DrafterX wrote:I'm still puzzled by the evil 1% thing... These are the guys that employ millions of tax paying property owners right..?? Yet they are the bad guys.. what if they took their money and closed up shop..??
There is a difference between big businesses that contribute to society, like you are talking about, and SOME big businesses that take big profits from hurting the average citizen in one way or another. These crooks, disguised as businessmen, took OUR money after closing up shop and left a contaminated mess that we all have to pay for and deal with for a long time, in some cases forever...
Look up "superfund sites" and see the number of haz-mat sites (hundreds-scattered all across our nation) left by businesses that employed thousands of tax-payers. Examples are some mining and manufacturing businesses that destroyed the environment around their operations and when the bills come due, the owners/operators file bankruptcy after years of profit-taking, leaving all of us to pay for another devastated super fund site. Hurricane Harvey shined some light on the potential danger of several superfund sites in and around Houston.
Other examples are like Enron, who purposely misled their employees and customers before collapsing after conducting business recklessly and without regard for legal boundaries while driving up profits, salaries and bonuses for the top administrators. They drove up electricity costs for huge numbers of Americans by manipulating the market and supplies they controlled. Enron's collapse destroyed most of their thousands of employees' retirement savings, cost everyone billions of dollars in higher electricity bills and disrupted the power grid.
The biggest and scariest latest example is the banking and investment industry nearly collapsing the entire world economy. We wouldn't tolerate a business that is set up to profit from some criminal enterprise, right? Wrong...we do, because we hope that our capitalistic market will push the bad actors out before they do great harm.
It doesn't in many cases, as a look at our history proves. We need government to regulate some businesses, especially those that can and have caused great harm. The problem is that many conservatives don't want regulation until after the catastrophes, some of which could've been prevented, and then after we have forgotten they want to remove the regulations.
So the Trump administration has reversed many regulations on myriad businesses...and is preparing to derail the Dodd-Frank Act and the Consumer Protection Agency, and yet we have been distracted by this issue involving 800K kids...another "squirrel" moment...