BlazeProbably not how it works
ekZepp
earthwormThe wealth tax typically proposed by these campaigns (like 2 or 3%) would raise money but it would not stop billionaires from getting richer. (That’s why even billionaires advocate for it.)
The finish line should not be “raise money to fund public programs.”
The finish line should be “tax wealth billionaires out of existence.”
"tax the rich" is a scam?
ObjectivityIncarnateThe finish line should not be “raise money to fund public programs.”
The finish line should be “billionaires don’t exist.”
Financially speaking, helping the poor and hurting the rich are not the same thing, and it’s honestly concerning when I see people prioritize the latter over the former. Eradicating poverty matters infinitely more than keeping people’s net worth (which as a reminder, is just a guessed (there is no billionaire whose net worth is precisely known), hypothetical, fluctuating price tag on the stuff they own, should they decide to sell it) under some arbitrary maximum.
And that’s without even mentioning how much tax revenue is wasted on things that don’t actually serve the population at large. What good is an extra $X billion in tax revenue if it’s all pissed away anyway? As one example, the US government spends more per capita on healthcare than any other country, and yet we’re far from #1 in most healthcare categories. How does that make sense? We’re already not getting what we’re paying for, fixing things like that is more important than simply increasing the amount of money going down the same wasteful hole, I think.
I disagree.
Billionaires have outsize influence. They buy politicians to set public policies that affect the working class and divert billions of our dollars into their pockets.
If you put all of their money on a pit and set it on fire, it would have a greater impact than taxing them 2% and spending all of it on public programs, because they would no longer be able to do harm on a billionaire scale.
The people could heal.
We’d still have other beasts to deal with, but the existence of billionaires is a cap on the lives of the working class.
the existence of billionaires is a cap on the lives of the working class.
Billionaires per capita in the US increased by about 7x over the past 100 years, while the percentage of the population living in poverty was 4-6x higher 100 years ago, compared to what it is today.
The correlation is in literally the opposite direction as what you claim. How do you reconcile these facts with your assertion?
The correlation is in literally the opposite direction as what you claim. How do you reconcile these facts with your assertion?
Its very easy to make an incorrect correlation like this when you are using faulty data like the FPL.
All it takes two seconds to find out the poverty line in the US is literally just 3 times the monthly minimum speed for food for one person. That doesnt factor in the extreme inflation on housing, medical, student debt, utilities, phone plan costs, taxes, etc. While food prices are inflated they are not nearly as inflated as the other areas critical to survival which are not calculated for the reporting of offical poverty figures. Once you actually account for all of this and look at what percentage of the population fails to meet basic needs you get to a more staggering 43% of the US living in poverty and even thats a rough estimate due to missing data points that might make it higher.
Its very easy to make an incorrect correlation
I think you don’t understand what “correlation” means. The correlation is clearly and inarguably what I showed it to be: billionaires per capita went up as poverty went down. That’s a plain fact.
43% of the US living in poverty
Even if I just take this at face value, what is that compared to the 40-60% I cited? It still does nothing to support the point that billionaires are ‘holding the working class down’ to any statistically-significant degree. If we take the bottom of the range of the estimate I got, 40%, and took your figure as-is, 43%, then a 7x increase in billionaires per capita increased poverty by 3%, which is almost certainly within the margin of error of any measure of nationwide poverty—effectively no difference.
That doesn’t do much of anything to support the assertion that billionaires are ‘capping the lives of the working class’, when there being seven times more of them makes no statistically-significant difference in the poverty rate.
Not to mention that 1925 is in the midst of the roaring twenties, before the Great Depression, and your article was written a few years after a global pandemic that wreaked havoc on the world’s economy—two facts that both skew things in favor of your claim.
Yeah I was gonna say, that persons picture of two percentages wasn’t very convincing.