> You can find any number of links talking about how unequal the tax cuts are.

All of those links are comparing dollars rather than percentages. It's obvious that a given percentage of $400,000 is more than the same percentage of $40,000.

> That's an insane thing to do in an economy that's already breaking records for inequality.

The cause of inequality isn't taxes, it's market consolidation. Rich people are rich because they own a large fraction of a megacorp. Under the existing system, higher corporate taxes, if anything, increase market consolidation because massive international corporations can use cross-border avoidance mechanisms whereas smaller purely domestic corporations can't, so they're effectively a tax on businesses too small to get out of them.

> That's not what these are.

It's essentially what they are, and the rate reduction in the lower brackets was slightly more. The highest bracket was lowered by 2.6% whereas the brackets from ~$12k to ~$100k were each lowered by 3%. And as a percentage of taxes paid, 39.6% was only 7% more than 37% at the top, whereas for the working poor 15% had been 25% more than the current 12%.

> Trillions of dollars are trillions of dollars.

You can turn any annual amount into trillions of dollars by multiplying it by an arbitrary number of years. And the only reason it can get so big so fast is that the US government spends a stupefying amount of money, so if you reduce it by even a small percentage it's a big number.

> Money IS a zero sum game

This is definitely false and is one of the major fallacies in the taxes vs. inequality problem.

In general people don't actually store wealth as money. Rich people store it as stocks and things. So if you tax them, you're not causing them to have less cash, or even causing them to sell their car or mansion. You're causing them to sell stocks.

If the person you transfer the money to is doing anything with it other than buying the same exact stocks, you're reconfiguring the economy, which is very much not zero sum and could be negative or positive sum depending on who gets it and what they do with it.

But Wall St. and Main St. are somewhat isolated pools of money. Making a transfer from one to the other has effects not entirely unlike printing new money and handing it out, because it gets spent very differently than it would have otherwise. And this is the nasty part: The sources of inequality are money sinks.

If you're paying high rents because there is a housing shortage as a result of captured zoning boards inhibiting new construction, and all the tenants suddenly have more money, the rent is going up. That's one of the reasons you can't solve it with taxes. You have to address the actual causes of inequality -- market consolidation and regulatory capture. Otherwise the incumbents just take the money right back out of your pocket.

What's interesting to me is how what constitutes a 'third rail' topic changes over time.

A quick search will show that it used to be fine to talk about Curtis Yarvin on here a decade ago but now that he's more relevant than ever it's suddenly taboo?

Did Curtis Yarvin and the ideas he espouses suddenly become less interesting or are a group of people working together to prevent critical discussion of his ideas?

Even the theory that the executive can just not spend money it finds wasteful doesn't extend to the executive being able to unilaterally reconfigure an in-kind assistance program into a refundable tax credit. Admittedly, an even bigger grab of dictatorial power is not out of character for this administration, though.