I mean, she is actually homeless. Sleeping on a couch on a friend’s teacher’s apartment isn’t exactly secure. She’s not on the street, but that’s not really necessary to be homeless.
Right, I’m aware, I was trying to say that out of choices tuition, place to live, and Robin actually voting for what they campaign for, maybe Becky didn’t pick place to live. But I think the next strip negates that now anyway.
“90% marginal tax rate on income over 10 million dollars” means that you get taxed 90% on any income OVER 10 million dollars, but not on the portion UNDER 10 million, regardless of how much you make.
That is:
Make $5 million: $0 marginal tax paid (other taxes still due, of course).
Make $10 million: $0 marginal tax paid
Make $11 million: $900,000 marginal tax paid.
Make $110 million: $9 million marginal tax paid.
When the starting floor of the tax is set at such a high point that it’s more than practically anyone actually NEEDS for their yearly income (as with the $10 million suggestion in the comic), it’s nowhere near as harmful as naysayers typically portray it.
It’s not really radical, that tax only effects income over 10 million dollars and it is a tax rate that we had in the 1950’s and 1960’s. It isn’t new. It would not be the problematic mess that people like the Koch brothers want you to believe. It’s just we have come to the point in Capitalism where it has become problematic in and of itself. It requires the existence of “have’s” and “have not’s”, basically requiring the suffering of people to work.
Do you know how marginal tax rates work? Marginal means you’re not getting taxed 90% for all of your income, just for the bit that’s over $10mil. So if you make $10.000.001, you’re getting taxed 90% for $1 (the bit that’s over $10mil) and a lower rate for the rest.
Also, do you make over 10 million dollars? Not just over, but significantly over? Do you have any idea how much that is? It doesn’t mean you have over 10 million dollars. It means you get over 10 million more dollars every month. Do you know what you can buy with that much money? Because the answer is everything, with enough left over to invest in a few ventures. It’s an obscene amount of money. Hell, even if you did only get to keep 10% of it, that’d still be over $1mil a month, which is enough for a truly decadent lifestyle.
From 1954 until the early Eighties the top marginal rate of federal income tax in the USA was 91% (on incomes over $200,000 per year). And some states had state income taxes in addition.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez occasionally mentions raising the top marginal rate of income tax to 70%. I suppose that the reason that she has chosen that figure is that what little evidence there is of a maximum in the Laffer Curve puts it at a marginal tax rate of 70–75%.
Actually, it was 91% until 1964. It then dropped to 70% through 1981 – which may be why Ocasio-Cortez chose that number. Subsequent to that it dropped substantially, and since the late 1980s has varied between 28% and Just under 40%.
Probably more significant to the (very) wealthy (who generally depend on “passive” income rather than “earned” income), capital gain and qualified dividend income rates are much lower (a maximum of 20%). I haven’t heard any proposals to deal with that, though Warren apparently proposes a tax on accumulated wealth. Given the opportunities to stash/hide wealth, I don’t have huge hopes that such a tax would be successful.
There have been proposals to treat long term capitals gains as regular income, though I’m not sure any high profile politicians have made them recently. There are some issues with doing so – like handling losses.
One of the more interesting side effects of a wealth tax would be disclosure. We really have very little direct information about who has how much wealth . It’s all estimates.
I’m not sure how much wealth hiding there would be. Most of the ways to hide wealth are counterproductive. The point of wealth is to generate more wealth. A million dollars in the market with a return of 8% is better than a million dollars buried in the back yard being eaten away by inflation, even if you have to pay a 2% tax on the money in the market.
There will certainly be some, but mostly rich people want their cash out making more cash.
SONIC SEZSAYS
“Kids, there’s nothing more cool than a 90% marginal tax rate on income over $10,000,000. But if someone tries to tax you in a way that makes you impoverished, that’s no good.”
I’m not an economics expert, but I’m pretty sure that noone would actually pay those taxes. They would just spend their earnings in new investments / projects so that their bottom line remains below $10 mil.
So the idea isn’t to take money from the rich, it is to prevent the rich from hoarding money, and instead forcing them to invest it into new ventures, creating jobs and keeping the money in circulation.
Except that the tax take on this would be extremely minor because if you’re making 10 million a year then you’d have an army of lawyers and accountants to make sure you don’t pay anything close to 90%
The marginal tax rate is NOT the same as the actual tax rate. Even if the marginal tax rate is 99% and you haven’t hired a single lawyer or accountant, you’re not going to be paying that much in actual cash.
I have no idea what a marginal tax rate is as opposed to an actual tax rate…but here in the UK, the top rate of income tax has been steady for many years now at 45% of everything after the first £150,000.
That’s actually exactly what a marginal tax rate is. In this case, 90% of every dollar *after the first 10 million*. If implemented in the UK using your example it would mean paying 45% of everything above 150k pounds and then 90% of everything above 10 million pounds. The reason Americans are being so specific about it being a marginal rate is because the Republicans are pretending it’s 90% of *all* income if you earn over 10 million, rather than 90% of the excess, or margin, above that.
The point still stands though, this tax won’t earn much because anyone making that much money will have it sorted that they won’t be paying much, if at all on anything above the 10 million so why have it in the first place other than to make people feel better about “punishing” the rich
Taxes aren’t punishments. When you ride on a bus, you’re not being punished by paying a fare. When you live in a society and make massive profit from the environment it provides you, you’re not being punished by paying for upkeep.
So let me turn that around: is there any reason [i]not[/i] to have it in the first place, other than to make people feel better about “giving a free ride” to the rich? Dog whistling at its finest, indeed.
Maybe we could make decisions based on what works best (which is [i]not[/i] letting inequality grow forever) rather than the kind of emotional appeal that can be turned both ways just as easily.
Taxes aren’t punishment I agree but extra taxes that serve no reason certainly are punishments, in this case punishment for being wealthy
Inequality is not the problem, being poor is the problem. Compare me to Warren Buffet and yeah its really unequal but I’m doing all right so bringing Warren Buffet down by extra taxes wont maker a blind bit of difference to me at all
However helping the unemployed find work certainly will so maybe the USA could look at lowering the company tax rates to the same levels as the Scandinavian tax rates
A marginal tax rate is not a punishment either. It’s a way to force the mega rich to pay their share in taxes. Yes, they’ll try to get around it – that means there needs to be work done on implementing it (like closing loopholes and tax havens). That doesn’t make it a bad idea.
Second of all, I’m glad you’re doing alright. Others aren’t and strengthening the social security net would be beneficial for them. Unless you’re making 10 million, you’re not going to be affected by such a tax.
Scandinavia also has a strong social security net so I dunno why you think one’s something the US should emulate but not the other. Even ignoring that lowering taxes on large corporations and companies never actually helps – see: Last years tax cut from Trump.
Yeah, that’s because the bottom 50% don’t have the money. What little they have goes to bare necessities. Should we make it strictly fair and require the bottom 10% to pay the same as the top 10%? The bottom would have to borrow and the top could pay it out of petty cash, but it would be fair, right? They call that a head tax or a poll tax and it’s horrendous.
Surprisingly the share of the total income tax revenue the top 1% pay has been going up, even as we’ve lowered rates. That’s because those lowered rates lead to more wealth and thus more income for the top 1%. They pay a larger share of the total income tax than they did decades ago because they have more money and proportionally everyone else has less.
Note that they pay a lower percentage of their income than when rates were higher, but their income is enough more to overcome that. Because money makes money.
You want them to pay a lower share of total income taxes? Tax them more for a few years. Tax their accumulated wealth. Spread it out to the rest of us and magically, you’ll see their share drop.
It’s a stupid metric and it always comes up in tax arguments.
The top three riches people in America are Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Jeff Bezos. All three have numerous, numerous articles about how they commit tax avoidance. Yeah, I’m gonna say that’s not paying their share.
I’m not doing your google searches for you because you want to be a bootlicker, Chris.
That last comment was uncalled for and for that I will apologize, but I stand by the top part – it’s been in the news several times (for all three) and it’s not difficult to find.
But everything I’ve seen investigate the question says that not just poverty, but high inequality is itself a problem. It’s negatively correlated with quality of life and distorts both economic and political processes to the point where only the ultra-wealthy get a say, and then things other people want gets ignored.
You already can see examples of this in the US, where for instance single-payer health care is actually something a majority of people support. And yet as far as the parties are concerned, it’s an untenable position. That’s not just a problem of poverty; even middle class people can be ruined by medical expenses, and yet right now even middle class people are not having their interests represented.
If you don’t think massive inequality is a problem, I can see thinking high marginal tax rates are purely punitive. But that ignores why people want them, which is that they think massive inequality is a problem, and I would say the data definitely backs that up.
Worse, wealth makes wealth. Once you’ve got enough wealth you can invest, live off the income that generates, plowing some of it back into the principal and your wealth just grows.
Assuming your return on investment is higher than the rate the economy grows – which it traditionally has been, those with significant investment income inevitably control a larger and larger portion of the economy – leaving less and less to be split among the rest of us.
Putting a cap on how obscenely rich you can be isn’t punishment. It’s sanity. Lowering taxes on businesses and the rich fixes NOTHING. Trickle down DOES NOT WORK
And “helping people get jobs” does fuck-all to address poverty when incredibly profitable corporations like Amazon don’t even pay all their workers a living wage. Not to mention all those people who literally CANNOT work.
Those countries have many other differences – more social supports, more worker’s rights, higher individual taxes and if I recall correctly less loopholes than our company taxes. The nominal rates here may be higher, but many large profitable companies wind up paying little or nothing.
The ultra rich may have paid a larger share of their income in income tax – but that’s what the hell income tax is supposed to be like! It’s a progressive tax! They paid a heck of a lot less of their income in sales taxes.
Correct. Anyone subject to this tax will easily find ways around it. These workarounds will distort the economy in ways that reduce efficiency, and most likely lead to even greater complications in the tax code. I’m not speculating here, this is what happened in the past when marginal rates were higher.
But, hey, soak the rich always plays well in some quarters. Never mind that the US already has one of the world’s most progressive income tax structures. People at the top already pay a percentage of taxes that’s greater than their share of income.
I mean they’ll do that literally no matter what the tax rate is, plenty of billionaires already pay no taxes or get refunds, not to mention what corporations do. That’s more of an argument for more and different kinds of tax reform in addition to raising the rates back to what they used to be.
They find ways around it, marginal tax rate or not.
Tax havens have to be clamped down. Tax havens have to be transparent, for a start.
Then there’s the whole problem with franchises. For example Starbucks cafes are franchises which usually run at a reported loss, but the parent company runs at a massive profit.
Essentially, a Starbucks in South Africa, say, is a pump from the South African economy to the US.
Companies like Amazon work on the same principle. The worse thing is that HMRC connive in such tricks.
Or, you know, actually invest in their business and community in order to lower their tax burden instead of being rentiers, the way it worked back when we had a 90% rate before.
The idea that you think the US has some of the highest income tax rates for high earners suggests you don’t know any examples of tax rates outside the US. For starters, no-one is expected to pay more tax than the income they earn. Second, the highest tax bracket in the US is 37%, as one commenter mentioned the UK is at 45%, and Australia is at 45% as well. Canada is a bit better at 33% for the top bracket. Not only that, but your brackets have way higher thresholds – as a single taxpayer in Australia I have to make the equivalent of only 125k USD to hit a 45% tax rate, whereas in the US I’d need to hit 4 TIMES that at 500k. Since Canada’s top bracket kicks in from 150k USD equivalent they’re not actually as generous as they seem on the surface either. That means that, in practice, the US has a pretty generous income tax rate for high earners by comparison with other western nations.
It’s not clear to me the tax code is any less complex than when marginal rates were highest or that rich people are any less dedicated to finding loopholes.
More importantly, it’s hard for me to see that the economy was any less efficient in any sense I care about back when we had high marginal rates than it has been since. Those were the boom post war years. Massive growth, broad prosperity, the growth of the middle class. Since Reagan’s tax reforms that drastically cut the top rates and supposedly reduced loopholes, the rich have gotten dramatically richer and the rest of us have stagnated. Even overall growth has been much slower.
There are certainly other external factors at play but it’s hard for me to accept that the tax policies in place during that period were really a huge drag on the economy and the policies since are boosting it, when the outcomes were reversed.
Yes, people will find ways around the law, so clearly the solution is to just make it legal. I hear this argument on everything from gun control to abortion. *Facepalm*
Regardless of the particular issue at hand, is anyone actually swayed by arguments like that? The hole in that reasoning is big enough to fly a fucking jumbo jet through it.
People are gonna have abortions anyway, so it might as well be safe, legal, and affordable. Anti-abortion policies are deliberately designed to harm and punish women, and nobody cares what happens after the baby is born. If I’m missing something, let me know.
The problem is that it’s simultaneously fallacious and unconvincing to people on the other side, which is kind of a twofer bad argument? Arguments being, something you have invested in and therefore have, on some level, an interest in winning?
Individual sovereignty of body, the fact that no one goes looking for the guy to face said penalty, the fact that no one wants to support the baby living with the impoverished uneducated 16 year old that basically cannot, it is not possible for her to do this alone, the fact that I thought that we (at least where I live) settled this “get your goddamn religious beliefs out of my government” thing *checks* 243 years ago? Those are all great arguments imo.
“People are gonna do it anyways” is…I don’t even know what that is. Let’s just file it away as “not good enough”.
I think the distinction with abortion is that “women are going to do it anyways” leads directly to women bleeding out from botched back-alley abortions. “safe” is critical part of that argument, in a way it isn’t in most of the other variations of the argument. There’s a reason the coathanger is such a potent symbol
“People are going to do it anyway and the consequences will be horrific” is a different argument than “People are going to do it anyway, so why bother.” It’s a harm reduction approach.
Of course much of the anti-abortion movement doesn’t care about harm reduction, since they see it as punishment for sinning.
Another version of that was the one Governor Schwarzenegger made a few years ago, when he cut funding from women’s shelters (which funding provided fully half their operating costs) by 100%: “We can’t completely resolve this issue, so why bother even trying.”
It’s such a bizarre and stupid way to look at an issue. I mean, ideally, if there’s a problem, you fix it, yeah? But if you can’t completely resolve it straight off, acting to at least mitigate it is better than just throwing up your hands and doing nothing. That whole “best is the enemy of the good” and all.
I mean, really, it’d be like saying, “I’ve got a cold and I feel like shit and I can’t cure it, so there isn’t even any point to me taking some cold meds so I don’t feel so crappy while I get over it.”
Or, “My car ran out of coolant and is overheating and I don’t have any more coolant to use with me. I could top up the radiator with water, which would at least stop the engine from seizing while I limp to the store or a mechanic for fluid; but since that won’t immediately fix my problem of not having any coolant, I’m just gonna run it dry rather than using something that helps, but isn’t quite as good in the meantime.”
“I don’t have an alarm system on my house, so why even bother locking the door? I can’t afford to put up security cameras to deter or prosecute potential burglars, so why bother trying to slow them down or prevent them getting in at all?”
“There’s always going to be some murder, even with the death penalty as a deterrent, so why bother making murder illegal in the first place?”
“Rich people are always going to be able to find some loopholes to avoid paying their full tax bill, so why bother closing any of them at all?”
Basically 90% on income over 10 million that means you have your 10 million dollars…and the amount ABOVE that 10 million gets taxed 90% If you made 13 million with a marginal tax rate of 90% above 10 million, you would pay 90% of….3 million. not 13 million.
It’s worth noting that 10 million dollars in 1960 is worth about 85.9 million dollars in 2019 due to inflation. I’m too uneducated on the marginal tax rate issue to have a good opinion on it, but 10 million is a lot less than it used to be, apparently.
Yeah, I feel like the only real restriction on what you can raise the marginal tax rate on really high brackets to is how much it’ll slow down investment and development from the private sector, but let’s be real. Billionaires are gonna make more money no matter how hard you make it, so 90% or 95% is pretty logical I feel. That 5% + deductions/incentives will have no problem driving the investment sector, and it’ll slow down the income disparity growth!
If by “investment and development” you mean “shareholder dividends and overseas wire transfers”, then yeah. The last tax code overhaul just made a few Scrooge McDuck money vaults a bit deeper.
Trickle-down economics is a fairy tale, told to make sure the masses keep voting against their own interest.
It won’t. People used to invest in their businesses in order to keep their tax rate lower. Then when they didn’t have to do that, they pulled the money out and put it in tax shelters, often overseas.
That’s an often overlooked point in these discussion: At a 35% rate, if I take $1000 out of my business, I’ve got $650 to play with in the stock casino. At a 90% rate, I’ve only got $100. It’s a lot harder to make up the difference. Makes more sense to leave it in and expand the business instead.
I did the math.
For the marginal tax rate to take 50% of your income you have to earn more than $22 million.
For the marginal rate to take 75%, you need to be earning $60 million.
Holy shit, I LOVE Becky. Like I’ve always liked her and since her scientist declaration I’ve liked her a LOT, but her improv skills this arc are killing me.
If Becky actually supports what she said in the last panel and isn’t just saying it to troll Robin, she should definitely run for Congress in a few years in-universe.
Well well well, isn’t this bit of math rather timely, considering what ideas Elizabeth Warren has been floating lately, although she bumped the margin way up to 50 million dollars.
I tend of think of myself as centre-left, but a tax rate 90% (if it’s the marginal tax rate) sounds a bit immoral. Nobody should have so much of their income taken away…
Dude, if you can’t live on ten million dollars, you’re officially ridiculous. That’s plenty to live on comfortably for your whole family. Now you’re just being obtuse.
You phrased it nicer than I was gonna. If you can’t live on ten million bucks a year, you basically are too inept and useless to survive in the first place.
The point of that much money isn’t to live on, it’s to establish an estate that’ll support descendants indefinitely.
Think Jane Austen and all those old families with incomes of X pounds per year. Have enough wealth you can live entirely off the earnings and expand or at least keep the principal intact. The way the world worked for centuries up until at least WWI and maybe WWII and the Depression. The US somewhat less so, since our fortunes were new money by those standards.
I get that, but you and at least a generation or two of descendants should be okay on ten million, plus whatever other income is coming in that’s being taxed. Like, let’s say you make 11 million dollars and there’s a 90% marginal tax rate – that’s still $100K per year coming in.
Theres better, way efficient ways of tax gethering than this, however the point of this tax isn’t revenue gathering its show you’re doing “something” even if what you’re doing isn’t very effective
‘Finally, it is very likely that the existence of a 91 percent bracket led to significant tax avoidance and lower reported income. There are many studies that show that, as marginal tax rates rise, income reported by taxpayers goes down. As a result, the existence of the 91 percent bracket did not necessarily lead to significantly higher revenue collections from the top 1 percent.’
That’s actually been a consistent part of Matthew’s point elsewhere in the thread: the goal is not to maximise tax revenue, necessarily; it’s to incentivise particular business practices. One of the easiest ways for a business owner to report and therefore get taxed on a lower income value is to simply have a lower income, by spending the money, growing the business, and generally participating in the economy like a contributing member of society, rather than hoarding it like a particularly slayable dragon.
Money is only ever worth what you spend it on, and if they aren’t doing that, then there really isn’t a reason to say that people who already get 10 million dollars should get to “earn” significantly more on top for doing what amounts to less than the average amount of labor, in any circumstance. It’s an attitude that ultimately puts property rights above human rights, and no matter which way you slice it there’s exactly one perspective from which that is Good, Actually and it’s the one where most people, possibly including you, definitely including me, just Don’t Count.
Income of the rich going down is the whole damn point.
Wealth and power naturally accumulate at the top. Money makes money. Letting this go on is bad for the economy and disastrous for democracy. High marginal tax rates are partly to directly keep money from the hands of the already rich, but even more too change the incentives so they don’t take as much in the first place.
Now, if you want to just increase revenue from the rich, let’s talk wealth taxes. 🙂
You and the rest of the posters on here are not poor because someone else is a billionaire and if all the billionaires suddenly lost their wealth no one here would suddenly become richer
Depending on what use the money was put to, maybe not richer in the bank account sense, but “poor and able to access adequate healthcare, shelter, education, etc.” sure beats “poor and none of that.”
It’s a more complicated question than that. But yeah, there are a lot of people who are poor because of the actions of billionaires and they way they make their wealth.
mm no but if we taxed billionaires that much maybe we could do something about public education, college debt, and medical care
or we could talk about how it’s immoral to take away that much money from someone when let’s see.. “you would have to spend over $100,000 every day for the next 25 years in order to spend $1-billion.” wow they wouldn’t even miss it
it’s almost like we could redistribute the wealth and provide for a better quality of life for everyone instead of letting the rich people keep living better lives than everyone else
Don’t “And?” me. You’re defending wastes of oxygen who would gladly squeeze every last penny out of you, if they could just figure out how to get away with it. You’re nothing but an obstacle to them.
My morals aren’t dependent on someone elses actions. What they would do is immaterial to what I believe.
If the only reason you’d say or do something morally right is because the other person would do the same for you then you need to take a look in the mirror because your morals are all messed up
Just going to drop the first formulation of moral philosopher Immanual Kant’s categorical imperative here.
“Act as if the maxims of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature.” (from Wikipedia).
Basically, if everyone were to hypothetically do what you do and it doesn’t actually work in practice, it is wrong to take that action.
I feel it is somewhat relevant as the basis of a viewpoint against your position. At the very least your post reminded me of it.
Refusing to defend an abstract group of people from accusations of wrongdoing isn’t immoral. Hell, even sometimes refusing to defend an real group of people isn’t immoral, like when said group is actively dangerous to you (ex. I wouldn’t step in to a conversation to defend a group of men who’d threatened me before from accusations they were creepy fucks).
Some people are born into rich families, some people are born with an over abundance of fast twitch muscles, some people are born with above average intelligence, some people are born with determination and drive, some people are born with pleasingly symmetrical features
But I’m not going to single out a group of people and over tax them because that leads to all sorts of issues
Define “over tax”? You tax them more because they’ve got more money and they can afford more taxes.
This is a weird slippery slope argument that never actually ends. It’s the exact same argument that Republicans just used to justify cutting the top rates down from 38%. It always applies. It was used against the first income taxes.
Hell, if we had a flat tax, they’d probably use it to justify a poll tax instead.
Chris, that “fast twitch muscle fibers” shit is actual white supremacist pseudo-science you’re citing while trying to equate a desire to tax the rich with racism
Being born into a rich family is not an achievement or an accomplishment. Being rich doesn’t deserve to be held up as success when so many people inherited their money.
Having millions of billions of dollars while people starve is the more immoral act, sorry. There is no defense for gathering up that level of wealth while others suffer.
That is the impression that I’ve got yes – Daddy’s little princess (and Daddy can afford things like a safe GOP seat so she doesn’t have to break her nail doing actual work).
Is there any evidence of this, other than Robin being a politician?
She does seem to have money, but that’s as likely from being a politician as how she got there.
Roz doesn’t seem to be rolling in wealth and I don’t think family money has ever been mentioned.
It’s pretty clear she’s not actually Daddy’s little princess – she’s talked about her dad. Her dad left and she’s not fond of the step-dad.
She’s probably coasting on the money her campaign had left. It’s easy enough for a politician to hold a press conference (she’s the local representative after all), and it’s likely thet already had that huge banner.
So Becky has no reason to actually make Robin win; Becky won’t betray her own principles and she won’t sabotage Robin, but she isn’t going to pull any kinda shady magic either. My hope is that the actual effect of this is to push Robin’s opponent further left… Is that how politics works?
In reality? More like let her opponent sit back and laugh as she self-destructs.
If anything, since she’s probably leap-frogged him on some issues (or Becky has), he’d slide more to the center to pick up Republican leaning moderates turned off by her radical proposals.
It’s hard to say, because this doesn’t actually happen in politics. Hardliners on one side of the debate don’t suddenly switch mid-campaign to radical proposals from the other.
I had a lengthy diatribe in the works to post, but of course my phone decided to eat it. Here’s the less soapbox-y TL;DR version for now:
Adjusting tax rates will help, but it won’t fix the systemic problems of wage stagnation and rising cost of goods.
We have a huge labor force that shifted from creating value (manufacturing and industry) to being a middleman getting squeezed in the name of consumer cost and profit margin (retail and services). The manufacturing was shifted offshore thanks to lower labor costs, and thus higher profit margins. This stifled middle class wages.
Well, crap. How do we keep the gears of consumption a-turnin’ now? Shift the focus from total cost to monthly payment. We’re at a point where a family car costs $50,000 and gets financed for 96 months at 2% interest to keep the monthly payments palatable. Cell phones cost $1000, but they’re “only” $70 a month rolled into the phone bill. Then there’s all the subscriptions. Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, wine of the month, meal kits, subscription surprise boxes… All cheap individually but they add up before you know it.
And how are we rewarded for our loyal patronage? With more shiny gadgets to buy, that invade our privacy and monitor our activity, so we can be bombarded with advertisements picked out just for us. Just to make sure we’re wringing every last penny out of America’s ears and eyeballs. But apparently that’s okay because they talk!
Reaganomics broke America. Supply side economics has only strangled the middle class while getting it addicted to conspicuous consumption. This has shifted tons of money from the lower and middle classes up, and it never “trickled down” as promised. It was never going to. The whole thing was a con job, the biggest cash grab in generations.
I agree entirely, except I’d like to note that robotic manufacturing has taken way, way more manufacturing jobs than moving factories overseas, and will continue to take even more jobs.
Robotic manufacturing was always an inevitable, though. Humans have always looked for ways to speed up production, beginning with the first animal-driven plows. An interesting aside though; it seems like it’ll be lawyers that’ll be the first to go, since AI can do their jobs faster and more efficiently.
Everyone’s job will be replaced by computers, in time. And not all that much time, either. I would not be surprised to see most people’s jobs replaced by 2050.
Either we figure out how to restructure society so that scenario isn’t a dystopian apocalypse, or we keep burying our heads in the sand and lying about the reality of it coming to pass.
Overall this is a good thing. Like other technological advances in the past. More production for less work is a good thing.
We just have to find a way to distribute the proceeds of that production more broadly. We’ve done this before in the Industrial revolution, though it took a long time and much misery. We need to do it faster this time. It’s not even a hard problem in theory. It’s just a matter of political will.
Everything you said is true. Wage stagnation needs to be solved via legislation concerning minimum wage, and I don’t think anyone disputes that.
The biggest benefit of a higher tax rate would be to allow more money to be funneled into social programs (like cheaper healthcare, for instance). This, in turn, would leave the lower rungs of the economic ladder with more spending money, which in turns makes for a healthier economy. I mean, if any’s left after they make sure they make rent and don’t go hungry, I mean.
Minimum wage might be true for corporations and other huge organizations but what about small shops, restaurants etc.? From what I heard the bar where AOC worked closed because they couldn’t afford to pay their workers the minimum wages. If anything increasing minimum wage for all businesses will help big corporations while hamstringing small scale businesses who won’t be able to absorb the losses like the big corporations can.
That’s not how it works. And I’d check into that story, cause there’s all sorts of rumors and myths flying around about AOC. OTOH, bars and restaurants go under all the time and minimum wage hikes can be a convenient excuse.
Minimum wages increase costs slightly, depending on the industry. Not all your costs are wages. Minimum wage increases, especially in small local businesses, give your local customers more money and thus increase potential volume. And that seems to bear out in studies of what happens when minimum wages go up. The dire economic consequences predicted by right wing pundits just don’t happen.
Very true regarding giving the customers more money. The profits-before-everything CEOs are definitely forgetting that you can’t sell stuff to people who don’t have money… well you can I guess… if they take out loans they’ll need to pay off.
A considerable issue in US I think is the disparity between worker salaries and CEO salaries. I remember seeing a comparison of such salaries and while in Europe the ratio between worker and CEO was around 1:50/1:70 in US the average was at 1:500 and that was the lower range.
Personally I believe that it would be better if the salary breakdown was a bit more fair towards the workers rather than squeezing the money out of a company via taxes because I just don’t trust the government to be responsible with the money, me being from post-communist Central Europe and all that. Maybe introducing some limits on how much more than the workers a CEO can earn?
Definitely. Honestly while I’m in favor of Capitalism it is one of the issues I have with it. It assumes that people with power and money would not try to manipulate the system to their benefit.
That’s actually a consequence of the tax policy, among other things. Low top end tax rates encourage those sky high salaries. There’s less motive to crank the cash up when the government gets most of it. Often compensation shifted to perks which weren’t taxable and thus look like loopholes, but have the advantage of not adding to wealth that can be used to generate more income.
There are other factors of course – strong unions being a major one. Not so much in keeping CEO compensation down, but in keeping worker’s salaries up and thus the ratio down.
Actually, small businesses tend to get more sales post wage increases because people will shop more when they have more money. Restaurants do see small price increases, but in the US and Canada, they tend to pay a smaller minimum wage in the first place.
More abstractly though – if you can’t afford to pay an employee a living wage, don’t hire an employee. You’re not entitled to have employees.
To add to that there is also the issue of cost efficiency. I remember hearing that McDonalds for example started replacing workers with kiosks because rising the minimum wage made it more cost effective to spend money on automation rather than living workers. I just think that this is a problem which requires much more thinking and experimenting than just slapping a “Raise minimum wage” on everything.
That is true to some extent. Rising wages increases the pressure towards automation. It is more complicated and we’re going to need more fundamental adjustments than just minimum wages increases.
That doesn’t mean that we should just leave workers living in dire poverty while we debate the bigger issues.
Quite. Honestly I think that US should start treating the “Bring the jobs back” shtick Trump has been using more seriously. On the one hand it would give a lot of people jobs, on the other hand it would weaken the China’s stranglehold on other people’s economies. Various countries are quite afraid of criticizing China because of their huge influence on global economy.
There are no jobs to bring back. The near entirety of those jobs hasn’t gone to other countries, it’s just gone. Poof. Kaput. They’re ex-jobs. As a rule of thumb, if Trump said it it’s not just a lie, it’s the actual opposite of the truth. If he ever says the sky is blue, I’m getting myself checked for daltonism.
And before someone claims THAT, automation isn’t the issue. The issue is that people have allowed capitalism to run rampant, so the social safety nets have been disintegrated in many countries. Automation should have resulted in people working less hours for the same pay, but morons and “muh capitalism” have ruined that. People having more free time is a GOOD THING.
Those… aren’t the same jobs. That’s not coal mining, or auto factories (which have in fact LOST jobs) or whatever. Those are NEW jobs, and therefore, aren’t being brought back.
It matters when you’re talking about bringing jobs “back” vs. new job creation. If that’s what you’re talking about, then say it. Frequently people talk about bringing “back” jobs that are no longer needed, which is what the issue with that is.
It also matters when those new jobs pay less and have less benefits than the old jobs – which has been the rule for much of this expansion.
We’ve been seeing a little wage pressure recently, but not really significant.
They should, because when politicians promise them “their jobs back”, they’re talking about coal and shit, which are jobs that no longer exist and won’t be coming back (also, it’s another dogwhistle for xenophobia, “look at all those BROWN people getting YOUR jobs”).
“old jobs” and “new jobs” require completely different things; namely, new jobs require a requalification of the workforce into new technologies, which is most definitely not happening under the current US policy of “fuck education”. And then those new jobs go to immigrants, who can actually type with both hands and read without moving their lips, and the Republicans get to blow on that dogwhistle again “look at all those FOREIGNERS getting MURICAN jobs”, conveniently sidestepping the fact that they made sure US folk were ever more unqualified to do high-tech jobs, which will constitute more and more of the job market as time goes on.
Automation *would* result in less hours for the same pay, if we weren’t a capitalist system always looking for ways to make more money. But we are, so automation is exactly the problem.
Automation and capitalism don’t mix well, especially not as automation becomes an increasingly large percentage of the job market.
It’s not capitalism. It’s exploitation and exploitation’s been around since long before capitalism.
It’s the damn predatory assholes. Keep them under control and you can handle it in any economic paradigm. Let them take over and you’re screwed under any economic paradigm.
I just fondly think of the Fifties’ vision of the future where automation would free us all from drudgery and give us a life of ease forever. I mean, we’ve got some of it (for example, Roombas free you from having to manually vacuum; vacuums free you from having to sweep), but it certainly isn’t the vision of fully-automated farms with self-driving vehicles delivering fresh produce each morning, no humans involved. We’re pretty close, though!
The basic assumption in that vision, though, is that, since no workers are being paid, the costs to produce drop to nearly nothing. If everything’s automated, from mining through resource refinement through production and delivery, then what is there to pay for, really?
But of course, that hasn’t happened. Corporations automate jobs, and then keep charging for those products as if they were still having to cover the cost of paying humans to make them. And meanwhile, not only are there fewer jobs to go around, thanks to automation, the population keeps rising so there are more people competing for what few jobs still exist.
And so the handful of people running the automated companies, having a large chunk of their overhead costs of doing business removed, while still earning money at the same rate, end up taking the money they were formerly paying to their workers and keeping it for themselves.
And meanwhile, the people who were formerly being paid to work, have lost that income and increasingly find themselves unable to replace it, the more so when businesses allow inflation to increase their prices while not also increasing their wages to keep pace with it.
And a key part to remember in all of this is that there is a finite amount of money in the system. The government can’t just make dollars magically out of nothing or inflation skyrockets, the value of it plummets, and the economy crashes.
Which means that when Jeff Bezos, for example, is worth several billion dollars, that is money that he has directly removed from the economy, that is now unavailable to everyone else.
And that’s why hoarding money to such a degree is so immoral; it’s literally removing it from being available to anyone else, instead of recirculating it back into the economy by paying workers, or even spending it freely (and by “freely” I mean “almost all of it,” whether by having custom houses built or eating out every meal or whatever).
Money is not like human rights. You can grant rights to a marginalized group that has previously not held them (the right for women and PoC to vote, for example, or for same-sex couples to marry), without stripping rights away from anyone else in order to do so, because “rights” is not a finite resource with only so many to go around.
But money is a finite resource. And the other half of that glorious, freed-from-drudgery, automated vision of the future from the Fifties–a time when the marginal tax rate was 95%, and not expected to change–is to take that income taken from workers/expense saved via automation, and either reduce the final cost via the proportional amount, or to enable society as a whole to prosper via a universal income.
Meet society’s needs. They have to be met, one way or another. Pay people a living wage, or reduce the cost of living. But you can’t just siphon such a huge amount of money out of the system and then just sit on it. That is not sustainable. And do it for too long and to too great a degree and you end up with a revolution again; this is exactly what led to the French revolution, for one: the rich wallowing in unimaginable luxury while the poor struggled and starved.
@Kryss LaBrin
Oh my god, this is so much WRONG in a single comment that I feel forced to answer even another day later.
And a key part to remember in all of this is that there is a finite amount of money in the system. The government can’t just make dollars magically out of nothing or inflation skyrockets, the value of it plummets, and the economy crashes.
Government making money out of nothing (Fiat-money) is exactly what the US-government does since 1971 (US-Dollar no longer bound to gold).
And all other governments do the same. Maybe a bit later, since 1976.
Well, yes, there is a bit of inflation, but that is accepted and actually aimed for. Economy has crashed several times (Dot-com-bubble, mortgage bubble and perhaps a few more) and continued to operate.
Which means that when Jeff Bezos, for example, is worth several billion dollars, that is money that he has directly removed from the economy, that is now unavailable to everyone else.
It would be really good news if he actually would have “removed (it) from the economy”.
But what he really did was investing it and expecting to see interest.
Money is credit. If you have money (and invest it) you expect to see more money. And that is the problem: Someone has to “produce” that money.
And that’s why hoarding money to such a degree is so immoral; it’s literally removing it from being available to anyone else.
They are not “hoarding” it and they expect to get back even more money!
Do you really think Jeff Bezos has a money bin like Scrooge McDuck?
Money is not like human rights. You can grant rights to a marginalized group that has previously not held them (the right for women and PoC to vote, for example, or for same-sex couples to marry), without stripping rights away from anyone else in order to do so, because “rights” is not a finite resource with only so many to go around.
And again the exact opposite is true: You can print as many money as you like (well actually as a government you will issue bonds, and it will work as long as investors are trusting you to get their money back and a bit of interest), but “rights” are not an infinite resource as you claim: For example college places are a very limited resource and “affirmative action” means a group gets more places which are no longer available for other groups (like Asian students).
Sorry, not to call you out, but the McDonalds kiosk thing wasn’t because of minimum wage increases or anything like that. I worked in a McDonalds for years, and they had started planning them long before the minimum wage even increased to 7.25 an hour. The problem is things like 5 Guys; see, McDonalds pretty much has the child demographic down, and it’s not going away, but that’s not where McDonalds gets most of its profits. In fact, I think they actually take a small loss on Happy Meals, or at least they did. It’s the adult burgers that they make their money on, especially things like their Signature Crafted burgers, or whatever they call them nowadays. McDonalds used to believe that they would capture the adult market by getting the in there, but made it so easy to get a happy meal for your kid and then drive somewhere else, that they were losing that market to better, adult burger places. Their solution is to have more expensive and more complex burgers, which do better with an adult market, but it ties up their lines; the kiosks were presented as a way for the adult customers to look at a list of their options and craft the burger they want, while not tying up the lines. At all the stores that have them, at least last I checked which at this point has been a couple of years, since I don’t work there anymore, there has been little to no loss of cashier positions. They usually have at least one person who assists customers with using the kiosks, while people just wanting a happy meal or something more simple are directed to the counter as normal.
Just being a citizen of a different country doesn’t help. If you’re a foreign citizen working here with a green card, you still pay taxes on income earned here.
Sure, if you’re getting mostly investment income and you’re willing to expatriate completely, you can probably avoid it. Not so much if you’re running a Wall Street hedge fund, for example.
Very true, however smacking those people with too high a rate might make them decide that it would be more cost-effective to just operate from a different country.
If the taxation would grow too much then an entire financial ecosystem might decide that moving somewhere else could be beneficial. I’m sure China for example would be more than happy to welcome these people and their money with lower tax rates.
They get taxed on any income they earn from doing business here. It doesn’t matter where they -are-, if they want to do business in the US and sell to American consumers, they have to pay taxes to the US government.
For most countries that takes 3-5 years to gain citizenship and unless there is an agreement between the countries, that could expose you to double taxation. The USA takes you on earned wages from the country even if not a resident and they also tax income earned over seas. Other countries tax residents regardless of income source as well, though both have different rates for in country vs out of country. So, once you gain citizenship and renounce USA citizenship you’d also have to move your investments after 3-5 years to have them cease taxing in the USA. There is also an exit tax for wealthy individuals so they don’t just run away because they don’t like taxes.
The amount of people in the comments going “but won’t someone think of the gazillionaires” is staggering. I hope you clowns are at least getting paid for all that shilling.
Billionaires aren’t even people, if we’re being honest. They’re nothing but profane amounts of illegitimate money, piloting around in soulless husks of meat. Meat that could be eaten.
Kind of. That’s because he’s got millions of times more disposable cash than all the posters here.
And other rich people (Koch Brothers?) have done far more harm.
Harm aside, there’s a lot of evidence that despite the high profile philanthropy of a few mega billionaires, on average poor working people donate a larger percentage of their income than the rich do. That suggests that charity would actually see more donations if income was distributed more evenly – despite a drop in the huge donations.
Also, his charity work is kinda offset by the way he treats his workers. Republic Services (of which he’s the principle shareholder) has locked out its workers repeatedly for things like protesting against abandoned contracts, unpaid overtime and destruction of pensions.
Hell, Bill Gates has enough money to end poverty four times over, so he’s really not doing all he can here.
Yeah, the Bill Gates of today is different than the Bill Gates that I remember being at the helm of Microsoft in the 80s and 90s. For that matter, this is nothing new. Andrew Carnegie was a real tyrant to his workers when he was making his money, only to try to buy his way into the public’s good graces with libraries and concert halls and such late in life. The question is, does the latter balance out the former? I don’t think so…
Also worth noting that a lot of what Carnegie (and some of the other robber barons) did as philanthropy was more aimed at the lower upper classes – libraries are cool, but concert halls aren’t really a priority of the starving working class.
Yeah, but Bill Gates is always the example because not many others actually do much. Looking at a list from Forbes, Buffett gives 70% of his money to charity and Gates 22%, but the others are from 10% down to essentially nothing. And as others have said, that’s ignoring any harm they might do.
What I have seen suggests that essentially nothing is the most common case for billionaires. On average, ordinary people provide a far higher percentage of their money for good causes. So if you want money for good causes, putting it in the hands of the rich in hopes they will turn out like Gates is a bad plan.
But yeah, in recognition of the good they have done, maybe we should only eat 30% of Buffet and 78% of Gates. (I’m kidding! Like I’ve said before, that’s how you get weird brain parasites.)
Bill Gates was raised in a millionaire’s home back when that was a lot of money. He dropped out of Harvard without becoming the “black sheep” of his family.
If I had dropped out of college, I would much more likely be another cautionary tale about not squandering opportunity.
If merit is “where you started” compared to “where you ended”, we have to acknowledge where he started.
The long term damage to society and the economy from wealth concentration is. It is not possible for a middle class democracy to exist long term with ever increasing inequity. The income of the top tenth of a percent or so has been growing faster than the economy as a whole for decades. Their accumulated wealth even faster. Every year they’re getting a larger percentage of the pie. That can’t continue.
If you have billions of dollars, it’s because you cheated it out of other people’s salaries. There is no way to earn that much without stealing it from other people.
While I can’t actually argue with what Willis said, it’s not the case I was making.
I said nothing about envy or wickedness. They can theoretically be perfectly good people, but they still can’t keep getting richer faster than the economy grows without other people getting poorer. That’s not a moral judgement. That’s math.
I am consistently amazed that people can believe “money can buy corruption” and not “money has rigged the political system so the rich pay less taxes than you or I, minus whatever they hid oversees, and also buy politicians and perfectly voting line maps, because they’re rich.”
Like…do they actually believe it’s the poor setting it all up this way so they keep literally dying?
I wonder what Becky’s face in panel 2 is about. Momentary stage fright would make sense. Or maybe she’s realizing how much power she was just handed? Well, she put it to good use!
For a bit of historical precedent, the marginal tax rate used to be 91% for the top income tax bracket (those earning over a million a year in today’s dollars thereabouts). President Kennedy cut this rate to 70% and it produced an economic boom. It’s one of the weird cases where tax revenue actually did increase despite the tax cut.
Economic context has changed a lot for sure, but I bet you’d be hard pressed to find any economist who thinks a 90% marginal tax on anyone is a good idea.
For fun points, that tax cut was opposed by conservatives, once again showing that there’s nothing they won’t vote against to “own the libs.”
Of course, you’re being disingenuous and totally “forgetting” to mention that the economic boom was a result of those tax cuts being paired with massive economic investment, that the marginal tax cut was for people who made less than 1.5 million for households and less than 1 for individuals, not 10, and the fact that in the 1960’s wage disparity wasn’t NEARLY what it is now.
You could have made your valid and noteworthy points without insulting my integrity. Yet you chose to do so based on what I can only conclude to be speculation because you know nothing about me.
That’s because I’m not sure how much integrity you actually have when you bring up an event that has two lead-ins, and leave out one of them (and arguably the bigger one).
It’s like saying that a drunk driver ran over someone at night, and when bringing up the event mentioning only “poor visibility.”
My statement was misleading because I forgot to use “was a major contributing factor” instead of “caused.” All you needed to attack was my statement, not jump to conclusions on the character of a stranger.
The analogy you used, for example, is also misleading because poor visibility is a minor factor in a DWI accident at night. And having street lamps would outright contradict poor visibility as a factor at all. When we translate the thrust of your comparison into your criticism of my argument, you’re saying that the Kennedy tax cut had negligible to no effect on the state of the economy at the time. That is a plainly false assertion.
There are plenty of factors that led to the economic boom of the period. Spending during war time. The dominant position of the US in post-war Europe. Public investment. The list goes on. The tax cut was a major player in that mix.
That doesn’t mean tax cuts are the solution in our economic situation. That doesn’t mean raising taxes on the wealthy would be a bad policy. By all means, raise taxes on the wealthy! But we should always take note of valid information that contradicts the way we’re naturally inclined to think. That’s how we correct for implicit bias.
The tax cut you brought up (the DUI) is irrelevant to the discussion of instituting a marginal tax rate of 90% on incomes over 10 million dollars, because it was very explicitly only for people making a shit ton less than that, a very important fact that you left out (like, y’know, all those streetlamps).
You know who cut taxes for the wealthy? Fucking Reagan, an action that tanked the US economy so hard that his successor, George Bush, had to commit political suicide to try and salvage the situation (spoiler: the situation was most definitely not salvaged).
So, sure, let’s take a look at valid information, that being Reagan’s “lower taxes on the massively wealthy tanks economies”, because Kennedy’s “lower taxes on the not massively wealthy” are sure as hell not relevant to the case.
How on Earth are Reagan’s tax cuts on the wealthy relevant if Kennedy’s are irrelevant? Reagan cut away as at a reasonable rate and grew the economy at a terrible cost to deficits. He himself signed bills raising taxes several times. Can you point to anyone during Reagan’s time whose taxes were at the 90% range?
The Kennedy tax cuts are a far better comparison because they were specifically targeted at the top income bracket. Once you’re making over a million dollars a year in today’s money you’re in a tiny fraction of 1% of the population. Becky’s proposal for 90% tax rate on those making over 10 million a year doesn’t shrink the number of people being taxed by an enormous figure. Would the impact be different? Of course! But the taxes Reagan inherited were nothing like what Becky is proposing.
I am well aware that you meant low visibility as the equivalent of a DWI at night in a well lit area. My point was the analogy is a very flawed one because (a) a well lit area isn’t an area with poor visibility under ordinary circumstances; and (b) the DWI makes the poor visibility reason for the accident worthless. The Kennedy tax cuts helped the economy. 91% on the super-rich was too high a rate. And given how ridiculously low taxes are now, raising them to 90% would be a major shock to the U.S. economy likely to send it at minimum into a recession.
I am in favor of taxing the rich more. It would help reduce deficits and raise money for much needed programs and save existing ones. Becky’s tax proposal is still a horrible idea.
I’m surprised Becky didn’t just say “Eat the Rich.” That’s my solution when it comes to dealing with the ultra-rich (specifically the non-philanthropists. There are good ultra-rich like Gates and Carnegie when he was alive.)
Plus, while it is theoretically possible to become a millionaire by legitimate means (like, I dunno, you’re a bestselling author who sells millions of copies), it’s pretty much impossible to be a billionaire that way. Somewhere down the line, either employees or the environment are exploited.
Fun fact, since you brought up the difference between millionaires and billionaires: it’s easier to be a billionaire in the US than in Europe, because a US billion is a thousand millions, whereas in Europe it’s a million million.
Personally I think it’s awful for a person to see someone else get hurt or even die, be in a position to save them without even any personal inconvenience, and then not bother. And yet that’s inherent to being a billionaire.
For one little example I think of all the kickstarters there are for sick people with no health care. So many people on-line try to spare some money to help them, though they may want it for other things. Gates could cover literally all of them with a single sentence to an accountant, and never notice the difference. And then he could go on to actually fix some of the things causing health problems, like the water crisis in Flint, and still never notice.
So I guess it depends on your definition of good. Is it about making sure you do some things for good causes, or is it about what you’re willing to pass by without caring, even when it would be no sacrifice at all for you to help?
I guess, to put it in perspective, less than a handful of billionaires pledged 600 million to rebuild Notre Dame, while it took several years for Flint, Michigan to get a similar amount as recompense for their poisoned water supply.
I guess it’s poor people’s fault for not being born a gothic tourist attraction that is under the responsibility of one of the (illicitly) wealthiest organizations in the world, who, by the way, is once again left off the hook for their responsibilities.
This is true – HOWEVER, the Catholic Church benefits from a sort of tenancy over Notre Dame, under the condition that they are responsible for its maintenance and repairs.
She gets put on the spot and put on display in front of the whole world – including an audience that up to recently included a lot of the people who threw her out from home and school – presented as an LGBT youth less then a month after her father hunted her with a gun for that very reason.
She has every reason to be terrified for what the attention might bring… and yet it take her less time than it takes to fart to start smartassing. Two panels later, and Robin is the one who is out-goofed.
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Becky’s got her Howard Beale moment!
Oh, wait…
I guess she got tips from Roz instead.
Well she got shoved in front of the people and will likely be hidden away for a while, at least in a speaking format.
This is a dream I didn’t know I had until it came true for Becky.
So I am going to guess that Becky did not choose changing her policies as 2 of the 3 since Robin is trying to keep her quiet?
It feels more like Robin trying to stop Becky from blurting out juicy details about her love life and or sex life.
Robin DID call her homeless in yesterday’s strip, maybe she was being honest and not just saying it for clout?
I mean, she is actually homeless. Sleeping on a couch on a friend’s teacher’s apartment isn’t exactly secure. She’s not on the street, but that’s not really necessary to be homeless.
Right, I’m aware, I was trying to say that out of choices tuition, place to live, and Robin actually voting for what they campaign for, maybe Becky didn’t pick place to live. But I think the next strip negates that now anyway.
Let me tell you how it will be (chung chung)
It’s one for you NINETEEN for me! (chung chung)
‘Cause I’m the Tax Man! Yeah, I’m the Tax Ma~an!
SRV FTW!
thatsnotwhatamarginaltaxratemeans.jpg
Tell it to the Beatles.
Those Well Known Rich People.
Tell that to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs who kept the poor poor and made the rich poor if they were not part of the protected classes.
Those potholes ain’t fixing themselves.
“90% marginal tax rate on income over 10 million dollars” means that you get taxed 90% on any income OVER 10 million dollars, but not on the portion UNDER 10 million, regardless of how much you make.
That is:
Make $5 million: $0 marginal tax paid (other taxes still due, of course).
Make $10 million: $0 marginal tax paid
Make $11 million: $900,000 marginal tax paid.
Make $110 million: $9 million marginal tax paid.
When the starting floor of the tax is set at such a high point that it’s more than practically anyone actually NEEDS for their yearly income (as with the $10 million suggestion in the comic), it’s nowhere near as harmful as naysayers typically portray it.
Typo: “Make $110 million: $9 million marginal tax paid.” Should have been:
“Make $110 million: $90 million marginal tax paid.”
Dangit, and the $11 mil one should have been $9 mil. I really messed that up. =/
Wait, no, that one’s right…
Becky is taking economy classes from AOC and Dave Strider. She is going to save the world one day.
I don’t know… a 90% tax? This is way too radical…
It’s not really radical, that tax only effects income over 10 million dollars and it is a tax rate that we had in the 1950’s and 1960’s. It isn’t new. It would not be the problematic mess that people like the Koch brothers want you to believe. It’s just we have come to the point in Capitalism where it has become problematic in and of itself. It requires the existence of “have’s” and “have not’s”, basically requiring the suffering of people to work.
Which, of course, is ironic because the conservative movement likes to laud the 50’s without acknowledging that little aspect of their prosperity.
Do you know how marginal tax rates work? Marginal means you’re not getting taxed 90% for all of your income, just for the bit that’s over $10mil. So if you make $10.000.001, you’re getting taxed 90% for $1 (the bit that’s over $10mil) and a lower rate for the rest.
Also, do you make over 10 million dollars? Not just over, but significantly over? Do you have any idea how much that is? It doesn’t mean you have over 10 million dollars. It means you get over 10 million more dollars every month. Do you know what you can buy with that much money? Because the answer is everything, with enough left over to invest in a few ventures. It’s an obscene amount of money. Hell, even if you did only get to keep 10% of it, that’d still be over $1mil a month, which is enough for a truly decadent lifestyle.
Everything there is right, except that it’s calculated by *year,* not by month.
while that’s a necessary correction, I’d still be obscenely happy to get $1mil in a year
From 1954 until the early Eighties the top marginal rate of federal income tax in the USA was 91% (on incomes over $200,000 per year). And some states had state income taxes in addition.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez occasionally mentions raising the top marginal rate of income tax to 70%. I suppose that the reason that she has chosen that figure is that what little evidence there is of a maximum in the Laffer Curve puts it at a marginal tax rate of 70–75%.
Actually, it was 91% until 1964. It then dropped to 70% through 1981 – which may be why Ocasio-Cortez chose that number. Subsequent to that it dropped substantially, and since the late 1980s has varied between 28% and Just under 40%.
Probably more significant to the (very) wealthy (who generally depend on “passive” income rather than “earned” income), capital gain and qualified dividend income rates are much lower (a maximum of 20%). I haven’t heard any proposals to deal with that, though Warren apparently proposes a tax on accumulated wealth. Given the opportunities to stash/hide wealth, I don’t have huge hopes that such a tax would be successful.
There have been proposals to treat long term capitals gains as regular income, though I’m not sure any high profile politicians have made them recently. There are some issues with doing so – like handling losses.
One of the more interesting side effects of a wealth tax would be disclosure. We really have very little direct information about who has how much wealth . It’s all estimates.
I’m not sure how much wealth hiding there would be. Most of the ways to hide wealth are counterproductive. The point of wealth is to generate more wealth. A million dollars in the market with a return of 8% is better than a million dollars buried in the back yard being eaten away by inflation, even if you have to pay a 2% tax on the money in the market.
There will certainly be some, but mostly rich people want their cash out making more cash.
SONIC
SEZSAYS“Kids, there’s nothing more cool than a 90% marginal tax rate on income over $10,000,000. But if someone tries to tax you in a way that makes you impoverished, that’s no good.”
I’m not an economics expert, but I’m pretty sure that noone would actually pay those taxes. They would just spend their earnings in new investments / projects so that their bottom line remains below $10 mil.
So the idea isn’t to take money from the rich, it is to prevent the rich from hoarding money, and instead forcing them to invest it into new ventures, creating jobs and keeping the money in circulation.
Squeeze them until it does trickle down.
Becky is the definition of grace under pressure apparently.
Truly rising to the occasion! Look at that grin in the last panel.
90% is a little excessive, Becky. 75% would be more than adequate.
Still making 10 million + a year. A person who can’t live on that is too dumb to be allowed to have money.
I like that the best response to this is already the alt-text
My thought exactly. Like 80%, max.
Except that the tax take on this would be extremely minor because if you’re making 10 million a year then you’d have an army of lawyers and accountants to make sure you don’t pay anything close to 90%
But hey its all about the feelz I guess
The marginal tax rate is NOT the same as the actual tax rate. Even if the marginal tax rate is 99% and you haven’t hired a single lawyer or accountant, you’re not going to be paying that much in actual cash.
I have no idea what a marginal tax rate is as opposed to an actual tax rate…but here in the UK, the top rate of income tax has been steady for many years now at 45% of everything after the first £150,000.
see joyfullofdreams’ reply for a concise summary.
That’s actually exactly what a marginal tax rate is. In this case, 90% of every dollar *after the first 10 million*. If implemented in the UK using your example it would mean paying 45% of everything above 150k pounds and then 90% of everything above 10 million pounds. The reason Americans are being so specific about it being a marginal rate is because the Republicans are pretending it’s 90% of *all* income if you earn over 10 million, rather than 90% of the excess, or margin, above that.
The point still stands though, this tax won’t earn much because anyone making that much money will have it sorted that they won’t be paying much, if at all on anything above the 10 million so why have it in the first place other than to make people feel better about “punishing” the rich
Its dog whistling at its finest
Taxes aren’t punishments. When you ride on a bus, you’re not being punished by paying a fare. When you live in a society and make massive profit from the environment it provides you, you’re not being punished by paying for upkeep.
So let me turn that around: is there any reason [i]not[/i] to have it in the first place, other than to make people feel better about “giving a free ride” to the rich? Dog whistling at its finest, indeed.
Maybe we could make decisions based on what works best (which is [i]not[/i] letting inequality grow forever) rather than the kind of emotional appeal that can be turned both ways just as easily.
Taxes aren’t punishment I agree but extra taxes that serve no reason certainly are punishments, in this case punishment for being wealthy
Inequality is not the problem, being poor is the problem. Compare me to Warren Buffet and yeah its really unequal but I’m doing all right so bringing Warren Buffet down by extra taxes wont maker a blind bit of difference to me at all
However helping the unemployed find work certainly will so maybe the USA could look at lowering the company tax rates to the same levels as the Scandinavian tax rates
A marginal tax rate is not a punishment either. It’s a way to force the mega rich to pay their share in taxes. Yes, they’ll try to get around it – that means there needs to be work done on implementing it (like closing loopholes and tax havens). That doesn’t make it a bad idea.
Second of all, I’m glad you’re doing alright. Others aren’t and strengthening the social security net would be beneficial for them. Unless you’re making 10 million, you’re not going to be affected by such a tax.
Scandinavia also has a strong social security net so I dunno why you think one’s something the US should emulate but not the other. Even ignoring that lowering taxes on large corporations and companies never actually helps – see: Last years tax cut from Trump.
“It’s a way to force the mega rich to pay their share in taxes.”
How much more is fair in your world?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-14/top-3-of-u-s-taxpayers-paid-majority-of-income-taxes-in-2016
The top 1 percent paid a greater share of individual income taxes (37.3 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (30.5 percent).
The top 50 percent of all taxpayers paid 97 percent of total individual income taxes.
Yeah, that’s because the bottom 50% don’t have the money. What little they have goes to bare necessities. Should we make it strictly fair and require the bottom 10% to pay the same as the top 10%? The bottom would have to borrow and the top could pay it out of petty cash, but it would be fair, right? They call that a head tax or a poll tax and it’s horrendous.
Surprisingly the share of the total income tax revenue the top 1% pay has been going up, even as we’ve lowered rates. That’s because those lowered rates lead to more wealth and thus more income for the top 1%. They pay a larger share of the total income tax than they did decades ago because they have more money and proportionally everyone else has less.
Note that they pay a lower percentage of their income than when rates were higher, but their income is enough more to overcome that. Because money makes money.
You want them to pay a lower share of total income taxes? Tax them more for a few years. Tax their accumulated wealth. Spread it out to the rest of us and magically, you’ll see their share drop.
It’s a stupid metric and it always comes up in tax arguments.
The top three riches people in America are Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Jeff Bezos. All three have numerous, numerous articles about how they commit tax avoidance. Yeah, I’m gonna say that’s not paying their share.
I’m not doing your google searches for you because you want to be a bootlicker, Chris.
That last comment was uncalled for and for that I will apologize, but I stand by the top part – it’s been in the news several times (for all three) and it’s not difficult to find.
But everything I’ve seen investigate the question says that not just poverty, but high inequality is itself a problem. It’s negatively correlated with quality of life and distorts both economic and political processes to the point where only the ultra-wealthy get a say, and then things other people want gets ignored.
You already can see examples of this in the US, where for instance single-payer health care is actually something a majority of people support. And yet as far as the parties are concerned, it’s an untenable position. That’s not just a problem of poverty; even middle class people can be ruined by medical expenses, and yet right now even middle class people are not having their interests represented.
If you don’t think massive inequality is a problem, I can see thinking high marginal tax rates are purely punitive. But that ignores why people want them, which is that they think massive inequality is a problem, and I would say the data definitely backs that up.
Worse, wealth makes wealth. Once you’ve got enough wealth you can invest, live off the income that generates, plowing some of it back into the principal and your wealth just grows.
Assuming your return on investment is higher than the rate the economy grows – which it traditionally has been, those with significant investment income inevitably control a larger and larger portion of the economy – leaving less and less to be split among the rest of us.
Putting a cap on how obscenely rich you can be isn’t punishment. It’s sanity. Lowering taxes on businesses and the rich fixes NOTHING. Trickle down DOES NOT WORK
And “helping people get jobs” does fuck-all to address poverty when incredibly profitable corporations like Amazon don’t even pay all their workers a living wage. Not to mention all those people who literally CANNOT work.
Well thats simply not true. Company tax in Norway, Denmark and Sweden is all considerably lower than the USAs company tax.
https://taxfoundation.org/how-scandinavian-countries-pay-their-government-spending/
Those countries have many other differences – more social supports, more worker’s rights, higher individual taxes and if I recall correctly less loopholes than our company taxes. The nominal rates here may be higher, but many large profitable companies wind up paying little or nothing.
Also, the tax structure works differently. Instead of flat rates, many are proportional (ex. ‘giving two percent of your income’).
The ultra rich may have paid a larger share of their income in income tax – but that’s what the hell income tax is supposed to be like! It’s a progressive tax! They paid a heck of a lot less of their income in sales taxes.
Correct. Anyone subject to this tax will easily find ways around it. These workarounds will distort the economy in ways that reduce efficiency, and most likely lead to even greater complications in the tax code. I’m not speculating here, this is what happened in the past when marginal rates were higher.
But, hey, soak the rich always plays well in some quarters. Never mind that the US already has one of the world’s most progressive income tax structures. People at the top already pay a percentage of taxes that’s greater than their share of income.
I mean they’ll do that literally no matter what the tax rate is, plenty of billionaires already pay no taxes or get refunds, not to mention what corporations do. That’s more of an argument for more and different kinds of tax reform in addition to raising the rates back to what they used to be.
They find ways around it, marginal tax rate or not.
Tax havens have to be clamped down. Tax havens have to be transparent, for a start.
Then there’s the whole problem with franchises. For example Starbucks cafes are franchises which usually run at a reported loss, but the parent company runs at a massive profit.
Essentially, a Starbucks in South Africa, say, is a pump from the South African economy to the US.
Companies like Amazon work on the same principle. The worse thing is that HMRC connive in such tricks.
Or, you know, actually invest in their business and community in order to lower their tax burden instead of being rentiers, the way it worked back when we had a 90% rate before.
Yeah, this.
But this was also at a time when stock buybacks were illegal too, so the excess couldn’t just be exclusively shoveled to the shareholders.
The idea that you think the US has some of the highest income tax rates for high earners suggests you don’t know any examples of tax rates outside the US. For starters, no-one is expected to pay more tax than the income they earn. Second, the highest tax bracket in the US is 37%, as one commenter mentioned the UK is at 45%, and Australia is at 45% as well. Canada is a bit better at 33% for the top bracket. Not only that, but your brackets have way higher thresholds – as a single taxpayer in Australia I have to make the equivalent of only 125k USD to hit a 45% tax rate, whereas in the US I’d need to hit 4 TIMES that at 500k. Since Canada’s top bracket kicks in from 150k USD equivalent they’re not actually as generous as they seem on the surface either. That means that, in practice, the US has a pretty generous income tax rate for high earners by comparison with other western nations.
It’s not clear to me the tax code is any less complex than when marginal rates were highest or that rich people are any less dedicated to finding loopholes.
More importantly, it’s hard for me to see that the economy was any less efficient in any sense I care about back when we had high marginal rates than it has been since. Those were the boom post war years. Massive growth, broad prosperity, the growth of the middle class. Since Reagan’s tax reforms that drastically cut the top rates and supposedly reduced loopholes, the rich have gotten dramatically richer and the rest of us have stagnated. Even overall growth has been much slower.
There are certainly other external factors at play but it’s hard for me to accept that the tax policies in place during that period were really a huge drag on the economy and the policies since are boosting it, when the outcomes were reversed.
Yes, people will find ways around the law, so clearly the solution is to just make it legal. I hear this argument on everything from gun control to abortion. *Facepalm*
Regardless of the particular issue at hand, is anyone actually swayed by arguments like that? The hole in that reasoning is big enough to fly a fucking jumbo jet through it.
People are gonna have abortions anyway, so it might as well be safe, legal, and affordable. Anti-abortion policies are deliberately designed to harm and punish women, and nobody cares what happens after the baby is born. If I’m missing something, let me know.
The problem is that it’s simultaneously fallacious and unconvincing to people on the other side, which is kind of a twofer bad argument? Arguments being, something you have invested in and therefore have, on some level, an interest in winning?
Individual sovereignty of body, the fact that no one goes looking for the guy to face said penalty, the fact that no one wants to support the baby living with the impoverished uneducated 16 year old that basically cannot, it is not possible for her to do this alone, the fact that I thought that we (at least where I live) settled this “get your goddamn religious beliefs out of my government” thing *checks* 243 years ago? Those are all great arguments imo.
“People are gonna do it anyways” is…I don’t even know what that is. Let’s just file it away as “not good enough”.
I think the distinction with abortion is that “women are going to do it anyways” leads directly to women bleeding out from botched back-alley abortions. “safe” is critical part of that argument, in a way it isn’t in most of the other variations of the argument. There’s a reason the coathanger is such a potent symbol
“People are going to do it anyway and the consequences will be horrific” is a different argument than “People are going to do it anyway, so why bother.” It’s a harm reduction approach.
Of course much of the anti-abortion movement doesn’t care about harm reduction, since they see it as punishment for sinning.
Another version of that was the one Governor Schwarzenegger made a few years ago, when he cut funding from women’s shelters (which funding provided fully half their operating costs) by 100%: “We can’t completely resolve this issue, so why bother even trying.”
It’s such a bizarre and stupid way to look at an issue. I mean, ideally, if there’s a problem, you fix it, yeah? But if you can’t completely resolve it straight off, acting to at least mitigate it is better than just throwing up your hands and doing nothing. That whole “best is the enemy of the good” and all.
I mean, really, it’d be like saying, “I’ve got a cold and I feel like shit and I can’t cure it, so there isn’t even any point to me taking some cold meds so I don’t feel so crappy while I get over it.”
Or, “My car ran out of coolant and is overheating and I don’t have any more coolant to use with me. I could top up the radiator with water, which would at least stop the engine from seizing while I limp to the store or a mechanic for fluid; but since that won’t immediately fix my problem of not having any coolant, I’m just gonna run it dry rather than using something that helps, but isn’t quite as good in the meantime.”
“I don’t have an alarm system on my house, so why even bother locking the door? I can’t afford to put up security cameras to deter or prosecute potential burglars, so why bother trying to slow them down or prevent them getting in at all?”
“There’s always going to be some murder, even with the death penalty as a deterrent, so why bother making murder illegal in the first place?”
“Rich people are always going to be able to find some loopholes to avoid paying their full tax bill, so why bother closing any of them at all?”
A marginal tax rate of 90% isn’t the same as paying 90% of your income in taxes.
Can you break this whole thing down then? I can keep the continuity of Doctor Who straight but tax law? Yeah, right.
Basically 90% on income over 10 million that means you have your 10 million dollars…and the amount ABOVE that 10 million gets taxed 90% If you made 13 million with a marginal tax rate of 90% above 10 million, you would pay 90% of….3 million. not 13 million.
the other 10 million would be taxed at a completely different rate, say, 60% or something like that.
A top marginal tax rate of 90% on income of 10 million dollars would also be what we had in the 1950s and 1960s, so it’s not a new idea really.
It’s worth noting that 10 million dollars in 1960 is worth about 85.9 million dollars in 2019 due to inflation. I’m too uneducated on the marginal tax rate issue to have a good opinion on it, but 10 million is a lot less than it used to be, apparently.
The 91% tax rate (the top rate for most of the 50s) was on income over $200k, though. There’s more information here.
https://taxfoundation.org/taxes-rich-1950-not-high/
Yeah, I feel like the only real restriction on what you can raise the marginal tax rate on really high brackets to is how much it’ll slow down investment and development from the private sector, but let’s be real. Billionaires are gonna make more money no matter how hard you make it, so 90% or 95% is pretty logical I feel. That 5% + deductions/incentives will have no problem driving the investment sector, and it’ll slow down the income disparity growth!
If by “investment and development” you mean “shareholder dividends and overseas wire transfers”, then yeah. The last tax code overhaul just made a few Scrooge McDuck money vaults a bit deeper.
Trickle-down economics is a fairy tale, told to make sure the masses keep voting against their own interest.
This is so true
Honestly, trickle down economics always sounded like a euphemism for urination to me.
Metaphorically that’s about how it works out, so it’s not a bad euphamism.
Tinkle down economics
Trump’s a big fan.
#WheresThePeeTape
It won’t. People used to invest in their businesses in order to keep their tax rate lower. Then when they didn’t have to do that, they pulled the money out and put it in tax shelters, often overseas.
That’s an often overlooked point in these discussion: At a 35% rate, if I take $1000 out of my business, I’ve got $650 to play with in the stock casino. At a 90% rate, I’ve only got $100. It’s a lot harder to make up the difference. Makes more sense to leave it in and expand the business instead.
What evidence there is* is that marginal rates of 70–75% begin to slow down work and investment. That’s perhaps why AOC chose to suggest a rate of 70%
_____
* It’s weak. There just isn’t much real evidence.
I did the math.
For the marginal tax rate to take 50% of your income you have to earn more than $22 million.
For the marginal rate to take 75%, you need to be earning $60 million.
BuT wHaT iF I wIn ThE LoTTeRy?
That I can’t afford to play anyways.I think they will have this dynamic A LOT.
WHO IS THE GOOFIEST GOOF? TIME WILL TELL!
In other news, look at this story and tell me you’re not imagining this being read by Joyce when she’s imagining to be a Lesbian Love Sleuth:
https://thecuckoohaslanded.tumblr.com/post/184426414506/story-time
Here’s the reference, by the way: http://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/04-the-do-list/creeeaaation/
I LOVE that strip.
And this was a cute story, emperor 🙂
What? You love that strip?!?! Impossible!!!
Next you’ll tell me that you think this strip is adorkable: http://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/03-the-thing-i-was-before/sooner/
Just a little bit, maybe 🙂
Also, what did you think of the story “Always Human”? I know you read it, but I had a hard time figuring out your opinion about it…
I love it!!!! It’s super cute and very doofusy 🙂
I love the very optimistic view of the future, and I also think it’s a good look at ableism in a fantastic setting.
I haven’t finished it yet though, so I can’t speak for the entire run.
“Ssssstoooorrrrrryyyyytiiiiiiiime!”
I appreciate that you’re avoiding stretching letters that can’t really be stretched.
“Julia Gray – Rebel”
On income over 10 million? Come a little further Left, Becky. You’re basically George Bush with a cap that high.
Asking anything of the uber-wealthy will mark her as a pinko commie to the right, and she needs their votes.
Well, if this keeps up, she’s almost certainly not getting elected as a Republican, so thank you, Becky! 😀
Hell at this rate she’d have trouble getting elected as a Democrat…
Good.
Oh my goodness Becky is just going to jump in and run with it.
Good for her. Put her in the spotlight and you deserve what you get!
But are we taxing capital gains like income, Becky?
How about a wealth tax, Becky?
The Krotch Bro.s will pay millions to keep Becky from getting elected.
I hope they try.
Because Becky’s not running for election, and by the time they realise their mistake…
I fucking love Becky.
Holy shit, I LOVE Becky. Like I’ve always liked her and since her scientist declaration I’ve liked her a LOT, but her improv skills this arc are killing me.
If Becky actually supports what she said in the last panel and isn’t just saying it to troll Robin, she should definitely run for Congress in a few years in-universe.
Robin had this coming to her. I’ll say no more.
Well well well, isn’t this bit of math rather timely, considering what ideas Elizabeth Warren has been floating lately, although she bumped the margin way up to 50 million dollars.
I see this is going well
Does Becky have a future in standup? Her timing is impeccable!
Baby steps Becky…
I tend of think of myself as centre-left, but a tax rate 90% (if it’s the marginal tax rate) sounds a bit immoral. Nobody should have so much of their income taken away…
Marginal means it’s only taking 90% of the amount above 10 million? So that’s not “so much of their income” at all imo
It never is when its not you income I suppose
Oh boo fucking hoo
🙂
Dude, if you can’t live on ten million dollars, you’re officially ridiculous. That’s plenty to live on comfortably for your whole family. Now you’re just being obtuse.
You phrased it nicer than I was gonna. If you can’t live on ten million bucks a year, you basically are too inept and useless to survive in the first place.
The point of that much money isn’t to live on, it’s to establish an estate that’ll support descendants indefinitely.
Think Jane Austen and all those old families with incomes of X pounds per year. Have enough wealth you can live entirely off the earnings and expand or at least keep the principal intact. The way the world worked for centuries up until at least WWI and maybe WWII and the Depression. The US somewhat less so, since our fortunes were new money by those standards.
I get that, but you and at least a generation or two of descendants should be okay on ten million, plus whatever other income is coming in that’s being taxed. Like, let’s say you make 11 million dollars and there’s a 90% marginal tax rate – that’s still $100K per year coming in.
Yet we had a 91% top tax rate on income over $200k in the 50s and somehow survived.
Theres better, way efficient ways of tax gethering than this, however the point of this tax isn’t revenue gathering its show you’re doing “something” even if what you’re doing isn’t very effective
https://taxfoundation.org/taxes-rich-1950-not-high/
‘Finally, it is very likely that the existence of a 91 percent bracket led to significant tax avoidance and lower reported income. There are many studies that show that, as marginal tax rates rise, income reported by taxpayers goes down. As a result, the existence of the 91 percent bracket did not necessarily lead to significantly higher revenue collections from the top 1 percent.’
That’s actually been a consistent part of Matthew’s point elsewhere in the thread: the goal is not to maximise tax revenue, necessarily; it’s to incentivise particular business practices. One of the easiest ways for a business owner to report and therefore get taxed on a lower income value is to simply have a lower income, by spending the money, growing the business, and generally participating in the economy like a contributing member of society, rather than hoarding it like a particularly slayable dragon.
Money is only ever worth what you spend it on, and if they aren’t doing that, then there really isn’t a reason to say that people who already get 10 million dollars should get to “earn” significantly more on top for doing what amounts to less than the average amount of labor, in any circumstance. It’s an attitude that ultimately puts property rights above human rights, and no matter which way you slice it there’s exactly one perspective from which that is Good, Actually and it’s the one where most people, possibly including you, definitely including me, just Don’t Count.
Income of the rich going down is the whole damn point.
Wealth and power naturally accumulate at the top. Money makes money. Letting this go on is bad for the economy and disastrous for democracy. High marginal tax rates are partly to directly keep money from the hands of the already rich, but even more too change the incentives so they don’t take as much in the first place.
Now, if you want to just increase revenue from the rich, let’s talk wealth taxes. 🙂
You and the rest of the posters on here are not poor because someone else is a billionaire and if all the billionaires suddenly lost their wealth no one here would suddenly become richer
Depending on what use the money was put to, maybe not richer in the bank account sense, but “poor and able to access adequate healthcare, shelter, education, etc.” sure beats “poor and none of that.”
It’s a more complicated question than that. But yeah, there are a lot of people who are poor because of the actions of billionaires and they way they make their wealth.
mm no but if we taxed billionaires that much maybe we could do something about public education, college debt, and medical care
or we could talk about how it’s immoral to take away that much money from someone when let’s see.. “you would have to spend over $100,000 every day for the next 25 years in order to spend $1-billion.” wow they wouldn’t even miss it
it’s almost like we could redistribute the wealth and provide for a better quality of life for everyone instead of letting the rich people keep living better lives than everyone else
What a surprise, a right-wing think tank promotes a right-wing view of taxes.
They’ll live.
Some people would say it’s immoral to earn over $10million dollars in the first place. If not immoral then certainly obscene.
I think its more obscene and immoral to take from someone simply because they’re more successful than you
They’d never defend you like that.
And?
Don’t “And?” me. You’re defending wastes of oxygen who would gladly squeeze every last penny out of you, if they could just figure out how to get away with it. You’re nothing but an obstacle to them.
I’ll and you all I like.
My morals aren’t dependent on someone elses actions. What they would do is immaterial to what I believe.
If the only reason you’d say or do something morally right is because the other person would do the same for you then you need to take a look in the mirror because your morals are all messed up
Just going to drop the first formulation of moral philosopher Immanual Kant’s categorical imperative here.
“Act as if the maxims of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature.” (from Wikipedia).
Basically, if everyone were to hypothetically do what you do and it doesn’t actually work in practice, it is wrong to take that action.
I feel it is somewhat relevant as the basis of a viewpoint against your position. At the very least your post reminded me of it.
Refusing to defend an abstract group of people from accusations of wrongdoing isn’t immoral. Hell, even sometimes refusing to defend an real group of people isn’t immoral, like when said group is actively dangerous to you (ex. I wouldn’t step in to a conversation to defend a group of men who’d threatened me before from accusations they were creepy fucks).
More successful like being born into a multimillionaire family, yeah.
Cry me a fucking river.
Some people are born into rich families, some people are born with an over abundance of fast twitch muscles, some people are born with above average intelligence, some people are born with determination and drive, some people are born with pleasingly symmetrical features
But I’m not going to single out a group of people and over tax them because that leads to all sorts of issues
that’s a lot of words to merely say “some people genetically deserve to starve”
that is literally eugenics, congratulations
Define “over tax”? You tax them more because they’ve got more money and they can afford more taxes.
This is a weird slippery slope argument that never actually ends. It’s the exact same argument that Republicans just used to justify cutting the top rates down from 38%. It always applies. It was used against the first income taxes.
Hell, if we had a flat tax, they’d probably use it to justify a poll tax instead.
Chris, that “fast twitch muscle fibers” shit is actual white supremacist pseudo-science you’re citing while trying to equate a desire to tax the rich with racism
Do you even hear yourself
Being born into a rich family is not an achievement or an accomplishment. Being rich doesn’t deserve to be held up as success when so many people inherited their money.
You’ve been ripped apart pretty hard already, but just to break it down to its most fundamental, basic, obvious level: wealth isn’t genetic.
I’m so happy I went looking through Willis’ Twitter, this was great.
Having millions of billions of dollars while people starve is the more immoral act, sorry. There is no defense for gathering up that level of wealth while others suffer.
I never thought I’d see such a machiavellian display. A bonfire manipulating a stack of dynamite. Politically.
Vote for Becky.
Question: if Robin lost her party’s support, how come she still has money for press conferences etc.? She’s that independently wealthy?
That is the impression that I’ve got yes – Daddy’s little princess (and Daddy can afford things like a safe GOP seat so she doesn’t have to break her nail doing actual work).
Is there any evidence of this, other than Robin being a politician?
She does seem to have money, but that’s as likely from being a politician as how she got there.
Roz doesn’t seem to be rolling in wealth and I don’t think family money has ever been mentioned.
It’s pretty clear she’s not actually Daddy’s little princess – she’s talked about her dad. Her dad left and she’s not fond of the step-dad.
She’s probably coasting on the money her campaign had left. It’s easy enough for a politician to hold a press conference (she’s the local representative after all), and it’s likely thet already had that huge banner.
She might have taken a bunch of lobby hand outs during her time in office?
She’s a republican, I’m pretty sure you’re required to be rich before they’ll elect you for anything.
So Becky has no reason to actually make Robin win; Becky won’t betray her own principles and she won’t sabotage Robin, but she isn’t going to pull any kinda shady magic either. My hope is that the actual effect of this is to push Robin’s opponent further left… Is that how politics works?
In reality? More like let her opponent sit back and laugh as she self-destructs.
If anything, since she’s probably leap-frogged him on some issues (or Becky has), he’d slide more to the center to pick up Republican leaning moderates turned off by her radical proposals.
It’s hard to say, because this doesn’t actually happen in politics. Hardliners on one side of the debate don’t suddenly switch mid-campaign to radical proposals from the other.
Haha, Becky gonna be Becky, no matter what😄
SO very true 🙂
Becky killed Rosa Luxemburg
Im not sure what Robin expected here tbh.
A ringing endorsement that wasn’t highly politically-controversial.
Can’t imagine why. She literally hired Becky to do what she’s been doing on Robin’s social media. Which is exactly this.
I had a lengthy diatribe in the works to post, but of course my phone decided to eat it. Here’s the less soapbox-y TL;DR version for now:
Adjusting tax rates will help, but it won’t fix the systemic problems of wage stagnation and rising cost of goods.
We have a huge labor force that shifted from creating value (manufacturing and industry) to being a middleman getting squeezed in the name of consumer cost and profit margin (retail and services). The manufacturing was shifted offshore thanks to lower labor costs, and thus higher profit margins. This stifled middle class wages.
Well, crap. How do we keep the gears of consumption a-turnin’ now? Shift the focus from total cost to monthly payment. We’re at a point where a family car costs $50,000 and gets financed for 96 months at 2% interest to keep the monthly payments palatable. Cell phones cost $1000, but they’re “only” $70 a month rolled into the phone bill. Then there’s all the subscriptions. Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, wine of the month, meal kits, subscription surprise boxes… All cheap individually but they add up before you know it.
And how are we rewarded for our loyal patronage? With more shiny gadgets to buy, that invade our privacy and monitor our activity, so we can be bombarded with advertisements picked out just for us. Just to make sure we’re wringing every last penny out of America’s ears and eyeballs. But apparently that’s okay because they talk!
Reaganomics broke America. Supply side economics has only strangled the middle class while getting it addicted to conspicuous consumption. This has shifted tons of money from the lower and middle classes up, and it never “trickled down” as promised. It was never going to. The whole thing was a con job, the biggest cash grab in generations.
I agree entirely, except I’d like to note that robotic manufacturing has taken way, way more manufacturing jobs than moving factories overseas, and will continue to take even more jobs.
Robotic manufacturing was always an inevitable, though. Humans have always looked for ways to speed up production, beginning with the first animal-driven plows. An interesting aside though; it seems like it’ll be lawyers that’ll be the first to go, since AI can do their jobs faster and more efficiently.
Everyone’s job will be replaced by computers, in time. And not all that much time, either. I would not be surprised to see most people’s jobs replaced by 2050.
Either we figure out how to restructure society so that scenario isn’t a dystopian apocalypse, or we keep burying our heads in the sand and lying about the reality of it coming to pass.
Overall this is a good thing. Like other technological advances in the past. More production for less work is a good thing.
We just have to find a way to distribute the proceeds of that production more broadly. We’ve done this before in the Industrial revolution, though it took a long time and much misery. We need to do it faster this time. It’s not even a hard problem in theory. It’s just a matter of political will.
Techno-fascism is not a good thing. The work never ends it just gets more and more precarious and “bullshit-y” in nature.
Everything you said is true. Wage stagnation needs to be solved via legislation concerning minimum wage, and I don’t think anyone disputes that.
The biggest benefit of a higher tax rate would be to allow more money to be funneled into social programs (like cheaper healthcare, for instance). This, in turn, would leave the lower rungs of the economic ladder with more spending money, which in turns makes for a healthier economy. I mean, if any’s left after they make sure they make rent and don’t go hungry, I mean.
Minimum wage might be true for corporations and other huge organizations but what about small shops, restaurants etc.? From what I heard the bar where AOC worked closed because they couldn’t afford to pay their workers the minimum wages. If anything increasing minimum wage for all businesses will help big corporations while hamstringing small scale businesses who won’t be able to absorb the losses like the big corporations can.
That’s not how it works. And I’d check into that story, cause there’s all sorts of rumors and myths flying around about AOC. OTOH, bars and restaurants go under all the time and minimum wage hikes can be a convenient excuse.
Minimum wages increase costs slightly, depending on the industry. Not all your costs are wages. Minimum wage increases, especially in small local businesses, give your local customers more money and thus increase potential volume. And that seems to bear out in studies of what happens when minimum wages go up. The dire economic consequences predicted by right wing pundits just don’t happen.
Very true regarding giving the customers more money. The profits-before-everything CEOs are definitely forgetting that you can’t sell stuff to people who don’t have money… well you can I guess… if they take out loans they’ll need to pay off.
A considerable issue in US I think is the disparity between worker salaries and CEO salaries. I remember seeing a comparison of such salaries and while in Europe the ratio between worker and CEO was around 1:50/1:70 in US the average was at 1:500 and that was the lower range.
Personally I believe that it would be better if the salary breakdown was a bit more fair towards the workers rather than squeezing the money out of a company via taxes because I just don’t trust the government to be responsible with the money, me being from post-communist Central Europe and all that. Maybe introducing some limits on how much more than the workers a CEO can earn?
This would in no way work – they would just create phantom positions than the CEOs would ALSO occupy and get paid for all of them.
Definitely. Honestly while I’m in favor of Capitalism it is one of the issues I have with it. It assumes that people with power and money would not try to manipulate the system to their benefit.
That’s actually a consequence of the tax policy, among other things. Low top end tax rates encourage those sky high salaries. There’s less motive to crank the cash up when the government gets most of it. Often compensation shifted to perks which weren’t taxable and thus look like loopholes, but have the advantage of not adding to wealth that can be used to generate more income.
There are other factors of course – strong unions being a major one. Not so much in keeping CEO compensation down, but in keeping worker’s salaries up and thus the ratio down.
Actually, small businesses tend to get more sales post wage increases because people will shop more when they have more money. Restaurants do see small price increases, but in the US and Canada, they tend to pay a smaller minimum wage in the first place.
More abstractly though – if you can’t afford to pay an employee a living wage, don’t hire an employee. You’re not entitled to have employees.
To add to that there is also the issue of cost efficiency. I remember hearing that McDonalds for example started replacing workers with kiosks because rising the minimum wage made it more cost effective to spend money on automation rather than living workers. I just think that this is a problem which requires much more thinking and experimenting than just slapping a “Raise minimum wage” on everything.
That is true to some extent. Rising wages increases the pressure towards automation. It is more complicated and we’re going to need more fundamental adjustments than just minimum wages increases.
That doesn’t mean that we should just leave workers living in dire poverty while we debate the bigger issues.
Quite. Honestly I think that US should start treating the “Bring the jobs back” shtick Trump has been using more seriously. On the one hand it would give a lot of people jobs, on the other hand it would weaken the China’s stranglehold on other people’s economies. Various countries are quite afraid of criticizing China because of their huge influence on global economy.
There are no jobs to bring back. The near entirety of those jobs hasn’t gone to other countries, it’s just gone. Poof. Kaput. They’re ex-jobs. As a rule of thumb, if Trump said it it’s not just a lie, it’s the actual opposite of the truth. If he ever says the sky is blue, I’m getting myself checked for daltonism.
And before someone claims THAT, automation isn’t the issue. The issue is that people have allowed capitalism to run rampant, so the social safety nets have been disintegrated in many countries. Automation should have resulted in people working less hours for the same pay, but morons and “muh capitalism” have ruined that. People having more free time is a GOOD THING.
“There are no jobs to bring back”
Well…
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/05/business/jobs-report-unemployment-march.html
‘U.S. Adds 196,000 Jobs in March, a Return to Solid Growth’
Those… aren’t the same jobs. That’s not coal mining, or auto factories (which have in fact LOST jobs) or whatever. Those are NEW jobs, and therefore, aren’t being brought back.
I’m sure the people working really give a hoot about whether its a new job or an old job
Also: https://nypost.com/2019/02/12/us-steel-credits-trump-as-it-restarts-construction-on-factory/
It matters when you’re talking about bringing jobs “back” vs. new job creation. If that’s what you’re talking about, then say it. Frequently people talk about bringing “back” jobs that are no longer needed, which is what the issue with that is.
It also matters when those new jobs pay less and have less benefits than the old jobs – which has been the rule for much of this expansion.
We’ve been seeing a little wage pressure recently, but not really significant.
They should, because when politicians promise them “their jobs back”, they’re talking about coal and shit, which are jobs that no longer exist and won’t be coming back (also, it’s another dogwhistle for xenophobia, “look at all those BROWN people getting YOUR jobs”).
“old jobs” and “new jobs” require completely different things; namely, new jobs require a requalification of the workforce into new technologies, which is most definitely not happening under the current US policy of “fuck education”. And then those new jobs go to immigrants, who can actually type with both hands and read without moving their lips, and the Republicans get to blow on that dogwhistle again “look at all those FOREIGNERS getting MURICAN jobs”, conveniently sidestepping the fact that they made sure US folk were ever more unqualified to do high-tech jobs, which will constitute more and more of the job market as time goes on.
Automation *would* result in less hours for the same pay, if we weren’t a capitalist system always looking for ways to make more money. But we are, so automation is exactly the problem.
Automation and capitalism don’t mix well, especially not as automation becomes an increasingly large percentage of the job market.
It’s not capitalism. It’s exploitation and exploitation’s been around since long before capitalism.
It’s the damn predatory assholes. Keep them under control and you can handle it in any economic paradigm. Let them take over and you’re screwed under any economic paradigm.
I just fondly think of the Fifties’ vision of the future where automation would free us all from drudgery and give us a life of ease forever. I mean, we’ve got some of it (for example, Roombas free you from having to manually vacuum; vacuums free you from having to sweep), but it certainly isn’t the vision of fully-automated farms with self-driving vehicles delivering fresh produce each morning, no humans involved. We’re pretty close, though!
The basic assumption in that vision, though, is that, since no workers are being paid, the costs to produce drop to nearly nothing. If everything’s automated, from mining through resource refinement through production and delivery, then what is there to pay for, really?
But of course, that hasn’t happened. Corporations automate jobs, and then keep charging for those products as if they were still having to cover the cost of paying humans to make them. And meanwhile, not only are there fewer jobs to go around, thanks to automation, the population keeps rising so there are more people competing for what few jobs still exist.
And so the handful of people running the automated companies, having a large chunk of their overhead costs of doing business removed, while still earning money at the same rate, end up taking the money they were formerly paying to their workers and keeping it for themselves.
And meanwhile, the people who were formerly being paid to work, have lost that income and increasingly find themselves unable to replace it, the more so when businesses allow inflation to increase their prices while not also increasing their wages to keep pace with it.
And a key part to remember in all of this is that there is a finite amount of money in the system. The government can’t just make dollars magically out of nothing or inflation skyrockets, the value of it plummets, and the economy crashes.
Which means that when Jeff Bezos, for example, is worth several billion dollars, that is money that he has directly removed from the economy, that is now unavailable to everyone else.
And that’s why hoarding money to such a degree is so immoral; it’s literally removing it from being available to anyone else, instead of recirculating it back into the economy by paying workers, or even spending it freely (and by “freely” I mean “almost all of it,” whether by having custom houses built or eating out every meal or whatever).
Money is not like human rights. You can grant rights to a marginalized group that has previously not held them (the right for women and PoC to vote, for example, or for same-sex couples to marry), without stripping rights away from anyone else in order to do so, because “rights” is not a finite resource with only so many to go around.
But money is a finite resource. And the other half of that glorious, freed-from-drudgery, automated vision of the future from the Fifties–a time when the marginal tax rate was 95%, and not expected to change–is to take that income taken from workers/expense saved via automation, and either reduce the final cost via the proportional amount, or to enable society as a whole to prosper via a universal income.
Meet society’s needs. They have to be met, one way or another. Pay people a living wage, or reduce the cost of living. But you can’t just siphon such a huge amount of money out of the system and then just sit on it. That is not sustainable. And do it for too long and to too great a degree and you end up with a revolution again; this is exactly what led to the French revolution, for one: the rich wallowing in unimaginable luxury while the poor struggled and starved.
@Kryss LaBrin
Oh my god, this is so much WRONG in a single comment that I feel forced to answer even another day later.
And a key part to remember in all of this is that there is a finite amount of money in the system. The government can’t just make dollars magically out of nothing or inflation skyrockets, the value of it plummets, and the economy crashes.
Government making money out of nothing (Fiat-money) is exactly what the US-government does since 1971 (US-Dollar no longer bound to gold).
And all other governments do the same. Maybe a bit later, since 1976.
Well, yes, there is a bit of inflation, but that is accepted and actually aimed for. Economy has crashed several times (Dot-com-bubble, mortgage bubble and perhaps a few more) and continued to operate.
Which means that when Jeff Bezos, for example, is worth several billion dollars, that is money that he has directly removed from the economy, that is now unavailable to everyone else.
It would be really good news if he actually would have “removed (it) from the economy”.
But what he really did was investing it and expecting to see interest.
Money is credit. If you have money (and invest it) you expect to see more money. And that is the problem: Someone has to “produce” that money.
And that’s why hoarding money to such a degree is so immoral; it’s literally removing it from being available to anyone else.
They are not “hoarding” it and they expect to get back even more money!
Do you really think Jeff Bezos has a money bin like Scrooge McDuck?
Money is not like human rights. You can grant rights to a marginalized group that has previously not held them (the right for women and PoC to vote, for example, or for same-sex couples to marry), without stripping rights away from anyone else in order to do so, because “rights” is not a finite resource with only so many to go around.
And again the exact opposite is true: You can print as many money as you like (well actually as a government you will issue bonds, and it will work as long as investors are trusting you to get their money back and a bit of interest), but “rights” are not an infinite resource as you claim: For example college places are a very limited resource and “affirmative action” means a group gets more places which are no longer available for other groups (like Asian students).
Sorry, not to call you out, but the McDonalds kiosk thing wasn’t because of minimum wage increases or anything like that. I worked in a McDonalds for years, and they had started planning them long before the minimum wage even increased to 7.25 an hour. The problem is things like 5 Guys; see, McDonalds pretty much has the child demographic down, and it’s not going away, but that’s not where McDonalds gets most of its profits. In fact, I think they actually take a small loss on Happy Meals, or at least they did. It’s the adult burgers that they make their money on, especially things like their Signature Crafted burgers, or whatever they call them nowadays. McDonalds used to believe that they would capture the adult market by getting the in there, but made it so easy to get a happy meal for your kid and then drive somewhere else, that they were losing that market to better, adult burger places. Their solution is to have more expensive and more complex burgers, which do better with an adult market, but it ties up their lines; the kiosks were presented as a way for the adult customers to look at a list of their options and craft the burger they want, while not tying up the lines. At all the stores that have them, at least last I checked which at this point has been a couple of years, since I don’t work there anymore, there has been little to no loss of cashier positions. They usually have at least one person who assists customers with using the kiosks, while people just wanting a happy meal or something more simple are directed to the counter as normal.
Wouldn’t the 90% rate just make the rich go grab a different country’s citizenship to avoid the taxes?
Just being a citizen of a different country doesn’t help. If you’re a foreign citizen working here with a green card, you still pay taxes on income earned here.
Sure, if you’re getting mostly investment income and you’re willing to expatriate completely, you can probably avoid it. Not so much if you’re running a Wall Street hedge fund, for example.
Very true, however smacking those people with too high a rate might make them decide that it would be more cost-effective to just operate from a different country.
If the taxation would grow too much then an entire financial ecosystem might decide that moving somewhere else could be beneficial. I’m sure China for example would be more than happy to welcome these people and their money with lower tax rates.
They get taxed on any income they earn from doing business here. It doesn’t matter where they -are-, if they want to do business in the US and sell to American consumers, they have to pay taxes to the US government.
Frankly the “entire financial ecosystem” needs some serious culling at the very least. Financialization of our economy is one of the root problems.
For most countries that takes 3-5 years to gain citizenship and unless there is an agreement between the countries, that could expose you to double taxation. The USA takes you on earned wages from the country even if not a resident and they also tax income earned over seas. Other countries tax residents regardless of income source as well, though both have different rates for in country vs out of country. So, once you gain citizenship and renounce USA citizenship you’d also have to move your investments after 3-5 years to have them cease taxing in the USA. There is also an exit tax for wealthy individuals so they don’t just run away because they don’t like taxes.
The amount of people in the comments going “but won’t someone think of the gazillionaires” is staggering. I hope you clowns are at least getting paid for all that shilling.
Billionaires aren’t even people, if we’re being honest. They’re nothing but profane amounts of illegitimate money, piloting around in soulless husks of meat. Meat that could be eaten.
Not sure if serious or not…
The last five words were a joke. The first four are the truth.
If we’re really being honest Bill Gates has done more for this planet than all the posters on here combined would do in over a hundred lifetimes
Kind of. That’s because he’s got millions of times more disposable cash than all the posters here.
And other rich people (Koch Brothers?) have done far more harm.
Harm aside, there’s a lot of evidence that despite the high profile philanthropy of a few mega billionaires, on average poor working people donate a larger percentage of their income than the rich do. That suggests that charity would actually see more donations if income was distributed more evenly – despite a drop in the huge donations.
Bill Gates is a fucking loser.
Also, his charity work is kinda offset by the way he treats his workers. Republic Services (of which he’s the principle shareholder) has locked out its workers repeatedly for things like protesting against abandoned contracts, unpaid overtime and destruction of pensions.
Hell, Bill Gates has enough money to end poverty four times over, so he’s really not doing all he can here.
For that matter, google microsoft and tax avoidance.
Yeah, the Bill Gates of today is different than the Bill Gates that I remember being at the helm of Microsoft in the 80s and 90s. For that matter, this is nothing new. Andrew Carnegie was a real tyrant to his workers when he was making his money, only to try to buy his way into the public’s good graces with libraries and concert halls and such late in life. The question is, does the latter balance out the former? I don’t think so…
Also worth noting that a lot of what Carnegie (and some of the other robber barons) did as philanthropy was more aimed at the lower upper classes – libraries are cool, but concert halls aren’t really a priority of the starving working class.
He’s only able to do that philanthropy because he’s rich. You’re essentially defending him being a billionaire by pointing out he has a lot of money.
Yeah, but Bill Gates is always the example because not many others actually do much. Looking at a list from Forbes, Buffett gives 70% of his money to charity and Gates 22%, but the others are from 10% down to essentially nothing. And as others have said, that’s ignoring any harm they might do.
What I have seen suggests that essentially nothing is the most common case for billionaires. On average, ordinary people provide a far higher percentage of their money for good causes. So if you want money for good causes, putting it in the hands of the rich in hopes they will turn out like Gates is a bad plan.
But yeah, in recognition of the good they have done, maybe we should only eat 30% of Buffet and 78% of Gates. (I’m kidding! Like I’ve said before, that’s how you get weird brain parasites.)
And of course, spread that money around more and there’ll be less need for charity for those good causes.
Bill Gates was raised in a millionaire’s home back when that was a lot of money. He dropped out of Harvard without becoming the “black sheep” of his family.
If I had dropped out of college, I would much more likely be another cautionary tale about not squandering opportunity.
If merit is “where you started” compared to “where you ended”, we have to acknowledge where he started.
Relying on the whims of millionaires to fix random issues isn’t the way rational governance should work.
For every Bill Gates there’s a Koch Brothers trying to increase the chances of a climate breakdown.
Get that billionaire out of your mouth. You don’t know where it’s been. Also, junk food is bad for you.
But if I suck on it hard enough, maybe it’ll give me money.
That’s, uh, a different line of work.
Here in the U.S.A., we call it “being a Republican”.
cuz they suck off grillionaires geddit
Nope but I do think that jealousy is not a good reason for increasing taxes.
More money for social programs totally is, though.
Sure but this isn’t the way to go about it because you’ll raise virtually nothing
Jealousy isn’t the reason.
The long term damage to society and the economy from wealth concentration is. It is not possible for a middle class democracy to exist long term with ever increasing inequity. The income of the top tenth of a percent or so has been growing faster than the economy as a whole for decades. Their accumulated wealth even faster. Every year they’re getting a larger percentage of the pie. That can’t continue.
Seriously, its not jealousy. Its all about the envy and the perceived wickedness of the wealthy.
If you have billions of dollars, it’s because you cheated it out of other people’s salaries. There is no way to earn that much without stealing it from other people.
While I can’t actually argue with what Willis said, it’s not the case I was making.
I said nothing about envy or wickedness. They can theoretically be perfectly good people, but they still can’t keep getting richer faster than the economy grows without other people getting poorer. That’s not a moral judgement. That’s math.
I am consistently amazed that people can believe “money can buy corruption” and not “money has rigged the political system so the rich pay less taxes than you or I, minus whatever they hid oversees, and also buy politicians and perfectly voting line maps, because they’re rich.”
Like…do they actually believe it’s the poor setting it all up this way so they keep literally dying?
*Perfect voting-line maps. Eff.
The Koch Bros and the Mercer family aren’t perceived as evil … they actually are evil.
They want a burning planet for increased shareholder value.
It’s the American way.
BECKY: “Okay, folks! Let’s wrap this up! We’re gonna rap ‘Vote Progress – Vote deSanto! Sing along or clap along…!”
I want to see this happen, and then I want to see the audience’s reactions!
I wonder what Becky’s face in panel 2 is about. Momentary stage fright would make sense. Or maybe she’s realizing how much power she was just handed? Well, she put it to good use!
For a bit of historical precedent, the marginal tax rate used to be 91% for the top income tax bracket (those earning over a million a year in today’s dollars thereabouts). President Kennedy cut this rate to 70% and it produced an economic boom. It’s one of the weird cases where tax revenue actually did increase despite the tax cut.
Economic context has changed a lot for sure, but I bet you’d be hard pressed to find any economist who thinks a 90% marginal tax on anyone is a good idea.
For fun points, that tax cut was opposed by conservatives, once again showing that there’s nothing they won’t vote against to “own the libs.”
Of course, you’re being disingenuous and totally “forgetting” to mention that the economic boom was a result of those tax cuts being paired with massive economic investment, that the marginal tax cut was for people who made less than 1.5 million for households and less than 1 for individuals, not 10, and the fact that in the 1960’s wage disparity wasn’t NEARLY what it is now.
You could have made your valid and noteworthy points without insulting my integrity. Yet you chose to do so based on what I can only conclude to be speculation because you know nothing about me.
That’s because I’m not sure how much integrity you actually have when you bring up an event that has two lead-ins, and leave out one of them (and arguably the bigger one).
It’s like saying that a drunk driver ran over someone at night, and when bringing up the event mentioning only “poor visibility.”
(and also leaving out that the road had a ridiculous amount of streetlamps, while we’re at it)
My statement was misleading because I forgot to use “was a major contributing factor” instead of “caused.” All you needed to attack was my statement, not jump to conclusions on the character of a stranger.
The analogy you used, for example, is also misleading because poor visibility is a minor factor in a DWI accident at night. And having street lamps would outright contradict poor visibility as a factor at all. When we translate the thrust of your comparison into your criticism of my argument, you’re saying that the Kennedy tax cut had negligible to no effect on the state of the economy at the time. That is a plainly false assertion.
There are plenty of factors that led to the economic boom of the period. Spending during war time. The dominant position of the US in post-war Europe. Public investment. The list goes on. The tax cut was a major player in that mix.
That doesn’t mean tax cuts are the solution in our economic situation. That doesn’t mean raising taxes on the wealthy would be a bad policy. By all means, raise taxes on the wealthy! But we should always take note of valid information that contradicts the way we’re naturally inclined to think. That’s how we correct for implicit bias.
The tax cut you brought up (the DUI) is irrelevant to the discussion of instituting a marginal tax rate of 90% on incomes over 10 million dollars, because it was very explicitly only for people making a shit ton less than that, a very important fact that you left out (like, y’know, all those streetlamps).
You know who cut taxes for the wealthy? Fucking Reagan, an action that tanked the US economy so hard that his successor, George Bush, had to commit political suicide to try and salvage the situation (spoiler: the situation was most definitely not salvaged).
So, sure, let’s take a look at valid information, that being Reagan’s “lower taxes on the massively wealthy tanks economies”, because Kennedy’s “lower taxes on the not massively wealthy” are sure as hell not relevant to the case.
Correction: the equivalent to the tax cut you brought up would be the “low visibility”.
How on Earth are Reagan’s tax cuts on the wealthy relevant if Kennedy’s are irrelevant? Reagan cut away as at a reasonable rate and grew the economy at a terrible cost to deficits. He himself signed bills raising taxes several times. Can you point to anyone during Reagan’s time whose taxes were at the 90% range?
The Kennedy tax cuts are a far better comparison because they were specifically targeted at the top income bracket. Once you’re making over a million dollars a year in today’s money you’re in a tiny fraction of 1% of the population. Becky’s proposal for 90% tax rate on those making over 10 million a year doesn’t shrink the number of people being taxed by an enormous figure. Would the impact be different? Of course! But the taxes Reagan inherited were nothing like what Becky is proposing.
I am well aware that you meant low visibility as the equivalent of a DWI at night in a well lit area. My point was the analogy is a very flawed one because (a) a well lit area isn’t an area with poor visibility under ordinary circumstances; and (b) the DWI makes the poor visibility reason for the accident worthless. The Kennedy tax cuts helped the economy. 91% on the super-rich was too high a rate. And given how ridiculously low taxes are now, raising them to 90% would be a major shock to the U.S. economy likely to send it at minimum into a recession.
I am in favor of taxing the rich more. It would help reduce deficits and raise money for much needed programs and save existing ones. Becky’s tax proposal is still a horrible idea.
Way to do the Kanye, Becky
I’m surprised Becky didn’t just say “Eat the Rich.” That’s my solution when it comes to dealing with the ultra-rich (specifically the non-philanthropists. There are good ultra-rich like Gates and Carnegie when he was alive.)
There are no such thing as “good” billionaires. If they were good people they wouldn’t BE billionaires in the first place
Plus, while it is theoretically possible to become a millionaire by legitimate means (like, I dunno, you’re a bestselling author who sells millions of copies), it’s pretty much impossible to be a billionaire that way. Somewhere down the line, either employees or the environment are exploited.
Fun fact, since you brought up the difference between millionaires and billionaires: it’s easier to be a billionaire in the US than in Europe, because a US billion is a thousand millions, whereas in Europe it’s a million million.
Personally I think it’s awful for a person to see someone else get hurt or even die, be in a position to save them without even any personal inconvenience, and then not bother. And yet that’s inherent to being a billionaire.
For one little example I think of all the kickstarters there are for sick people with no health care. So many people on-line try to spare some money to help them, though they may want it for other things. Gates could cover literally all of them with a single sentence to an accountant, and never notice the difference. And then he could go on to actually fix some of the things causing health problems, like the water crisis in Flint, and still never notice.
So I guess it depends on your definition of good. Is it about making sure you do some things for good causes, or is it about what you’re willing to pass by without caring, even when it would be no sacrifice at all for you to help?
I guess, to put it in perspective, less than a handful of billionaires pledged 600 million to rebuild Notre Dame, while it took several years for Flint, Michigan to get a similar amount as recompense for their poisoned water supply.
** In a few days after Notre Dame burnt down, I forgot to add
Flint’s water STILL isn’t fixed, so on that note, I’m gonna drop a fundraiser link.
https://ca.gofundme.com/LMFWater
JFC, STILL? That thing is going on what, five years old? Is the US AIMING to be called a third-world country?
I’d like to say so but Canada has water issues of its own, especially on Indigenous reserves, so I won’t say anything.
I guess it’s poor people’s fault for not being born a gothic tourist attraction that is under the responsibility of one of the (illicitly) wealthiest organizations in the world, who, by the way, is once again left off the hook for their responsibilities.
Shit, I didn’t add a sarcasm tag for the first part there? Should I have? Is it needed? I feel like it’s obvious, but I can never tell.
Notre Dame is owned by the French government, not the Roman Catholic church.
This is true – HOWEVER, the Catholic Church benefits from a sort of tenancy over Notre Dame, under the condition that they are responsible for its maintenance and repairs.
Hah, this is our Becky.
She gets put on the spot and put on display in front of the whole world – including an audience that up to recently included a lot of the people who threw her out from home and school – presented as an LGBT youth less then a month after her father hunted her with a gun for that very reason.
She has every reason to be terrified for what the attention might bring… and yet it take her less time than it takes to fart to start smartassing. Two panels later, and Robin is the one who is out-goofed.
NO ONE KEEPS BECKY DOWN!!!
NO ONE PUTS DINA’S BABY BECKY IN A GOOFLESS CORNER!!!
NUKE THE CORNER FROM ORBIT
She gets put down
But she gets up again
Ain’t no one keepin’ Becky down!
Robin needs to sing the Queen Whatever song from Lego 2 to convince people she’s not evil.
I love Becky even more now. How is this possible?
At least she got to make some of her values clear, since she’s been made to be in the public eye.
Nailed it!
Next Book Title: What An Inspiration! Now Shut Up!