Soylent Green is people!

When it comes to economic politics, my motto is "Soylent Green is people! If we don't eat the rich, figuratively speaking, the rich will feed us to ourselves, literally speaking."

If you don't know the Soylent Green reference, check out the 1973 science fiction film Soylent Green which I consider to be Charlton Heston's best film. It was also the great actor Edward G. Robinson's last film.

Spoiler Alert: Or jump to the synopsis of Soylent Green at Wikipedia..

Basically, for instance, there is no reasonable justification for the rich to have unearned income from financial investments at a far lower rate for "capital gains"  than workers pay on their earned income.  It is just one of the ways in which the rich control Congress to their own benefit and redistribute the nation's wealth into their own pockets.  We see worldwide how the rich are demanding austerity from the working class for the purpose of bailing out the banks and their own lack of austerity.

As a follower of the Buddha Dharma, I begin with the premise that all these distinctions are distinctions made by the false thinking of our own mind, the mind that is one mind, because the 1istinction that we are separate minds is also a discrimination of that very same mind. As the Buddha said,

“I now universally see that everyone of the multitude of beings is endowed with the qualities of the Tathagata’s wisdom and virtue.  However by means of erroneous thinking and grasping attachments, nevertheless they do not bear witness to attaining it.”

This common endowment of the Tathagata's wisdom and virtue is the basis for what we call the Golden Rule. Since we all have the shared foundation of the mind ground, to treat each other as if we do not have the same Buddha nature is the result of our erroneous thinking, false conceptions, and grasping attachments..
 
As a political democracy, it is the obligation of citizens to prevent the rich from stealing resources and wealth from the nation and redistributing it to their own pockets and bank accounts.  The private banking system and institutions of legalized financial gambling on Wall Street, called "the stock market," "hedge funds," "derivative investments", etc. should be severely regulated to keep them fair. There is nothing wrong with markets that fairly trade in actual ownership of stocks, but these money carnivals are nothing other than gambling institutions that hold our economy in their grip.  

Most importantly, the money of the government should never be dependent upon or entangled with private banking, as that is the primary way that the people's treasury is looted into the private pockets of the rich. The people's public money in their government treasury should always be held in a public bank.  A public banking system is the single most important change that would prevent the kind of financial collapses that we have seen created by the gambling institutions of Wall Street.  Here's a wonderful but sad story of the destruction of the Canadian public banking system at the hands of the rich in their never ending greed.