Why does it matter if their motives are pure? You don't need a moral justification to do a thing that helps other people and is entirely at your personal expense.
You're right, but unless a person is spending money for a social-cause that benefits us all, they absolutely do not deserve any special status, press coverage or a title such as "philanthropist." They're just spending money for themselves, and that's nothing special. Anyone can do that.
If everyone has to benefit, this seems to define philanthropy to be an impossible feat.
I suspect you're thinking of some celebrities or causes you agree with and assuming their motives must be pure because they agree with your interests. This isn't saying you have some devious intent, I'm just pointing out a potential unquestioned assumption you may hold.
Maybe the compromise is this: Wanting people to like you (or wanting good PR) may be an impure motive, but it's also the least concerning impure motive. After all, if a very powerful person wants to be liked by others, that motivation forces them to then listen to others and consider their interests.
I didn't try to define philanthropy at all. Call it what you will.
I'm not thinking of any celebrities, and it's really weird that you made that assumption.
It's simply unimpressive to me when people give away money through foundations or other organized means just cause they're rich. The bar should be much higher to earn anyone's praise. That's all I'm saying. And I don't have anything to add to what you've written.
In my opinion, the problem isn't that people hate on Billionaires for philanthropic acts, but increasing wealth gap. In other words - very fact that billionaires exist.
Unless you believe everybody is equally skilled at managing money, investment and entrepreneurship, it's natural that some people will be more successful than others. China 70 years ago had no wealth gap, because everyone was dirt poor (except maybe the Party members).
Calling it skill is one option, but is a very ideologically colored one. Ideally, yes skill and hard work would lead to money as a reward and as a way to promote the most skilled to powerful positions so they can use those skills to improve the common good.
1) In my opinion, on an everyday scale of richness, the most important causal factor is family background, including inheritance. Would you support abolishing all forms of inheritance? Then skill could develop on an even, level playing field. For some reason the same people who say the rich are rich because they are skilled and work hard, are the same people who really want to keep the system of inheritance intact.
2) On the billionaire level of richness it is mostly luck, out of a strictly limited pool of potential candidates.
Look I'm not saying that managing money, technical skills, investment etc should not matter. Of course it should. Of course it's true that some people work harder than others (even if we discount the upbringing, and the family's economic situation).
That said, the difference in standard of living, and the difference in the number of zeros in bank balances surely do not reflect the aforementioned differences. Surely you don't believe that someone works a thousand time better than me (current income ~ 2.5k EUR)?
I'm saying that the wealth gap is far too wide for any reasonable justification. I'm not rooting for a completely egalitarian/communist society, but the current situation needs to change.
>That said, the difference in standard of living, and the difference in the number of zeros in bank balances surely do not reflect the aforementioned differences.
Look at it this way. A company is something someone can create that grows in value many orders of magnitude. Wouldn't we hence expect an ownership stake in this to also grow many orders of magnitude? Whereas the average worker assists in creating some product that has a fixed value, so when they receive a share of what people are willing to pay for that product/service, it's obviously much less compared to if they had created something with the potential for exponential growth.
If the worker assists in creating a company, and manages to negotiate for stock in it, then they too can experience an exponential growth in their income's zeros if it grows in value.
Too many temporarily embarrassed billionaires in our population to push for this from the bottom, and too many billionaires using their version of lunch money on our politicians to get traction from the top.
This is a problem in the US, and probably other places as well. People know the system is rigged against them but they think they'll be rich one day and want to take advantage of the same system.
I like George Carlin's saying: "They call it the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."
This is such a tired take. Is it not possible to just believe that a person shouldn’t HAVE to pay more (percentage-wise) in taxes because they’re successful - while at the same time, be fine with the credits / deductions available to the less fortunate? I can’t be the unicorn here.
The “temporarily embarrassed” take is tired. I can believe Jeff Bezos should pay the same tax rate as I do, regardless of his ability to pay more, without having my reasoning be because I assume I’ll be a billionaire someday.
Amazon still pays to register vehicles, so they’re paying for roads as much as anyone that uses them, right? I work from home, and pay as much for the roads as my neighbor who commutes. Is that fair? No - but I’m completely fine with it.
Um, they aren’t paying more, percentage wise. That’s why everyone is upset. They’re paying more in gross volumes of money, but significantly less when compared to their actual income.
You should ask, whose life would be enriched more by having more of the money they’re paying in tax - the average income household paying 30% on their $40,000, or the millionaire paying 7% on their hundreds of millions of income?
By being on this site, it seems safe to assume that you’re in the top 10% of earners across the US. Perhaps it would be worth thinking of this from the point of view of the other 90% of the population? Folks for whom that tax money would greatly enrich their lives?
Also, let’s not forget that it’s not just the visible 30% that’s taken from your paycheck, but a matching 30% that’s paid by your employer on your behalf. So, by leveling the playing field, a median earner could be getting upwards of $20,000 more than they are today.
Without thinking too much I’d agree, but I have a hard time saying someone making $25k/yr should pay 25% of their income compared to someone making $1mil/yr.
If the very wealthiest weren’t paying lower effective tax rates than the people making $200k/yr. that would be a start.
If by "the wealthiest" you mean millionares and billionaires, then you must also know that they have ways to move their money around to avoid those taxes. Some programmer with 200k wage, living in an ultra expensive city, doesn't.
It's probably different in the UK where The Guardian is, but in the USA the bottom 45% of wage earners pay $0 federal income tax while the top 20% pay 87% of it. I'm not sure how much more you should slap on the "evil" job-creating rich before it's "proper", but 87% already seems pretty high to me.
Top are doctors, engineers, small business owners, etc., and usually, they are the ones who get hit with the highest taxes (atleast around here in europe).
The super rich have ways to move their money, the ones above usually don't.
Well, 2% of 100 million dollars is more than 30% of $40,000. However, it’s fairly easy to argue that to the earner of that $40,000, that 30% has an impact on their life significantly greater than the millionaire’s 2%.
And, if we set everyone at a flat (for example) 3%, it’s not as if the government would lose money. That additional 1% against all the super-rich would more than cover the missing contributions of those who need the money more.
What would you propose, squeeze more water from the stone? The bottom 45% of wage earnes are broke as hell, they hardly have any income to tax. Meanwhile, the top 20% have so much more money that you can raise 87% of income tax revenue even with today's more flattened tax brackets.
He's also giving thousands of people jobs, making necessities available to millions at low prices, and paying enormous amounts in total taxes. Can gov't really do more with his money than he can? Do you really want to disincentivize what he does for humanity?
Enterpreneurs don't "give" jobs to people. Refer to the "wage labour" definition:
> Wage labour is the socioeconomic relationship between a worker and an employer, where the worker sells their labour power under a formal or informal employment contract.
precisely, they're purchasing labor. And actually, Bezos is puchasing it at a dirty cheap price.
Pedantic. He created a job opening, they accepted it. Ask NYC how terrible those 30,000 new Amazon jobs are ... oh right, they don't exist there because the "Bezos is a meanie" people drove them away.
A job is better than no job. Bezos hired them to do something productive.
Incorrect. Amazon says it was not about the politics[0]. Plus, Amazon is still coming to NYC anyway, because there was still demand for an office there[1]. But now NYC gets it for free rather than paying billions in subsidies.
The HQ2 jobs don't exist in Crystal City yet, either. Let's not count chickens before they hatch... particularly with Amazon quietly continuing to hatch chickens in NYC anyways.
NYC doesn't seem like it's struggling to attract jobs.
Most of Bezos' money is invested in Amazon, investing in growth to create more jobs and better/cheaper goods & services. What he actually spends, funds jobs that exist because rich people exist and buy things others don't.
While also destroying jobs in the retail sector as brick and mortar stores are closing shop.
> Do you really want to disincentivize what he does for humanity?
This is such a broad question to directly answer. But in my opinion, a big part of Amazon's success has been at the expense of dozens of retail companies (Macy's stock price was $50+ 5 years ago, today it's $15, and the same trend exists for just about every large retailer).
I'm sure a lot of people will disagree, but I much prefer an economy with many smaller companies competing in the market instead of one giant company controlled by 1 person dominating everything. I think the government should do more to incentivize healthy market competition (which Amazon is not), BUT I don't think the solution to that is more taxes..
He's not giving away jobs as charity because he has money. The need for these jobs stems from the demand for the work produced by those jobs, not his on-hand availability of money. If he/Amazon didn't have the money on hand, they would just borrow it and/or raise investments.
What Jeff Bezos does for humanity: kill lots of small business owners, drive down wages, eliminate blue collar jobs, and amass entirely too much power and wealth for himself.
Neither point is good. If I only earn $50 a day and decide to buy a sandwich which has a meal tax of $1.00 - the problem isn’t that I just paid 5% of my earnings in sales taxes. The problem is I’m only earning $50 a day.
But even more to the point is that that only way you can calculate that someone earning $15,000 a year is paying a “higher tax rate” than someone earning $15 million a year is by ignore the fact that the person earning $15k is year is getting EITC, food, and health care subsidies and has an effective negative tax rate even if they did actually pay a few hundred dollars in sales taxes.
Here is a good analysis on average tax rates and effective marginal tax rates across income deciles:
Note that average effective tax rate is negative up through the 4th decile. (Figure 2)
There are points along the curve where the effective marginal tax rate for a mid-range income earner is higher than the effective marginal tax rate of a high income earner. This is due to phase-out of transfer credits — specifically, ACA credits phasing out. (Figure 7) Specifically what that means is you earn an extra dollar and in addition to it being taxed at e.g. 25% it also causes you to lose .25 of ACA credits, making the effective tax rate on that $1 be 50%.
I guess that’s one way of thinking about income redistribution, but I don’t think it’s a robust way to analyze it.
In a competitive market with low switching costs, workers get paid roughly what their work is worth. It’s government’s function to ensure the market is competitive and the switching costs are low.
But a competitive market with low switching costs does not guarantee that every worker is capable of performing at the median in terms of value creation. In fact it’s a mathematical impossibility.
So in perfectly competitive market with a progressive taxation model, lower income earners will be subsidized by the higher income earners, despite everyone being paid entirely competitive and appropriate wages for their individual contributions.
It’s not the employers responsibility to subsidize below-median earners, because they aren’t the ones collecting the surplus from the above-median earners.
I personally think that most of these subsidies shouldn’t ever phase out, specifically because they screw over the middle class with punitive marginal tax rates. The net effect is that you still cross from negative to positive effective taxes at some point, but it happens with a much smoother marginal tax rate versus gross income.
A completely different discussion is whether employers should be able to hire very low skilled workers to do menial jobs at very low pay, or whether we should force employers to provide training and support to employees to the point where they can perform enough valuable work to justify some minimum wage, and everything else just needs to be automated away.
>It’s not the employers responsibility to subsidize below-median earners, because they aren’t the ones collecting the surplus from the above-median earners.
This I disagree with emphatically. The empoyers benefit from the social structure supported by tax dollars.
Could you imagine a starting a business in the wilderness with no transportation, utilities or other community supported infrastructure ?
Those companies also put the most wear and tear on the infrastructure.
I’m not following the logic. Obviously we build infrastructure so that we can have an economy. You don’t get a $20 trillion economy without it.
Now we have the infrastructure and the economy, from which the government collects ~$6.5 trillion each year.
Companies hire people and pay them for the jobs they perform. In general, more valuable jobs pay higher salaries. The whole thing is a virtuous cycle. Without companies paying salaries, no consumers are buying products from those companies, and so on.
In the end, all of the $6.5 trillion comes from people living here. Whether it’s payroll taxes, income taxes, excise taxes, business profit taxes, usage fees,... it’s people paying these taxes out of their personal bank account, or out of a corporate bank account which is in turn owned by the shareholders of that company.
Generally increasing the tax rate on a company just increases the price of that conpany’s goods on the market. The customers of the company pay, or the company goes out of business.
The infrastructure is there so that companies can use it to hire employees, sell goods & services provided by their employees, grow the economy, increase payroll, and generate more tax revenue.
The tax structure is designed around redistribution of wealth. It does not follow that therefore somehow employers are underpaying their employees.
There have been cases where employers have colluded to keep wages below market. The government should prosecute those cases and fine those companies.
And like I said, if we want a minimum wage, that’s fine, but what it’s setting is a floor on the marginal value of an employee that is hireable, and anyone below that threshold becomes un-hireable.
You're looking at a single number, his income tax rate.
This is why high tax proponents are never satisfied: we can raise all kinds of rates, but there's always some tax that a "rich" (which is never well defined) person is not paying enough of.
Why the notion that gov't should be the provider & arbiter of all? Why do none of the "they don't pay enough taxes" crowd not realize the rich do so much of, and more efficiently, what the gov't purports to with massive overhead? Job creation, charity, arts funding, lowering costs of necessities, etc - and at levels & locations which gov't would never achieve.
The "tax/soak the rich" notion seems almost entirely punitive, not productive. Yeah Musk has $billions, he's also creating thousands of jobs (direct & indirect), making the expensive affordable, improving environment, etc - and able to because he's very rich. Even the "mean" rich create jobs & markets etc that gov't can't.
Everyone deserves a say in the allocation of resources. The way we accomplish that is through government. Elon Musk is not improving the environment, he's launching cars into space for giggles while mistreating his workers.
> Everyone deserves a say in the allocation of resources.
How about we amend that to, 'Everyone deserves a say in the allocation of resources, in proportion to their demonstrated ability to amass and manage resources'.
Elon Musk figured out how to make a ton of money; he has more right to determine its use than some bureaucrat in an office. You say that government is our method of collective allocation, but it's really unelected officials doing what lobbyists recommend. I trust them a lot less than I trust a rich philanthropist.
No thanks! The "demonstrated ability to amass and manage resources" is mostly a matter of luck, with a small dash of willingness to exploit others. Everyone deserves an equal say in the allocation of resources. It pains me to say that this must include even those who are willing to exploit other people to amass resources.
By what reasoning does someone deserve a say in the allocation of something they made no contribution to producing? How would you feel if somebody came to your house, ate your food and slept on your bed, because they felt they deserved a say in how those resources were allocated?
> The "demonstrated ability to amass and manage resources" is mostly a matter of luck, with a small dash of willingness to exploit others
Citation very much needed. I'd say "luck given the presence of opportunity and ability", perhaps - but luck alone is certainly not enough. (Or else why do lottery winners do so poorly?)
As for "the willingness to exploit others", is this universally true? Are performers exploiting their audiences? Companies their customers? Their workers? Their vendors?
I think that would be trivially true for some definitions of "exploit", but that is not the definition of exploit that most people would tend to think of.
> in proportion to their demonstrated ability to amass and manage resources'.
This makes the huge assumption that "the market" is already equitably rewarding talent with money. It is not. Luck, heritage (inherited wealth and power), and race/gender all skew how much you can amass and the effects are exponential, not linear.
That logic justifies Kings and Dictators; if someone, by force, amasses total power over a people, then according to your rule they deserve to control it.
Kings and Dictators get overthrown for a reason.
All people deserve to have a say in society, even if they don't want it, use it poorly, or use it reluctantly. It's not because human rights should matter to all individuals, it is because the implementation of human rights and equality is a better guarantee of social stability, and therefore a better conduit for trade and growth.
Kings and Dictators open up a society to turmoil and instability, which is bad for markets. There is no reason for a society not to guarantee social stability through measures of equality at this point.
There's a huge difference. Kings and dictators get power through war and violence. Musk got rich through making and selling things people want. Surely you see the difference between war and commerce.
Well actually no. Kings and Dictators also gain power by being opportunistic in the same way as Musk. They begin by amassing social power, and then at the right moment they take over. See the Medici family of Florence, or the East India Company. War is not the only means for domination.
Also, the only difference between war and commerce is the level of violence applied. War is an exchange, just as commerce is. The only difference is what is being offered in the exchange. In commerce "I will give you this for that." And in war, it's the same: "I will give you my bullets for your surrender."
Lastly, Elon Musk didn't just get rich through selling things people want. No one believes that this works. Henry Ford even said as much: "If I had asked people what they wanted they would have asked for faster horses." Musk gained his power by being opportunistic. He jumped into opportunities at the right time, competitively fought to get the engineers he needed, and punched his way through almost every problem he faced. The product quality is a byproduct of his ruthlessness as a capitalist. Don't forget it.
> Lastly, Elon Musk didn't just get rich through selling things people want. No one believes that this works. Henry Ford even said as much: "If I had asked people what they wanted they would have asked for faster horses." Musk gained his power by being opportunistic. He jumped into opportunities at the right time, competitively fought to get the engineers he needed, and punched his way through almost every problem he faced. The product quality is a byproduct of his ruthlessness as a capitalist. Don't forget it.
I think you're horribly twisting the meaning of Ford's words there. It doesn't mean "ignore what people want", it means to figure out what they actually want. People didn't want faster horses, they wanted better transport - "faster horses" was just how they expressed that.
I think you're horribly twisting my words. I didn't mean that at all. I meant exactly what you wrote and there really isn't anything there for you to accuse me of otherwise.
You amass resources by investing
(allocating) them well. If you invest poorly, you lose what you invested. Over time, the person who invested best will have the most resources.
Resources don't just appear out of thin air, someone has to invest in producing/creating/mining them. Why should somebody who made no contribution to creating something have any say in how it's used?
You raise an interesting point, and I'd like to follow it further with some numbers across job creation, charity, arts funding, etc, so I can follow things more closely?
Also, how do contributions to these differ across the rich? Are there a couple of 'whales' who keep the numbers high while the other freeload or are they all equally contributing in this efficient manner?
It's also somewhat implicit (correct me if I'm wrong) in your post that government spending and voluntary contributions from the super rich are almost mutually exclusive. To argue devil's advocate, if that's not the case, both can coexist and the overall amount goes up.
One last point, I would like the super rich to be taxed at the same proportion as the middle class. I know wealth isn't linearly distributed but I do expect the relative tax bill to be - would you say that's punitive?
> Why the notion that gov't should be the provider & arbiter of all?
Because the government is democratically elected. Billionaires are not.
> Why do none of the "they don't pay enough taxes" crowd not realize the rich do so much of, and more efficiently, what the gov't purports to with massive overhead?
[citation needed] In fact, there's an easy counter-example. Healthcare. More expensive than any public system, with worse outcomes for the general population.
Democracy just means you managed to convince more idiots to say A rather than B. It's not like it is really an admirable state of affairs.
Billionaires have to at least be competent enough to make their money, and shelter it from the thieving governments and other leeches that are trying to suck it away from them.
"Billionaires have to at least be competent enough to make their money, and shelter it from the thieving governments and other leeches that are trying to suck it away from them."
Is this actually true? At having that much money you can hire someone to be competent for you in wealth management.
Individuals choosing to engage in mutually beneficial activities, rather than being told at implied gunpoint to do what a bunch of ignorant strangers, or a tyrannical dictator, decided.
Democracy is, literally, a majority deciding what laws all must adhere to. They don't know/care about a minority's circumstances/needs/choices, yet impose their ill-informed will through the police power of the state (to wit, obey or we'll use force increasing up to and including death).
Stating an insane position, even one with internal logic, and then saying "show me how that's not true" does not make your position either correct or convincing.
What's more, your position is very much the one in the minority. It is incumbent upon you to convince us, or else you will simply be ignored. You haven't done anything like a credible attempt to do so.
I trust politicians as much as I trust billionaires: not at all. In fact as the OP points out at least the occasional billionaire will do something productive for society. The same can't be said for the government.
> [citation needed] In fact, there's an easy counter-example. Healthcare. More expensive than any public system, with worse outcomes for the general population.
The only reason health care is so expensive in the US is because of government regulations. From doctor accreditation, FDA approval, health insurance "marketplace" rules... The government is the single largest force pushing up the price of health care.
You seem to have grasped the essence of the argument, except that health insurers wouldn't have captive customers because the captivity is enforced largely by government regulations.
The point is that mandatory certification of doctors, medications vetted through a highly risk averse process and having no flexibility in dealing with health insurers all secure better outcomes at a cost that nobody apart from the government thinks is reasonable. If anyone had a choice, which they do not, they would probably choose something cheaper.
It is lovely that surgeons are all wealthy, articulate, over-educated polymaths with numerous hobbies and interests (and can probably play a musical instrument, I don't know), etc, etc, except it isn't actually obvious why they need all that. At the end of the day a surgeon needs experience, steady hands and an aversion to doing things that are not necessary. And when tested people will prefer cheap with a good reputation to overqualified but approved by some guild.
It isn't like accidents don't already happen. Can't escape from risk using bureaucracy; minimising risk at all costs is a sign that people are making bad decisions.
Assuming you live in the USA, the simple fact, that you can leave your house and have access to a (still) working transportation infrastructure and do not need (I hope) private security to protect your life and property is proof that the Government does something productive for society.
I am as off by a lot of recent Government actions and their seeming inability to fix obvious issues. But to argue they to nothing productive for society? That is just plain wrong.
Also, I'd like to highlight that millions of citizens are only healthy/alive because of regulations. Are they perfect? Far from it, but can we live without them? No.
It's a mixed bag. My daughter-in-law was doing a rotation in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins, and the commissioner of police(?) that lived on her block was mugged. She definitely didn't feel safe there, and will not likely accept a residency there because of the security situation.
So in Baltimore at least, the local government has fundamentally failed at some of the things mentioned.
Baltimore is a funny one, because I was reading about it and it's actually in one of the wealthiest, most educated parts of the US. But the city itself is a dump. What's going on there if you've got all these wealthy, educated people around, and yet the place is a kip. Is everybody just sitting in their gardens in their leafy suburbs while the world around them burns?
Well, obviously this is not a binary situation. There is more than one government, and event within the same government, it's still people governing and people being governed. I am afraid we have to expect some gradient here.
>Also, I'd like to highlight that millions of citizens are only healthy/alive because of regulations
Citation needed? There were practically no regulations a century ago compared to now, and while more people died then, it certainly wasn't millions (unless you're counting something like vaccines as "regulation").
Looking at increased average life expectancy [1], decreased child death rates [2] etc over the last 1-2 millennia, I'd say millions is a very reasonable estimate.
> More expensive than any public system, with worse outcomes for the general population.
That presupposes the US would have a cheaper system if it were public. (Also most European systems aren’t “public systems” but that’s a separate issue.) We spend more per student on our public education system than almost every other OECD country, to get far worse results. Our public transit systems spend several times as much money per mile to build transit, again to get worse results. There are scant few examples of the US public sector being competitive with those of well-run European countries. (In fact I can’t think of any.) Remarkably, Canada’s non-military government spending per person is lower than America’s non-military government spending, and Canada offers significantly more services for less money.
I don’t think it is at all clear that costs wouldn’t go up under a public healthcare system in the US.
>I don’t think it is at all clear that costs wouldn’t go up under a public healthcare system in the US.
I'm a simple mathematician, so I'll admit that I tend to look at issues where numbers are involved a bit too simply sometimes. Having mentioned that, shouldn't it be self-evident that costs will go up?
You'd essentially be playing an actuarial/insurance game and on-boarding an enormous number of new beneficiaries. Naturally costs will go up. Costs per capita will go up as well due to issues like logistics. Issues that are avoided currently by, for example, simply not providing services in certain areas. (I suppose issues like logistics are not so much "avoided", as they are "offloaded". For instance, people in rural america where senior citizens sometimes have to drive 60 miles to get emergency services.)
On the flip side of all that, I suppose the entire point of government healthcare is to provide necessary services for people who are not currently being served. So at least we can see the benefits of the extra money in the goveernmental case. ie - everyone is served. Which can't be said for the current system despite its enormous expense.
I'm not an expert on what costs would do under a public healthcare system, but I think "self-evident that costs will go up" is very much wrong. You add new beneficiaries, but you also change major cost centers.
For example, the healthcare industry spends a lot of time and money on medical billing, on the side of providers sending bills and insurers paying them. Clearly some of this would be reflected in new and different bureaucracy, but probably less of it (and certainly not self-evidently more).
Also, preventative care can be much better than reactive care. Sure, a public health care provider would have to spend more money on insulin for diabetics when all of them are covered, but maybe it will spend less on emergency room visits for patients who suffer serious complications of poorly managed diabetes and can't pay the ER bill.
> More expensive than any public system, with worse outcomes for the general population.
US public schools are also more expensive than any public system, with worse outcomes for the general population. These are operated by the government.
There is little evidence that making a service "public" will make it less expensive to operate, quite the opposite. The underlying cause of relatively expensive US services is not who is operating it, as they are expensive no matter who does.
> Because the government is democratically elected. Billionaires are not.
Billionaires are as much democratically elected via purchase. Noone put a gun to our head to use AWS use Google or buy a car. On the other hand, political party campaigns require billionaires' cash. Doesn't look so democratic.
> > Why the notion that gov't should be the provider & arbiter of all?
> Because the government is democratically elected.
We didn't democratically elect them to be the provider and arbiter of all. In fact, we deliberately designed a system where there are limits on what the government can do, because we didn't want the government to be the provider and arbiter of all.
Why should the average American pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes?
Allowing the rich to choose what organizations and causes are worth supporting is certainly not Democratic. For example, you have private schools getting massive amounts of donations from Alumni, while the local elementary is shutting off water fountains because of lead exposure and they can’t afford to update the plumbing. I also don’t think the kids in the school with books so old they don’t mention 9/11 care about the millions donated to the art museum.
Why should the average American pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes?
They shouldn't. All should pay $0 taxes.
We expect adults be financially independent after a few decades. The gov't, with its ability to literally make money along with other unique powers, should be financially independent after 225 years.
The gov't isn't supposed to be some entity on its own but an orchestrator of society, balancing things, running ahead of feedback loop effects etc.
The whole concept of "financially independent govt" sounds like they are spending the tax earnings just on themselves. Of course they have overhead costs, but the main function of the govt is to redistribute.
They are supposed to be like the heart that pumps the blood around, and doesn't just use it up all for itself.
It seems like many Americans view the government as some external entity that imposed itself on the people and now the people have to keep them in quarantine. A bit like how we felt in Hungary when the Soviets were sitting on us. They came in and now are taking our stuff away.
But a country's own govt isn't supposed to be "those guys who came in and took our stuff for themselves", but rather a network of institutions that help organize society for things where market forces are not appropriate for several game theoretical reasons.
what makes you think society can’t organize itself?
The state only exists for protection of its members: military protection from other states and the monopoly on violence with a system of law internally
Multimillionaires and billionaires constantly donating to the Harvard endowment while public education--and even other private schools--is certainly overhead free, but far from an efficient use of resources.
"Why do none of the "they don't pay enough taxes" crowd not realize the rich do so much of, and more efficiently, what the gov't purports to with massive overhead? Job creation, charity, arts funding, lowering costs of necessities, etc - and at levels & locations which gov't would never achieve."
Is this actually true? The vast majority of research and innovation is gov't funded. The vast majority of tuition reimbursement and educational spending is gov't. The US Gov't is the biggest employer in the nation of the USA. Medicare, food stamps, disability spending, and social security altogether dwarf any charity that the rich is doing in the US.
What is the rich doing to the public benefit that governments aren't dwarfing them in doing? I'm super baffled here.
These individuals accumulated their massive wealth by utilizing the infrastructure and economic substrate of our society. So the people who make up that society have a right to decide democratically how some of those resources are allocated. That’s the deal.
Even assuming you are right, there are many more important values than mere efficiency. Governments are the only bodies which can realistically pursue the values and needs of the people in the face of massively powerful multinational corporations. Of course there is always room for improving the effectiveness of government, but the alternative is blind faith that the super-rich know best for us, despite their limited perspective and many well-documented flaws and biases.
Everybody had equal access to the infrastructure and economic substrate, billionaires just made better use of it to generate more value, so why should they have to pay more?
They literally can and do pay for laws written in their favor, to entrench their interests, limit their competition, and adjudicate their behavior? See, even they agree they should "pay more."
And because obviously they have more to lose if government services decline. They are the primary driver of demand for government services. Many of them need a functioning military, aviation, infrastructure, law enforcement, patent office, and other services to continue to make their billions.
If all the highways, gas pipelines, airports, Internet backbone and the Pacific Fleet in America crumbled to dust tomorrow, I'd be greatly unhappy but WalMart, Amazon, and Facebook would be ... well let's just say disproportionately affected.
Well 1) everyone does not have equal access in practice and 2) they should have to pay more specifically to help provide more equal opportunities to everyone in the future instead of resigning ourselves to dynastic feudalism. And also because ultimately that is the explicit agreement that one enters into by choosing to participate in this society.
And they externalize the impacts of their work. The Waltons pay very little to their employees such that their employees must rely on public services. If the public services weren't there, the Waltons aren't suddenly going to pay people more out of the goodness of their hearts. You can substitute a lot of corporations here (Amazon outsourcing all of their fulfillment operations for example).
Resource extraction companies pollute even with the regulations in place. How much worse would it be without those regulations?
2) The amount of tax the super rich pay is way down on the list of issues to be worried about. The top 0.01% (household income above $7.5 million per year, so not even “super rich”) make just 3.3% of all income. Tax them at 25% or 75%—it doesn’t make much of a difference to the Treasury. Taking all of their money would add maybe 3% to total government spending. That wouldn’t pay for Medicare for All. It won’t pay for the Green New Deal. It might just about pay for universal child care and pre-K.
That’s the top marginal rate on wage income. It doesn’t actually look at the total tax people pay as a percentage of their total income. That changes not just based on the top marginal rate, but on where each bracket kicks in, the composition of income, and the tax base. For example, back in the day, things like corporate expense accounts were not treated as taxable income. And the highest brackets kicked in at the equivalent of $3.5 million today, which means even top 0.01%-ers had half their income taxed at a lower bracket.
At least everyone can agree that government taxing should be higher than government spending^.
This article is mainly baiting rich v poor division; on a close read it doesn't actually say much.
The real issue is that everything in general has become so complicated that nobody has a hope of understanding how it works. Unless we have accountants on deck today nobody really has a feel for how much the rich pay in taxes (including under the '70%' regime - I bet there was nobody actually paying anywhere near 70%) and nobody has a great feel for how those taxes are being spent. And nobody has a feel for what happens to the money that rich people control and what it actually goes into doing. They aren't hiding it under the mattress, that money is out there causing real outcomes in the real world that go far beyond the rich having nice houses.
The rich could pay 0% taxes if we had confidence that they believed they should invest it all into ordinary people. We could tax at 100% if we had confidence that an enlightened government would spend it with prudence and intelligence. We will do neither because we know both those assumptions are stupid.
Quoting GK Chesterton and observing that politicians are treacherous is not a powerful contribution.
^ EDIT: Thanks neogodless - I mean specific policy for literally right now, to pay down debt.
I'd prefer the government spent the same amount as taxing. Or it does very thoughtful borrowing. (There are arguments about whether a government should have debts, and I don't think that's particularly salient to your point, but I can only assume you want taxes higher than spending to either pay off debt, or save for a rainy day.)
How do the rich think about money and spending? Everything is an investment (or an intentional extravagance to enjoy a little bit of that money.) So there's going to be literal investing (financial vehicles) but also influential investing to ensure things go the way they want. Money at that level doesn't magically translate to power without thoughtful investment.
Anyway, I think we're saying some of the same things. But I don't like the statements saying that we can't examine taxes being paid or spent. We should be working towards that being more transparent - not necessarily that we need to make public the private financial details of everyone (or just the particularly rich), but that there's, at least on the government side, a clear picture of how the various tax policies are being exercised and adhered to.
The '70%' regime was then reinvesting all those profits right back into their businesses to avoid those taxes, which spurred job growth and R&D innovation.
The simple reality is that today's "regime" simply stockpiles that wealth for their own benefit and then gives out a few token amounts to charitable causes and thinks that will stave off the pitchforks when the uprising begin.
Giving money to charity doesn't cleanse your soul of it's moral responsibility to society. As abrasive as it sounds, it may very well be true that if someone is in the position to be giving out millions to charitable foundations that end up making a lot of people fat from managing them, maybe they took too much in the first place.
This argument makes no sense. The super rich aren’t keeping their money under a mattress. They’re investing in VC, public markets, etc. It’s the exact same result, except instead of investing in the same company, profits can be invested in a different company.
They'd also reap the profits from businesses investing in themselves since they own those companies. The only difference would be encouraging conglomerates instead of new companies. Not sure why that benefits anyone.
I was reading economic drivel yesterday that indicated high debt-to-GDP could be making interest payments out of worker productivity increases, which would explain flat buying power (non)growth.
It's still unclear to me how running a huge deficit is not a problem. It doesn't matter, but... how? The natural inclination is that it does.
I don't agree that taxing should be higher than spending. Debt is a powerful tool that every country uses and the US would be lagging behind if not for using debt. The global economy and power struggle is competitive - we'd be tremendously disadvantaged if we didn't use debt.
Paying more than 70% of what you earn is not fair. It is slavery and confiscation.
And it always happens the same way, those in charge, in power, who control this 70% will manage to spend it on themselves one way or another.
In the soviet Union official markets will have stands selling just one potato, or one lemon or egg. Then in the black market the communist families could buy(or access, because with power and influence you don't need money)everything, from good meat, fish...
People that traveled abroad, with public money were the children of the communist... they had access to (imported)TVs, good houses and cars instantly while the rest of the population will wait for years or decades, only to get bullshit TVs, bullshit houses and bullshit cars.
In the UK,and the US with confiscation taxes rich people found ways to not pay taxes at all. It was only a barrier of entry to middle class.
It's only 70% of what you earn on dollars after certain other nominal limits. For example, 70% of what you earn after you've earned your first $1,000,000.00. Please do spare everyone these absurd tears for the "enslaved" rich.
Extremely wealthy people don't just donate to charity to cherry-pick the social programs they support. They also gain influence over organizations and communities. They promise support to gain favor and threaten withholding to gain influence. People this rich don't need more money, they want more power.
Good luck with the whole killing satan with his own pitchfork thing. All this does is turn those who try into demons; if you can hurt class enemies for being insufficiently good, you can do the same to anyone. And nobody ever accused the proletariat of being excessively possessed of virtue...
This is just a thin veneer over the libido dominandi. "We can't wait to remake society in the image of the blood god, so sacrifices must be made. No, not my kids ha ha"
The Guardian journos are not even trying to hide their jealousy any more. They don't care one jot about the living standards (the ever rising living standards) of the global poor. They just care that they can only afford one cruise a year while Bezos can buy his own cruise ship.
Philanthropy, at least in theory, directly benefits people; Taxes don't; We should keep both; The focus of every government must be the well-being of people, and most importantly, setting things so that the people have better opportunities to be the owners of their own lives and being able to care for themselves, returning value to the country and the World. Yes we need money for that, but when people focus on money instead of caring for others, corruption ensues. It is inevitable.
> Er, the United States, an economist sitting next to him replied, where the highest tax rate averaged about 70% from the 1930s to the 1970s, “and those were actually pretty good years for growth”. Rates are nowhere near that now. The supposed populist Trump gave a $1.5tn tax cut mainly to the richest corporations and individuals and the top rate now stands at 37%.
Go ahead and tax the likes of Bill Gates at 70%. You won't get much more than you do now, relatively speaking.
Forget proper taxes: give us a simple, coherent, 21st-century system for taxation that reasonably links what I'm paying to an actual budget, and maybe all of this class-warfare whinging on will sound less laughable.
160 comments
[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 248 ms ] threadDid I not really love him in the first place?
I suspect you're thinking of some celebrities or causes you agree with and assuming their motives must be pure because they agree with your interests. This isn't saying you have some devious intent, I'm just pointing out a potential unquestioned assumption you may hold.
Maybe the compromise is this: Wanting people to like you (or wanting good PR) may be an impure motive, but it's also the least concerning impure motive. After all, if a very powerful person wants to be liked by others, that motivation forces them to then listen to others and consider their interests.
I'm not thinking of any celebrities, and it's really weird that you made that assumption.
It's simply unimpressive to me when people give away money through foundations or other organized means just cause they're rich. The bar should be much higher to earn anyone's praise. That's all I'm saying. And I don't have anything to add to what you've written.
1) In my opinion, on an everyday scale of richness, the most important causal factor is family background, including inheritance. Would you support abolishing all forms of inheritance? Then skill could develop on an even, level playing field. For some reason the same people who say the rich are rich because they are skilled and work hard, are the same people who really want to keep the system of inheritance intact.
2) On the billionaire level of richness it is mostly luck, out of a strictly limited pool of potential candidates.
That said, the difference in standard of living, and the difference in the number of zeros in bank balances surely do not reflect the aforementioned differences. Surely you don't believe that someone works a thousand time better than me (current income ~ 2.5k EUR)?
I'm saying that the wealth gap is far too wide for any reasonable justification. I'm not rooting for a completely egalitarian/communist society, but the current situation needs to change.
Look at it this way. A company is something someone can create that grows in value many orders of magnitude. Wouldn't we hence expect an ownership stake in this to also grow many orders of magnitude? Whereas the average worker assists in creating some product that has a fixed value, so when they receive a share of what people are willing to pay for that product/service, it's obviously much less compared to if they had created something with the potential for exponential growth.
If the worker assists in creating a company, and manages to negotiate for stock in it, then they too can experience an exponential growth in their income's zeros if it grows in value.
everyone starts off with 0 wealth
Great concept, won’t ever actually happen.
I like George Carlin's saying: "They call it the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."
The wealthy benefit from the social infrastructure they live in. Should they not pay for it ?
Think of the wear and tear the roads get from the Amazon delivery service alone.
Amazon still pays to register vehicles, so they’re paying for roads as much as anyone that uses them, right? I work from home, and pay as much for the roads as my neighbor who commutes. Is that fair? No - but I’m completely fine with it.
Not to mention the US is huge, the actual cost of fixing the infrastructure would be staggering. It needs fixing too.
You should ask, whose life would be enriched more by having more of the money they’re paying in tax - the average income household paying 30% on their $40,000, or the millionaire paying 7% on their hundreds of millions of income?
Also, let’s not forget that it’s not just the visible 30% that’s taken from your paycheck, but a matching 30% that’s paid by your employer on your behalf. So, by leveling the playing field, a median earner could be getting upwards of $20,000 more than they are today.
If the very wealthiest weren’t paying lower effective tax rates than the people making $200k/yr. that would be a start.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/45-of-americans-pay-no-fed...
Top are doctors, engineers, small business owners, etc., and usually, they are the ones who get hit with the highest taxes (atleast around here in europe).
The super rich have ways to move their money, the ones above usually don't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Historical_Marginal_Tax_R...
little note about how much the rich are actually paying here
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/10/08/first-tim...
And, if we set everyone at a flat (for example) 3%, it’s not as if the government would lose money. That additional 1% against all the super-rich would more than cover the missing contributions of those who need the money more.
For example, in Spain, you pay 19% on the first 12,450E, and the rate quickly goes up to 45% for anything over 60,000E (average income is ~30K)
There are some personal allowances and deductions, but most people pay at least some tax.
OTOH the top 400 households in the US paid a lower tax rate than any other group who owed anything last year: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/06/opinion/incom...
Enterpreneurs don't "give" jobs to people. Refer to the "wage labour" definition:
> Wage labour is the socioeconomic relationship between a worker and an employer, where the worker sells their labour power under a formal or informal employment contract.
precisely, they're purchasing labor. And actually, Bezos is puchasing it at a dirty cheap price.
A job is better than no job. Bezos hired them to do something productive.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/10/amazon-reveals-the-truth-on-...
[1] https://nypost.com/2019/05/27/amazon-is-reportedly-eyeing-of...
NYC doesn't seem like it's struggling to attract jobs.
While also destroying jobs in the retail sector as brick and mortar stores are closing shop.
> Do you really want to disincentivize what he does for humanity?
This is such a broad question to directly answer. But in my opinion, a big part of Amazon's success has been at the expense of dozens of retail companies (Macy's stock price was $50+ 5 years ago, today it's $15, and the same trend exists for just about every large retailer).
I'm sure a lot of people will disagree, but I much prefer an economy with many smaller companies competing in the market instead of one giant company controlled by 1 person dominating everything. I think the government should do more to incentivize healthy market competition (which Amazon is not), BUT I don't think the solution to that is more taxes..
Yes, I would like to "disincentivize" this.
But even more to the point is that that only way you can calculate that someone earning $15,000 a year is paying a “higher tax rate” than someone earning $15 million a year is by ignore the fact that the person earning $15k is year is getting EITC, food, and health care subsidies and has an effective negative tax rate even if they did actually pay a few hundred dollars in sales taxes.
Here is a good analysis on average tax rates and effective marginal tax rates across income deciles:
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44787.pdf
Note that average effective tax rate is negative up through the 4th decile. (Figure 2)
There are points along the curve where the effective marginal tax rate for a mid-range income earner is higher than the effective marginal tax rate of a high income earner. This is due to phase-out of transfer credits — specifically, ACA credits phasing out. (Figure 7) Specifically what that means is you earn an extra dollar and in addition to it being taxed at e.g. 25% it also causes you to lose .25 of ACA credits, making the effective tax rate on that $1 be 50%.
In a competitive market with low switching costs, workers get paid roughly what their work is worth. It’s government’s function to ensure the market is competitive and the switching costs are low.
But a competitive market with low switching costs does not guarantee that every worker is capable of performing at the median in terms of value creation. In fact it’s a mathematical impossibility.
So in perfectly competitive market with a progressive taxation model, lower income earners will be subsidized by the higher income earners, despite everyone being paid entirely competitive and appropriate wages for their individual contributions.
It’s not the employers responsibility to subsidize below-median earners, because they aren’t the ones collecting the surplus from the above-median earners.
I personally think that most of these subsidies shouldn’t ever phase out, specifically because they screw over the middle class with punitive marginal tax rates. The net effect is that you still cross from negative to positive effective taxes at some point, but it happens with a much smoother marginal tax rate versus gross income.
A completely different discussion is whether employers should be able to hire very low skilled workers to do menial jobs at very low pay, or whether we should force employers to provide training and support to employees to the point where they can perform enough valuable work to justify some minimum wage, and everything else just needs to be automated away.
This I disagree with emphatically. The empoyers benefit from the social structure supported by tax dollars.
Could you imagine a starting a business in the wilderness with no transportation, utilities or other community supported infrastructure ?
Those companies also put the most wear and tear on the infrastructure.
Now we have the infrastructure and the economy, from which the government collects ~$6.5 trillion each year.
Companies hire people and pay them for the jobs they perform. In general, more valuable jobs pay higher salaries. The whole thing is a virtuous cycle. Without companies paying salaries, no consumers are buying products from those companies, and so on.
In the end, all of the $6.5 trillion comes from people living here. Whether it’s payroll taxes, income taxes, excise taxes, business profit taxes, usage fees,... it’s people paying these taxes out of their personal bank account, or out of a corporate bank account which is in turn owned by the shareholders of that company.
Generally increasing the tax rate on a company just increases the price of that conpany’s goods on the market. The customers of the company pay, or the company goes out of business.
The infrastructure is there so that companies can use it to hire employees, sell goods & services provided by their employees, grow the economy, increase payroll, and generate more tax revenue.
The tax structure is designed around redistribution of wealth. It does not follow that therefore somehow employers are underpaying their employees.
There have been cases where employers have colluded to keep wages below market. The government should prosecute those cases and fine those companies.
And like I said, if we want a minimum wage, that’s fine, but what it’s setting is a floor on the marginal value of an employee that is hireable, and anyone below that threshold becomes un-hireable.
This is why high tax proponents are never satisfied: we can raise all kinds of rates, but there's always some tax that a "rich" (which is never well defined) person is not paying enough of.
The "tax/soak the rich" notion seems almost entirely punitive, not productive. Yeah Musk has $billions, he's also creating thousands of jobs (direct & indirect), making the expensive affordable, improving environment, etc - and able to because he's very rich. Even the "mean" rich create jobs & markets etc that gov't can't.
How about we amend that to, 'Everyone deserves a say in the allocation of resources, in proportion to their demonstrated ability to amass and manage resources'.
Elon Musk figured out how to make a ton of money; he has more right to determine its use than some bureaucrat in an office. You say that government is our method of collective allocation, but it's really unelected officials doing what lobbyists recommend. I trust them a lot less than I trust a rich philanthropist.
Citation very much needed. I'd say "luck given the presence of opportunity and ability", perhaps - but luck alone is certainly not enough. (Or else why do lottery winners do so poorly?)
As for "the willingness to exploit others", is this universally true? Are performers exploiting their audiences? Companies their customers? Their workers? Their vendors?
I think that would be trivially true for some definitions of "exploit", but that is not the definition of exploit that most people would tend to think of.
This makes the huge assumption that "the market" is already equitably rewarding talent with money. It is not. Luck, heritage (inherited wealth and power), and race/gender all skew how much you can amass and the effects are exponential, not linear.
The rules they run by are created by your elected representatives.
Kings and Dictators get overthrown for a reason.
All people deserve to have a say in society, even if they don't want it, use it poorly, or use it reluctantly. It's not because human rights should matter to all individuals, it is because the implementation of human rights and equality is a better guarantee of social stability, and therefore a better conduit for trade and growth.
Kings and Dictators open up a society to turmoil and instability, which is bad for markets. There is no reason for a society not to guarantee social stability through measures of equality at this point.
Also, the only difference between war and commerce is the level of violence applied. War is an exchange, just as commerce is. The only difference is what is being offered in the exchange. In commerce "I will give you this for that." And in war, it's the same: "I will give you my bullets for your surrender."
Lastly, Elon Musk didn't just get rich through selling things people want. No one believes that this works. Henry Ford even said as much: "If I had asked people what they wanted they would have asked for faster horses." Musk gained his power by being opportunistic. He jumped into opportunities at the right time, competitively fought to get the engineers he needed, and punched his way through almost every problem he faced. The product quality is a byproduct of his ruthlessness as a capitalist. Don't forget it.
I think you're horribly twisting the meaning of Ford's words there. It doesn't mean "ignore what people want", it means to figure out what they actually want. People didn't want faster horses, they wanted better transport - "faster horses" was just how they expressed that.
That's like saying that winning a game makes you competent to referee it.
Also, how do contributions to these differ across the rich? Are there a couple of 'whales' who keep the numbers high while the other freeload or are they all equally contributing in this efficient manner?
It's also somewhat implicit (correct me if I'm wrong) in your post that government spending and voluntary contributions from the super rich are almost mutually exclusive. To argue devil's advocate, if that's not the case, both can coexist and the overall amount goes up.
One last point, I would like the super rich to be taxed at the same proportion as the middle class. I know wealth isn't linearly distributed but I do expect the relative tax bill to be - would you say that's punitive?
Because the government is democratically elected. Billionaires are not.
> Why do none of the "they don't pay enough taxes" crowd not realize the rich do so much of, and more efficiently, what the gov't purports to with massive overhead?
[citation needed] In fact, there's an easy counter-example. Healthcare. More expensive than any public system, with worse outcomes for the general population.
Billionaires have to at least be competent enough to make their money, and shelter it from the thieving governments and other leeches that are trying to suck it away from them.
Is this actually true? At having that much money you can hire someone to be competent for you in wealth management.
So, what is an "admirable state of affairs" if democracy is so objectionable to you?
Individuals choosing to engage in mutually beneficial activities, rather than being told at implied gunpoint to do what a bunch of ignorant strangers, or a tyrannical dictator, decided.
and
>rather than being told at implied gunpoint to do what a bunch of ignorant strangers
You are clearly emotionally driven on this issue so it's probably best that I step out of this discussion. You have a good day guy.
Democracy is, literally, a majority deciding what laws all must adhere to. They don't know/care about a minority's circumstances/needs/choices, yet impose their ill-informed will through the police power of the state (to wit, obey or we'll use force increasing up to and including death).
Show me how that's not true.
Stating an insane position, even one with internal logic, and then saying "show me how that's not true" does not make your position either correct or convincing.
What's more, your position is very much the one in the minority. It is incumbent upon you to convince us, or else you will simply be ignored. You haven't done anything like a credible attempt to do so.
Only 56% of all billionaires are self-made.
Others inherited their money (the Walton family, the Rockefellers, eetc.)
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/10/wealthx-billionaire-census-m...
> [citation needed] In fact, there's an easy counter-example. Healthcare. More expensive than any public system, with worse outcomes for the general population.
The only reason health care is so expensive in the US is because of government regulations. From doctor accreditation, FDA approval, health insurance "marketplace" rules... The government is the single largest force pushing up the price of health care.
Sure, if we pretend roads, emergency services, public schools, safer cars, hell, the very Internet we're posting on don't exist.
> The only reason health care is so expensive in the US is because of government regulations.
And yet, highly regulated, government-run European healthcare costs half what it does here.
The point is that mandatory certification of doctors, medications vetted through a highly risk averse process and having no flexibility in dealing with health insurers all secure better outcomes at a cost that nobody apart from the government thinks is reasonable. If anyone had a choice, which they do not, they would probably choose something cheaper.
It is lovely that surgeons are all wealthy, articulate, over-educated polymaths with numerous hobbies and interests (and can probably play a musical instrument, I don't know), etc, etc, except it isn't actually obvious why they need all that. At the end of the day a surgeon needs experience, steady hands and an aversion to doing things that are not necessary. And when tested people will prefer cheap with a good reputation to overqualified but approved by some guild.
It isn't like accidents don't already happen. Can't escape from risk using bureaucracy; minimising risk at all costs is a sign that people are making bad decisions.
Good point! We all know how ARPANET turned out.
I am as off by a lot of recent Government actions and their seeming inability to fix obvious issues. But to argue they to nothing productive for society? That is just plain wrong.
Also, I'd like to highlight that millions of citizens are only healthy/alive because of regulations. Are they perfect? Far from it, but can we live without them? No.
So in Baltimore at least, the local government has fundamentally failed at some of the things mentioned.
Citation needed? There were practically no regulations a century ago compared to now, and while more people died then, it certainly wasn't millions (unless you're counting something like vaccines as "regulation").
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality
Crumple zones, seat belts, and air bags save tens of thousands a year (https://www.nhtsa.gov/seat-belts/seat-belts-save-lives).
The EPA estimates the Clean Air Act alone saved 100k/year. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171226105042.h...
Lead paint, workplace safety, FDA approval, product recalls, aviation safety... Hell, fighting the tobacco industry is a big regulatory move.
That presupposes the US would have a cheaper system if it were public. (Also most European systems aren’t “public systems” but that’s a separate issue.) We spend more per student on our public education system than almost every other OECD country, to get far worse results. Our public transit systems spend several times as much money per mile to build transit, again to get worse results. There are scant few examples of the US public sector being competitive with those of well-run European countries. (In fact I can’t think of any.) Remarkably, Canada’s non-military government spending per person is lower than America’s non-military government spending, and Canada offers significantly more services for less money.
I don’t think it is at all clear that costs wouldn’t go up under a public healthcare system in the US.
I'm a simple mathematician, so I'll admit that I tend to look at issues where numbers are involved a bit too simply sometimes. Having mentioned that, shouldn't it be self-evident that costs will go up?
You'd essentially be playing an actuarial/insurance game and on-boarding an enormous number of new beneficiaries. Naturally costs will go up. Costs per capita will go up as well due to issues like logistics. Issues that are avoided currently by, for example, simply not providing services in certain areas. (I suppose issues like logistics are not so much "avoided", as they are "offloaded". For instance, people in rural america where senior citizens sometimes have to drive 60 miles to get emergency services.)
On the flip side of all that, I suppose the entire point of government healthcare is to provide necessary services for people who are not currently being served. So at least we can see the benefits of the extra money in the goveernmental case. ie - everyone is served. Which can't be said for the current system despite its enormous expense.
For example, the healthcare industry spends a lot of time and money on medical billing, on the side of providers sending bills and insurers paying them. Clearly some of this would be reflected in new and different bureaucracy, but probably less of it (and certainly not self-evidently more).
Also, preventative care can be much better than reactive care. Sure, a public health care provider would have to spend more money on insulin for diabetics when all of them are covered, but maybe it will spend less on emergency room visits for patients who suffer serious complications of poorly managed diabetes and can't pay the ER bill.
US public schools are also more expensive than any public system, with worse outcomes for the general population. These are operated by the government.
There is little evidence that making a service "public" will make it less expensive to operate, quite the opposite. The underlying cause of relatively expensive US services is not who is operating it, as they are expensive no matter who does.
Tyranny of the majority is a bad thing.
Tyranny of the minority is significantly worse.
Billionaires are as much democratically elected via purchase. Noone put a gun to our head to use AWS use Google or buy a car. On the other hand, political party campaigns require billionaires' cash. Doesn't look so democratic.
> Because the government is democratically elected.
We didn't democratically elect them to be the provider and arbiter of all. In fact, we deliberately designed a system where there are limits on what the government can do, because we didn't want the government to be the provider and arbiter of all.
Allowing the rich to choose what organizations and causes are worth supporting is certainly not Democratic. For example, you have private schools getting massive amounts of donations from Alumni, while the local elementary is shutting off water fountains because of lead exposure and they can’t afford to update the plumbing. I also don’t think the kids in the school with books so old they don’t mention 9/11 care about the millions donated to the art museum.
They shouldn't. All should pay $0 taxes.
We expect adults be financially independent after a few decades. The gov't, with its ability to literally make money along with other unique powers, should be financially independent after 225 years.
The whole concept of "financially independent govt" sounds like they are spending the tax earnings just on themselves. Of course they have overhead costs, but the main function of the govt is to redistribute.
They are supposed to be like the heart that pumps the blood around, and doesn't just use it up all for itself.
Absolutely not. That's communism, which never does - and never can - turn out well.
The USA was founded on the main function of gov't is to protect individual rights - that each knows & serves his own interests better than strangers.
It seems like many Americans view the government as some external entity that imposed itself on the people and now the people have to keep them in quarantine. A bit like how we felt in Hungary when the Soviets were sitting on us. They came in and now are taking our stuff away.
But a country's own govt isn't supposed to be "those guys who came in and took our stuff for themselves", but rather a network of institutions that help organize society for things where market forces are not appropriate for several game theoretical reasons.
The state only exists for protection of its members: military protection from other states and the monopoly on violence with a system of law internally
Overtime a lot of stuff just gets tacked on
Podcast about this specific phenomenon: http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/06-my-little-hundred-...
Is this actually true? The vast majority of research and innovation is gov't funded. The vast majority of tuition reimbursement and educational spending is gov't. The US Gov't is the biggest employer in the nation of the USA. Medicare, food stamps, disability spending, and social security altogether dwarf any charity that the rich is doing in the US.
What is the rich doing to the public benefit that governments aren't dwarfing them in doing? I'm super baffled here.
Not even remotely. Not even in the same ballpark as true. Not even the same sport.
Even assuming you are right, there are many more important values than mere efficiency. Governments are the only bodies which can realistically pursue the values and needs of the people in the face of massively powerful multinational corporations. Of course there is always room for improving the effectiveness of government, but the alternative is blind faith that the super-rich know best for us, despite their limited perspective and many well-documented flaws and biases.
They literally can and do pay for laws written in their favor, to entrench their interests, limit their competition, and adjudicate their behavior? See, even they agree they should "pay more."
And because obviously they have more to lose if government services decline. They are the primary driver of demand for government services. Many of them need a functioning military, aviation, infrastructure, law enforcement, patent office, and other services to continue to make their billions.
If all the highways, gas pipelines, airports, Internet backbone and the Pacific Fleet in America crumbled to dust tomorrow, I'd be greatly unhappy but WalMart, Amazon, and Facebook would be ... well let's just say disproportionately affected.
Also, doesn't it seem fair that those who benefit the most from society contribute back the most?
> Everybody had equal access to the infrastructure and economic substrate
Lastly, this point is more thornier, but I think it is easy to say that this isn't true across the board.
Resource extraction companies pollute even with the regulations in place. How much worse would it be without those regulations?
1) The bit about the 70% tax rate is wrong. The 70% was on wage income, but other sorts of income was taxed lower, and a lot of income wasn’t taxed at all. https://taxfoundation.org/70-tax-rate-entrepreneurial-income. Actual tax rates on the rich have been highly stable since the 1950s: https://taxfoundation.org/taxes-on-the-rich-1950s-not-high/
2) The amount of tax the super rich pay is way down on the list of issues to be worried about. The top 0.01% (household income above $7.5 million per year, so not even “super rich”) make just 3.3% of all income. Tax them at 25% or 75%—it doesn’t make much of a difference to the Treasury. Taking all of their money would add maybe 3% to total government spending. That wouldn’t pay for Medicare for All. It won’t pay for the Green New Deal. It might just about pay for universal child care and pre-K.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Historical_Marginal_Tax_R...
This article is mainly baiting rich v poor division; on a close read it doesn't actually say much.
The real issue is that everything in general has become so complicated that nobody has a hope of understanding how it works. Unless we have accountants on deck today nobody really has a feel for how much the rich pay in taxes (including under the '70%' regime - I bet there was nobody actually paying anywhere near 70%) and nobody has a great feel for how those taxes are being spent. And nobody has a feel for what happens to the money that rich people control and what it actually goes into doing. They aren't hiding it under the mattress, that money is out there causing real outcomes in the real world that go far beyond the rich having nice houses.
The rich could pay 0% taxes if we had confidence that they believed they should invest it all into ordinary people. We could tax at 100% if we had confidence that an enlightened government would spend it with prudence and intelligence. We will do neither because we know both those assumptions are stupid.
Quoting GK Chesterton and observing that politicians are treacherous is not a powerful contribution.
^ EDIT: Thanks neogodless - I mean specific policy for literally right now, to pay down debt.
How do the rich think about money and spending? Everything is an investment (or an intentional extravagance to enjoy a little bit of that money.) So there's going to be literal investing (financial vehicles) but also influential investing to ensure things go the way they want. Money at that level doesn't magically translate to power without thoughtful investment.
Anyway, I think we're saying some of the same things. But I don't like the statements saying that we can't examine taxes being paid or spent. We should be working towards that being more transparent - not necessarily that we need to make public the private financial details of everyone (or just the particularly rich), but that there's, at least on the government side, a clear picture of how the various tax policies are being exercised and adhered to.
The simple reality is that today's "regime" simply stockpiles that wealth for their own benefit and then gives out a few token amounts to charitable causes and thinks that will stave off the pitchforks when the uprising begin.
Giving money to charity doesn't cleanse your soul of it's moral responsibility to society. As abrasive as it sounds, it may very well be true that if someone is in the position to be giving out millions to charitable foundations that end up making a lot of people fat from managing them, maybe they took too much in the first place.
It's not about how much money is in the system. Its about who benefits from it.
It's still unclear to me how running a huge deficit is not a problem. It doesn't matter, but... how? The natural inclination is that it does.
And it always happens the same way, those in charge, in power, who control this 70% will manage to spend it on themselves one way or another.
In the soviet Union official markets will have stands selling just one potato, or one lemon or egg. Then in the black market the communist families could buy(or access, because with power and influence you don't need money)everything, from good meat, fish...
People that traveled abroad, with public money were the children of the communist... they had access to (imported)TVs, good houses and cars instantly while the rest of the population will wait for years or decades, only to get bullshit TVs, bullshit houses and bullshit cars.
In the UK,and the US with confiscation taxes rich people found ways to not pay taxes at all. It was only a barrier of entry to middle class.
Lash the sinners into virtue, eh?
Good luck with the whole killing satan with his own pitchfork thing. All this does is turn those who try into demons; if you can hurt class enemies for being insufficiently good, you can do the same to anyone. And nobody ever accused the proletariat of being excessively possessed of virtue...
This is just a thin veneer over the libido dominandi. "We can't wait to remake society in the image of the blood god, so sacrifices must be made. No, not my kids ha ha"
Go ahead and tax the likes of Bill Gates at 70%. You won't get much more than you do now, relatively speaking.
Back to my fantasizing .