7 ms·

I don't follow politics closely, and I noticed it's creeping up on here more and more, but from my shallow observations, it seems that Democrats are just rich p

I don't follow politics closely, and I noticed it's creeping up on here more and more, but from my shallow observations, it seems that Democrats are just rich people protection as Republicans, if not more? A lot of it seems to be done under the guise of liberty and social welfare too. Am I wrong?

jfengel 3y ago
If the Democrats were "just as rich people protection" as the Republicans, they wouldn't need this. A billionaire tax is popular among Democrats. It's just not universal. A thing like this is mostly political posturing. No "billionaire tax" is going to happen this year or any time soon. There are plenty of Republicans who can ensure that, without any Democratic help. But centrist Democrats are trying to avoid the perception that it it's a likely thing, which they think will play badly during the next election. There are more realistic things that Democrats do plan on, that billionaires don't like. They want to use regulations designed to rein in harm by large corporations, end tax cuts that benefit the wealthy more than others, shift rapidly away from a fossil fuel economy, etc. They also have a further left wing which wants to do even more, and there are genuine differences of opinion within the party. The centrist wing, which is mostly in charge of the party, thus gets tagged both with being too liberal by Republicans and too conservative by their own left wing. Moderation is much less popular than political theorists would have you believe.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  To be really fair, a "wealth tax" would be a nightmare to administer. If someone has some income they can sock some of it away to pay the IRS. If you look at the case of Twitter, for instance, how do you tax it? Is it worth $44 billion, $22 billion or is it a Superfund site that has negative value? How does the owner get the cash? (I think of how the business model of Premier League football seems to be something like: buy a team for $300M, lose $30M a year running it for ten years, sell it to someone else for $1B, at least you can tax a $700M capital gain - $300M of operating losses.) The manipulations that people can make with capital gains are already bad enough but when you sell something there is a real price, there will be all kinds of crazy games with a wealth tax.
  - fakedang 3y ago
    > Is it worth $44 billion, $22 billion or is it a Superfund site that has negative value? How does the owner get the cash? It would be worth the last buying price for that owner, that is $44 billion. Gives an incentive to negotiate down as much as possible, instead of buying at inflated prices. The seller pays capital gains and the buyer pays a wealth tax on the asset. It doesn't matter if Twitter is a negative income entity, if it is ascribed some value. It would essentially become the equivalent of a white elephant. There used to be a time in India when people who did not have an income but had lots of erstwhile assets (usually upper caste folks with zero skills) would sell off their properties just so they didn't have to pay wealth tax. That was essentially how my parents bought their first property. The caveat is that enforcement is going to be a bitch, black money will proliferate in the market but if digitally maintained, collection could be streamlined.
  - jfengel 3y ago
    Somehow, Colombia, France, Norway, Spain and Switzerland make it work. I don't doubt that it's an accounting nightmare, but Elon Musk can afford an accountant who can apply the Generally Accepted Accounting Practices. I have no doubt that games would be played, and that the IRS would constantly play cat-and-mouse with them. Arguably, we could solve the problem without a wealth tax just by funding the IRS properly to enforce the rules already on the books. That's why things like this happen. Rules get written; wealthy people subvert them; new rules pile on more. It's not great, but it's better than the alternative of just giving up. I actually have no idea whether a wealth tax is a net benefit. I just know that it's not going to happen in my lifetime (not with a Supreme Court guaranteed to find it unconstitutional), so I don't spend any time thinking about it on the merits.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    > how do you tax it? Is it worth $44 billion, $22 billion I'd say a start would be what is the value it's being borrowed against? Quite often you see rich people getting loans based on the imaginary value of these ethereal assets. Seems like a good starting point for taxation.
  - thmsths 3y ago
    And yet we make the wealth tax work for the middle class. For most people in the middle class, their house is most of their net worth and states/counties will tax that asset around 1/2% per year. But when someone has Billions in stocks (which arguably are more liquid than a house since you can sell only a fraction of what you own to cover your tax bill) suddenly it becomes unfair and impossible to administer.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  Interesting and informative take on it, thank you for sharing.
fnordpiglet 3y ago
The article reads that way until you get half way through it and realize that it’s a few sellouts shilling for dollars. The second half outlines that democrats are the ones who are actually proposing wealth taxes to begin with. It’s a classic outrage based clickbait article format.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  Good point!
- EA-3167 3y ago
  It's Jacobin, they have a massive agenda and despise "liberals" as they call them. It's a classic case of extremists who think their greatest enemy is the moderate faction of their party, rather than the other party.
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    It’s frankly a shame we’ve gotten to the point where the other side is an enemy. Washington and Adams strongly believed parties shouldn’t exist in America because of this. Jefferson manipulated the situation to his advantage and won, enshrining the enshitification of American politics in just the way Washington and Adams feared it would.
    - EA-3167 3y ago
      I'm too much of a cynic to believe that this was anything, but inevitable. It's not as though countries with many parties or no parties are somehow less divided right now. And frankly when one party led to what we saw on 1/6, and that party is doubling down on that ideology, it's hard to frame them as something other than an enemy. I've never felt that way about the GOP until quite a bit into Trump's presidency, but the feeling has stuck. At some point we're beyond both civics and civility.
    - finite_depth 3y ago
      [dead]
Chanticleer 3y ago
You're not completely wrong. We're watching the slow-motion transformation of both parties. The Republicans are becoming a working class, multi-racial party while the Democrats are turning into the party of rich, upper-class white people. I'm so old I can remember when Democrats would be standing with the auto workers instead of snuggling up obscenely overpaid, incompetent Detroit executives but that's what they're doing now.
- vero24 3y ago
  https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/09/22/uaw-strike-tim-scott-faces-labor-complaint-over-firing-comments.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/09/22/uaw-strike-tim-scott-fac... https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/amp/shows/maddow/blog/rcna107966 https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/amp/shows/maddow/blog/rcna107966 this took two seconds to google
  - pauldenton 3y ago
    https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2019/april/us-auto-labor-market-nafta https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2019/april/us-auto... https://www.chicagofed.org/publications/economic-perspectives/2017/6 https://www.chicagofed.org/publications/economic-perspective.... Took two seconds of google to see that US Auto Jobs went down after NAFTA and Mexican auto jobs went up after NAFTA If Democrats successfully passed the Trans Pacific Partnership we would have seen another decline of US Auto jobs and an uptick in Vietnamese or South Korean auto Manafacturing.
- aceazzameen 3y ago
  Please source your nonsense.
- faeriechangling 3y ago
  Rich upper-class white people are still absolutely a republican demographic, if there's any rich people the democrats woo it's highly educated wealthy people, urban wealthy people, and wealthy people who are minorities of some sort. Whereas your prototypical rich republican is a WASP who owns something like a mining company and lives on a ranch or something. The democrats also notably have a lot of support among the poorest in society, and this base is a LOT of their electorate, so this really shouldn't be overlooked.
faeriechangling 3y ago
It's hard to see the Democrats as supporting the super-wealthy MORE when the Republicans are running Donald Trump who introduced a ton of tax breaks for his buddies, and the proposals for wealth taxes are coming from the democrats. I am however increasingly seeing the Democratic Party leave the middle class and start to pull more of their electorate from the fringes of the poor and wealthy, whereas republicans have more of a middle-class focus nowadays. So there has been a notable re-alignment with the democrats focusing more on the wealthy with the trend I suppose starting with Clinton.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  My point is, I hope it’s not just a ruse and they actually do what they promise to do?
poulsbohemian 3y ago
Consider the capital gains tax in Democratically-controlled Washington state. There's no question that the backers intended it as an overt tax on the wealthy.

jfengel 3y ago

If the Democrats were "just as rich people protection" as the Republicans, they wouldn't need this. A billionaire tax is popular among Democrats. It's just not universal. A thing like this is mostly political posturing. No "billionaire tax" is going to happen this year or any time soon. There are plenty of Republicans who can ensure that, without any Democratic help. But centrist Democrats are trying to avoid the perception that it it's a likely thing, which they think will play badly during the next election. There are more realistic things that Democrats do plan on, that billionaires don't like. They want to use regulations designed to rein in harm by large corporations, end tax cuts that benefit the wealthy more than others, shift rapidly away from a fossil fuel economy, etc. They also have a further left wing which wants to do even more, and there are genuine differences of opinion within the party. The centrist wing, which is mostly in charge of the party, thus gets tagged both with being too liberal by Republicans and too conservative by their own left wing. Moderation is much less popular than political theorists would have you believe.

PaulHoule 3y ago
To be really fair, a "wealth tax" would be a nightmare to administer. If someone has some income they can sock some of it away to pay the IRS. If you look at the case of Twitter, for instance, how do you tax it? Is it worth $44 billion, $22 billion or is it a Superfund site that has negative value? How does the owner get the cash? (I think of how the business model of Premier League football seems to be something like: buy a team for $300M, lose $30M a year running it for ten years, sell it to someone else for $1B, at least you can tax a $700M capital gain - $300M of operating losses.) The manipulations that people can make with capital gains are already bad enough but when you sell something there is a real price, there will be all kinds of crazy games with a wealth tax.
- fakedang 3y ago
  > Is it worth $44 billion, $22 billion or is it a Superfund site that has negative value? How does the owner get the cash? It would be worth the last buying price for that owner, that is $44 billion. Gives an incentive to negotiate down as much as possible, instead of buying at inflated prices. The seller pays capital gains and the buyer pays a wealth tax on the asset. It doesn't matter if Twitter is a negative income entity, if it is ascribed some value. It would essentially become the equivalent of a white elephant. There used to be a time in India when people who did not have an income but had lots of erstwhile assets (usually upper caste folks with zero skills) would sell off their properties just so they didn't have to pay wealth tax. That was essentially how my parents bought their first property. The caveat is that enforcement is going to be a bitch, black money will proliferate in the market but if digitally maintained, collection could be streamlined.
- jfengel 3y ago
  Somehow, Colombia, France, Norway, Spain and Switzerland make it work. I don't doubt that it's an accounting nightmare, but Elon Musk can afford an accountant who can apply the Generally Accepted Accounting Practices. I have no doubt that games would be played, and that the IRS would constantly play cat-and-mouse with them. Arguably, we could solve the problem without a wealth tax just by funding the IRS properly to enforce the rules already on the books. That's why things like this happen. Rules get written; wealthy people subvert them; new rules pile on more. It's not great, but it's better than the alternative of just giving up. I actually have no idea whether a wealth tax is a net benefit. I just know that it's not going to happen in my lifetime (not with a Supreme Court guaranteed to find it unconstitutional), so I don't spend any time thinking about it on the merits.
- pixl97 3y ago
  > how do you tax it? Is it worth $44 billion, $22 billion I'd say a start would be what is the value it's being borrowed against? Quite often you see rich people getting loans based on the imaginary value of these ethereal assets. Seems like a good starting point for taxation.
- thmsths 3y ago
  And yet we make the wealth tax work for the middle class. For most people in the middle class, their house is most of their net worth and states/counties will tax that asset around 1/2% per year. But when someone has Billions in stocks (which arguably are more liquid than a house since you can sell only a fraction of what you own to cover your tax bill) suddenly it becomes unfair and impossible to administer.
ChatGTP 3y ago
Interesting and informative take on it, thank you for sharing.

fnordpiglet 3y ago

The article reads that way until you get half way through it and realize that it’s a few sellouts shilling for dollars. The second half outlines that democrats are the ones who are actually proposing wealth taxes to begin with. It’s a classic outrage based clickbait article format.

ChatGTP 3y ago
Good point!
EA-3167 3y ago
It's Jacobin, they have a massive agenda and despise "liberals" as they call them. It's a classic case of extremists who think their greatest enemy is the moderate faction of their party, rather than the other party.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  It’s frankly a shame we’ve gotten to the point where the other side is an enemy. Washington and Adams strongly believed parties shouldn’t exist in America because of this. Jefferson manipulated the situation to his advantage and won, enshrining the enshitification of American politics in just the way Washington and Adams feared it would.
  - EA-3167 3y ago
    I'm too much of a cynic to believe that this was anything, but inevitable. It's not as though countries with many parties or no parties are somehow less divided right now. And frankly when one party led to what we saw on 1/6, and that party is doubling down on that ideology, it's hard to frame them as something other than an enemy. I've never felt that way about the GOP until quite a bit into Trump's presidency, but the feeling has stuck. At some point we're beyond both civics and civility.
  - finite_depth 3y ago
    [dead]

Chanticleer 3y ago

You're not completely wrong. We're watching the slow-motion transformation of both parties. The Republicans are becoming a working class, multi-racial party while the Democrats are turning into the party of rich, upper-class white people. I'm so old I can remember when Democrats would be standing with the auto workers instead of snuggling up obscenely overpaid, incompetent Detroit executives but that's what they're doing now.

vero24 3y ago
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/09/22/uaw-strike-tim-scott-faces-labor-complaint-over-firing-comments.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/09/22/uaw-strike-tim-scott-fac... https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/amp/shows/maddow/blog/rcna107966 https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/amp/shows/maddow/blog/rcna107966 this took two seconds to google
- pauldenton 3y ago
  https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2019/april/us-auto-labor-market-nafta https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2019/april/us-auto... https://www.chicagofed.org/publications/economic-perspectives/2017/6 https://www.chicagofed.org/publications/economic-perspective.... Took two seconds of google to see that US Auto Jobs went down after NAFTA and Mexican auto jobs went up after NAFTA If Democrats successfully passed the Trans Pacific Partnership we would have seen another decline of US Auto jobs and an uptick in Vietnamese or South Korean auto Manafacturing.
aceazzameen 3y ago
Please source your nonsense.
faeriechangling 3y ago
Rich upper-class white people are still absolutely a republican demographic, if there's any rich people the democrats woo it's highly educated wealthy people, urban wealthy people, and wealthy people who are minorities of some sort. Whereas your prototypical rich republican is a WASP who owns something like a mining company and lives on a ranch or something. The democrats also notably have a lot of support among the poorest in society, and this base is a LOT of their electorate, so this really shouldn't be overlooked.

faeriechangling 3y ago

It's hard to see the Democrats as supporting the super-wealthy MORE when the Republicans are running Donald Trump who introduced a ton of tax breaks for his buddies, and the proposals for wealth taxes are coming from the democrats. I am however increasingly seeing the Democratic Party leave the middle class and start to pull more of their electorate from the fringes of the poor and wealthy, whereas republicans have more of a middle-class focus nowadays. So there has been a notable re-alignment with the democrats focusing more on the wealthy with the trend I suppose starting with Clinton.

ChatGTP 3y ago
My point is, I hope it’s not just a ruse and they actually do what they promise to do?

poulsbohemian 3y ago

Consider the capital gains tax in Democratically-controlled Washington state. There's no question that the backers intended it as an overt tax on the wealthy.