> That is a transfer of money from bond investors to the government. No new money is made.

All forms of debt are money creation. All loans are money creation. Fractional reserve banking is money creation. It doesn't have to be "oh now we are making dollar bills" to count.

Taxation reduces the money supply. Government spending increases the money supply.

> I want to mention that the Federal Reserve can and does increase money supply by buying US Treasury Bonds from banks (converting the asset into cash reserves).

Fun small print. As though that's not the exact mechanism of the brutal inflation the US has suffered the past 5-6 years. The US money supply says it all. There are no other serious buyers for $20 trillion in new garbage paper debt every ten years. It's inflation by currency destruction plain and simple and there are no other paths. It's also why gold is $5,000 instead of $500.

> No, it's not "easier" because it's hard-if-not-impossible to accurately and objectively judge the present-value of many types of assets. Even the case most-familiar to working-class folks, property taxes, nobody really likes/trusts the outcome.

You can easily get within 10% of the "real" value on most assets. And, in particular, assets like stock have a built in ticker to tell you their exact current value.

This sort of evaluation happens all the time privately. For example, car insurance companies have gotten extremely good at evaluating the value of a car to determine when to simply total it.

The only thing that really makes it tricky is hidden assets or assets with no market value.

The likes of the richest people, who I think most of the "tax wealth" people are thinking of, have the majority of their wealth in equity. It's easy to tax the majority of their wealth.

This does not need to be a perfect system to be very effective at generating revenue and redistributing wealth.

> 2. We don't tax work, we tax income, because actual transactions between people with "skin in the game" are harder to fake.

Also because taxing income (or other cash) is disinflationary. Taxing assets is inflationary because it forces sales.

If someone takes a loan out against an unrealized gain, that should immediately trigger a tax event.

The real solution though is for the legislative branch to not be beholden to those same people and be able to quickly and effectively close tax loopholes as they are discovered.

There's a very simple solution to that problem. Tax Alice in Y rather than in $.

So it would fix false valuation shenanigans too? I see that as a win/win.

Maybe we need a debt jubilee then.

Many countries have figured out a wealth tax, so this isn't an impossible problem.

you can tax stock without taxing inventory.

Also the term "asset" exists and is used in accounting

Who says you need to tax the whole wealth if it in form of Ys?

We all know that 10 million Ys maybe not sold for $10 billion dollars but it gives you enough leverage to buy a social network and name it Y

Only in a system where the buyer sets the price.

> Alternatively, it is used to pay social benefits for the sole purpose of keeping the current political party in power

This sounds like a 2-party government problem, not a tax problem. Plenty of countries do just fine spending that money to provide healthcare, unemployment, etc to their citizenry. Only really seems to be the US that views this as a negative

I am amazed. What an incredible statement!

The USA is very corrupt, true. But getting rid of the "huge administration" and burning tax receipts is not going to solve that. How could it?

One of the roles of the state in a modern society should be to ensure no one is left behind to starve, wither and freeze amongst the incredible resources we (as a society) have accumulated.

That takes administration. That takes resources. That is what your taxes should be used for.

I agree that far too much is used to give aid to the powerful, but the solution to that should not be to condemn the weak.

Burning taxes and de-funding the administration is exactly that: condemning the weak.

> If you tax too much wealthy people, they will leave

Are we not tired yet of the various versions of the Reaganomics boogieman? When are we going to grow out of trickle down economics mentality?

> If you tax too much wealthy people, they will leave

You say this like it’s a bad thing.

You pay enough. Musk doesn't. Does he even pay any at all?

Activist judges?

The supreme court is majority activist judges. Why cant new judges undo the old activist judges wrongly decided law? Why are the other new judges suddenly activists?

must be pretty upsetting that sitting president Trump has tens of billions in 2 dark money shitcoins and owns a majority stake in crypto company World Liberty Financial. Just 0.001% of the total sum Hunter Biden was allegedly corrupt over (no evidence).

who could have seen this coming.. twice.

1 check would require 2 x marks and 1 envelope and 1 stamp (or other indicia) --- just paying minimum-wage folks for stuffing envelopes and making "X"s would probably result in this being equivalent to a job creation program, and it would probably save the USPS.

FPTP will just guarantee that nothing meaningful can be done. Too much compromise in decision making is bad.

Personally I think ideal set up is a system which grants quite a of power to a small handful of people, but makes it very easy for those people to be removed. This is typically the model that works best in business and other cooperative pursuits anyway.

Throwing more people in the room with different opinions will ensure significant decisions can almost never made. Any policy too far to the right or too far to left will be watered down. The result is that you'll be led by centrists who can't really change anything and anything they do change will be disliked by everyone.

Voting is meaningless if it's not for a program with people charged to implement it being on revokable mandat if they go out of the rails of the planned destination.

Instead general elections are theaters were all that is voted is which clown is going to have a blank check.

100% agree, and I think that's sort of what was intended with a lot of democratic government setups. What we fail to realize though (or maybe just remember) is that these systems will ALWAYS be under attack by those who want more power always looking for attack surfaces. (We seem to be under attack by almost all, if not all, current billionaires!)

For example in the US, the executive order is a massive problem. Citizens united as well. And for all democracies the natural appeal of strongman politics is a huge problem.

Every attempt at government overreach really needs to be questioned. I don't say rejected, just questioned. How will it be used by future powers? Is the tradeoff worth it? Can it be temporary? Do we even have a way to claw it back if it turns out to be detrimental? Is it too subtle and nuanced that the majority will miss seeing it? etc.

In enlightenment, you realise rich and powerful are synonyms.

That makes sense, but for most voters the left/right politics matters more than the economic identities you mentioned.

Most people don't care that much about the economy, they make up their minds based on other issues, then find a way to rationalize the state of the economy with that choice after the fact.

> white color workers need representation [...]

Don't worry - it's still there under the orange makeup. jk; I think you may have misspelled "collar"

Democrats always get their way because their way is to do nothing. They rarely roll back all the stuff the republicans do in the term before.

The Republicans this term have gotten plenty done, it's just nothing that helps average people. Their wins can't be widely celebrated and so they aren't, as much.

https://www.project2025.observer/

First, republicans blocked everything including formarly own proposals when Obama adopted it ... ever since Obama. It is other way round, the republican party is getting what it worked for, because democrats are weak opposition.

> Democrats will undo it all when the pendulum shifts.

It is impossible. Will they give reparations to blue cities? From what money?

Likewise institutions - it is easier to corrupt and destroy them then to build them anew.

Amd crutially, the right wing supreme court needs ro be enlarged or new constitution written for the bad precedents to be changed.

> token deportation effort,

The whole thing is bigger size then most militaries.

> no material change on mass legal immigration,

The whole classes of legal immigrants were suddenly ruled illegal and are violently mistreated.

> nothing happening on the voter ID front.

Republicans are trying to make voting for blie places harder.

There is one reality that's undeniable: that political donations by individuals are strictly monitored and can land you in jail if violated, but PAC money is untraceable and unlimited. That fact alone has led to stacking the deck in favor of lobbyists and monied interests at the expense of the electorate and national institutions.

This comment is not well-formatted and a bit "zomg", but an important mention:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Raffensperger_ph...

This is the infamous call where Trump, according to the recorded tapes, tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election results by demanding that Raffensperger "find 11,780 votes".

+1... Reducing government is part of power reduction, not the sum total. To reduce the size of government you need to reduce the size of things it manages. So, for instance, anti-trust would need a huge buf in enforcement to eliminate concentrations of power in business. I'd think strongly progressive inheritance tax would cover the rest.

Let's start with your private property.

Has this been tried successfully anywhere? Seems like mostly a dead end as long as we have resource scarcity.

This is unhelpful fatalism and actively dissuades reform. Not all politicians are "corrupt and bought". And further, there is an enormous difference before and after this Supreme Court decision.

It costs money to run for office. Before Citizens United, it was hard, limited, traceable donations, from individuals. No corporations, no soft money, no legal dark money. Now money has flooded in, with far less accountability.

I didn't really mean "regulations" but more a political (and civic) system in which a given individual's corruption etc. gets caught quickly and/or there are too many disincentives for them to to do much based on it.

Authoritarian governments are always more efficient than democracies. Their flaw is that citizens have no say in what goal will be efficiently pursued. When a technocratic authoritarian is in power, things improve overall (but there are still many "inefficient" people left behind or crushed). But when a cruel or incompetent authoritarian takes control, things hit lows that sound democracies wouldn't allow. Lows that take generations to recover from.

> China's technocratic rule…seems a lot better at creating a coherent strategy for economic growth and international soft power.

This requires that those in/with the power actually have altruistic, or at least not solely selfish, concerns. How rampant is government/bureaucratic corruption in China?

I elided the population starving part in order to not distract from the possibility of truly selfless governance strategy. It may very well be the case that millions starving is considered "acceptable losses" ("the needs of the billions outweigh the needs of the millions") in executing on that strategy. Which, make no mistake, would be truly tragic and should be undesirable. But that not everyone sees it that way is really what we're fighting against.

"I have a machine that feeds everyone, no one shall go hungry."

"But mah profits!"

"You only need profits so you yourself can eat, but that's now a solved problem"

"But mah profits. How will we know who's winning?"

Andrew Carnegie wrote and lived in an era without an income tax. In that era rich men were expected to be broadly philanthropic, to steward their wealth for the good of the common, to act with generosity and responsibility. Because the state did not provide a safety net, the wealthy faced immense social pressure to act as stewards of the public good.

In today's era those expectations do not exist. The public-facing, gilded age palaces, which by their public nature tend to enforce good behavior by forcing them to physically interact with the society they profited from, have been replaced by private, gated bunkers behind tall hedges blurred out on Google Maps. The wealthy wear jeans and hoodies to "blend in" or appear common, when they are very much not. A rail tycoon in a 10X beaver tophat might offer a beggar something on the street. A tech mogul in a hoody might not even get solicited.

Income tax - and broadly speaking many other changes to the social contract between upper and lower classes, like the bureaucratization of welfare - has not just allowed but incentivized the wealthy to shirk the responsibilities of old, and outsource their morality to a (corrupt, as many have pointed out) government. And it's not good. There is no honor in giving anymore.

I think you've got that quote backwards. In full it reads:

> Unequally or unjustly, perhaps, as these laws sometimes operate, and imperfect as they appear to the Idealist, they are, nevertheless, like the highest type of man, the best and most valuable of all that humanity has yet accomplished.

Or (to shorten it a bit): "These laws (of capitalism) [...] are nevertheless [..] the best and most valuable of all that humanity has yet accomplished". So this is only an unlimited belief in the virtues of capitalism, not in the virtues of rich people.

From the introduction:

> Carnegie believed in giving wealth away during one’s lifetime, and this essay includes one of his most famous quotes, “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.” Carnegie’s message continues to resonate with and inspire leaders and philanthropists around the world.

I really wonder what Carnegie would think about his successors dismantling USAID?

I think he's guilty, and even so I don't believe we actually have anything that proves him a pedophile any more than Bill Clinton, for example. Continuing to call him a pedo just looks like more partisan politics, which uninterested people (who still bother to vote) tune out.

Dems need to figure out how to run more interesting candidates. In 2024 they thought everyone wanted status quo, and it turns out that as housing prices go up and up, along with wages staying flat, people want to blow things up. And Trump seems to be that guy for them.

You're right, the other was Kamala Harris, who was far worse.

In my case it is a charitable take of someone who appreciates that painting his political opponents as evil incarnate is not going to bring about a political change. There is nuance in how people form their ideological priorities and how they end up making the final decision on who to vote for. Recognizing that is very important if we want to, you know, win any more elections. Trump would be approximately dead last for my vote if you gave me an arbitrarily long list of terrible candidates.

The dems consistently push everyone even a little bit impure from their coalition, which is why they have had difficulties winning slam-dunk elections. And instead of calling everyone who voted from Trump evil or stupid, they refuse to look in the mirror and see if there is anything they could change about their own pitch that would make it more appealing.

> From a pure performance standard across economy and quality of life, its pretty clear that Democratic policies always end up as net positive,

All one has to do is point at San Francisco as this us provably false. Dems have been in charge their for decades and it's arguably not working.

> conservative talking point

The problem with your accusation is that I am a long ways from conservative, and what I said is a pop culture reference straight from South Park.

> In 2024, it wasn't about politics

It wasn't? The dems took a candidate so weak in charisma [0] that she lost her first primary to another candidate also historically weak in charisma (Biden) who himself tried multiple times to run for president and only won in 2020 because he barely edged out the most historically unpopular president in memory. The cherry on top was that she didn't have to win a single primary to become the nominee, and her party had just spent months insisting that the guy at the helm, who promised to be a one term president, was losing his already unfortunately weak ability to speak clearly before realizing how badly he was going to lose to Trump and just gifting the nomination to his VP. What a shit show.

As a long time democrat I remain astounded at how horridly incompetent the leadership is and the lengths to which rank-and-file supporters will go to make excuses for them. Followed closely by the insistence of democratic voters to focus on narrow cultural priorities that resonate with a small number of people and don't move the needle at all for like 80% of the population. What on God's green earth happened to being, you know, progressive? What about labor, or healthcare, or affordable groceries, housing, etc?

[0] yes, charisma isn't the ideal requirement for a presidential candidate, but failure to recognize that this is basically how all presidents win election just means you are going to lose more often.

Plus, we still have people insisting that Kamala lost because she was a woman. No, she won because she sucks as a political candidate. Hillary had precisely the same issue. There are strong women who communicate well who would perform much better, but they have thus far decided to avoid the circus.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/non%20sequitur

I appreciate the sentiment, but what makes you think that the internet or technology at all can help with this? Judging by the state of the modern internet and WWW, technology seems to be making things worse, not better. The idealistic view of the 1990s that connecting the world would make us more compassionate, tolerant, and rational, hasn't panned out. I don't see a reason to still cling on to that idea.

Thomas Jefferson treated humans as objects.

In reality, losing the nsfw content was certain death, but losing the app would have just been a downsizing. Maybe not even a major one - platforms are sticky as hell. I think most people would happily use the browser.

Now if you go out of your way to make your browser experience dogshit, like Patreon... Then yeah, losing the app store is very bad.