People love to talk about the marginal tax rates but not the average tax rates. And I think that’s right because the conversation should be focused on the wealthiest people.
That's an irrelevant diversion though, because the measure that matters when discussing the fairness of taxes is how much people are left with at the end after paying whatever taxes they pay, including sales tax, income tax, and any other kind of tax. And for those particular people you're talking about the answer is very little, next to none, and for the people for whom a wealth tax would even apply the answer is unimaginable amounts.
The government's monopoly on punitive violence isn't only intended for the peasantry...
Considering the alternative for them over the past millennia has been, inevitably that they get caught, hanged, quartered, beaten and other various violent methods: yes, they should smile, they're buying their lives with all that money :)
Threatening violence to get what you want always ends with you being out-violenced by a bigger thug.
In humanity, being the alpha chimp, you can actually just run away from the tribe with all your wealth instead of outright die and form a new identity and start a life elsewhere and change your last name and go somewhere not well known, and if you and your family does this for enough generations you are forgotten.
I think this might explain the rotten apples at the tip-top of our industrial/societal wealth classes. I think they are these people, played out over generations, having somehow survived the system that used to make it impossible to do this when at the chimp level (or even medieval maybe, maybe this new form of evasion only arose in the industrial age).
And no, I do not believe that Musk's flabby arms or Bezos' shiny head are a threat of bigger violence to me anyways.
Extortion is the word that summarizes your point.
Just so you know, careers as a bootlicker are kind of a dead end.
If you're not using your funding to support your goals, thats corruption.
People can vote that a new tax should be levied on billionaires, but can't vote how those billionaires will react to the tax. Moving out of state is one option (see Larry Page, Sergey Brin, etc). Hiring armies of lawyers to challenge any wealth assessment is another. Litigating to the Supreme Court yet another. I'm not a billionaire and never will be, but if I can think of these few ideas, they can think of 100 times more.
It feels to me you are asking "why can't we just eliminate billionaires". Well, they have a vote in that decision.
I'd say the fact that California remains the epicenter of tech despite its high taxes suggests concentration of talent matters far more than tax rates.
Both are important reasons for taxes.
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both." (often attributed to Louis Brandeis, though he probably never said exactly the quote)
Taxation is one of the primary tools for avoiding destructive levels of wealth concentration.
Of course, the wealthy decry this as unfair wealth redistribution but all governments engage in constant wealth redistribution.
In the US we happen to have decided (since the Reagan era) that through increasingly regressive taxes the redistribution will almost always function upwards, ultimately resulting in the oligarchical dismantling of our government that we find ourselves in today.
> And for those particular people you're talking about the answer is very little, next to none...
So... where are the real resources coming from then? Because if these people aren't using them to support their living standards they must be doing something else. If we give one person enough money out of the tax pot to pay rent, that means the resources were redeployed from somewhere else that was about 1-rentworth of something.
Because I agree that the taxes aren't going to come out of the wealthy's living standards, but the implications of that in practice are not good.
Yes, and that "somewhere else" is others' excess profit.
That excess profit comes from (a) inventing or investing capital with a return or (b) paying less for goods / labor than they can be sold for.
Capitalist profit has always been equal parts ingenuity and fucking other people over, and as most often implemented makes no discrimination between the two.
The bargain by which this has traditionally been squared is "the person who made the profit gets to keep some of it" + "they pay the rest in taxes to support the society they're successful in and depend on."
Unfortunately over the years this has continually been eroded by capital's invasion into democracy, with the express purpose of neutering the latter part of that bargain.
Those who would be hit with a wealth tax are incensed by it precisely because it would be less avoidable than the myriad of loopholes that have been engineered into income taxes.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource#Tangible_versus_intan...
For the last ~3000 years of human history, wealth has been liquid via some form of money.
Ironically the communists have managed to out-greed the capitalists through this one fantastical concepts. Capitalists accept that they need to pay people to get their inputs and try to make the most of it one way or another. Communists are kept up at night at by the thought that somebody else may have made a penny off of their labor, and think that they need to murder them for it.
No one would be paying Apple or Google 30% of their revenue if there were infinite alternative app distribution options.
The essence of post-capitalism is that a lack of market intervention allows monopolies to not just grow (probably fine in limited niches with regulatory bounds) but also to rent seek without investing and adding value.
So yes, profit is a motivational force that has outperformed all others to date in aligning individual action with market desires.
But the excess profit era the US has been sliding towards for decades is not a free market.
When was the last time a large corporation was forcibly broken up?
How else could it work? The poor don't have enough money to tax them. That's why they're poor. Schemes where the rich don't get taxed are systems that tend towards the 0% tax for everyone end of the spectrum.
Yes. Focus on outcomes.
Pick a target amount of inequity. Act to hit that goal. Adjust as needed.
For example, I advocate restoring our gini coefficient from the current 0.48 (?) back to 1970s era 0.35. People smarter than me will figure out how to best measure inequity, ideal targets, and implementation details.
Arguing about all the misc tax rates, purposefully ignoring the macro, is an obfuscation strategy to prevent taking any action at all. Straight out of the CIA's field guide on sabotage.
(Social security and Medicare)
SS tax has a limit because benefits are also limited. It is a forced retirement plan where if you live long enough, you might get back what you paid in.
It could also be classified as an insurance premium, but a government mandating it is the key characteristic of a tax.
But the fact that the government reduces the annuity amount by increasing retirement age and benefit purchasing power means it is not insurance either. It is wealth redistribution from the working to the non working.
If you have a car, you need to pay car insurance. Is that also a tax?
The concept of insurance is independent of mandatory or not. That should be obvious, I wonder why it isn't to you. Maybe your ideology prohibits clear thinking and makes you vote Trump?
In the context of differentiating between wealth redistribution and insurance, insurance does not redistribute wealth, insurance redistributes risk since underwriting in a competitive marketplace ensures you only a premium commensurate to your risks.
For example, the government mandates only liability insurance up to $x, for which the premium for the same coverage can be vastly different depending on each person's driving history. While this can be considered a tax because the government mandates it, one can see how this is not wealth redistribution since the "tax" being paid is at least partly dependent on one's risk profile.
Contrast this with a government mandated defined benefit pension contribution equal to a percentage of one's earned income, with a known fact that one's contributions will reflect their benefit less and less as the years go on. That is far more "wealth redistribution" than "insurance".
Another example is in the US, health insurance premiums are more tax than an actuarially calculated premium based on health risk. This is because health insurers are not allowed to price health insurance based on health risks. It is explicitly a redistribution of wealth from the young and healthy to the old and sick, due to the maximum age rating factor and inability to underwrite based on pre-existing health conditions.