Some dude I work with said “man, if they start taxing Bezos more, at what point are they gonna come after me?”
Maybe when you start making billions of dollars? Fuckin idiot
They’re right tho, millionaires are way more protected by government than the average person
You know what the difference is between a million and a billion? Roughly a billion.
Idk man maybe you should be comfortable paying more taxes if it gets you something worth it. I’d probably be hit by the taxes to get free effective public transit, that’s cool, I’d rather pay my car transit bills into a pool that gets us the metro or subway but free
Well he’s a Michigan libertarian so I think he only wants the US to fund the military, and of course anything that personally and directly impacts him but not if it only impacts some unlocky fool in his immediate neighborhood… because he’s a libertarian
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Political party promises taxes for billionaires
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Political party also promises to spend that money
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Party gets elected
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Party realizes that super rich people have enough resouces to avoid any tax they can come up with as a single country
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Party still wants to live up to the promises from 2, so they try to tax large corporations
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Same problem as 4. Fun fact by the way: The nice left colonialism-hating palistine-supporting irish are the ones most responsible for big tech not paying any taxes for doing business in europe. (Double irish with a dutch sandwich)
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Party turns to the “richest” people that cannot afford tax evasion.
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I pay close to the maximum tax rate although making far less than 100k per year without any noteworthy savings
Of course it doesn’t have to go that way, I just want to point out there are reasons to be skeptical besides being a “Fuckin idiot”. Politics can turn good ideas into bad policies
Are you talking about a real party in a real country or you just made this all up because it sounds edgy in your head? Fact that you included a rant as “fun fact” half way through your numbered list and that can’t even fucking spell Palestine makes me think you are 15 and came straight from reddit?
I was trying to point out a possible train of thought causing someone to be opposed to ideas of higher taxes for rich people. Sorry for the spelling mistake, English is not my first language. I also shouldn’t have mixed other issues into it, that did not help the discussion.
Maybe the main reason for people refusing taxes for the rich is a lack of trust to those in favour of it, because they percieve the ones favouring it as opponents. This could be at least partially due to them using insults and personal attacks as a means of discussion. Sorry if there are spelling mistakes again, my break is over and I do not have time to check each word I am unsure about.
I truly don’t understand these people. Their life is generally stressful to the extreme and the current system of “trickle down” has been for a long time shown to not work. So why not tax the rich, install some decent social systems, make the world better for the general public and move on?
They’ve been made to believe things like this:
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They’d be able to make more than they’re making if taxes were less. In effect, their employer and wealthier individuals would share the additional after-tax income.
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Job prospects would be better. More promotion opportunities, less layoffs, etc. Also, more vacation time, sick leave, etc would be available.
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Just about everything bad that happens economically can be linked to higher taxes.
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Prices for everything would be lower.
I’m not defending these views, but this is just what some people believe, and it explains their voting actions. I used to be one such person and I still live among people who see taxes like this. Blame Fox, radio, and similar outlets for spreading misinformation
Ah yes, if companies made more money, they’d share more with the workers. That explains why corps have been making record profits and… Nothing has improved for workers.
At some point you just have to ask whether these people are disconnected from reality.
At some point you just have to ask whether these people are disconnected from reality.
we’ve past that point. We don’t need to ask anymore, really. FWIW, I blame the sabotages public education
The crazy thing is seeing people who work for these companies for 30 years straight, got treated kind of decently like 25 years ago, now the company has grown over 100x in size and their pay and benefits haven’t even doubled.
Yet they still talk about how taxes are the problem. And that things will trickle down. They’ve literally been in that system for 30 years of it failing to work and they still think it’s the right answer.
I can excuse people having their ideas twisted about something they don’t really know about. But if you’re that deep into it, have literal experience showing it not working, and you still buy into that shit and vehemently defend it despite facts being presented that show otherwise… Yeah, there’s no excuse anymore. Now you’re just a fucking idiot voting against your own best interest.
Have you seen politics in this country before? It’s not about logic, it’s about being mad at some invisible boogey man because someone on the TV told you to.
I feel like we should make up some shit about Muppets. and then get sound bites of GOPers being like "i like muppets… who doesn’t like muppets’ and then, you know, use that to smear them.
(sorry, muppets, your sacrifice is appreciated.)
Already sorta happened when Mitt Romney talked about how he liked Big Bird but wanted to try to kill him off by eliminating funding for PBS…
I’ve never met one in real life, I’ve only heard of their existence through social media.
Do they actually exist or is it an enemy people have fabricated?
The most likely answer is I’m bubbled around good people, which is a result I guess.
I think it can be difficult to verify directly because the concept is more abstract than those implicated are accustomed to dealing with.
Consider the similar scenario where impoverished seniors vote to have the government be more fiscally responsible by cutting the very services their lives depend on. If they understood how they were fucking themselves, they’d probably stop. Should we really expect any sort of meaningful discussion here? It is a deeply fundamental problem whose solution would require much more openness and vulnerability than our society or collective consciousness is currently able to support.
It wasn’t too long ago we were seeing a constant stream of folks expressing regret for their vocal opposition to the vaccines, sometimes even pleading to be vaccinated upon learning of their imminent demise. If they were better equipped to think through these issues, they’d be better equipped to participate in constructive discussion, and we wouldn’t be talking about this problem.
You may be in a bubble, or maybe you’re just a kind and trusting person who tends to give people the benefit of the doubt.
You’re in a huge bubble. A large portion of boomers very strongly defend this shit. Other generations tend to see past it, some areas of more educated boomers see past it, but even among generally good people, Reagan etc brainwashed the majority of an entire generation into believing this shit and most of them have not let go.
Friendly reminder that the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is still essentially one billion dollars. Billionaires shouldn’t exist
Remember nobody can possible EARN a billion dollars. Nobody is that important or effective. If someone made a billion dollars, it was by taking away from the people below, the ones who actually did the work. Billionaires are thieves and leeches.
We have roughly 8 billion people on earth. If a person’s inventions and solutions combined improved the life of every person by a value of 13 cents, then they would have EARNED a billion dollars (because they would have created thta value).
Imagine I made a product that saves the life of 1,000,000 people (from an otherwise deadly desease). Is that not worth 1B dollars?
This is where the disconnect between “left” liberals and socialists come in. Left liberals will often say “nobody should have a billion dollars”, or even “nobody can legitimately accumulate a billion dollars”, and even in your example that’s probably true (no single person can manufacture, distribute, and administer a billion vaccines), but to steelman your argument, a better version would be a solo streamer who has a billion viewers, each donating $2 (half of it going to the streaming platform). That would be a legitimate accumulation of a billion dollars. Whether or not some of that should be taxed is an orthogonal discussion to the whether or not the accumulation was legitimate.
What we actually need to separate is legitimate and illegitimate accumulation of wealth. Socialists do this correctly. We recognize stealing the surplus generated by value of workers through private property rights (either of IP, or industry like factories) is a form of theft, and this happens to be how every current billionaire got their wealth, most millionaires, and even some people with net worths under a million got all their net worth.
It’s wrong to steal the surplus value of labor of your workers, even if it just amounts to 100k a year, while solo streaming to 10k viewers and making 100k a year is not wrong.
You wouldn’t have made a product that saves a million lives. Teams of doctors and scientists, not to mention the pharmaceutical companies they work for, are the plurality of people required to release and market a life saving medicine. If one person did everything, the R&D, the experimentation, the trials, the marketing, the backend business of running a pharmaceutical company, etc, then sure, have your billion dollars.
It represents the money in their pockets to literally anyone and anything that matters. They can secure multimillion dollar homes with that “fake” money. They can finance yachts, fancy cars, more houses, etc. Whatever the fuck rich people waste their money on.
So for all intents and purposes, it makes no difference does it?
Capital gains tax exists. Whenever they liquidate any assets, they should be taxed heavily. That’s just a start.
Yes, but the ultra wealthy rarely are subject to taxes. They have no income. Their wealth is tied up in stocks, and they rarely sell the stocks therefore nearly never opening themselves to capital gains taxes.
They then borrow against the stocks for spending money. When they want more money, the refinance and get a bigger loan. The loan is only paid off by their estate after they die. The bank is happy to accommodate, because they’re willing to play the long game.
If you tax loans as income, you’d be screwing over the middle class who need mortgages to get ahead.
My dad always says “but then what motivation will they have to make money and innovate.” To which I respond, “they’ll still be millionaires and far richer than either of us will ever be.”
Why is everyone concerned with making humans work? We already have technology to where one human’s work can feed, clothe, and house a hundred more, right? So, pay the one human twice as much, as an incentive, and then give a free ride to ninety-nine more. We don’t need everyone to be at work all their life.
Because boomers want younger people to suffer like they did. Up until them, every generation had it better than their parents, but boomers are just so fucking selfish that they couldn’t stand to see their children do better than them.
“I had to work to get where I am, so you have to work too.”
Our economy isn’t based on providing goods or services, it’s based on the theft of economic output. Without workers providing goods and services for stockholders to steal economic value from, everything about our system collapses.
(To be clear, I’d like to watch it collapse.)
Another answer is that if the wealthy pay more into the system and that money is put into universal health care and a more robust social safety net then other, non-billionaires, would have the motivation to innovate and build businesses. Why the fuck is it only the wealthy that we need to motivate to make money and innovate?
Yeah, it’s a wealth tax we need. 10% a year of everything over $100 million. Yeah, bitch, I’m including all your motherfucking shares and property as well.
I think you need to be careful with a wealth tax because it will just make millionaires “move” to the US but still do business here. Under NAFTA they can live in the US and only pay US taxes while working here, except for services where GST must be charged.
It’ll also really fuck up the TSX because the TSX does not see 10% gains, so we would lose a lot of capital for our business and reduced value of our pension funds.
Not saying no wealth tax, but wealth tax is complicated and the amounts need to be well considered for their impact to the economy.
Edit: forgot I wasn’t on the Canada instance.
This applies to Canada doing wealth tax specifically, if everyone coordinated and closed loopholes wealth tax could be realistic, it’s a cooperation game.
Two counterpoints:
Norway implemented a wealth tax and millionaires didn’t move. It still has one of the highest rates of millionaires in Europe.
France implemented a wealth tax and millionaires moved causing them to make less than if they hadn’t implemented it. They repealed said tax after 2 years.
Wealth taxes can work if done right. Done wrong and they do leave.
Not sure about France wealth tax specifically, but the EU has always had a huge problem with taxes being uneven, especially stuff like corporate tax, with smaller countries “stealing” companies from the bigger ones.
This year a minimum of 15% eu-wide was introduced to stop the tax race to the bottom, something similar could and should be applied to a wealth tax.
Fine, let some other country have their population exploited for labor, put an import tax on their products, we’ll survive just fine.
Edit: forgot I wasn’t on the Canada instance.
Fucking CanadaDefaultism. I expected better from you guys. You truly are just Americans with moosephilia. How aboot you kick yourself up the ass buddy, eh?
My most sincere apologies! Our government has deemed I shall be set adrift on an ice floe, with only a Tim Hortons duchie, a double double, and a hockey stick as punishment.
No, we need to tax the poor to the death and all the problems will disappear over time.
