They don’t want a faster bureaucracy, or more efficient government. The goal in cutting funding for public services is to decrease the quality of services so that they can then trick people into supporting private companies in being awarded the contracts to provide those services (cut costs in the short-term so that they can justify higher costs later).
The goal is to DESTROY government and REPLACE it with profit-driven private interests. Capitalists are the enemy.
Writing this as an opinion makes you seem like a conspiracy theorist.
You need actual quotes about Dark Enlightenment
I appreciate your response and that you also did the legwork to include the citable quote that I was negligent to omit.
Glad to help. You are sounding the alarm, but not in a way that people will listen.
Just like project25 these guys have already told everyone exactly what they are going to do. And it will happen quickly.
Taxing the rich built the strongest most wealthy nation in the world that landed a man on the moon.
Ever since then, the greatest thing they’ve done is manipulate number charts to convince everyone that they shouldn’t tax the rich.
Twelve men on the moon. We did it six times, out of seven attempts.
But then they’ve have to find something else to do with that money. In the old days, they just kept reinvesting it in the company’s reputation and their employees. They wanted that same company to pay out them and their family for a hundred years.
Is that really what we want to encourage?
I get what you’re saying but yes, I think that’s what we want. When a company pays its employees a good salary the employee will stay for a couple of years. When a company pays its employees a great salary ($50-80k+ more than the avg in that area) it encourages employees to stay and work for that same company. You’re getting paid well, you have healthcare, if the company has good benefits(stock, pensions, long term investments), why leave?
Employees will be happier, product quality will increase, and the company is supplying the community in that area with more money and local taxes. We saw that in the 40’s, 50’s and then yea kinda down hill from there.
Yes
I wrote this on a similar post a day or two ago, so I’ll repost it here:
There were very few people this applied to.
The real reason is the corporate tax rate.
It was 52%. Today it’s 21%., and it’s effectively close to zero for many corporations with the tax loopholes used to avoid taxation. Shell corporations, deferring taxes, what have you.
So the US has lost more than 50% of the corporate taxes by % since the ‘50s.
E: the decline in tax % is pretty closely followed by the dramatic rise in CEO compensation. The wealth being funneled to the top by cutting corporate tax got us the billionaire oligarchs we’re dealing with today.
Your comment is a bit misleading. Part of the point of why we need to raise the top marginal tax rate to 100% above $250,000 is because the accumulation of wealth is itself a threat to liberty and democracy. The New Deal was designed to save capitalism—the grand irony being that capitalists are so greedy they can’t even live with less in order to simply exist.
So yes, we need to raise all sorts of tax rates to previous levels and even higher when possible, no question. We just need to understand that these are guardrails on the way to socialism in order to have real freedom and democracy after capitalism is fully abolished.
I said that the cutting of corporate taxes was part of the rise in CEO compensation that led to us having oligarchs.
That’s accumulation of wealth. There is nothing misleading about what I said. Both can exist at the same time, but cutting the corporate taxes is by far the greater loss to federal tax vs the relatively few billionaires.
The top-tier tax bracket motivated businesses to increase their spending. When the IRS is going to take 91% of any additional profits you are going to make, it is better for you to spend that money on tax-deductible “business expenses” than to keep those excess profits.
Those “business expenses” are someone else’s paycheck, so even if they were bullshit, they were a benefit to society.
Now, they just take those profits, invest them, and expect the economy to return more money to them than they put in. They converted that money from someone’s paycheck into a debt owed back to them.
To answer your question, it’s not.
The Republicans, as proxies for the 1% and Evangelicals, have been trying to break the Federal government at least since Reagan, if not longer.
They’ve been trying to break the federal government since before the nation was founded. These are the descendents of the same people that wanted to count “non-humans” like slaves towards their population but without giving those slaves the same rights as them.
You’re not wrong, but post WWII Republicans were more than willing to play along so long as big business got theirs.
IMO, it was when the CRA, the EPA and other “anti-business” initiatives came into existence that “small government” because a buzz word for them.
They made a completely wrong turn when they teamed up with Evangelicals in the 80’s and let them into positions of power in the party in the 90’s culminating in the bat-shit-crazies we have now.
I mean technically before the party swap it was democrats but the pre swap Dems where the post swap republicans
It’s just southern racists. It’s all just southern racists.
And how did they accumulate the wealth to be able to pull this off?
Ignoring laws long enough to get them changed in their favor.
Shitty people devite the vast majority of their time working on tearing things down. Non-shitty people want to spend time doing positive things instead of fighting the people tearing things down. Add to that how much easier it is to tear down than build up and shitty people have a huge advantage.
Imagine life was a game. You lived for 2025 years. You worked 260 days / year. You made the median US salary.
You would need to relive that process 3,145 times to match an Oligarch.
That amount of wealth is unethical while humanity suffers. No one can really fathom “1b dollars.”
Who has 105 days off in a year‽
EDIT I forgot weekends, man it’s time to sleep.
ok so eat the rich but you can’t just put numbers from your personal receipts into a chart describing 2,000 years and assume it will make sense.
Whats there not to understand here? If you make $400,000 per day since the year 1 up until modern day, you still would only have 87% of Bezos’ modern net worth.
what is $400,000 in year one of this? you have that, you own the entire Levant?
it’s actually impossible to argue against you for not “weighting for inflation” because money does kind of make sense back then, and now, because it’s more efficient than shuttling goats around as currency, or investing in shitcoins.
$400k per WORKING DAY. If you did that for 2025 YEARS, you’d still be short.
People don’t get how stupid this is in human terms. Sure, just rewards for effort, but this is insane. It makes no sense on a human scale. And these people have us so worried about everything that we can’t step back and comprehend.
Now in touch form: https://eattherichtextformat.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
Look up for assholes; they’re above us and they keep shitting.
I use Christtimes as a rallying call for people who call themselves Christian. Is this what Christ would want? Luke 18:25, Matthew 19:21, John 13:34-35.
I’m sick of this country talking about Christ while this shit is happening. This isn’t Christian. It isn’t moral. I don’t pretend to know the answer: the problem is obvious if you think about it in human terms.
✌️ & 💜
unfortunately I can’t respond on any bible quotes. i’m just saying, $400k is not a meaningful concept 2000k years ago. That was Antony and Cleopatra type ultra trash drama. Fantastic costumes, there’s always some child teetering inside the monstrous costume head.
Run the numbers for yourself. I tried to make it easy. :/
Do you think it’s fair a median US household should work 3125 * 2025 = 6,328,125 years of work to catch up to Jeff? I don’t.
dear crypto bro or m’lady. fuck jeff. I am here from the future and I have immense wealth from assaulting Virtua Arcade Fighter 2 machines.
Do I have a moral obligation to use my time machine to invest in AI from the past?
Ah the basilisk.
I like to imagine it’s evolved past the human desire for revenge.
I’d like to hope I’m beyond crypto. Was a strange period in my life.
I hope you got wings on your chariot, or at least a really bulletproof legal document
Run the numbers for yourself. I tried to make it easy. :/
Do you think it’s fair a median US household should work 3125 * 2025 = 6,328,125 years of work to catch up to Jeff? I don’t.
i didn’t mean to argue about the value of work. it doesn’t mean anything in coins to me
Seems absurd to me compare the value of shekels 2,000 years ago to modern shekels, even before attempting to translate an ancient culture to ours today
IRS expects DOGE cost the country half a trillion dollars so far. Bankruptcy is the point.
The funny thing is the path to MAGA is taxing the rich, but the dummies are doing the opposite.
“Make America Great Again” was also Reagan’s campaign slogan:
It’s always been the calling card for letting the rich get richer and accumulate more power.
it’s called the MAGA approach to epistemology [ed. need a better more made-up word] or something and we blame it all on Bill Clinton.
“Let’s” – as if.
BuTt they CreAte JerBs!
Narrator: They did not, in fact, create jobs.
It would already help if they would actually pay those 37%. But with the tax avoidance they can afford to get, they usually pay nothing at all.
Tax cheats abound among the rich, how else do you think they afford their yacht parties. Yachts are expensive!
What would be REALLY new is if people understood how little the top income tax rates matter because almost nobody pays them. Income tax rates only apply to salaries. Wealthy people get almost all their income from capital gains - i.e. buying and selling stocks and other investment items. Capital gains tax has always been much lower than income tax, currently I think 10-15% depending on how long the item is held before being sold. Raising top income tax rates back above 90% would not “tax the rich” or provide enough tax money to take any burden off the rest of us. It’s a silly PR slogan.
To ACTUALLY tax the rich we need to increase capital gains taxes. Or create new wealth taxes. Or even a ceiling on individual wealth. That last one would have the greatest effect, by limiting how much money any one person has available to influence politics - which really seems like the root of the whole problem. Secondly, abolish Citizens United, the congressional act that made corporations “people”, to stop corporate wealth from buying politicians.
The difficulty is how to get anything like this past the people whose power it would eliminate. A good first step tho would be whenever you feel like you understand something because of some meme you saw, remind yourself that you don’t, and then stop scrolling and do some real reading on the subject.
There is truth here.
I think rich people will have assets, like stock, and they’ll get a loan out with the stock as collateral. They pay like 2% on the loan, but they get like a million dollars cash. If that was treated like income, they’d pay a lot more taxes.
Not sure the best way to address this, but it should be addressed.
Simple really
When you use unrealized gains as collateral for a loan, those gains have now become realized, and they are taxed.
Oh, did your stock valuations go up? Did you use that stock to take out a personal loan? You’ve realized those gains. Apply a progressive tax until those loans look more like minimum wage. Make it not worth it to invent value out of fractional reserves in order to bankroll oligarchy.
The fact that this is apparently not done now is the single biggest loophole in the whole system. This is what allows the “unlimited money glitch”.
Making it illegal to consider investments a form of collateral for a loan would be the first step. Prove you can repay based on your annual income or that there’s actual physical assets that can be seized or fuck off.
Make loans above a certain amount count as income. Exempt mortgages below a million dollars. The rich would just have to take out larger loans to offset the taxes. Force taxes to be paid at time of loan receipt. Like payroll taxes. Like everyone else they can get a tax refund if they overpay.
It’s 1000% possible, they just don’t want to do it.
Oh, not to worry. I’m not satisfied with taking a couple percent of them anymore. I have become way too radicalized by these leeches turning everything to shit. I won’t be sated without eating the rich at this point. They could willingly give up their wealth and I’d still call for blood for the harm they have caused.
So true. The ultra wealthy don’t “earn” anything on paper, so they literally don’t collect a paycheck like you or I do…
Quick question:
how much money would be worth if every person on earth ceased to exist?
Quick answer:
That would be a stupid idea with no value.
I feel like short is already your tax rate. Long being like 13%.
I’d propose the top tax rates on income. Then tax short cg at that rate, 2-3% less for long (or some other scale designed to keep money stable in the market.)
But yes, convince everyone that needs done and the rich to ever let it get close to passing.
Access to the domestic American market is what made most of these guys billionaires in the first place.
But the laws don’t require them to return the favor.
A sensible solution would be to find a way to make the loopholes more expensive than returning some of those spoils in the form of some kind of tax.
Ideally that tax would create a positive feedback loop such as free higher education or other benefits to humanity that would continue to make the USA a better place to live and survive.
If the tax is too high or is used in a way that seems frivolous to the rich they will fight it so hard that it could never succeed.
What’s absolutely crazy to me, the 50’s were some of the best times economically in this country, every time we tax the rich less the country goes further to shit. More so when these non taxed assholes spend their non taxed wealth on corrupting politicians to tax them even less.
The rich have simply become too powerful and they will never just give up that power willingly.
Less popular opinion. If we drive taxes up on the rich they’ll just get more creative with tax avoidance or move to Panama.
The ultra wealthy don’t pay income taxes and they didn’t in 1950 either. They’re mostly paying capital gains which was lower back then then it is now.
What we really need to do is remove all the massive loopholes in the current tax code and maybe do something like having progressive tax brackets on capital gains (some people are legitimately just using capital gains as retirement income).
Also, fund the IRS more. They’re not the evil tax man. They are finding the people who aren’t paying their legal fair share.
What’s so bad about the ultra wealthy moving out?
Genuine question.
Because even if they pay a lot less percentagewise, they still pay a lot. Having like 10% of something is better than having nothing.
We should still track down and close loopholes, and increase taxes on capital gains tho.
They’re paying $0, in fact they are managing to get refunds on $0 paid.
The top of the top are paying $0. But That’s like the 0.1% or the 0.01% and yes wed probably be best if they left. The top 10% are not paying a fair percentage but they are paying a lot in total dollars. Blue states are beginning to see a lot of wealthy leave for no income tax states. They still pay taxes in those places in the form of property and sales tax. Now the red state gets their tax dollars.
Taxing should be a tool, but not our only tool to fight income inequality.
Money has no value by itself.
If all humans died today (thanos snap with 100%), the paper-money would still exist, but would you (your ghost, I mean) say that a 100 dollars still holds value in an earth devoid of humans?
I will argue for no. Without humans, money has no value.
Money is the value being priced on labor-hours that was stolen by someone.
When an ultra rich move their assets outside, they are moving the stolen hours.
But even if he didn’t move those stolen hours outside, they would still be stolen hours.
Keeping the ultra-rich in our country is enabling the thief that keeps stealing us.
The true value is made by those who work the fields, academy, construction and all other sectors that keep society working.
The people living on a country and the sites/places/plot of lands can’t be moved overseas.
The rich must choose between getting his money out of high taxes and keeping his access to a country’s internal market if he decides to remove all of his investing (including machinery/real state investment) from a given country.
A country should tax them wherever they live if they have that country’s citizenship. Pretty sure they do that in the US. If they don’t want to pay they can give up the citizenship.
They do that in the US. It hurts a lot of people leaving the US. They are the only relevant country in the world that does this.
Very bad. For example. Someone gets his income from Australia. He lives in Indonesia. Then the indonesian government will tax on the person’s worldwide income. The Australian government will tax the Australian income. The American government will tax all of the income.
Then there’s double taxation treaties to reduce the damage.
It’s nasty. USA in this instance has no right to claim that income. The person does not live in USA. The income does not come from USA.
Just an abuse of power
sarcasm: that’s why all countries in europe who do tax their rich have zero billionairs, they all fled to the us where you can’t even study abroad without being detained and tortured
European countries have scaled back taxes on the rich because they started fleeing. That’s exactly what I’m referencing. NPR article
The same way cutting the budget of poorly performing schools makes students more successful.
Hack and slash your children’s education away, they say
At higher marginal rates we see larger amounts of avoidance, evasion, and fraud. In 1983 the US cut their top tax rate and took in more tax revenue than they had under the previous higher rates.
This worked once. There is no reason to believe that further cuts would produce similar results. There are other things we should be doing to pursue greater income equality such as funding the IRS fully.
Instead of cutting it they could have just enforced it.
Plus the odds are fairly high that a significant number of wealthy people complied after the cuts as a tradeoff of good will from the masses for future cuts. If it hadn’t worked out, they could have just gone back to cheating the system harder than they currently do.
Nah, it’s easier and less risky to not have to park ypur money in theoretically less stable nations with looser banking rules than to have it parked here. We might be too low but there’s no math supporting going back to 70+%.
how much money would be worth if every person on earth ceased to exist?
What would happen with the economy in this scenario?
Do you think you are introducing a novel concept by pointing out that money is a replacement for bartered goods? We knew that when we invented currency thousands of years ago.
I’m not trying to introduce a novel concept.
I’m trying to bring up to the forefront the old concept surplus value from Karl Marx.
money isn’t just a replacement for battered goods, but also a way to precify the value of work.
Work is the real value that runs through the world.
Now, when we talk about taxing the rich, we are talking about the State getting back the value of our work (money) that the rich stole from us by underpaying our jobs.
And for those who says “The rich will move their riches to a country that pays less taxes”, I must remind you again that these riches can only be generated through work.
Tax the rich means taxing their companies and stores as well
It means not letting them have half a trillion of a surplus value that they stole from all of us (because one way or another, we are “working” for them even if by something as stupid as writing a comment on a social media).
And if, supposedly, the company desires to shutdown their factories here, the State must simply buy it and reopen the factories (maybe under another company that, but still with the state as the main “shareholder”).
What makes the factories produce goods is not a rich man with billions of dollars.
What make the goods exist is the working from man and woman in these factories.
And doing so, the company that left will also leave the internal market share where they were profiting over us, but yet, the market share will still exist and be filled by those from within the state-company.
Yeah the Labor theory of value is highly flawed. It doesn’t explain speculative gains in value that require zero labor to exist for example.
I feel like if we had spent the money lost to tax cuts on enforcing existing laws, like really throw the book at tax cheats, like put them in orange jumpsuits and make them rot in a cell, we’d have had better outcomes.
The ultra rich should be afraid.
Yes
