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To solve all this, it's pretty simple, and the U.S. actually used to do it: heavily tax the super rich. Heavy taxation and then appropriate use of those funds f

by bmitc 4y ago

To solve all this, it's pretty simple, and the U.S. actually used to do it: heavily tax the super rich. Heavy taxation and then appropriate use of those funds for education, R&D funding, infrastructure, etc. is actual trickle-down economics. And mega corporations should be heavily taxed instead of holding the country economically hostage. They jumpstart their companies off of government funding and R&D and then act abused when asked to help give back. Right now, the middle class is getting slammed with taxes. They make almost all their money through salary and get taxed heavily, while the super rich pay either no tax or a maximum of capital gains, so almost 40% or less than upper middle class in terms of percentage. Corporations and the super rich have bought out democracy, and what is crazy is that they are supported by the very groups they intrinsically hate and hurt through their policies.

likelyharrison_ 4y ago
Heavy taxing is not the take away from the model the article discuses.
- naasking 4y ago
  The model clearly shows that while heavy taxation does not fully eliminate unequal distribution, it does dramatically suppress the inequality. Completely eliminating inequality is not necessarily a goal.
system2 4y ago
I know all of this but reading it again made me angry.
sgjohnson 4y ago
> To solve all this, it's pretty simple, and the U.S. actually used to do it: heavily tax the super rich. That never happened. https://mises.org/library/good-ol-days-when-tax-rates-were-90-percent https://mises.org/library/good-ol-days-when-tax-rates-were-9...
- bmitc 4y ago
  What is "that" that you're referring to? Tax rates have absolutely fallen. If you're referring the article's claim that the rich pay much more taxes in terms of dollar amount, that doesn't necessarily mean anything because the rich are wealthier and more concentrated than every before. For example: > According to investment bank Credit Suisse, the fraction of global household wealth held by the richest 1 percent of the world's population increased from 42.5 to 47.2 percent between the financial crisis of 2008 and 2018. To put it another way, as of 2010, 388 individuals possessed as much household wealth as the lower half of the world's population combined—about 3.5 billion people; today Oxfam estimates that number as 26. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-inevitable/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-ine...
  - sgjohnson 4y ago
    Looking at the total world population is completely meaningless. This is because fertility rate in virtually every developed country is below 2, however there are extremely poor countries where the population is exploding with fertility rates above 8. > To put it another way, as of 2010, 388 individuals possessed as much household wealth as the lower half of the world's population combined—about 3.5 billion people; today Oxfam estimates that number as 26. This is also completely meaningless, because that figure is largely imaginery and super illiquid. Rest assured, Jeff Bezos can't cash out of Amazon and expect to be paid the current market rate for all of his shares. It's also completely meaningless because the world's bottom 3.5 billion people control virtually no wealth whatsoever. Makes for a good headline though
    - bmitc 4y ago
      For the U.S. alone, I think the stat is something like out of every 10,000 people, it's something ridiculous like either 40 or even 4 people that own as much wealth as the bottom 6,000 combined. It may honestly be something worse like 1. I remember calculating this from a research paper I read, and I feel like 10,000 was the sample population needed to get a non-fractional rich person or persons. This is absurd.
    - 4y ago
blfr 4y ago
The US is only very loosely constrained by its tax base. It does not lack funds. It has also been spending much more on education over the past decades[1]. With very little to show for it. [1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_236.55.asp?current=yes https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_236.55.a...
- foldr 4y ago
  You’d expect education costs to be rising, though, as people are expected to have a higher level of education before entering the workforce than they were previously, and because career changes and reskilling are far more common than previously. It’s a bit like healthcare. You can be spending far more than you were when there was a younger population and fewer sophisticated and expensive treatments, and yet still not be spending enough.
  - rsj_hn 4y ago
    There is no evidence that people have a higher overall level of education before entering the workforce over time. Rather, people know a different set of skills and accumulate a different body of knowledge. It is only if we define "education" as the degree of knowledge in the body of subjects we teach today that one can say people in the past had less of it. But that's only because we have discarded the many bodies of knowledge an educated person needed to have in the past. For example, one can laugh and say that to earn a doctorate in mathematics during the renaissance you'd need to know algebra only to the level of solving a cubic equation. However you are missing all the archaic geometric ruler and compass constructions, evaluation of various infinite series, and deep knowledge of Latin, Greek, French, German texts, mastery of rhetoric, music theory, and other topics that few learn today. So it is not true that a mathematician of the present could waltz in and get a Doctorate in Philosophy in medieval Paris. He would probably get quickly thrown out for failing to master the many various scholastic topics that were required of a PhD in that time period, and which no one learns today. As another example, a new worker in 1800 might be expected to know how to deliver a calf, fix a fence, shod a horse, make homemade preserves, skin a rabbit, set a broken bone, paint a barn, as well as know Greek, geography, history, recite the speeches of Cicero, translate the Odes of Horace, navigate the seas by an astrolabe, stain a bookcase, identify the key flood valleys of Europe and know which animals could be hunted in which part of the year in various European forests, or know the biographies of German princes, etc. But you are correct, they wouldn't have MS Office skills or know how to create a webapp. Once you move past "hunter-gatherer", you very quickly run into complex societies with their own historically developed bodies of knowledge that require lifetime learning, whether that means learning the seasons and details about planting crops and irrigating fields, dealing with pests, where to dig a well, how to tan leather, etc - or whether that means something else, it is still a vast body of knowledge that takes decades to master. The point is, wherever a society is technologically, it will choose different areas to train its workers, and omit other areas that are no longer needed. But how many resources does a society need to train its workers? If that number keeps growing, then there is something wrong with the society.
derelicta 4y ago
I think this time we should go above and beyond regular heavy taxation. We should seek to extend republican norms within the corporate sphere and downright prohibit rent-seeking. A country whose inhabitants have no say in its internal politics is called a tyranny. It's more than time to see the current workplace the same way.
patientplatypus 4y ago
[dead]
hackerman123469 4y ago
But tell me, how are you going to tax the super rich? It's incredibly difficult to tax someone who's actually poor on paper. Most super rich people actually don't seem to have much wealth officially declared, all of their wealth is sort of like "pseudo" in that it's all tied up in assets, and sometimes assets that aren't directly owned by them but their companies etc. and they have a lot of shortcuts for tax breaks on the stuff that can be taxed. With the current system in place then it's impossible to actually tax the rich.
- shafyy 4y ago
  > It's incredibly difficult to tax someone who's actually poor on paper You think this because the super rich want you to think this. Actually, it's not hard and there are some good ideas floating around (e.g. more inheritance tax, don't let them get loans without taxes againt their illiquid wealth). Does it require a change of laws? Yes, but that's the whole point of democracy.
  - sgjohnson 4y ago
    > more inheritance tax won't fix anything > don't let them get loans without taxes againt their illiquid wealth You don't want to fix this. It would kill repurchasing agreements as a collateral damage, making access to credit more difficult and expensive for everyone. Not to mention HELOCs. You might say, "ok, exempt HELOCs", but that's just an arbitrary goalpost. The economy is organic, you can just use a wrench and have a go at a couple of cogs and expect there to be no knock-on effect.
    - shafyy 4y ago
      > The economy is organic, you can just use a wrench and have a go at a couple of cogs and expect there to be no knock-on effect. What do you even mean by "organic"? Of course governments can, do and should intervene in the economy. And yes, there should be a range of experts evaluating policies before they are encated. I never stated the opposite.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
shafyy 4y ago
> Corporations and the super rich have bought out democracy, and what is crazy is that they are supported by the very groups they intrinsically hate and hurt through their policies. This is known since at least Marx, and still it doesn't change. This makes me very sad.
smilekzs 4y ago
One thing I've noticed consistently, is when politicians talk about "taxing the wealthy", they almost always follow that with "earning more than $xxxk a year". This is conflating wealth with income. Being within this tax bracket myself, I do not deny that I am biased, but I do hope this bullshit gets called out hard whenever someone brings up yet another underhanded measure to milk us (typical SFBay SWE) above and beyond the ~40% levels we're already facing...
- nemo44x 4y ago
  Is this a new form of NIMBY taxation? “Tax the rich but not rich people like me!”?
  - bmitc 4y ago
    I think it's more that the upper middle class gets hammered while those above do not, so it feels like punishment and adversarial. The way things are right now, everyone has to play the "get as much capital as possible" game because it's the only way to support your family and progeny, but as soon as you hit a relatively low threshold, you start receiving a huge amount of tax pressure. If we redistribute wealth, we redistribute infrastructure, homes, education, medical care, etc. this pressure could be relieved by not forcing personal capital to be deployed and responsible for such support structures.
  - smilekzs 4y ago
    You too are conflating wealth ("rich people") and income ("me").
    - nemo44x 4y ago
      Why should wealth be taxed? It already has been and it is immaterial until it is realized. At that point the profits are taxed. Lots of income may not make you wealthy but it lets you live a rich lifestyle. Move somewhere cheaper if you aren’t meeting your savings goals.
      - 4y ago
bamboozled 4y ago
"To solve all this, it's pretty simple," I feel if it was simple it would be fixed?
- danaris 4y ago
  Something can be very simple, and still be very hard to achieve because of resistance to it.
  - bamboozled 4y ago
    Which is why I don't think it's very simple, you have to convince a lot of powerful people they should pay more tax to achieve said goal, that's not easy.
    - polygamous_bat 4y ago
      Simple and easy are not antonyms here -- something can be simple but difficult to accomplish depending on the time and place at the same time. For example, "respect women" is a simple enough phrase but getting the Taliban to follow it is anything but simple.
    - danaris 4y ago
      "Simple" is the opposite of "complicated". "Easy" is the opposite of "hard". Reaching a high shelf is very simple. But if you're short, it may be hard. Calculus is very complicated. But if you're a third-year grad student in mathematics, it may also be very easy for you.
- Moissanite 4y ago
  Solving problems requires both the way and the will - those two things are not co-incident in many politicians.
- chousuke 4y ago
  Things can be simple to fix but actually getting people to implement the fix won't be there are incentives against it. They are two different problems.
nemo44x 4y ago
The problem with this live of thinking is that in reality most taxes are paid by wealthy people. The majority of people actually pay 0 taxes and in fact receive credits above their burden of 0. Whine there’s certainly room to address fair taxation rates we should seriously consider how we spend tax revenues today. A 1.5 trillion omnibus is being rushed through Congress that’s full of pork and special interests. We just sent however many billions to a country to fight a war that has nothing to do with us. So we spend all this money and of course it’s not enough. People say “more! Tax the rich!” Without considering the reality.
- bmitc 4y ago
  That's not a problem at all. The concern is not the absolute dollars paid. The concern are the percentages and the concentration of wealth. That the rich pay a lot of tax is basically immaterial except that it points out just how skewed the wealth distribution is. The "rich pay the majority of taxes" is an excuse.
WalterBright 4y ago
The top 1% pay 40% of the federal tax revenue. The top 5% pay 60%. California has the highest income tax at 13.3%, the highest federal tax rate is 37%. That makes the top income tax rate 50%.
- underdeserver 4y ago
  Top 1% of salary earners. The CEOs, highly paid doctors, engineers. The real capitalists - those who hold the assets and pay for their yachts with stock-backed loans - they don't pay 40% of the federal tax revenue. Their salary is $1/year.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Loans are not income.
    - janalsncm 4y ago
      There is no law of nature that says only income can be taxed. Loans could be taxed.
      - bmitc 4y ago
        You totally get it, and I really like the law of nature phrasing.
      - WalterBright 4y ago
        How about taxing your mortgage, then?
        janalsncm 4y ago
        That could be a law. It would be a bad law for most people since they don’t own any houses. Taxing loans to billionaires is a good law because it closes the “just take out a loan” loophole.
    - 4y ago
jmeister 4y ago
This focus on super-rich individuals is totally misguided. What's important is the economic system. Rich individuals are simply a nauseating side-effect of capitalism. Nobody really likes it, but there simply isn't anything better. The burden of proof is on the complainers. Even Marxist-sympathetic Peter Singer gets it. >Look, I think it would be better if you had an economic system in which we didn’t have billionaires—but the productivity that billionaires have generated was still there, and that money was more equitably distributed. But, really, there hasn’t been a system that has had equity in its distribution and the productivity that capitalism has had. I don’t see that happening anytime soon. http://archive.today/2021.04.25-160837/https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/peter-singer-is-committed-to-controversial-ideas http://archive.today/2021.04.25-160837/https://www.newyorker...
- bmitc 4y ago
  I don't get the productivity argument. What productivity is enabled by billionaires or even individuals? Noam Chomsky has covered this, but most corporations benefit extensively from decades of government funded research and development. The socialist driven productivity is there, it's just that we slap capitalism on it at the end and think it was that that got us here.
  - jmeister 4y ago
    R&D is just one aspect. Productivity refers to general competent management incentivized by market pressure. Anti-capitalists apparently can't even run lemonade stands these days: Ezra Klein: "If progressivism can’t work there, why should the country believe it can work anywhere else?" https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/opinion/california-san-francisco-schools.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/opinion/california-san-fr... "Meltdowns Have Brought Progressive Advocacy Groups to a Standstill at a Critical Moment in World History" https://theintercept.com/2022/06/13/progressive-organizing-infighting-callout-culture/ https://theintercept.com/2022/06/13/progressive-organizing-i... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne... https://nationalcenter.org/ncppr/2021/05/27/basecamp-climbs-out-of-woke-corporate-culture/ https://nationalcenter.org/ncppr/2021/05/27/basecamp-climbs-...
selfmodruntime 4y ago
The funny thing is, you don't even need to tax the rich all that much. The money is there. It's just spent on ludicrous stuff. The US annual defense budget is 800 billion dollars a year. Even when you argue that national defense and a well equipped military are necessary (which I believe them to be), I've seen military cost receipts. They're outrageous. You don't need 50 dollar rolls of toilet paper.
- cpursley 4y ago
  Dropping income tax and replacing it with a progressive sales tax should be at least explored. Wealthy don't file W2s but they do buy luxury items.
an-allen 4y ago
This all presupposes that the government is an efficient user of capital, when its pretty clear its not. Heavy taxes on the rich, means that capital investments that a rich person might finance, become government programmes and bureaucracies. Theres obviously a sweet spot here - but rich folks are good at creating capital and governments are notorious for wasting it. Now in the US I probably don’t have to tell you where most of the money goes - hint military - so more rich folks money into the governments coffers - what industry do you think benefits the most from a policy like this?
- danny_codes 4y ago
  Most of our money does not go to the military. Defense spending is about 700b per year, while the budget is over 4t. The government doesn't need to handle capitol allocation. We can simply shift the tax burden upwards. Poorer people get reduced tax, rich people get more.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    > Poorer people get reduced tax, rich people get more. This already happens. Many people either don't pay tax, or pay less tax than they cost. > The government doesn't need to handle capitol allocation. Then who will spend the tax money?
    - spinchange 4y ago
      The working poor pay into FICA which is a greater percentage of their cash flow. They get it back upon annual tax reconciliation. The same entitlement programs nonetheless have lots of unfunded liabilities so the money has already been allocated even if it's not currently "there" -- 'The Rich' are beneficiaries of entitlement spending too.
      - robertlagrant 4y ago
        It's a simpler situation than that. Regardless of proportions of payment, we already have a percentage of the population whose public services are paid for by someone else, either directly through income or divided tax or indirectly through higher prices from corporation tax, or more indirectly through inflationary monetary policy. In other words: we don't need to invent taxing people with more money more. We have that. Millions of people are partly or fully paid for by others. We might want to adjust it, but we don't need to pretend we're doing something revolutionary in doing so.
janalsncm 4y ago
Adding on to this, we absolutely know how to tax assets. We do it all the time: property (i.e. house) taxes. The unfortunate thing for middle class home owners is that houses are a type of wealth that is taxed just for having it whereas art, corporate shares, bonds, and trust funds are not.
verisimi 4y ago
As if the wealthy have never thought of ways to hide their money... The best you'll do is tax those who are actually turning up to get a salary. Ie you will tax people who arguably might be producing something, as opposed to the inter-generational, rent-seeking families that own so much of our world. If you ask me, and you accept overt governmental control of everything, the best thing to do would be a system of openess about ownership, so that ownership of everything can be seen by everyone - with no murky legal instruments. If you have the information about who owns what - and everything is owned by people, individuals, even if they hide behind legal and corporate instruments - you can then consider addressing what would be an equitable may to proceed. My guess would be that something ludicrously minor like a 10% wealth tax on the top 0.01% of wealth owners, would cover us indefinitely.
neilwilson 4y ago
Or alternatively realise that there isn't a fixed amount of money and therefore if 'rich people' want to count their coins let them do so. (i) it solves the capital accumulation problem (ii) you can accommodate the hoarding by guaranteeing people a job at the living wage, which then injects the right amount of new money, both temporally and spatially, to offset the hoarding. Tax has nothing to do with raising money. Tax is about reducing the capacity of the private sector to hire people so the public sector can hire them instead. If there is unemployment then the public sector hasn't hired enough people or taxes are too high/ineffective. It's never about money. It's always about stuff. Here's how it works[1] [1]: https://new-wayland.com/blog/how-the-job-guarantee-fixes-mainstream-macro/ https://new-wayland.com/blog/how-the-job-guarantee-fixes-mai...
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  There isn't a fixed amount of money. And taxes are only incidentally about public sector hiring. There is (more or less) a fixed amount of power. Taxes doesn't raise money, but they do redistribute and decentralise power, making it harder for the very rich to dominate economic and social strategy for their own ends.
  - neilwilson 4y ago
    Except that if you have power, then by definition you can stop people redistributing it. Otherwise you don't actually have power. That concept is another fallacy of composition. Taxes are there to reduce the capacity of the private sector to hire by reducing monetary flow. Without that you will get inflation.
543g43g43 4y ago
Ah, the mythical "super-rich" who could fund all of our solutions, if only we could prise their money out of their clutching hands! It's funny how they always exist, even in countries like the UK and France which in reality have taxed them out of existence, and payscales are absurdly compressed compared to the US. Careful what you wish for, you are someone else's "super rich".
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >the UK and France which in reality have taxed them out of existence You're making it sound like billionaires are an endangered species there. :) Last time I checked there's more than enough billionaires living in the UK and France[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Arnault https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Arnault
  - 543g43g43 4y ago
    That's the very definition of cherry picking. Try this dataset instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_billionaires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...
    - nobodyandproud 4y ago
      According to the third list (Hurun), the UK is keeping pace with the US.
      - 543g43g43 4y ago
        Shame Hurun doesn't publish its source data, or a list of those people.
        nobodyandproud 4y ago
        Which is an irrelevant objection, unless the list is inaccurate. Hurun reports are widely cited with few (if any) questions on its accuracy. In fact, it's an inaccurate objection proven by 1 minute of research: https://www.hurun.net/en-US/Rank/HsRankDetails?pagetype=global https://www.hurun.net/en-US/Rank/HsRankDetails?pagetype=glob...
XiphiasX 4y ago
As a reaction to this, the super-rich will just implement offshore strategies to move their operations to tax-friendly jurisdictions.
imgabe 4y ago
There is no “this” to solve because this is a wildly inaccurate simulation and not the real economy.
1letterunixname 4y ago
Fair taxation doesn't work with regulatory capture. The US is a gross-unequal mafia colonial power. If it wasn't, campaign finance reform not only would've passed decades ago, it wouldn't be necessary. Instead, it's easy to be super rich and pay almost no taxes like Trump or Buffett.
jmyeet 4y ago
The idea of the “middle class” is propaganda. The whole point of this as well as any number of wedge social issues is to sow division and direct your anger at marginalized groups instead of the wealthy and powerful. There are only two groups when it comes to economic status: labor and the capital-owning class. Labor is anyone who derives their income from their labor and goes all the way from the janitor to doctors and professional athletes. Th idea of the middle class was invented to sow division with the “lower classes”. I mean look at your comment. You assert the “middle class” is getting slammed with taxes. Some (not necessarily you) imply the lower classes are somehow getting a free ride or are lazy. This is the propaganda. We live in the wealthiest nation on earth. People without housing or food security is completely unnecessary. Charging people $1000/month for insulin, without which they would die, is only that way for corporate profits. Think about that.
- Valakas_ 4y ago
  I don't think it was *invented* to sow division, but I agree with you that it can definitely be used for it. There's different ways to categorize things - lower-class, middle-class and upper-class is a sort of intuitive way which throughout history has made some sense, somewhat, with different names. However, I get that maybe it's not the most useful currently, because there's such a ridiculous divide between upper-class (rich) and the other two, that we, belonging to the bottom 2, should band together to bring change favorable to us.
- int_19h 4y ago
  You're right, but this misdirection goes both ways. Logically, it would make more sence for the "lower" and the "middle" class to present a unified political front to tax the capital-owning class. But with the division in place, politicians backed by capital can sell a tax plan that is mostly, in fact, about raising taxes on the middle class but not the capital (most proposals that focus on personal income tax rates are in this category) to the "lower" class.
wtcactus 4y ago
Your assumption is that the state will apply that money optimally (or at least more optimally than the super rich - also, notice you didn’t define what super rich are). Looking at historical and present data, I can be absolutely sure that the state will mismanage that money in almost every country. I’m Portuguese, my government is collecting more ~ 25% taxes than it collected 6 years ago when the current ruling party got into power. Almost everyone (left and right) agrees that public services and administration are much worst. So, it begs the question: why giving the government even more money, will solve anything?
- sega_sai 4y ago
  To be honest I think this is strawman argument. I think it is absolutely true that the government will mismanage some of that money. The question is whether that money used with not 100% efficiency is better than a billionaire who may spend that money on anything. I certainly agree there are rich people who donate their money effectively but even then they decide what to spend the money on. So in my opinion some government mismanagement is not the reason to have some redistribution, but rather a reason to ensure that governments are properly accountable etc. And even if that is a government spending it can be still tendered to private companies depending on what's being done.
- pixelfarmer 4y ago
  That implies that privately owned organizations manage money well, which is not the case either. The larger an organization is, the more inefficiencies it accumulates. Plus, don't forget that states usually provide a lot of subsidies to companies and also pay businesses/consultants to do some of their work.
- Valakas_ 4y ago
  If the state doesn't apply the money optimally, i.e. it's not doing its job, then that's the problem that needs to be fixed.
joemazerino 4y ago
Tax the rich and they leave. OP has made a fundamental mistake in their logic. Poverty and earnings aren't based on "coin flips".
- naasking 4y ago
  > Tax the rich and they leave. A common claim but never accompanied by actual evidence.
Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
Another contributor is dividends getting taxes lower than earned income (like from a job). Why would money you got from sitting on your ass doing nothing be taxed less than money you got by working a job?
LatteLazy 4y ago
The problem with this plan is that modern economies need a lot of capital. There are three places that capital can come from: * the state, but we have voted year in and year out for tax cuts and spending rises, so the state is bankrupt. Not only is it not a source of capital, it is a major customer for it * normal individuals saving and those small amounts being aggregated by banks etc. But rampant (and government supported) consumerism means most people are also consumers of capital not sources of it. Incidentally an example of the opposite of this is Germany where ordinary people save a lot more and don't have OTT mortgages and credit card debt. Mysteriously they have very few billionares... * Billionaires. Which given the US (and UK where I live need their capital AND cannot get it elsewhere are able to charge a premium for it and cannot really be taxed etc without pain spreading all over the rest of the economy. But if you try and tell people to spend less, save more, pay their taxes and accept less services in order to have a better, fairer, more equal, ultimately richer life they bulk...
newZWhoDis 4y ago
If the government is not bound by a balanced budget amendment (can spend more than it takes in), and can print money whenever it wants, why do I pay taxes? If the entire monetary system is fake, why do they need 40+% of my paycheck?
- mint2 4y ago
  Because without an income stream no one loans to the government, or at least not at current rates. Interest rates would explode. Funnily enough Britain just demoed that for everyone. the prior pm tried to reduce taxes a ton and everything nearly went to hell in a hand basket. So at least we can be confident the taxes are actually doing things.
  - newZWhoDis 4y ago
    > Because without an income stream no one loans to the government The government prints whatever money it needs to pay its bills, and does so already with impunity. It also pays interest on money loaned to it (bonds) with printed fiat. Also, you completely missed the point. Of course taxes “do things”, and ending them would also “do something”. That wasn’t the question. The question is simple, why pay taxes at all when the government has the ability to print an endless supply of money?
    - mint2 4y ago
      Why so should people answer or respond if the responses are ignored in order to repeat posting the same wrong preconceptions… preconceptions that were already addressed and even provided a contemporary example that was also ignored.
therealdkz 4y ago
the problem is the taxeg go to funding military and healthcare. education is futher down the list.
willmadden 4y ago
The solution is to cut the size of government first. The inefficiency and outright grift happening in all federal agencies would make any entrepreneur’s head spin. Imagine if Congress had to answer to VCs for their spending. They would all be blackballed from the investor community overnight. The “tax the rich more” line is a little naive. The world is a different place after the Rothschilds figured out how to shield their wealth from monarchies. It’s easier than ever to offshore wealth, remember the Panama papers that promptly disappeared from the news? The “solution” of global governments is a cure that’s likely far worse than the disease. It’s a complicated situation. A progressive VAT tax that is consistent across jurisdictions would be a good start. The tax code (at least in the US) needs to be thrown out and replaced. Monetary policy and taxation via inflation is also primitive and in dire need of reform.
hartator 4y ago
Or maybe just align income tax on capital gain taxes?
- ethanbond 4y ago
  Eh, this would discourage investment. Investment is important.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    By the same logic, taxing sweat-of-the-brow income higher than capital gains discourages labor. And, between the two, labor is clearly more important.
    - ethanbond 4y ago
      It sure does, which is why we should tax land instead. :) No level of taxation on land value will prevent the land from materializing and being usable.
2devnull 4y ago
There a thing called the Laffer Curve. It’s not as though politicians, whose job it is to spend money, and whom can easily get more popular votes by spending ever larger sums of money rather than budgeting in such a way that defers immediate gratification, have never thought of just taxing more (read history).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
abnry 4y ago
> Corporations and the super rich have bought out democracy, and what is crazy is that they are supported by the very groups they intrinsically hate and hurt through their policies. Oh yes, the "they don't know what's good for them" argument.
hardwaregeek 4y ago
I find it really frustrating that the discourse around taxing the super rich does not emphasize how absurdly rich the super rich are. Even if you are worth 500 million dollars, own a mansion, fancy cars, etc., you are still extremely poor compared to a billionaire. And even among billionaires, someone like Bill Gates is massively more wealthy. On /r/nba some people were remarking about how even among NBA owners, not exactly a poor group, Steve Ballmer is so absurdly rich that he could probably buy the entire NBA (obviously not with his liquid cash, although he did literally buy the Clippers in cash). Like the phrase "tax the rich" makes people think of their neighbor George who as a nice house or even themselves if they make six figures. Nah man, tax the person who can literally buy the NBA and still be a billionaire.
listenallyall 4y ago
How does this "solve" anything? Do you actually think that if rich people start paying more, then that will result in a reduction in what poor/middle class people pay? You are treating the government as if it had even the tiniest bit of fiscal discipline, as if it says, ok, we only have $x coming in, therefore we can only spend $x this year (or alternatively, we plan to spend x, therefore we're obliged to collect x in revenue, but no more than that.) US government hasn't worked like this in decades. Our debt is out of control and growing exponentially. The government has the green light to spend spend spend without any caution whatsoever. Joe Biden has a 4000-page, $1.7 trillion spending bill working it's way through Congress right now that nobody has read. Do you think any politician actually cares how it's going to be paid for? Do you think there are enough ultra rich people in this country, that even if taxed at 99.9%, will dig us out from a 30+ trillion hole?
olvar_ 4y ago
This model does not resemble a free economy at all. Not only it doesn't consider the wealth-creation aspect of a free economy, but it assumes people "wagers" their wealth. No society does this and is a terrible model of how an economy works. Most people earn their wages, if they have some money left they may save that, but long term saving is not comparable with a bet on a coin flip, if you think it is, then you should not save at all because you will go broke with probability one. Again, that is not what happens in our societies. Jumping to the conclusion that "taxing the rich" could solve anything is completely wrong. You would just make things more expensive and add extra incentives to take jobs abroad. It doesn't matter that the model is too simplistic, the problem is that this model is too far from reality.
slowhand09 4y ago
So this redistribution... How will this ever be fair? If I work harder and smarter, save/invest instead of spending recklessly - how is it fair that the fruits of my effort are taken by the government (who incidentally created all the laws and loopholes we have now) to redistribute as THEY see fit (also known as Buying Votes). How do you redistribute my house (expensive due to location) to others living in less expensive places? How about my car (expensive and fast). It costs more, drinks more fuel, and looks nearly new. Never mind that I paid a gasguzzler tax on purchase, sales tax, smog inspection since new(another tax in disguise). It looks new. But I care for it, handwash it, polish it, seal it, personally - my labor. I roundtrip it 90miles a day, so it as 135k miles. But it looks new. MY LABOR. Nobody offered to wash/wax it for me and make some cash. Just like I shovel snow off my driveway. And rake leaves. Nobody wants to do that work. They just want their part of the redistribution. Y'all worry about these millionaires and their money, yet here you are, hoping to learn the secrets of success from Y-Combi companies... and become wealthy yourselves.
fomine3 4y ago
Global fair taxation is what capitalism must solve in this century.
deterministic 4y ago
The solution is simple: Tax land not income.

by bmitc 4y ago

likelyharrison_ 4y ago

Heavy taxing is not the take away from the model the article discuses.

naasking 4y ago
The model clearly shows that while heavy taxation does not fully eliminate unequal distribution, it does dramatically suppress the inequality. Completely eliminating inequality is not necessarily a goal.

system2 4y ago

I know all of this but reading it again made me angry.

sgjohnson 4y ago

> To solve all this, it's pretty simple, and the U.S. actually used to do it: heavily tax the super rich. That never happened. https://mises.org/library/good-ol-days-when-tax-rates-were-90-percent https://mises.org/library/good-ol-days-when-tax-rates-were-9...

bmitc 4y ago
What is "that" that you're referring to? Tax rates have absolutely fallen. If you're referring the article's claim that the rich pay much more taxes in terms of dollar amount, that doesn't necessarily mean anything because the rich are wealthier and more concentrated than every before. For example: > According to investment bank Credit Suisse, the fraction of global household wealth held by the richest 1 percent of the world's population increased from 42.5 to 47.2 percent between the financial crisis of 2008 and 2018. To put it another way, as of 2010, 388 individuals possessed as much household wealth as the lower half of the world's population combined—about 3.5 billion people; today Oxfam estimates that number as 26. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-inevitable/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-ine...
- sgjohnson 4y ago
  Looking at the total world population is completely meaningless. This is because fertility rate in virtually every developed country is below 2, however there are extremely poor countries where the population is exploding with fertility rates above 8. > To put it another way, as of 2010, 388 individuals possessed as much household wealth as the lower half of the world's population combined—about 3.5 billion people; today Oxfam estimates that number as 26. This is also completely meaningless, because that figure is largely imaginery and super illiquid. Rest assured, Jeff Bezos can't cash out of Amazon and expect to be paid the current market rate for all of his shares. It's also completely meaningless because the world's bottom 3.5 billion people control virtually no wealth whatsoever. Makes for a good headline though
  - bmitc 4y ago
    For the U.S. alone, I think the stat is something like out of every 10,000 people, it's something ridiculous like either 40 or even 4 people that own as much wealth as the bottom 6,000 combined. It may honestly be something worse like 1. I remember calculating this from a research paper I read, and I feel like 10,000 was the sample population needed to get a non-fractional rich person or persons. This is absurd.
  - 4y ago

blfr 4y ago

The US is only very loosely constrained by its tax base. It does not lack funds. It has also been spending much more on education over the past decades[1]. With very little to show for it. [1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_236.55.asp?current=yes https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_236.55.a...

foldr 4y ago
You’d expect education costs to be rising, though, as people are expected to have a higher level of education before entering the workforce than they were previously, and because career changes and reskilling are far more common than previously. It’s a bit like healthcare. You can be spending far more than you were when there was a younger population and fewer sophisticated and expensive treatments, and yet still not be spending enough.
- rsj_hn 4y ago
  There is no evidence that people have a higher overall level of education before entering the workforce over time. Rather, people know a different set of skills and accumulate a different body of knowledge. It is only if we define "education" as the degree of knowledge in the body of subjects we teach today that one can say people in the past had less of it. But that's only because we have discarded the many bodies of knowledge an educated person needed to have in the past. For example, one can laugh and say that to earn a doctorate in mathematics during the renaissance you'd need to know algebra only to the level of solving a cubic equation. However you are missing all the archaic geometric ruler and compass constructions, evaluation of various infinite series, and deep knowledge of Latin, Greek, French, German texts, mastery of rhetoric, music theory, and other topics that few learn today. So it is not true that a mathematician of the present could waltz in and get a Doctorate in Philosophy in medieval Paris. He would probably get quickly thrown out for failing to master the many various scholastic topics that were required of a PhD in that time period, and which no one learns today. As another example, a new worker in 1800 might be expected to know how to deliver a calf, fix a fence, shod a horse, make homemade preserves, skin a rabbit, set a broken bone, paint a barn, as well as know Greek, geography, history, recite the speeches of Cicero, translate the Odes of Horace, navigate the seas by an astrolabe, stain a bookcase, identify the key flood valleys of Europe and know which animals could be hunted in which part of the year in various European forests, or know the biographies of German princes, etc. But you are correct, they wouldn't have MS Office skills or know how to create a webapp. Once you move past "hunter-gatherer", you very quickly run into complex societies with their own historically developed bodies of knowledge that require lifetime learning, whether that means learning the seasons and details about planting crops and irrigating fields, dealing with pests, where to dig a well, how to tan leather, etc - or whether that means something else, it is still a vast body of knowledge that takes decades to master. The point is, wherever a society is technologically, it will choose different areas to train its workers, and omit other areas that are no longer needed. But how many resources does a society need to train its workers? If that number keeps growing, then there is something wrong with the society.

derelicta 4y ago

I think this time we should go above and beyond regular heavy taxation. We should seek to extend republican norms within the corporate sphere and downright prohibit rent-seeking. A country whose inhabitants have no say in its internal politics is called a tyranny. It's more than time to see the current workplace the same way.

patientplatypus 4y ago

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hackerman123469 4y ago

But tell me, how are you going to tax the super rich? It's incredibly difficult to tax someone who's actually poor on paper. Most super rich people actually don't seem to have much wealth officially declared, all of their wealth is sort of like "pseudo" in that it's all tied up in assets, and sometimes assets that aren't directly owned by them but their companies etc. and they have a lot of shortcuts for tax breaks on the stuff that can be taxed. With the current system in place then it's impossible to actually tax the rich.

shafyy 4y ago
> It's incredibly difficult to tax someone who's actually poor on paper You think this because the super rich want you to think this. Actually, it's not hard and there are some good ideas floating around (e.g. more inheritance tax, don't let them get loans without taxes againt their illiquid wealth). Does it require a change of laws? Yes, but that's the whole point of democracy.
- sgjohnson 4y ago
  > more inheritance tax won't fix anything > don't let them get loans without taxes againt their illiquid wealth You don't want to fix this. It would kill repurchasing agreements as a collateral damage, making access to credit more difficult and expensive for everyone. Not to mention HELOCs. You might say, "ok, exempt HELOCs", but that's just an arbitrary goalpost. The economy is organic, you can just use a wrench and have a go at a couple of cogs and expect there to be no knock-on effect.
  - shafyy 4y ago
    > The economy is organic, you can just use a wrench and have a go at a couple of cogs and expect there to be no knock-on effect. What do you even mean by "organic"? Of course governments can, do and should intervene in the economy. And yes, there should be a range of experts evaluating policies before they are encated. I never stated the opposite.
- WalterBright 4y ago

shafyy 4y ago

> Corporations and the super rich have bought out democracy, and what is crazy is that they are supported by the very groups they intrinsically hate and hurt through their policies. This is known since at least Marx, and still it doesn't change. This makes me very sad.

smilekzs 4y ago

One thing I've noticed consistently, is when politicians talk about "taxing the wealthy", they almost always follow that with "earning more than $xxxk a year". This is conflating wealth with income. Being within this tax bracket myself, I do not deny that I am biased, but I do hope this bullshit gets called out hard whenever someone brings up yet another underhanded measure to milk us (typical SFBay SWE) above and beyond the ~40% levels we're already facing...

nemo44x 4y ago
Is this a new form of NIMBY taxation? “Tax the rich but not rich people like me!”?
- bmitc 4y ago
  I think it's more that the upper middle class gets hammered while those above do not, so it feels like punishment and adversarial. The way things are right now, everyone has to play the "get as much capital as possible" game because it's the only way to support your family and progeny, but as soon as you hit a relatively low threshold, you start receiving a huge amount of tax pressure. If we redistribute wealth, we redistribute infrastructure, homes, education, medical care, etc. this pressure could be relieved by not forcing personal capital to be deployed and responsible for such support structures.
- smilekzs 4y ago
  You too are conflating wealth ("rich people") and income ("me").
  - nemo44x 4y ago
    Why should wealth be taxed? It already has been and it is immaterial until it is realized. At that point the profits are taxed. Lots of income may not make you wealthy but it lets you live a rich lifestyle. Move somewhere cheaper if you aren’t meeting your savings goals.
    - 4y ago

bamboozled 4y ago

"To solve all this, it's pretty simple," I feel if it was simple it would be fixed?

danaris 4y ago
Something can be very simple, and still be very hard to achieve because of resistance to it.
- bamboozled 4y ago
  Which is why I don't think it's very simple, you have to convince a lot of powerful people they should pay more tax to achieve said goal, that's not easy.
  - polygamous_bat 4y ago
    Simple and easy are not antonyms here -- something can be simple but difficult to accomplish depending on the time and place at the same time. For example, "respect women" is a simple enough phrase but getting the Taliban to follow it is anything but simple.
  - danaris 4y ago
    "Simple" is the opposite of "complicated". "Easy" is the opposite of "hard". Reaching a high shelf is very simple. But if you're short, it may be hard. Calculus is very complicated. But if you're a third-year grad student in mathematics, it may also be very easy for you.
Moissanite 4y ago
Solving problems requires both the way and the will - those two things are not co-incident in many politicians.
chousuke 4y ago
Things can be simple to fix but actually getting people to implement the fix won't be there are incentives against it. They are two different problems.

nemo44x 4y ago

The problem with this live of thinking is that in reality most taxes are paid by wealthy people. The majority of people actually pay 0 taxes and in fact receive credits above their burden of 0. Whine there’s certainly room to address fair taxation rates we should seriously consider how we spend tax revenues today. A 1.5 trillion omnibus is being rushed through Congress that’s full of pork and special interests. We just sent however many billions to a country to fight a war that has nothing to do with us. So we spend all this money and of course it’s not enough. People say “more! Tax the rich!” Without considering the reality.

bmitc 4y ago
That's not a problem at all. The concern is not the absolute dollars paid. The concern are the percentages and the concentration of wealth. That the rich pay a lot of tax is basically immaterial except that it points out just how skewed the wealth distribution is. The "rich pay the majority of taxes" is an excuse.

WalterBright 4y ago

The top 1% pay 40% of the federal tax revenue. The top 5% pay 60%. California has the highest income tax at 13.3%, the highest federal tax rate is 37%. That makes the top income tax rate 50%.

underdeserver 4y ago
Top 1% of salary earners. The CEOs, highly paid doctors, engineers. The real capitalists - those who hold the assets and pay for their yachts with stock-backed loans - they don't pay 40% of the federal tax revenue. Their salary is $1/year.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Loans are not income.
  - janalsncm 4y ago
    There is no law of nature that says only income can be taxed. Loans could be taxed.
    - bmitc 4y ago
      You totally get it, and I really like the law of nature phrasing.
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      How about taxing your mortgage, then?
      - janalsncm 4y ago
        That could be a law. It would be a bad law for most people since they don’t own any houses. Taxing loans to billionaires is a good law because it closes the “just take out a loan” loophole.
  - 4y ago

jmeister 4y ago

This focus on super-rich individuals is totally misguided. What's important is the economic system. Rich individuals are simply a nauseating side-effect of capitalism. Nobody really likes it, but there simply isn't anything better. The burden of proof is on the complainers. Even Marxist-sympathetic Peter Singer gets it. >Look, I think it would be better if you had an economic system in which we didn’t have billionaires—but the productivity that billionaires have generated was still there, and that money was more equitably distributed. But, really, there hasn’t been a system that has had equity in its distribution and the productivity that capitalism has had. I don’t see that happening anytime soon. http://archive.today/2021.04.25-160837/https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/peter-singer-is-committed-to-controversial-ideas http://archive.today/2021.04.25-160837/https://www.newyorker...

bmitc 4y ago
I don't get the productivity argument. What productivity is enabled by billionaires or even individuals? Noam Chomsky has covered this, but most corporations benefit extensively from decades of government funded research and development. The socialist driven productivity is there, it's just that we slap capitalism on it at the end and think it was that that got us here.
- jmeister 4y ago
  R&D is just one aspect. Productivity refers to general competent management incentivized by market pressure. Anti-capitalists apparently can't even run lemonade stands these days: Ezra Klein: "If progressivism can’t work there, why should the country believe it can work anywhere else?" https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/opinion/california-san-francisco-schools.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/opinion/california-san-fr... "Meltdowns Have Brought Progressive Advocacy Groups to a Standstill at a Critical Moment in World History" https://theintercept.com/2022/06/13/progressive-organizing-infighting-callout-culture/ https://theintercept.com/2022/06/13/progressive-organizing-i... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne... https://nationalcenter.org/ncppr/2021/05/27/basecamp-climbs-out-of-woke-corporate-culture/ https://nationalcenter.org/ncppr/2021/05/27/basecamp-climbs-...

selfmodruntime 4y ago

The funny thing is, you don't even need to tax the rich all that much. The money is there. It's just spent on ludicrous stuff. The US annual defense budget is 800 billion dollars a year. Even when you argue that national defense and a well equipped military are necessary (which I believe them to be), I've seen military cost receipts. They're outrageous. You don't need 50 dollar rolls of toilet paper.

cpursley 4y ago
Dropping income tax and replacing it with a progressive sales tax should be at least explored. Wealthy don't file W2s but they do buy luxury items.

an-allen 4y ago

This all presupposes that the government is an efficient user of capital, when its pretty clear its not. Heavy taxes on the rich, means that capital investments that a rich person might finance, become government programmes and bureaucracies. Theres obviously a sweet spot here - but rich folks are good at creating capital and governments are notorious for wasting it. Now in the US I probably don’t have to tell you where most of the money goes - hint military - so more rich folks money into the governments coffers - what industry do you think benefits the most from a policy like this?

danny_codes 4y ago
Most of our money does not go to the military. Defense spending is about 700b per year, while the budget is over 4t. The government doesn't need to handle capitol allocation. We can simply shift the tax burden upwards. Poorer people get reduced tax, rich people get more.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  > Poorer people get reduced tax, rich people get more. This already happens. Many people either don't pay tax, or pay less tax than they cost. > The government doesn't need to handle capitol allocation. Then who will spend the tax money?
  - spinchange 4y ago
    The working poor pay into FICA which is a greater percentage of their cash flow. They get it back upon annual tax reconciliation. The same entitlement programs nonetheless have lots of unfunded liabilities so the money has already been allocated even if it's not currently "there" -- 'The Rich' are beneficiaries of entitlement spending too.
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      It's a simpler situation than that. Regardless of proportions of payment, we already have a percentage of the population whose public services are paid for by someone else, either directly through income or divided tax or indirectly through higher prices from corporation tax, or more indirectly through inflationary monetary policy. In other words: we don't need to invent taxing people with more money more. We have that. Millions of people are partly or fully paid for by others. We might want to adjust it, but we don't need to pretend we're doing something revolutionary in doing so.

janalsncm 4y ago

Adding on to this, we absolutely know how to tax assets. We do it all the time: property (i.e. house) taxes. The unfortunate thing for middle class home owners is that houses are a type of wealth that is taxed just for having it whereas art, corporate shares, bonds, and trust funds are not.

verisimi 4y ago

As if the wealthy have never thought of ways to hide their money... The best you'll do is tax those who are actually turning up to get a salary. Ie you will tax people who arguably might be producing something, as opposed to the inter-generational, rent-seeking families that own so much of our world. If you ask me, and you accept overt governmental control of everything, the best thing to do would be a system of openess about ownership, so that ownership of everything can be seen by everyone - with no murky legal instruments. If you have the information about who owns what - and everything is owned by people, individuals, even if they hide behind legal and corporate instruments - you can then consider addressing what would be an equitable may to proceed. My guess would be that something ludicrously minor like a 10% wealth tax on the top 0.01% of wealth owners, would cover us indefinitely.

neilwilson 4y ago

Or alternatively realise that there isn't a fixed amount of money and therefore if 'rich people' want to count their coins let them do so. (i) it solves the capital accumulation problem (ii) you can accommodate the hoarding by guaranteeing people a job at the living wage, which then injects the right amount of new money, both temporally and spatially, to offset the hoarding. Tax has nothing to do with raising money. Tax is about reducing the capacity of the private sector to hire people so the public sector can hire them instead. If there is unemployment then the public sector hasn't hired enough people or taxes are too high/ineffective. It's never about money. It's always about stuff. Here's how it works[1] [1]: https://new-wayland.com/blog/how-the-job-guarantee-fixes-mainstream-macro/ https://new-wayland.com/blog/how-the-job-guarantee-fixes-mai...

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
There isn't a fixed amount of money. And taxes are only incidentally about public sector hiring. There is (more or less) a fixed amount of power. Taxes doesn't raise money, but they do redistribute and decentralise power, making it harder for the very rich to dominate economic and social strategy for their own ends.
- neilwilson 4y ago
  Except that if you have power, then by definition you can stop people redistributing it. Otherwise you don't actually have power. That concept is another fallacy of composition. Taxes are there to reduce the capacity of the private sector to hire by reducing monetary flow. Without that you will get inflation.

543g43g43 4y ago

Ah, the mythical "super-rich" who could fund all of our solutions, if only we could prise their money out of their clutching hands! It's funny how they always exist, even in countries like the UK and France which in reality have taxed them out of existence, and payscales are absurdly compressed compared to the US. Careful what you wish for, you are someone else's "super rich".

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>the UK and France which in reality have taxed them out of existence You're making it sound like billionaires are an endangered species there. :) Last time I checked there's more than enough billionaires living in the UK and France[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Arnault https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Arnault
- 543g43g43 4y ago
  That's the very definition of cherry picking. Try this dataset instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_billionaires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...
  - nobodyandproud 4y ago
    According to the third list (Hurun), the UK is keeping pace with the US.
    - 543g43g43 4y ago
      Shame Hurun doesn't publish its source data, or a list of those people.
      - nobodyandproud 4y ago
        Which is an irrelevant objection, unless the list is inaccurate. Hurun reports are widely cited with few (if any) questions on its accuracy. In fact, it's an inaccurate objection proven by 1 minute of research: https://www.hurun.net/en-US/Rank/HsRankDetails?pagetype=global https://www.hurun.net/en-US/Rank/HsRankDetails?pagetype=glob...

XiphiasX 4y ago

As a reaction to this, the super-rich will just implement offshore strategies to move their operations to tax-friendly jurisdictions.

imgabe 4y ago

There is no “this” to solve because this is a wildly inaccurate simulation and not the real economy.

1letterunixname 4y ago

Fair taxation doesn't work with regulatory capture. The US is a gross-unequal mafia colonial power. If it wasn't, campaign finance reform not only would've passed decades ago, it wouldn't be necessary. Instead, it's easy to be super rich and pay almost no taxes like Trump or Buffett.

jmyeet 4y ago

The idea of the “middle class” is propaganda. The whole point of this as well as any number of wedge social issues is to sow division and direct your anger at marginalized groups instead of the wealthy and powerful. There are only two groups when it comes to economic status: labor and the capital-owning class. Labor is anyone who derives their income from their labor and goes all the way from the janitor to doctors and professional athletes. Th idea of the middle class was invented to sow division with the “lower classes”. I mean look at your comment. You assert the “middle class” is getting slammed with taxes. Some (not necessarily you) imply the lower classes are somehow getting a free ride or are lazy. This is the propaganda. We live in the wealthiest nation on earth. People without housing or food security is completely unnecessary. Charging people $1000/month for insulin, without which they would die, is only that way for corporate profits. Think about that.

Valakas_ 4y ago
I don't think it was *invented* to sow division, but I agree with you that it can definitely be used for it. There's different ways to categorize things - lower-class, middle-class and upper-class is a sort of intuitive way which throughout history has made some sense, somewhat, with different names. However, I get that maybe it's not the most useful currently, because there's such a ridiculous divide between upper-class (rich) and the other two, that we, belonging to the bottom 2, should band together to bring change favorable to us.
int_19h 4y ago
You're right, but this misdirection goes both ways. Logically, it would make more sence for the "lower" and the "middle" class to present a unified political front to tax the capital-owning class. But with the division in place, politicians backed by capital can sell a tax plan that is mostly, in fact, about raising taxes on the middle class but not the capital (most proposals that focus on personal income tax rates are in this category) to the "lower" class.

wtcactus 4y ago

Your assumption is that the state will apply that money optimally (or at least more optimally than the super rich - also, notice you didn’t define what super rich are). Looking at historical and present data, I can be absolutely sure that the state will mismanage that money in almost every country. I’m Portuguese, my government is collecting more ~ 25% taxes than it collected 6 years ago when the current ruling party got into power. Almost everyone (left and right) agrees that public services and administration are much worst. So, it begs the question: why giving the government even more money, will solve anything?

sega_sai 4y ago
To be honest I think this is strawman argument. I think it is absolutely true that the government will mismanage some of that money. The question is whether that money used with not 100% efficiency is better than a billionaire who may spend that money on anything. I certainly agree there are rich people who donate their money effectively but even then they decide what to spend the money on. So in my opinion some government mismanagement is not the reason to have some redistribution, but rather a reason to ensure that governments are properly accountable etc. And even if that is a government spending it can be still tendered to private companies depending on what's being done.
pixelfarmer 4y ago
That implies that privately owned organizations manage money well, which is not the case either. The larger an organization is, the more inefficiencies it accumulates. Plus, don't forget that states usually provide a lot of subsidies to companies and also pay businesses/consultants to do some of their work.
Valakas_ 4y ago
If the state doesn't apply the money optimally, i.e. it's not doing its job, then that's the problem that needs to be fixed.

joemazerino 4y ago

Tax the rich and they leave. OP has made a fundamental mistake in their logic. Poverty and earnings aren't based on "coin flips".

naasking 4y ago
> Tax the rich and they leave. A common claim but never accompanied by actual evidence.

Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago

Another contributor is dividends getting taxes lower than earned income (like from a job). Why would money you got from sitting on your ass doing nothing be taxed less than money you got by working a job?

LatteLazy 4y ago

The problem with this plan is that modern economies need a lot of capital. There are three places that capital can come from: * the state, but we have voted year in and year out for tax cuts and spending rises, so the state is bankrupt. Not only is it not a source of capital, it is a major customer for it * normal individuals saving and those small amounts being aggregated by banks etc. But rampant (and government supported) consumerism means most people are also consumers of capital not sources of it. Incidentally an example of the opposite of this is Germany where ordinary people save a lot more and don't have OTT mortgages and credit card debt. Mysteriously they have very few billionares... * Billionaires. Which given the US (and UK where I live need their capital AND cannot get it elsewhere are able to charge a premium for it and cannot really be taxed etc without pain spreading all over the rest of the economy. But if you try and tell people to spend less, save more, pay their taxes and accept less services in order to have a better, fairer, more equal, ultimately richer life they bulk...

newZWhoDis 4y ago

If the government is not bound by a balanced budget amendment (can spend more than it takes in), and can print money whenever it wants, why do I pay taxes? If the entire monetary system is fake, why do they need 40+% of my paycheck?

mint2 4y ago
Because without an income stream no one loans to the government, or at least not at current rates. Interest rates would explode. Funnily enough Britain just demoed that for everyone. the prior pm tried to reduce taxes a ton and everything nearly went to hell in a hand basket. So at least we can be confident the taxes are actually doing things.
- newZWhoDis 4y ago
  > Because without an income stream no one loans to the government The government prints whatever money it needs to pay its bills, and does so already with impunity. It also pays interest on money loaned to it (bonds) with printed fiat. Also, you completely missed the point. Of course taxes “do things”, and ending them would also “do something”. That wasn’t the question. The question is simple, why pay taxes at all when the government has the ability to print an endless supply of money?
  - mint2 4y ago
    Why so should people answer or respond if the responses are ignored in order to repeat posting the same wrong preconceptions… preconceptions that were already addressed and even provided a contemporary example that was also ignored.

therealdkz 4y ago

the problem is the taxeg go to funding military and healthcare. education is futher down the list.

willmadden 4y ago

The solution is to cut the size of government first. The inefficiency and outright grift happening in all federal agencies would make any entrepreneur’s head spin. Imagine if Congress had to answer to VCs for their spending. They would all be blackballed from the investor community overnight. The “tax the rich more” line is a little naive. The world is a different place after the Rothschilds figured out how to shield their wealth from monarchies. It’s easier than ever to offshore wealth, remember the Panama papers that promptly disappeared from the news? The “solution” of global governments is a cure that’s likely far worse than the disease. It’s a complicated situation. A progressive VAT tax that is consistent across jurisdictions would be a good start. The tax code (at least in the US) needs to be thrown out and replaced. Monetary policy and taxation via inflation is also primitive and in dire need of reform.

hartator 4y ago

Or maybe just align income tax on capital gain taxes?

ethanbond 4y ago
Eh, this would discourage investment. Investment is important.
- int_19h 4y ago
  By the same logic, taxing sweat-of-the-brow income higher than capital gains discourages labor. And, between the two, labor is clearly more important.
  - ethanbond 4y ago
    It sure does, which is why we should tax land instead. :) No level of taxation on land value will prevent the land from materializing and being usable.

2devnull 4y ago

There a thing called the Laffer Curve. It’s not as though politicians, whose job it is to spend money, and whom can easily get more popular votes by spending ever larger sums of money rather than budgeting in such a way that defers immediate gratification, have never thought of just taxing more (read history).

deleted 4y ago

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abnry 4y ago

> Corporations and the super rich have bought out democracy, and what is crazy is that they are supported by the very groups they intrinsically hate and hurt through their policies. Oh yes, the "they don't know what's good for them" argument.

hardwaregeek 4y ago

I find it really frustrating that the discourse around taxing the super rich does not emphasize how absurdly rich the super rich are. Even if you are worth 500 million dollars, own a mansion, fancy cars, etc., you are still extremely poor compared to a billionaire. And even among billionaires, someone like Bill Gates is massively more wealthy. On /r/nba some people were remarking about how even among NBA owners, not exactly a poor group, Steve Ballmer is so absurdly rich that he could probably buy the entire NBA (obviously not with his liquid cash, although he did literally buy the Clippers in cash). Like the phrase "tax the rich" makes people think of their neighbor George who as a nice house or even themselves if they make six figures. Nah man, tax the person who can literally buy the NBA and still be a billionaire.

listenallyall 4y ago

How does this "solve" anything? Do you actually think that if rich people start paying more, then that will result in a reduction in what poor/middle class people pay? You are treating the government as if it had even the tiniest bit of fiscal discipline, as if it says, ok, we only have $x coming in, therefore we can only spend $x this year (or alternatively, we plan to spend x, therefore we're obliged to collect x in revenue, but no more than that.) US government hasn't worked like this in decades. Our debt is out of control and growing exponentially. The government has the green light to spend spend spend without any caution whatsoever. Joe Biden has a 4000-page, $1.7 trillion spending bill working it's way through Congress right now that nobody has read. Do you think any politician actually cares how it's going to be paid for? Do you think there are enough ultra rich people in this country, that even if taxed at 99.9%, will dig us out from a 30+ trillion hole?

olvar_ 4y ago

This model does not resemble a free economy at all. Not only it doesn't consider the wealth-creation aspect of a free economy, but it assumes people "wagers" their wealth. No society does this and is a terrible model of how an economy works. Most people earn their wages, if they have some money left they may save that, but long term saving is not comparable with a bet on a coin flip, if you think it is, then you should not save at all because you will go broke with probability one. Again, that is not what happens in our societies. Jumping to the conclusion that "taxing the rich" could solve anything is completely wrong. You would just make things more expensive and add extra incentives to take jobs abroad. It doesn't matter that the model is too simplistic, the problem is that this model is too far from reality.

slowhand09 4y ago

So this redistribution... How will this ever be fair? If I work harder and smarter, save/invest instead of spending recklessly - how is it fair that the fruits of my effort are taken by the government (who incidentally created all the laws and loopholes we have now) to redistribute as THEY see fit (also known as Buying Votes). How do you redistribute my house (expensive due to location) to others living in less expensive places? How about my car (expensive and fast). It costs more, drinks more fuel, and looks nearly new. Never mind that I paid a gasguzzler tax on purchase, sales tax, smog inspection since new(another tax in disguise). It looks new. But I care for it, handwash it, polish it, seal it, personally - my labor. I roundtrip it 90miles a day, so it as 135k miles. But it looks new. MY LABOR. Nobody offered to wash/wax it for me and make some cash. Just like I shovel snow off my driveway. And rake leaves. Nobody wants to do that work. They just want their part of the redistribution. Y'all worry about these millionaires and their money, yet here you are, hoping to learn the secrets of success from Y-Combi companies... and become wealthy yourselves.

fomine3 4y ago

Global fair taxation is what capitalism must solve in this century.

deterministic 4y ago

The solution is simple: Tax land not income.