The dotcom bubble burst and the GFC were a tiny fraction of the country misbehaving and causing a crisis that they used as an excuse to rob the lowest earners - the ones who hadn't already been abandoned, anyway. More work, lower pay, have an inferior version of the old product or service for more money (or just go without, you're too poor for our target demo anyhow). Of course you're going to hollow out your consumer base eventually; you can't profit off volume if you kill the volume. The people who can still pay don't care because they can still pay, but any given manager or exec only needs one newspaper, and you're not going to be able to charge $50 for it, even if they can afford it.
When people talk about a wealth tax, or an unrealized capital gains tax, or a 90% top marginal income tax rate, it's not about jealousy or entitlement. It's because those vehicles are where the money to support our institutions gets stashed once it's skimmed off the top of the wages of workers who are too desperate to demand their real worth (and risk losing their jobs in the process). If you want these things to continue existing, you can't rely on a captured market to cap wealth and ensure a floor. Sorry.
[–] prirun 2 days ago
[–] tancop 2 days ago
If you tried to ban all of the known strategies they would just come up with new ones. That's why we need more general solutions like unrealized gains tax.
Of course for the long term it would be better to replace traditional shares with time limited ones that give you a percentage of profits for 5 years but no voting rights. Power stays with workers and no one gets unlimited returns on a one time investment. And enforce pay equality where no one can get more than 20x median total comp. But I think that's too radical to pass anywhere today.
[–] hunterpayne 2 days ago
The problem with this is that is a good reason we don't tax unrealized gains. Yes, there are people using this as a loophole. But if you tax this, everytime home value goes up, there is a huge wave of bigger tax bills for every home owner and business owner. Which would crash the housing market overnight and probably kill 90% of the job creation in the economy. I'm sure you could make some carve outs for it, but if you do that, you probably won't collect much in tax revenue.
The biggest thing you don't seem to understand is that there is an economic concept called the Laffer curve. It relates tax rates to the total amount of tax a government takes in. And we are already at or near that tax rate. Increase taxes and the government won't take in more revenue. Growing the economy, that increases government tax revenue. But increasing tax rates past the optimum rate DECREASES not increases the tax revenue. Even ignoring the increased rates of tax avoidance, it constricts economic growth which reduces the employment tax revenue.
Basically, you can't tax your way to pay for your desired programs. Either allocate the budget you have or cancel the programs.
PS 1/2 of the federal budget is social spending, 1/6th is military (1/4 of which is the VA), 1/6 is interest on the debt and 1/6 is everything else the government does.
[–] pnut 2 days ago
https://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1148666/FULLTEXT0...
[–] bananamogul 2 days ago
Trying to make Salon’s failure about tax policy is bizarre.
[–] MattDamonSpace 2 days ago
[–] KingMob 2 days ago
We don't need to tax them to make up a shortfall; we need to tax them to remove their power to distort government in their favor.