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Life During Class Wartime

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Re: Life During Class Wartime

#221

Post by JuniperMesos »

BrenBarn wrote: post #188
nullocator wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't most of the housing issues in this country NIMBYism and zoning? NIMBYism lead by vocal, wealthy property owners? Zoning controlled by governments lead and captured by wealthy and corporate interests?

Many of the NIMBY property owners are not nearly wealthy enough to be affected by most wealth tax proposals (e.g., the "few tens of millions" suggested in the article).

Many NIMBYs are basically ordinary middle-class people who are old enough that they were able to buy the house they live in decades ago before the price of properties in their area got bid up; so most of their wealth is locked up in the same house they are currently living in.

Taxing the extremely wealthy basically does nothing to decrease the property values of this class of people en masse, and decreasing their property values en masse is precisely what it would mean to make housing more affordable for more people.

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#222

Post by JuniperMesos »

pseudohadamard wrote: post #202
JuniperMesos wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear a lot of accounts of relatively-normal people who talk about one member of their family who is homeless and living on the streets because they stopped letting that family member live with them because they did things like violently attack children in their home, or steal money in order to buy drugs. So this makes me think that a lot of visibly homeless people were in fact dysfunctional before they became homel…

Friend of mine is in a situation like that, they live next to subsidised housing for people who'd otherwise be homeless and you really, really don't want to live there. It's a good week when armed police have to turn up less than once a week. They're actually quite an SJW so you know it's really bad when even they say "some people have to be made homeless".

I don't actually want someone who gets kicked out of subsidized housing for doing things that get the cops called on them to be homeless - because it means that they'll be wandering the streets doing the same sorts of crazy and probably-violent things they did to lose their housing, just aimed at anyone who happens to be near them in public. I want them to be institutionalized in some way, not for their sake, but for the sake of ordinary people who want to be able to use public spaces without the risk of visibly-homeless people acting crazy in those spaces.

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#223

Post by thunky »

BrenBarn wrote: post #162
thunky wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think almost everybody would be better off if taxes were something like 1% of total assets rather than off the top of your income No thanks. Any discussion about tax reform has to start with government spending otherwise it's not serious. Nobody wants to give away a slice of their net worth to pay for bullshit wars and ballrooms.

> Any discussion about tax reform has to start with government spending otherwise it's not serious. I'd say almost the reverse. What we need most in terms of "tax reform" is to move away from thinking about taxes as solely a means of funding government operations, and towards thinking about taxes as a way of directly redistributing wealth. That is, the revenues of a wealth tax could simply be given to the non-wealthy…

Totally agree but its not the reverse of what I said, you're still talking about changing how the government spends money.

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#224

Post by thunky »

tyg13 wrote: post #171
thunky wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The vast majority of people in America are already doing this, because their wealth is entirely derived from their income Derived is not the same thing. Not even close. Then why stop at 1%? Why not fork over half of your possessions to the government every year and let them spend it for you, if you trust them so much? And by the way we already have a wealth tax. Its called inflation.

Why not eliminate tax entirely, then? Is that a conclusion you'd support?

If the choice is between giving the govt an portion of my net worth, a portion of my income, or nothing, I'll choose nothing. But that's not really an option is it?

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#225

Post by ponector »

stavros wrote: post #220
ponector wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all wealth of top 10 will be distributed equally it will add 5-10k per person. Will it make any difference in amount of pure people?

Yes, 5k will make a difference. How about the top 1000?

Average household debt is 154k. Average household credit card debt is 11k.

How 5k will make a difference?

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#226

Post by thunky »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #166
thunky wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The vast majority of people in America are already doing this, because their wealth is entirely derived from their income Derived is not the same thing. Not even close. Then why stop at 1%? Why not fork over half of your possessions to the government every year and let them spend it for you, if you trust them so much? And by the way we already have a wealth tax. Its called inflation.

Inflation is only a wealth tax if you invest in cash. If you invest in stocks, real estate, and sometimes other things (gold, bonds, art) then your wealth grows faster than inflation.

> If you invest in stocks, real estate, and sometimes other things (gold, bonds, art) then your wealth grows faster than inflation

Aka put your wealth at risk or watch it disappear.

And the larger point is that runaway govt spending makes it disappear faster.

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#227

Post by hermitcrab »

jrflowers wrote: post #120
hermitcrab wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Most of them were were pretty unconcerned with Hitler until after the marxist-leninists were already fighting him. Britain, France and allies were fighting Hitler in 1939. Russia was allied with Hitler until 1941, when Hitler attacked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...

I love this link about a treaty, which the Soviets broke quickly, that was the direct result of a different treaty between Nazi Germany, the UK, France, and Italy that was signed a year earlier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_Agreement It seems like the signatories to that treaty had no issue with the Nazis annexing particular bits of Europe at the time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Britain and France's abandonment of Czechoslovakia was a pretty shameful episode all round.

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#228

Post by stavros »

ponector wrote: post #225
stavros wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, 5k will make a difference. How about the top 1000?

Average household debt is 154k. Average household credit card debt is 11k. How 5k will make a difference?

Because a household typically has more than one person in it, which immediately means no credit card debt.

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#229

Post by cestith »

AlexandrB wrote: post #20
hootz wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the west, the prevalent idea is that socialism/communism lost and that there is nothing beyond capitalism. This is it, we will forever live in a social-democracy state. I wonder who promotes this idea.

> In the west, the prevalent idea is that socialism/communism lost and that there is nothing beyond capitalism. It didn't just "lose", it killed millions of its own people in the process. Having been born in a communist state, I'd rather clean toilets in American than do anything else in the USSR. Edit: It's basically impossible to communicate the day-to-day misery and deprivation of late stage Communism without soun…

Was it communism that killed people in the Soviet times, or was it authoritarianism? You can have authoritarians no matter your economic structure. They have killed people around the world in the name of communism, capitalism, fascism, race, culture, religion, colonialism, and just general jingoistic control for millennia.

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#230

Post by tim333 »

zug_zug wrote: post #3

Yeah I'm glad somebody's talking about it. Wealth inequality seems like it will be THE defining issue of our lives (accelerated drastically by AI). I think there are many practical ways to solve it, and would love to see more proposals out there. Instead I tend to see nihilism or division.

The UK went through getting rid of that with the landed gentry at the start of the twentieth century. Mostly tax - income and inheritance. It requires the political will to vote in people who will do it though.
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