No, I don't think so. Virtually all the wealth we're talking about confiscating is instantly dissipated in transfer payments. That's what virtually all the stimulus amounted to, and that's what we're still doing. The moment it's spent, it's gone forever, consumed.
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I might've hurt me if he got it from pulling the gold out of my teeth, or the titanium implant out of my hip (if I had one), but that's almost never what generally happens. I've stated the general case, you've created a hypothetical exception.
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It's a problem when someone makes something better?
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Absolutely not. First, you'd have already killed the return on innovation, so you wouldn't have it.
2nd, the problem is they'll train a bunch of people to do what the gov't thinks is a good idea, and they don't know. It doesn't matter if it's President Foodstamps or Ronald Rayguns, no one person or group can direct the economy as efficiently and effectively as The People.
3rd, why the heck didn't you save any money for this? If you're 23 and six months into your first job, fine. Move back in with your parents. Otherwise...
I started working at 17, living on my own, with two miserable full- time jobs earning minimum wage. I saved every cent, and very quickly had 6 months' reserves, then saved for the university, and a car.
So, if making a huge investment and risk improves something, and gives one guy an advantage, say 5%, and you take 2 of those %, that means his return is cut by 40%, and most improvements aren't worth chancing.
The "winning" outfit hires people, or makes products or food so efficiently that society doesn't need that anymore. Is it a loss to you that you no longer have the job on the farm waiting for you to grow food? No, of course not.
However well-intentioned, well-intentioned ideas can have devastating impacts on society.
Charlie, it's all been done before. What's income? The tax code is huge, just on that subject. Wealth is probably no more difficult, likely easier to quantify. Besides, it's been done before in the US, in fact. There was quite a fight about this vs income, in fact. Before I was born, but still quite a deal about it.
Your argument applies as well to income, too, about being wrong no matter which way you go.
But taxing wealth can be done with a single rate and it would work well as a progressive tax.
The easliest form of it, 200 years ago, was taxing property. Back then, there was almost no difference between property and net wealth. Today, it is more complex. But no more complex than "income."
It would work no worse than what we have now and it would do a lot to give those with less a better chance accumulating.
It's not a new idea. It's been done. In fact, well before and after the formation of the US, and inside the US. And it is still done here, in hacked part, via property taxes for example. There is nothing new or novel here and it's already being done effectively, as well.
And then, of course, when you patiently explain to Billly, "Well, he did his chores today and you didn't, therefore he has _earned_ a bigger piece," he throws a tantrum:
Of course, you're absolutely right, and I own you one Mea Culpa for the misattribution.
Mea Culpa. :-)
But that doesn't mean I'm _not_ insane! I obviously am, because I'm a skydiver! - Q.E.D. %-}
But in a way, it's one of those logic things. Given: skydiving is insane; I'm a skydiver, therefore I'm insane. Or maybe that should be, I'm insane, therefore I skydive. ;-P
But you're not going to get me on a pair of skis on the top of some mountain in the cold and wind and glare and expect me to slide down on these little sticks and not break every bone in my body?
Skiing will *not* break every bone on your body. Rarely more than two or three. None of mine, so far. Skydiving *can* break every bone.
Snowboarding is worse than skiing. I took a snowboard lesson: the lady who sold me the ticket had a broken finger, and my instructor had a broken wrist. The little doctor's office in Truckee does four or so wrists on a good day.
Skiing is like having wings. And except for beer breaks, you can do it all day.
If you tax wealth, not income, then your lowest taxes are for renters, who never save a dime but spend every dollar they earn as soon as they earn it, pure consumers. They will rely on government entirely to protect them from any changes in their status quo, since any savings for retirement or unexpected circumstances will be punished by taxation!
You must be a democrat... ;-)
The real problem is not that we don't have enough tax revenue, but that we are spending more than we take in by a large margin! More revenue is not the answer, there is more spending than you have possible victims. If you want more income, simplify the tax code to eliminate all the special tax credits (including all the 'family' tax credits!) and you will help a lot!
Of course, if everybody spends less, the economy slows down and you've re-created the Great Depression, with 25% unemployment. But right-wing nit-wits think that this is "natural" and probably "organic" and thus desirable.
Of course, if you scouted around a little and found the money that the rich collect which doesn't happen to qualify as income - it's called tax avoidance, and is perfectly legal because somebody bribed a legislator or two to make it perfectly legal - you'd have a whole lot of other money streams to tax, and you might well be able to make a hole in the deficit.
But the US was set up by the founding tax evaders as a tax avoidance paradise, and your loyalty to your ancient and deeply flawed constitution doesn't let you even think about dealing with the abuses it accommodates.
This assumes a level playing field. Crooked investors make money, and at the expense of good and bad investors. Out of a large population, the most crooked investors wind up having the most to invest. Some get caught and go to jail, but it does seem to take a very long time for anybody to wake up - Madoff seems to have been running his fraud for about 25 years before he got caught - and one has to suspect that most frauds die undetected.
William Jennings Bryan said "Nobody can make a million dollars honestly" back when a million dollars looked like what a billion dollars looks like today.
Don't be silly.
But you quote them all the time. Exxon-Mobil is sneaky. They don't go around saying that Exxon-Mobil thinks that global warming is good for you, they pay front organisations to write opinion articles to be planted in the sort of right-wing newspapers that you read and - gullibly - believe to be honest and objective.
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The give-away is that some of the organisations that Exxon-Mobil support were originally set up by the tobacco companies to lie to the public about the way smoking doesn't really damage your health. Some of the people who are now telling you that anthropogenic global warming isn't actually happening, used to tell you that smoking didn't actually cause lung cancer ...
Since I spent most of my working career earning a distinctly above average income, I'm the kid who did his chores - got the Ph.D., and the occasional patent - and did earn the bigger piece.
Rich is a brain-damaged twit, and doesn't seem to have processed that particular bit of information.
Rich does like to simplify his world - with only a few working brain cells left, he doesn't actually understand how modern socialism works in western Europe, and finds it easier to equate it with the lessons he got in primary school about the evils of soviet communism.
Socialists in England, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands are all perfectly happy to see some people earning more than others. They do collect more tax on those higher earnings, but the maximum marginal rate seems to be around 50%, which isn't exactly confiscatory, There was a time when the maximum marginal rates of income tax went up to
95% - even in the USA it peaked at 94% in 1944
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but this merely discouraged people from devising extravagant remuneration packages where the bulk of the remuneration could be identifed as taxable income. People kept on getting extravagant remuneration, but the governments didn't get to collect much tax on it, and eventually the bureaucrats noticed that setting high marginal rates of taxation on high incomes was a waste of time.
Of course, if Rich had such a modicum of consciousness, he'd know the difference between "complement" and "compliment". No doubt his spell- checker is equally happy with either, but the distinction is subtle enough that what remains of Rich's brain isn't up to making the distinction.
Do you find that a problem? I don't know if you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth, Charlie. I'll assume not. But people who earn very little money _do_ pretty much spend what they earn. Do you think they should be taxed _before_ they even get a chance to meet their expenses?
One of the really great things I learned in starting several businesses is just how much of my life I'm able to place underneath my schedule C -- quite legitimately (and I've been audited several times before and will be going through another this year.) The concept of "income" for those of us lucky enough to know what to do and how and who run businesses is incredible. It gets even better when you have employees who stand between you and the "tax man." (You control their lives, control their income, control their benefits and therefore have many more ways to isolate yourself from targeted tax changes.)
You characterize these people as "pure consumers" as though that is a slight, Charlie. That almost borders on sinful, to me. I know so many (and as I've said many times before, I volunteer at leasdt 300 hours of my time each year and as much as 500 hours as part of 501(c)3 charitable activities) who really _do_ work hard (harder than I do, no question) and barely make ends meet. Yes, all of their income goes to consuming. Because they aren't rich, Charlie. Because they need to spend everything they take in to live a very modest life.
Why you might imagine that as a negative shocks me to my core. I very much hope I am mistaking your motives in writing that way.
Sure, there are hangers' on. Always will be some folks who are just, for quite a variety of reasons, more willing to take than to give. But those exist just as often (more often, in my opinion, but I won't debate it with you) among the very wealthy, too. That's true at all levels. You just have to realize it's a problem everywhere and try and mitigate the impacts and encourage better behaviors where you can.
None of this even scratches the surface for those with serious disabilities, by the way, who through no fault of their own (being born with CP or profound autism, for example, is not their fault) are, by definition, the worst kind of consumer who simply cannot actually give back as much as they must take. Yet there are bizarre rules about even SSI which make absolutely no sense and take away some of what already isn't enough to survive on. (We could discuss this at long length.)
I find the whole idea of thinking about people nearer the bottom as "pure consumers" downright insulting, if you haven't gotten the point. I suppose, because I meet these people, help them, see what they go through, cry with them, feel their pain to a degree, and hug them and try and make things work just a little bit better. It strikes hard to my heart to hear you write like that. So I hope I misunderstand.
You are talking like a Republican who sees ONLY those who take away. Because, and this is my opinion from long debates with many Republicans before and this may not apply to you, they are sensitive and intimately aware of the idea since that is exactly what they themselves would do. They take advantage where they can. So they project this onto others.
It's kind of sad. The best way out of that impression is to spend a few hundred hours a year helping others. Giving time. Seeing the real situations out there. Not reading papers, or propaganda. I'm out there. I know from routine, constant presence what it going on. it's not an occasional thing for me. So it's not as though I "see something once" or "twice." It's an always-thing for me and I'm in touch all the time.
I'm not denying that some folks do take advantage. But it isn't sane to hurt so many because of a few.
I probably won't say this again to you, Charlie. You either get it, or don't.
I flip between parties almost with the winds. I've been both as well as an unspecified independent. It's all irrelevant to me. Reality and people count. Life in the trenches. Not party affiliations, flags, idols, and so forth.
Taxing wealth at a flat rate makes complete sense. It's been done before, is being done in a hap-hazard way right now in the US but not nearly enough nor nearly well enough (should be a homestead exemption, for example.) Income tax is actually a rather new creation and it is very, very complex. I actually read through almost all of the 1986 tax bill under Ronald Reagan. 2/3rds of it was about special compensations for specific names and businesses (though it avoided using their actual names in many cases, citing instead "anyone living between block X and block Y, with a business revenue between C and D, operating in the area of Q.") People with access to their politicians represented almost all of that tax code. It's complex. And nasty. I can't imagine that wealth taxation could be any worse.
And it would permit what you seem so down on, accumulation. Those at the bottom would actually be able to experience little tax and therefore live a little better than before and, if good enough, actually start rising upward by saving for their kids. For those at the top, its the same percent of their accumulation. But they would need to make their wealth "work" through activities in order to retain it. Which would be VERY GOOD for the economy.
I just hope I've been getting your first comment wrong.
There should be taxes only for fundamental services, like sewer, water, roads, highways, police and fire protection.
All other "services" should be fee-for-service paid by the beneficiary ;-) ...Jim Thompson
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Romneycare is nothing like Obamacare
Except for those parts which are the same ;-)
The newspapers that I read regularly are the print editions of The San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times. My wife gets Time Magazine, and I occasionally read one.
I have never inhaled a single puff of tobacco smoke, and absolutely hate the tobacco industry, who killed two people that I cared about.
You never make sense. You are an emotional creature who doesn't allow himself to think.
What's wrong with fee-for-service for roads? There is nothing fundamentally wrong with a gas tax or toll roads (other than the latter is redundant with the former).
But, ironically, Reagan's change was both a simplification and a tax increase. The rates went down, the exemptions went out, collections went up.
To tax wealth is to reject the idea of private property. Taxing wealth is exactly taking x% of someone's private property, on a regular basis. Tribute. That means that whatever you get is never secure, only ever subject to the whims of government and popular cries for redistribution. That's tyranny. (Or tyrananny.)
Nope. Those 51% on the "bottom" don't pay federal income tax, and many of them *receive* it.
What hurts them most is the people-who-know-better lovingly taking 14% from their paychecks, plus other taxes so levied. That's what hurts them most.
Imagine someone barely getting by--just barely staying above water-- suddenly getting to keep an extra 15%, a 15% surplus? With a surplus, rather than being flat broke... they could save for a rainy day, for a car, for a house, for school, etc.
Nope, sorry, that's not allowed.
No it wouldn't. That's absurd. You've postulated these people are worthless, that they never earned what they have. If true, they're incapable of working harder and earning more. So that capital is gone, with noting to show for it.
OTOH if they capably earned it, then you've stripped them of something they earned. That does *not* encourage people to work harder and earn more.
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