| ▲ | roenxi an hour ago |
| There is a certain tautology to "tax the rich" - a country can't exactly tax the poor. The poor have no money. Taxes on poor people are more about the principles of fairness and to some extent transparency than because they have the financial resources to contribute meaningfully. It'd be interesting to do the same graph by real consumption. I bet it'd be much more equal - most of the wealth is tied up in systems that keep the country ticking over and are only providing paper benefits to the owner. Which is why I say "transparency" - once you track what happens in real terms, "taxing the rich" almost certainly becomes "everyone ends up with less". If you take real resources away from the person who owns the McDonald's ice cream machine in real terms I have a hard time seeing how it won't come out of the lifestyle of the dude buying icecream. The person getting the money wasn't consuming anything real. |
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| ▲ | bryanlarsen 44 minutes ago | parent | next [-] |
| The primary benefit of massive wealth is power. It's an intangible, but it's very real. It can't be dismissed as paper wealth. And it's not like taxes destroy wealth. Distributing from the person who owns the ice cream machine to the person buying ice cream puts the money in the hands of the person far more likely to spend it quickly. On ice cream, making the business case for owning ice cream machines better, not worse. |
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| ▲ | roenxi 35 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > The primary benefit of massive wealth is power. It's an intangible, but it's very real. It can't be dismissed as paper wealth. I mean, sure. The follow up thought is after that power has been taxed away then someone else is going to need to be taxed for the raw resources that are needed. If welfare checks start being paid out with intangible benefits it'll lead to loud complaints. That gets to the heart of the problem with taxing the people with truly enormous amounts of wealth, they mostly have power, which isn't much use to someone who needs food and shelter. The tax burden has fall somewhere in the logistics chain that produces the houses and the food (although maybe a long way upstream). > Distributing from the person who owns the ice cream machine to the person buying ice cream puts the money in the hands of the person far more likely to spend it quickly I'm not going to disagree with that, but I will point out that this is why they couldn't afford the ice cream machine in the first place. Consuming the seed corn is a road to eventually having no corn. There is an economic optimum amount of ice cream production and there isn't any reason to believe it isn't being hit under the current system. It isn't obvious if the need is for more or less ice cream machines. Moving ownership of the machine around doesn't obviously change the amount of ice cream produced; and its owner isn't consuming the machine. But a wealth tax on the ultra-wealthy is pulling all those levers on the assumption that making random changes in ownership has to help. It probably won't. | | |
| ▲ | bryanlarsen 26 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > I'm not going to disagree with that, but I will point out that this is why they couldn't afford the ice cream machine in the first place. Consuming the seed corn is a road to eventually having no corn. The modern capitalistic system has devised many fabulous ways of enabling people to buy ice cream machines and seed corn without being able to afford it individually. Equity and loans are the two most obvious, there are many more. That is the main reason that American capitalism has thrived. Because you don't have to be rich to buy ice cream machines. | | |
| ▲ | roenxi 19 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Absolutely. It's a very effective system for quickly concentrating all the owenership of ice cream machines in the hands of the people who are best at deciding when, where and how much ice cream is needed as measured by profits - even if they personally don't have much when they're starting out. And if there is a better measure than profit I'd like it to be proved up in a country I don't live in because those experiments usually result in ice cream shortages. The concentrated ownership results in graphs a lot like the one in the linked article. | | |
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| ▲ | zombot an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > a country can't exactly tax the poor. Reality would like a word with you... |
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| ▲ | mcphage 38 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > If you take real resources away from the person who owns the McDonald's ice cream machine in real terms I have a hard time seeing how it won't come out of the lifestyle of the dude buying icecream. What you're describing is called "Trickle Down Economics", and has led to 50 years of economic failure. |
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| ▲ | roenxi 30 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Assuming we're talking about the US, printing money and giving it to wealthy people has been a big contributor to the failure of the last few decades. The US has made a broad-scale effort to disable every form of market-based feedback that tried to replace the leadership class with more competent leaders. If they'd stopped with the upper class welfare then the 1% probably would have less money, but giving them the money then organising to tax it away again is a strategy that is both bizarre and unlikely to be effective. It's too complex and arbitrary. If we're talking globally, Asia ain't failing. They're big on producing lots of real stuff. Minted a lot of new billionaires. |
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| ▲ | alistairSH an hour ago | parent | prev [-] |
| a country can't exactly tax the poor. Tell me you've never met a modern Republican without telling me you've met a Republican. |
