501–510 of 961 posts
This premise has been the basis for many political uprisings (e.g. Venezuela) where wealth has been destroyed instead of created.
> It amazes me why most people do not grasp this. I think it is lack of education. Huh? Literally everybody grasps this. This is the most widely parroted mainstream narrative about the economy right now on the internet. Hell, you can't throw a rock at the Wall Street Journal (conservative) or the New York Times (liberal) without hitting a sentence that mentions wealth inequality brought on by fed policy. For further…
The people protesting are not protesting the Fed. No institution (i.e. media, grassroots, journalists) criticizes the Fed - it's always the 1%.
But, I guess you wouldn't understand, since you make baseless assumptions about internet strangers. How would you know my net worth - do you think there aren't billionaires that share my "mainstream" opinion?
Your fallacious logic and personal attacks against me do not diminish my argument. In fact, since you cannot attack the substance of my argument, you have already admitted defeat.
"But poor people have iphones now" when people can't afford food, healthcare, or any leisure time is the 2021 equivalent of "Let them eat cake". The balance of wealth is insulting when we have so many basic needs not being met for those at the bottom "Stealing" is a word that gets knee jerk reactions. But the more polite way to phrase it is that the rich benefit from societal structure 1000x more than the poor and ar…
https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/historical-highes...
People read this article and love to bitch, but what is the solution? Flat tax? Raise income taxes ? Inheritance tax? The fact of the matter is poverty is really what is sad an unacceptable. People you should access to free health care and their basic needs met if they cant meet them, but I do not see what is fundamentally wrong with Bill Gates earning 100000X more than someone that is making a good living wage, with…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given that the thread is about how $50T has been appropriated from the poor it seems odd to say that the poor should use $250 phones, and they have no business owning anything which costs more.
An iphone is as disposable as a kleenex. It is not an asset, at least not a better one than a 250 phone.
> It amazes me why most people do not grasp this. I think it is lack of education. Huh? Literally everybody grasps this. This is the most widely parroted mainstream narrative about the economy right now on the internet. Hell, you can't throw a rock at the Wall Street Journal (conservative) or the New York Times (liberal) without hitting a sentence that mentions wealth inequality brought on by fed policy. For further…
So we haven't been experiencing inflation? I guess it's just me seeing all the real items in the economy skyrocket in price. But I guess when you can just readjust the definition and what's included it doesn't matter. The fed won't be able to raise interest rates without crushing the same people they were lowered to support.
Correction: The Fed's policies have taken $50T of wealth from the Bottom 90%. When you bail out irresponsibly over-leveraged and nearly bankrupted banks and corporations, and pay for those bailouts with tax-payer money, you steal from the poor and give to the rich. Most importantly, when the Fed decides to print money ad nauseam, they create massive asset inflation, which steals from the poor and gives to the rich. T…
Blaming the fed is a common libertarian tactic to avoid blaming the capitalists. Oh yes, in a pure anarchocapitalist Austrian utopia, you'd never have capitalists paying workers shit wages, employing child labor, forcing workers into unsafe firetrap buildings, etc It's a way of averting ye eyes from the real problems with the negative externalities and market failures, and the hard work to come up with policy solutio…
I will take the capitalist over these government clowns any day of the week.
Moderna created a vaccine in less than a day. Even with a year to think about it, my state and county still can't decide where the mass vaccination site should be located.
Our government has coasted for too long and is incompetent. When the world decides to quit paying the dollar tax imposed via Fed printing, it will be a rude awaking for all Americans.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Yes, and that person is Uncle Sam, Marianne, the Goddess of Democracy, it is me and you, because it is be formed from societal consensus and the republican process. Good, then you’ll have no objection to me helping myself to your surplus. For “the good of society.” > Coercion schmoercion. Its interesting how people are often quite concerned with someone else’s perceived lack of things, but references to someone bei…
> Good, then you’ll have no objection to me helping myself to your surplus. For “the good of society.” I don't evade taxes, so you're welcome to my surplus. > Its interesting how people are often quite concerned with someone else’s perceived lack of things, but references to someone being a victim of violence are dismissed. By all means, please expound upon the victims of violence caused by taxpaying in modern day Am…
The taxes were already accounted for, my claim is on top of what you already contributed.
> By all means, please expound upon the victims of violence caused by taxpaying in modern day America.
Its all very simple, if you don’t give them what they want, they threaten you at first and then they come take what they want.
> Are you referring to
This isn’t helpful.
> Then you'll have to provide your alternative to taxation,
Its the same as my alternative to rape. Namely, abolition.
> and indeed your alternative to governments or societies, as those can't really exist beyond taxes, at least until we achieve a post-scarcity society.
I thought you were familiar with alternative viewpoints? When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with? If your society is dependent on violence and coercion, then perhaps your society shouldn’t exist.
> Incidentally, I should note that being against the principle of taxation not only precludes income taxes, but sales taxes and other consumption taxes, property taxes, estate taxes, tariffs, public tolls.
Don’t stop there, I’m also opposed to bank robbery, grand theft auto, petty theft, burglary, larceny, fraud, theft by conversion, and rapine. You get a lot for your trouble when you give up aggressive violence.
> you would call it theft and thus NASA would continue to go unfunded.
I’m fine with NASA relying on voluntary sources of funding and ceasing to extort the working class.
> "Taxation is theft" is a meme well-known to the internet, and this conversation we are having has been repeated over and over uncountable times. Neither of us represent original ideas. We are just rehashing the same unanswerable debate many men have had before us.
If you think the debate is unanswerable then perhaps you would enjoy something else more. For my part, the only way to find an answer is to have the debate. Furthermore in my experience these debates tend to get derailed by people pattern-matching their interlocutor’s response to something they feel more comfortable responding to and in the process eliding nuanced arguments in favor of rehashing things that haven’t even been mentioned. Either “taxation is theft” or “taxation is not theft” (or some more compicated relation between ‘taxation’ and ‘theft’), but in no case does “‘taxation is theft’ is a libertarian idea” get use closer to a resolution.
> memoization can be a way to expedite a solution.
I’ll look, thanks.
> It amazes me why most people do not grasp this. I think it is lack of education. Huh? Literally everybody grasps this. This is the most widely parroted mainstream narrative about the economy right now on the internet. Hell, you can't throw a rock at the Wall Street Journal (conservative) or the New York Times (liberal) without hitting a sentence that mentions wealth inequality brought on by fed policy. For further…
So we haven't been experiencing inflation? I guess it's just me seeing all the real items in the economy skyrocket in price. But I guess when you can just readjust the definition and what's included it doesn't matter. The fed won't be able to raise interest rates without crushing the same people they were lowered to support.
We have not. Your impression of prices doesn't necessarily correlate with actual inflation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From 1960 to 1985 the top marginal tax rate crashed from 90% to 30%. And then of course there's the demise of private sector unions, the effects of computerization, etc. Arguably, it was always a natural law, but the 1970s were an inflection point after which capital was allowed to accrue advantages at a much faster rate.
It's mostly a myth that there was a 90% marginal tax rate. It's technically true, but when the top tax rate was removed they also removed all the loopholes and deductions that were being used to reduce the effect tax rate on top earners to below 45%. All the while the proportion of tax receipts as a percentage of GDP has remained constant. Meanwhile, the proportion of taxes paid by the top quintile earners has increa…
Citing the amount collected from the top quintile is moving the goalposts a bit. A typical 20%er is someone like a successful dentist. Sure, they probably have a stock portfolio, but that's for funding their retirement.
It doesn't help that the statistics are always presented in misleading ways. We really need the stats to be stated in terms of tranches that exclude the higher ones (eg. top 0.01%, 0.01-0.1%, 0.1-0.5%, 0.5-1%, 1-5%, 5-10%, 10-20%, 20-40%, 40-60%, etc.). Instead, lumping the 1% in with the 1-20% just co-opts the upper-middle class into defending the interests of the 1% and above.
> But all this ignores the main fact, which is that actual rich people make most of their money not as income, but as unrealized capital gains. High marginal rates on income taxes affects high-earning professionals. Not the private jet crowd.
Of course. That's where discussion of wealth inequality (and the estate tax) takes over from income inequality.