4 ms·

To be honest I believe in exactly the opposite. My personal crazy theory is that there is organic and synthetic inequality. Organic being caused by natural fac

To be honest I believe in exactly the opposite. My personal crazy theory is that there is organic and synthetic inequality. Organic being caused by natural factors and projected as a Gaussian distribution significantly smothered down by factors such as altruicity and compassion. An example for a naturally inequal society would be 60-s US, heyday Venice or some early classic republics. Still unequal, but nowhere near banana republic level. Quite the opposite it is the minimal level of inequality sustainable with current human psyche in mind. There is also the synthetic inequality caused by artificial state-driven (coercion) factors with examples being Feudal lords, the Soviet nomenklatura, today's Fed cronies and so on. P.S. https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

thr0wawayf00 5y ago
It's also important to point out that taxation in eras like the 60's was very, very different than it is today. The marginal tax rate was still over 90% in the early 60's, versus less than 40% today[0]. The wealthy paid a whole lot more in taxes than they do today and that had major downstream effects for society. Some of the upper echelon tax rate increases that have been proposed recently and panned as catastrophic for the wealthy don't even compare to the rates they were paying back then. And pushing to reinstate those kinds of tax rates would be political suicide because everyone believes they'll be a millionaire in the next 5 years. 0: https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2021/04/26/taxing-the-rich-the-evolution-of-americas-marginal-income-tax-rate-infographic/?sh=638f19835fdc https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2021/04/26/taxing...
- luciusdomitius 5y ago
  This is extremely relative. There is the Laffer curve and the point of it is that at 90% taxation the taxes collected were actually less than at the moderate tax rates. A side effect of this phenomenon is that this is the period when the American elites underwent a great transformation and became significantly more pragmatic than idealistic. And honestly the monetary response from the government that we are seeing over the past 15 years is just a consequence of that - people (especially the wealthy, but what is the direction of the correlation?) learned how to dodge taxes, so gov took out the heavy artillery. So from the wealthy being (still enterprenural and crafty) tax dodgers we went to the cronies we have today.
  - stormbrew 5y ago
    The problem with the Laffer curve (well, the relevant problem to this discussion anyways) is that it assumes the primary goal of taxation is to maximize government revenue while minimizing payable taxes on an individual level. Higher marginal rates are predicated on creating effects that may involve potentially reducing government revenue as a second order effect, in service of a first order effect like "decreasing inequality" in the "make more middle class" sense. (the other problems all have to do with things like it being impossible to tell where revenues are on the laffer curve without actually changing rates, and the fact that conservatives largely assume the laffer curve is a parabolic one where somehow a zero tax rate is infinite revenue. Those things make it an essentially impossible-to-use policy tool in practice)
    - luciusdomitius 5y ago
      Oh my... In truth you can very easily do that just look how the taxation graph in OP's link compares to the gov spending over that period. The only anomaly seem to be the late WWII years. https://taxfoundation.org/short-history-government-taxing-and-spending-united-states/ https://taxfoundation.org/short-history-government-taxing-an... Laws and mass compliance are really two different things. An example would be when new EU countries introduced those UUID's to each receipt while "lowering" taxes, resulting gov spending to gdp going actually up significantly.
      - stormbrew 5y ago
        > can very easily do that I'm not sure what part of my post you're disagreeing with. What can you do and how does this graph of historical data show it?

thr0wawayf00 5y ago

It's also important to point out that taxation in eras like the 60's was very, very different than it is today. The marginal tax rate was still over 90% in the early 60's, versus less than 40% today[0]. The wealthy paid a whole lot more in taxes than they do today and that had major downstream effects for society. Some of the upper echelon tax rate increases that have been proposed recently and panned as catastrophic for the wealthy don't even compare to the rates they were paying back then. And pushing to reinstate those kinds of tax rates would be political suicide because everyone believes they'll be a millionaire in the next 5 years. 0: https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2021/04/26/taxing-the-rich-the-evolution-of-americas-marginal-income-tax-rate-infographic/?sh=638f19835fdc https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2021/04/26/taxing...

luciusdomitius 5y ago
This is extremely relative. There is the Laffer curve and the point of it is that at 90% taxation the taxes collected were actually less than at the moderate tax rates. A side effect of this phenomenon is that this is the period when the American elites underwent a great transformation and became significantly more pragmatic than idealistic. And honestly the monetary response from the government that we are seeing over the past 15 years is just a consequence of that - people (especially the wealthy, but what is the direction of the correlation?) learned how to dodge taxes, so gov took out the heavy artillery. So from the wealthy being (still enterprenural and crafty) tax dodgers we went to the cronies we have today.
- stormbrew 5y ago
  The problem with the Laffer curve (well, the relevant problem to this discussion anyways) is that it assumes the primary goal of taxation is to maximize government revenue while minimizing payable taxes on an individual level. Higher marginal rates are predicated on creating effects that may involve potentially reducing government revenue as a second order effect, in service of a first order effect like "decreasing inequality" in the "make more middle class" sense. (the other problems all have to do with things like it being impossible to tell where revenues are on the laffer curve without actually changing rates, and the fact that conservatives largely assume the laffer curve is a parabolic one where somehow a zero tax rate is infinite revenue. Those things make it an essentially impossible-to-use policy tool in practice)
  - luciusdomitius 5y ago
    Oh my... In truth you can very easily do that just look how the taxation graph in OP's link compares to the gov spending over that period. The only anomaly seem to be the late WWII years. https://taxfoundation.org/short-history-government-taxing-and-spending-united-states/ https://taxfoundation.org/short-history-government-taxing-an... Laws and mass compliance are really two different things. An example would be when new EU countries introduced those UUID's to each receipt while "lowering" taxes, resulting gov spending to gdp going actually up significantly.
    - stormbrew 5y ago
      > can very easily do that I'm not sure what part of my post you're disagreeing with. What can you do and how does this graph of historical data show it?