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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.
I would just point out that luck counts in favor of the system, not against it.
Yes, people risk their capital against luck. They bet on questionable investments. Is this R&D on solar cells going to pay off? Are we going to be able to build this wind farm? Well, we put our cash on the line and we hope fortune favors us.
Yes, a lot of that does come down to luck, but we want people to be betting on these efforts that end up helping humanity.
Just because there's luck involved doesn't mean the effort isn't worthwhile. It's even more reason that we should applaud the people who put their own money toward these risky efforts.
The billionaire got lucky. That just means he risked his resources on an effort that ended up succeeding and helping others.
No doubt the world has an element of luck in it. But there is a reason successful people keep being successful even after bankruptcy and failures while unsuccessful people keep going back to being unsuccessfully after they get lucky and win some money they burn.
Its a bit like being a card counter in a friends-only texas holdem game (no house). Sure there is an element of luck but if you hedge your bets properly that luck doesnt matter so much over the long run.
Sure, but my point here is that even if we accept the argument, it still doesn't really work.
I think that in reality people do have some skill that choosing the better risks to take. But even if we set that aside and we accept the argument that people like @wjmaggos seem to be making, even if it is pure chance with no skill at all, even in that unrealistic case their argument still falls flat.
Even if there is zero skill to choosing the flip of the coin that might or might not benefit humanity, it's still a good thing that these people with resources take the risk and risk their resources for the sake of the coin coming up heads and benefiting us all.
The billionaire didn't work harder than the millionaire and it was all luck? Fine! Either way, their luck benefited us all. Even if you want to ignore the reality that there was work involved.
I'm saying there was equal work involved. The difference between the multi millionaire and the billionaire was luck. Right industry, right time etc. So taxing that off (not so that they are regular, just a multi millionaire now etc) should not reduce incentives, will give them less power to fuck around and help others (lower taxes or better services or investments chosen by the public through democracy, not their VC friends).
