The wealth tax typically proposed by these campaigns (like 2 or 3%) would raise money but it would not stop billionaires from getting richer. (That’s why even billionaires advocate for it.)
The finish line should not be “raise money to fund public programs.”
The finish line should be “billionaires don’t exist.”
There literally should just be a cap. Make it something ridiculous like “billionaires are not allowed to exist, so everything you earn past $999,999,999.99 is public property” and I don’t see any way how someone could disagree with this other than wanting to be a malicious parasite. That is more than enough money to buy a yacht for your yacht and is also an amount of money that cannot be legitimately obtained.
I’ve always liked the idea of the cap being an immediate loss of any legal property protection.
This would not be through any process, they simply instantly legally cease to have any property rights anytime they cannot prove their net worth is below the limit.
Any member of the public can reclaim any piexe of their ex-property, until the not-quite-billiomaire gets a court ruling confirming their not-a-billionaire status.
Then the not-yet-billionaires can figure out how to constantly stay comfortably below the limit.
Or…they can file an updated wealth disclosure every time they attempt to keep anyone from walking away with any piece of their former property.
If they want to avoid the inconvenience of their yachts, cars, pets, plants, fences, lamps, and television sets being repossessed, they can
negotiate with their employees unions for collective ownership in good faith, instead.
It’ll be fun to see how many of them are too stupid to take a good deal, and lose their stupid toys.
The finish line should not be “raise money to fund public programs.”
The finish line should be “billionaires don’t exist.”
Financially speaking, helping the poor and hurting the rich are not the same thing, and it’s honestly concerning when I see people prioritize the latter over the former. Eradicating poverty matters infinitely more than keeping people’s net worth (which as a reminder, is just a guessed (there is no billionaire whose net worth is precisely known), hypothetical, fluctuating price tag on the stuff they own, should they decide to sell it) under some arbitrary maximum.
And that’s without even mentioning how much tax revenue is wasted on things that don’t actually serve the population at large. What good is an extra $X billion in tax revenue if it’s all pissed away anyway? As one example, the US government spends more per capita on healthcare than any other country, and yet we’re far from #1 in most healthcare categories. How does that make sense? We’re already not getting what we’re paying for, fixing things like that is more important than simply increasing the amount of money going down the same wasteful hole, I think.
Edit: That argument is just “trickle down economics” with extra steps.
I disagree.
Billionaires have outsize influence. They buy politicians to set public policies that affect the working class and divert billions of our dollars into their pockets.
If you put all of their money in a pit and set it on fire, it would have a greater impact than just taxing them 2% and spending all of it on public programs, because they would no longer be able to do harm on a billionaire scale.
The people could heal.
We’d still have other beasts to deal with, but the existence of billionaires is a cap on the lives of the working class.
Even if I had asserted that billionaires cap the lives of the working class to the poverty line (which I didn’t), the poverty line is an outdated, unserious measure of how Americans are doing.
More about the FPL
My assertion is that billionaires are a cap on the lives of the working class, not that the cap is set at the federal poverty line.
I can’t see your links (imgur says their servers are overloaded), but I’ll use US figures for the sake of argument.
The [federal poverty line is] derived from the official poverty thresholds, which were originally developed in the 1960s based on the cost of a minimum food diet multiplied by three — reflecting the “fact” [quotations mine] that food makes up about one-third of a typical family’s budget. (What is the federal poverty level?)
Look up “average American monthly expenses”, and you’ll see that food consistently accounts for less than 15%. The FPL is outdated and has been for decades.
There’s controversy about the right way to measure poverty, but no one serious on either side of the argument points at “the percentage of the population living in poverty” and calls it a day.
The majority of Americans support progressive policies. But whether or not a policy is passed depends on whether or not it has the support of the billionaire class.
More on the popularity of progressive policies and the impact of wealth on policy change
Over half of Americans say they lack the cash to cover a $1,000 unexpected emergency expense. Increased earnings — not lower spending — is main driver for boosting emergency funds. The most common cause of emergency expenses in the United States is a medical emergency. Regardless of whether or not they meet a 1960’s definition of poverty, Americans are not, by and large, financially well.
When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.
…
When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.
Working class Americans (and not just those at or below the federal poverty line) support policy changes that would materially improve their lives. When those policies conflict with the interests of billionaires, the billionaires stop them from passing.
“tax the rich” is a scam?
The wealth tax typically proposed by these campaigns (like 2 or 3%) would raise money but it would not stop billionaires from getting richer. (That’s why even billionaires advocate for it.)
The finish line should not be “raise money to fund public programs.”
The finish line should be “billionaires don’t exist.”
How about putting a cap onto inheritance?
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good, don’t let good be the enemy of okay, and don’t let okay be the enemy of “not as bad as it could be”
Because it’s starting to get as bad as it can be.
Agreed.
Pass what you can pass.
But don’t let that be the finish line.
There literally should just be a cap. Make it something ridiculous like “billionaires are not allowed to exist, so everything you earn past $999,999,999.99 is public property” and I don’t see any way how someone could disagree with this other than wanting to be a malicious parasite. That is more than enough money to buy a yacht for your yacht and is also an amount of money that cannot be legitimately obtained.
Just reinstate 1950s top marginal rates. Then have a drink after a job well done.
I’ve always liked the idea of the cap being an immediate loss of any legal property protection.
This would not be through any process, they simply instantly legally cease to have any property rights anytime they cannot prove their net worth is below the limit.
Any member of the public can reclaim any piexe of their ex-property, until the not-quite-billiomaire gets a court ruling confirming their not-a-billionaire status.
Then the not-yet-billionaires can figure out how to constantly stay comfortably below the limit.
Or…they can file an updated wealth disclosure every time they attempt to keep anyone from walking away with any piece of their former property.
If they want to avoid the inconvenience of their yachts, cars, pets, plants, fences, lamps, and television sets being repossessed, they can negotiate with their employees unions for collective ownership in good faith, instead.
It’ll be fun to see how many of them are too stupid to take a good deal, and lose their stupid toys.
Oh, so we put the bar at proving a negative? Easy peasy.
Financially speaking, helping the poor and hurting the rich are not the same thing, and it’s honestly concerning when I see people prioritize the latter over the former. Eradicating poverty matters infinitely more than keeping people’s net worth (which as a reminder, is just a guessed (there is no billionaire whose net worth is precisely known), hypothetical, fluctuating price tag on the stuff they own, should they decide to sell it) under some arbitrary maximum.
And that’s without even mentioning how much tax revenue is wasted on things that don’t actually serve the population at large. What good is an extra $X billion in tax revenue if it’s all pissed away anyway? As one example, the US government spends more per capita on healthcare than any other country, and yet we’re far from #1 in most healthcare categories. How does that make sense? We’re already not getting what we’re paying for, fixing things like that is more important than simply increasing the amount of money going down the same wasteful hole, I think.
Edit: That argument is just “trickle down economics” with extra steps.
I disagree.
Billionaires have outsize influence. They buy politicians to set public policies that affect the working class and divert billions of our dollars into their pockets.
If you put all of their money in a pit and set it on fire, it would have a greater impact than just taxing them 2% and spending all of it on public programs, because they would no longer be able to do harm on a billionaire scale.
The people could heal.
We’d still have other beasts to deal with, but the existence of billionaires is a cap on the lives of the working class.
Billionaires (inflation-adjusted, of course) per capita in the US increased by about 7x compared to 100 years ago, while the percentage of the population living in poverty is 4-6x lower today than it was 100 years ago, compared to what it is today.
The correlation is in literally the opposite direction as what you claim. How do you reconcile these facts with your assertion?
Correlation is not causation.
Even if I had asserted that billionaires cap the lives of the working class to the poverty line (which I didn’t), the poverty line is an outdated, unserious measure of how Americans are doing.
More about the FPL
My assertion is that billionaires are a cap on the lives of the working class, not that the cap is set at the federal poverty line.
I can’t see your links (imgur says their servers are overloaded), but I’ll use US figures for the sake of argument.
Look up “average American monthly expenses”, and you’ll see that food consistently accounts for less than 15%. The FPL is outdated and has been for decades.
There’s controversy about the right way to measure poverty, but no one serious on either side of the argument points at “the percentage of the population living in poverty” and calls it a day.
The majority of Americans support progressive policies. But whether or not a policy is passed depends on whether or not it has the support of the billionaire class.
More on the popularity of progressive policies and the impact of wealth on policy change
Over half of Americans say they lack the cash to cover a $1,000 unexpected emergency expense. Increased earnings — not lower spending — is main driver for boosting emergency funds. The most common cause of emergency expenses in the United States is a medical emergency. Regardless of whether or not they meet a 1960’s definition of poverty, Americans are not, by and large, financially well.
The majority of Americans support progressive programs that address the causes of this precarity: paid maternity leave, childcare support, boosting the minimum wage, free college, and Medicare for All.
But what we want doesn’t get passed.
Working class Americans (and not just those at or below the federal poverty line) support policy changes that would materially improve their lives. When those policies conflict with the interests of billionaires, the billionaires stop them from passing.
In other words, they put a cap on it.