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Oh come on don't make these idiotic arguments that forget that pretty much all Western European nations that have low levels of income inequality have done so t

Oh come on don't make these idiotic arguments that forget that pretty much all Western European nations that have low levels of income inequality have done so through massive taxation and the creation of public goods and benefits that allow them to support a highly developed society. Free universities, free healthcare, long paternity leaves, environmental protection and subsidies to underdeveloped areas are all factors that are proven to have helped substantially to reduce inequality and increase social mobility. I seriously can't stop marveling at how people can defend an increasingly unequal world when there is a shrinking middle class and a more fragile position for the most vulnerable.

dnautics 9y ago
You think that's sustainable? Ithink you will find that even though all of the countries in Europe have basically free social services, the divide between the rich and poor is not decreasing in all of them. What does correlate with it is institutional corruption and confiscatory monetary policy ( the nordics are not on the euro, which is for now better than the pound). People in the nordics are doing way better than in Europe they in turn are doing better than the British The funny thing is that the world itself is not increasingly unequal, the global gini coefficient is coming down, mostly due to arbitrage - migration away from countries with corruption and poor, confiscatory monetary policy to ones where the confiscation is slow enough to be generational.
- Daishiman 9y ago
  The Nordics are doing way better precisely because they have the highest taxation rate and the largest states. Statoil is a massive mixed enterprise and it's doing just fine, and unlike the rest of the countries where wealth from oil gets funneled overseas or goes to a few corporations, it goes into the largest sovereign fund in the planet to safeguard people's wealth. The Nordic nations have the proportionally massive states and nobody's saying that they would be better off with fewer public services... because they wouldn't, and it's obvious to anyone who wants to make the debate global.
  - dnautics 9y ago
    you're neglecting the fact that the nordics have the lowest rate of inflation among all of the countries in europe, in other words, the state steals the least from its (poorest) people.
    - jacobush 9y ago
      Maybe but I know they are doing the best they can to increase inflation, to little avail.
    - AFNobody 9y ago
      Inflation is not theft. If you genuinely believe that: 1) Please use a deflationary currency (like bitcoin) for all your transactions. 2) Study the impact of deflation on Japan. Or the deflations in the US that almost always coincided with a depression with one (arguable) exception. Keep in mind, that arguable exception was one of half a dozen such events.
      - dnautics 9y ago
        Correlation is not causation. your arrow of causality is wrong. Of course deflations are correlated with modern economic contractions. In the era of central banking, contractions happen after the social capacity for debt has been stretched to the limit because tptb have tried to goose the economy too hard, and defaults exceed the rate of debt creation, leading to a contraction of the money supply. I suggest studying the free banking era and the us during the 1800s. How did the country ever survive without inflation??? They even managed to royally screw things up with a civil war and a completely insane bimetallic standard, without implosion. I suggest you study the effect of inflation on Japan. How's that lost decade going? Well, at least we got a lot of pansocial angst among the < 30 crowd (and some interesting anime) out of it.
    - Daishiman 9y ago
      Inflation as a variable for income inequality is dwarfed by tons of other factors. No serious economist is going to say that it's a terrible thing. A lot of countries have had to deal with inflation rates above 5% and they could still grow and lower inequality.
- skummetmaelk 9y ago
  >the nordics are not on the euro, which is for now better than the pound. You have no idea what you are talking about. Finland uses the euro. Denmark is pegged to the euro, a peg which cannot be broken like Switzerland's because it is 100% politically controlled. Norway is not in the EU so why would it use the euro? Iceland is also not in the EU. Besides being completely wrong, why does the nordics being on the euro even matter for this discussion?
maoistinquisitr 9y ago
Stay tuned over the next five years. Most of the European welfare systems are teetering on the brink. The pension funds are busted, the healthcare systems are having huge budget problems, and yields are shooting up on the municipal and national bonds. Eventually you run out of other people's money. Remember that Greece looked pretty good ten years ago.
- Daishiman 9y ago
  This applies to the entire planet (except for countries with growing populations, and that is a substantially worse problem), and European states have much greater safeguards and are in general far more stable than most other places in the world.
  - maoistinquisitr 9y ago
    It really is worse in Europe on the fiscal front. About half of German municipalities have busted pension funds, for example. The problem is also huge in America, but it's an order worse and more imminent in Europe. Ceteris paribus the USA will probably blow up around 2025 or so, but instead hopefully in the wake of Europe's more imminent fiscal crises we can correct course somehow to avoid their fate.
    - carterehsmith 9y ago
      Oh, we've been hearing the same (German pension funds are underfunded, Germany is about to collapse) things for the last 2 decades at least. Did Germany collapse? Oh no, but sure will in two years... or whatever. Same with US. By now it should have turned to 1997 with Curt Russell being president &c, but it did not really happen. BTW same with any stock that someone on the internet has bought or shorted. Sure it's going down... about to collapse!!! Going up... buy now!!
      - QAPereo 9y ago
        To be fair, Detroit more or less conformed to the hype, a la Robocop, at least for a while. Cali is doomed long term with the water situation (Caddilac Desert is a great read), the future of Louisiana is unclear, and so on. The predictions have been off as to timing, but the trajectory seems accurate.
rayiner 9y ago
For the most part, Western European countries have less redistribution baked into their tax systems than the U.S. Take Germany for example. The top marginal income tax rate in Germany is about 50%. In California, it's over 50%. Corporate tax rates are similar (with Germany's being slightly lower). Capital gains rates are higher in California than in Germany (and similar between Germany and the U.S. on average). If you make $2 million per year, your tax bill is probably a bit less in Germany than in California. But the tax burden overall, of course, is higher in Germany. That extra money comes from the middle class. Here are the tax brackets for a single person (in Euros): 0% up to 7,664 15% 7,665- 52,153 42% 52,154 - 250,000 45% 250,001 and over Then Germans pay various health insurance and pension contributions that are, like our FICA taxes, subject to wage caps, which puts most of the burden of their healthcare and retirement system on the middle class. They also pay 19% VAT, which again puts most of the burden on the middle class. If Trump proposed implementing a tax plan that distributed the burden of taxation the way Germany's does, people would be apoplectic.
- refurb 9y ago
  Indeed. Yes, there are people that have very high incomes. However, there aren't that many of them. The gov't has no choice but to increase the burden on the middle class if they want to raise serious revenue. It reminds me of an interview with a candidate in the Canadian election back in the 1990's. This was the NDP party (left wing). The candidate said his platform was to raise taxes for the rich. The intrepid reporter asked "what is rich?". The candidate in a moment of honesty said "A family of four making more than $60K per year". People went apeshit with that comment.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    It's true to a significant extent in the US as well that to raise significant revenue --- for instance, to create a new entitlement program for health care --- taxes have to be raised from the middle class.

dnautics 9y ago

You think that's sustainable? Ithink you will find that even though all of the countries in Europe have basically free social services, the divide between the rich and poor is not decreasing in all of them. What does correlate with it is institutional corruption and confiscatory monetary policy ( the nordics are not on the euro, which is for now better than the pound). People in the nordics are doing way better than in Europe they in turn are doing better than the British The funny thing is that the world itself is not increasingly unequal, the global gini coefficient is coming down, mostly due to arbitrage - migration away from countries with corruption and poor, confiscatory monetary policy to ones where the confiscation is slow enough to be generational.

Daishiman 9y ago
The Nordics are doing way better precisely because they have the highest taxation rate and the largest states. Statoil is a massive mixed enterprise and it's doing just fine, and unlike the rest of the countries where wealth from oil gets funneled overseas or goes to a few corporations, it goes into the largest sovereign fund in the planet to safeguard people's wealth. The Nordic nations have the proportionally massive states and nobody's saying that they would be better off with fewer public services... because they wouldn't, and it's obvious to anyone who wants to make the debate global.
- dnautics 9y ago
  you're neglecting the fact that the nordics have the lowest rate of inflation among all of the countries in europe, in other words, the state steals the least from its (poorest) people.
  - jacobush 9y ago
    Maybe but I know they are doing the best they can to increase inflation, to little avail.
  - AFNobody 9y ago
    Inflation is not theft. If you genuinely believe that: 1) Please use a deflationary currency (like bitcoin) for all your transactions. 2) Study the impact of deflation on Japan. Or the deflations in the US that almost always coincided with a depression with one (arguable) exception. Keep in mind, that arguable exception was one of half a dozen such events.
    - dnautics 9y ago
      Correlation is not causation. your arrow of causality is wrong. Of course deflations are correlated with modern economic contractions. In the era of central banking, contractions happen after the social capacity for debt has been stretched to the limit because tptb have tried to goose the economy too hard, and defaults exceed the rate of debt creation, leading to a contraction of the money supply. I suggest studying the free banking era and the us during the 1800s. How did the country ever survive without inflation??? They even managed to royally screw things up with a civil war and a completely insane bimetallic standard, without implosion. I suggest you study the effect of inflation on Japan. How's that lost decade going? Well, at least we got a lot of pansocial angst among the < 30 crowd (and some interesting anime) out of it.
  - Daishiman 9y ago
    Inflation as a variable for income inequality is dwarfed by tons of other factors. No serious economist is going to say that it's a terrible thing. A lot of countries have had to deal with inflation rates above 5% and they could still grow and lower inequality.
skummetmaelk 9y ago
>the nordics are not on the euro, which is for now better than the pound. You have no idea what you are talking about. Finland uses the euro. Denmark is pegged to the euro, a peg which cannot be broken like Switzerland's because it is 100% politically controlled. Norway is not in the EU so why would it use the euro? Iceland is also not in the EU. Besides being completely wrong, why does the nordics being on the euro even matter for this discussion?

maoistinquisitr 9y ago

Stay tuned over the next five years. Most of the European welfare systems are teetering on the brink. The pension funds are busted, the healthcare systems are having huge budget problems, and yields are shooting up on the municipal and national bonds. Eventually you run out of other people's money. Remember that Greece looked pretty good ten years ago.

Daishiman 9y ago
This applies to the entire planet (except for countries with growing populations, and that is a substantially worse problem), and European states have much greater safeguards and are in general far more stable than most other places in the world.
- maoistinquisitr 9y ago
  It really is worse in Europe on the fiscal front. About half of German municipalities have busted pension funds, for example. The problem is also huge in America, but it's an order worse and more imminent in Europe. Ceteris paribus the USA will probably blow up around 2025 or so, but instead hopefully in the wake of Europe's more imminent fiscal crises we can correct course somehow to avoid their fate.
  - carterehsmith 9y ago
    Oh, we've been hearing the same (German pension funds are underfunded, Germany is about to collapse) things for the last 2 decades at least. Did Germany collapse? Oh no, but sure will in two years... or whatever. Same with US. By now it should have turned to 1997 with Curt Russell being president &c, but it did not really happen. BTW same with any stock that someone on the internet has bought or shorted. Sure it's going down... about to collapse!!! Going up... buy now!!
    - QAPereo 9y ago
      To be fair, Detroit more or less conformed to the hype, a la Robocop, at least for a while. Cali is doomed long term with the water situation (Caddilac Desert is a great read), the future of Louisiana is unclear, and so on. The predictions have been off as to timing, but the trajectory seems accurate.

rayiner 9y ago

For the most part, Western European countries have less redistribution baked into their tax systems than the U.S. Take Germany for example. The top marginal income tax rate in Germany is about 50%. In California, it's over 50%. Corporate tax rates are similar (with Germany's being slightly lower). Capital gains rates are higher in California than in Germany (and similar between Germany and the U.S. on average). If you make $2 million per year, your tax bill is probably a bit less in Germany than in California. But the tax burden overall, of course, is higher in Germany. That extra money comes from the middle class. Here are the tax brackets for a single person (in Euros): 0% up to 7,664 15% 7,665- 52,153 42% 52,154 - 250,000 45% 250,001 and over Then Germans pay various health insurance and pension contributions that are, like our FICA taxes, subject to wage caps, which puts most of the burden of their healthcare and retirement system on the middle class. They also pay 19% VAT, which again puts most of the burden on the middle class. If Trump proposed implementing a tax plan that distributed the burden of taxation the way Germany's does, people would be apoplectic.

refurb 9y ago
Indeed. Yes, there are people that have very high incomes. However, there aren't that many of them. The gov't has no choice but to increase the burden on the middle class if they want to raise serious revenue. It reminds me of an interview with a candidate in the Canadian election back in the 1990's. This was the NDP party (left wing). The candidate said his platform was to raise taxes for the rich. The intrepid reporter asked "what is rich?". The candidate in a moment of honesty said "A family of four making more than $60K per year". People went apeshit with that comment.
- tptacek 9y ago
  It's true to a significant extent in the US as well that to raise significant revenue --- for instance, to create a new entitlement program for health care --- taxes have to be raised from the middle class.