5 ms·
Only if the people pay, it sounded like the one of Swedish economists from the article think there is a limit to what you can tax people before the social contr
by MollyR 9y ago
Only if the people pay, it sounded like the one of Swedish economists from the article think there is a limit to what you can tax people before the social contract breaks.
I'm assuming this applies to individuals and populations.
- Dylan16807 9y agoIf their take-home pay is still increasing, I'm not sure there can be all that much objection to higher taxes.
- ehsankia 9y agoIn theory, yes. In practice, it's almost a branding issue. Knowing that 60% of your money is being taken away from you is generally a bigger takeaway for people than the total amount being bigger.
- QAPereo 9y agoMaybe they’re bright enough to see that it’s not taken and wasted, but becomes the foundation of their incredibly successful state. Not everyone in every country is blinkered by the ideology of the greediest, in the hope of joining them.
- yazaddaruvala 9y agoI agree and disagree. In a state with a single worker, that single worker is almost guaranteed to be a sociopath. They likely don't care about other people. You'd have to frame it for them differently. Perhaps the glory of an immortal title? Maybe the admiration of the populace? Something like that.
- henrikschroder 9y agoIn a post-labour society, labour is completely divorced from productivity, so you have to tax productivity somehow to get the resources you need to take care of your population. So somehow, sometime, we have to stop relying on income-tax, and start relying on some kind of productivity tax instead, and forge a new social contract based on that. Otherwise we end up in the situation you describe, an ever-decreasing sliver of the population is taxed to support the masses. And even though their productivity is multiplied enormously by technology, a lot of people will still think it's unfair.
- maxander 9y ago> So somehow, sometime, we have to stop relying on income-tax, and start relying on some kind of productivity tax instead, and forge a new social contract based on that. I don't think that's actually true, absent tax evasion. Take the limiting case of the "fewer people being more productive" scenario- someday only one person in Sweden participates in economic work (who operates all the robots, or whatever.) Since all economic production is hers, her salary is essentially equivalent to Sweden's GDP. Tax her at whatever absurd rate Sweden would tax such a person, and you can definitely pay for the social safety net. (Actually, Sweden collects much more in taxes in that scenario than in the present day, since the entire salary base is being taxed at the highest possible income bracket.) This is perhaps counter-intuitive, and possibly irrelevant, because we're accustomed to high earners not paying taxes like ordinary folk do. In the above scenario, Sweden's sole worker would likely spend some effort trying to hide her income in the Canary Islands. Whether productivity-concentration harms social safety nets eventually comes down to the tax authorities' ability to stop that kind of behaviour.
- henrikschroder 9y agoWell, in reality the productivity gains usually go to the owners of the means of production, not labour. So if Sweden only required one person to actually perform labour, then that person would get paid a high salary, but the owners of the company doing that work would get all the profit, and you would have to tax them somehow. And they would do all they could to evade taxes. So to reach that limit example, you would have both productivity concentration, and an enormous amount of capital concentration in the background, screwing things up, making it harder to reason about the example. I think Blockbuster vs. Netflix is a very good illustration of what happens when productivity concentrates. With Blockbuster, you had 300k simple low-wage jobs. But they were distributed across the country, so their collective income taxes were also distributed into a lot of local economies, doing good locally. Blockbuster went bankrupt, and Netflix took their place. So instead of 300k distributed low-wage jobs, you now have 10k high-skill high-wage jobs, but they're concentrated to LA and Silicon Valley. Those employees pay local taxes there, and nowhere else. So from a national perspective, you now need to re-distribute those taxes to the areas who lost tax revenue, somehow, without pissing off the employees, and without pissing off Netflix, and without pissing off the local government in SF and LA. Usually this is done through federal aid/job aid programmes that take money from richer states and distribute to poorer states, but that's an incredibly blunt instrument. But if you were to tax productivity and if you were able to tax it locally where it's consumed, this change from Blockbuster to Netflix wouldn't have disrupted local economies. Because then it wouldn't matter how many employees did the actual production, or where they were located, and that's good for the places that productivity is concentrated away from. (Unless, of course, you are of the position that fuck those guys for living in the middle of nowhere, they should move to the cities like everyone else.) Anyway, tying it all back to the original point, productivity concentration necessitates some kind of new/stronger redistribution mechanism so the gains are spread across the entire population. Previously, and still, when we have income-tax and a high percentage of the population participating in the labour force, that distribution happens automatically. Maybe a productivity tax to make sure the country as a whole captures part of the GDP, UBI to spread it equally across the population, and then local consumption taxes to redistribute to local governments? I don't know.
- nordsieck 9y agoPrecisely. The most wealthy people are also the most mobile and most able to jurisdiction shop. Wealthy Swedes may have a certain affection to Sweeden, but would probably move (to Singapore, for example) rather than pay 95% income tax.