this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2024
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Trickle down economics works on paper but because it assumes that A there's only one country in the world in which anybody would spend any money, and it's the country in which they generated that money, and B that people pay taxes proportionate to the amount of money they possess and therefore are incentivized to spend it when they get it, which of course doesn't work because either they are not paying taxes proportionate to their earnings, or they are finding some other way to not pay the taxes other than spending the money.
It also assumes that rich people will invest all of their money into new businesses and create jobs and thus let the money flow into the economy. But most rich people just invest most of their wealth in real estate and in the stock market, that money will never flow into the real economy.
It also assumes the people on top want to give a higher proportion of their earnings to their workers or hire more staff. If I own a business and it's most efficient with 12 employees, you can cut my taxes to zero and I still won't hire more people, and as long as there are people willing to work for pennies I won't be paying dimes.
The best way for the government to incentivize better pay and for my wealth to benefit society is to force me to pay my workers a loving wage and to increase my taxes.
Yeah, a lot of the 1% is overleveraged and still lives paycheck-to-paycheck and increasing their taxes may hurt. Buy really, it's the. 001% that we need to be going after.
We need a wealth cap after which the tax rate is 100%. And to keep them from moving to a new country we can require that it applies to anyone whose business interesta intersect with US companies, with the enforcement mechanism being an embargo from any company operating in the US. We don't even need the taxes to go to the US, but after X amount of wealth it needs to be paid in taxes to someone.
it also assumes that the ultra-wealthy are human and should be allowed to live. which I think is a really problematic assumption.
but their behavior is fundamentally not human. it's like a whole thing.
Did Reagan assume a wealth tax? Who did?
Theodore Roosevelt
Before Reagan we had a progressive tax actually