Disagreed. Games like Fortnite and League of Legends went down this road and ended up at even more unfathomable $500 microtransactions. The only issue with skin trading is that people will take it more seriously than it is, which is a problem with all cosmetic systems.
Also the same seems to extend to things when private companies discussed. Nothing is enough you cannot be happy with company making million in post tax profit a year. Next year you must do two million, then 4 and 8 and so on... Even not attempting this is somehow failure for some people...
Not nearly to the same degree. It's easier for a privately held company to focus on long-term goals without CEOs having to hit quarterly targets set by external analysts (Wall Street).
It feels more skewed for public companies for me. There's definitely "well off" small private companies that have good returns (mom and pop shops) and keep going and making their customers happy for decades, and those aren't an issue. There'll definitely be 'evil' private companies, but something about the stock market ruins companies. You are too dependent on the perception of your company and the markets reaction to it and your decisions. Investors do a lot of knee jerk selling. Meanwhile billionaires swoop in and purchase a chunk of your company at a discount.
Yeah I noticed any time original founders are replaced, companies degrade. The pride of running a good company just isn't there. That's not ALWAYS the case though. I have a relative who bought an AC repair company out, and made it into the amazing company that it is today.
It's not just about pride. Companies, artistic productions, projects of any kind...they require vision and focus. When the people in charge change, maintaining these becomes a challenge.
The East India Company set the template for joint-stock corporations, and the model was basically a weaponized extension of post-Norman politics. Its leadership acted like a portable aristocracy. Accountable only upward to investors and the Crown never to the people they ruled. Their mandate was extraction, not participation. Communist regimes are always pointed out, but that pure Free Markets look like the East India company is never highlighted.
That mindset carried straight into corporate governance. Joint-stock companies inherited a Norman-style hierarchy where a self-defined ruling stratum treats populations as revenue sources, not stakeholders. Legitimacy comes from charter and capital (today: job/founder title and investment), not from any connection to the community affected.
In Norman social architecture you have a ruling stratum that views itself as distinct from and superior to the alien conquered population under it, bound by obligation only to peers and superiors, not to the commons. The joint-stock corporation inherited that same operating philosophy. The “company” wasn’t conceived as part of society; it was a chartered power structure hovering above society. Local populations are revenue sources, not stakeholders. Accountability runs up the hierarchy, not down. Legitimacy comes from charter (now job title/founder title) and capital, not community integration. The company's goal is to be a mini Norman conqueror of it's specific market. The logic of Norman style extraction from a conquered people, rather than participation/obligation/upholding social norms, sits at its core. Norman style extraction first, everything else second.
Compared to the 90s, I'm sure those years did feel pretty awful, but 2008-2010 were far worse. The global financial crisis caused college graduates to return to school for additional 1-2 year degrees in order to simply defer student loan payments, and avoid the job market. Once they graduated from their masters programs, or additional majors, they were still applying for the same entry level positions.
> But is it possible that part of the reason crime is down is because of Stranger Danger?
Yes. This is a really soft question. Sure, part of the reason that crime is down could possibly be due to stranger danger.
On the flip side, over-parenting has negative consequences on kids who have no freedom. I believe the same poll had said that most kids had never walked down a grocery store aisle by themselves and weren't allowed to play outside in front of their house w/o a parent.
Why. We used to have much higher tax rates on the super wealthy. That was when America was doing stuff rather than floundering.
I'd even argue it's in their own interest to have higher taxes. There is no guarantee the current structure of society will continue indefinitely. Without a more reasonable distribution of wealth, we may end up repeating the "let them eat cake" episode.
Very astute. Of course my comment is saying no it won't - its called mathematics. Its all posturing without any meaningful effort but people lap it up because it doesn't require anyone else to anything different.
Such that one person doesn't have the power to buy, legally, a presidential election, multiple regional elections, or half the politicians via lobbying/corruption.
The problem you are describing is revoking Citizen's United. What your trying to do is a patch job to another problem which is going to cause all sorts of unintended consequences.
First principles people, not these lazy slap dash approaches.
It's not about Citizen's United, because it's very specific to the US, while it's a global problem that rich people have too much influence.
Forget about elections and politicians, they can fund media empires at a loss to push their ideologies. No one should have that much power. They can buy lawyers effectively putting them out of the reach of the law. So many problems would be solved or reduced in intensity by taxing them.
The goal is to stop wealth inequality from continuing to rise and to even decrease it. Taxing wealth (holding on to assets and letting them generate income passively) past a certain amount (progressive tax brackets based on wealth) is the first step to have precisely the effect of reducing that inequality.
People with no/little wealth will be taxed nothing/very little and the wealthiest will be taxed a lot; offer government subsidies for those with no or little wealth to make their daily spending easier, perhaps even a small UBI. All of a sudden, wealth inequality is going the other way. That seems kind of obvious, frankly.
I'm no economist, but it feels like just adjusting the taxation the further up the marginal brackets (even creating more marginal brackets at different increments to make the resolution finer) is what would benefit the majority more.
Whether that has negative effects elsewhere, I have no idea and thank goodness I'm not in charge of that.
That is a discussion that inflation resembles a tax. And in any case, how does that refute the idea that taxation in general is not a solution? That’s like saying soda taxes are bad so we shouldn’t have income taxes either.
> That is a discussion that inflation resembles a tax.
That's splitting hairs. Inflation is a choice, just like taxes, and, importantly, it's a regressive tax, which helps us understand why the elites love it so much. Inflation shouldn't be mentioned without pointing out that it's a regressive tax.
> And in any case, how does that refute the idea that taxation in general is not a solution?
It doesn't. Nobody claimed that either.
Taxation by itself isn't a solution, but I doubt there is a solution that doesn't involve taxation.
> You’re arguing that because inflation (which is not a tax) is kinda sorta like a tax, therefore taxation in general isn’t a solution?
I can't find anybody claiming anything of the sort.
> That’s like saying soda taxes are bad so we shouldn’t have income taxes either.
Inflation looks a lot like taxation, yes. But assets, the markets for equities, etc rise with inflation. The upper class has most of their net worth in assets/equities, whereas the poorer people are living paycheck to paycheck just buying the essentials each month, and each month those essentials become more expensive. Only one of these groups feels any real impact.
So yes it's a tax but it's a tax on a very specific segment of the population.
It's less about raising taxes on people making less than 250,000 a year and more on getting people who make over 1,000,000 pay taxes at all. Sure there's plenty of people who aren't rich that commit tax fraud but the IRS is pretty good at getting them. Getting the millionaires who can throw lawyers at them to waste time makes it not worth it. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer
When the top 5% makes 3x more than the bottom 50%? The top 5% makes 38% of the total, while the top 1% alone makes 22%, per the same sources you just quoted. Yes, the ones who make the most can afford to pay the most in taxes.
You didn't even cover GP's main point about getting the top to even pay taxes; the top 1%, per your own source, only pays 26%, while the top 50% pays 16%.
> When the top 5% makes 3x more than the bottom 50%? The top 5% makes 38% of the total, while the top 1% alone makes 22%, per the same sources you just quoted. Yes, the ones who make the most can afford to pay the most in taxes.
And this isn't even considering the wealth distribution disparity, which is even greater than the income distribution disparity. A lot of that is held in the form physical assets (property) and government debt.
Financially, the wealthy own the government. In a way, a lot of the taxes they pay go back to them in the form of interest paid on government debt.
Argue for higher tax rates and more enforcement all you want, but the fact is that the current setup results in a situation where the bulk of actual taxes collected come from the rich.
This situation has persisted for as many decades as I've been able to find data for.
Here's a quote from my source: "The top 1 percent earned 22.4 percent of total AGI and paid 40.4 percent of all federal income taxes.
In all, the top 1 percent of taxpayers accounted for more income taxes paid than the bottom 90 percent combined."
And we haven't even talked about the avalanche of payroll and sales taxes generated by the businesses they run.
> Argue for higher tax rates and more enforcement all you want, but the fact is that the current setup results in a situation where the bulk of actual taxes collected come from the rich.
As they should, because the rich are paid multiples or orders of magnitude more than the middle/working class and poor. That's possible because they make money by:
- Owning capital and taking a share of the resulting productivity passively (the wealthiest of the wealthy)
- Working at a level of abstraction in the hierarchy where their skills allow them to scale their income via technology or by directing the labor of lower skilled workers.
- Working in elite supply-limited professions (i.e highly specialized doctors and lawyers, r&d in high speculation industries like AI).
It takes significant financial, social, or education capital to be able to participate in the economy in either of those modes.
As the income and wealth inequality trends have become more extreme, it makes sense that the wealthy should be paying an ever increasing portion of the tax burden, not a lower portion. Otherwise you end up with feudalism.
> The top 5% of taxpayers in the USA pay 61% of the taxes.
Only if you ignore the payroll tax.
For the median US worker, they pay ~15% in payroll tax, and significantly less in income tax. The median US worker makes $40k year, paying like $6k in payroll tax and like $2.8k in federal income tax.
So yes, if you ignore the majority of tax that the average worker pays, then the top 5% pay the majority of tax.
The useful statistic is not "what percentage of the taxes do each quintile/decile/etc pay?"
It's "What percentage of their disposable income (ie, net of housing, food, health care, and other necessary expenses) do each quintile/decile/etc pay in taxes?"
And the answer is going to be that the middle and working classes pay a huge percentage—close to 100% for many—while for the wealthy it's effectively nothing.
....Right. Which is why what I described would ensure that the people who feel the least pain from funding the state are asked to pay the greatest share.
If you make having neighbors painful don't be surprised when "the rich" stop collaborating and instead work to eliminate them like you're seeing everywhere in the post millennial US now.
I'm not sure what this subthread has to do with having neighbors?
But regardless, "if you try to make the rich actually participate in and contribute to society, don't be surprised if they try to destroy society instead" is exactly the kind of threat that supports the idea that we should, instead, make it impossible to be rich enough to carry that threat out.
Having a functioning and mutually beneficial society is much, much more important than letting outlandishly rich selfish people stay rich.
Their tax rates have been reduced every time a Republican President has been in office in the last 25 years, and not, to the best of my knowledge, increased enough to counteract that when a Democrat has been in office.
The top marginal tax rates during the right's supposed "golden age" after WWII were much, much higher than they are now.
We're running a deficit because huge promises were made to entire generations of people when we had a pyramid-shaped demographics, but now we have a population candle.
If you tax rich people even more than now, you risk simply slowing down the economy long-term and making the whole situation much worse.
If you raise taxes on people with a lower marginal propensity to spend and transfer it to people with a higher marginal propensity to spend you'll have a stronger economy.
We were running surpluses at numerous times across the past 100 years. Each of those surpluses ends with a reduction in the top tax rate.
I’ve heard this statistic before and it always strikes me as basically a non-sequitor. You’re writing down two percentages as if they are meaningful with respect to one another, but they arent.
If we as a society agree that some sort of progressive tax system is good (based on the fact that the mere act of survival comes with fixed costs, that naturally impact low-wealth holders over high-wealth holders) then we presumably expect higher wealth people to shoulder a larger burden of the cost of maintaining society, relative to that wealth.
The top 1% hold >30% of all wealth in the US, which, by the logic I described above, makes your 40% figure sound not just not exorbitant, but possibly too low.
People making one million dollars a year are people like doctors and lawyers and are most certainly paying taxes. One million dollars today was ~$680k in 2008.
