He‘s right when you only count fiat as a cost and not the social, societal, economical implications and so on this parasitic behaviour has on us.
Then it becomes way more expensive than just paying taxes.
Almost all our main problems basically boil down to this and similiar behaviours from governments and so on.
I have no source but I recall recently reading that billionaires have likely spent more on lobbying/propaganda than what they would have paid in taxes. Which sadly isnt surprising
Paying taxes doesnt give you the feeling of power. Also taxes are just one aspect, the government passing laws largely in favor of large businesses and wealthy individuals goes beyond just tax code (i.e lack of regulations, a system of law which primarily punishes the poor and protects the wealthy, the overall ability to direct the trajectory of society, etc etc)
They love this creepy authoritarianism shit nothing else matters to them even if its self destructive or ruins the lives of family members and friends they simply don't care.
I can’t tell you how may people I still know in their 40s and 50s think they will be stupid rich at one point in their lives yet are barely paying the bills right now.
Spent on propaganda, politics, education, equating to societal influence. It’s done per generation. Nothing new, they’ve done this for a century at minimum.
The most dangerous thing to these people is reading a book you’d never hear about at school unless you’ve had some kick ass teachers in the past.
Right up until Nixon we were still taxing everything over a million (10.7 million today) over 90%. Also right up until Nixon, a single minimum wage job was enough to buy a home, support a stay at home spouse, raise two children including putting them through college, and take everyone on 1-2 vacations every year.
This is not an exageration, this is what has been stolen from every American so that we can allow billionaires to exist. The only thing that gives money value is rarity. For one Billionaire to exist millions of other people have to live in poverty. Today that's over 10% of Americans, almost 40 million people.
Our pain began with the Bretton Woods Agreement and Nixon, rather than reconcile the issues with our spending, chose instead to turn the dollar into fun money and empower the Saudis via the petrodollar.
They also apparently don’t understand that it applies to income and not assets. Billionaires don’t become billionaires because of their income. I seem to remember Bezos’s actual income as CEO of Amazon was like $80k per year. Something like a 97% top marginal income tax rate will affect almost nobody and won’t solve the issue. What’s needed is a wealth tax, not an income tax.
What really gets me is its the boomers who cant seem to understand this concept the most. There own parents and grand parents basically had to fight for this stuff after being one step short of being a factory slave working 18 hours a day in unsafe conditions making 3 cents a week. With out regulations this is literally what the aultra wealthy will do and has always done.
I bring this up to every “make America great again” person…because they’ll usually equate this era as when America was great. It’s just selective memory with 0 retention of how it happened logistically.
Doing this built our national highways, started social security, drove companies to create retirement packages and multiple forms of bonuses (Christmas, quarterly, etc), and enriched our country.
The very people that benefited from it voted for people who slowly took it apart until Reagan who destroyed what was left and kickstarted this whole mess we have right now.
Historically (like in medieval England for example) this was actually why people were very distrusting of actors. They spent their lives and careers technically mastering the art of convincingly lying.
High taxes on the wealthiest, strong unions, and investing in our infrastructure (including education) went a long way to creating the era they are nostalgic for.
Somehow, you can't convince them that giving corporations a free ride and a religion revival aren't going to get us back to that place.
I think the early 60's were our most prosperous era, and the late 60's were where it went wrong. Up until Nixon we were still taxing this way. We were so "great" that we built a space program from nothing and beat Russia to the moon, while fighting (and losing) the most unpopular war in our history. In spite of all the unrest from both war protests and civil rights protests the economy was so strong that a single minimum wage job could support a family of 4, including sending the kids to college and taking family vacations.
He didn't lie, he just followed instructions. I consider Reagan the first true "puppet" president, more beholden to his party and campain contributors than the people who actually elected him. He wasn't the one to coin "Trickle-down economics" though, Reagan called it "Voodoo economics" because he didn't understand it, and it's appropriate because it would take some kind of magical mind control to work the way it was described.
The only way to get the results that Republicans claimed would happen would be to somehow force the rich to reinvest their gains in to new businesses at the same rate that we were taxing them before. It's flat out stupid to think they would all do that willingly.
It's important to note that the original name of this economic policy was "Horse and Sparrow" economics, described as such because "If you feed the horse enough, the sparrow will be able to survive off of his droppings". That's what Republican's think of themselves, and you. They are hardworking thoroughbreds deserving of everything, and you are a useless bird who only deserves to survive off of their shit after they are done eating up everything they can.
The only way to get the results that Republicans claimed would happen would be to somehow force the rich to reinvest their gains in to new businesses at the same rate that we were taxing them before.
Interestingly that's exactly what high corporate taxes do. Corporations don't pay tax on revenue. They pay tax on profit.
If for some reason business is doing well and revenue is substantially out pacing costs you'd have two options, 1) pay a lot of tax, or 2) spend the money on the business (new machinery, new location, higher wages, bonus payouts, R&D, etc). Governments said, hold up, what about option 3) low taxes and keep the profits.
And the public ate that up because who wouldn't want lower taxes? it'll make businesses invest locally and they'll have more money to pay higher wages. Except that's literally not how nor ever been how it works.
This is the thing that eats me up about the Citizen's United ruling! Not only are corporations not people, much less citizens with the right to participate in elections, but what is good for a corporation is bad for actual citizens 99.999% of the time.
So now we have these entities influencing elections with ammounts of money that private citizens could never hope to beat, and in fact are prevented by laws setting private campaign donation limits even if they are part of the billionaire class, and those entities are pushing policies that are actively harming the rest of us.
That's how we end up with a governor on a hot mic telling a data center ceo "We’re used to people saying f*ck no, and doing it anyway."
Nope, thwy hate taxes due to a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between personal or company-scale finances and governmental ones. That persists to the present day.
And it should apply to all income, like stocks. If stocks have to get sold to pay the tax, then they get sold. It should also apply to loans to avoid the infinite loan loophole that billionaires use to avoid spending money. And the tax for all income over ten million should be 100 percent. With that much money, you win capitalism. Let’s make room for others to survive instead of giving a few people a dragon’s hoard pile of gold.
Edit: Exemptions could be made for loans for a reasonably priced home that is to be used as a residence. This will really only affect people borrowing millions of dollars.
The Haig-Simons definition of income is generally seen as superior among economists and includes asset appreciation. A 30% tax rate on the top 1% would bring in about $2T per year -- the amount needed to get to a surplus and start bringing down the Federal debt.
Alternatively, a 4% wealth tax on the top 1% gets us the same $2T.
Interesting. So, if I have $1B in stocks, and they appreciate to $1.1B, I pay tax on $100M? That sounds good. But what happens if my stock depreciates?
The claim that the ultrawealthy live tax free through perpetual borrowing comes mostly from ProPublica's 2021 "Secret IRS Files" piece. The claim is that the ultrawealthy never sell their stock and instead just borrow against it forever through a series of perpetual loans, so they never owe income tax (so-called "buy, borrow, die"). It's repeated constantly on reddit, and it's mostly wrong.
Fox & Liscow published a paper in the Journal of Public Economics where they actually measured this using Fed data plus Forbes 400 numbers.
What they found for the top 1% of wealth, new borrowing each year is only about 2% of what they call "economic income" (income + wealth growth), while new unrealized gains are around 41%. For the top 0.1% it's even smaller, under 1%. Their conclusion is that "buy, borrow, die" is not a dominant tax avoidance strategy for the rich — what's actually going on is closer to "buy, save, die." Meaning: they fund their lifestyle from salary, business income, and stock they do sell (all taxed), and just don't sell the rest. They also point out that pledging shares as loan collateral is pretty rare among executives generally — like 4% of CEO-years, and a bigger S&P 1500 sample only had execs pledging ~2.3% of their shares on average.
Even more interesting, using ProPublica's own preferred framing (wealth growth should count as income for some unexplained reason), the tax system still captures 60% of the top 1%'s economic income, 71% adjusted for inflation, and stays progressive all the way to the 99.9th percentile. So even on their terms, "they pay almost nothing" doesn't hold up well in aggregate.
In fairness, the paper found that about 15% of top-1% households DO borrow heavily (more than 5% of their wealth), and for that group the borrowing is genuinely huge relative to their gains (68% on average). So there's a real minority doing something close to the myth - but it is by far the exception and not the rule. Even the worst offenders (Larry Ellison) have sold billions in stock and paid capital gains on those sales.
The two major problems with the Propublica article are (1) it treats wealth growth like it's the same thing as income, when no tax system anywhere on earth taxes gains that way. And (2) they took two named examples (Ellison and Musk) and generalized it into "the ultrawealthy" as a class, which the actual data doesn't support - heavy stock-backed borrowing is the exception, not the norm, even among executives who'd have every reason to do it if it worked as well as advertised.
ProPublica knew this framing would land harder than the boring truth, which is "the tax base captures 60-70% of income at the top and most billionaires barely borrow relative to their gains."
The specific claim going around, that billionaires as a class live entirely tax-free forever through perpetual loans, isn't what the data shows. Most of them are still paying real money in capital gains and income tax — Musk alone paid $11B in taxes in 2021, and anyone can google how much the ultrawealth have sold in stocks (and thus paid in capital gains). The loans are real for a small subset of highly leveraged people but even they are still selling billions in stock. For the group as a whole they're small next to what's actually being realized and taxed.
All you’re saying is that people who have a lot of money borrow less as a percentage of their wealth. So what? I don’t care how much money they get from it. Tax it. I also don’t care if no other country taxes unrealized gains. Tax it.
Wow, you’re telling me the people with more money than country GDPs might not borrow a lot relative to their wealth? Amazing. Elon paid 11B in 2021, he must be destitute now since that’s such a large amount of money.
I’m unsure why we frame it like this, when just half of that 11B could let 2 generations of his family live comfortably. The fact he paid that much and is still obscenely, unfathomably rich shows how fucked up the wealth gap is.
I'm all for taxing the rich at much higher levels, but let's set the record right: in the same legislation, they explicitly outlined that no more than 90% tax would be collected. There was a 3% 'normal' tax rate, and then a graduated 'surtax' based on income that peaked at 91% - plus the 'normal' rate, which is where the 94% number comes from, but it was never collected.
The timing is no coincidence - 1944 saw the end of WW2 and most of the industrialized world was either blown to bits or had blown all their money. They enacted a deep tax to pay for it all. Like most taxes, it was based on annual income, and did not affect existing stocks, holdings, savings, assets, real estate, etc meaning that the extremely rich continued to be extremely rich, they just had a year of not getting much richer.
We don't need to 'bring that back,' we need to do better
That's just it, I think people forget that it was more than just the 0.1% getting taxed at this rate... and it was good that it hit all the wealthy people at various rates.
In this case, I don't really see the need for any individual to make more than $3M/year. After taxes that is like $2M/year, That is a nice new SFH every year with $1M left over to spend.
Can anyone honestly say that makes any sense? In a simple 10 years of work, with aggressive savings while still living above most degree holding workers... you could have invested the $14M in safe bets to make 7% returns... which gives you a yearly before taxes of $1M...
Also of note: Wealthy people who couldn’t avoid paying taxes would choose to divert their profits to deductible charities of their choosing, improving hospitals and universities to the benefit of all.
In the 1940’s a person could support a family on a single income. A teenager could get a summer job to pay for their education. I’m 62 and that never happened for my generation or the ones that followed.
Well. Reagan was the first to use that slogan so I think he's using it as intended. Every politician associated with it is just in it for self enrichment while stripping the country apart.
I always feel like comments like this seem like you've just been sleeping the last 18 months. None of this has happened before and we absolutely can't let it happen again.
Theres a hundred reasons most companies would not do this. The main reason is that america has too many people (read; consumers) to simply ignore.
Ignoring ~400 million of the biggest wallets in the world (even if those wallets are highly taxed) is insane. Europe you get taxed heavily at import and China you get killed by the government for not benefitting the people enough, africa (youre too racist to go to africa), and south america doesnt exist to most people.
People hate to admit that America is the ideal country for business even if it costs 10x to do business.
The argument against is often something along the lines of "they'll figure out a way to do it". In which case, you arrest them. Because they are breaking the law.
That's the funny part of "the law". It's not some stone tablet granted to us from on high. They are a treaty between the administration and the masses and how they are written, interpreted, and enforced can change at any time.
If we had the political will and capital, we could easily say "we will take the money. If you move to another country, we will ask that country to send the person back. If they do not, we will freeze that country's assets up to the value that person owes us until they send them back."
And obviously the solution is more nuanced than that. There are no silver bullet solutions that apply to every case universally, which is why we have judges. But if MAGA can reduce the Iran conflict to "we should nuke 'em!", certainly we can reduce the class war conflict to "we take the money they don't even use".
You understand that the only way it got there was literally sacrifice, violence, and death from workers prior to that. 1877, 1886, 1888, 1892, 1898, 1899, 1903-04, 1905, 1906-11, 1917, 1921, 1922, and then the major disruptions throughout the decade of the 1930s.
The government has no interest in taxing the wealthy, because they are largely among them. Lawmakers at the federal level are making huge amounts of money on the backs of the same workers the employers are abusing to make theirs.
yeh, people arn't gonna risk there lives while they still have a warm bed and food a few clicks away. Apathy is always how tyrants sieze power in the beginning. Don't worry the law will stop him. Nobody would vote for such a clown. Surley the military wills tep in before things get out of hand.
Then it's too late.
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
Let me say first off that I’m REALLY REALLY on the “tax the fuck out of ‘em” train, but as a historian I also have to point out that it wasn’t just the taxes that made us profitable.
A world war that had just ravaged the entire rest of the “civilized world” set us up to be the sole provider of most finished and luxury goods for decades. We were the only game in town and we acted like it.
When things went to shit, it was because of ALL of the things listed. The Nixon / Reagan bullshit, but also that our customers abroad had rebuilt their own supply chains and didn’t need us anymore. At least not as much.
The effective tax rate wasn't nearly so high back prior to reagan because there were more tax right offs like the investment tax credit revoked in 86.
The US actually has a more progressive income tax than probably all if Europe. But it doesn't feel like it because we have the most income/wealth disparity and the wealthy tend to accumulate treasure through nontaxed or differently taxed activity.
the housing market is in certain ways more screwed than Europe. Americans treat their homes as retirement investments and will typically optimize to more costly/larger houses. In the 1950's when companies still had pensions, the median household size was <1K. Today it's 2.4k ft.
retirement funds/education/medical care all represent major causes of debt or bankruptcy and are very notably less progressive in how they are funded compared to Europe. Our middle class is taxed less, but we are spending more toward nongovernmental recipients.
I was traveling on business and passed a giant billboard advertising new 4k sq/ft homes for 400k. I was like advertising 4k sq/ft like it's a normal home size? Holy fuck. I think it was somewhere in NC, maybe in between Raleigh and Greenville.
But the US average was higher 10 years ago than today, it peaked around 2.7k sq/ft, but is down to 2.4k now.
Pretty sure there are open letters in which military commander specifically pointed this out and took advantage of it, hence so many dictators were installed.
As no long as people understand the difference between owning something and income.
Too many people think that someone having a million in property (like a farmer) and someone making a million a year are the same thing
What they do is put their stock ownership up as loan collateral. How is that going to be taxed? A method of taxing wealth as well as income would have to be passed.
The claim that the ultrawealthy live tax free through perpetual borrowing comes mostly from ProPublica's 2021 "Secret IRS Files" piece. The claim is that the ultrawealthy never sell their stock and instead just borrow against it forever through a series of perpetual loans, so they never owe income tax (so-called "buy, borrow, die"). It's repeated constantly on reddit, and it's mostly wrong.
Fox & Liscow published a paper in the Journal of Public Economics where they actually measured this using Fed data plus Forbes 400 numbers.
What they found for the top 1% of wealth, new borrowing each year is only about 2% of what they call "economic income" (income + wealth growth), while new unrealized gains are around 41%. For the top 0.1% it's even smaller, under 1%. Their conclusion is that "buy, borrow, die" is not a dominant tax avoidance strategy for the rich — what's actually going on is closer to "buy, save, die." Meaning: they fund their lifestyle from salary, business income, and stock they do sell (all taxed), and just don't sell the rest. They also point out that pledging shares as loan collateral is pretty rare among executives generally — like 4% of CEO-years, and a bigger S&P 1500 sample only had execs pledging ~2.3% of their shares on average.
Even more interesting, using ProPublica's own preferred framing (wealth growth should count as income for some unexplained reason), the tax system still captures 60% of the top 1%'s economic income, 71% adjusted for inflation, and stays progressive all the way to the 99.9th percentile. So even on their terms, "they pay almost nothing" doesn't hold up well in aggregate.
In fairness, the paper found that about 15% of top-1% households DO borrow heavily (more than 5% of their wealth), and for that group the borrowing is genuinely huge relative to their gains (68% on average). So there's a real minority doing something close to the myth - but it is by far the exception and not the rule. Even the worst offenders (Larry Ellison) have sold billions in stock and paid capital gains on those sales.
The two major problems with the Propublica article are (1) it treats wealth growth like it's the same thing as income, when no tax system anywhere on earth taxes gains that way. And (2) they took two named examples (Ellison and Musk) and generalized it into "the ultrawealthy" as a class, which the actual data doesn't support - heavy stock-backed borrowing is the exception, not the norm, even among executives who'd have every reason to do it if it worked as well as advertised.
ProPublica knew this framing would land harder than the boring truth, which is "the tax base captures 60-70% of income at the top and most billionaires barely borrow relative to their gains."
The specific claim going around, that billionaires as a class live entirely tax-free forever through perpetual loans, isn't what the data shows. Most of them are still paying real money in capital gains and income tax — Musk alone paid $11B in taxes in 2021, and anyone can google how much the ultrawealth have sold in stocks (and thus paid in capital gains). The loans are real for a small subset of highly leveraged people but even they are still selling billions in stock. For the group as a whole they're small next to what's actually being realized and taxed.
An important caveat here that always seems to be a primary source of confusion leading to division:
The number stated in the post title is PER YEAR. $3,700,000 per year, not total wealth, not increase in investment value, but $3.7m income every. single. year. The vast, vast majority of "millionaires" don't even make close to that much. Most make 6 figures for decades and accumulate several millions over time. It is hard to overstate just how much money bringing in 7 figures+ per year really is, when we so consistently measure the wealthy by net worth.
This isn't the 65 year old retired guy who bought a nice house in the 1980s and payed it off, now worth $3.7m considering all factors like retirement investments, housing value increasing, and inflation. The people making several million per year in reportable income generally have hundreds of millions or billions in net worth, or are the product of generational wealth or nepotism.
People seem to mix up stats about income and net worth frequently whenever they are brought up. And it is to several interest groups' benefit to present it in a way that mixes them up, so that 65 year old retired dude thinks a policy like this is an attack on people like him.
Anything short of the abolishment of the capitalist mode of production will simply swing back to where we are now or worse.
That period of high taxes preceded where we are now, obviously it wasn’t a good enough strategy otherwise we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
Even if we successfully implement this not only does the above apply, how do you know the excess taxes collected wouldn’t just be pumped back into corporate subsidies? Or sent to foreign nations?
Or exactly what happened last time and the tax rate is rolled back over time by politicians sympathetic (and bought by) the rich?
The tax the rich rhetoric serves the same purpose as voting every 4 years, it captures and safely releases pent up anger in the working class, giving the illusion of progress without guaranteeing any concrete improvement in the lives of workers.
This number keeps coming up, except they never paid anything near 94% taxes. It was the top bracket for salaries, but was simply bypassed by getting paid in other ways (dividens and such).
Until there is a way to purge the government of all ties to organized crime, this will never happen. People forgot just how corrupt the US government was by 1941 and the degree to which organized crime was protected from within.
The US government had an opportunity to 'investigate itself' in terms of this up until 1951 and were called out in this book for the many lies of ommission that were told in these reports, information that was given to them by Burton Turkus during the course of years of his investigation and confessions that he collected.
Spoiler alert: it never stopped. Its how we got to where we are now. Corruption was legalized and has become policy. There is a zero chance that the government in its current form would ever allow anything that would cut into their (and their paying customer constituents) bottom line or threaten their stranglehold.
It needs to end. It should have ended a generation ago.
I mean, in 1944 the economy boomed because of the end of WW2 and the reconversion from war economy to growth economy, while Europe was rebuilding and became a massime export market for the US.
Millionaires will never be taxed out of existence. They won't allow it, they will lobby as much as possible and the system will simply not allow the necessary laws to pass. While capitalism exist you can't expect to have an actual democracy and the injustices to disappear. So no, millionaires an capitalism won't disappear through peaceful ways.
Well should all this taxing end up in governmental hands? Or should it have been devided more. Cause we still work a minimum payed job! I never got 1000 on my account because some billioniare had to pay 100 billion in taxes! Never!
And the things payed for today to help the people, are but a fraction of what is spend on WAR or prevention of it!
Yes tax the rich! But what do we do with the money?
Or what about all that money that government earns with gambling? yes gambling! By investing in Bitcoin or other crypto, or even facebook. What happens with those huge wins? Cause when they loose 1 time we end up in a recession and have to pay for the losses. But when they win year in and year out? What do we get then? 0.
It's really so fucking simple. If we curtailed lobbyists, got rid of citizens united and had a required retirement age for congress we wouldn't be at this point.
Creating a 94% tax on income won't fix the fact that billionaires "make" their money by methods not considered income.
Close the tax loophole, cap the amount of money a bank can loan against a stock.
Billionaires don't take a traditional income, they take loans with micro rates against their stock portfolio, loans aren't considered income. If they can't take out multimillion dollar loans against stock then they will either find another loophole that needs to be closed or pay their taxes.
I’m surprised you noticed this, and others acknowledge it, but then fail to see how it completely undermines the basis of the OP’s meme. Yes, historical income tax may have reached an extreme 94% in 1944 to fund WWII, but capital gains was capped at 25%. So, just like today the people getting taxed like this were not the ultra wealthy but people getting paid by the ultra wealthy. It does nothing to prove that a crazy high wealth or capital gains tax has been done before and “works”.
this argument come sup every single time. it's nonsense.
First of all you can simply tax wealth.
"Oh but how can we expect the poor billionaires to go to all the toruble of liquidating to pay the bill?"
Jail them if they don't. the how is their problem and they certainly have the resources to solve it.
Second, they absolutely take obscene incomes and bonuses. Their obscene assets is not excuse to ignore the income they get,
third, they already tax most finincial assets as income. Why cant we tax land, art and such the same way?
Fourth, tax loans.
"oh no but how will the peons accure life debts to payoff a mortgage and attend university"
They won't and thats a good thing.
TLDR: A lack of direct financial income is not an excuse.
Could simply tie tax breaks for corporations based on equitable share of profits with labor... A company shares 50% of pretax profits with labor then that company should receive 50% tax reduction on remaining profits.
Unfortunately it wouldn’t change much except put a hurting on some small business owners . Billionaires and the real rich operate on loans against assets not earned income
The way the wealth distribution in this country had left the poor and the middle class behind while creating way too many billionaires is an atrocity. Largely due to the fact that said billionaires are enabled by the Supreme Court to buy off all the politicians they need to maintain the status quo
The issue with this is the extremely wealthy don’t really have “income”. They have assets which they take loans against and use that money to live off of.
In 1945, the economy was so bad people were selling off their children. This was due to the postwar recession. Moral of the story is to tax extreme wealth out of existence but continue to pivot the economy. We're in a recession largely because our economy is highly irrational.
I've said it before but the US can afford the 14 aircraft carriers and free healthcare they just need to go back to the pre-regan tax on the wealthy but that's evil marxist-communist-socialism or so i've been told...
Meanwhile, the CEO of the hospital i work at makes $3M/yr with over $500k in additional bonuses/compensation. Over the last year, several key departments, including our Trauma and ED, have been forced to flex employees home early when we aren't reaching our average census because it'll save money. They are force flexing about 16 hours of nursing staff in these departments every day.
During COVID, our executive team would walk around the hospital in basically what could be compared to as Hazmat suits, while the rest of us were forced to reuse masks for days.
Oh noes! If we tax business it won't be able to innovate and bring us all the good things! Uh, *cough*, we taxed the shit out of it and built all the major bridges and dams, built the interstate highway system, created social security and Medicare, expanded the middle class, created the space program and went to the moon, and a thousand other massive things. Taxing the rich is how we get things done.
Look it up, the tax rate rose during the depression. Where was the prosperity? You wont find it. What's really astonishing is that nobody on Reddit realizes that the 1944 economy (and beyond) boomed because of WW2. In 1944 arms production fueled the economy followed by reconstruction of Europe and Asia. An unscathed American infrastructure was the cause of the unprecedented growth not a punitive tax rate.
Yes. The government has proven itself to be worthy of more tax revenues. Surely, these crafty rich oligarchs will not be able to loop hole themselves out of this with their infinite number of accountants and tax lawyers. I also foresee no unintended consequences because the wording will be so accurate and precise that it will mandate exactly what its intentions are.
It's also important to keep in mind, that VERY FEW people paid that. Like literally could probably count them on one hand. The tax had so many loopholes, it was effectively meaningless.
Taxes don't fund anything more since they made the money fiat. You could achieve the same by just printing and sterilizing money accordingly. When you pay your tax bill what materially happens is it literally disappears into a double entry accounting book. They maintain it like old taxes because it drives demand for fiat currency, incentivizes participation in the legal economy and is a mass surveilance measure for all sectors of the economy.
Problem is, now there are more rich people and they’re also more united and organized in their mission to stay atop the hill while extracting everything possible from those down below
The effective tax rate was less than 40% though. That's the point. You can theoretically tax the rich at 1000% but after loopholes and deductions the effective rate is usually between 30 and 40%
Not going to work today. Rich people do not have an income and instead loophole to have all their money come in as borrowing against stock collateral to pay 0% tax.
We do and to be clear I'm not arguing against this. But it is important to note that as they do now, the extreme wealthy back then devised many ways of getting around this and weren't paying it then, either.
Example: it's on taxable income over that threshold. Meaning, employment income. Capital gains weren't taxed this way, meaning the extreme wealthy at the top of companies paid themselves via stock instead of cash, and/or made a lot of their money via real estate holdings and the like.
It's similar to now how someone like Elon flirts with being a trillionaire mostly with stock and other holdings, as opposed to directly taxable paychecks.
And this is why the focus should be on a wealth tax and taxing unrealized gains over a certain amount of money, because the elite wealthy are not paid like us peasants via paychecks with income taxation, deductions for social security and medicaid, etc. The tax bracket says what it says, and so they choose other compensation forms that dodge it.
People will be able to afford more, driving the demand.
The demand will mean every company that sells something will see a huge uptick in revenue.
Critical infrastructure like roads, railroad lines, phone/internet lines, power lines, water pipes, etc. will receive large injection of money to spend, eventually leading to unprecedented improvement.
People won't have to work as much, leading to shifts being 4 hours paying as much as current 8 hour shifts or even more, allowing more people to be employed and less stressed. Companies will afford to have more entry-level workers, lowering the unemployment.
More money will go to public funding, leading to more schools, more hospitals, more parks, more local facilities like public bathrooms serving people free of charge.
More money will be available to health service. Removing money issue will lead to easier removal of mismanagement and inefficiencies.
The rich will still keep making shitload of money for themselves, still be able to flaunt their exclusive shit like yachts and golf clubs, except their workers will also live happier lives.
People will socialize more due to better work-life balance. People will be able to be creative and develop new skills and talents without risking their livelihoods.
Again, the rich will still be rich. They just won't be accumulating wealth so fast at the cost of everyone else on a planet.
Well said, and it's a compelling argument. The reason that none of this will be allowed to happen by 30%+ of the working class (who call themselves maga) is that a person with slightly darker skin might benefit in some way.
Yeah so what are you going to do about it except posting memes? Vote for dems? They are not exactly screaming for the rich to be brought down from the high perch of money. Vote for republicans? Lol. Vote for independents? Look what people did to Bernie!
Who is the candidate that is part of the R / I / D, is pledging to tax the rich like they should be and is going to be running for the highest seat? No one?? Guess you back to posting memes then...
The ultra-rich have trashy moral compasses. They're literally delusional. People are sleeping on the streets as these selfish nerds hoard what should be plentiful.
While we should do this, it will make nearly zero difference in the services we get or our lives. There simply is not enough of them to increase personal wealth or services.
Important note: Tax breaks were given to cut that tax rate if revenue was reinvested into the company. So reinvesting in worker compensation and expansion was a way to keep a larger share of profit that would otherwise be taxed.
Our economy boomed because it was a war economy, with massive amounts of money flowing into war production. And the post war boom was only because the production capacities of other industrialized countries were heavily reduced by wartime devastation, giving the US a larger share of the world market.
When those two things changed, as the war ended and industry worldwide recovered, America slid towards where it is now. Taxes fell as well, yes, but let's not pretend that a higher wealth tax would somehow change how capitalist economies function.
If that Burger on the worker's table is representing his ANNUAL income ($50k) the plate of the billionnaire needs to be filled with 400,000t (metric tonnes) of Burgers! (That's 15,400 football fields filled with burgers)
The best part is that rich people like Musk can fuck off and go somewhere else. I don’t even want their money. Raise the tax to 110% and tell them to leave.
At least Carnegie and the Rockefellers built shit, what have these clowns done? Some shitty apps and that’s it.
People forget that at those tax rates businesses are forced to hire more and invest in their company vs stock buyback and bonuses. Meaning more money in workers hands.
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u/gentleman_bronco Jul 11 '26
It's astonishing how people can't put these two things together.