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

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

And firms are already incentivised to increase productivity, including by offshoring jobs or replacing staff by robots, because that's their profit margin. And in this case we're not concerned with firms reducing costs in general, but firms substituting capital for labour. This was an improvement for agriculture, but it was an improvement because that labour found more productive things to do...

But if you're a government those decisions businesses make don't help unless the robots or Chinese factories are considerably more efficient at making stuff than domestic labour, because a business decision that at the margin spending a dollar less on domestic labour and 99 cents more on another production input is very slightly more efficient loses the government more in income tax receipts than it gains on anything else, and usually adds to their benefit bill. Also, people don't like their jobs being replaced. (And yet ironically, tax structures are often more favourable to companies increasing the capital input and decreasing the labour input...)

Obviously it's true that you can go too far and end up subsidising firms to keep on employees that aren't doing anything useful, but relatively minor tax breaks which mainly advantage low margin retail businesses don't do that, and they're not going to stop NVIDIA being NVIDIA either. But they might make the $45k outsourcing contract not look a substantially better deal than retaining the $50k employee.

How do you compare a criticism, with a policy? Trickle-down economics doesn't have any legislative appropriations. It's not taught in economics classes. Like saying "what's the difference between a boat and a car?" I can tell you that a boat is not a car, but I can't compare the wheels of a car with a boat, nor the keel of a boat with a car. They are different things is all I'm trying to say.

Now as for why I didn't expand with nuance earlier, in my defense I was expanding, but elsewhere in the thread. I foolishly thought this was enough.

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