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.
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
Twelve men on the moon. We did it six times, out of seven attempts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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!
IRS expects DOGE cost the country half a trillion dollars so far. Bankruptcy is the point.
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.
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
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.
The same way cutting the budget of poorly performing schools makes students more successful.
Hack and slash your children's education away, they say
BuTt they CreAte JerBs!
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+%.
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
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.
It doesn’t seem like the marginal rate is the issue as long as it’s about income.
What if it were about net worth. That’s why it seems the rich aren’t paying. Sure some people’s net worth drops like elons recently, but that could result in a refund from the previous year.
Boomers: 1965 - that was like 30 years ago. Not taxing the rich isn't "new".
Gen Z: Well, ya, Washington had to tax them that much to pay off the debt from the revolutionary war. That was in 1976, right?
I bet Drumpf cuts taxes completely for the mega rich. You wait and see.
