nytimes.com
www.nytimes.com
    • theneverfox@pawb.socialEnglish
      11·
      3 months ago

      Yes, absolutely. Coming out of the great depression we clawed back so much, but that’s been slowly dismantled and we’re back in the roaring 20s now

      Things are more complicated now, but there’s certainly ways to do this if we have politicians who will fight to carry out our will

        • theneverfox@pawb.socialEnglish
          52·
          3 months ago

          I mean… Fuck economic theory, the entire field is a mess of myths and narratives. There’s good work to be sure, but governments and organizations just find models that support what they want to do, no matter how much it conflicts with observations

          There’s historical examples in this country, there’s modern examples like the Scandinavian model… Wealth was redistributed, there’s

          I have no idea what you’re asking for. What even is a wealth tax “working” to you?

          I mean I could pull up some economists who go over numbers and adamantly advocate for wealth redistribution, but I feel like nothing I give you is going to actually change your mind

            • Auli@lemmy.caEnglish
              2·
              3 months ago

              Tax companies revenue first. It would be at a lower rate then profit but also doesn’t allow them to hide the profit.

            • theneverfox@pawb.socialEnglish
              1·
              3 months ago

              I never said anything about income tax… But again, these are real things that we used to have and they have elsewhere:

              Tax brackets to to 90%+ on business profits - incentivize companies to reinvest in r&d while disincentiving investment

              Tax inheritance and crack down on forever trusts

              Progressively tax money moving in and out of the country, and close up tax loopholes (killing the tax filing industry would be a necessary prerequisite)

              You could even revamp capital gains and certain types of loan to somehow figure into a progressive income tax

              And most importantly - this has been done before. It has been done, you can pick apart suggested methods and come up with excuses for why it’s impossible… But it’s so clearly not. Everything else is an engineering problem

              If you want to hear economists talk about it, Garys economics on YouTube popped into my feed a few days ago. He’s far from the only one, even Warren Buffett has gone through a plan where he says the full tax burden could be put on businesses

              And if you want to know why I don’t respect economics… It’s not because I’m not read up on it, it’s because: how can you read up on it and still think taxing the wealthy is impossible? This has been written about by economists for decades, but it doesn’t matter because there’s more convenient economic theories to push far and wide

                • theneverfox@pawb.socialEnglish
                  1·
                  3 months ago

                  And there we go… I must not know anything about economics because you’ve been fed convenient models that justify the decision to cut taxes, and I’m not quoting them back to you

                  And FYI, I even added a side note about this - want to know some tax avoidance strategies that I like? R&D. Higher wages and benefits to compete over talent. Fancy offices and better equipment. Swag and giveaways to capture customer loyalty

                  This is why fuck “fuck economics”. I tell you it worked, we had a less inequal society, and you come back with “well, cutting this raised tax revenues”.

                  Of course it did - it let the wealthy open up a spigot from companies to their portfolios, and the government gets a portion.

                  It incentivized slashing corporate spending, but corporate spending is good - it’s money flowing back into the economy. Even if they keep it in a slush fund, at least that fund will offset loans needed to expand or weather a storm - loans that also funnel money upwards and essentially force companies to pay a tax to the rich to continue to exist

                  But please, keep dismissing everything I say as “they just don’t understand economics”. No, I understand it well enough to know that what I was being taught didn’t add up

    • AA5B@lemmy.world
      1·
      3 months ago

      There’s also the option of additional tax brackets for those wealthy whose income still counts as income. Why do the tax brackets stop? Massachusetts has one set $1M that’s doing pretty well

      • jacksilver@lemmy.world
        1·
        3 months ago

        Because most of the 1% wealth isnt in the form of wages (hence why people say working class vs wealthy sometimes).

        Sure you could increase the income brackets, but I think (would need to double check) that wealth tax would make a larger impact.

        • AA5B@lemmy.world
          1·
          3 months ago

          Sure, but we know income taxes work, we have a mechanism for collecting them, and we already have a ladder of brackets that are completely logical to extend.

          While I’m also for some sort of wealth tax, I think that will be much harder to even define, much less implement. There are a lot of loopholes that need to be plugged, an entire industry for the purpose of finding those loopholes, and no objective way to even quantize unrealized gains