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I hate to break it to you but the whole "tax the rich" thing is what the rich want you debating... why? Cause you can tax them all you want, but when our budget is 60% military they will still get rich and we will go in debt no matter how much you tax them.
Ya know what the rich really dont want? You fighting to get the military budget slashed in half leaving more than enough money to cut taxes for everyone (including the rich)... but noooo, any solution that saves everyone money, including the rich, is one that will never be supported.
So many people just get spoon fed a narrative and then its law.
taxing the rich is about reducing their political power, not the government revenue. we must also slash military spending. and provide universal health care.
@wjmaggos I am all for making sure money isnt able to influence political power... but going about that by taking away people with money is a really self-destructive tactic.
I also want to decentralize all media and get rid of advertising and pass political reforms, but a person with a $1b is going to have a lot of power when most don't have $1m. I'm for taking the money away, not the people. I'd rather we have such a competitive market that no company or person ever has such unfair advantages imo. how is it self-destructive?
Taking the money away from wealth produces like billionairs is probably the most destructive thing a society can do. There is a very good reason why over the last hundred plus years that the number of people in poverty dropped as the number of billionairs increased.
Money has absolutely no power as long as the people dont let it and the elections are fair. The only reason people with money have power is because people dont turn off their tvs when the lobbying ads come on. Money can only buy you votes when the general population is willing to sell their vote to the highest (figurative) bidder.
what's the very good reason? places with massive poverty have also had an exploitative wealthy class. you don't take all their money eliminating incentives. the billionaire didn't work harder than the multi millionaire. it was luck.
money can be used in more ways than that, and nobody is 100% immune to propaganda nor will we ever achieve near immunity to it in most of society. I agree about educating the public interest this direction, it's essential. but it will never be enough.
@wjmaggos the "very good reason" is simple... money is not a fixed quantity where in order to have mroe others must have less. Wealth is **generated** not taken.
Billionaires are the most successful wealth generators in a society. So having them means a lot of wealth is likely being generated (not always, but usually). Destroying the wealth generators and distributing what money they created therefore might temporarily feed a few people but plunge society into poverty long term.
The reason poverty levels plummet as billionairs become more numerous is because a society that has a lot of well performing wealth generators makes all of society wealthier and has been shown to significantly reduce poverty levels.
I agree that a well functioning market creates a lot of wealth for everyone and reduces poverty. There's innovation. There's cheaper and better stuff and services. I strongly support a mixed economy.
IDK why you keep saying it this way, but I am not for destroying wealth generators. Successful businesses who don't create billionaires also generate wealth. Billionaires don't prove the economy is good, but they are most easily able to use that wealth to thwart competition.
The point your missing is the existance of billionairs is in no way something to avoid... why would you want to, their existance takes from no one, and contributes **hugely** to the economy, in such a way that if they didnt exist we would all be worse off.
No billionairs dont "prove" the economy is good, but a good economy will have few poor people and many rich people, the more so the better.
do you think a gazillionaire would be something to avoid? do you think they might be able to use that money to garner power in a way that even the smart democracies might have a problem dealing with if his interests went against those of the public? maybe buying all our telecommunications infrastructure and politicians and military industries? maybe just confusing people about the threat of climate change?
> do you think a gazillionaire would be something to avoid?
No it isnt a good thing, because someone owning a fictional amount of money would make no sense and I dont like things not making sense.
in all seriousness though, in and of itself, no. But not all super-wealthy are good just as not all are bad. People who have wealth may generate it (provide services we want) or may get it through exploitation (literally stealing or inciting wars). So long as the wealthy person is one who largely made their money generating that wealth then yes its a good thing no matter how much they have (because it didnt reduce the amount anyone else had). However if they got that wealth through the destruction of wealth (for example literally robbing a bank) then no it isnt a good thing.
> do you think they might be able to use that money to garner power in a way that even the smart democracies might have a problem dealing with if his interests went against those of the public?
That depends largely on the society. While I am opposed to just taking a persons money simply for having money I am all for making sure money can not buy influence in a society when it comes to our policies and governance. A persons money only has as much power as we let it as a society. If we all had integrity then that money couldnt buy anyone or anything that wasnt something we as a society are ok with. So if you find things are being bought with money that money shouldnt be able to buy (such as votes for politicians) then that is a problem.
Remember people can pool their resources into a common organization. So I dont care any more or less about 1 super rich evil dude than I care about 100,000 evil middle class dudes.
> maybe buying all our telecommunications infrastructure and politicians and military industries?
They would be unable to do this if those non-billionairs simply refused to sell to them. Or if the government prevented it through anti-trust laws (I am against monopolies but all for the rich).
we do not have the perfect society where massive wealth cannot influence lots of people in lots of different ways. I'd be for ancapistan or communism if I thought people were interested or able to thrive in those situations too etc.
you should care whether it's a billionaire or 100k middle class dudes. because wanting to do evil is rarely the problem. it's not understanding other perspectives and not having to compromise. that's the danger of billionaires in a democracy.
> we do not have the perfect society where massive wealth cannot influence lots of people in lots of different ways. I'd be for ancapistan or communism if I thought people were interested or able to thrive in those situations too etc.
No we dont... which is why you shouldnt try to fix it by doing one of the most harmful things we can do: destroy wealth generators and push everyone to extreme poverty and starvation.
Its not like taking all their resources would be easy, there is a reason communist countries had uprisings by the people demanding capitalism. So you have two difficult tasks ahead, you can steal everyones money and cause massive harm to society, or take the equally hard route and try to fix our governments and people so they have values and integrity. While neither is easy at least the latter actually results in a healthier better society, rather than actively trying to make things worse by identifying the root of a problem and then addressing a symptom instead.
> you should care whether it's a billionaire or 100k middle class dudes. because wanting to do evil is rarely the problem. it's not understanding other perspectives and not having to compromise. that's the danger of billionaires in a democracy.
I see you have never gotten to know a billionaire. Many understand others perspectives rather well, in fact, its kinda a prerequisite to see success in most business (cant sell shit to people if you dont understand their points of view). As for not needing to compromise, tell that to must, he took a no-compromise approach as of late and his fortune has crashed directly as a result (and if he keeps it up he will loose it all eventually).
I'm not for stealing all their money. I'm for a much higher progressive income tax top rate at least. like we had in the US during the 50s. worldwide.
but yes, do both. imo the fedi ala media decentralization and finding an ad free way to fund media without paywalls will do more for advancing the public interest than something like campaign finance reform. billionaires will try to squash us too if we ever look like a real threat.
https://time.com/6112318/american-democracy-final-five-voting/
> I'm not for stealing all their money. I'm for a much higher progressive income tax top rate at least. like we had in the US during the 50s. worldwide.
Yes I am aware that you want a grossly unfair and abusive rate that will take the overwhelming majority of their resources/wealth but not all of it... and again, taking the overwhelming majority of money from people on the criteria that they have proven themselves the most effective wealth generators in society (several orders of magnitude above millionairs) is again probably the most self destructive thing you could do.
Thing is, you are also not well studied on this. The effective tax rate paid by the rich in 1950s was more or less the same as it is today.
Here is an explanation along with a chart of actual tax rates for you:
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/taxes-on-the-rich-1950s-not-high/
And "do both" is hardly a solution, why do one self-destructive thing and one good thing and call that good?
You keep trying to eliminate something that isnt a bad thing, something that is actually a good thing, especially when you consider that more billionaires directly relates to fewer people in poverty. Having bigger and better wealth generators is **good** for economy, not bad, so no reason to eliminate it, full stop.
> as your article says, the 50s tax rates barely actually had any impact on the wealthy.
The article says nothing of the sort
> except you're wrong about it being a self-destructive thing.
I have presented actual evidence, namely the fact that as wealth disparity increased (more billionaires) the number below the poverty line plummited (from 70% world wide to ~10%)... So the actual numbers are against your assertions and you've done nothing to demonstrate your own stance with facts, just unsubstantiated claims about it being bad.
the article says there is an effective 6% change in taxes on the wealthy between 1950s and 2014. when we had an amazing economy and lots of govt support for science, infrastructure, education and buying homes. I agree that allowing people to improve themselves makes a strong economy but that doesn't necessarily include no limits to wealth accumulating or some mythical appropriate limit on taxing wealth. middle classes matter more. we see massive poverty with extreme wealth.
economies opened up and poverty decreased, as expected. you are connecting opening these economies with more billionaires, such that if at the same time as the economies opened up, they taxed wealth so there were less billionaires but more education and better infrastructure and health care for the poor etc, you'd argue poverty would get worse. that's ridiculous. more billionaires and less poverty are both a result of a more open economy, but taxes used well can also help.
I didnt ask for the opinion of that article, I want your opinion. I cant debunk or discuss points with an article, nor do I know fromt hat article part part of it you agree, and what are the **measurable** metrics we can look at.
So I ask again, what do you think were the specific laws changes that correlate to this change in poverty and we will then look at the poverty rate and see if we see spikes on those specific dates changing the rates.
That wasnt what I asked, I asked what events or laws, and what dates constitute this change in open economies. Which we can then check to see if those dates cause corelation.
As for me, I have stated specifically the correlation, that you will se a close following and correlation between two specific data points: wealth disparity, and percentage below the poverty line over long-periods. I have even provided specific numbers to this effect and a chart at one point (happy to give those again).
Still waiting on yours so we can check the correlations there and compare.
Sorry about that I'm off the phone now.
I basically gave two charts. The first shows world wide poverty rates since the 1800s: https://cepr.shorthandstories.com/history-poverty/
Then for wealth disparity itself (top 0.001% wealth) you go here:
https://fgeerolf.com/data/wid/index.html#European_Union,_United_States
Though you may need to copy the code and run it locally and change it to global to see the correlation first hand.
You can even break it out by country and show just USA if you want.
The correlation between percentage in poverty and wealth disparity is strong and shows a very suggestive connection where more people or wealth concentrated in fewer people results in fewer people in poverty. In other words you only have low poverty when you have more billionaires historically.
Now your turn, show me your data that contradicts this.
there's nothing about billionaires here. open economies lead to less poverty and more wealth concentration. that doesn't mean you can't then do something about the latter without putting more people back in poverty.
humans figuring out fire meant we could do lots of things but also died from it more often, till we learned better ways to deal with it. maybe more still die from it than before, but having less deaths from fire didn't mean losing our on the benefits.
Would you agree that buying a milling machine means that a worker would be able to operate that machine to make parts to earn a living?
And without that machine the worker would face poverty as he is unable to make the parts to earn the living?
Well, how do you buy the milling machine? You concentrate wealth to place the order for the machine.
In the real world wealth concentration is part of alleviating poverty.
I am not against concentration of wealth to a degree. I am not against markets or capitalism. I think they can be overdone and then have unintended consequences. maybe the line needs to be drawn above or below $1b. I think it's crazy that people don't see this as a concern for democracy, knowing that we are not immune to the influence such concentrated wealth can wield (even if we should be or accepting some wealth disparity can be advantageous or unavoidable).
good night.
Personally, I'd say focus on people.
@wjmaggos is proposing actions that harm people.
I don't care about whether that makes government better or worse, I care about the people who are impacted by those bad decisions.
@freemo