Would love to tax the wealth of the rich to pay down the national debt, but the Reaganism that conservatives of yesteryear supported think that's communism so we have the decadence of the billionaire class instead of the "communism" of a balanced budget. Thanks Reaganites. We're going to tax…
Would love to tax the wealth of the rich to pay down the national debt, but the Reaganism that conservatives of yesteryear supported think that's communism so we have the decadence of the billionaire class instead of the "communism" of a balanced budget. Thanks Reaganites. We're going to tax cuts our way to the default house some day because guys like Elon and Bezos don't have enough decadent wealth for your liking.
!! Me too! Like let’s seriously fund the irs and let them do their thing; if they could it would wipe out so much debt and - I mean it’s such a clear fix. Such a clear fix that the fact that it’s not done is part of what makes everyone so jaded, why politicians can seem so nihilistic and self interested. Tax the rich! But like the super rich!
Yeah the WSJ types don't want to vote for Joe Biden until he is able to get a hold of the people that in unison shout "F*&^ Joe Biden!" ... seems perfectly reasonable
They won’t vote for ANY democrat. That’s why I find it hard to take them seriously anymore. They are never ever objective.
The never trumpers are at least honest. They bitch and complain but we know the stakes. I love the bulwark because of that. My only political pundit complaint is that they never recommend taking positions that are unpopular with their own worldviews but would help Joe revitalize his base. For example I hate loan forgiveness but I see Joe has weakness with his youth base and I’m like “well I only care if he wins. If these idiot kids need their loan forgiven so that they vote for him then so be it.” There are a bunch of other issues too. Bill, who I love, is the worst about this. He is still talking about Afghanistan. That was a dead loser position since Obama’s second term
I stumbled across something a couple of days ago I didn't even know existed: "Politics Chat" by Heather Cox R. The 4/30 edition is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a876Hb6c4F8. It's one of the most educational things I've ever heard.
She covers several topics in depth, but you might be interested in the details she provides of the loan forgiveness stuff, which starts at about 53:50. I too wasn't happy when I first heard about it, but I have a very different opinion now that I understand it. For example, it involves zero tax dollars.
HCR is so incredibly knowledgeable; I wish the Bulwark folks had time to listen to this but I know it's very long. I can't imagine what it's like being her, knowing so much and yet recognizing how little most of us truly understand the issues.
Yeah she is smart and thoughtful. I was just using student loans as an example though. I am supportive of Israel but I think Biden should pivot hard on Israel now to gain support with the youth vote.
In the end I just don’t trust center right politicos that say if “Biden abandons Israel then I have to vote for Trump.” These voters (pick any issue) are going to vote for Trump anyway. They are just looking for an excuse to do it and blame Biden.
What I don't understand, now that I've heard HCR explain the details, is why anyone is opposed to the banks now having to honor the terms of the student loans - which is what results in the forgiveness. I was initially opposed b/c I had a total misperception about what was being done.
Because explaining means you’re losing. Also, the details don’t matter. To most people, someone is getting a benefit and it’s not them so they don’t like it. Classic human politics
I'm opposed to wealth taxes on considerations of both practicality and principle. but I think that we need to kick the income tax rates on EVERYBODY up to what they were during the Eisenhower Administration for starters, and then do mid-course corrections if necessary. As the Economist wrote in an important article on May 2, "America’s fiscal outlook is disastrous, but forgotten". Following standard American procedure we'll probably wait until disaster hits to start thinking about corrective actions, but it sure would be great if for once, we did better.
The less the Americans with the most are willing to sacrifice, the more the country will continue to deteriorate financially. It's either that or we end social security and you add to the current batch of the homeless camps with sick/old low-income Boomers and Gen Xers in addition to the migrants and evicted. Because if 65% of federal spending is on entitlement programs and we cut that you're going to see whole new levels of homelessness and medical premium rises as hospitals foot bills that aren't covered by government programs and that gets passed onto consumers via medical insurance rates going up. Then it's going to look a lot like that movie Elysium.
The main hurdle you run into in taxing the wealthy is not the wealthy, it is the incentives nature of government, which is not the same incentives nature as The People. Government wants wealthy people to spend a bunch of money on things like the opera, so it incentivizes the wealthy to spend a bunch of their wealth on such things in order to "reduce" their taxes. Or, conversely the government could tax that money and fund the opera itself, but that's the hard way to fund the opera and results in less funding overall, because people are way more willing to Give than to Have Taken. The incentive for the government is thus to find ways to encourage wealthy people to "donate" as much money as possible, while saying as loudly as possible that doing so is really honest-to-god avoiding taxes. (But of course, it isn't, just like an IRA it is just government wheedling you into volunteering to do something it wants you to do.)
But even discounting that, the wealthy do pay a bit less in taxes these days: specifically just about 2% less than at the height. Yes, 2%. I know, there's all that talk about the 70% tax rate from FDR's time, but that was just propaganda. Nobody actually paid that, unless they volunteered to do so. That tax rate was specifically made to not actually gather any taxes, but to have something to point to to SAY you were taxing that much. And it worked; it worked so well that all of these decades later, people still think it was real. FDR was super good at propaganda like that. More to the point, though, since a tax costs some money to implement (tax coding, agents, printing, etc), if a tax doesn't bring in any funding, it actually costs the government money, which in turn reduces the budget for some other programs. So, implementing that fake tax robbed funding from programs that people like, but helped FDR get re-elected. As I said, he was GOOD at propaganda.
All of which is not to say that one can't successfully tax the rich. It's just, most politicians who say they want to, they're not actually serious. You will know the serious ones when they talk tax implementation and final taxes paid, not tax rates, vanishing middle-class and Forbes's pretend list of the wealthiest people. (The actual wealthiest person is Putin, and there's a huge long list of people until you get to the folks who advert their brand in Forbes. If you're adverting your brand, you're not actually one of the most wealthy people, who don't need to advert for new clients.) Anyone talking the latter are either talking propaganda or they haven't learned anything about the methods of getting money out of people.
The easiest thing in the world is to define what somebody ELSE should "be willing to sacrifice". Confiscation of other people's property on that basis conflicts with everything that the United States is founded on: that's the first principled argument against it.
The second principled reason is that if we need to reform our revenue policy to massively increase revenue (which I agree we have to do), everybody should be contributing. And if everybody IS contributing, then we may finally have the honest debate that our politicians keep avoiding on how and how much we should reduce the spending side.
The first practical reason is that wealth taxes don't work. Almost every country that's tried them has dropped them, because they only produce a good return in the early years, then the rich find ways to avoid them. So they're not effective as the basis of a fiscal policy, no matter how much class-warfare jollies some may derive from them.
The most important practical reason of all is that even if you completely soak the rich, there aren't enough of them to balance the budget on forever; what's your next act?
The problem is that the gamed tax system allowed the accumulation of huge piles of self-reinforcing wealth. The question is how to reverse these black holes of wealth.
No, the easiest thing in the world for folks like you is to tell poorer Americans that they should live shorter lives or carry ridiculous levels of medical debt because the rich need to fly around in a G650. That's a lot easier than telling the rich to sacrifice more apparently.
And no, the country was founded on "taxation without representation," not taxation in general (big difference). Not only do the rich have representation here--unlike the colonists who didn't--but they have people like you defending their decadent wealth for them on top of that.
And it's pretty easy to tax wealth so long as you're not carving out any loopholes. You just set the taxes to 100% on any wealth held above a certain limit. They only avoid the taxes when you let them do so and don't punish them with consequences for trying to avoid paying them. Throw a few in prison for dodging new wealth taxes and the rest will get in line. You also make those taxes owed regardless if they try to move to other countries and you arrest them abroad if they try to flee to avoid paying them.
We're talking about paying off the national debt that stands at $34T. Deficits and national debts are two different things. If you paid off the debt via taxing wealth, then the deficit is the problem that's leftover that you have much more time to solve since the debt is wiped clean and takes a lot more time to reaccrue. You answer that side by raising capital gains taxes on wealth above a certain threshold so it doesn't hit working/middle class retirement plans, etc., to force people at the top of the income/wealth ladder to work for income rather than collect income passively and having it taxed at lower rates via capital gains, and then set caps on income via taxes as well (all $ earned above threshold caps are taxed at 100%) sop that the rich can't reward themselves further with decadently high income brackets. That puts a lot more money into the economy as opposed to walling it off in rich people assets, which stimulates consumption and raises revenues that way (increased consumption leads to job creation, more jobs equals more payroll revenues at all levels of government). Basically you are maximizing to the highest degree possible the money moving through the economy via consumption and then raise higher revenues that way to pay for the outlays already on the books with a balanced budget. That's my solution to the budget side of things.
Tax the rich! I’m with you! We ride at dawn! (For real tho, all the “let’s talk about the individual being responsible blah blah blah is centrifuge for the rich to distract us ala self righteous infighting. It’s really just the crazy rich- they are CRAZY RICH. The need to pay taxes!)
What personal attacks? That I said you were defending their decadent wealth? Well aren't you? That's not an attack so much as it is a reasonable descriptor.
If someone’s income is utilized to pay for food, shelter, and other basic expenses, and they’re just getting by, they don’t need their taxes raised, they need them lowered.
Fair taxation means that higher earners pay a higher percentage of their income for taxes. There were no billionaires when Eisenhower was president.
The IRA means that wealthier people will pay at least their fair share, which they’ve skirted consistently. There are no faultless billionaires; they’ve all inherited money earned through exploitation of others, or they’ve exploited people themselves.
It’s not a taking, because that isn’t what a taking is. We need a purer progressive tax system (we had one but the GOP flattened it out substantially) and soon.
You and I have no argument on a progressive income tax. You know what the rates before the Kennedy Tax Cut were like, right? We've NEVER had a "pure" progressive system, but I'm all for starting. In fact, I think that it's absolutely necessary.
"There are no faultless billionaires; they’ve all inherited money earned through exploitation of others, or they’ve exploited people themselves." The problem with assuming that your political preferences are facts that don't require proof is that you can't convince anybody of them who doesn't already share them. that one is especially easy to debunk. As far as I know, Warren Buffett didn't have much of an inheritance, and didn't exploit anyone himself, unless you think that "exploit" is a synonym for "employ". He has made a lot of other people rich, though.
"There were no billionaires when Eisenhower was president." I'm not sure that's true, but if there were, there were far fewer. A billion dollars were a lot harder to accumulate then, not that it's really easy now. In purchasing power, the 2024 US Dollar is worth about 9.4 1960 CENTS, which means that $1 Billion in 1960 was equivalent to $10.55 Billion today.
Buffett is pretty much the exception that proves the rule. And, he’s had 93 years to get there. He wasn’t a billionaire when Eisenhower was in office.
I’m talking about Bezos and Musk and all the tech guys and the Saudi billions. The Waltons, the Sacklers, the Johnsons. I’m not a Marxist, but I have eyes. If you’re a Walton and you’re paying Walmart employees minimum wage, that’s exploitation. It doesn’t have anything to do with my political party. CEOs should make 100 times the salary of the lowest paid worker, not 10,000 times.
I would gladly pay more in taxes if Jeff Bezos had to pay his fair share.
My idea has always been progressive up to 70% for the top bracket.
These are the tax brackets that I'd like to see, and simple, with very few deductions. Of course, all of the dollar values need to be multiplied by 10 (see my last response for the reason), and there should probably be no tax below three or four times the poverty level:
I've never understood all the Bezos-hate on the Left. Nobody's forced to buy from Amazon, nobody's forced to work for Amazon, and minimum wages are set by elected representatives: if some people want them higher, it seems to me that it would be more constructive to organize to make that happen than to slander individuals, although I know that slander is a whole lot easier. Millions of people's lives are better every day because Jeff Bezos thought Amazon up; the lives of additional millions were not just better, but bearable during the pandemic thanks to Amazon. I don't just like Amazon, I LOVE Amazon, and I'm not ashamed to say it.
I hate Walmart myself; it's probably been 20 years since I've even been in one, and then I didn't stay long. But millions of people disagree with me, and far be it from me to say that they're wrong. If they don't think that the Waltons are giving them fair value for their money, they'll stop giving it to them. As for minimum wage, see above.
"CEOs should make 100 times the salary of the lowest paid worker, not 10,000 times." That is certainly an opinion -- but that's all it is. Until it becomes a law, it's no more or less valid than anybody else's opinion. I'd rather approach the subject through the tax brackets above, and include deferred income, rather than tell companies what they can and can't pay their executives. But that's just an opinion, too.
As for the Sacklers and Musk, and people you didn't mention like the investment bankers who caused the 2007-8 Crash, prosecutors as well as tax collectors should be after them, and the holes in our criminal laws that they sneak through need to be fixed.
The Bezos hate doesn’t come from buying from Amazon. That’s just a choice. The hate comes from the abusive working conditions and anti-union labor violations of the company.
I live in a big city. Maybe you do too. If we don’t want to shop at Walmart we have dozens of choices. If you live in an Ohio county in southeastern OH, though, you live in a depressed community in a food desert and Walmart is the only store for 40 miles because they put everything smaller out of business.
The CEO earnings aren’t my opinion; that’s where things stood (roughly) until the eighties. And employers are allowed to pay MORE than minimum wage. If employers paid enough money to live on and raise kids, there wouldn’t have to be a minimum wage, but no huge corporation is going to do that. Apple is always going to have little children in China make its components. If they didn’t, cell phones would be $7500. So phones should either be $7500 or Apple should figure out a way to cut costs without involving small Chinese children.
Absolutely with you on the Wall Street stuff, Al. If you’ve not seen The Big Short, do. Steve Carell’s character embodies the moral disgust of the subprime mortgage market.
On that national debt talk of the final minute:
Would love to tax the wealth of the rich to pay down the national debt, but the Reaganism that conservatives of yesteryear supported think that's communism so we have the decadence of the billionaire class instead of the "communism" of a balanced budget. Thanks Reaganites. We're going to tax cuts our way to the default house some day because guys like Elon and Bezos don't have enough decadent wealth for your liking.
!! Me too! Like let’s seriously fund the irs and let them do their thing; if they could it would wipe out so much debt and - I mean it’s such a clear fix. Such a clear fix that the fact that it’s not done is part of what makes everyone so jaded, why politicians can seem so nihilistic and self interested. Tax the rich! But like the super rich!
I wont talk about the deficit until republicans talk about a pretty massive increase in taxes.
As Liz Cheney says; " This election is not about policy.It is about democracy".
I’m voting for Biden even if he is in a coffin.
The people on the center right, not so much. Youth maybe not. Progressives maybe not.
I just find it really weird how center right republicans don’t see, in general, that they sound like the progressive youths.
Center right “I’m not sure if I can vote for Biden unless he deals with protesters and gives his full throated support for Israel.”
Progressive youths: “I’m not sure I’m voting for Biden unless he stops the war in Gaza.”
Youth have an excuse for being idiots.
Yeah the WSJ types don't want to vote for Joe Biden until he is able to get a hold of the people that in unison shout "F*&^ Joe Biden!" ... seems perfectly reasonable
They won’t vote for ANY democrat. That’s why I find it hard to take them seriously anymore. They are never ever objective.
The never trumpers are at least honest. They bitch and complain but we know the stakes. I love the bulwark because of that. My only political pundit complaint is that they never recommend taking positions that are unpopular with their own worldviews but would help Joe revitalize his base. For example I hate loan forgiveness but I see Joe has weakness with his youth base and I’m like “well I only care if he wins. If these idiot kids need their loan forgiven so that they vote for him then so be it.” There are a bunch of other issues too. Bill, who I love, is the worst about this. He is still talking about Afghanistan. That was a dead loser position since Obama’s second term
I stumbled across something a couple of days ago I didn't even know existed: "Politics Chat" by Heather Cox R. The 4/30 edition is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a876Hb6c4F8. It's one of the most educational things I've ever heard.
She covers several topics in depth, but you might be interested in the details she provides of the loan forgiveness stuff, which starts at about 53:50. I too wasn't happy when I first heard about it, but I have a very different opinion now that I understand it. For example, it involves zero tax dollars.
HCR is so incredibly knowledgeable; I wish the Bulwark folks had time to listen to this but I know it's very long. I can't imagine what it's like being her, knowing so much and yet recognizing how little most of us truly understand the issues.
Yeah she is smart and thoughtful. I was just using student loans as an example though. I am supportive of Israel but I think Biden should pivot hard on Israel now to gain support with the youth vote.
In the end I just don’t trust center right politicos that say if “Biden abandons Israel then I have to vote for Trump.” These voters (pick any issue) are going to vote for Trump anyway. They are just looking for an excuse to do it and blame Biden.
I agree w/ your last point!
What I don't understand, now that I've heard HCR explain the details, is why anyone is opposed to the banks now having to honor the terms of the student loans - which is what results in the forgiveness. I was initially opposed b/c I had a total misperception about what was being done.
Because explaining means you’re losing. Also, the details don’t matter. To most people, someone is getting a benefit and it’s not them so they don’t like it. Classic human politics
JVL's horse shoe political spectrum at work. Hell, I'll vote for Joe if he is six feet under!
But I’m not talking about the far right. I’m talking about the writers at NRO or wsj or the dispatch. So frustrating.
Yeah, this is about Podhoretz and Douthat. Not Erickson or Barr.
I'm opposed to wealth taxes on considerations of both practicality and principle. but I think that we need to kick the income tax rates on EVERYBODY up to what they were during the Eisenhower Administration for starters, and then do mid-course corrections if necessary. As the Economist wrote in an important article on May 2, "America’s fiscal outlook is disastrous, but forgotten". Following standard American procedure we'll probably wait until disaster hits to start thinking about corrective actions, but it sure would be great if for once, we did better.
The less the Americans with the most are willing to sacrifice, the more the country will continue to deteriorate financially. It's either that or we end social security and you add to the current batch of the homeless camps with sick/old low-income Boomers and Gen Xers in addition to the migrants and evicted. Because if 65% of federal spending is on entitlement programs and we cut that you're going to see whole new levels of homelessness and medical premium rises as hospitals foot bills that aren't covered by government programs and that gets passed onto consumers via medical insurance rates going up. Then it's going to look a lot like that movie Elysium.
The main hurdle you run into in taxing the wealthy is not the wealthy, it is the incentives nature of government, which is not the same incentives nature as The People. Government wants wealthy people to spend a bunch of money on things like the opera, so it incentivizes the wealthy to spend a bunch of their wealth on such things in order to "reduce" their taxes. Or, conversely the government could tax that money and fund the opera itself, but that's the hard way to fund the opera and results in less funding overall, because people are way more willing to Give than to Have Taken. The incentive for the government is thus to find ways to encourage wealthy people to "donate" as much money as possible, while saying as loudly as possible that doing so is really honest-to-god avoiding taxes. (But of course, it isn't, just like an IRA it is just government wheedling you into volunteering to do something it wants you to do.)
But even discounting that, the wealthy do pay a bit less in taxes these days: specifically just about 2% less than at the height. Yes, 2%. I know, there's all that talk about the 70% tax rate from FDR's time, but that was just propaganda. Nobody actually paid that, unless they volunteered to do so. That tax rate was specifically made to not actually gather any taxes, but to have something to point to to SAY you were taxing that much. And it worked; it worked so well that all of these decades later, people still think it was real. FDR was super good at propaganda like that. More to the point, though, since a tax costs some money to implement (tax coding, agents, printing, etc), if a tax doesn't bring in any funding, it actually costs the government money, which in turn reduces the budget for some other programs. So, implementing that fake tax robbed funding from programs that people like, but helped FDR get re-elected. As I said, he was GOOD at propaganda.
All of which is not to say that one can't successfully tax the rich. It's just, most politicians who say they want to, they're not actually serious. You will know the serious ones when they talk tax implementation and final taxes paid, not tax rates, vanishing middle-class and Forbes's pretend list of the wealthiest people. (The actual wealthiest person is Putin, and there's a huge long list of people until you get to the folks who advert their brand in Forbes. If you're adverting your brand, you're not actually one of the most wealthy people, who don't need to advert for new clients.) Anyone talking the latter are either talking propaganda or they haven't learned anything about the methods of getting money out of people.
SCOTUS actually heard a case this week in which an argument was made that homelessness can be criminalized.
I’m pretty sure the pitchforks will be out before long. Maybe worse. We can have a Gilded Age, or just hire Robespierre 2.0.
The easiest thing in the world is to define what somebody ELSE should "be willing to sacrifice". Confiscation of other people's property on that basis conflicts with everything that the United States is founded on: that's the first principled argument against it.
The second principled reason is that if we need to reform our revenue policy to massively increase revenue (which I agree we have to do), everybody should be contributing. And if everybody IS contributing, then we may finally have the honest debate that our politicians keep avoiding on how and how much we should reduce the spending side.
The first practical reason is that wealth taxes don't work. Almost every country that's tried them has dropped them, because they only produce a good return in the early years, then the rich find ways to avoid them. So they're not effective as the basis of a fiscal policy, no matter how much class-warfare jollies some may derive from them.
The most important practical reason of all is that even if you completely soak the rich, there aren't enough of them to balance the budget on forever; what's your next act?
The problem is that the gamed tax system allowed the accumulation of huge piles of self-reinforcing wealth. The question is how to reverse these black holes of wealth.
To some people, that clearly appears to be a vitally important question. After we save the Republic, I guess we can have a huge debate on it.
Yes. That, of course, comes first -- because without a real Republic, there will be few debates of any kind.
No, the easiest thing in the world for folks like you is to tell poorer Americans that they should live shorter lives or carry ridiculous levels of medical debt because the rich need to fly around in a G650. That's a lot easier than telling the rich to sacrifice more apparently.
And no, the country was founded on "taxation without representation," not taxation in general (big difference). Not only do the rich have representation here--unlike the colonists who didn't--but they have people like you defending their decadent wealth for them on top of that.
And it's pretty easy to tax wealth so long as you're not carving out any loopholes. You just set the taxes to 100% on any wealth held above a certain limit. They only avoid the taxes when you let them do so and don't punish them with consequences for trying to avoid paying them. Throw a few in prison for dodging new wealth taxes and the rest will get in line. You also make those taxes owed regardless if they try to move to other countries and you arrest them abroad if they try to flee to avoid paying them.
We're talking about paying off the national debt that stands at $34T. Deficits and national debts are two different things. If you paid off the debt via taxing wealth, then the deficit is the problem that's leftover that you have much more time to solve since the debt is wiped clean and takes a lot more time to reaccrue. You answer that side by raising capital gains taxes on wealth above a certain threshold so it doesn't hit working/middle class retirement plans, etc., to force people at the top of the income/wealth ladder to work for income rather than collect income passively and having it taxed at lower rates via capital gains, and then set caps on income via taxes as well (all $ earned above threshold caps are taxed at 100%) sop that the rich can't reward themselves further with decadently high income brackets. That puts a lot more money into the economy as opposed to walling it off in rich people assets, which stimulates consumption and raises revenues that way (increased consumption leads to job creation, more jobs equals more payroll revenues at all levels of government). Basically you are maximizing to the highest degree possible the money moving through the economy via consumption and then raise higher revenues that way to pay for the outlays already on the books with a balanced budget. That's my solution to the budget side of things.
Tax the rich! I’m with you! We ride at dawn! (For real tho, all the “let’s talk about the individual being responsible blah blah blah is centrifuge for the rich to distract us ala self righteous infighting. It’s really just the crazy rich- they are CRAZY RICH. The need to pay taxes!)
You have a nice day, and if you're ever able to have a policy discussion without stooping to personal attacks, we'll have to give it another try.
But fighting aside, it’s nice to be doing so over a non trump issue! Yep. 🙂
What personal attacks? That I said you were defending their decadent wealth? Well aren't you? That's not an attack so much as it is a reasonable descriptor.
If someone’s income is utilized to pay for food, shelter, and other basic expenses, and they’re just getting by, they don’t need their taxes raised, they need them lowered.
Fair taxation means that higher earners pay a higher percentage of their income for taxes. There were no billionaires when Eisenhower was president.
The IRA means that wealthier people will pay at least their fair share, which they’ve skirted consistently. There are no faultless billionaires; they’ve all inherited money earned through exploitation of others, or they’ve exploited people themselves.
It’s not a taking, because that isn’t what a taking is. We need a purer progressive tax system (we had one but the GOP flattened it out substantially) and soon.
You and I have no argument on a progressive income tax. You know what the rates before the Kennedy Tax Cut were like, right? We've NEVER had a "pure" progressive system, but I'm all for starting. In fact, I think that it's absolutely necessary.
"There are no faultless billionaires; they’ve all inherited money earned through exploitation of others, or they’ve exploited people themselves." The problem with assuming that your political preferences are facts that don't require proof is that you can't convince anybody of them who doesn't already share them. that one is especially easy to debunk. As far as I know, Warren Buffett didn't have much of an inheritance, and didn't exploit anyone himself, unless you think that "exploit" is a synonym for "employ". He has made a lot of other people rich, though.
"There were no billionaires when Eisenhower was president." I'm not sure that's true, but if there were, there were far fewer. A billion dollars were a lot harder to accumulate then, not that it's really easy now. In purchasing power, the 2024 US Dollar is worth about 9.4 1960 CENTS, which means that $1 Billion in 1960 was equivalent to $10.55 Billion today.
https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1960
Buffett is pretty much the exception that proves the rule. And, he’s had 93 years to get there. He wasn’t a billionaire when Eisenhower was in office.
I’m talking about Bezos and Musk and all the tech guys and the Saudi billions. The Waltons, the Sacklers, the Johnsons. I’m not a Marxist, but I have eyes. If you’re a Walton and you’re paying Walmart employees minimum wage, that’s exploitation. It doesn’t have anything to do with my political party. CEOs should make 100 times the salary of the lowest paid worker, not 10,000 times.
I would gladly pay more in taxes if Jeff Bezos had to pay his fair share.
My idea has always been progressive up to 70% for the top bracket.
These are the tax brackets that I'd like to see, and simple, with very few deductions. Of course, all of the dollar values need to be multiplied by 10 (see my last response for the reason), and there should probably be no tax below three or four times the poverty level:
https://www.tax-brackets.org/federaltaxtable/1960
I've never understood all the Bezos-hate on the Left. Nobody's forced to buy from Amazon, nobody's forced to work for Amazon, and minimum wages are set by elected representatives: if some people want them higher, it seems to me that it would be more constructive to organize to make that happen than to slander individuals, although I know that slander is a whole lot easier. Millions of people's lives are better every day because Jeff Bezos thought Amazon up; the lives of additional millions were not just better, but bearable during the pandemic thanks to Amazon. I don't just like Amazon, I LOVE Amazon, and I'm not ashamed to say it.
I hate Walmart myself; it's probably been 20 years since I've even been in one, and then I didn't stay long. But millions of people disagree with me, and far be it from me to say that they're wrong. If they don't think that the Waltons are giving them fair value for their money, they'll stop giving it to them. As for minimum wage, see above.
"CEOs should make 100 times the salary of the lowest paid worker, not 10,000 times." That is certainly an opinion -- but that's all it is. Until it becomes a law, it's no more or less valid than anybody else's opinion. I'd rather approach the subject through the tax brackets above, and include deferred income, rather than tell companies what they can and can't pay their executives. But that's just an opinion, too.
As for the Sacklers and Musk, and people you didn't mention like the investment bankers who caused the 2007-8 Crash, prosecutors as well as tax collectors should be after them, and the holes in our criminal laws that they sneak through need to be fixed.
Also, I’m not the Left. I’m a centrist, left of center. The Left aren’t Democrats.
The Bezos hate doesn’t come from buying from Amazon. That’s just a choice. The hate comes from the abusive working conditions and anti-union labor violations of the company.
I live in a big city. Maybe you do too. If we don’t want to shop at Walmart we have dozens of choices. If you live in an Ohio county in southeastern OH, though, you live in a depressed community in a food desert and Walmart is the only store for 40 miles because they put everything smaller out of business.
The CEO earnings aren’t my opinion; that’s where things stood (roughly) until the eighties. And employers are allowed to pay MORE than minimum wage. If employers paid enough money to live on and raise kids, there wouldn’t have to be a minimum wage, but no huge corporation is going to do that. Apple is always going to have little children in China make its components. If they didn’t, cell phones would be $7500. So phones should either be $7500 or Apple should figure out a way to cut costs without involving small Chinese children.
Absolutely with you on the Wall Street stuff, Al. If you’ve not seen The Big Short, do. Steve Carell’s character embodies the moral disgust of the subprime mortgage market.