Fixing Inequality through Taxes

Maybe this issue is being approached from the wrong end.

If a US entity's income or assets were greater than the total GNP, I would think that could be a problem.

The question would then become, at what percentage of the GNP would an accumulation threaten the security and well being of the country and its inhabitants?

Another way would be to look at how the accumulation came to be. Did it happen through clear cut, positive production, or did it happen through harmful cost externalization? Weakening of US manufacturing capacity? Environmental degradation? Money maipulation essentially stealing hard-earned money of others? Drug or weapons trafficking? Etc.

Also, rather than excessively focusing on great wealth (with the abovementiomed exceptions), IMO it also makes more sense to see that those workers on the bottom rung are able to earn enough to have a reasonable life in this society, and not have to become professional welfare cheats or criminals to do this. Here we also get into licencing issues and many other legal protections designed more to solidify business monopolies and shut out beginning enterpreneurs than anything else.

I realize too much regulation hampers those at the high end as much as too much licensing hampers those at the low end, but I believe that skillful regulation at both levels can produce financial miracles without harming anyone of good will.

 

Taxes are not a moral issue, and equality is not a noble goal.

Using taxes to promote equality is a benevolent arrogance that can be resisted with moral impunity.

 

How do you feel about such things as regulation to help keep the air breathable and severance taxes?

 

Government is the legal use of force. I advocate for the use of force to protect individuals and their property from others and their property, legal or otherwise.

I do not advocate severance taxes.

 

The answer in a word: IGNORANCE. And that could pretty much describe the notion that taxes are the answer also.

 

Still no belief, just a pretty picture with no correlation to reality.

 

What about cases where mining activities have poisoned the water table? Should others pick up the externalized costs associated with that?

In my opinion a fund supported by severance taxes should do that job.

I am against litigation in instances like that; it is a costly, time-wasting process, often with little recourse to be had due to bankruptcies, etc.

 

Wow, another pretty picture with a source that tries to imply validity but when actually looked at states adjustments and calculations of some sort.

While there can be no denial that the masses get dumber as each new year passes, that is but the product of the system and intentional. But still that does not in itself prove the theory. You are trying to prove with sheer numbers a theorem that is misleading under that type of analysis.

 

Please define "money", then using that definition, explain "moving". With that, just what economic system do you use to establish your statements?

 

Has to be doesn't it? After all they are still there like good little employees.

Absolutely not, they made their bed, now must lie in it.

Back to that single word: IGNORANCE

 

As you define the scenario, limited as it may be, it falls squarely into the 'use of force to protect individuals and their property from others and their property' category.

 

It's funny how you call advocating the extraction of wealth from those who earned it through a wasteful, illicit government sieve "improving their lives."

Also how you and the other resentment baiters don't bother to respond to the many FACTS I offered previously in the longer post.

Instead you make an intellectually dishonest slavery comparison. Obnoxious and disgusting. <Bronx cheer>

 

Why don't you define definition first and explain explanation second. It is really straight forward, to have economic growth people should have money to consume goods, services and organize enterprises. There is no economy if money disappear from the economy to the pockets of wealthiest 1%.
How long do you think professional sport would last if we did not have a Draft. A system where "to encourage parity, teams that do poorly in the previous season usually get to choose best players in the postseason". I do not think it would take longer than 5 - 6 years before we have all the best players in one team that has most of the money. That team would be playing with itself in one empty stadium, watching stupid commercial that no one else is watching.

 

Even worse than Godwin's Law. You lose.

We both know it's not "the poor" complaining to boot, but rather very well-fed Complex parasites that thrive on redistribution and confiscation from a productive minority that is already paying 30-50% of their working lives in taxes at all levels to support the rest.

Noted also that you continue to refuse to engage all the FACTS about the "fabricated poor" and the "undeserving rich" I posted previously. Other than an irremediable 10-20% of the population given to repetitive destructive life choices no amount of redistribution or tax policy will fix, the poor and the rich are the EXACT SAME PEOPLE, just at different points in time.

 

Taxes are the cause of inequity not the solution.

 

Your point seems correct in the abstract, but the reality is a population that increasingly is unable to find a means of self support.

I would prefer to live in a society in which most have a decent degree of autonomy and self sufficiency. The best way to achieve that, of course, would be to fashion society in such a manner that all segments of the population have a shot at some sort of work they are actually capable of doing, and then see that they are adequately compensated for doing it. That does not seem to be happening quickly enough.


Because of the above, a sensible way of apportioning wealth is needed.

Apportioning most of the wealth to only a few individuals changes a financial system from a structure that assists in the exchange of goods and services into, instead, a funneling system that directs most resources to just a few.

Such a system is, in the long term, not good for anyone. It deprives those with less power to control financials' proper distribution of their just rewards, and eventually endangers those who willingly take their unjust gains with no realization of the injustice.

I suppose one could say, of those who lost their heads in the French Revolution, that they deserved it in a Darwinian sense because they were too stupid to see that they were the benefactors of a rigged, unjust system.

I guess that would be the equivalent of telling a poor heavy furniture mover who had to retire at age 50 with high blood pressure from overexertion that he deserved what he got, because he was too stupid to do better...?

In any case, no one likes higher taxes. A much better solution is to have a financial sector that is a service, not a parasitic tick on the economy, and a taxation system that is equitable to everyone.

 

Sure: Definition

A statement of the exact meaning of a word. An exact statement or description of the nature, scope, or meaning of something. The degree of distinctiveness or clarity of an object, image, or sound. The more accurate our definitions for words or concepts are, the better our clarity of meaning, and therefore, our understanding, of those words or concepts will be.

And "moving" is your term, so what is moving money? I find your explanation to be rather naive. With the Federal Reserve, their is no money, just legal tender in the discharge of debt, not the payment of same. Money is value and debt has no value.

Now it also seems the economy is little understood. It is the expansion of debt that expands the economy and the contraction of that that causes the contraction. That is the mechanism that has been used for more than a century to move all the real assets into the hands of the rich while all the others stand around with handfuls of worthless paper.

But this explains more than it would seem. This is the whole problem in a nutshell so aptly employed by the Romans with much success as Rome was reduced from a Republic to ruins. All you need to do is provide entertainment and the masses will know all the stats and moves leaving the elite to rob them blind without hardly any opposition.

 

taxing one group more than another is fighting inequality with more inequality. that's like saying you can fix racism with more racism, or like saying you can get out of debt by going further into debt.

 

Ah yes, the American dream, being born on third base and somehow portraying that as a triple. A paraphrase from one of my favorite people, Gerald Celente.

But what I would really like to know is what is rich?

Some of the poorest people I have ever met has gobs of money and some of the richest people I have have met have very little money.

 

Shouldn't we start by not taxing the poor?

 

Wealth is not "apportioned," like a static pie is sliced, but is fluid, created by individuals who EARN it by providing benefit to ALL via voluntary markets in which people line up to trade money for quality of life. Any appeal that resorts to the phrasing you choose above starts out illegitimate and quickly rolls down hill from there.

I prefer to live in a country where Enlightenment principles of strong property rights and the rule of law control as against the government, which has proven by hundreds if not thousands of historical datapoints to be a necessary evil, a blind, stupid, wasteful, corrupt oaf in need of restraint above all else. We tried the other way for ten thousand years and somehow that didn't get us smartphones and the internet, but millennia of oppression by a truly tiny % of elites. Our poor today in the US have more wealth, life and quality life than KINGS had 150 years ago. This is no accident, and results directly from the aforementioned firm rule of law and strong property rights that lead to markets that give us the bounty we enjoy today. Government gives NOTHING, especially in relation to its costs, only takes in the long run.

Banal. Get back to us with a better comparison, or just acknowledge that even our "peasants" in the US have more than the middle class in other affluent countries today, and no comparison whatsoever is possible between the bounty that we ALL have in the US compared to what the -centrally ruled- French peasantry had at the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkebmhTQN-4

Oh, are YOU a "heavy furniture mover?" I HAVE BEEN in life, for five years, it was one of my EASIER early jobs, and am a professional today. By and large in the US, people CHOOSE their station in life. To restate, other than an irremediable 10-20% of the population who regularly blow massive lottery winnings and other windfalls such that no amount of redistribution or tax policy will "fix" their perpetual BAD CHOICES, a vast majority of the "poor" and "rich" in this country are the EXACT SAME PEOPLE at different points in time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGuNNyOTRnI (start at 6 minutes, but the whole thing is educational)

Appeals to "wealth inequality" are appeals by an infinitely greedy, well-fed Complex of gov-edu-union-contractor-grantee-lawyer-MSM parasites against the rest of us who already pay 30-50% of our working lives in taxes at all levels. ROFLMAO at a "financial sector" that is a parasitic tick. Do tell us all what "financial sector" interests flourish on fiat, which is where the dog has no choice how much blood the tick extracts? The only parasitic class in our economy is the Complex.

 

Good luck! The ignorance of republicans and economic history is too large to battle a topic like this. With all their talk of lazy and stupid people and they won't pick up a book or google a topic and learn about it. It's like they're parroting zombies, quite impressive really of how successful ignorant people are to manipulate. Hell I'll give it a shot; OBAMA BAD, MUSLIM, COMMUNIST, GO READ WHAT CAUSED GREAT DEPRESSION AND FDRs NEW DEAL. I doubt it will work but if one conservative learns the truth it won't be a total loss.