Each year raise or lower each citizen’s tax rate the same amount from some base tax rate schedule to cover the prior year’s government spending.
Except they won’t. Because they can’t find the same combination of quality of life and worship of the wealthy anywhere else. Taxes are beside the point.
And if they did, we’d be better off anyway given how destructive they are. A corporation or the government can perform the function of providing capital just fine without them, and even an amoral corporation is better than a malignant, bigoted and power-mad billionaire.
So you’re saying the government should use tax revenue to fund promising projects that could have high social benefit? Kind of like how we developed atomic power, the internet, and the space program?
And that maybe other projects could be collectively funded by like-minded individuals with common goals, maintaining common ownership and paying their fair share of taxes from their earnings?
So many of these capitalist “gotchas” are only “gotchas” if you think there is only pure, unfettered capitalism or guerrilla warfare.
In Florida the lowest 20% pay 13.2% of their to the state goverment. The top 1% in Florida pay 2.7% of their income in taxes. So the poor have a higher tax rate than the rich, paid to Florida, by a factor of 5. Cite.
This is just a data point. So you should ignore it. If fact it’s not worth building a thread upon. It’s just a data point.
Or maybe you could build a really misleading thread about it, along with a disclaimer. A good thread would look at the total tax burden faced by each income group. At least this post totals all taxes going to the state of Florida, and doesn’t just cherry pick one or two of the taxes, like the Wall Street Journal repeatedly does.
In fact, the Federal tax system is broadly progressive across income groups for all Federal taxes, according to the best analysis of the topic, at least as of 2023. I’d expect tax law to change in 2025 as it does when power shifts between political parties. State taxes tend to be more regressive (Florida is the worst in the country). Corporate taxes are pitted with loopholes, and it’s hard to estimate what the effects are on income groups.
Would the US government have the power to impose wealth taxes, not related to income, in light of the constitutional provisions?
Wouldn’t a tax on wealth be a direct tax, but not on income, and therefore need to be apportioned amongst the states?
See also:
Capitalism does not have to be rapacious mindless brutality. We know this is true because it has been true, repeatedly, in American history.
(Oh, no, here comes another of his history lessons.)
The rise of rapacious capitalism in what got called The Gilded Era was mostly legal, mostly because it was so unprecedented that nobody had ever thought to write rules against, partly because the rich bought off entire legislatures and courts.
A generation later, the trusts had been busted and the worst excesses trimmed. Corporations still flourished, the rich kept their huge fortunes, bankers got fat. Farmers went into a depression in around 1920 and stayed there, but, hey they could just move to a city and take a factory job, right?
Life was so good that people got greedy. Everybody wanted a slice. A bubble formed. Then broke. Turned out the fat bankers had been engaging in record amounts of fraud and shady dealing. Some of them went to jail. Millions starved. No factory jobs this time.
So more regulations were written and even the corporate heads remembered how awful things had gotten. A combination of luck, distance, and collective effort (socialism!) made America the wealthiest nation history had ever seen in the 1950s. Corporations prospered, workers shared in the bounty, banking and the stock market stagnated, the super-rich got that way by striking oil.
The boomers didn’t wreck this Gilded Age. A man born in 1912 did. The day the hippie era died.
The businessmen believe that they are defending free enterprise when they declaim that business is not concerned “merely” with profit but also with promoting desirable “social” ends; that business has a “social conscience” and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers. In fact they are—or would be if they or any one else took them seriously— preaching pure and unadulterated socialism. Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.
What if a capitalist could get away with that? Starve workers, bust unions, pollute the environment, stiff cities or play them off one another, ignore safety, and keep all that money for yourself, and then get applauded for making stockholders richer? The stampede started. Screw the future. All that mattered was the stock price and the stock price was whatever the earnings were during the current quarter. CEOs stopped looking at income as a measure of success and asked for millions in cheap stock options that could be multiplied infinitely.
That being a responsible company was socialism is a flat-out lie. Then and now. The world would still be awash in money if we went back to the capitalism of the 1950s. In fact, I would argue that more money would be generated if the lower 90% were treated better instead of exploited. That’s because I’m an actual capitalist, not whatever the greedy rich are.
A thing that even Henry Fucking Ford, basically, understood.
It’s a little known fact that Fucking was in fact Henry Ford’s middle name. His mother came from a long Fucking line.
Progressive, surely, but broadly progressive? Considering Von Neumann- Morgenstern utility, you’d think the top 0.1% would pay a higher percentage than the top 1% and the delta between the top quintile and the top1% would be higher.
To clarify by “Broadly”, I meant, “Not limiting your analysis to one tax, but rather considering all taxes taken together.” By “Progressive”, I meant that the tax rate increases as income increases, the technical definition.
@Exapno_Mapcase :
As for Milton Friedman, I would tend to pin blame for our troubles on the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, a daily reinforcement of the business manager’s worst preconceptions and instincts with little care about getting their story right. They seek to pander rather than inform and their shoddy attitudes have unfortunately influenced the news side in recent decades. I agree though that the myth of shareholder value has been pernicious and was left unchallenged for too long.
Lots of places worship the wealthy and have a high quality of life- Japan for example.
But they mostly have higher taxes than the USA.
Let’s not get into wealth taxes, which are a pretty bad idea. We can do it all by just fixing the tax code- back the way it used to be. Reagan started taxes on Social Security and lowered the marginal tax rate from 93% to 28%. Reagan fucked us up.
Executive compensation rules, governance practices, and federal securities laws, have all been “reformed” to give shareholders more influence over boards and to make managers more attentive to share price. The results are disappointing at best. Shareholders are suffering their worst investment returns since the Great Depression…
When she wrote that article, the S&P 500 was at about 1541. Today it’s at about 6000. In fact, the bottom was just after the literally criminal idiocy of 2008. The index rose steady for the next five years, and more steeply since. The compound annual growth rate since 1992 has been 10.57%. That has been 11.2% over the last decade. Seems to me that’s far better than at any time since the Depression. How much better can you get?
I’ll take a closer read of the article, because I want to agree with it, but that beginning is a huge stumbling block.
This post appears to be attacking the posters(s), not the post. If you don’t like the responses to your OP, you can leave the thread or you can contest them. But this kind of lashing out isn’t appropriate in MPSIMS.
No… I really do want more money to lower the national debt and more money for government programs. It’s not about “hating” rich people. But then, I’m not actually screaming, more speaking with a firm, very audible voice. not quite a yell.
Sort of the flip side of whining about “welfare queens” - I don’t think people on the public dole should live in luxury but I DO think they should be able to access decent housing, decent food, get whatever forms of assistance they need to either be more productive citizens or, in the case of the permanently dysfunctional, get humane care, and any children involved should be able to access a good education. As opposed to people who have the illusion that the poor live in idle luxury.
There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning. - Warren Buffett
It would kill professional athletes, and superstar entertainers, doctors, CEOs, and lawyers, but it still wouldn’t affect the ultra-rich billionaires (Musk, Bezos, etc.) because, while these individuals have enormous wealth, they generally don’t have much taxable income.
It’s almost as if the rich don’t actually pay their fair share.
I guess it depends on what you mean by the “rich” and “fair share”. Taxes are based on income not wealth. Certainly the ultra-rich are not paying an amount of taxes as a percentage of their wealth anywhere close to what a dental assistant making $70k/year is paying.
You keep talking about “taxable income” as if the definition of what is taxable was sent down from heaven by god himself and is utterly unchangeable…
The whole and entire point of tax reform is to cause the actual economic results of wealth to be taxed. If you’re richer this year than last because you worked hard and got paid, that should be taxed. If some retired internet blowhard living on savings and investments (i.e. me) is richer this year than last because his investments performed well, that too should be taxed.
That alone would stop most of the “obscene” levels of both functional income inequality and asset inequality.
I think part of the argument is that the rich are rich enough to use loopholes and advantages. For example, the rich can buy a how and deduct their mortgage payment. Renters can’t and I can’t since our mortgage is cheap enough that we just fall under the cutoff for taking the standard deduction. IF we got rid of all of that I think people would be happier even if overall the rich paid less.