Posted by mooreds 14 hours ago
The only reason this isn't common sense is because the rich have fought it for millennia.
The only real way to tax the rich is to ensure that the rich have to compete for workers by paying competitive wages
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, preventative spending, time losses...
in theory eliminating the poor by literally giving them money could have an impact that makes society better for everyone... it's very reductive to assume there's just one big knob that the rich can turn to get it all back
Taxes on the rich are like increased power bills. Businesses pass on costs at a markup.
They can do that because you need a job to eat and they only need to hire if there is a profit to be had.
at the very least locking up a trillion dollars with some douchebag isn't a reasonable strategy against inflation
It seems like all it does is lock people into poverty with unreasonably high effective marginal tax rates.
In UK though the salaries are fixed at 25k GBP annually until forever, they simply like this number.
Source: https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Einkom...
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.
EDIT: Seems like the article is suggesting that giving more disposable income to the rich, results in them using that extra income to buy capital rent seeking assets. So it is a double fuck you to the poor. Because not only do the rich end up paying proportionally less in taxes, but they also use the extra money to compete with you for your home, buy the home and rent it back to you, putting you in an even worse financial situation.
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 $2 trillion spent, yearly, by the state. This is where wealth goes to die.
If you were to seize, just fully seize (and consider it's liquid, which it is not), the wealth of all the billionaires in France (there aren't even 50 of them) you'd end up with $500 billion.
So if you were to just take all the wealth from all the french billionaires, you'd only pay a quarter (!) of the budget of the french state. For one year.
And that's it. 25% for a year.
Another way to see it: the french public deficit is more than $100 billion, yearly. If you were to seize the wealth of all french billionaires, you'd only have enough money to prevent the public debt from growing (which has to be at around 140% by now) for five years.
I'm not listening to talks about "taxing the rich" anymore until that caste called politicians stops spending money it doesn't have, enslaving future generations that shall be taxed to death to pay the insane public debt their governments are creating.
Wanna talk about what's happening to the city of Brussels (Belgium), my native city? 40% right at the poverty line. Immense deficit. Conditions of living going down the drain. First political party in the poll is now the PTB, a full on communist party (and communist in the EU have noticed that, at the moment, they could get the votes of islamists, so strangely enough in a "the enemy of my enemy of my friend" way, communists in countries like France and Belgium happen to be very welcoming to religious extremism [in France the communist party literally has been forced, when it created a coalition with others party at the left, to sign a paper saying it condemned islamism terrorism for they've been so cosy with the idea that it really wasn't clear at all that they actually were against islamist terrorism]).
And you want to get me started on that wonderful discovery the left made recently: that by importing millions of poor migrants and then giving them the right to vote, by a very surprising coincidence these poor imported migrants happened to not vote for the right?
How... Convenient?
Several countries are discovering that: "you eventually end up of the money of others" and "when the rich becomes poor, the poor dies".
The one thing that really irks me in this is the full-on hypocrites I know who believe that anyone richer than them should be taxed to death: to them "trickle down economics" do not work but that they live a middle-class lifestyle more preposterous than 99% of the planet doesn't bother them. They want lower taxes but not for those richer than they are.
I cannot understand that mindset.
I hate the Zuck: really, screw that guy and his faked 3D legless avatar demo for his dystopian VR world (how did that one turn out btw? As well as the Meta AI race?) and screw his PHP+JavaScript "punch the monkey" abusive ad world. Just fuck it. But I don't give a single crap in the world that he's got two $250 million Yacht or whatever they cost and however many he's got.
Good. For. Him.
I'd rather be poor and free than live under communism. And doubly so if we're talking about living in a society dictated both by religious intolerance and communism (which is where several countries are headed).
And if you want to "help the poor", go give all your money, open your house/appartment to pooor migrants and give me a fucking break.
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.
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 of that public money to go to subsidizing insurance companies.
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 does while having less public healthcare, precisely because of the "help the rich" policies causing most of that public money to go to subsidizing insurance companies.
Is this shocking display of government incompetence supposed to be an argument for increased spending, more government involvement, or both?
https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/household-debt.html
https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/household-financial-...
https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/household-savings.ht...
https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/household-disposable... (Select 2024 to see US data included)
Also just because someone benefits, that doesn't mean that other people have to suffer.
If basic needs aren’t being sufficiently eased, there’s no money left to invest.
I mean I'm perfectly fine with people who work hard making a lot of money. But that changes once that money is used against me. From that moment on I want to be compensated for damages, and the best way to do it is through taxes.
I don't want to be personally compensated. I just want to live in a society where people's basic needs are easily met: clothes, food, medicine, housing. The current landscape is, by the day, increasingly dystopian.