and over again. Mitch McConnell is the master of the technique. The fact that he has been absent of late, at least publicly, speaks volumes about his opinion of Trump.

There is a book called “Influence” by Robert Cialdini that explains how influence works and how easy it is to apply it to manipulate public opinion. A must read if you are really into politics or just want to understand human interaction.

that with all of this effort to save money, by firing masses of federal workers and slashing government agencies and programs, has there been ANY talk of using the money saved to pay down the National Debt? Remember the National Debt -- that enormous number that used to make Republican leaders so worried?
No, all of this pain is only so we can give tax cuts to Trump and his highest-paying donors!

Unfortunately too many elected officials, and voters, don't believe in consent of the governed. They think might makes right.

It was riveting and used personal, individual examples.

Democrats need to do town halls similar to the one done for fired federal workers, town halls with one topic.

Example: SignalGate and NLRB gate is not getting enough attention so do a town hall about this relating to our national security.
Get Malcolm Nance to moderate it and get people who are or were involved in national security as guests, maybe pry General Milley off his couch. With the proper publicity the MSM will be all over this type of town hall.

Do a town hall on billionaire tax cuts vs gutting the social safety net. Have Martin O'Malley as a moderator and get people to attend whose lives are dependent on the social safety net. let ordinary people tell their stories.

If the DNC wants some ideas, PM me. Wasting time on a 3rd impeachment is the definition of insanity.

Being a crafter, I see ai in many things. Crochet patterns with lovely images of what it’s “supposed“ to look like, but never does. Bright colorful books on subjects that the “writer” knows nothing about. Weaving, knitting, crochet. You name it. Some charlatan has gone to ChatGPT and had it write a book for him/her that looks beautiful but doesn’t make sense to a knowledgeable crafter. Then they use it to scam people out of money until it gets so many bad reviews no one will buy it. Ai does what it’s told but cannot create! Yet! We had all better hope it never learns to do more than efficiently take orders.

They can hole up in their fortified mansions and they plan on AI solving the earth's problems from climate change.

I don't.

They manufactured a horserace and now they have what they wanted - a black mirror style reality show to air nonstop to a frightened nation.

The reason is that the current rate was reduced by the Trump tax cuts that expire. They expire because when enacted they were unsustainable if permanent.

Now, they want to prevent a ,"tax increase" which is really the rate returning to the rate before the TEMPORARY tax cut. All the cuts etc already threatened are still not enough to offset making that tax break permanent.

to be the beneficiaries of the rules. They plan to scrape together every last cent we have to live off of and give it to themselves. There is no check and balance system on greed in an oligarchy..

yup

It closes a little over half the shortfall.