The Fed Gov should seize Gate's homes and turn them into shelters for the homeless.

Do the same thing with every billionaire. Also seize all private golf courses and country clubs and hand them over to habitat for humanity.

Nobody should be allowed to live in obscene luxury while anyone who wants a home but can't afford one goes homeless.

@2 You're an idiot.

When we moved house, I asked the movers if they'd ever done anyone famous. "Nah," the guy said, "not really ... oh, apart from Bill Gates". I asked what Gates' house and stuff was like, and the mover guy said, "Surprisingly ordinary actually".

@5 If you read his post, it is obvious to the most casual observer. A lot of foolish people are good guys.

In truth, we should never have allowed things to get to the point that Gates and other billionaires live opulent lives in the same cities as hundreds and thousands of homeless.

Of the billionaires in existence, Gates is at least one of the better ones, if there is such a thing. Still, how many homes does he own? And we don't question this?

Even when I read @4, my first thought was, "which home?"

Incredibly, it's actually getting worse too.

America.

@5, thanks. I ignore ad hominem attacks. They're typically a sign of defensiveness when the attacker has run out of rational arguments and knows they've lost.

@8 Your "proposal" is worthy of the Bolsheviks. Seize property and turn it over to agents of the state. It's disgusting and stupid.

@9,
Ideally, it wouldn't never need to be seized at all. Ideally, the billionaires of the country (and world) would use their vast riches to help improve the society they live in and profit off of. Unfortunately, they've chosen to hoard their riches instead.

They've been given enormous advantages and have profited tremendously from using the infrastructure society has provided. But they don't want to give back to that society. They don't want anyone else to achieve what they've achieved.

They're takers. Moochers.

Their rising tide should lift all boats. Instead, they only want it to lift their own.

If they refuse to contribute to society in the same capacity that society has contributed to them, then they should be forced to contribute their fair share. And there's way more of us than there are of them.

and you can pick up your pitchfork
or you can pick up your machine gun
with all the eXtra clips 'cause your fellow
Man's not gonna just lie down. not Forever

@11 Bolshevik

@13,

You're stuck in the early 20th century. The rest of us have moved on. Long ago.

It's the year 2021. Try to catch up.

@3, @6, @9 & @13: You might want to go take that Calgon soak if you haven't already, Swift-boots. Your tighty whities really seem to have gotten tangled up in a wad, lately.
How's your blood sugar? Are you worried about squatters taking over Bellevue?

Chase Burns, Wm. Steven Humphreys, and @11 Urgutha Forka: I'm ready to see all RepubliKKKan chuds and their enablers get shipped off ad nauseum to a deserted island, like Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and be left scratching and fighting each other off like rats in a trap, like the boys in William Golding's 1954 Nobel Prize winning novel, "Lord of the Flies".

@14 Urguthat: Ol' Swift-boots is still living in a mortally combatant fear that The Big, Bad Guv'Mint is going to confiscate his guns. Consequentially, shooting his mouth off half-cocked is his only defense, no matter how lame.

Ron De Santis--Governor of glaring red Flor-i-DUMB.

Fascinating that there is not one comment that COVID deaths here in this country are probably closer to one million and worldwide closer to 7.5 million.

http://www.healthdata.org/special-analysis/estimation-excess-mortality-due-covid-19-and-scalars-reported-covid-19-deaths

@18, probably because the estimate isn't the least bit surprising.

I have assumed all along that there was significant undercounting, especially when you have a significant number of lawmakers trying to pretend it isn't any worse than the flue, and is therefore invested in keeping the count artificially low. Nobody wants to admit the numbers are higher, even in countries that are relatively transparent. In the US, DeSantis in Florida has been a complete bastard about hiding the true numbers of deaths. Even in states with halfway honest governments, some cases will get missed simply because they weren't all tested for it. Then there are cases where the deceased had Covid, but also had a heart attack or stroke or something, so the cause of death may not be counted as Covid, even when Covid was clearly a contributing (if not primary) cause.

On top of that, you have countries like India where their medical infrastructure has been completely overwhelmed, and there are now people dying on the streets and being cremated without ever being tested. So you'll obviously get a massive undercount in countries like that. They're not necessarily hiding their numbers; they've just been overwhelmed and don't know. Then you've got Russia, which is very obviously massively underreporting their count; they are utterly corrupt and simply lying. Who knows what their numbers are, but the truth is far worse than they are reporting. And North Korea isn't reporting a thing. Good luck with that.

On top of that, there are ancillary preventable deaths indirectly caused by the pandemic. People who are sick or feel chest pains or something, but don't go to the doctor or hospital because they are afraid to go out, or because the hospital is full of Covid patients or whatever, and they die of a heart attack or infection or something that would normally be treatable if they went in right away. This almost happened to me. I had a bit of skin cancer, which I delayed getting seen for. I did catch it before it got out of control, but only just. These deaths aren't counted toward the pandemic count at all.

So, yeah, the actual death count is probably way higher than the official count. Sad and unfortunate, but not at all surprising.

@2: Obscene luxury is a personal choice. Deal with it.

@21 -- stick a fork innit?

oh you Revolutionary you.

@19: I am so glad that you got treatment in time!

@19:

I don't know if this plays a factor in the reporting, but when my uncle died from COVID about a month ago, the family desperately tried to browbeat the doctors into reclassifying his COD as just pneumonia, which of course they correctly refused to do; and to this day - and probably until they themselves die - they continue to tell everyone that he never had COVID, because they don't believe it's a real thing. So, I can imagine there have been many other deaths during the pandemic that WERE either inadvertently or deliberately not reported as being caused by COVID because of pressure from families or because someone in the reporting pipeline questioned the diagnosis.

@24: So sad that your family had to deal with that nuttiness on top of the grief of your uncle's death.

@27: It wasn't quite like that. Relatively few had to pay those high 90% rates.

https://slate.com/business/2017/08/the-history-of-tax-rates-for-the-rich.html

Every one of those pandas who voted n Arizona was at least 18. In panda years.

@10 - unfortunately, India is working hard at catching up. At this point I doubt there is much that anyone can do except send oxygen and PPE and hope that they start to make better decisions re lockdowns. Even if they got a zillion vaccine doses yesterday it would take months to have much effect.

I don't know whether Mexico suffered from the Trump/Modi kind of denial that cranked up the pandemics here and in India or whether it was something else.

@11 You make a poor argument choosing Bill Gates as an example. Have you heard of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation? Did you know his children are not going to inherit his fortune, instead he plans to give it all away? He is doing exactly as you wish. Too bad he developed so much of what you use to post in this blog and made money by creating value that pretty much everyone uses today. Should we disincentivze creating value by seizing success?

Who asked who to believe what? I can't speak for Bill Gates, but I'm pretty sure he didn't think what he was creating would make him the richest person in the world. However, it happened. Should he be punished for that? Especially considering what he is doing with the Foundation?

Bezos, on the other hand, is a better choice to make the argument. Although, he took risks in developing Amazon in a way that had many investors telling him he was crazy. He did it his way and turned out to be right. So, he deserves to reap some of his success. But he could be doing so much more, starting with making his employees lives so much better than they currently are.

@33,

That's why I said in my post @8 that of all the billionaires, Gates is at least one of the better ones.

Still, with as much good as the Gates Foundation has done, is a privately run, non-transparent corporate charity the way we want to handle things? The issues that the foundation takes on aren't necessarily the most pressing or dire, they're simply the ones Bill, Melinda, and Warren Buffett are interested in pursuing. Should three people privately decide where billions in charity are directed?

Let's not forget that the whole reason the Gates foundation even came into existence is because Bill wanted to deflect everyone's attention away from the antitrust motions towards microsoft (the company is still monopolistic)

So yeah, pat on the back there Bill, for not being a complete scumbag like the Kochs or Walton family, but let's shut down the foundation and instead get some of these people's wealth taxed and used for public organizations to take over addressing national and global problems.

I know you said in in @8, but I believe he shouldn't be on the list at all, considering his doing everything you want. Whether private or public, transparent or open, it is doing great work. And if it is your money, why shouldn't you get to decide how it's spent? I'm sure you enjoy making the decision on how to spend your own money, or do you let someone tell you how to spend it? And shut the Foundation down? You must then feel the world should suffer from more malaria, which is just one example.

My objection is extreme position of "seizing" shit from people who have been successful in some poor attempt at creating "fairness" however it is defined by that person. I am a big fan of "Restrained Capitalism" in a way that helps create more fairness in a broader sense, although, even in a broad sense is still tough to agree upon. Our tax system is broken and will be difficult to repair with those in power wanting to keep it the way it is. But at some point, it might break under its own weight.

I have always voted Democratic as am still a Bernie fan. However, I know with age that the only way to really move forward is push little by little. The trick is not to swing the pendulum too far, because it always swings back too far in the opposite direction. I know it's a tough sell on The Stranger, but the extreme left slamming into the extreme right only leads to a dead stop.

@43 I agree with you. It's why I keep voting Democrat. And I appreciate progressive voices in the conversation. However, we need to be careful not to eat our own and for example, put Bill Gates in the same category as Jeff Bezos.

@40:

Reminds me of a passage from William Saroyan's 1939 Pulitzer Prize winning play, "The Time Of Your Life". The following is spoken by Joe, a young man with money and means, but with a troubling conscience:

"If anybody’s got any money—to hoard or to throw
away—you can be sure he stole it from other people.
Not from rich people who can spare it, but from
poor people who can’t. From their lives and from
their dreams. I’m no exception. I earned the money
I throw away. I stole it like everybody else does. I
hurt people to get it Loafing around this way, I
still earn money. The money itself earns more. I still
hurt people. I don’t know who they are, or where
they are. If I did, I’d feel worse than I do. I’ve got a
Christian conscience in a world that’s got no con¬
science at all. The world’s trying to get some sort of
a social conscience, but it’s having a devil of a time
trying to do that. I’ve got money. I’ll always have
money, as long as this world stays the way it is."

"Troubled conscience"...

DeSantis is actually a chode.

@Nothing Important,

The gist of what I'm getting at is that social services are dreadfully underfunded and the wealthy hold nearly all the funding they need. We shouldn't even NEED a Gates foundation. His taxes, and Microsoft Corp, should have been high enough to pay for social services that do all of what the Gates Foundation does and more.

Instead, we're stuck begging the wealthy to spare us some of their crumbs. Some, like Bill Gates, kindly do so. He's the exception. We shouldn't be a society begging the wealthy to help us. We, as a civilized society, should have instruments in place to help ourselves, funded by those in our society who are more than able to do so.

Oh, and I'm very glad you vote democrat, but I could not disagree more with your assertion that we should only push for a little at a time.

The republican/fascist party has been dragging the entire country further and further to the authoritarian right--against majority wishes, I might add--for decades. They've enacted dramatic right wing, even fascist, legislation. Where's the pendulum swing in the opposite direction from that?

We don't have time to push for a little bit at a time. $15 minimum wage was proposed YEARS ago. Even $15 per hour is, now, also below a living wage. It should be more like $25-30 per hour now.

We need drastic actions NOW. Climate change is happening now. Homelessness is rising now. Wealth inequality is increasing now. We can't afford to nudge things a little bit, we've got to act big, and act big now. We're not approaching the iceberg, we've already hit it and are halfway sunk. Playtime's over.

@49 Urgutha Forka for the WIN! YESSSSSSSsssssssss!!!! Agreed and seconded.

RepubliKKKans have been getting exponentially more corrupt as fuck ever since Ronald a.k.a "Mr. Cue Cards", a.k.a. "Mr. Arms Race to WWIII With Russia", a.k.a. "Mr. Iran-Contra", a.k.a."Mr. Capitalism is Good" a.k.a. "Mr. Trickle Down Economy" a.k.a. "Mr. Let's Kill All Social Programs for the Poor and Give Enormous Tax Cuts Instead to the Rich Who Don't Need Any Federal Assistance! (sound familiar?)", a.k.a. "Mr. AIDS Will Go Away if We All Just Ignore It", a.k.a. "Mr. Oh, and----uhh, ketchup is now a Vegetable!"* Reagan took office---40 years ago. And all because their fearless crooked leader, Richard Milhouse Nixon publicly resigned from the White House on August 9, 1974, permanently staining their "Grand Old Party" after the Watergate scandal. After four abysmal years of Dark Ages, Donald Jackass Trump is still MAGA proud of his blowhard attempt at making Nixon look like a choir boy now.

*I knew to vote for former President Jimmy Carter's Vice President, Walter Mondale and his running mate, Geraldine Ferraro in 1984, the first election year that I could vote for a U.S. President when Reagan was up for re-election.

That 1984 race? The most delightful landslide in American political history! Mondale and Ferraro were totally humiliated.

and Nothing
Delights the dewdrop
more than others' Humiliation.

small Wonder
when pickings get
slim you Volunteer.

@52: Oh please.

@51: Reagan landslide or not, I stand behind my Democratic votes, Elmer. I can't be humiliated knowing damned well not to vote for the self-serving party of corporate greed that over the last four decades has brought this country to its knees.
You, on the other hand, are still a desperately lonely, trolling incel and I'm not----regardless of whom is in the White House.
Thank you, Amerwica, it has been fun being Pwesident.
HUHUHUHUHUHUHUHUHUUHUHUUHUHUHUHUHUHUHUHUHUHUHUHHHHHH....

@53: Give it up, Elmer. At this point even Bugs Bunny would brand you an Ultra Maroon.

@52 kristofarian: Yep. Elmer obviously suffered another extreme early morning sugar rush and felt he had to have SOMEthing to say, gulldernit, no matter how pathetically lame. The Ritolin must have finally settled in.

@55: You are unbalanced, but I still love you.

@57: I'd rather be unbalanced than uneducated, Elmer.
Seek enlightenment now before your brain becomes total Gorilla snot.

@58: Aww, auntie. Tsk tsk.