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When the rest of us get taxed it's just how society works. When billionaires get taxed, now it's a "scheme."
To be fair, that's a British style of writing. It's a loaded word in North American journalism, but neutral in the UK.
Ah, fair!
This is the point to be made.
Scheme just refers to a system. And you need buy in else billionaires just pull up their flag and move their capital.
The fact these people can borrow against their portfolio and thus have no income is ridiculous.
When they decide to tax the rest of us they just do it. When they decide to tax billionaires, they hem and haw forever over feasibility studies first.
Sadly I doubt the US would ever go along with this even though our citizens would strongly support it. The wealthy have too much power here.
We're patient zero for the world's current greed disease.
Not only won't we go along, our purchased government will internationally war against this. Never forget we destabilized the South American continent, a government at a time, to keep their markets open for capitalist exploitation and snuff out any potential examples of an economy that serves its people, as opposed to a society that subsists in service to an economy as it is here and increasingly everywhere.
We're a big reason the global owner class has so much unelected, unaccountable power that needs to be fought to begin with, our government has spent decades convincing other governments to "turn the bull loose" to open their markets to unchecked capitalist exploitation and betray their people under the promise that their elite can live like gluttonous modern Pharoahs for their betrayal. The UK has fully fallen to this as just one example.
This initiative for all intents and purposes is an attack on the United States and everything its people THAT MATTER, not us, stand for.
The way the US political system works is that it really requires solid majorities to want something.
So it will take a long time where nothing seems to happen and then suddenly big changes can happen.
I remember back in the 90s, it seemed impossible to ever get a black president, gay marriage or legal marijuana.
Or look at student loans or universal healthcare. Not perfect, but steps have been made.
So yeah, I do think the USA will lag for a long time and then suddenly surprise us all.
Or look at student loans
In the US, student loans were a problem that was created starting in the 90s by cutting government funding of state colleges and legislating a way to dump a ton of dept onto students under the pretense of access. Biden's actions are temporary bandages on the open, gaping wound that will not heal until we address the actual underlying cause.
Triage in the form of student debt forgiveness, while necessary, is not progress towards a solution.
By "surprise" I assume you mean a capital-friendly, poorly implemented solution that does not solve the underlying problem. All of your examples illustrate this.
The first black president was a war criminal who enacted a right wing agenda.
Gay marriage is likely to be overturned by our billionaire-owned, unaccountable Supreme Court.
Legal marijuana is a patchwork- the best states have inefficient and nonsensical cannabis regulations, and the worst states still have inhumane, draconian punishment.
Despite the small amount of forgiveness, the total amount of student loans owed is rising. Currently we are at a record high of $1.75 trillion in debt.
And as for universal healthcare, the number of uninsured and underinsured keeps rising. The number of deaths due to lack of access keeps rising. And there are many people, like myself, who have had their lives destroyed by medical bankruptcy. The entire system is designed to maximize profit, patient health is a secondary concern.
Please let this finally happen. It's absurd when normal people pay maybe 20-40% taxes depending on the country when the super rich almost don't pay at all.
The wealthy being able to use the appreciated, estimated value of things they own to secure low interest loans to purchase even more things without needing the money to be considered income for tax purposes is a primary driver of wealth in equity.
I'd looove to see this but an international plan to stop climate change is also technically possible but I'm not gonna get my hopes up based on what we've seen in that arena thus far. That latter is also an outright existential threat to our species.
It's also technically possible that anyone can win the lottery but the odds are decidedly stacked against them.
I hate that I'm so goddamn pessimistic about this stuff, but it's hard to see a path to betterment until shit really hits the fan in catastrophic ways. (Moreso than we've seen thus far.) Between the rich holding ridiculous power and the 30-40% of the population they've utterly brainwashed, an optimistic future seems pretty far fetched. Not that we shouldn't try, of course, I'm just venting my frustrations. That said, as an elder millenial, I have a good degree of hope for the younger generations. Overall they seem much more progressive and don't buy into the illusions about our current system that we do.
I spent sooooo much of my teens and early 20s involved in leftist activism and spent the next decade utterly apathetic as we never seemed to accomplish much of anything. Now I'm just trying to get by and help those who I directly have the power to help, such as coworkers and the kids in my life.