71–80 of 162 posts
The rich prefer to hire armies of accountants and lawyers to design the most hermetic pipeline funelling out everything they consider to be an excess. There is not a single droplet dropping, how could anything tricke down?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s effectively what Nick Hanauer has been saying more recently but I believe we are too far gone at this stage.
> I believe we are too far gone at this stage When irrationality and straight-up lying are so entrenched, you wonder what it would take to shake up the system. The only thing I see is some major catastrophe, like a meteor strike or something on that scale.
The people are not content. Look at the BLM protests in the US, they were the largest uprising in American history. They were bigger than the MLK riots. Content people do not riot. Needs are not being met, or at least perceived needs are not being met.
> The study compared countries that passed tax cuts in a specific year, such as the U.S. in 1982 when President Ronald Reagan slashed taxes on the wealthy, with those that didn't, and then examined their economic outcomes. All of these studies consistently miss one thing. Effective tax rates haven't really changed since before Reagan. Prior to Reagan, the tax code was riddled with loopholes. Not like how it is now wh…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This doesn’t seem like a question inviting genuine discussion. Tax laws don’t take into account how hard someone works, where they went to school, or a taxpayers character. Unless your argument is that taxes should be based on factors outside of income/etc, it seems like you might be trying to bait people with some version of “Look how hard Steve works - you can’t possibly support raising taxes on him.”
I think it's a valid question though. In my mind, the closest thing to a fair tax law is one that applies evenly to everyone, like UBI. Consider a flat 10% income tax applied evenly regardless of socio-economic status. If you made 1M, then you pay $100K. If you made $10K, you pay $1K. If you made $0 or less, you pay 0. That's it. In some senses that is very fair - everyone pays 10% of their income, no exceptions. It'…
Wouldn't trickle up economics work better? Poor people have more unmet needs and more likely to spend any extra they get into the economy.
No one buys my idea because it's always something like, "I don't trust them", or "why does that lazy guy deserve any money"....
I am not sure how to win that argument.
This is only tangentially on topic, but I genuinely wonder about this. When people state that they want the wealthy to pay their fair share, the first two questions I have are, what constitutes wealthy and what constitutes fair? Let's take a specific person as an example of wealthy (let me know if you don't agree), and I'd be grateful to hear your thoughts: Wealthy Person X: - CEO, 55 years old, University of Illinoi…
More than what they are paying today. I'll also remind you that the tax burden on every marginal dollar is the same for everyone. That is, that CEO pays the same amount of tax on their first taxable dollar as I do irrespective of what our total income is. With that said, there is no reason that the top marginal tax rate shouldn't be 90%, and that should apply to incomes in 10's of millions. And the marginal tax rate…
But why should the government get to essentially steal 90% of wealth generated by a person above an arbitrary threshold? Because "there's no reason someone needs that much money"?
I would argue that if you do this, you'll get less things like SpaceX and Tesla, which required a person with much more than 25MM to decide to create them.
This is only tangentially on topic, but I genuinely wonder about this. When people state that they want the wealthy to pay their fair share, the first two questions I have are, what constitutes wealthy and what constitutes fair? Let's take a specific person as an example of wealthy (let me know if you don't agree), and I'd be grateful to hear your thoughts: Wealthy Person X: - CEO, 55 years old, University of Illinoi…
Ignoring edge cases like selling a house, I would argue ‘fair share’ is for capital gains tax to have brackets that eventually equal regular income tax brackets, such that a CEO that makes $1 / year and 4 million in stocks, if he sells all 4 million in stocks 2 years later, isn’t paying only 15% income tax.
> The study compared countries that passed tax cuts in a specific year, such as the U.S. in 1982 when President Ronald Reagan slashed taxes on the wealthy, with those that didn't, and then examined their economic outcomes. All of these studies consistently miss one thing. Effective tax rates haven't really changed since before Reagan. Prior to Reagan, the tax code was riddled with loopholes. Not like how it is now wh…
> The new paper ... examines 18 developed countries — from Australia to the United States — over a 50-year period from 1965 to 2015.
And from the original paper[0]:
> Many empirical studies look at single tax policy indicators to identify tax cuts for the rich. However, there is some disagreement on measuring taxes on the rich in the literature. First, there is no consensus on which taxes to look at. Whilst some authors look at taxes on personal income (Egger et al., 2019; Rubolino and Waldenström, 2020), others focus on corporate taxation (Devereux et al., 2002) or inheritance taxation (Piketty and Saez, 2013b). Second, economists have used different tax policy indicators. Some look at top marginal income tax rates (Piketty et al., 2014), while others look at effective tax rates (Egger et al., 2019) or revenue generation (Baunsgaard and Keen, 2010). We propose an encompassing approach that utilises Bayesian latent variable analysis on a range of different taxes and indicators to overcome these problems. This allows us to detect shared variance across 7 indicators that are commonly used proxies for taxes on the rich (see Table A1 in the Appendix). In total, the data cover 18 OECD democracies over 5 decades (1965-2015). We estimate the latent variable using a Bayesian Markov-Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach with diffuse normal priors, three MCMC chains and 1000 burnin iterations (for more information on the estimation of the latent variable, see Hope and Limberg, 2020).
It's likely that professionals have a better grasp of the nuances of empirical tax research than you or I.
[0] http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/107919/1/Hope_economic_consequences...
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Cars, computers, cell phones, rockets to mars, etc... all exist because rich people bought the super expensive first versions or funded their development. We all benefit from those things greatly.
You seem to radically misunderstand the history of cars, computers, and cell phones, and I fail to see how we're all benefiting from rockets to mars--which don't yet exist--at this time.
But it is ridiculously absurd to assert that all developments or even most come from this.
You can't really compare the present time to the post-war period, especially in the case of the United States. Basically, post-war USA had a monopoly in industrialization. Great Britain, France, Germany, USSR, Japan had all had their industry literally blown up. China had undergone a huge civil war and invasion and occupation by the Japanese. India was just emerging from centuries of British colonialism which basically exploited its natural resources.
In addition, in the USA there was rampant and overt discrimination and harassment against women. There was open racism and segregation.
So if you were a white male, your skills were desperately needed as the US now supplied the industrial output for a huge chunk of the world's population.
Even in Europe, a generation of males had been killed in two world wars. There was a huge labor shortage. And especially for Western Europe, with the Marshall Plan, the US was pumping in loads of cash to enable industrialization to face a perceived Soviet threat.
It all came together to create a very high demand on labor, and as such allowed labor to claim a high proportion of the value generated. Those were the days where you could have one man with a high school education, support an entire family in middle class lifestyle with a detached house and yard.
Those post-ware days are long gone, and no tax policy will bring them back. The rest of world is industrializing. Globalization is happening with the world getting flatter. A larger percentage of the population is entering the work force.