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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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @05:04PM
At ~15:00: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okAIf5-BDAQ [youtube.com]
(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.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @05:22PM (16 children)
They sound great to the ignorant without capital.
If you want to see these people get white in the face, talk about taxing capital.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @05:25PM (12 children)
Sounds great. The government will need a list of everything you own to make sure no cheating, and they won't use that info to mess with you at all. Just like the income tax it will start out as for the "1%" but eventually apply to everyone.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by YeaWhatevs on Friday February 15 2019, @05:52PM (5 children)
That's fine. Haven't you heard? The 1% own 50% of wealth and growing. I believe it was that lower 50% own 0 or less.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @05:59PM
And why do you think that is? Because the government didn't spy on everyone enough? It is because the fed gives them free money. Look up where money comes from. The fed creates money from thin air to loan to banks, those banks loan it to rich people and their business, etc.
You think giving the government more money is going to stop this?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday February 16 2019, @12:29AM (2 children)
My sarcasm detector is tripping on that. Perhaps, you think something is not fine about that situation? Even though more than that lower 50% aren't even trying to own wealth?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 16 2019, @10:56PM (1 child)
Now you've tripped my sarcasm detector. You honestly don't see any problem with 1% of the population owning 50% of the wealth? Let me guess: you imagine yourself a temporarily embarrassed millionaire?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday February 17 2019, @12:24AM
Nope, particularly since it's not 50% of the wealth. It's maybe 50% of assets and ambiguous securities/derivatives.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 16 2019, @01:35AM
The 1% own 99.6 % of the nation’s wealth.
“That means the wealthiest 1 percent held an average of 225 times the wealth of the average median household in 2009 — a ratio that was 125 in 1962.”
from a paper owned by one of those 1%
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/who-are-the-1-percenters/2011/10/06/gIQAn4JDQL_blog.html?utm_term=.aadb35abaaf3 [washingtonpost.com]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday February 15 2019, @05:56PM (5 children)
No, what they need is what they already have: Mandatory reporting from the companies about what capital distributions they have made and to whom, and certified auditors reports showing the books match up to what they disclosed to the government. Sure, a company can get away with a lot of shit, but sooner or later it will catch up to them if the accounting isn't proper. Witness Enron. Madoff. Others. And what caused Arthur Andersen to fail was that while the company writes the check the work of an independent auditor is actually for the government and general public, as well as its investors.
A company who fails to do report correctly will find its assets frozen and men with guns and padlocks on their doorstep. And there are plenty of hungry agents looking to take down a big one to make their name.
That's why when you start talking capital gains hikes you get a shitstorm of complaining about "limiting investment" and restricting economies: You can get away with something, but not much.
But the problem is the same as increasing income tax: In theory the investors will find better havens for their money. In theory.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 3, Informative) by canopic jug on Friday February 15 2019, @06:00PM (1 child)
A company who fails to do report correctly will find its assets frozen and men with guns and padlocks on their doorstep. And there are plenty of hungry agents looking to take down a big one to make their name.
What defines correctly at this point? They'll simply shrug their shoulders and remind inverstigator, accurately, that pretty much everyone does it that way. Heck even business schools are teaching MBAs to keep two sets of books, one for investors, one for the government. Go after those schools first or they'll keep churning out crooks.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @07:01PM
lets stick with the idea that laws are fairly enforced in actuality so that we can talk about "taxes on capital" vs "taxes on income". :)
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Friday February 15 2019, @06:26PM
Except that what actually happens is that the company who has been lying like crazy to the government says to the investigator in one of their many wine-and-dine sessions something along these lines: "We really appreciate the diligence and thoroughness of your efforts to investigate us. How about you come work for us as a regulatory compliance consultant for 7 figures instead of 5? Plenty of flexibility you can't get as a government bureaucrat - we're totally fine with you taking time during the day to take care of your kids or something, and you'll have no need to worry about job security. All we ask in return is that you go ahead and find that what we're doing is A-OK."
If they don't bite, they make a similar pitch to the person further up their food chain with the power to kill the subordinate's investigation, and so on until somebody decides to be bought off. This is now common enough that a lot of the people we have working in government enforcement arms are looking for evidence not to generate indictments but to push their targets into precisely this kind of job offer. Especially when we have, as is not infrequent, people running the regulatory agencies who want to ensure that those agencies fail to do their job.
Oh, and this is all legal.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Friday February 15 2019, @08:11PM (1 child)
They laugh at the idea of higher income taxes because that's not how they make their money.
Capital gains is how you make the wealthy pay. That's how you reduce the massive economic inequality.
Naysayers still mock and say that the wealthy will simply move their money and operations elsewhere. It's an empty threat. Really, Michael Dell, you're going to move your computer operations to the Seychelles? Yes, I'm sure that the Seychellese will easily and effortlessly transition from harvesting coconuts to building computers; also, I'm sure the Seychellese will have no problem whatsoever importing the skilled foreign labor that can build computers. "China!" you say? Hahaha yeah, if you believe that I got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday February 16 2019, @12:37AM
The empty threat has been going on for a while. This study [bbc.com] says $21 trillion in various tax havens, including places in the US. I think it's pointless to talk tough when rich people have been rocking your strategy for a century or more.
You do realize that a huge portion of US business has already been there, done that.
(Score: 2) by NewNic on Friday February 15 2019, @06:47PM (2 children)
Since the US has such great disparities in wealth, a wealth tax is probably a good idea, but it would take a change to the constitution, unless all of you in those poorer red states would like to have crushing levels of wealth tax.
More practically, the estate tax could be raised.
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @07:09PM (1 child)
why would one need to change the constitution to realize a personal/corporate tax on cash/wealth? i don't understand how or why red-states would have a problem there -- given the idea that you deduct one from the other without a forward-carry as done elsewhere in the world.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by NewNic on Friday February 15 2019, @08:06PM
Because of the Constitution requires apportionment of direct taxes among states by population. There is an exception for income taxes.
Under a wealth tax, poorer states would have to pay the same amount per person as wealthier states, which would mean higher effective wealth tax rates in poorer states.
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @06:43PM (4 children)
Honestly I have concluded that many people are just not capable of understanding cause and effect when it comes to finances beyond a very basic level. One level of misdirection is enough to trick them into advocating solutions to their problems will have the exact opposite effect. There is a "can't beat them join them" thing going on with the "predators" who take advantage of these people, but I do not want to join in that if I can help it.
So what to do when so many people want to give more money and power to the same people/organizations who have been screwing them over? Logic and reason won't work because they apparently cannot comprehend what is happening, so they must be treated like children I guess? But that is a slippery slope, we do not want that practice to exist either
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @07:06PM
The "solutions" I see here are more debt, more inflation to pay off this debt (not acting to increase inflation is now even stealing from debtors) and more government spying powers. Basically the status quo except even more of it.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday February 15 2019, @11:55PM (2 children)
There are 2 major reasons for this:
1. Humans, per this classic NSFW demonstration by Penn Jillette [youtube.com], have a hard time picturing and understanding at a gut level really huge numbers. For instance, if you look at polls and such, you'll sometimes see lots of people who genuinely appear to believe that $127 million is more money than $3 billion - part of that is that they're not reading carefully, see the 127 and the 3 and don't understand what the "million" and "billion" really mean, and part of that is that when you see numbers like that most people generally think of them as "far more than I'm ever going to see in my entire miserable life."
2. When rich people and organizations engage in crooked accounting, they can afford to pay smart people big bucks to among other things come up with terminology designed to hide their chicanery. That's how concepts like "Evade corporate profits taxes by pretending all our income went to a hitherto minor Irish subsidiary" became known as "inversion". It's the "you can't understand what I just did, therefor you won't question me on it" defense. In general, the more complicated and confusing the accounting has become, the more I'm going to assume you're up to something, because there's no particular reason for it to be complicated if you aren't doing something shady.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 16 2019, @12:26AM
It's even worse than that though. For some reason people think giving the government money from the rich (those who run it or control the politicians who do) means they are getting money. No, the government will spend it however the rich tell them to.
Like this idea of higher taxes that is supposed to address wealth inequality. Why isn't the idea to collect $1 trillion in taxes and give everyone else $10-20 thousand dollars. Where is the second half of this raise taxes on the rich idea that actually addresses wealth inequality? It looks like another scam to me.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Saturday February 16 2019, @06:55AM
This seems like a shortcoming of English more than anything else. Maybe ebonics and/or engineering notation could help here -- "large" or "g" for 1E3, and I don't know what we'd use for 1E6 and 1E9.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @06:54PM (3 children)
That pretty much sums up nicely how the ultra rich feel about us plebs.
If you ever wanted a good example of elitism, this is elitism. Seriously. The ultra rich really see themselves as a class of its own. They're not evil, they're not sociopaths devoid of compassion or empathy (not all of them anyway), they truly, sincerely believe that they're inherently superior to the rest of humanity. It's like they're a different species. That's how they've been raised, that's what they've had drilled into their head virtually from birth.
For the sociopathic ones, they see this as a God-given right to manipulate and exploit. "Sheep were made to be shaved". Yes, I've heard that, with my own ears, and the person saying it was not joking.
For the more empathic, compassionate ones, they see their perceived superiority as a responsibility to take care of the less fortunate. But even then, they never perceive those they help as one of their own. Their relationship with them is more akind of a dog shelter owner taking care of those poor abandonned animals, or the crazy cat lady taking into her home all the stray cats. They're not hypocrits, they truly do it out of the kindness of their heart, but they don't, and never will, perceive those they help, as one of their own.
This kind of elitism is deeply ingraned in the human psyche, at the genetic level. We are a social species, but we are a highly hierarchical social species. No amount of education will ever change that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @07:15PM
The idea of fair taxation by-way-of-a-tax-on-wealth is that you constrain the sociopaths. As is, they are profiting from the misdirects that has the median think of taxes as being sales/property or income. Even the reporting on that Davos laughter failed to mention that taxes on capital, and not just capital gains, are the way to get a sense of fairness into the system -- without having to make moral judgments, and therefore without the hopelessness that you might have felt/found yourself in at the end of your post.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @07:37PM
Sums up the feeling of many of the ultra-rich. You have you exemptions there like Buffet, but most believe they are superior to the plebs and anything goes to try to prevent taxation.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Saturday February 16 2019, @12:19AM
I can think of someone who seems to be an exception to that, although he's not quite a billionaire: LeBron James. He's put a lot of his money into charity work in his home town of Akron focused on scholarships and now a school for kids who grew up the way he did. He's had regular conversations with these kids, and by all appearances genuinely cares about their well-being. I get the impression from people who've been involved that he does in fact have genuine empathy for those kids, precisely because he lived their life for 18 years before becoming a basketball superstar.
Of course, he's not at Davos, because (a) he's busy playing basketball, and (b) he doesn't seem to really identify with the likes of Michael Dell. A couple of the major differences between LeBron and Dell:
- LeBron got most of his money by the sweat of his own brow, whereas most of the other Forbes 400 got rich by either being born rich or making other people do the work. LeBron doesn't go into work wearing a coat and tie and sit at a desk sending a memo to Cheryl that the ball needs to go into the hoop this time, he has to put it there himself if he wants to keep on getting paid. And that makes him a very different breed from those who exploit others to live well.
- LeBron knows what it's like to be poor, because he was poor. Most of the super-rich never were poor: About half inherited their money. Most of the rest had a trajectory along the lines of "upper-middle class suburban childhood, trust fund pays for an Ivy League degree and an MBA, either work on Wall Street or start out in middle management, through various bits of ruthlessness, brains, and luck make it to the top levels at their company." Very few have ever seen a salary below $50,000 in their entire life.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @07:33PM (6 children)
I wonder if perhaps they found the question so funny because they know they already own sufficient (if not all) members of Congress to make sure nothing like that would ever happen. Whether it would be bad for the economy is just the cover story they use as an excuse to dismiss the question.
All institutions in the West are corrupt to the core, and the Davos crowd performed most of the corruption. They have little to fear from any of those institutions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @07:52PM (2 children)
Why isn't a part of this proposal at least to give the money directly to poorer people or something? What good does giving it to the government do for anyone but those who control it? I think it is meant as a joke, just shifting the wealth from left to right pocket.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 16 2019, @11:10PM (1 child)
I can't be bothered to find a link right now but I seem to recall reading somewhere that the uber-wealthy give substantially less to charity than those in the middle class. (By percentage of income I assume.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 16 2019, @11:21PM
I'm talking about this idea where corrupt puppets of the super rich and corporations get more money in some scheme purported to decrease wealth inequality. It makes no sense except as a scam, probably why they all laugh at it.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday February 15 2019, @08:25PM (2 children)
It's a self-defeating idea. What happens when you raise taxes to punitive levels on those most able to flee the juridiction?
They flee the jurisdiction, of course. Taking their money with them.
So you raise taxes but wind up with less revenue - because your tax base just shrank.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @11:11PM (1 child)
1) punitive levels
70% for all above 10 000 000 or so. I do not think you know what that first word means.
2) The idea sort of is to implement this in most of the civilized world
3) if you want to live in a 3rd world country with all your $$$, be my guest, it might enlighten you. At least you also do not get to profit from our tax money.
4) A punitive (hey look at that word) fee for fleeing the jurisdiction can be implemented.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @11:38PM
2. National interest and economic interest mitigate against it.
3. GFYS. Seriously, that sentence is nothing but a compound series of unfounded and factually incorrect assumptions. You're a cabbage.
4. Sig Heil!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Friday February 15 2019, @08:19PM (1 child)
We need a tax structure designed to re-launch real capitalism and innovation in the West. Crony "capitalism," aka what we have now, destroys as thoroughly as the socialism the Cortez woman wants.
We do not need Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and their ilk to have billions of dollars. We need to give incentives to entrepreneurs to bring new goods and services to market. Doing that is hard, because there are so many aspects to cover; government should get off the backs of the startups and stop helping the behemoths to strangle their competition in the cradle.
But we can't ever make a system like that happen now, under the auspices of the current system. The status quo is thoroughly locked down by those who want to stifle innovation and strangle humanity's collective genius. A sea change, a revolution, is a necessary prerequisite to human economic progress.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @08:26PM
Oligopolies usually kill innovation, competition, and choice.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @11:07PM
Maybe there should be something that makes business owners more likely to share more $s (%-wise) with their workers. Somehow.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Friday February 15 2019, @11:40PM
MANDATORY: Tax at 95% ANY politician who takes money from a lobbyist or from a corporation.
MANDATORY: Tax at 95% ANY company/corporation/rich person who tries or succeeds at influencing politician or policy or law.
Don't allow corporations to donate money or influence employees to donate money to politicians or (super) PACs or whatever.
Other than that, leave it as is. Should solve the problem? (I am not a lawyer/tax person...anybody got a better idea?)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 16 2019, @05:50PM
i think selling self made steel should incur a (clubberment) tax, but taking shelter under a steel reinforced structure (you own) should not incur extra rust in form of a tax...