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

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

#131

Post by jimaway123 »

odo1242 wrote: post #62
TacticalCoder wrote: post #49

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…

You should include other countries for reference. The US has approximately 390x that amount of debt (only 5 times the population) and the average person is economically much worse off than all the European countries you just mentioned. We literally spend more government money per person on healthcare than France does while having less public healthcare, precisely because of the "help the rich" policies causing most o…

7x not 390x

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

#133

Post by smallmancontrov »

manlymuppet wrote: post #104
jibal wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Can I extend an olive branch anyways? I really believe in good faith, civil conversation, and I'd love the opportunity to make amends here. You've said you won't respond further, but seeing your passion, I think it would be great if we could have a civil conversation. I genuinely believe that trickle-down and supply-side economics are meaningfully different things, and I think there would be much to gain from hearing…

I'll pick up the conversation if GP won't (GP = grand parent, your post is the parent of mine and the post above is the grandparent of mine).

You're missing the forest for the trees. I argue that the forest is a high level strategy that has been playing out for approaching 50 years:

1. Push money into the capital economy and cut taxes. If anyone complains, cite growth.

2. Push taxes into the labor economy and cut benefits. If anyone complains, cite fiscal responsibility.

This doesn't necessarily show up to an egregious degree in any individual policy. I can think of a few examples but that's beside the point. If (1) and (2) are aggressively promoted and happen frequently while the invisible (3) and (4) -- capital pays taxes, labor gets benefits -- aren't and don't, then the net effect is intentionally and predictably and observably upwards re-distributive.

Furthermore, I don't buy the excuse that policy wonks don't understand this. Back in comparative government class, they taught us that Iran was a theocracy rather than a democracy not because it didn't do the rituals of electing leaders, but because a Council of Religious Experts got to select the candidates. You can have any color you want, as long as it is black (or Shia Muslim). In any case, the filter is the policy.

Between campaign finance and private ownership of media, it's no real surprise that in the US we have the policy filtering mechanism that allows (1),(2) and blocks (3),(4). Again, the filter is the policy, the same logic that makes Iran a theocracy shoves the US towards plutocracy, and we need to push back by shifting aggregate legislative attention away from (1), (2) and towards (3), (4) rather than getting bogged down in debates over whether any particular fig-leaf appropriately covers any particular penis.

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

#134

Post by [deleted] »

manlymuppet wrote: post #81
vlovich123 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you describe the defensible policies of supply-side economics? That's as vague a term as trickle-down economics to me. Supply-side economics is based on a flawed premise of looking at only the Laffer curve and saying if taxes are too high the economy suffers, therefore we must make the tax rate arbitrarily low. In reality though there are more nuances to making the tax rate arbitrarily low (e.g. high inflation an…

Sure. I think supply-side economics deserves more nuance than simply thinking we need to make the tax rate arbitrarily low. The Laffer curve isn't the only thing you should look at, since where you tax can be just as important as how much you tax. Take corporate taxes for example. If one were to advocate to get rid of corporate taxes, you might think that person unabashedly biased. What kind of person would want to g…

[deleted]

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

#135

Post by brightball »

twoodfin wrote: post #55
brightball wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always like to approach this conversation with a question: Should business that actually do create jobs in practice get bigger tax breaks? For example, if I by some miracle create a 1 man company that makes $100 million / year profit and somebody else creates a company that makes $100 million / year profit but has 2,000 employees...should the two companies be taxed differently? Walmart employees 1.6 million people…

It would incentivize the wrong things: All else being equal, you want to produce more with less labor and other inputs. It’s a good thing farming needs an order of magnitude fewer farmers than a century ago.

That's true to a certain degree, but there's a labor supply factor involved too. If companies are rewarded for employing more people it lowers the available supply of labor forcing companies to create a more enticing environment to attract that labor (prices, benefits, etc).

It compounds if the incentive is aimed at domestic labor.

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

#136

Post by jimaway123 »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #113
neilwilson wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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, p…

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.

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

#137

Post by miyoji »

manlymuppet wrote: post #6

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 peopl…

This is ridiculous. "Trickle-down economics" is just another name for "supply-side economics". You can also call it "voodoo economics", as George H.W. Bush did. They're all referring to the exact same failed policies that have been criticized for failing to achieve what they claim to achieve for 130 years.

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

#138

Post by rahimnathwani »

wang_li wrote: post #106
rahimnathwani wrote: post #96

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, discret…

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?

[dead]

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

#139

Post by ratelimitsteve »

lifestyleguru wrote: post #46
ratelimitsteve wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the rising tide that's supposed to lift all boats? also piss.

Whole life had the don't piss in water anxiety, only to realize that everyone does it and I'm swimming in it.

"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.

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

#140

Post by manlymuppet »

bena wrote: post #105
manlymuppet wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right. I should be more forthright; I was answering elsewhere. Here's another comment I made that's relevant. """ I think supply-side economics deserves more nuance than simply thinking we need to make the tax rate arbitrarily low. The Laffer curve isn't the only thing you should look at, since where you tax can be just as important as how much you tax. Take corporate taxes for example. If one were to advocat…

> You'll see this often in the social democracies of Scandinavia, like Sweden or Denmark. These are countries with strong welfare states, and yet, the corporate tax rates are often lower than the U.S., even if you look at the most red states. This is only true if you look at the standard tax rate. The effective tax rate of a lot of US corporations is appreciably lower. It works in places like Scandinavia because they…

My point still stands though. Taxing income and consumption directly (hopefully the income/consumption of rich people) is preferable to indirect corporate taxes.

In other conversation though, am I curious to know where you got your data. As far as I'm aware the Scandinavian countries do in fact have a robust system of corporate tax incentives. This is part of the reason they boast such high productivity.

I very well might be wrong here though, and the topic is interesting. Would you care to share a source?

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