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Travis's avatar

One could ask the whole "masters of our fate" question about why we continue to allow a billionaire oligarchy to dictate our politics for us. Are we so sheepish as a peoples that we have to beg decadent billionaires to fix things for us rather than demanding that our politicians tax away their wealth and then use it to *actually* fix things ourselves through government policy? Maybe we stopped being "masters of our fate" when we surrendered our economy to the shareholder class back in the Reagan years. It's no wonder that so many in the MAGA base are ready to surrender our democracy to a billionaire autocrat--they've been raised since birth to worship billionaires, give them tax cuts, and then watch them increasingly hoard the nation's wealth over time in order to take control of things through the power of the wealth we allowed them to accrue via low taxation on the decadently rich.

I'd ask ideological conservatives why they became so reliant on giving billionaires tax cuts in order to stimulate the economy for 40+ years if they wanted us all to be "masters of our fate"? If self-actualization was so important to our nature as Americans, then why did we become a nation of billionaire bootlickers under Reaganism and Milton Friedman's supply-side economics? Ideological conservatism is what got us to abandon individual self-actualization because it gave us concentrated power via wealth hoarding that politicians now cater to more than their own mainline voters. "Money talks," and a small handful of decadent billionaires have wayyyy too much power via wealth hoarding, which poisoned both our politics and our meritocracy, so now we're a broken society that's divided by class and those who are at the table versus those who are on the menu.

What we need to remedy this is a political revolution that revolves around taxing away the wealth of the billionaire class so that power doesn't get concentrated, which reduces systemic corruption because there's not nearly as much money held by individuals to corrupt politicians and the heads of institutes with. Put all of the taxes raised off of liquidating the billionaire class's assets toward the national debt and almost all of that debt goes away. If it's true that the "cream rises to the top" all those former billionaires would make that money back over time if they're truly so full of merit right? Make them put their merit where their mouth is then and tax away their hoarded wealth.

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TimesLostArc's avatar

As a bit of a former supply sider until the events of 2008, I can tell you my logic for believing in Tax Cuts.

The "billionaire class" were a group of people who could articulate a vision of technological advancement and broader markets that provided higher quality goods. Increasing supply and lowering taxes to a level that was more sensible was (in the 80s, 90s, and 00s at least) a far more compelling argument. It was different from the punitive tax rates for the sake of seeming like we were "screwing the rich" that dominated progressive circles.

The 1970's and earlier had episodes of government overreach and clear inadequacy like:

- The Vietnam War with conscription for an expeditionary mission (Compared to Iraq and Afghanistan that had significantly fewer casualties with an all volunteer force)

- The Great Society where the objective was noble, but the results were questionable

- Families in many states had a duty to flee their own homes in the case of home invasions during an era of rising crime

- High Tax rates that almost no one except lottery winners or game show contestants ever paid

- Schools that produced students that had high dropout rates and areas with terrible literacy

- Rising Fuel costs and ineffective price freezes

- An overly protected industrial system that produced some of the worst cars imaginable (Cars are often the second most expensive asset that a person can own) along with other second rate American Products

- A general technological and financial stagnation that created a heavy sense of 'malaise' within the country itself

Did America go overboard with tax cuts and deregulation? In my opinion, yes it did.

Do we have a lot more high quality goods with relatively lower costs for those goods? Yes we most certainly do! We also have seen a dramatic increase in technological advancement as well.

At this point, I do think that the government should be a bit more involved with Small Business loans to overlooked and deprived communities. I doubt just raising taxes as a performative measure is really effective.

Education needs to also focus less on test performance as well as concentrate more on class room projects to teach students how to be better problem solvers and critical thinkers.

Republicans did go overboard, but I would argue that often Center Right leaders have an important place in society when it comes to solving problems. The mayor in Finland who created its most effective homelessness outreach and housing solution was a center right leader.

Many of us on the right who are now disowned from the Republican Party want to do important things to improve society, we just want them to work as well instead of just making us feel good.

As for liquidating assets, I will agree on this point. A tiny wealth tax is needed to do one thing. It can reduce asset bubbles. The bubbles we have are often in sectors that the ultra wealthy flock too. Forcing a tax on these bubbles can gently deflate them before they explode violently as in 2008, 2020, and pretty soon with Commercial Real Estate. Removing tax loopholes also might do this. Just hiking the tax rate to a point where no one would ever rationally pay it is not a real solution in my mind.

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Travis's avatar

"....until the events of 2008" This made me chuckle a bit. We privatized the profits but socialized the losses didn't we? Suddenly we didn't have billionaires wondering aloud about the "moral hazard" of bailing out irresponsible people when it was bank CEOs who were irresponsible with adjustable-rate mortgage loans to clients without income/jobs/assets which turned their mortgage-backed securities rotten and allowed financial contagion to spread beyond just the housing sector and crash the economy while those in the know made profits off of credit default swaps and then got bonuses paid out to them with the government bailout money.

"I doubt just raising taxes as a performative measure is really effective." It's not performative, it's collective self-defense. It's about draining the assets of decadently-rich people who use those assets to poison the well of politics and the meritocracy. It's about trust-busting individuals. It's about the deconcentrating of power because money is power and some individuals have too much of it. Is it any wonder Trump can grind the justice system to a halt by throwing large sums of money at the courts through lawyer motions and feckless appeals in order to avoid accountability through delay? Failing to drain the assets of the billionaire class ensures that the American oligarchy sticks around. And if you don't believe in American oligarchy just compare our Gini Index coefficient to Russia's--who we're happy to declare an open oligarchy--and see which country has a worse measure of wealth inequality.

"The bubbles we have are often in sectors that the ultra wealthy flock too." Agreed. Whales drive markets now, which is antithetical to the idea of free markets. That's why we need trust-busting of individuals with net worth above $100M. I want people to be able to be rich in this country--which you can with a net worth as high as $99.99M, I just don't want an oligarchy that drives markets, poison politics with corruption, and ruins the idea of meritocracy with nepotism and the upward mobility ladder in this country becoming a pay-to-play system.

"Just hiking the tax rate to a point where no one would ever rationally pay it is not a real solution in my mind." I don't see what's wrong with taxing assets held beyond a net worth of $100M at 100%. Incomes can be done this way too once net household income goes too high (I haven't really settled on a number here, but $500+k sounds like a good starting place). You can still tax income below that level progressively too, and since we're a consumer-driven economy it makes more sense to offset lower taxes on the consumer class with higher taxes on the shareholder class so that net revenue stays even but consumption goes up because the consumer class has more $ in their pockets due to lower taxes (which also collects more sales tax revenue for local governments).

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Mark Shields's avatar

Travis, there’s Lots to like in the Egalitarianishness, and intrinsic Democracy of your view, & I share your diagnosis.

But we are SO far down the road of oligarchy that there are a 2 big practical issues:

a) the whale/billionaire class you and I would like to entirely disenfranchise already owns the government we want to tax them with. In current 1$=1vote America, the “Nays” own your plan.

b) but IF you could even reach the flat tax if 17% that Forbes(?) once proposed (arguably much tougher than what we actually get from the wealthy), much less impose the meaningfully progressive tax laws you and I favor, which would better reflect founding American (and most religious!) ideals, then the wealthy would demonstrate their virtual/effective super-national statehood, and like ‘sanctioned’ Russian oligarchs, obfuscate or move their assets off-shore.

Don’t have to see our well meaning, nice old man Biden problem to realize it is the exceptional wealthy person or powerful person who ever meaningfully self-divests, when given any choice.

The Thesis of the book “The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century”, by Walter Scheidel, 2017), which I do suggest, is that a peaceful healthy stable society NEVER moves toward egalitarianism or away from concentration of power.

So how much ya willing t’pay? Your comfort? Your home? Your health? Your children’s lives? All that and more?

It takes a real revolution, a Great War, a deadly pestilence (>10x deadlier than Covid (my guess, I’m an epidemiologist)), ... basically, it takes what he calls the four horsemen of the apocalypse. (I’ll leave the 4th leveler as an exercise for the reader.)

Mere law, or religion, or politico-economic theory, or good intentions, or even angry riots/populism, or ANYTHING short of massive destruction of assets and most levers of power/civilization (which ironically MAGAts may be effectively leading us toward), has NOT sufficed to re-level the playing field, per the author’s reading of history.

Need a Plan C.

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Travis's avatar

Get a new law that allows FinCen to track assets if the rich offshore funds to avoid paying taxes and make them subject to arrest and prison time for doing so. We have the resources to do stuff like this, just not the will power. If we can map out the entire funding logistics for international terror groups we can certainly map out where the rich are hiding their money overseas. We just need laws in place that make that illegal and policy in place that allows FinCen to do that work of finding and tracing those funds to wealthy tax-dodgers.

That’d be my solution to that particular problem anyway.

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TimesLostArc's avatar

I would argue that Donald Trump can grind the legal system to a halt because quite often the judges let him and others like him do it. At any point a judge could do what they are increasingly doing now and just crush his legal delaying tactics. Judges kept letting Trump do this and exhaust his opponents. No trial should last more than a year, period, yet Judges continuously do so. At any time, Judges can and are really obligated to even the scales and not allow this type of behavior. Sadly few of them do.

I would argue institutional cowardice allowed Trump to get away with so much for so long. The judges and members of these institutions knew they had a duty to reign in this behavior and they abdicated that responsibility. Wealth wasn't the cause of this type of cowardice, human weakness was. Hence the topic of Bill's Newsletter.

Trump has revealed extensive institutional cowardice and vulnerabilities along the stretch of our political, social, as well as institutional systems.

As for taxes, we've had taxes like the Alternative Minimum Tax, 3 Martini Lunch Tax, and other oddities to curb tax evasion. Our tax code itself is ridiculously complex and ineffective. Little of it has ever worked. Rather than create a tax rate that no rational person will ever pay, I think policies to help people and reduce bad behavior is a better option. Having more tax collectors and a simplified tax code can collect more revenue as well.

A person being a billionaire is not a problem in my mind. It is the fact that such a person can exploit clear vulnerabilities in our institutions is the problem. I would argue we need stronger people in those institutions who are more than simply Ivy League minted homunculi born to replicate true leaders. Ron DeSantis, JD Vance, Elise Stefanik, Vivek Ramaswamy, Ted Cruz and others are perfect examples of the type of Ivy Leagued produced 'perfect people' who have nothing inside them to resist a corrupting challenge to character represented by Donald Trump.

Donald Trump himself was never really that rich in the first place. Most of our "billionaires" are nothing but an illusion propped up on financing. A small wealth tax is all that is needed to reduce those bloated financial evaluations. Just 1% or 2% could do it over a long period of time along with removing tax loopholes and increasing tax collector numbers.

Reestablishing Character and substance instead of Ivy League Pedigree alone as a qualification of leadership is much harder, but far more necessary.

Principled people said no and took the Liz Cheney route. There are very few of them and we are realizing how truly lacking our leaders are.

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Mark Shields's avatar

TimesLostArc, Like your note, but disagree in key parts.

Share your attraction to the Invictus remedy, but not your diagnosis- “Wealth wasn't the cause of this type of cowardice, human weakness was.”

Attraction to wealth(/power) IS that VERY same human weakness that is destroying our best institutions and our nation.

Appetite for wealth and the will to more power is the Achilles heel of our valuing laissez-faire capitalism as a the proper end of human aspirations.

(Is your favorite child the one with the largest bank account?)

Ironically, in a different sense, if we can’t let it go, the will to power may well be the ‘end’ of human aspiration.

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Travis's avatar

"Rather than create a tax rate that no rational person will ever pay..."

Well, if you don't pay your taxes you go to jail. Happy to let rich people who refuse to pay the taxes get jailed and then have their assets seized to pay back the taxes they tried dodging.

"A person being a billionaire is not a problem in my mind." So when this kind of greed-based behavior scales up and we have a class of billionaires who become an oligarchy, do you see a problem there? How strong are institutions going to be when "money talks" and all of these people have so much of it? You seem to have a lot of faith in institutions avoiding corruptibility when there are plenty of people with 9-figure-deep pockets who seem to be able to bend them to their will when it comes time to do so--as high up as the SCOTUS in the case of Clarence Thomas.

"Reestablishing Character and substance instead of Ivy League Pedigree alone as a qualification of leadership is much harder, but far more necessary." Here's the thing, when people are rich like Trump is, their money allows them to avoid accountability and so they're de facto allowed to become the worst versions of themselves because the power of their wealth and position allows them to do so. These people don't need to have better character, because their wealth allows them to avoid character-based accountability. How do you enforce character standards on the rich when enough money dissolves the necessity to adjust character to anyone else's desires but your own? Elon Musk and Donald Trump are perfect examples of this dynamic. They don't answer to anyone because they're too rich to be held accountable. And when you can buy your way into the Ivy League the way that Trump did and still walk out the other side a complete moron, how strong are these institutions really? When the Ivy League-driven "meritocracy" becomes a pay-to-play system for families like the Trumps it kind of shows how easily these institutes bend to wealth.

The more wealth you allow these folks to accrue, the more they will use it to bend institutions and our meritocracy into giving them more power and defending themselves from true accountability. America is for sale, and bootlickers to the oligarchy keep letting them take more and more so they can warp the country and our institutes with the power they hoard.

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TimesLostArc's avatar

If our institutions were not filled with such empty vulnerable people, no amount of money could be enough to get them to abandon their principles. Clarence Thomas took the money because he had nothing left except temporary comforts of wealth to believe in.

You saw that ultimately with Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and others. They took the career black pill to defend our Democratic Republic. Money, power and safety were not enough to buy them off.

Elon, Trump and most of our 'billionaires" have no real wealth of their own. It is simply assets supported by debt that can and eventually will evaporate at any time. They are fleeting illusions. So many of the US's largest and most important companies are like this. Better Monetary, Banking, and even more effective tax enforcement will remove the bloated evaluations that they have.

Taxing these rich into oblivion won't grant the rest of our political and institutional figures any level of increased integrity or character. Their weakness and obvious lack of virtue will remain. They will simply just acquiesce to a different standard of power. Trump's power right now is less monetary and more influence within a passionate base. Hillary outspent Trump two to one in monetary power.

Reducing the gap in money is not enough. Another source of imbalance will inevitably show up. The way to curb this is stronger institutions made with better people of higher character.

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Travis's avatar

"Elon, Trump and most of our 'billionaires" have no real wealth of their own. It is simply assets supported by debt that can and eventually will evaporate at any time."

Elon has his Tesla shares and Trump has his properties. These things actually *do* have value, are not necessarily supported by debt--only the case if those assets are leveraged for loans, at which point it becomes a factor of their debt-to-income ratio for the purposes of classifying their net worth, and nothing suggests that the valuations on these assets will simply "evaporate at any time."

"Reducing the gap in money is not enough. Another source of imbalance will inevitably show up. The way to curb this is stronger institutions made with better people of higher character."

Got any suggestions of how we get to institutions staffed by "better people of higher character" when the Ivy League that feeds these institutions are pay-to-play schemes where students are mostly selected from wealthy families and "higher character" isn't evaluated? The Ivy League isn't exactly screening applicants/students for character flaws--not with people like Josh Hawley coming out of Yale/Stanford or Bannon/Kushner coming out of Harvard or Donald Trump coming out of UPenn.

I agree with a lot of what you say in some respects about character, I just don't think you see what extreme wealth does to character. It makes people more individualistic and less patriotic. It makes them think of themselves and not the country. It also degrades the meritocracy when the meritocracy caters to wealth and the children of the wealthy get auto-populated into the Ivy League and then into these important institutions afterwards where their character flaws show up and have real consequences for everyone else.

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