SmirKing Revenge

Steven Bartlett asks James Talarico how Texas chases “equality” without chasing off figures like @ElonMusk. Talarico’s answer: Musk’s net worth is a “spiritual sickness,” and the rich should pay something closer to the 1950s rate of 90%. BARTLETT: “What would you have done to stop [Elon from becoming a trillionaire]?” TALARICO: “We at one point in this country, we had, I think it was in the 1950s, had a top marginal tax rate of 90%. I don’t think it needs to be that high, but we used to have a political system and an economic system that more fairly distributed the fruits of our labor.” “And I think the thing that really upsets people, particularly about the Elon example, is that Tesla was successful because of taxpayer dollars, right? Tesla got investment from the federal government, which is why it has been so successful.” CONTEXT: The taxpayer dollars Tesla received were a LOAN from the Department of Energy in 2010. Ford got $5,900,000,000, and Nissan got $1,400,000,000 from the same program. But Tesla did something those automakers hadn’t. It repaid the full $465,000,000 it had borrowed, with interest, 9 years ahead of schedule, becoming the first automaker in the program to pay its loan back in full.

DSA candidate Tim Denson tries to sell the crowd on “democratizing the workplace” and says Walmart should belong to the workers. Big mistake. The guy 6 ft away from him grew up in Venezuela. And he’s heard this communist fairy tale before. DANIEL DI MARTINO: “So you want to take it [Walmart] from its owners and have the workers do what?” TIM DENSON: “I want the workers to own it and get paid better and have better benefits and be able to provide better lives for their families.” DI MARTINO: “We can buy shares in Walmart right now. In fact, all of the SpaceX workers became millionaires overnight.” “You can start a workers’ cooperative right now. It’s legal, but under a socialist country, you’re not allowed to own your own property and start your own private corporation.” Denson tried to refute Di Martino’s point. Then Di Martino dropped this line on him: DI MARTINO: “It’s very easy to be a socialist in a capitalist country. It’s illegal to be a capitalist in a socialist country. That is the difference.” [audience applause] Then it got personal: DI MARTINO: “When I had to go to the grocery store, Tim, I had to put my fingerprint in a scanning machine so that they would tell me what I was allowed to purchase.” “And I could only go Mondays and Saturdays because we have to ration food, because that’s what happens when there’s no profit motive and the farmers, their food is confiscated because they had to sell it to the government and everybody else at the price the government tells the farmers.” “My mom made chocolate bonbons for parties.” “Well, people have a right to chocolate, so we had a price control on chocolate.” “So my mom had to buy counterfeit chocolate, put it in black bags as if we were cocaine drug dealers. That’s what socialism was in Venezuela. That’s what worker ownership of the means of production is.” “Where has it ever worked?” Denson had no answer. Because there isn’t one.