Graham Platner got a lot of attention with this:
U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner wants to eliminate the federal tax on gasoline and diesel fuel, freeze electric rates and fund clean energy developments, as part of his "Take Back American Energy" plan released Friday.
Gas taxes are 18.3 cents a gallon, and I’m fine with a moratorium on gas tax, if only to teach people that gas taxes are a drop in the bucket in a scenario where gas prices have gone up a couple of bucks. But there’s another approach that will do very little to address the high price of gas, but might address the deep and abiding public hatred of oil companies: tax their extra profits that come from the high price of oil. A so-called “windfall profits tax”, would simply tax back the extra money they made because the price of oil jumped due to the Iran war. I guess this isn’t populism, because even Platner isn’t suggesting it. It would be populism if you tell people that we’ll re-open the hospitals in their towns, or pay their SNAP benefits, from excess oil company profits.
Maybe a windfall profits tax is “slopulism”, a new term coined on BlueSky and other forums where self-anointed smart people decide to tell us dummies that some proposal that would be popular can’t really work. I really hate that term, because the people labeling proposals “slopulism” might be technically correct — for them, the best kind of correct — but who really cares if the “slopulist” proposal gets some political traction?
The reality is that when Democrats get some power and solve some problems, the solution is going to be a mishmash anyway. Take, for example, Mamdani’s latest video bragging — as he should — about closing New York City’s $12 billion budget deficit.
The “pied a terre” tax that all the billionaires were freaking out about was a small ($500 mil) piece of the $12 billion solution. The important part that people will remember is that Mamdani got it done without closing down libraries or making public school classes bigger. And they’ll also remember that some of that money came out of the hide of the rich.
Remember that next time someone beings a tedious “well ackshully” lecture about how taxing the rich, alone, won’t be enough to fund everything we need to fund in the US. Taxing the rich didn’t do the whole job in NYC, but it got a hell of a lot of attention.
Finally, let’s not forget that the ur-slopulist — cro-magnon slopulist man, if you will — one Donald J. Trump, is now our President for the second time. He’s horribly unpopular, not because of his slopulist policies, but because it’s becoming clear to even the dimmest Trump voter that he never had any intention of doing anything to make their lives better. It’s not the details of his slopulism, it’s the overall failiure to deliver.
People want to results, and they want some of those results to come out of the hide of the rich and the big corporations. The details don’t matter, and we’re not going to win unless we come up with some proposals that are popular. Politics just isn’t that hard unless you make it so.
