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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).
@wjmaggos @volkris Why would we want someone to be paid for doing work regardless of the value it provides, if we do that people will not provide value to society as they have no motivation to do hard work with large reward.
Bob got high and spun around in his chair in circles for 10 hours, it was a lot of work. Why should I pay him the same amount of money as the guy who built 10 cars on the construction line that actually enables other people to do their work more effectively?
I am not paying you for wasting energy doing "anything", I pay you (give you something I worked hard for) because you did something for me I **needed**.
Why on earth would you think out of fairness people who do work we need should be the same as people who do work we dont need. Wasting energy is not something we should reward.
> I'm saying there was equal work involved. The difference between the multi millionaire and the billionaire was luck.
I was responding to this part of the message just to be clear.
But also in addition the difference isnt luck or amount of work, its investment. The poor person likely took bad risks and/or focused on short term easy gains rather than harder long term gains. The billionaire on the other hand spent their time learning, studying, aquiring skills, building networks, saving and sacraficing, all while not making a penny, often over very long periods of time. They start companies that fail and eventually all that time they invested will pay off.
The poor person usually works a 9-5 and may even work more 60 hours, but they do little in investing in themselves to get out of it (usually). Those that do try are irresponsible, usually being cocky without the skills to back it up.
One common pattern is the poor usually despise the rich, so they never both to learn from them (most rich people are eager to take on mentees I find). The people who succeed usually work under someone who has been successful and cares a great deal about learning from them and will often take councel in many business experts in their journey.
why are you talking about poor people? I'm comparing the billionaire vs the multi millionaire. I'm saying what separates them is luck. and I'm saying that taxing that difference is essentially taxing the bonus one guy got from working his ass off or making a smart investment in the slightly better industry for the time. they both did great and deserve to live well etc. I'm not eliminating that by reducing the billionaire to a multi millionaire thru progressive taxes.
> why are you talking about poor people?
Because the poor people are the ones suffering, not the millionairs. I dont care about wealth disparity, I care about the quality of life of the poorest people and what percentage are below the poverty line, I work from the bottom up.
More billionairs mean fewer people in extreme poverty. That is the win, not how well off the millionairs are, who are welcome to exist, but their quality of life is not my top concern.
> I'm comparing the billionaire vs the multi millionaire
You shouldnt be, the millionaires arent suffering, improving their quality of life should not be the focus.
> I'm saying what separates them is luck.
Which is wrong, while there is an element of luck it is quite obvious if you knows these sorts of people that a millionaire has a very different approach to money than a billionaire. A billionaire isnt lucky, statistically that doesnt make much sense as most are not billionairs from single ventures, they become rich over many many short term successes and failures. Over long periods of time luck averages out and its mostly skill... Unless you became a billionaire over night or inhereited it (which is a minority among the rich) then its skill mostly with an element of luck that is fairly minor.
> they both did great and deserve to live well etc. I'm not eliminating that by reducing the billionaire to a multi millionaire thru progressive taxes.
They both did well but the fact that the difference is mostly luck is just pure nonsense... the billionaire consistently made better choices. They are usually far more skilled at generating wealth than millionaires, this should be apparent given that these are long term gains over hundreds of thousands of decisions, not a roll of the dice.
@freemo @volkris
I don't know what I said that you think you're responding to here.