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.
Glad to help. You are sounding the alarm, but not in a way that people will listen.
Just like project25 these guys have already told everyone exactly what they are going to do. And it will happen quickly.
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.
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.
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.”
BuTt they CreAte JerBs!
Narrator: They did not, in fact, create jobs.
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!
What would be REALLY new is if people understood how little the top income tax rates matter because almost nobody pays them. Income tax rates only apply to salaries. Wealthy people get almost all their income from capital gains - i.e. buying and selling stocks and other investment items. Capital gains tax has always been much lower than income tax, currently I think 10-15% depending on how long the item is held before being sold. Raising top income tax rates back above 90% would not “tax the rich” or provide enough tax money to take any burden off the rest of us. It’s a silly PR slogan.
To ACTUALLY tax the rich we need to increase capital gains taxes. Or create new wealth taxes. Or even a ceiling on individual wealth. That last one would have the greatest effect, by limiting how much money any one person has available to influence politics - which really seems like the root of the whole problem. Secondly, abolish Citizens United, the congressional act that made corporations “people”, to stop corporate wealth from buying politicians.
The difficulty is how to get anything like this past the people whose power it would eliminate. A good first step tho would be whenever you feel like you understand something because of some meme you saw, remind yourself that you don’t, and then stop scrolling and do some real reading on the subject.
Oh, not to worry. I’m not satisfied with taking a couple percent of them anymore. I have become way too radicalized by these leeches turning everything to shit. I won’t be sated without eating the rich at this point. They could willingly give up their wealth and I’d still call for blood for the harm they have caused.
Quick question:
how much money would be worth if every person on earth ceased to exist?
Quick answer:
That would be a stupid idea with no value.
I feel like short is already your tax rate. Long being like 13%.
I’d propose the top tax rates on income. Then tax short cg at that rate, 2-3% less for long (or some other scale designed to keep money stable in the market.)
But yes, convince everyone that needs done and the rich to ever let it get close to passing.
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.
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.
Because even if they pay a lot less percentagewise, they still pay a lot. Having like 10% of something is better than having nothing.
We should still track down and close loopholes, and increase taxes on capital gains tho.
They’re paying $0, in fact they are managing to get refunds on $0 paid.
The top of the top are paying $0. But That’s like the 0.1% or the 0.01% and yes wed probably be best if they left. The top 10% are not paying a fair percentage but they are paying a lot in total dollars. Blue states are beginning to see a lot of wealthy leave for no income tax states. They still pay taxes in those places in the form of property and sales tax. Now the red state gets their tax dollars.
Taxing should be a tool, but not our only tool to fight income inequality.
Money has no value by itself.
If all humans died today (thanos snap with 100%), the paper-money would still exist, but would you (your ghost, I mean) say that a 100 dollars still holds value in an earth devoid of humans?
I will argue for no. Without humans, money has no value.
Money is the value being priced on labor-hours that was stolen by someone.
When an ultra rich move their assets outside, they are moving the stolen hours.
But even if he didn’t move those stolen hours outside, they would still be stolen hours.
Keeping the ultra-rich in our country is enabling the thief that keeps stealing us.
The true value is made by those who work the fields, academy, construction and all other sectors that keep society working.
The people living on a country and the sites/places/plot of lands can’t be moved overseas.
The rich must choose between getting his money out of high taxes and keeping his access to a country’s internal market if he decides to remove all of his investing (including machinery/real state investment) from a given country.
A country should tax them wherever they live if they have that country’s citizenship. Pretty sure they do that in the US. If they don’t want to pay they can give up the citizenship.
They do that in the US. It hurts a lot of people leaving the US. They are the only relevant country in the world that does this.
Very bad. For example. Someone gets his income from Australia. He lives in Indonesia. Then the indonesian government will tax on the person’s worldwide income. The Australian government will tax the Australian income. The American government will tax all of the income.
Then there’s double taxation treaties to reduce the damage.
It’s nasty. USA in this instance has no right to claim that income. The person does not live in USA. The income does not come from USA.
Just an abuse of power
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
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.
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.
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+%.
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.
I’m not trying to introduce a novel concept.
I’m trying to bring up to the forefront the old concept surplus value from Karl Marx.
money isn’t just a replacement for battered goods, but also a way to precify the value of work.
Work is the real value that runs through the world.
Now, when we talk about taxing the rich, we are talking about the State getting back the value of our work (money) that the rich stole from us by underpaying our jobs.
And for those who says “The rich will move their riches to a country that pays less taxes”, I must remind you again that these riches can only be generated through work.
Tax the rich means taxing their companies and stores as well
It means not letting them have half a trillion of a surplus value that they stole from all of us (because one way or another, we are “working” for them even if by something as stupid as writing a comment on a social media).
And if, supposedly, the company desires to shutdown their factories here, the State must simply buy it and reopen the factories (maybe under another company that, but still with the state as the main “shareholder”).
What makes the factories produce goods is not a rich man with billions of dollars.
What make the goods exist is the working from man and woman in these factories.
And doing so, the company that left will also leave the internal market share where they were profiting over us, but yet, the market share will still exist and be filled by those from within the state-company.
Yeah the Labor theory of value is highly flawed. It doesn’t explain speculative gains in value that require zero labor to exist for example.
I bet Drumpf cuts taxes completely for the mega rich. You wait and see.
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?
