Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wealth of this nature is not accumulated; it is extracted.
It’s actually created.
It’s not. It’s extracted.
Tax cuts for the wealthy only benefit the rich (2023)
191–200 of 209 posts
Re: Tax cuts for the wealthy only benefit the rich (2023)
#192The 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 whi…
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.
Re: Tax cuts for the wealthy only benefit the rich (2023)
#193The 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…
Just look at growth rates before Reagan/Thatcher in the US/UK and after. If you take the 30 years before and the 30 years after, you'll see growth actually decreased.
Obviously this is correlation, but it's somewhat damning to the conservative gospel (dogma?) that lowering taxes somehow automatically produces more growth.
Given that we have no clear indicator that raising taxes on wealthy people would reduce growth (really, we have the opposite signal from the historical record), there seems little reason not to pursue greater equality.
Re: Tax cuts for the wealthy only benefit the rich (2023)
#194The 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.
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.
Re: Tax cuts for the wealthy only benefit the rich (2023)
#195All 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.
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.
Re: Tax cuts for the wealthy only benefit the rich (2023)
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> the average person is economically much worse off than all the European countries you just mentioned. Where on earth did you get this idea? US Households have much higher disposable income (~50% higher than the Western European average) and much lower household debt levels than the average Western European country. See OECD links below. > We literally spend more government money per person on healthcare than France…
Regulatory capture by business interests seems like something you'd solve via government, ironically.
Re: Tax cuts for the wealthy only benefit the rich (2023)
#197Take 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…
I don't know if you remember, but Elon recently spent over $200M getting his chosen guy elected. He then went on to waste over $100B tax dollars trying to "cut fraud", retiring in disgrace after achieving nothign.
The impact of having stupid-rich people isn't limited to clean-room economic thought experiments. It is seemingly incompatible with democracy as we practice it in the US.
Re: Tax cuts for the wealthy only benefit the rich (2023)
#198The 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…
Nobody knows what the Laffer curve is. Maybe we should be raising taxes.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make
Re: Tax cuts for the wealthy only benefit the rich (2023)
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, when I googled supply-side economics it said it was another name for trickle-down economics. I'm interested in how you'd say they differ, honestly, not trying to be argumentative. I found at least found one analysis (by a left leaning think tank, so take it for what you will) https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-failure-of-supp... that seems to show that supply-side economics hasn't panned out. It see…
I don't know where you're looking, but if you go to the first result for trick-down economics, the Wikipedia page, within the first few lines it mentions how the term is used, and how it was created by detractors of supply-side economics. It's never been a real policy. "the term 'trickle-down economics' was popularized by Democrats in the US to derogate Reaganomics" If you similarly look up supply-side economics, at…
What does socialism have to do with universal health care?
For someone who is making a point of using correct terminology this seems really strange. Universal healthcare is a policy that is completely compatible with capitalism, implemented by countries even far from being social democracies.
Re: Tax cuts for the wealthy only benefit the rich (2023)
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Proponents of what? Growing the pie isn't going to convince anyone who has a small slice of anything. Maybe you've never seen a pie before, but no matter how much it grows by the angle of your slice remains the same. People don't care about how much absolute wealth they have. If they did they'd all be happy as even the peasants today are richer than the kings of yore. In reality, people are only concerned about havin…
Ah, the "let them eat iPhones" argument. No, cool tech does not make up for the ruinous cost of health care, housing, and education vs median wages. Maslow's Hierarchy still exists. A system that fails to deliver food and shelter for a reasonable number of worked hours at a reasonable and available job is still a failure no matter how cool the Big Screen TVs are.
> A system that fails to deliver food and shelter for a reasonable number of worked hours at a reasonable and available job is still a failure
If other jobs are not fruitful enough to provide food and shelter then the worker can simply go direct to producing food and shelter themselves. That baseline is always available.
At least it is as long as you have land. That is where relative wealth inequality can quickly come to bite you. That is why nobody gives a shit about the pie growing. They only care about the pie having equally divided slices.
These silly catchphrases you keep coming up with do nothing to change reality.