The Trump administration is preparing to cancel a large swath of federal funding to California, an effort which could begin as soon as Friday, according to multiple sources.
California should absolutely cut off funds to the federal government if this happens and start just paying for their own shit. Suddenly they’ll have a huge budget surplus.
If I recall correctly the problem is at least in terms of income tax that’s automatically withheld for most people. Same thing with corporate taxes. You’d have to get thousands, tens of thousands of companies to agree to violate federal law and face massive federal backlash including you know jail for the owners for this to work. Sorry to say but those companies aren’t going to go along with it. They’re going to continue sending Washington DC the withholdings from employee paychecks and from their own owed taxes because they don’t want that kind of trouble and are not revolutionaries.
In olden times this might have been more practical for the state as they could just hold up physical money cars leaving with this stuff but these days its all electronic so there’s really no border to police.
This is all factually correct, but I hope Californian comrades are talking to their local liberals about this stuff. “Normie” types don’t like what’s going on and are down to think about what life would look like without Trump in the picture.
“Yeah if they cut all federal funding, then why are we paying ~30% as a state to the US? Let’s just stop, what’s the worst that could happen?”
This has never been in the media before so you can finally kick of an actual political conversation that has very few existing brainworms.
Maybe in a decade “West coast secessionist” viewpoints have a space in the conversation, although at the fringe of the mainstream (thinking along the lines of “alt-right”). This sort of internal tension is bad for the empire and good for the global south. I think socialists should be advocating for it. We know that the Democratic voter base, and even many Republican voters are to the left of the Democratic Party on a lot of social issues. Weakening the DNC means we could actually get some socdem shit done while things are unstable and on decline.
Ideals don’t drive the wheels of history, but they do steer them. As you said, this is not something that is practical materially, but on the ideological battlefield, we need to wield it as a rallying point for something to the left of neoliberalism. If everything goes well, you’d probably get the West coast to be another Canada tbh. Maybe would even make sense to annex in to Canada?
If I recall correctly the problem is at least in terms of income tax that’s automatically withheld for most people. Same thing with corporate taxes. You’d have to get thousands, tens of thousands of companies to agree to violate federal law and face massive federal backlash including you know jail for the owners for this to work. Sorry to say but those companies aren’t going to go along with it. They’re going to continue sending Washington DC the withholdings from employee paychecks and from their own owed taxes because they don’t want that kind of trouble and are not revolutionaries.
In olden times this might have been more practical for the state as they could just hold up physical money cars leaving with this stuff but these days its all electronic so there’s really no border to police.
This is all factually correct, but I hope Californian comrades are talking to their local liberals about this stuff. “Normie” types don’t like what’s going on and are down to think about what life would look like without Trump in the picture.
This has never been in the media before so you can finally kick of an actual political conversation that has very few existing brainworms.
Maybe in a decade “West coast secessionist” viewpoints have a space in the conversation, although at the fringe of the mainstream (thinking along the lines of “alt-right”). This sort of internal tension is bad for the empire and good for the global south. I think socialists should be advocating for it. We know that the Democratic voter base, and even many Republican voters are to the left of the Democratic Party on a lot of social issues. Weakening the DNC means we could actually get some socdem shit done while things are unstable and on decline.
Ideals don’t drive the wheels of history, but they do steer them. As you said, this is not something that is practical materially, but on the ideological battlefield, we need to wield it as a rallying point for something to the left of neoliberalism. If everything goes well, you’d probably get the West coast to be another Canada tbh. Maybe would even make sense to annex in to Canada?