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I hope this works. The only way to save the economy and the society is by taxing the rich. Think about it for a minute. The rich people hoard all the resources

• tzekid 1y ago
  In modern societies: top 1% of earners pay roughly 30% of taxes top 5% pay 65% of taxes top 10% pay 80% of taxes while bottom 50% usually barely make 2% of taxes. Heavy redistribution of wealth is already in place and it's not making things better.
  • samiv 1y ago
    "Heavy redistribution of wealth is already in place and it's not making things better." You're right, because the distribution is removing large groups of people from the economy. Just for reference, this has been done before and it produced possibly one of the best economies (at the time) and it was very social democrat. This was the United States after the so called "New Deal". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal And just to make it crystal clear, we're not talking about taxing working people. We're talking about taxing the obscenely wealthy people who just sit on massive amounts of wealth, whether it's stocks or property or yachts or mansions or gold and jewelry. You know the > 10-1000x millionairs
  • robin_reala 1y ago
    I’m not sure how your second statement follows your first? It’s implying that your numbers are “heavy” but not backing it up.
  • thinkcontext 1y ago
    > Heavy redistribution of wealth is already in place and it's not making things better. Really? Universal education and healthcare don't make things better?
  • ulrikrasmussen 1y ago
    But the top 1% still pays proportionally less of their wealth in taxes than the bottom 50%. Yes, they may pay a large fraction of the total taxes, but with what they own they should pay even more. I think another big problem is that this extremely uneven distribution of wealth is a basic democratic problem. The reason we have states is, among other things, to put the allocation of our finite resources under democratic control. If the majority of those resources are on private hands, then states get less control and our votes have less power.
    • AlgorithmicTime 1y ago
      [dead]
  • misterhill 1y ago
    A lot of people survive and tolerate a lifestyle that comes from these redistributions of things to people who no longer have direct access to means of survival like water and land. You really have to qualify what you mean in better. Many rich people with heads should consider that the current situation is making things better than the next version of the French Revolution.
    • logicchains 1y ago
      >Many rich people with heads should consider that the current situation is making things better than the next version of the French Revolution. The French Revolution was a revolution against the French government, and its high tax policies.
      • skywal_l 1y ago
        No. It was a revolution against a regime where the rich paid NO taxes. Article 9 of the august decree – Fiscal privileges in the payment of taxes were abolished forever. Taxes were to be collected from all the citizens, in exactly the same manner, and plans were to be considered to set up a new method of tax collection. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_feudalism_in_France#August_decrees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_feudalism_in_Fran...
  • myrmidon 1y ago
    Sure, but how "heavy" is that redistribution though? Top 1% paying 30% of taxes sounds like a really rough deal for them at first, but if those 1%ers already own over 30% of your country in the first place (which is the case in the US), then thats barely their "fair share", and you are not really achieveing any redistribution at all. How can you be certain that the problem is "progressive taxation is not working" instead of "taxation does not help against wealth inequality because it is actually barely progressive"?
    • hnhg 1y ago
      Also the top 1% covers everything from the very affluent middle class to billionaires - the distance from the least rich part of the 1% to the richest part spans billions, much greater than the rest of the distribution's 99%.
      • cloverich 1y ago
        top 1% net worth is around 10 million says google. That's enough to live off and not need to work at any age. It's clearly not middle class.
        • hnhg 1y ago
          It depends on where you are. There are parts of the USA where a 10 million net worth does not mean you are "yacht rich" (but certainly very comfortable).
          • ethbr1 1y ago
            No one has a right to live anywhere specific. That seems like an individual's problem rather than a government's.
  • koonsolo 1y ago
    Do you have a source for this?
• mrweasel 1y ago
  > I hope this works. It won't. Richest people in the world are exceedingly wealth, but they're not that wealthy. I'm not suggesting that they shouldn't be taxed, they should, and much harder than is currently the case. We should move to remove the loop holes used and abused to make people like Bezos appear poor, in the eyes of the tax authorities, but it won't move much in terms of monetary value, because they're not that wealthy. Let's tax Zuckerberg half of his wealth, that's roughly 2% of the US budget. That's a lot, but you can only do that once, maybe twice. You can certainly tax the wealthiest enough to fund quite a bit and if you pick the right things you can do a lot of good. It's just not enough to reshape society, which seems to be what most think would happen. What I see as the biggest issue is the amount of societal damage these people are willing to do to amass their fortunes. I don't even care that Bezos is worth $250 billon, if he didn't exploit workers and deliberately destroys other business to accumulate that wealth. Same with Zuckerberg, he can be as rich as he likes, but he can't build that wealth of spying on users and generally being a dick. Musk... He can build all the cars and rockets he like, but stop undermining democracy through financial means. Taxing billionaires hard won't stop their bad behaviour.
  • samiv 1y ago
    If the US government is 30 trillion dollars in debt someone is 30 trillion dollars in credit. The money doesn't disappear. Now the problem is (in the context of United States) that the number #1 and #2 creditors are People's Republic of China and Japan. So the US cannot tax those entities. But they can tax domestic creditors and wealthy individuals. "Let's tax Zuckerberg half of his wealth, that's roughly 2% of the US budget. That's a lot, but you can only do that once, maybe twice. You can certainly tax the wealthiest enough to fund quite a bit and if you pick the right things you can do a lot of good. It's just not enough to reshape society, which seems to be what most think would happen." No, the point is that you can do it over and over again. Once you put that money into the economy it will flow all around it and most of the money will end up in the same place again. I.e in the bank account of Zuckerberg and it can be taxed again.
    • logicchains 1y ago
      >Once you put that money into the economy it will flow all around it and most of the money will end up in the same place again. I.e in the bank account of Zuckerberg and it can be taxed again. Money is not value, it's a proxy for value. By taxing capital and using it on handouts, you're essentially burning that value; it's like a farmer eating all their seeds rather than saving some for the next year's crop.
• logicchains 1y ago
  Spending money doesn't grow the economy; the economy grows by saving and investment. Punishing people who successfully save and invest by giving money to people who prefer to spend everything they earn leads to less savings and investment, and lower economic growth, as the poor economic conditions of Brazil and Spain demonstrate. Rich people don't "hoard" the means of production, they create it. Confiscatory policies lead to less business creation; if Gates, Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg and Page had not had the wealth to create the businesses that made them billionaires, those businesses wouldn't exist, the jobs and products they create wouldn't exist. Europe demonstrates this empirically with its complete lack of any big tech companies, a result of its hostile policies and cultural attitudes to entrepreneurship.
  • samiv 1y ago
    Investing in passive assets such as property that already exists does not create new economy. "Rich people don't "hoard" the means of production, they create it." Actually they do. Look at the GDP growth rates across western countries. 1-2%. The wealthy people (since pandemic) have grown their wealth 10-20%. Where did that come from if the GDP didn't grow. The only way they were able to do this was by literally hoarding wealth and by buying assets that already exist and by doing so displacing other people with less assets.
    • drcongo 1y ago
      Indeed. There's a whole street in London (The Bishop's Avenue) that's essentially unoccupied - every house on it is owned by foreign billionaires. Every now and then one of them knocks down the house and builds a new, more garish one in its place. It used to be stunning, now it's grotesque.
  • mafuy 1y ago
    I think the GP comment has some issues, but this is not the right way to address them. If someone owns all the houses but does not rent them out at a reasonable cost, so people have to sleep on the street while the house stays empty, then I will call that hoarding. You don't really address that core problem.
  • 1y ago
• Arnt 1y ago
  Really rich people don't have a lot of money, they have a lot of assets that are considered to be worth a lot of money, typically companies. Companies are work. If you make the big owners ask for higher dividends, you tax the work indirectly. You could of course tax the non-work wealth. Most of that is home ownership, few home owners consider themselves rich.
  • justonceokay 1y ago
    The modesty of the landlord knows no bounds
    • Arnt 1y ago
      Yeah, well. The richest person in the city where I live is rich because many thousand well-paid jobs are counted as part of her wealth. I've heard that she's not a nice person, but that hardly matters: If you want to extract money from that fortune, the money has to be squeezed from the many thousand jobs, because most of it is those jobs. (It's also the buildings it happens in, and the machines they use, but the largest part if the workforce.)
      • ethbr1 1y ago
        Respectfully, I don't buy the power-not-actual-wealth argument. If someone has wealth in non-liquid forms, they still have wealth. Addressing inequality is going to mean governments and tax authorities take a broader view of wealth and methods to tax it. There needs to be a new consensus that if wealth exceeds a certain level, it will be aggressively traced and progressively taxed. Whether that wealth is in the form of currency, equity, corporate ownership, political power, or any of the other forms. Because of the pyramidal distribution, it'd absolutely be feasible to say "If you have a net worth about USD$1b, you have a dedicated tax authority team who combs over your assets and calculate the minimum you should owe, using generally accepted accounting standards. Your choice how you choose to pay that." And if they don't want to -- fine, your ability to travel in the first world is recinced. Have fun being rich, but you're not going to do it in Monaco.
• sershe 1y ago
  I wish these kind of comments were backed by some numbers. European welfare states are paid for by taxes on the middle class. The wealthy already pay taxes disproportionately and taxing the wealth itself has an obvious problem, it's stock not flow, so given government spending it will last you a few years at best. Then what? The way to fix the economy is to bring one metric back to what it was when the economy supposed ly worked in the past - per capital government spending