8 ms·

Tax cuts for the wealthy only benefit the rich (2023)

188 points by mooreds 3mo ago

teach 3mo ago
Quelle surprise!
cdrnsf 3mo ago
Well, yes — much like trickle down economics.
- ceejayoz 3mo ago
  Yeah, turns out the trickle is just piss.
  - ratelimitsteve 3mo ago
    the rising tide that's supposed to lift all boats? also piss.
    - lifestyleguru 3mo ago
      Whole life had the don't piss in water anxiety, only to realize that everyone does it and I'm swimming in it.
      - ratelimitsteve 3mo ago
        "We'd been floating on inner tubes on the river for 8 hours, drinking beer, and I realized that not once had any of my friends gotten out of the river to pee." ---ron white, upon experiencing a flash of enlightenment. quote from memory.
numbers_guy 3mo ago
No shit. If you want a tax cut to have an economic impact, cut taxes for the poorest, the ones with the least disposable income. EDIT: Seems like the article is suggesting that giving more disposable income to the rich, results in them using that extra income to buy capital rent seeking assets. So it is a double fuck you to the poor. Because not only do the rich end up paying proportionally less in taxes, but they also use the extra money to compete with you for your home, buy the home and rent it back to you, putting you in an even worse financial situation.
- ratelimitsteve 3mo ago
  it really does trickle up, and the greater percentage of their income the beneficiaries spend on consumables the greater the upward benefits.
  - iso1631 3mo ago
    More "vacuumed up" than trickled
manlymuppet 3mo ago
The thing I don't like about this is that it treats trickle-down economics as if it's something that needs to be debunked. Trickle-down economics has never been a real economic policy, and never been seriously advocated by federal policy-makers. It is an entirely pejorative term created by detractors of supply-side economics. The policies of supply-side economics, however, are much more defensible, but it seems people would much rather pick on the strawman.
- smallmancontrov 3mo ago
  You're right, it's not one lie, it's a pack of lies, trotted out every time congress needs to justify another capital gains tax cut or rationalize why the next tax hike needs to target work not wealth.
  - ghurtado 3mo ago
    It's much more than a set of lies, it's an entire cultural phenomenon 100% USA made. Unlike many of our worst ideas, I'm actually surprised this one didn't become more popular around the world.
    - smallmancontrov 3mo ago
      I've been reading about the US progressive era of 100 years ago and I am seeing from Robber Barons many of the same arguments that I heard growing up from my Reagan-worshipping parents. It's both frustrating and encouraging to know that we soundly defeated these at one point before the pendulum swung back. They didn't invent a new pack of lies, they just put the old one in the microwave and gave it 30 seconds. I suspect that were I to learn about the industrial revolution I would find that the US Robber Barons didn't invent their talking points either and that they simply took British Industrialist talking points and, err, gave them 3 minutes on the stove.
      - roughly 3mo ago
        Worth a read: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/brian-merchant/blood-in-the-machine/9780316487740/ https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/brian-merchant/bloo...
miguel_rdp 3mo ago
In other news, the pope is catholic
- eks391 3mo ago
  I also heard that every 60 seconds in Africa, a minute passes
livinglist 3mo ago
But hey it’s for the greater good eh, like Effective Altruism that people like Dario or Peter Thiel have been really obsessed with.
curiousgal 3mo ago
I think the real issue in the UK is the definition of "wealthy". The government seems to think it's people making more than 50k...
- lifestyleguru 3mo ago
  In Germany it's 90k EUR, in Poland it's a mere 30k EUR gross on employment contract. No it's not a coincidence, the government knows what they're doing. In short, they are not friends with those on employment contract in private sector. In UK though the salaries are fixed at 25k GBP annually until forever, they simply like this number.
  - maverwa 3mo ago
    Just for context: for an average single paying tax class 1 that’s 4.4k net per month, while the median working single earned 2.2k net in 2025. Source: https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Einkommen-Konsum-Lebensbedingungen/Lebensbedingungen-Armutsgefaehrdung/Tabellen/einkommen-einkommensarten-typ-2.html https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Einkom...
    - lifestyleguru 3mo ago
      Meantime the average German billionaire, which Germany has the highest number in Europe: [awkward look monkey puppet meme]
amelius 3mo ago
Can we please tax the negative effect that big money has on the rest of us? I mean I'm perfectly fine with people who work hard making a lot of money. But that changes once that money is used against me. From that moment on I want to be compensated for damages, and the best way to do it is through taxes.
- gardnr 3mo ago
  I want a system that taxes things we don't want (unproductive rent-seeking) and doesn't tax things we do want (productive stuff e.g. income tax). I don't want to be personally compensated. I just want to live in a society where people's basic needs are easily met: clothes, food, medicine, housing. The current landscape is, by the day, increasingly dystopian.
- sharts 3mo ago
  Problem is those taxes just get funneled to things taxpayers don’t even support.
hunterpayne 3mo ago
The scientists who worked for the cigarette companies couldn't find a link to cancer. Economists who work in academia can't find working economic policies for the same reason. Private sector economists on the other hand...actually place bets and get rewarded or punished for being wrong. Not shockingly, they have very different opinions from the academic economists. PS And you wonder why Mississippi is richer than the UK. PPS The Laffer curve is real, has a mountain of evidence and disproves this paper.
- HaloZero 3mo ago
  I thought the scientist who worked for cigarettes companies did find a bunch of links but the companies squashed the results. It’s pretty famously known that they knew cigarettes were bad for you decades ago.
  - alistairSH 3mo ago
    Yes, tobacco companies knew the health risks at least back tot he 70s, if not the 50s or 60s. And in the late 70s, they launched Operation Berkshire as a bulwark against negative press and government regulation. They have literally been found guilty of conspiring to suppress the health risks.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
- convolvatron 3mo ago
  every single time taxes for the wealthy were cut, it was argued that the laffler curve would make up for the loss in federal tax receipts, thus leaving us with the same level of services and a larger economy. every single time its resulted in lower tax intake compensated with more deficit spending.
  - hunterpayne 3mo ago
    Everytime we increase taxes past the optimum point of the Laffer curve, the government takes in less total tax. If you aren't past the optimum point, it won't. And your claims about loss of collected taxes haven't really ever come true at the US federal level. Total tax receipts in the 1980s were very high and there were several major tax cuts then. The same pattern usually follows, but the effect of the Laffer curve was deformed during the 1990s due to the dot com boom. Tax cuts in the 2000s increased tax receipts. The Trump cuts in the late 2010s did the same. The last 6 CA tax increases all resulted in less taxes being collected the following year. Now there are multiple things that can impact total tax collected for CA (mostly the S&P500), but those factors all varied in those 6 tax increases. As for federal tax, if a tax cut doesn't result in an increase in taxes collected, then you are likely below the optimum point in the curve. PS The government doesn't have a tax collection problem, it has a spending problem. On average, every public sector job costs 3 jobs in the private sector. If the size of a government is choking the economy, then messing about with the tax rate won't fix the problem.
charcircuit 3mo ago
Giving tax cuts to public companies allows anyone to invest in them and benefit from that. Also just because someone benefits, that doesn't mean that other people have to suffer.
- t-writescode 3mo ago
  You have to have enough liquid to be able to invest. If basic needs aren’t being sufficiently eased, there’s no money left to invest.
  - charcircuit 3mo ago
    Enough liquid = $1. That is not insurmountable barrier. It's 25% of the price of a single burger at McDonald's.
- alistairSH 3mo ago
  They're literally argue the opposite in the paper... when taxes are lowered, executives demand higher compensation, at the expense of their employees.
haunter 3mo ago
This is basically what happened in Orbán's 16 years in Hungary. He gave indirect tax cuts for the rich, or just generally everyone who is not living pay check to pay check (by hungarian standards it means you are rich). So for example installing solar panels came with a tax writeoff but the whole thing was setup that it only benefit who already have had enough money to install a full brand new solar panel system. So it didn't help at all those who are really in need. Same happened with EV cars. If you already have money for a brand new EV car you got it cheaper. For the rest? Good luck. Mind you this is eastern Europe where everyone is driving +15 year old diesels from Germany. The rich got richer.
- lifestyleguru 3mo ago
  The same in Poland. Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary are oligarchic corrupted disfunctional hellholes. No, electing this new politician and party will not change anything. Without "license to steal and defraud" your life there will be miserable. Hopefully Russia will not take the easy opportunity and attack, but hey at least they'd erase the local "elites".
- dec0dedab0de 3mo ago
  Ehh, I don't know if those examples really apply, even if they effectively have a similar outcome. Incentives for environmentally friendly tech are more about helping those industries get off the ground against entrenched incumbents that are harmful to everyone. The benefit of less exhaust in the air is immediately good for everyone. Although I'm sure government and corporate greed was able to exploit those policies as much as it could.
  - lifestyleguru 3mo ago
    Subsidies for electric car and solar panels on private house are a very specific loyalty rewards. No random person receives it, the requirements and bureaucracy are impenetrable.
    - dec0dedab0de 3mo ago
      but everyone else has cleaner air to breathe
micromacrofoot 3mo ago
The most effective economic policy to help the impoverished is to tax the rich and give the money directly to the poor. The only reason this isn't common sense is because the rich have fought it for millennia.
- neilwilson 3mo ago
  The poor will then give it back to the rich in higher prices for the same amount of stuff. The only real way to tax the rich is to ensure that the rich have to compete for workers by paying competitive wages
  - t-writescode 3mo ago
    And by making it so that an employee can safely quit at any time without losing their ability to, you know, not get blasted by insane surprise bills - e.g. healthcare.
  - micromacrofoot 3mo ago
    This makes the false assumption that all the money given to the poor go back into high margin goods that the rich profit from? it ignores competition, ignores productivity gains by a lesser impoverished population, ignores the impact on small businesses... there are all sorts of losses inherent to poverty that shouldn't be discounted, like the inability to save via bulk purchasing, transportation, high cost credit, preventative spending, time losses... in theory eliminating the poor by literally giving them money could have an impact that makes society better for everyone... it's very reductive to assume there's just one big knob that the rich can turn to get it all back
    - jimaway123 3mo ago
      It's called inflation. If you helicopter money on people they will bid up the prices of everything that they need. We had an experiment with this just a few years ago.
      - 3mo ago
TacticalCoder 3mo ago
Take the inverse stance: take a country that taxes its citizens to death, like France or Belgium. How are they doing? Very badly. France is concerned that the IMF main jump in and take things under control because the government's public deficit is out of control. With a GDP of about $3.6 trillion (american trillion, not french) and public spending representing, officially, 57.2% of those $3.6 trillion, that's a cool $2 trillion spent, yearly, by the state. This is where wealth goes to die. If you were to seize, just fully seize (and consider it's liquid, which it is not), the wealth of all the billionaires in France (there aren't even 50 of them) you'd end up with $500 billion. So if you were to just take all the wealth from all the french billionaires, you'd only pay a quarter (!) of the budget of the french state. For one year. And that's it. 25% for a year. Another way to see it: the french public deficit is more than $100 billion, yearly. If you were to seize the wealth of all french billionaires, you'd only have enough money to prevent the public debt from growing (which has to be at around 140% by now) for five years. I'm not listening to talks about "taxing the rich" anymore until that caste called politicians stops spending money it doesn't have, enslaving future generations that shall be taxed to death to pay the insane public debt their governments are creating. Wanna talk about what's happening to the city of Brussels (Belgium), my native city? 40% right at the poverty line. Immense deficit. Conditions of living going down the drain. First political party in the poll is now the PTB, a full on communist party (and communist in the EU have noticed that, at the moment, they could get the votes of islamists, so strangely enough in a "the enemy of my enemy of my friend" way, communists in countries like France and Belgium happen to be very welcoming to religious extremism [in France the communist party literally has been forced, when it created a coalition with others party at the left, to sign a paper saying it condemned islamism terrorism for they've been so cosy with the idea that it really wasn't clear at all that they actually were against islamist terrorism]). And you want to get me started on that wonderful discovery the left made recently: that by importing millions of poor migrants and then giving them the right to vote, by a very surprising coincidence these poor imported migrants happened to not vote for the right? How... Convenient? Several countries are discovering that: "you eventually end up of the money of others" and "when the rich becomes poor, the poor dies". The one thing that really irks me in this is the full-on hypocrites I know who believe that anyone richer than them should be taxed to death: to them "trickle down economics" do not work but that they live a middle-class lifestyle more preposterous than 99% of the planet doesn't bother them. They want lower taxes but not for those richer than they are. I cannot understand that mindset. I hate the Zuck: really, screw that guy and his faked 3D legless avatar demo for his dystopian VR world (how did that one turn out btw? As well as the Meta AI race?) and screw his PHP+JavaScript "punch the monkey" abusive ad world. Just fuck it. But I don't give a single crap in the world that he's got two $250 million Yacht or whatever they cost and however many he's got. Good. For. Him. I'd rather be poor and free than live under communism. And doubly so if we're talking about living in a society dictated both by religious intolerance and communism (which is where several countries are headed). And if you want to "help the poor", go give all your money, open your house/appartment to pooor migrants and give me a fucking break.
drowntoge 3mo ago
> The average citizen seems to be fairly poorly informed that taxes on the rich have fallen really dramatically in the past 40 years. There's an observation.
7230883707 3mo ago
[flagged]
peter-m80 3mo ago
No se podía saber
rahimnathwani 3mo ago
The paper talks about economic growth, income distribution and unemployment. I'm mostly interested in economic growth, so looked at what the paper claimed about that. It found that major, sudden reductions in taxes on the rich did not have any statistically significant effect on the trajectory of economic growth over the following five years. But: - Their sample is small. They only looked at relatively large, discrete declines in their home-grown measure of taxes on the rich. They did not look at all tax-rate changes. - They did not look at effects beyond the five-year horizon, which means it would probably exclude the impact on people starting startups, as the successful ones usually take more than 5 years to start making serious money. (or did during the period the paper considered, even if timelines have subsequently accelerated.) - Big sudden tax cuts don't happen in a vacuum, and I don't see a way to control for confounding.
- wang_li 3mo ago
  The question I have is that at some point X taxes are collected and the economy is growing at Y, then the policies change and now X-5 taxes are collected and the economy grows at Y. What was the function of the 5 under the first regime?
  - alex43578 3mo ago
    Slowing the growth of the country’s debt. Some would argue this gives flexibility to expand that debt during crises like wars, economic events, or pandemics; by “keeping powder dry” in terms of debt to GDP.
    - wang_li 3mo ago
      Are you thinking specifically of the US or you thinking of all the countries that were part of the data they reviewed? Also, how does leaving the wealth in the hands of citizens prevent it from being taxed in the future if needs be?
      - alex43578 3mo ago
8by3 3mo ago
Its been trickle up economics for a long time now.
slifin 3mo ago
A lot of the poor and middle classes don't understand how a billionaire earning millions of pounds per week in passive income is any problem for them - or where it comes from 1, billion, 2 billion, 100 billion individuals makes no difference to the average person In fact there's a misguided sense that they earnt that money through work and not rent seeking But the sad truth of the matter is - the rich are on the other end of your mortgage or indirectly your rent - the other end of that business loan to your favourite coffee shop controls the price of your coffee - you pay them interest directly or indirectly through everything you pay for and they use that money to buy more of the assets you use - they are a massively increasing rent seeking class Their wealth growth is exponential it compounds on itself some particularly rich people are seeing 40% annual returns and the overall economies wealth growth is 1 or 2% It's analogous to a black hole things like capital gains tax and income tax mean nothing to these people because they don't sell and they don't have a "working" income because that's not how the ultra rich accumulate wealth The sad thing is for people on benefits the government look automatically into your personal bank account and track anything coming in - they have built a massively invasive infrastructure to track the poor so they can remove their benefits if they try to earn £5 selling music or selling IT services - but if you're rich the government don't even know how wealthy you are - the government doesn't know how many billionaires there are - let alone any talk of having to tax them - so they get to pay very close to - if not nothing - whilst software engineers (as an example relative to this forum) in the UK get to be the high rate tax payers where 50% or more is taken Everyone else has to fund their free ride and its absurd - they're the group that need the least support financially
- CuriousSkeptic 3mo ago
  > you pay them interest directly or indirectly through everything you pay for I wonder how feasible that would be to track as an economic index. Even on individual level its popular to workout which day of the year you start earn money you get to keep after income taxes and vat.
- weavejester 3mo ago
  There's a parallel between welfare and passive gains from diversified investments; yet as you point out, government welfare is tracked and very visible, while private investments are far more opaque. Part of the wealth that workers create is paid in taxes to the government; another part is paid to the shareholders of the company they work for, to the bank they get their mortgage from, and so forth. The latter is equivalent to an hidden tax, part of which goes toward a form of private welfare that's proportional to an individual's wealth. People get quite angry about government welfare, particularly if the recipient seems undeserving of it. Yet they have no problem with the passive income from billionaires, even if it ultimately amounts to the same thing.
aristofun 3mo ago
All the brain dead marxists here - please remember, any artificially promoted slogans whether it’s “tax the rich” or “cut the taxes” are there only to get your votes. The real problem is never as simple as turning few knobs.
- danny_codes 3mo ago
  Nobody is suggesting that raising the effective tax rate for the richest people will magically fix all our problems. However, we are saying that making the tax code progressive is better than what we're doing now. I think we can all agree that Bezos paying an effective tax rate of 4% or whatever is not a fair way to organize society.
  - aristofun 3mo ago
    Whatever scheme you will think is “fair” - Besos, not you, will find a way around it. But thousands of middle class and small business owners will bear the burden while dumb marxists keep complaining about their free lunch.
    - danny_codes 3mo ago
      I mean that's the entire point of structuring your taxes so they are unavoidable. Piketty's proposal of a 2% wealth tax floor on wealth over $100M is a great way to solve that problem. I'm not sure why thousands of middle class people would "bear the burden", since by definition they are far too poor to be effected by a wealth tax.
      - aristofun 3mo ago
        > I'm not sure why thousands of middle class people would "bear the burden" Because there are many ways it can play out. One of the obvious - if rich are too uncomfortable they flee the assets out of the country and the amount of taxes collected drops -> all middle and low class is left to compensate for it. As far as i know similar dynamics already happened in various places throughout history. But dumb marxists are incapable of thinking about anything productive or creative to solve the problem, they only think about how to take someone else’s. Partially because of low intellect (i.e. inability to calculate multiple steps forward), but mostly because of the scarcity mindset, thinking about life as a zero sum game. We need to be better than that.
1997cui 3mo ago
The current issue I feel with taxing is that, at least in USA, it mostly taxes based on Salary on Employees, but never tax on the capital or the actual wealth. Tax the rich means: Increase W2 tax and property tax which, takes money away from me to feed lower middle class Tax cut means: Reduce the estate tax and cooperate tax, keep the W2 tax flat, and cut the benefits that most critical to the bottom: Food stamps while keep other unnecessary programs unchanged: Discounted Toll for low income when driving in HOV lanes.
- danny_codes 3mo ago
  I'm reading Piketty's book now and it's not isolated to the US. Once you hit a certain wealth in most OECD countries, you just stop paying taxes. All that is required is to not take any income, which is easily done. So the top of the "income" distribution is a lie. When we say "top 1% pay X of all taxes", we're talking about the top 1% income earners, not the 1% who have the most wealth, or even the 1% who have increased their wealth the most over the last year. Piketty is clearly correct with his minimum wealth tax proposal. It does seem the only way to tax people who never realize income.
CrzyLngPwd 3mo ago
The rich don't pay income tax like us little people do, they don't pay capital gains tax like us either. They can avoid both through schemes such as taking low salaries and borrowing against assets they will never sell for a profit. The tax system would need a complete overhaul to plug those holes, but it would always be a game of whack-a-mole.
- danny_codes 3mo ago
  Piketty's 2% tax floor on wealth (for those with over $10M/$100M in wealth) is an excellent way to fix this. Basically the idea is to just accept the fact that the super wealthy will find the loopholes, so instead remove the loopholes. Just flatly put a minimum tax all wealth over $XX million at 2%. One nice aspect of the policy is that it's a tax minimum: so people with high incomes who are already paying that much, regardless of how wealthy they are, don't need to pay the tax. Another nice aspect is it's relatively easy to implement. There aren't that many people with $XX millions in wealth.
  - CrzyLngPwd 3mo ago
    I have land, and so I am appatently wealthy, but if someone wanted to put a 2% tax on it I would have to sell it to pay the tax since I have very limited cash. This would result in a land grab only the super wealthy could afford. I already pay high taxes on everything from fuel to food to tissue to wipe my ass. Taxing my land ownership might push people to the edge. The super wealthy would avoid it by pyutting everything into an offshore trust. Us little people, with expensive houses their parents worked hard and paid taxes for would just see another tax.
    - derwiki 3mo ago
      > us little people > with expensive houses
      - CrzyLngPwd 3mo ago
        Selective quoting is rude. In some parts of the world $100k is an expensive house to inherit from a parent.
tsoukase 3mo ago
If we started the society/economy from scratch today, the current situation would seem absurd, inhumane and unacceptable. Imagine an inequality in scale of 10000s while you are only 1.5 more capable than the average. (Very) rich people with their legal (eg tax loopholes) and illegal (eg sold politicians) tactics cost middle class people almost 100% their optimal income. Not to mention qualities of life like social state and safety. Calculations need a blog post.

188 points by mooreds 3mo ago

teach 3mo ago

Quelle surprise!

cdrnsf 3mo ago

Well, yes — much like trickle down economics.

ceejayoz 3mo ago
Yeah, turns out the trickle is just piss.
- ratelimitsteve 3mo ago
  the rising tide that's supposed to lift all boats? also piss.
  - lifestyleguru 3mo ago
    Whole life had the don't piss in water anxiety, only to realize that everyone does it and I'm swimming in it.
    - ratelimitsteve 3mo ago
      "We'd been floating on inner tubes on the river for 8 hours, drinking beer, and I realized that not once had any of my friends gotten out of the river to pee." ---ron white, upon experiencing a flash of enlightenment. quote from memory.

numbers_guy 3mo ago

No shit. If you want a tax cut to have an economic impact, cut taxes for the poorest, the ones with the least disposable income. EDIT: Seems like the article is suggesting that giving more disposable income to the rich, results in them using that extra income to buy capital rent seeking assets. So it is a double fuck you to the poor. Because not only do the rich end up paying proportionally less in taxes, but they also use the extra money to compete with you for your home, buy the home and rent it back to you, putting you in an even worse financial situation.

ratelimitsteve 3mo ago
it really does trickle up, and the greater percentage of their income the beneficiaries spend on consumables the greater the upward benefits.
- iso1631 3mo ago
  More "vacuumed up" than trickled

manlymuppet 3mo ago

The thing I don't like about this is that it treats trickle-down economics as if it's something that needs to be debunked. Trickle-down economics has never been a real economic policy, and never been seriously advocated by federal policy-makers. It is an entirely pejorative term created by detractors of supply-side economics. The policies of supply-side economics, however, are much more defensible, but it seems people would much rather pick on the strawman.

smallmancontrov 3mo ago
You're right, it's not one lie, it's a pack of lies, trotted out every time congress needs to justify another capital gains tax cut or rationalize why the next tax hike needs to target work not wealth.
- ghurtado 3mo ago
  It's much more than a set of lies, it's an entire cultural phenomenon 100% USA made. Unlike many of our worst ideas, I'm actually surprised this one didn't become more popular around the world.
  - smallmancontrov 3mo ago
    I've been reading about the US progressive era of 100 years ago and I am seeing from Robber Barons many of the same arguments that I heard growing up from my Reagan-worshipping parents. It's both frustrating and encouraging to know that we soundly defeated these at one point before the pendulum swung back. They didn't invent a new pack of lies, they just put the old one in the microwave and gave it 30 seconds. I suspect that were I to learn about the industrial revolution I would find that the US Robber Barons didn't invent their talking points either and that they simply took British Industrialist talking points and, err, gave them 3 minutes on the stove.
    - roughly 3mo ago
      Worth a read: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/brian-merchant/blood-in-the-machine/9780316487740/ https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/brian-merchant/bloo...

miguel_rdp 3mo ago

In other news, the pope is catholic

eks391 3mo ago
I also heard that every 60 seconds in Africa, a minute passes

livinglist 3mo ago

But hey it’s for the greater good eh, like Effective Altruism that people like Dario or Peter Thiel have been really obsessed with.

curiousgal 3mo ago

I think the real issue in the UK is the definition of "wealthy". The government seems to think it's people making more than 50k...

lifestyleguru 3mo ago
In Germany it's 90k EUR, in Poland it's a mere 30k EUR gross on employment contract. No it's not a coincidence, the government knows what they're doing. In short, they are not friends with those on employment contract in private sector. In UK though the salaries are fixed at 25k GBP annually until forever, they simply like this number.
- maverwa 3mo ago
  Just for context: for an average single paying tax class 1 that’s 4.4k net per month, while the median working single earned 2.2k net in 2025. Source: https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Einkommen-Konsum-Lebensbedingungen/Lebensbedingungen-Armutsgefaehrdung/Tabellen/einkommen-einkommensarten-typ-2.html https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Einkom...
  - lifestyleguru 3mo ago
    Meantime the average German billionaire, which Germany has the highest number in Europe: [awkward look monkey puppet meme]

amelius 3mo ago

Can we please tax the negative effect that big money has on the rest of us? I mean I'm perfectly fine with people who work hard making a lot of money. But that changes once that money is used against me. From that moment on I want to be compensated for damages, and the best way to do it is through taxes.

gardnr 3mo ago
I want a system that taxes things we don't want (unproductive rent-seeking) and doesn't tax things we do want (productive stuff e.g. income tax). I don't want to be personally compensated. I just want to live in a society where people's basic needs are easily met: clothes, food, medicine, housing. The current landscape is, by the day, increasingly dystopian.
sharts 3mo ago
Problem is those taxes just get funneled to things taxpayers don’t even support.

hunterpayne 3mo ago

The scientists who worked for the cigarette companies couldn't find a link to cancer. Economists who work in academia can't find working economic policies for the same reason. Private sector economists on the other hand...actually place bets and get rewarded or punished for being wrong. Not shockingly, they have very different opinions from the academic economists. PS And you wonder why Mississippi is richer than the UK. PPS The Laffer curve is real, has a mountain of evidence and disproves this paper.

HaloZero 3mo ago
I thought the scientist who worked for cigarettes companies did find a bunch of links but the companies squashed the results. It’s pretty famously known that they knew cigarettes were bad for you decades ago.
- alistairSH 3mo ago
  Yes, tobacco companies knew the health risks at least back tot he 70s, if not the 50s or 60s. And in the late 70s, they launched Operation Berkshire as a bulwark against negative press and government regulation. They have literally been found guilty of conspiring to suppress the health risks.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
convolvatron 3mo ago
every single time taxes for the wealthy were cut, it was argued that the laffler curve would make up for the loss in federal tax receipts, thus leaving us with the same level of services and a larger economy. every single time its resulted in lower tax intake compensated with more deficit spending.
- hunterpayne 3mo ago
  Everytime we increase taxes past the optimum point of the Laffer curve, the government takes in less total tax. If you aren't past the optimum point, it won't. And your claims about loss of collected taxes haven't really ever come true at the US federal level. Total tax receipts in the 1980s were very high and there were several major tax cuts then. The same pattern usually follows, but the effect of the Laffer curve was deformed during the 1990s due to the dot com boom. Tax cuts in the 2000s increased tax receipts. The Trump cuts in the late 2010s did the same. The last 6 CA tax increases all resulted in less taxes being collected the following year. Now there are multiple things that can impact total tax collected for CA (mostly the S&P500), but those factors all varied in those 6 tax increases. As for federal tax, if a tax cut doesn't result in an increase in taxes collected, then you are likely below the optimum point in the curve. PS The government doesn't have a tax collection problem, it has a spending problem. On average, every public sector job costs 3 jobs in the private sector. If the size of a government is choking the economy, then messing about with the tax rate won't fix the problem.

charcircuit 3mo ago

Giving tax cuts to public companies allows anyone to invest in them and benefit from that. Also just because someone benefits, that doesn't mean that other people have to suffer.

t-writescode 3mo ago
You have to have enough liquid to be able to invest. If basic needs aren’t being sufficiently eased, there’s no money left to invest.
- charcircuit 3mo ago
  Enough liquid = $1. That is not insurmountable barrier. It's 25% of the price of a single burger at McDonald's.
alistairSH 3mo ago
They're literally argue the opposite in the paper... when taxes are lowered, executives demand higher compensation, at the expense of their employees.

haunter 3mo ago

This is basically what happened in Orbán's 16 years in Hungary. He gave indirect tax cuts for the rich, or just generally everyone who is not living pay check to pay check (by hungarian standards it means you are rich). So for example installing solar panels came with a tax writeoff but the whole thing was setup that it only benefit who already have had enough money to install a full brand new solar panel system. So it didn't help at all those who are really in need. Same happened with EV cars. If you already have money for a brand new EV car you got it cheaper. For the rest? Good luck. Mind you this is eastern Europe where everyone is driving +15 year old diesels from Germany. The rich got richer.

lifestyleguru 3mo ago
The same in Poland. Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary are oligarchic corrupted disfunctional hellholes. No, electing this new politician and party will not change anything. Without "license to steal and defraud" your life there will be miserable. Hopefully Russia will not take the easy opportunity and attack, but hey at least they'd erase the local "elites".
dec0dedab0de 3mo ago
Ehh, I don't know if those examples really apply, even if they effectively have a similar outcome. Incentives for environmentally friendly tech are more about helping those industries get off the ground against entrenched incumbents that are harmful to everyone. The benefit of less exhaust in the air is immediately good for everyone. Although I'm sure government and corporate greed was able to exploit those policies as much as it could.
- lifestyleguru 3mo ago
  Subsidies for electric car and solar panels on private house are a very specific loyalty rewards. No random person receives it, the requirements and bureaucracy are impenetrable.
  - dec0dedab0de 3mo ago
    but everyone else has cleaner air to breathe

micromacrofoot 3mo ago

The most effective economic policy to help the impoverished is to tax the rich and give the money directly to the poor. The only reason this isn't common sense is because the rich have fought it for millennia.

neilwilson 3mo ago
The poor will then give it back to the rich in higher prices for the same amount of stuff. The only real way to tax the rich is to ensure that the rich have to compete for workers by paying competitive wages
- t-writescode 3mo ago
  And by making it so that an employee can safely quit at any time without losing their ability to, you know, not get blasted by insane surprise bills - e.g. healthcare.
- micromacrofoot 3mo ago
  This makes the false assumption that all the money given to the poor go back into high margin goods that the rich profit from? it ignores competition, ignores productivity gains by a lesser impoverished population, ignores the impact on small businesses... there are all sorts of losses inherent to poverty that shouldn't be discounted, like the inability to save via bulk purchasing, transportation, high cost credit, preventative spending, time losses... in theory eliminating the poor by literally giving them money could have an impact that makes society better for everyone... it's very reductive to assume there's just one big knob that the rich can turn to get it all back
  - jimaway123 3mo ago
    It's called inflation. If you helicopter money on people they will bid up the prices of everything that they need. We had an experiment with this just a few years ago.
    - 3mo ago

TacticalCoder 3mo ago

Take the inverse stance: take a country that taxes its citizens to death, like France or Belgium. How are they doing? Very badly. France is concerned that the IMF main jump in and take things under control because the government's public deficit is out of control. With a GDP of about $3.6 trillion (american trillion, not french) and public spending representing, officially, 57.2% of those $3.6 trillion, that's a cool $2 trillion spent, yearly, by the state. This is where wealth goes to die. If you were to seize, just fully seize (and consider it's liquid, which it is not), the wealth of all the billionaires in France (there aren't even 50 of them) you'd end up with $500 billion. So if you were to just take all the wealth from all the french billionaires, you'd only pay a quarter (!) of the budget of the french state. For one year. And that's it. 25% for a year. Another way to see it: the french public deficit is more than $100 billion, yearly. If you were to seize the wealth of all french billionaires, you'd only have enough money to prevent the public debt from growing (which has to be at around 140% by now) for five years. I'm not listening to talks about "taxing the rich" anymore until that caste called politicians stops spending money it doesn't have, enslaving future generations that shall be taxed to death to pay the insane public debt their governments are creating. Wanna talk about what's happening to the city of Brussels (Belgium), my native city? 40% right at the poverty line. Immense deficit. Conditions of living going down the drain. First political party in the poll is now the PTB, a full on communist party (and communist in the EU have noticed that, at the moment, they could get the votes of islamists, so strangely enough in a "the enemy of my enemy of my friend" way, communists in countries like France and Belgium happen to be very welcoming to religious extremism [in France the communist party literally has been forced, when it created a coalition with others party at the left, to sign a paper saying it condemned islamism terrorism for they've been so cosy with the idea that it really wasn't clear at all that they actually were against islamist terrorism]). And you want to get me started on that wonderful discovery the left made recently: that by importing millions of poor migrants and then giving them the right to vote, by a very surprising coincidence these poor imported migrants happened to not vote for the right? How... Convenient? Several countries are discovering that: "you eventually end up of the money of others" and "when the rich becomes poor, the poor dies". The one thing that really irks me in this is the full-on hypocrites I know who believe that anyone richer than them should be taxed to death: to them "trickle down economics" do not work but that they live a middle-class lifestyle more preposterous than 99% of the planet doesn't bother them. They want lower taxes but not for those richer than they are. I cannot understand that mindset. I hate the Zuck: really, screw that guy and his faked 3D legless avatar demo for his dystopian VR world (how did that one turn out btw? As well as the Meta AI race?) and screw his PHP+JavaScript "punch the monkey" abusive ad world. Just fuck it. But I don't give a single crap in the world that he's got two $250 million Yacht or whatever they cost and however many he's got. Good. For. Him. I'd rather be poor and free than live under communism. And doubly so if we're talking about living in a society dictated both by religious intolerance and communism (which is where several countries are headed). And if you want to "help the poor", go give all your money, open your house/appartment to pooor migrants and give me a fucking break.

drowntoge 3mo ago

> The average citizen seems to be fairly poorly informed that taxes on the rich have fallen really dramatically in the past 40 years. There's an observation.

7230883707 3mo ago

[flagged]

peter-m80 3mo ago

No se podía saber

rahimnathwani 3mo ago

The paper talks about economic growth, income distribution and unemployment. I'm mostly interested in economic growth, so looked at what the paper claimed about that. It found that major, sudden reductions in taxes on the rich did not have any statistically significant effect on the trajectory of economic growth over the following five years. But: - Their sample is small. They only looked at relatively large, discrete declines in their home-grown measure of taxes on the rich. They did not look at all tax-rate changes. - They did not look at effects beyond the five-year horizon, which means it would probably exclude the impact on people starting startups, as the successful ones usually take more than 5 years to start making serious money. (or did during the period the paper considered, even if timelines have subsequently accelerated.) - Big sudden tax cuts don't happen in a vacuum, and I don't see a way to control for confounding.

wang_li 3mo ago
The question I have is that at some point X taxes are collected and the economy is growing at Y, then the policies change and now X-5 taxes are collected and the economy grows at Y. What was the function of the 5 under the first regime?
- alex43578 3mo ago
  Slowing the growth of the country’s debt. Some would argue this gives flexibility to expand that debt during crises like wars, economic events, or pandemics; by “keeping powder dry” in terms of debt to GDP.
  - wang_li 3mo ago
    Are you thinking specifically of the US or you thinking of all the countries that were part of the data they reviewed? Also, how does leaving the wealth in the hands of citizens prevent it from being taxed in the future if needs be?
    - alex43578 3mo ago

8by3 3mo ago

Its been trickle up economics for a long time now.

slifin 3mo ago

A lot of the poor and middle classes don't understand how a billionaire earning millions of pounds per week in passive income is any problem for them - or where it comes from 1, billion, 2 billion, 100 billion individuals makes no difference to the average person In fact there's a misguided sense that they earnt that money through work and not rent seeking But the sad truth of the matter is - the rich are on the other end of your mortgage or indirectly your rent - the other end of that business loan to your favourite coffee shop controls the price of your coffee - you pay them interest directly or indirectly through everything you pay for and they use that money to buy more of the assets you use - they are a massively increasing rent seeking class Their wealth growth is exponential it compounds on itself some particularly rich people are seeing 40% annual returns and the overall economies wealth growth is 1 or 2% It's analogous to a black hole things like capital gains tax and income tax mean nothing to these people because they don't sell and they don't have a "working" income because that's not how the ultra rich accumulate wealth The sad thing is for people on benefits the government look automatically into your personal bank account and track anything coming in - they have built a massively invasive infrastructure to track the poor so they can remove their benefits if they try to earn £5 selling music or selling IT services - but if you're rich the government don't even know how wealthy you are - the government doesn't know how many billionaires there are - let alone any talk of having to tax them - so they get to pay very close to - if not nothing - whilst software engineers (as an example relative to this forum) in the UK get to be the high rate tax payers where 50% or more is taken Everyone else has to fund their free ride and its absurd - they're the group that need the least support financially

CuriousSkeptic 3mo ago
> you pay them interest directly or indirectly through everything you pay for I wonder how feasible that would be to track as an economic index. Even on individual level its popular to workout which day of the year you start earn money you get to keep after income taxes and vat.
weavejester 3mo ago
There's a parallel between welfare and passive gains from diversified investments; yet as you point out, government welfare is tracked and very visible, while private investments are far more opaque. Part of the wealth that workers create is paid in taxes to the government; another part is paid to the shareholders of the company they work for, to the bank they get their mortgage from, and so forth. The latter is equivalent to an hidden tax, part of which goes toward a form of private welfare that's proportional to an individual's wealth. People get quite angry about government welfare, particularly if the recipient seems undeserving of it. Yet they have no problem with the passive income from billionaires, even if it ultimately amounts to the same thing.

aristofun 3mo ago

All the brain dead marxists here - please remember, any artificially promoted slogans whether it’s “tax the rich” or “cut the taxes” are there only to get your votes. The real problem is never as simple as turning few knobs.

danny_codes 3mo ago
Nobody is suggesting that raising the effective tax rate for the richest people will magically fix all our problems. However, we are saying that making the tax code progressive is better than what we're doing now. I think we can all agree that Bezos paying an effective tax rate of 4% or whatever is not a fair way to organize society.
- aristofun 3mo ago
  Whatever scheme you will think is “fair” - Besos, not you, will find a way around it. But thousands of middle class and small business owners will bear the burden while dumb marxists keep complaining about their free lunch.
  - danny_codes 3mo ago
    I mean that's the entire point of structuring your taxes so they are unavoidable. Piketty's proposal of a 2% wealth tax floor on wealth over $100M is a great way to solve that problem. I'm not sure why thousands of middle class people would "bear the burden", since by definition they are far too poor to be effected by a wealth tax.
    - aristofun 3mo ago
      > I'm not sure why thousands of middle class people would "bear the burden" Because there are many ways it can play out. One of the obvious - if rich are too uncomfortable they flee the assets out of the country and the amount of taxes collected drops -> all middle and low class is left to compensate for it. As far as i know similar dynamics already happened in various places throughout history. But dumb marxists are incapable of thinking about anything productive or creative to solve the problem, they only think about how to take someone else’s. Partially because of low intellect (i.e. inability to calculate multiple steps forward), but mostly because of the scarcity mindset, thinking about life as a zero sum game. We need to be better than that.

1997cui 3mo ago

The current issue I feel with taxing is that, at least in USA, it mostly taxes based on Salary on Employees, but never tax on the capital or the actual wealth. Tax the rich means: Increase W2 tax and property tax which, takes money away from me to feed lower middle class Tax cut means: Reduce the estate tax and cooperate tax, keep the W2 tax flat, and cut the benefits that most critical to the bottom: Food stamps while keep other unnecessary programs unchanged: Discounted Toll for low income when driving in HOV lanes.

danny_codes 3mo ago
I'm reading Piketty's book now and it's not isolated to the US. Once you hit a certain wealth in most OECD countries, you just stop paying taxes. All that is required is to not take any income, which is easily done. So the top of the "income" distribution is a lie. When we say "top 1% pay X of all taxes", we're talking about the top 1% income earners, not the 1% who have the most wealth, or even the 1% who have increased their wealth the most over the last year. Piketty is clearly correct with his minimum wealth tax proposal. It does seem the only way to tax people who never realize income.

CrzyLngPwd 3mo ago

The rich don't pay income tax like us little people do, they don't pay capital gains tax like us either. They can avoid both through schemes such as taking low salaries and borrowing against assets they will never sell for a profit. The tax system would need a complete overhaul to plug those holes, but it would always be a game of whack-a-mole.

danny_codes 3mo ago
Piketty's 2% tax floor on wealth (for those with over $10M/$100M in wealth) is an excellent way to fix this. Basically the idea is to just accept the fact that the super wealthy will find the loopholes, so instead remove the loopholes. Just flatly put a minimum tax all wealth over $XX million at 2%. One nice aspect of the policy is that it's a tax minimum: so people with high incomes who are already paying that much, regardless of how wealthy they are, don't need to pay the tax. Another nice aspect is it's relatively easy to implement. There aren't that many people with $XX millions in wealth.
- CrzyLngPwd 3mo ago
  I have land, and so I am appatently wealthy, but if someone wanted to put a 2% tax on it I would have to sell it to pay the tax since I have very limited cash. This would result in a land grab only the super wealthy could afford. I already pay high taxes on everything from fuel to food to tissue to wipe my ass. Taxing my land ownership might push people to the edge. The super wealthy would avoid it by pyutting everything into an offshore trust. Us little people, with expensive houses their parents worked hard and paid taxes for would just see another tax.
  - derwiki 3mo ago
    > us little people > with expensive houses
    - CrzyLngPwd 3mo ago
      Selective quoting is rude. In some parts of the world $100k is an expensive house to inherit from a parent.

tsoukase 3mo ago

If we started the society/economy from scratch today, the current situation would seem absurd, inhumane and unacceptable. Imagine an inequality in scale of 10000s while you are only 1.5 more capable than the average. (Very) rich people with their legal (eg tax loopholes) and illegal (eg sold politicians) tactics cost middle class people almost 100% their optimal income. Not to mention qualities of life like social state and safety. Calculations need a blog post.