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> All they can see is the free stuff being promised, not the inevitable fallout down the road (the wealthy will be fine, they always are...) The current progre

> All they can see is the free stuff being promised, not the inevitable fallout down the road (the wealthy will be fine, they always are...) The current progressive plan being floated on the left (socialist is a scare word cooked up in the 1950s and still bandied about by conservatives who have no clue how outdated it makes them sound to younger voters) is to greatly increase taxes on the rich and use it to fund social services like college. So, by your own logic, this can work.

joejerryronnie 7y ago
It won’t work for the following 2 reasons: 1) The wealthy have the resources to fight back against much higher taxation and play the long game. Even if a spate of progressive candidates are elected and drastically raise taxes, the wealthy will just wait until the political pendulum swings back and will get themselves a better deal than they had originally. 2) Even if higher taxes on the wealthy stuck, there is not nearly enough money there to fund every progressive pipe dream (education, healthcare, housing, environment, inequality, reparations, etc, etc). So once again, the working middle class gets stuck with the tax bill, just like every other time we’ve tried something like this. And speaking about conservatives sounding outdated, there’s nothing that highlights the naivete of youth more than hearing them say “this time it’s different”.
thrower123 7y ago
There's just not enough money in raising taxes on the rich to pay for what people want to do, even discounting the effects of capital flight and other restructurings that will be inevitably employed to dodge such exactions. The federal tax code, at least, is already massively progressive, and the rich pay far above their share of the revenue already.
- JetSpiegel 7y ago
  Not just individuals, companies too. Not to mention Bezos and other billionaires keep getting richer even with a ʾmassively progressive' tax code. It's not progressive enough!

joejerryronnie 7y ago

It won’t work for the following 2 reasons: 1) The wealthy have the resources to fight back against much higher taxation and play the long game. Even if a spate of progressive candidates are elected and drastically raise taxes, the wealthy will just wait until the political pendulum swings back and will get themselves a better deal than they had originally. 2) Even if higher taxes on the wealthy stuck, there is not nearly enough money there to fund every progressive pipe dream (education, healthcare, housing, environment, inequality, reparations, etc, etc). So once again, the working middle class gets stuck with the tax bill, just like every other time we’ve tried something like this. And speaking about conservatives sounding outdated, there’s nothing that highlights the naivete of youth more than hearing them say “this time it’s different”.

thrower123 7y ago

There's just not enough money in raising taxes on the rich to pay for what people want to do, even discounting the effects of capital flight and other restructurings that will be inevitably employed to dodge such exactions. The federal tax code, at least, is already massively progressive, and the rich pay far above their share of the revenue already.

JetSpiegel 7y ago
Not just individuals, companies too. Not to mention Bezos and other billionaires keep getting richer even with a ʾmassively progressive' tax code. It's not progressive enough!