This is just offensive. I don’t think I’m unrealistically enthusiastic about the benefit of wealth taxes at all. I expect them to reduce the concentration of wealth into the hands of the few. Beyond that, I don’t see any good reason — economically or philosophically — that great fortunes should be beyond the reach of the taxman. That’s all.
Ah, I see. That’s certainly better.
To the extent that it’s never tapped and never converted into realized gain, it can’t influence anything else in the world. It’s just numbers on paper at that point. And if those numbers are attached to stock prices, and there’s some sort of stock crash, then that untapped wealth can be reduced by billions overnight.
And it’s the “…at the cost of everyone else” that I disagree with. If Amazon stock goes from $3500 to $3600 and Jeff Bezos makes another billion, it’s not “at the cost of” anyone. It’s a stock ticker going up; it’s not actual dollars flowing out of people’s pockets and into Bezos’ account. Similarly, when the stock tanks, it doesn’t help anyone. They’re just numbers on paper.
Again, “concentration” implies that wealth is flowing away from some people and to Bezos, when the reality is that he has a bunch of stock certificates, and today people say that those stock certificates are worth $50 more than they were yesterday. Or on some says, people say that they’re worth $50 less than yesterday.
Is anyone else not? I don’t think anyone here is saying we should raise revenue via a wealth tax and then, like, take a shit on it and set it on fire, or give it to the military, or redistribute it to the workers or whatever. At the core, the argument is that a wealth tax should feed into social programs that would alleviate the constant, droning financial strain on the working and middle classes.
To be fair, most of this conversation has been around the question of “Should we tax wealth at all?”, not “What should we do with the taxed wealth?”. But I think it’s fair to say that everyone here arguing for a wealth tax is also arguing for that extra revenue to fund things like healthcare, childcare, and, yes, education.
I’m just quoting the one line but responding to your greater point.
You’re right that a large part of our electorate is politically illiterate. There’s no silver bullet solution for that, but if you could reduce the amount of headspace and time it takes just to exist without going bankrupt, I think you’d see more people get involved and educated in various realms. You’d certainly see more people take part in higher education if that financial barrier was lowered or removed. A lot of folks on Qt3 are more affluent than most. I think that blinds some of you to the reality of life in the working class, which is that most people are constantly working and constantly stressed, with little to no control over their situation and little to no social mobility. Those folks just can’t spend the hours to read, argue, and internalize politics. You can call political awareness more important (and it may well be in the grand scheme of things), but if you try to explain that to a twentysomething who needs to work sixty hours a week across two jobs just to afford rent in a place she’ll never be able to afford to buy while she needs to organize childcare across five different family members because she can’t afford daycare, it’s going to fall on deaf ears.
Timex
3020
I agree with this wholeheartedly.
See, while I’m saying I don’t care that much about wealth inequality, that’s not to say that I don’t care about increasing effective wealth for the lower income levels (including up through the middle class).
I am very much in favor of doing exactly that. While my motivations may be different than some, I think that from a non-altruistic, purely utilitarian perspective, increasing the effective wealth of the bottom of the economic scale will functionally improve society in a number of ways, including for the very rich. I think that such expenditures are simply useful, overall.
Well, a big part of this discussion is focusing on wealth taxation, because there are those here who have explicitly decided that reducing the wealth levels of the ultra-wealthy is ITSELF the goal. Not simply raising revenues, but lowering the wealth of those individuals.
To me, I am far less concerned with that goal, than I am with increasing revenues. If I could achieve better revenue increases without taxing wealth, then I absolutely will choose that, because simply decreasing the inequality from the top is not a goal I care about.
My main goal is to increase the standard of living for those at the bottom, because doing so will improve society overall. Part of doing that involves increasing tax revenue so that we can spend that money to support programs to those ends.
Thrag
3021
Who? Who has that as a singular goal?
Timex
3022
There were multiple folks here who have stated that reducing the wealth of the ultra wealthy was their actual goal. Even you yourself have suggested that reduction of wealth is itself a direct goal for you, even if it’s not the singular goal.
I’ll just drop this here again.
Thrag
3024
And we’ve come full circle again. I’ll just quote this ahain
If I say “no one should have more than a billion dollars in wealth” and nothing else, and I say so in the context of a society where there is a welfare system so woefully inadequate that most Americans can’t get anywhere near realizing the American dream, and also there are people whose wealth is so vast that it could shore up that welfare system with money to spare, it shouldn’t be hard to connect those dots, even if I don’t connect them explicitly each time I make my statement.
And, to be clear, I’m not saying you’re misinterpreting the obvious. You’re not wrong that several have stated things like “no one should have that much wealth at all”. But those things are being said in the above context and should be interpreted in that context.
If no one was struggling and everyone’s basic and complex needs were met and everyone could satisfactorily balance work, leisure, and family without killing themselves over it, I don’t think anyone here would care how much money Jeff Bezos has.
And yet people talk about fixing income tax, and one response is:
Obvious he would want that money to be used for social programs…but he’s very specifically saying that fixing income tax isn’t enough if it doesn’t specifically accomplish the accumulation of wealth by the very few. He has specifically and repeatedly been concerned with how much money Jeff Bezos has, and I’ve never seen a response along the lines of “Well if we did X then I wouldn’t care about dynastic wealth anymore.”
Yes, this thread is full of different viewpoints by different people and contains many subthreads and tangents! Asynchronous internet-based communication is a wonder, no?
Because it’s a weird and unnecessary thing to say in the context of a large discussion about wealth inequality? I can’t speak for Scott - maybe he would still care about dynastic wealth if everyone’s needs were sufficiently met - but are you really getting on his case for not explicitly saying “Well, if this problem were solved, then we wouldn’t need to solve the problem”? It seems self-evident.
Thanks! Indeed, I would still care about extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, because I think it is corrosive and ultimately destructive to democratic society. This would be true even if everyone were healthy, well-fed and decently sheltered, happy, etc; because of course those conditions might well be temporary. This doesn’t mean that people can’t be rich. It means they can’t be permitted to be Croesus.
I actually had the same thought right after I posted that - massive wealth would still give undue influence over politics and other societal matters, even in a more prosperous society. You could try to pass legislation to prevent such influence, but I don’t think that’s realistic given the aforementioned undue influence.
So maybe reduction of wealth for its own sake has some merit. It’s maybe a little inelegant but would be (I think) much better for society overall.
Right, it’s a wonder, whatever. The point is that when Timex makes this statement:
…that statement is indeed (as Scottagibson confirmed) what some people here have as their actual goal.
Fair! And after thinking about it, I think it’s a fine goal because it would both increase revenues that could better fund social programs and decrease the avenues for undue political influence. It’s not necessarily because I think billionaires are inherently bad people (although I think their answers to the question “With a fraction of your wealth you could end homlessness/fund healthcare/etc, so why don’t you?” would be fascinating).
Thrag
3032
It’s not “if everyone’s needs were met” as much as it is “if ridiculous levels of wealth didn’t have a corrosive an destructive effect on democratic society”.
The reduction of wealth is not in and of itself the goal. Since a perfect society where crazy aristocratic levels of wealth doesn’t have such an effect doesn’t exist and likely can’t exist the reduction of wealth may likely be necessary to the larger societal goal.
Edit: While it should be obvious I feel in this thread I need to add: Something can be done for more than one reason, more than one solution can be applied to a problem. Nothing I have said is meant to indicate the only possible goal of a wealth tax is to reduce the potential corrupting influence of insane levels of wealth nor to mean that the only possible way to reduce that influence is through a wealth tax.
I feel like a lot of billionaires have become so by providing a product or service that millions of people use that improves their lives. Maybe after that they go on and use that money to start a charitable foundation to determine where that wealth can be better distributed, but I feel like a lot of people just look at the wealth without looking at the millions of people that they helped along the way to becoming wealthy.
Thrag
3034
These replies as if we are talking about eating the rich and not a really minor wealth tax are a little tiring.
Seriously. Bezos with half his wealth would still be unfathomably wealthy.
It’s true. The man could pay the 28 Million cost of a space flight ticket his company just sold once per month for the next 40 years and it wouldn’t even make a dent in his wealth. Pretty much just pocket change.
