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At the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, a panel moderator asked Michael Dell, America's 17th-richest man, what he thought about the idea of raising the top marginal tax rate to 70 percent.
This idea has been in the headlines since Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez floated it in a 60 Minutes interview on January 6 as a way to pay for a Green New Deal.
The Davos panel found the question hilarious. When the laughing died down, Dell, the founder and CEO of Dell Technologies, dismissed the idea out of hand, claiming it would harm U.S. economic growth.
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For Dell's Billionaire CEO, Taxing the Ultra-Rich is a Joke
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TAPPING? You POLITICIANS! Don't you realize that the END of the "Wash
Cycle" is a TREASURED MOMENT for most people?!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by jddimarco on Friday February 15 2019, @05:16PM (22 children)
High marginal tax rates are not an unknown thing; the UK had them until around 1980. It didn't work particularly well: the rich simply moved their money (and themselves) out of the country. If taxation starts to look like confiscation, that's what will likely happen.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @05:22PM (10 children)
Once I bothered to find how much tax was collected per income bracket when the US had super high ones in the 1950s, it was a rounding error because like two people paid it. Do people proposing this even say how much they expect to raise based on historical results? And anyway, the low hanging fruit is to increase the efficiency of government. The budget could be cut in half easy for the same results, leaving trillions of extra dollars per year for whatever crap.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @06:35PM (7 children)
Ah yes, thus why the US was able to fund so many programs for "the people" and the rich spent so much money supporting politicians who would peel their taxes back. If they weren't even paying then why would they care?
So much propaganda around here. I'd give my left pinky to magically know who the real shills are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @06:53PM (2 children)
The rich would rather not have to pay high priced lawyers to get them through tax loopholes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @07:12PM (1 child)
Nationalize all the law firms?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 16 2019, @04:48PM
Sure, then you can have the government defend you from the government. Pooh bear, is that you?
(Score: 1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @06:55PM (3 children)
1) What programs?
2) The US was better off because the dollar had just become the reserve currency (bretton woods) and hadn't been totally debased. Also, Europe and just been recently in total war and needed to both buy American stuff and pay back American loans. Finally, the MIC hadn't grown to such ridiculous levels yet and taxes in general were much lower. Go find the tax revenue by bracket for the 1950s, high tax revenues from the wealthy had nothing to do with it.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Friday February 15 2019, @11:21PM (2 children)
Some of federally funded programs that come to mind out of the high-income tax era in the US:
- The Interstate Highway System. It's named after Eisenhower for a reason.
- NASA - Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo.
- Putting electric and telephone service into many rural areas for the first time.
- Nuclear research, including civilian nuclear power and the synthesizing for the first time of most of the Period 7 elements.
- Aquaducts vital to the water supplies of major cities in the southwest US such as Los Angeles.
- Development of vaccines for polio, measles, mumps, rubella, and several other major diseases.
- The development of the transistor and the subsequent substantial miniaturization of computing technology.
- Fighting the Cold War, which wasn't a war against the common cold. And the MIC was ridiculous enough that Ike thought it worth pointing out in 1960.
Just to name a few things. The idea that we didn't get anything of value for those tax dollars is quite simply a lie.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @11:35PM
It was a good post until you just couldn't help yourself from inserting the obligatory strawman at the end.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday February 16 2019, @12:27AM
Are you counting the things with negative value, eh?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday February 15 2019, @09:41PM (1 child)
That would mean cutting a lot of government employees, and a lot of those are Jews and their unskilled minority pets paid large sums of money to sit around and point all day in-between TMZ readings.
The Jews will be fine because they have charities to look out for each other until they get other plum jobs from their nepotism, but the minorities will revolt and join Antifa and BLM and get violent and shit when they realize they're never ever again gonna make 80K a year for sitting down and fucking off on the internet all day continuing to rubber-stamp Obama's agenda.
How will the Escalade with the gold rims be paid off? What will pay the weekly grape soda bill? How can a family have to deal with downgrading to wearing Dickies after so many years of sporting Kangol, Timberland, and FUBU?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 16 2019, @11:54PM
Yep, just as I theorized. EF's watch is still stopped.
(Score: -1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @05:24PM (6 children)
Taking money out circulation is theft. It's like damning up a river and fucking over the people downstream. You can have your "rain barrel" for emergencies, but if you're hoarding, fuck you!
(Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @05:27PM (4 children)
Taking your money out of circulation means everyone else's money is worth more... This is the most retarded thing I've heard yet.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by bzipitidoo on Friday February 15 2019, @06:45PM (3 children)
That's called deflation, and it's very bad. Most people have debts, things like student loans, home mortgages, car loans, credit card balances. Deflation makes debt bigger. It can be so bad that the debt grows faster than the debtor can pay it off.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @06:58PM (2 children)
Having debt like that in the first place means you fell for a scam. Declare bankruptcy at a time of convenience to get out.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @07:33PM (1 child)
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/student-loans-bankruptcy_n_5bedfe4ee4b0510a1f2f1f5e [huffpost.com]
Good luck with that "convenience"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @07:45PM
So the same person who is apparently an expert into going into debt can't figure out a way to do this? I know people who did. It isn't a difficult puzzle, basically the person needs to just apply how they pay for other stuff to the student loan.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday February 16 2019, @12:26AM
I have to agree that this is stupid, if only because taking money out of circulation is near nonexistent in the first place and wouldn't be a problem even if taking money out of circulation were a common thing.
Except, of course, it's not like that. Water isn't scale independent. You can't use a million liters or 1 microliter to flush a toilet. With money, it doesn't matter how many zeros are present. Money spends the same whether you have to use a dollar or a million dollars to buy the item.
I guess you're thinking that rich people somehow hoard money. That is a remarkable ignorance since the vast majority of such wealth is in investments, which aren't hoarded but put into some activity with positive return on the investment (which by definition makes it not money hoarding since the wealth has gone back inot the economy).
I think the final kicker is that high income taxes don't touch money hoarding even in the least. If I put a thousand dollars in a sofa - a genuine example of money hoarding, it's not income nor will it accrue capital gains. It's completely untouched by the proposed taxation scheme. Meanwhile, that money would steadily lose value due to inflation, which let's face it is a very effective tax on money hoarding.
So to summarize: you claim that money hoarding is a big problem, even though it's almost nonexistent, and wouldn't be a problem even if it were common. Further, you're probably just spouting profound ignorance about investments and such, which aren't even remotely close to money hoarding.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday February 15 2019, @05:40PM
That sounds bad in the short term, but in the longer term, assuming the economy survives long enough, won't they leave gaps in the market for smaller businesses to profit? Ideally it should disincentivize anyone from becoming too big--although I can see the problem would continue, once those smaller business owners get rich enough, they will leave the country too. Some kind of exit fee? Really, it would have to be done globally.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @05:42PM (1 child)
AOC suggesting 70% isn't unreasonable.
Warren Buffet agrees, and claims he pays less tax than his secretary.
"In 1981, Reagan significantly reduced the maximum tax rate, which affected the highest income earners, and lowered the top marginal tax rate from 70% to 50%; in 1986 he further reduced the rate to 28%."
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Friday February 15 2019, @06:14PM
Taxes on the rich were even higher when that well-known rampaging socialist Dwight Eisenhower was in charge.
The position of people like Michael Dell is very simple: The rich should pay no taxes, ever, under any circumstances. And unlike the rest of us mere plebs, they can get your congressman or senator or favorite presidential candidate on the phone by dangling a very large check in front of their nose.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 17 2019, @08:56AM
On the other hand, they worked quite well in the US. A 70% top marginal tax rate would be optimum, with little chance that most rich people would simply move away. The US is also in quite a different position from the UK.