The problem those arguing for a 'revival' of Centerism have (this morning Phillip Collins/Observer) is that they draw centrism wide enough to draw in Blairs' Labour & Cameron's Tories.
If that's the liberal centre then its been in power for decades & got us to the stagnating, unequal, failing juncture we have reached.... why would anyone think they now have the answers (other than their feeling of entitlement to govern?) as the are worried less by Reform than the Greens?
@JeniParsons @ChrisMayLA6 maybe a bit, but mostly because they’re bought into the Thatcherite cargo cult that believes her story about what she did. In reality she threw the benefits of EC membership and north seas oil to private business and allowed them to use it to buy up everything that had been built up post-war.
Starmer and company are Very Serious and know that saying any of that is Very Unserious and only Very Serious people are worth listening to,
@ChrisMayLA6 fact: nobody with a brain is worried about the Greens.
Reform are nazis in landrovers, as dangerous on the road as they are in the concentration camp.
everybody who can think is worried about the Reform sociopaths getting their small, milky, never-worked-a-day-in-their-life hands on the nuclear launch codes.
@falcennial @ChrisMayLA6 Looks like you are a Russian speaker. And know the word белоручка.
“White” “little hands”
I was struck by this:
"In the 1950s about 70% of manual workers voted Labour and the same percentage of non-manual workers voted Conservative. Today, education and age both predict voting affiliation better than class."
It is an example, I think, of the myopia of centrist or 'liberal' thinking. It misses the point that the current association of education and age with political affiliation comes out of the expansion of higher education in the 60s and 70s, then the generational inequality perpetrated by the single-generation handout of neoliberal privatisation, that has produced a society in the UK (and to some extent elsewhere) in which lots of well-educated young people don't have any assets to fall back on - which is really what being working class means - rather than having a regional accent or liking chips, as 'liberals' would have it - and lots of older people living longer that are less well educated but have both assets and relatively generous pensions.
What is 'social class' supposed to mean if not the difference between having no choice but to keep working all hours for somebody else, or conversely receiving unearned asset income ?
But naturally 'centrists', 'liberals', whatever you call them, must never see this, because if they did they would have to admit the economic interests (in preserving the status-quo) that really lie behind their own supposedly a-historical 'ideas' and 'values'.
Yes, a really good point... and as you say what centrists are (wilfully) blind to
I disagree
(Not with the assessment of how we got here, but with laying the blindness on "liberals)
Every liberal who calls for a #WealthTax (a lot of them) understand the dynamic you mentioned.
Now, "centrists" - yeah they are probably turning a blind eye.
As implemented, with lots of holes, sure the few #WealthTax have barely moved the needle.
And yes, let's tax unearned income more
But the real problem is not income. It's the vast hoards of wealth that underwrite loans and favors - and create an exploitive rentier culture.
Just look at Musk. He has little income (of any type) while sitting on historic wealth.
Sorry, are you saying a #WealthTax is "confiscation of people's legally acquired wealth"?
Because lots of places already tax property, cars and boats based on the value of the asset. So, I don't see why that same principle cannot extend to stocks, bonds, art, commodities and other sources of wealth storage.
And yes, of course, we need to look at how great wealth was accumulated and where it is being hidden.
#TaxTheRich
@TCatInReality @ChrisMayLA6 @GeofCox Taxing an object every year after it has been legally acquired because you don't like the type of object it is seems pretty confiscatory to me. Taxing it at purchase is fine.
Property taxes are different, they are intended to fund the provision of local services
So, if we use a recurring annual wealth tax to fund public services (like property taxes do), then that must be OK too.
Let's do that.
@wyliecoyoteuk @rpluim @ChrisMayLA6 @GeofCox
And thank goodness local services receive funding from the national government.
Otherwise, it's a quick decent into a handful of wealthy enclaves and mass poverty everywhere else.
Well, much worse than it already is.
This exchange raises many issues. The article argues that 'liberals' and 'centrists' are different terms for the same politics (but prefers 'liberals' as 'centrists' are merely defined by their position in the left-right spectrum. Actually, it's the other way round - the centre is merely the political expression of the status-quo, and it's this that creates the left-right spectrum). What particular policies the centre advocates are different in different times and places. The great European Enlightenment philosophers, like Locke and Voltaire, claimed as the progenitors of liberal democracy, and indeed the US Founding Fathers, were apologists for slavery. So it should not be surprising that in some times and places centrists/liberals support a wealth tax (as, incidentally, does the extreme right here in France).
Having said that, the idea that tax is needed to 'raise revenue' or 'fund services' is another aspect of the false 'household analogy' Chris and I have been discussing in another thread - https://climatejustice.social/@GeofCox/116272097415626100 - ie. it is a centrist conception of tax (which should rather be seen as a mechanism for removing money introduced into the economy by government when it's no longer in useful circulation - as defined by political aims - for example when and where it's accumulation is driving up asset values, whatever the assets may be).
@GeofCox @TCatInReality @ChrisMayLA6 I reject the household analogy at the national level, but local taxes fund local spending in many countries, and thus the local books need to balance.
Wealth taxes are an example of what I call "management ideas", where the action is easy to describe "just take 1% of the wealth of people worth more than $x", but the implementation is very difficult, since establishing the value of property, art jewellery etc is both difficult and subjective.
I reject the notion that #WealthTax is too hard. It is made hard with opaque markets, tax shelters and lack of proper registries.
All can be resolved and any disputed valuations should be appealable (based on comparators)
It is only a question of political will. And saying "too hard" is defeatist.
@KimSJ @rpluim @TCatInReality @GeofCox
Great example with Rembrandt... because as the current scholarly discussions around hi autograph works play out your wrk bought for $200m, having been rejected from his catalogue & now worth only $20k, might well find its way back into his autograph works & thus gain its value back... so very convenient to time the 'valuation' when the work is in doubt.... which underlines the point about the difficulty of valuation
@ChrisMayLA6 @KimSJ @rpluim @GeofCox
Kim, Prof May
I fear we are debating edge cases and ignoring the much greater potential, but OK...
In your Rembrandt example:
1) valuation could be tied to insurance cover. If you want to insure your possible-Rembrandt for £20k, go ahead
2) Tax auditors will look at patterns (as they do now). If an art collector devalues a dozen paintings, that gets investigated as tax fraud.
Like all laws, it works 99% of the time.
#TaxTheRich
@TCatInReality @KimSJ @rpluim @GeofCox
I think 2) is the key issue; we need trusted tax valuers....
but yes, of course, the Rembrandt thought experiment was not the central issue, I agree; but did provide a real world example of how values shift & change
@ChrisMayLA6 @KimSJ @rpluim @GeofCox
Yes, of course we should game out all the scenarios.
But we should also be clear when we are talking about edge cases (eg, I'm a billionaire with a Rembrandt that may be a fake)
A #WealthTax is imminently possible (with political will) and (like all taxes) an industry will grow trying to find/make loopholes. But if we don't start, we'll never get anywhere - and trillions will sit, untaxed, in hidden assets.
1/2
@ChrisMayLA6 @KimSJ @rpluim @GeofCox
To me, the far bigger obstacle to a #WealthTax is the startlingly large number of ways to hide assets
- Freeports
- Corporate ownership
- Tax havens
- Multiple shell companies
- Lack of registries
- Intermediaries
- Noncooperation between countries
That's the real obstacle - and one that should provoke outrage amongst the public and a demand for action.
One estimate has $21-32 trillion in hidden money. #TaxTheRich
2/2
An $21 to $32 trillion in financial assets are sitting offshore in tax havens. Due to the secrecy that pervades the tax haven system, precise numbers are hard to come by so estimates can vary. The Tax Justice Network estimates that $427 billion is tax is lost every year to tax havens.
@TCatInReality @KimSJ @rpluim @GeofCox
Yes, all good points & completely concur - the myriad ways of (legally) hiding assets from the taxman is the biggest issue....
In the UK at present it's true that council tax funds local expenditure, but this is not true in other countries and easily changed (as we see by the fact that newly created central government funding makes up varying proportions of that local expenditure in the UK too).
The difficulty of implementing wealth taxes is of course a live debate among tax experts, and Richard Murphy for example takes your view. I don't find it convincing - all assets are valued, for example on purchase, for insurance, when a notional value is needed for CGT/IHT, etc...
@GeofCox @TCatInReality @ChrisMayLA6 What's the value of a Picasso or a van Gogh? The only way to find out is to sell it. You can set a value on it when someone inherits it, but then what is it worth 50 years later? And if it turns out to be a fake, do you refund 50 years' worth of wealth taxes?
Taxing earnings is just easier to do, and much easier to justify and explain.
@jimmynohands @rpluim @GeofCox @ChrisMayLA6
Love this creative thinking
@jimmynohands @rpluim @GeofCox @ChrisMayLA6
Also... a great many of these assets are insured for ... Checking notes ...a determined value.
@ChrisMayLA6 @GeofCox https://youtu.be/ZuXzvjBYW8A?is=9hfjXDLKZmDoTnkH
There. I don't fully agree with his solutions but the data is ... Compelling
It's inherently conservative and often close to the right - and when politics polarises will generally side with the right - but whereas the centre doesn't really want change, is broadly content with existing relations of power and wealth, the right does want change - albeit often to go back to a less liberal real or imagined past when women, black people, etc, 'knew their place'.
@GeofCox
Ah.. But something I've run into continuously with my own parents' aspirational politics: if they constrain "class" to not really exist, then it doesn't and they can conveniently ignore any discussion using that language.
Any discussion of socialism immediately stops when you mention classes. They insist classes don't exist in the US, therefore this entire discussion is factually incorrect, and a waste of time.
It won't matter if you point out their embrace of the Epstein class as "peers" politically. (Aspirational politics) They just won't see it.
It won't matter if you point out our family interactions with the American justice system as white privilege; that we had to interact at all proves to them that there's no privilege.
#Blinders or #LeadPoisoning ? IDK.
Among the shibboleths of liberalism/centrism are such ideas as 'equality before the law', equality of opportunity', etc - but without some basic economic equality these are meaningless (if, for example, you can pay for the best lawyers, or private tutors for your kids). It's precisely the same double-think that enabled the Founding Fathers to say 'all men [sic] are created equal' and own slaves - liberalism/centrism must exclude the economic realm - and as Chris points out in another thread of this discussion, must exclude history, or the origins of wealth and privilege - just as it must not extend 'liberal democracy' to the insides of its businesses.
But the denial that social class exists in the US I think relates to two main threads in its history: its foundational assertion of equality as a counter to the royalty/aristocratic class differences of feudalism (in favour of capitalist class differences), and the long disguise of class by race, immigration, etc, in what is really still a post-colonial society.
"... the generational inequality perpetrated by the single-generation handout of neoliberal privatisation..."
It's amazing how invisible this is to most people, but selling off the public assets accumulated by previous generations to pay for current expenses really warped the political landscape.
Add in burning through our inherited environmental 'assets' and it's no wonder the young are depressed, furious or both.
Yup, me too...
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