Are you proud of yours? I'm US and I'm not proud of how our taxes are earned and I'm definitely not proud how they're spent.

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tossandthrow 4 days ago | parent [-]

This is a strawman - but we can play.

You should be proud, but you should also lobby for better spend of the tax money.

Regardless, a well functioning nation should target some level of equality. This does not necesarrily happen through taxes, but taxes have just shown to be incredibly effective.

Regardless of your status, you still suffer from high inequality. If you are poor it is self explanatory. But even rich people need to shield them from ceo killers, use incredibly bad infrastructure, etc.

In that view I do understand why you are not a proud US person - but taxes would likely safe you - like it did in the 60s.

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kortilla 4 days ago | parent [-]

>But even rich people need to shield them from ceo killers, use incredibly bad infrastructure, etc.

CEO killers are not a result of inequality. The only recent example of a CEO killer was a result of being the head of a health insurance company and the motivation was not his comp.

Bad infrastructure is also not a good example. That’s just a result of gov choices on spending.

At least in the US, pulling levers on taxing the middle and upper middle class produces far more revenue than hitting the 0.1%. This is why Democrats nor Republicans will ever provide meaningful cuts for people making $90k-$500k/year.

Inequality causes issues, but infrastructure failures is not one of them.

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anovikov 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

That's natural, upper class makes money from assets, not from work - it's hard and also probably morally impossible to tax these (do it and they sell and buy assets abroad where assets aren't taxed, and just throw country into shit, leaving generations without pensions and without profits from their consumption). Only something that has no way to run away, can be taxed. Labor is that thing: for all the bad things about America, you have to build walls to keep people out not keep them in.

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tossandthrow 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Infrastructure was an example of a common good that rich and poor people use alike - not something that necessarily is fixed with equality.

Thinking about taxes in terms of producing revenue completely misses the point. Taxes in this context is a tool for increasing equality.

As for the ceo killings, if not the US increases equality, we will likely only see more of that behavior going forward.

	▲	kortilla a day ago \| parent [-]
		The ceo killing was not a result of inequality. Both the assailant and the CEO were rich and the motivation was entirely the nature of health insurance as an industry. So given that the only recent CEO killing was not a result of inequality, what evidence do you have to support the notion than increased inequality would increase CEO killings?