Any decent government should be able to enforce the laws it makes, including its own tax laws and its own employee protection laws. People who break these should face the legal penalty. People who don't break these laws should not be penalised under new made-up laws that are just easier to enforce.
The economist who helped invent the proposed wealth tax
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Any decent government should be able to enforce the laws it makes, including its own tax laws and its own employee protection laws. People who break these should face the legal penalty. People who don't break these laws should not be penalised under new made-up laws that are just easier to enforce.
This doesn't address the crux of my argument. By using services such as public roads, large internet pipes, emergency services, healthcare services, business grants and loans from the government, etc they owe us, the taxpayers, significantly more than they are paying.
The vast majority of tax burden is forced upon the middle class who are wealthy enough to be taxed significantly, but not wealthy enough to avoid taxes. Why should we disenfrachise the people who actually create value, small business owners (who are majority middle class), in order to protect the obscene wealth of people leeching off our tax dollars?
Unless you are a billionaire, voting against higher taxes on these people is voting against your own benefit.
Wealth isn't obscene.
But I already agreed wealthy people should pay more tax than people on very low incomes. The principles of taxation are that after payment of tax, the payer of higher is still financially better off than the payer of lower tax, regardless of time-frame.
What Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders etc. seek to do is appropriate wealth from the very wealthy and taper their wealth until they are excluded from that wealth bracket. This is a wonderful policy in Marxist states but in the sane world is commonly looked at as theft.
We are on the verge of a plutocracy lead the by techno-elite. The majority of the wealth of our country is concentrated in the fewest hands in history, even accounting for the robber baron days of yore.
This is, by definition, obscene. As the gap between the richest and poorest increases so does social unrest. Mobility among income strata has never been lower. It is harder today to become what I'll call "normally wealthy" than at any time in history. Entire cohorts of people are virtually excluded from normal routes of building wealth such as property ownership, market participation, and business creation by virtue of everything becoming so expensive only the upper strata can afford to be mobile. In my area for example, foreign investment from billionaires has driven the property values on normal "starter homes" so far outside of the average income of the area your average worker can't afford to buy even at the bottom.
I don't agree with Sanders and Warren on their approach, but at least they are presenting solutions rather than groveling at the heels of the plutocrats like our RNC friends.
So then your argument isn't one of ongoing efficient use of opportunities and capital? Just efficient use initially? Not quite as compelling, and certainly the "once I have property it belongs to me and mine forever" argument isn't very compelling on an economic or rational basis, even though it has emotional appeal. Just trying to make your argument more robust, and I think it has to address the issues I raised to be robust. Certainly you can't ignore the enabling and use of resources argument entirely, and the wealth inequality in a place like Argentina is very real, it can't simply be dismissed as BS without some further explanation. Don't forget, Venezuela once had the 4th highest GDP per capita in the world! But it turns out that was pretty unevenly distributed, and when the distribution gets too uneven the Chavez's of the world get elected and then it sucks for everyone. I don't think a strong argument can dismiss the very real upheaval that happens pretty much with certainty eventually around a certain level of inequality, we all know how "Let them eat cake" worked out!
I'm certainly not a fan of Sanders or Warren. But I think we need well thought out, cogent arguments and alternatives to what they're preaching. And so far I'm not really seeing that, but hoping to. Maybe by pushing each other we can work toward that goal.
But if I made money in some way (legally), and pay a high rate of taxes on my income per year, why would my remaining wealth ever go to the state? It was never the state's capital.
Venezuela - I don't think they're in the trouble they're in because of wealth inequality. Although wealth inequality is often a symptom of terrible government, as seen in Cuba and Venezuela, its not the cause of their problems, which is their terrible Marxist despotic and dehumanising governments.
Its a self-fulfilling prophecy that raising the political issue of wealth inequality begets social unrest. The fact that people are socially unrestful (if that's technically the right expression) doesn't make them right.
So what harm does wealth inequality do to the poor? None - as long as the politicians take responsibility. Wealth inequality is great for politicians - nothing is their fault any more.
You should really try to flush out your original argument, I think it had merit it just needed to be worked on a bit. Now you're just devolving into Fox talking points developed by folks far less intelligent than you or I, and I think you're better than that.
We're in violent agreement that Venezuela is in horrible shape because of the awful government it's had starting with Chavez, no question. However that awful government wouldn't ever have even come close to being in power if there hadn't been awful wealth inequality at the point Venezuela had the 4th highest per capita GDP in the world. Numbers 5-50 in per capita GDP didn't end up with that kind of government, and not coincidentally didn't have near the inequality. Listen, I hate the argument that we should avoid vast disparities in wealth simply so we can avoid the guillotine or at the very least nationalization of our companies, it's unsatisfying on many levels. But it's undeniable that it's eventually what happens when severe wealth inequality exists, pretty much every time. You can argue all day that it's not right for the guy living in the shack with no hope of anything but minimum wage jobs for 40 years to be unrestful toward the kid living in the mansion he inherited by accident of birth. But that doesn't stop reality that he is going to be, regardless of what you or I think is right or even what objectively is right. Eventually extreme wealth disparity nearly inevitably leads to bad things for the wealthy....and even more relevant lack of extreme wealth disparity almost always avoids bad things happening to the wealthy. You can blame bad government, bad people, what people should or shouldn't do....but at the end of the day it's an inescapable reality that places with extreme inequality are unstable and places without extreme inequality are far more robust to living through bad governments and angry people. Any argument has to address that fact to be a strong, robust argument.
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There is a real problem when huge amounts of US consumer spending is being funneled through tax advantaged entities in order obtain near zero effective tax rates for people who measure profit in billions.
The tax code is 100% a tool for the mega rich to competitively cheat the US consumer. There are other things like regulatory capture, monopolist practices, and accounting fictions.
The abuses are absolutely ridiculous.
However, the voting citizens of the United States have started to wise up.
Up until now they have been placated with excuses, lip service, misdirection, outright obfuscation and various other forms of denial.
A wealth tax may be clumsy, and it may be unsophisticated. It may even be ineffective, but the people of the United States know the game is rigged. They just don't really understand who is responsible. They suspect that there is blame among all of the moneyed class.
But, believe me, the middle class is getting bent over every day of their lives and they are starting to wonder whether it is worth it to sit by and stay quiet when Warren is saying let's even the score. There is massive social unrest in this country. It is a tinderbox.
The tax code is 100% a tool for the mega rich to competitively cheat the US consumer. There are other things like regulatory capture, monopolist practices, and accounting fictions.
The abuses are absolutely ridiculous.
However, the voting citizens of the United States have started to wise up.
Up until now they have been placated with excuses, lip service, misdirection, outright obfuscation and various other forms of denial.
A wealth tax may be clumsy, and it may be unsophisticated. It may even be ineffective, but the people of the United States know the game is rigged. They just don't really understand who is responsible. They suspect that there is blame among all of the moneyed class.
But, believe me, the middle class is getting bent over every day of their lives and they are starting to wonder whether it is worth it to sit by and stay quiet when Warren is saying let's even the score. There is massive social unrest in this country. It is a tinderbox.
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Its just a self-perpetuating cycle, between wealth inequality and these rotten governments. Wealth inequality is used to stir up populist movements and rotten governments come to power as a result, which do little for the people and use despotic anti-democratic means to sustain their power. Left and right use similar tactics here, but it happens to have been a more successful tactic for the Communists than for the right: that's maybe only because they're more organised.
Warren and Sanders are playing the same game. They say there's a problem and the only way to solve it is to let them get into power. I am not convinced its the problem they say it is, and if it is an issue, its not necessary to hand the USA over to Socialists etc. in order to solve it. Or anything. What extreme left or right government has got into power using wealth inequality as a campaigning tool and then made a serious impact on the statistics?
It has to be recognised that the only point of politics for politicians is to get power. Get power and avoid blame. None of this is aimed at making people's lives very different.