331–340 of 587 posts
To solve all this, it's pretty simple, and the U.S. actually used to do it: heavily tax the super rich. Heavy taxation and then appropriate use of those funds for education, R&D funding, infrastructure, etc. is actual trickle-down economics. And mega corporations should be heavily taxed instead of holding the country economically hostage. They jumpstart their companies off of government funding and R&D and then act a…
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Because spending money on education doesn't equate to better outcomes. It creates more bureaucracy, bigger councils, etc. Teacher pay is still abysmal, especially considering the fact they are expected to act as guardians and even security these days. And you'll never get better outcomes if you can't attract smart people to actually teach, no matter how much you pay the superintendent. US public education should be c…
That's the thing I don't get. Most of those budgets should go to people. Rocks and bricks and concrete don't teach people, people teach people :-) Similar story for medical staff.
School board elections are one of the best examples of a local election being able to enact meaningful, visible change in your community.
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There is no evidence that people have a higher overall level of education before entering the workforce over time. Rather, people know a different set of skills and accumulate a different body of knowledge. It is only if we define "education" as the degree of knowledge in the body of subjects we teach today that one can say people in the past had less of it. But that's only because we have discarded the many bodies o…
>Rather, people [nowadays] know a different set of skills and accumulate a different body of knowledge. Yes, but this is increasingly knowledge that needs to be imparted through formal education (for a variety of reasons). Hence it costs more. >But how many resources does a society need to train its workers? If that number keeps growing, then there is something wrong with the society. I don't see the logic here. It's…
Surely that can't be true? Here in Sweden literacy was made mandatory for adults in 1686. It was not permitted to get married without being able to read.
Surely England can't have been that far behind, as late as 1800ed?
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I don't think its that unreasonable that big apartment complexes are owned by corporations.
I have a friend who buys apartment complexes and houses on the company for his employees to live in; that seems not to be reasonable. In fact, it became more reasonable with wfh; now his colleagues living farther away, who he wants in the office 3 months a year, can live for cheap for both sides and without any long term contracts. Definitely cheaper and more convenient than hotels in his area.
When railroad and heavy industry did this exact thing in the 19th century we called them robber barons and broke up their obscenely powerful and corrupt monopolies via antitrust legislation.
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As a practical matter, it is very difficult to tax wealth (and even harder to do it fairly.) I don't think the issue is lack of will but lack of plan that actually works in the face of assets with unclear value and/or difficult to liquidate. And this doesn't just affect the ultra rich but people like SWE too. How much is the stock you have in the non-public company you work at really worth? SWE are probably one of th…
It’s hard problem that can only be solved through attempts and iteration. The fact that a wealth tax is difficult is not a good enough reason to not try, because the problem of wealth inequality is so severe now.
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The rich buy stuff, do they not? Tax those things to force realization and thus tax of unrealized wealth. Buying a second, third, fourth home? Here's your increasingly high tax and interest rate penalty. Instead of throwing up our hands with "they don't have cash", force them to realize investments into cash and deincentivize being able to keep everything hidden being investments and purchasing things with unrealized…
> Buying a second, third, fourth home? It's too easy for the ultra-rich to find loopholes in any rules. If there is a tax on homeownership, they will simply not own any home but will own some corporate entity that own the asset. See ? No secondary residence. Just an investment in a corporation that happens to home a bunch of houses.
Or prevent companies from holding real estate as an investment vehicle?
I'm not naive enough to argue that this is a definitively easy thing, but especially when it comes to housing, the poor and middle class are getting completely fucked right now; it's gotten to the point in the crisis where we absolutely need to do something urgently.
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No, but it is an avoidance mechanism specifically designed to avoid tax on income. If an independent third party has deemed your stock sufficiently valuable (and stable) to lend money against, then you should be taxed on that loan. You can get a credit when you repay the loan (to offset tax on the income you used to repay).
Not familiar with the US tax code, but if Musk borrows $1b with a portion of his Tesla stocks as collateral, will he be charged capital gains tax by assuming that these stocks are now worth $1b?
This is a dishonest piece. It ignores that it's based on a zero-sum game and the world isn't zero sum. The quoted economists know that very well. I like that the coin flip game illustrates the concept of compounding interest, but it doesn't model wealth creation at all. Most new ventures aren't I-win-you-lose, they're we-win-or-I-lose. Wealthy people really can take bigger bets more frequently like the article sugges…
Wealth isn’t zero sum but power over law (as defined by who has influence over the rules we live by) is. When you have concentration of power due to concentration of wealth, the society will become unstable and undemocratic. So even though wealth isn’t zero sum, wealth inequality is a problem that needs to be addressed for long term stability.
Religious extremism isn’t coming mainly from the wealthy. It’s dominantly a lower-strata southern thing, with notable metastases all around the country, yet it plays strongly in the US system.
That some wealthy co-opt the extremists doesn’t change the above.
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If you are wealthy and refuse to earn an income, then your savings will eventually deplete and you’ll become bankrupt. Additionally they wealth already taxed in a previous era, and is currently taxed in this era any time they spend it via sales tax. If of course you are spending all your money on personal groceries as a billionaire, then I’m 100% fine with not taxing you.
> If you are wealthy and refuse to earn an income, then your savings will eventually deplete and you’ll become bankrupt. Please look up "rent", "dividend" and "capital gains".
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So your plan to tax wealth instead of income doesn't involve taxing wealth? Sure you can do all that, and that would close some tax loopholes (albeit at a cost), but has nothing to do with taxing wealth instead of income.
See step 4? They should probably add in an increased capital gains tax as well
Bad for families building generational wealth who don't have it yet though, and boy do I hate the idea as a result.