This road leads to poverty, not prosperity (and more inflation as more money chases fewer goods produced in fewer factories by fewer workers).
Investment happens anywhere there is a chance of positive return.
Investing in new technology either as an inventor/entrepreneur or dumb money still offers returns exponentially higher than anything else, should it work out.
There is a point where excessive taxation/regulation hurts innovation, but I don't think we're anywhere near that.
I have a home solar-panel system to sell you. It will pay for itself in a mere 25 years. Now, normally, it'd pay for itself in 8 years, but taxes have raised the price. You will surely invest in this system anyway.
All you've done with this example is try to say that X is better than (X + tax), failing to identify the actual benefits and tradeoffs derived from the tax. Please at least try to be somewhat intellectually honest.
Cut that return to a third of its previous value and I’ll leave my money in stocks and just buy electricity made from natural gas.
Thats not how it works. Taking a higher percentage of returns, can leave the returns positive, but the expected value of risks negative.
EX: To make a simplified example, imagine that you can invest 10$, in an investment that has 50% chance of giving you an additional 11$.
That has a positive expected value. But if you put a 20% tax on the winning, now that investment no longer has a positive expected value, even though the returns in the wining case are positive.
It's been happening since the dawn of the industrial revolution.
The harnessing of fossil fuels and machinery should have put everyone out of work forever.
We used to be 85% living and working on farms, and now we're 5%.
In short, we found ways to make people way, way more productive, and the standard of living for the average person is astronomically higher today than it was 200 years ago.
I think special attention needs to be paid to accumulation of assets, and that this can definitely get out of hand (even as wages and standard of living rise, it can still be a problem), but overall, it's worked out.
Paradoxically, I still trust markets and regulation more than I do centralized control and distribution. The current US governments multi trillion dollar budgets come with all sorts of special requirements, usually of the social kind that can be liberally interpreted by institutions receiving the money (i.e. schools have to comply with our social view in order to receive the money, instead of just making sure that it's fairly spent).
For example, I think min. wage increases tend to be a better social measure because it's attached to actual production, and, it's generally not encumbered by some kind of employment and hiring ideology.
I honestly believe the tools are available to us, and we can make a ton of progress by just doing basic adjustments, closing loopholes, ensuring standards.
As an example, Healthcare reform of one way or another, even something that disentangled employment from Health Insurance, and somehow got 'pretty much everyone' covered one way or another, might yield gigantic side benefits with reduction of poverty and individual calamity. 50% of individual bankruptcies are Healthcare related. Imagine how much strife comes from that, and it's most unnecessary using a policy framework that we could apply today.
Especially things like offshore tax havens, tax loopholes, bogus charities etc. etc..
So much low hanging fruit, or at least, low-hanging from an ideological perspective.
The key many Americans seem to forget.
You mean these people are so disgusted by the idea of taxation that they would abandon the business opportunity that has presented itself in front of them?
This is the kind of thinking that has gotten us into this hole: "We have to do everything we can to appease the wealthiest, or they'll stop gracing us with jobs!"
There are only so many places you can park your money
Neoliberalism is a failed experiment, we now live in the results of this failure, 40 years after it started. We either address this failure or we let it roll until it sparks a revolution, either way it needs fixing.
how has neoliberalism failed?
And if there is any improvement in neoliberal poor countries it is because of the definition of "extreme poverty" used is based on nominal dollar value disconnected from material reality.
I’m having trouble finding a data set and definition of “long term” that supports that top-3 ranking, care to share yours?
[1] https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2018/09/19/d...
I left another comment on the thread with this study [1] which I recommend to anyone wanting to dispute that neoliberalism has failed.
About the US from this study:
> Third, where we have seen a reduction in poverty, it has come from government action, not from education. The earned income tax credit (EITC) and minimum wage, for example, are the systematic levers that raised wages for lower-wage workers—not skills. In 1967, the poverty rate was 27 percent without tax credits and benefits. That number is 29 percent now, but it is 16 percent when tax credits and benefits are applied. The EITC has pulled many people out of poverty.
[1] https://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/RI...
[1] https://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/RI...
Unfortunately and unsurprisingly you got the math backwards on this one.