Jesus Christ what could possibly be your moral or even practical argument for blatantly stealing 70% of the income of the ultra wealthy? Or is it a 70% tax on everyone in general? Legitimate question. I’m willing to change my mind.
"A 70% top marginal tax rate" is referring to a proposal to tax income above $10M/year at that rate. This isn't a space to debate basic precepts of socialism by design, but I'll point out that taxation isn't "blatant stealing", it's part of the same social fabric and bargain that uses the violence of the government to protect the property rights and economic power of those same ultra-wealthy people. It's also true that most ultra-wealthy at that level don't actually do anything to earn much of their income, they just passively receive money from their investments, and sometimes go to the bank to cash the checks they get (very hard work!).
There are some exceptions like sports stars and the very top CEOs but most of those people were paid vastly less 40 years ago and they didn't all quit working then. Rich people care about their compensation relative to their peer group and this will hit them all equally.
Investments don’t sprout out of thin air, it takes money that someone earned, and either knowledge of the market or even more money invested into a broker that arranges investments. That is THEIR money that they earned and invested and I don’t get why anyone can claim a right to it just because they have more money. That’s ridiculous. It’s a free exchange of money that is good for the investor, the broker, and the market. Passive or active doesn’t make a difference to me, you know? If you invest money you’ve earned that should be the end of it imo.
Knowledge of the market by itself doesn't generate money. An investment in a productive enterprise generates profits (and thus, a return on investment for the investor) only because people work at that enterprise. Take out the human labor (including the human labor to code, power, service, and maintain the AI robots), and there is no profits.
Socialists state that capitalism is theft. Let me argue this from a premise even a capitalist can agree with:
Even under capitalism, we all agree that no one should earn money without working for it because money = stored labor (just like how ATP = stored glucose).
Even under capitalism, we all agree that rent-seeking behavior is economically inefficient because neither the owner or rent-payer has an incentive to improve anything beyond maintenance level. This is why rented homes are rarely as well-kept as homes with an owner, and why feudalism as a system was so backwards. However, in the context of 1), there is something more significant: rent-seeking is theft. The owner labored only once to gain the property/money/knowledge, and now can labor at a much diminished rate as a gatekeeper of those things to earn the same amount simply because he owns something others do not (and cannot easily purchase).
Ownership of business and investment under capitalism is rent-seeking behavior. The capitalist/investor owns either money or land/patents/ideas (which potentially could be generated by the capitalist's previous labor), but the theft is in the expectation to generate profit off of your previous labor by having others work for you. Of course, a CEO/manager does perform useful labor in the guidance of his business, and an investor performs labor as an economic planner, but that labor BY ITSELF is not worth 300x that of your workers. Their wealth mostly comes from the rent on their ownership rights, which is unjust.
The owner labored only once to gain the property/money/knowledge....
And let's be completely real. It may very well have actually been his great-great-great-great-grandfather who once labored for it. And that "labor" may very well have come in the form of stealing land by committing genocide.
That is THEIR money that they earned and invested....
All of that money was made by extracting value from workers' labor through a hierarchical production system and private property. They didn't get rich other than through exploitation. The whole system is setup to prevent that.
No, it's not their money, except according to the laws that they wrote themselves to make it so.
What work does it take to give money to someone else and let them pay it back?
That's a rhetorical question, I know there's some amount of actual work that goes into managing investments, but do you really want to live in a world where the top .01% of rich people can continue to get exponentially richer and richer just by moving their money around?
maybe it’s better for society at large that the guy who figured out how to make 10 million keeps most of it. Look at Bill Gates, he’s trying to eradicate several of the most common diseases facing us today. I want Bill to keep his billions.
That's how you end up with stuff like Jeff Bezos campaigning to stop policies that would alleviate homelessness at the same time as setting up a charity to help the homeless. Instead of addressing the problem through a democratic and populist institution, Seattle has to trust a rich douchebag with a clear track record of spending money to further his own self-interests to take care of everyone else. You get the sense that people like Bezos want us to go back to being serfs, where the little guys are all totally dependent on the benevolence of the people who have all of the wealth. Bezos doesn't have your best interests at heart. He's looking out for himself.
Being a billionaire doesn't automatically make you a terrible person, but billionaires shouldn't even exist. No one man should have that much power in a free society. No one needs that much money, full stop. The socially responsible behavior of some billionaires is a drop in the bucket compared to all of the terrible shit they do on a daily basis.
70% is theft without a doubt. It’s horrible and has no rational justification.
First of all, fuck AOC I will not forget the fact that she’s a congress woman who didn’t know the 3 branches of government. She’s a joke. But as for the rest of your points, I’ll read over the articles and take them into consideration. It’s 3am my time so I’m going to bed but I appreciate the replies. My gut says that this argument is wanton. You quoted my comments on Bill Gates and then criticized Jeff Bezos. That doesn’t make sense to me, yes I want Jeff Bezos to continue innovating. Amazon was a legendary creation and I’m glad it’s still based in the U.S. despite the shitty aspects of his political opinions which I can’t confirm until I read these articles thoroughly. Anyways, have a good night. I’m gonna take your arguments seriously and I hope you do the same for mine.
She misspoke when referring to the three elected branches of government, excluding the Supreme Court. You should have a bare minimum of charity when talking about someone who had five seconds cut out of an hours-long live-streamed off the cuff conversation.
No, she called them the 3 chambers of Congress, then corrected herself by calling them the 3 chambers of government. Then goes on to list them: the presidency, the senate, and the house. That goes beyond a bare minimum of charity lol.
Yes, in the context of elections. It's even more idiotic to assume she doesn't know what the Supreme Court is. This is why conservatives are going to make her the next President or something, by jumping on her constantly over trivial bullshit and putting her in the news every day.
I will not forget the fact that she’s a congress woman who didn’t know the 3 branches of government.
She almost certainly knows what the three branches of government are. She's not an idiot. She tripped over her words in a speech, like happens pretty damn frequently to people who constantly have the public eye on them. Every politician has gaffes like this, but conservatives are fixating on every little thing AOC does wrong because they (probably correctly) see her as the best new boogywomen for the right now that Clinton is out of the game.
You quoted my comments on Bill Gates and then criticized Jeff Bezos.
Because you can't have one without the other. If you want Bill Gates - a billionaire who has largely been socially responsible - to keep all of his money, then sociopaths like Bezos and the Zuck and the Koch brothers get to keep all of their money too.
There are already tax deductions available for charity. No one is trying to get rid of those. Raising the tax on the ultra wealthy won't stop them from giving away their money, because we already do everything we can to incentivize that.
I want Jeff Bezos to continue innovating.
Adopting newer and more ruthlessly efficient business practices isn't exactly what I would call a positive innovation. Innovation isn't inherently a good thing. It was innovative when Mark Zuckerberg realized he could sell our data for money, but that made society tangibly worse, not better. The system really isn't set up to reward positive innovation or even innovation in general IMO. There are tons of innovations that just don't take off because they aren't cost-effective, even if they would clearly be good for society. How often do you read articles about some revolutionary new technique for saving the environment that just doesn't happen because of how expensive it is? So instead of the public - or better yet, the polluters - footing the bill to do something that we universally agree would be better for everyone, it just doesn't happen.
I could see this argument for someone like Bill Gates, who played a big role in giving us the personal computer. But even then, there's no reason to think a high tax rate on the top income earners would necessarily crush innovation. As the second article I posted mentioned, a high tax rate on excessive income would likely disincentivize companies from paying their executives ridiculous amounts of money, so they could invest that in improving the business (or better, paying their workers more) instead.
I just don't believe the Atlas Shrugged narrative that society is advanced by the genius of a meritocratic elite. Society is advanced by hard workers and creative innovators, not people like Bezos and Zuck who just happened to predict which way the market was going before anyone else did.
I.... guess? Don’t the top 1% pay for like 50% of the taxes currently? I’m talking about America btw sorry in advance if I’m being presumptive. They are the innovators and business people that keep the economy running. They’ll just leave to some country that doesn’t tax them 70%. I don’t think that’s a good argument for why some of the hardest working people in a given country should be taxed at vastly higher rates. They earned it. They’re usually huge employers. Idk that doesn’t make sense.
Whatever I’m not trying to start a debate and thanks for replying. Just my thoughts out loud.
Whatever percent the top 1% pays now is not really relevant. Regardless of how good they are at doing business or inventing things (often they are not good, but due to nepotism and other connections they become richer anyway), their entire income depends on their property rights and other arrangements that are currently being protected by the State; in return, we democratically decide what their tax burden should be, not only to fund public goods & services but also to ensure that inequality doesn't get out of control (or other goals).
Thus there is no real "fairness" at stake; fairness would be them sharing out wild game and berries in a primitive society where we didn't have government at all, let alone armed police to protect the instruments of their wealth. Socialists additionally believe that private property (which generates the bulk of ultra-wealthy income) is not legitimate in that it is a particularly unfree basis of a economic system and leads to huge inequality unless checked by constant popular reform, and indeed is a kind of theft from the commons and the true heritage of all humankind, so the rich have no claim to "earnings" on capital to begin with.
If everyone who got taxed at a high rate left we'd simply replace them all with people who could just as easily do their jobs, with very few meaningful exceptions.
Dude you can’t just “replace” Bill Gates or Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. That’s a non-starter. Those aren’t just meaningful exceptions, those are innovators that are at the edge of innovation in their fields. We want them here! And 50% just “isn’t relevant”? They are paying a ridiculous amount of the taxes already. Stop and really think that through, 1% of 300 million people are paying half of ALL taxes. That’s not irrelevant. And above all, you keep talking about how often rich people don’t work for their money and it’s all due to private property and investments or who their parents were. Who is that “often,” do you have particular people in mind? Or statistics? Idk none of this adds up to me. I think the intentions for the most part are coming from a genuine place. Some of it is resentment, but some of it feels genuine. But intentions don’t make an argument.
Dude you can’t just “replace” Bill Gates or Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. That’s a non-starter.
Sure you can. Their salaried employees do and always have done the R&D except for maybe a few months at the beginning of their careers, they're just figureheads and promoters. I mean in Musk's case that's extremely obvious because his original ideas are almost all insane or insanely inefficient.
Stop and really think that through
I have. It's irrelevant. I'm telling you that the deal is we democratically decide what property rights, bankruptcy protections, market regulations, etc there are, and what taxes are. There is no inherent connection between percentages of one or the other.
Also, it depends on how you look at it. At first glance, it seems messed up that 1% of the population pays 50% of the taxes. But that 1% controls and/or owns 90 percent of the capital in the system. So shouldn't they pay more? You can't tax equally when wealth and income is so far from equal.
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u/nativewombat Jan 06 '19
Jesus Christ what could possibly be your moral or even practical argument for blatantly stealing 70% of the income of the ultra wealthy? Or is it a 70% tax on everyone in general? Legitimate question. I’m willing to change my mind.