Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's actually pretty similar when you get to the bottom of it. Lenin was a member of the nobility during the Tsar rule. He saw his oppurtunity when Russian leadership was weakened after the first World War (similar to how the British were weakened after the Seven Years' War) and took it. The biggest difference is that he had unsuccessfully tried before and was orchestrating the whole thing from his exile base in Swit…
> Lenin was a member of the nobility during the Tsar rule. This is not true at all. Where is your source for this claim?
The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
571–580 of 606 posts
Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
#572Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Here in Germany, I know of at least three different NGOs that have been pointing to this problem for more than a decade now and have developed detailed policy recommendations, both on a national and E.U. level. What are the NGOs? I'd be interested to read what they recommend. I also appreciate your efforts to explain how this might work but there are still some big gaps (you may well have answers too but I think yo…
This is a comprehensive (I think several hundred pages) tax scheme by the German branch of Attac: https://www.attac.de/kampagnen/wer-zahlt/unser-steuerkonzept (Attac is generally far left on the political spectrum and explicitly critical of capitalism as a concept, so expect more of a radical perspective and solutions) Das "Netzwerk Steuergerechtigkeit" has detailed concepts for a broad range of taxation schemes. Thi…
My concern is that if middle/upper income groups believe that a wealth tax will reduce asset prices through forced selling by the ultra wealthy, and they think that affects assets in their pensions/home/savings then they will not vote for it and therefore it won't happen. I'm looking for something which tackles this concern head on.
Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
#573Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really enjoy Gary Stevenson - both his YouTube channel and his book - but his very convincing message that wealth inequality is a problem isn't really accompanied by any particularly good solutions. Tax the wealthy yes, but how do you do it exactly? How much does it raise? How should the revenue be spent?
He actually provides the solution quite explicitly in several of his videos: Tax non-moveable assets of the ultra-rich, i.e. real estate. His theory (which sounds plausible to me) is that a lot of the wealth of the ultra rich is actually bound up or linked to immovable assets. At the same time, investments in these assets is what makes them unaffordable for everyone else (i.e. your kids won't be able to buy a house a…
It’s the absolutely most valuable thing in the world. It increases in value constantly due to finite supply.
Yet you are allowed to buy it for a one time cost and own it FOREVER.
And there’s zero cost to owning it. Only upside of charging rent.
All the taxes we pay are for buying land or earning money. If you just already own everything, you pay nothing at all.
Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
#574Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
#575Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also ended up with all of Europe's gold by the end of WW2, making the dollar the global reserve currency
Both facts may be true without the causal link being present. Establishing the US as the global reserve currency had little if anything to do with where gold was stored, and far more to do with US economic and military power generally in the post-war era.
Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
#576Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both facts may be true without the causal link being present. Establishing the US as the global reserve currency had little if anything to do with where gold was stored, and far more to do with US economic and military power generally in the post-war era.
That’s incorrect. It had a lot to do with it because it represented the fact that Europe’s governments had little to no wealth after WW2 while the US had it all (thus economic and military dominance).
Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
#577Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a comprehensive (I think several hundred pages) tax scheme by the German branch of Attac: https://www.attac.de/kampagnen/wer-zahlt/unser-steuerkonzept (Attac is generally far left on the political spectrum and explicitly critical of capitalism as a concept, so expect more of a radical perspective and solutions) Das "Netzwerk Steuergerechtigkeit" has detailed concepts for a broad range of taxation schemes. Thi…
Thanks I'll take a look. I'm broadly aware of some of this and have read Piketty but not any of these German sources. My concern is that if middle/upper income groups believe that a wealth tax will reduce asset prices through forced selling by the ultra wealthy, and they think that affects assets in their pensions/home/savings then they will not vote for it and therefore it won't happen. I'm looking for something whi…
I'm not an economist. But from my point of view and based on what I've read about this the argument is relatively straightforward:
- Yes, if you tax the assets of the ultra-rich, the prices of those asset classes will tend to fall.
- That is the whole point of the exercise (in addition to maybe raising government revenues). You tax real estate held be the ultra-rich, because you want real estate to be affordable by normal people. But yes, it is likely that also the house or apartment of a "normal" home owner will decrease in value.
- This decrease will not be drastic or sudden, though. It might also simply come in the form of less value appreciation over time. If (like in the U.S.) the top 10% hold 50% of the real estate (presumably measured in value, not square footage) and increased taxes would lead to those ultra-rich to divest of half of that over the span of a few years, the effect on individual home owners would probably be negligible in practically all cases.
- You can minimize or outright eliminate downside risk for "normal" people with regulation: limits on foreclosures, direct subsidies for middle-class homeowners, etc.
- At the same time, if you succeed in lowering real estate prices, the upside is clear: For poor and middle class people, both renting and acquiring real estate becomes more affordable. If this policy pushes you above the wealth threshold required for home ownership, it makes a strong contribution to building intergenerational wealth. And if you remain a renter, it makes moving (and thus maximizing your income potential) much more accessible, because you are not bound to your existing lease (which is much cheaper than having to sign a new rental agreement).
Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
#578Earlier quoted context omitted.
The people of Belarus put this to test not that long ago. Massive numbers of people came out, factories went on strike, even people from the military and police spoke out against the regime. Turned out that in this day and age when the governments have unprecedented powers of surveillance and the ability to cut anyone from the respective financial system, a revolution is a really hard thing to pull off. If the Britis…
One thing the 'reactionaries' (anti-revolutionaries) do is spread propaganda of powerlessness. I'm not saying you are doing it intentionally, but they do it for a reason.
Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
#579Earlier quoted context omitted.
so how does this align with your opinion/idea that a stock market crash today would reduce inequality? more likely the same thing would just happen again.
As I'd just noted in another comment: in 1929 the US (and eventually global) stock markets collapsed. This set off the greatest period of wealth equality in the US, through a combination of factors: - Strengthening the power of the Federal Reserve to re-liquidate banks. - Direct government employment of individuals, whether through the Works Progress Administration (WPA), Civil Conservation Corps (CCC), and eventuall…
Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
#580Earlier quoted context omitted.
As I'd just noted in another comment: in 1929 the US (and eventually global) stock markets collapsed. This set off the greatest period of wealth equality in the US, through a combination of factors: - Strengthening the power of the Federal Reserve to re-liquidate banks. - Direct government employment of individuals, whether through the Works Progress Administration (WPA), Civil Conservation Corps (CCC), and eventuall…
You are missing the mass destruction of assets of the wealthy in WWII and the increase in bargaining power of labour in the post-war years (perhaps driven by loss of life/injury for those of a working age). The post-war public sentiment, at least in the UK, was that the lower orders of society had fought the most and suffered the most, and there was an appetite for a new social contract that saw Churchill voted out f…
The irony is that the countries which did substantially see their industry wrecked and received Marshall Plan or equivalent funds afterward turned into the most competitive post-war economies, most notably Germany and Japan.
The US managed to build out new infrastructure, where it couldn't convert its war plant directly (which in automobiles, lorries, locomotives, ships, and aircraft it largely did).
We saw spectacular greenfields development most especially in high-speed rail, first in Japan, then France and Germany, all of which saw both infrastructure and real estate valuations (the key obstruction to railroad rights-of-way) collapse after the War. (China's HSR build-out follows a similar dynamic, though with different reasons, as that country industrialised for the first time.)
(Edit: The US hasn't established HSR, largely I feel because its previously-transport-enabled real-estate became too valuable. It's not tractably feasible to buy rights of way in the US, alternatives such as subway construction are themselves phenomenally expensive.)
I'm not sure of all the reasons for the UK's relative economic stagnation, though I suspect it was a mix of WWI and WWII debt, not having its industry blown to splinters, being out-competed by the US, and losing its cheap inputs as the Empire collapsed and colonies were spun out as independent states.
(Edit: The UK didn't see an economic turn-around until the 1980s, largely as North Sea oil came online, a boom it managed to extend with financialisation of the City of London, though that was largely restricted to the London metro region itself at a cost to the rest of the country which is immensely backwards.)
It's interesting to note that the US's post-war boom began slowing in the 1970s (for reasons which are widely, and I strongly suspect mostly wrongly speculated upon, particular the goldbugs' hypothesis), whilst Japan and later South Korea's were just hotting up (the latter imploded with the asset bubble collapse in 1990), and later of course China starting to grow significantly during the 1990s.
But at the end of WWII, the US had huge productive capacity, largely non-obsolete factories, worldwide markets for goods, raw materials, and a largely intact workforce (vanishingly few overall war casualties), a situation few other countries could claim, and none at similar scale. This provided about two-to-three decades runtime before factors caught up with it.
And in light of the 1929 crash, helped both prolong the expansion out of that crisis and see that the rewards were widely distributed among socioeconomic classes rather than concentrated amongst the very wealthy. That formula's not been tried since.
(Edits: Note two late adds above, they clarify/expand my argument slightly, pre-empt some possible counterarguments, and shouldn't change the meaning significantly.)