Shouldn't have been allowed to have undemocratic control over that amount of political power (wealth) to begin with.
Each registered candidate with more than a certain number of signatures of support should be given a budget of money and pre-paid airtime on all major networks by the FEC, and that's it. Once it's out, it's out. All other contributions (including in-kind) to political campaigns are tantamount to bribery and should just be illegal.
It seems all but impossible to stop billionaires like Koch waging public relations campaigns. If nothing else they'll just buy entire media companies (c.f. Bezos and the Washington Post) and jump in to the fray Fox News style.
It is pretty likely that no-money-in-politics rules would be weaponised against smaller donators. I'm sure there are a bunch of wealthy people who would love nothing more than legal tools to shut down donation-driven groups like the Black Lives Matter website.
Parties are allowed donations, but they can't spend more than x on election campaigns, no matter where the money is coming from. Time on public TV is kind-of regulated. TV ads are not really a thing, mostly billboards and print.
Can be circumvented though, since it requires parties to declare spendings correctly (and labelled correctly). "Oh, those fancy pens that look like merch? For work if course!" "We didn't rent this venue, a party-friend did"
Difficult to enforce with all the possible loopholes.
That doesn't really follow. Why should something be exclusively publicly funded just because it is in the public interest?
>All other contributions (including in-kind) to political campaigns are tantamount to bribery and should just be illegal.
What about completely anonymous donations? If the receiver doesn't know who is giving the money, how could it act as a bribe?
Re: completely anonymous donations, you mean, like Bitcoin? Generally any legitimate business has to report where it’s money came from - even if just for tax purposes - otherwise it’s a whole new crime. Remember, under my model, all contributions would be banned. Then, candidates would have to compete on platforms instead of fundraising.
It would be pretty hard to set things up so that donations were not only anonymous, but non-verifiable (as in, it should be impossible for a donor to prove to a recipient that they were the one who donated). This attribute in voting systems is part of 'coercion resistance' (as in, if you can't prove how you voted even when you want to, there is no point in trying to coerce you into voting a particular way). In a payments system, we can call it 'corruption resistance'.
So me, as a private citizen, should be outlawed from making a sign on my front yard in support of a candidate with my own money? Should I be prevented from making my own website in support of issues and candidates I care about? Can I create YouTube videos with my own money to support issues and candidates I care about with my own money? This is supporting a candidate with funds outside of the public funds -- clearly illegal under your proposal! At what point is it no longer individuals expressing their own opinions in public?
I encourage you to actually read the Citizens United opinion. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/558/310
This last round of elections showed how money doesn't buy elections as easily as you'd think. Democrats massively over-spent Republicans, and what did it get them? A narrow Biden win, a smaller lead in the house, and a smaller gap in the Senate. Bloomberg's image and as businessman and politician is pretty strong, but for all his spending, the only votes he won in the primary were form American Samoa.
It’s a challenge, for sure. And some proposed solutions may cause more harm that good. But it’s absurd to me the level of wealth inequality we have today. That there are individual humans worth over a billion dollars while so many even in developed nations are hungry and overworked.
More cooperatively owned firms and less intellectual property control are two voluntarist ways we can reduce this inequality.
> In 2016, the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers—those with adjusted gross incomes (AGI) below $40,078—earned 11.6 percent of total AGI. However, this group of taxpayers paid just 3 percent of all income taxes in 2016.
> In contrast, the top 1 percent of all taxpayers (taxpayers with AGI of $480,804 and above), earned 19.7 percent of all AGI in 2016, and paid 37.3 percent of all federal income taxes. The top 1 percent of taxpayers accounted for more income taxes paid than the bottom 90 percent combined, who paid 30.5 percent of all income taxes.
I think a flat 20% above a certain rate is probably the most 'fair', but what needs to change is remove most loopholes that exist now. So everyone above a certain income level pays the same proportion of their income.
Of course the tax base ends up really top heavy, if you earn most of the income, you pay most of the tax. That seems fair to me.
....
So why is it that Buffett himself doesn't pay more tax? It's because the bulk of his income comes from dividends and long-term capital gains, which are taxed at a much lower rate than ordinary income.
https://www.fool.com/taxes/2020/09/25/why-does-billionaire-w...
No, "flat tax" is not what I'm describing or advocating.
Did you know that Warren Buffet paid a total tax rate of 17.7%, whilst the average tax rate for ordinary American office workers in his office was 32.9%?
This doesn't take into account taxes, however, which means that we're assuming a 0% flat tax rate. But, you see, what happens is that if you start imposing a positive taxation rate, then all that changes in the preceding argument is the definition of who is "rich" and who is "poor." The general trend is all that matters.
One actual limitation to point out is that this argument doesn't take investment into account. Over long enough time periods, all major asset classes have a positive expected return, so, it doesn't matter precisely what people invest in. What does matter is how much they have to invest, and how long "long enough" time periods are.
IIRC, for the stock market, "long enough" means 15 years or so. Since this is much shorter than a single human lifetime, you see that all someone who is rich enough to invest has to do is just keep shovelling money into their brokerage account, and it will pay off eventually.
Poor people don't even get to that point. The hows and whys of that are myriad, so I won't even get into that. Just imagine that, instead of calling them "poor people," we call them "economically fragile" people. Then, what you start to realize is that a small bump in the road, like, say, an unexpected car repair, can really devastate an economically fragile person's finances.
And, because economically fragile people don't have a lot of money coming in, their expenses are pretty low. That means that even if they follow standard personal finance advice and try to accumulate a 6 month emergency fund, a car repair costs what a car repair costs, so it's going to eat a much larger chunk of that emergency fund for the economically fragile person than the non-economically fragile person.
Oh, and, because economic fragility is relative (meaning if you, and everybody else have 1 quatloo each and I have 10 quatloos, I'm still as "rich" overall as if everybody had 10 quatloos each, and I had 100), that means starting poor and getting rich takes a long, long time, and may not ever happen.
TL;DR: A completely flat tax rate for all citizens implies that the rich will get richer, and the poor will stay fairly poor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_propensity_to_consume
For a just society we should tax working far less than taxing capital and dividend gains, not the opposite.
"The richest one percent of this country owns half the country's wealth: 5 trillion dollars. One third of that comes from hard work, two thirds of it comes from inheritance, interest on interest accumulation to widows and idiot sons and what I do -- stock and real estate speculation. It's bullshit. Ninety percent of the American people have little or no net worth. I create nothing; I own. We make the rules, Buddy, the news, war, peace, famine, upheaval; the cost of a paper clip. (picking one up) We pull the rabbit out of the hat while everybody else sits around their whole life wondering how we did it..."
If you look at the data, i think you'll find that billionaires own a very small proportion of all wealth
Allegedly about 2100 billionaires - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Billionaires
A couple of years ago all the millionaires put together controlled about 45% of global wealth - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/global-wealth-concentration...
Since billionaires are a subset of those, then they cannot possibly control any more than 45%, so certainly less than half.
Can't find a source showing just billionaires, at the moment, but the first source suggests that the billionaires have a net worth on the order of 9 to 10 trillion; if billionaires control 10 trillion, and about 130 trillion is 45% of the wealth, then billionaires are in control of somewhere around 4% of global wealth.
As a rough calculation in sixty seconds, this does appear to support your assertion that billionaires control a small proportion of wealth. If you team them up with all the millionaires, they're up to almost 50%, but just the billionaires on their own; not so much.
Another angle is that Jeff Bezos, richest man in the world, has $184B. That's $550 per American, or $24 per human.
Undeniably a lot of money, but also far from a sum that would change the world if it got redistributed.
There are 19 million millionaires in the US, or 5-6% of the population.
Hhttps://spendmenot.com/blog/what-percentage-of-americans-are...
To pick an extreme and unlikely hypothesis, it could be that if there weren't any billionaires corrupting politics, then the economy would be run in a better way which enabled everyone to become millionaires.