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Posted by mooreds 14 hours ago

Tax cuts for the wealthy only benefit the rich (2023)(www.lse.ac.uk)
177 points | 191 commentspage 2
miguel_rdp 13 hours ago|
In other news, the pope is catholic
eks391 13 hours ago|
I also heard that every 60 seconds in Africa, a minute passes
peter-m80 12 hours ago||
No se podía saber
micromacrofoot 13 hours ago||
The most effective economic policy to help the impoverished is to tax the rich and give the money directly to the poor.

The only reason this isn't common sense is because the rich have fought it for millennia.

neilwilson 12 hours ago||
The poor will then give it back to the rich in higher prices for the same amount of stuff.

The only real way to tax the rich is to ensure that the rich have to compete for workers by paying competitive wages

t-writescode 12 hours ago|||
And by making it so that an employee can safely quit at any time without losing their ability to, you know, not get blasted by insane surprise bills - e.g. healthcare.
micromacrofoot 12 hours ago|||
This makes the false assumption that all the money given to the poor go back into high margin goods that the rich profit from? it ignores competition, ignores productivity gains by a lesser impoverished population, ignores the impact on small businesses...

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

neilwilson 10 hours ago|||
The rich own things. They collude. You hit them with costs and they put the price up which is validated by the extra money given to the poor, or by wage suppression as there aren’t enough jobs to go around.

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.

jimaway123 11 hours ago|||
It's called inflation. If you helicopter money on people they will bid up the prices of everything that they need. We had an experiment with this just a few years ago.
micromacrofoot 11 hours ago||
except that the biggest handouts during covid went to businesses, not people... so we didn't really, it was also a very supply constrained economy which was unique to the situation

at the very least locking up a trillion dollars with some douchebag isn't a reasonable strategy against inflation

IshKebab 12 hours ago||
Doubtful. The UK is practically at this point with generous benefits and a very progressive tax curve (you don't pay any tax on the first £12.5k of earnings).

It seems like all it does is lock people into poverty with unreasonably high effective marginal tax rates.

curiousgal 13 hours ago||
I think the real issue in the UK is the definition of "wealthy". The government seems to think it's people making more than 50k...
lifestyleguru 13 hours ago|
In Germany it's 90k EUR, in Poland it's a mere 30k EUR gross on employment contract. No it's not a coincidence, the government knows what they're doing. In short, they are not friends with those on employment contract in private sector.

In UK though the salaries are fixed at 25k GBP annually until forever, they simply like this number.

maverwa 12 hours ago||
Just for context: for an average single paying tax class 1 that’s 4.4k net per month, while the median working single earned 2.2k net in 2025.

Source: https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Einkom...

lifestyleguru 12 hours ago||
Meantime the average German billionaire, which Germany has the highest number in Europe: [awkward look monkey puppet meme]
livinglist 13 hours ago||
But hey it’s for the greater good eh, like Effective Altruism that people like Dario or Peter Thiel have been really obsessed with.
aristofun 11 hours ago||
All 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.
danny_codes 1 hour ago|
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.

numbers_guy 13 hours ago||
No shit. If you want a tax cut to have an economic impact, cut taxes for the poorest, the ones with the least disposable income.

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.

ratelimitsteve 13 hours ago|
it really does trickle up, and the greater percentage of their income the beneficiaries spend on consumables the greater the upward benefits.
iso1631 13 hours ago||
More "vacuumed up" than trickled
TacticalCoder 13 hours ago||
Take 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 $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.

danny_codes 1 hour ago||
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.

odo1242 12 hours ago|||
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 of that public money to go to subsidizing insurance companies.

marcusverus 9 hours ago|||
> 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 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)

danny_codes 1 hour ago||
Regulatory capture by business interests seems like something you'd solve via government, ironically.
jimaway123 11 hours ago||||
7x not 390x
odo1242 8 hours ago||
The US public debt is $39 trillion. The figure quoted by the parent comment is $100 billion
ivewonyoung 2 hours ago||
I believe that's new public debt per annum.
slopinthebag 11 hours ago|||
So the politicians waste money and your conclusion is it’s the private sectors fault??
slopinthebag 11 hours ago||
Well said. People won’t like to hear it but it’s true. If you seized the wealth of every billionaire in the US you could fund the federal government for about a year. Of course most of it is not liquid so in reality much less. So when people talk about how we need to “tax the rich” and our problems will be solved I assume they're lacking in political knowledge. Or they just see it as a form of punishment for daring to accumulate so much wealth.
archagon 9 hours ago||
Wealth of this nature is not accumulated; it is extracted.
slopinthebag 8 hours ago||
It’s actually created.
archagon 2 hours ago||
It’s not. It’s extracted.
charcircuit 13 hours ago||
Giving tax cuts to public companies allows anyone to invest in them and benefit from that.

Also just because someone benefits, that doesn't mean that other people have to suffer.

alistairSH 13 hours ago||
They're literally argue the opposite in the paper... when taxes are lowered, executives demand higher compensation, at the expense of their employees.
t-writescode 13 hours ago||
You have to have enough liquid to be able to invest.

If basic needs aren’t being sufficiently eased, there’s no money left to invest.

charcircuit 11 hours ago||
Enough liquid = $1. That is not insurmountable barrier. It's 25% of the price of a single burger at McDonald's.
amelius 13 hours ago|
Can we please tax the negative effect that big money has on the rest of us?

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.

sharts 13 hours ago||
Problem is those taxes just get funneled to things taxpayers don’t even support.
gardnr 13 hours ago||
I want a system that taxes things we don't want (unproductive rent-seeking) and doesn't tax things we do want (productive stuff e.g. income tax).

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.

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