They don’t want a faster bureaucracy, or more efficient government. The goal in cutting funding for public services is to decrease the quality of services so that they can then trick people into supporting private companies in being awarded the contracts to provide those services (cut costs in the short-term so that they can justify higher costs later).
The goal is to DESTROY government and REPLACE it with profit-driven private interests. Capitalists are the enemy.
Taxing the rich built the strongest most wealthy nation in the world that landed a man on the moon.
Ever since then, the greatest thing they’ve done is manipulate number charts to convince everyone that they shouldn’t tax the rich.
Twelve men on the moon. We did it six times, out of seven attempts.
86% ain’t terrible
Leaves everybody else jockeying for seventh place.
To answer your question, it’s not.
The Republicans, as proxies for the 1% and Evangelicals, have been trying to break the Federal government at least since Reagan, if not longer.
They’ve been trying to break the federal government since before the nation was founded. These are the descendents of the same people that wanted to count “non-humans” like slaves towards their population but without giving those slaves the same rights as them.
You’re not wrong, but post WWII Republicans were more than willing to play along so long as big business got theirs.
IMO, it was when the CRA, the EPA and other “anti-business” initiatives came into existence that “small government” because a buzz word for them.
They made a completely wrong turn when they teamed up with Evangelicals in the 80’s and let them into positions of power in the party in the 90’s culminating in the bat-shit-crazies we have now.
I mean technically before the party swap it was democrats but the pre swap Dems where the post swap republicans
It’s just southern racists. It’s all just southern racists.
And how did they accumulate the wealth to be able to pull this off?
Ignoring laws long enough to get them changed in their favor.
Shitty people devite the vast majority of their time working on tearing things down. Non-shitty people want to spend time doing positive things instead of fighting the people tearing things down. Add to that how much easier it is to tear down than build up and shitty people have a huge advantage.
Imagine life was a game. You lived for 2025 years. You worked 260 days / year. You made the median US salary.
You would need to relive that process 3,145 times to match an Oligarch.
That amount of wealth is unethical while humanity suffers. No one can really fathom “1b dollars.”
Who has 105 days off in a year‽
EDIT I forgot weekends, man it’s time to sleep.
ok so eat the rich but you can’t just put numbers from your personal receipts into a chart describing 2,000 years and assume it will make sense.
Whats there not to understand here? If you make $400,000 per day since the year 1 up until modern day, you still would only have 87% of Bezos’ modern net worth.
what is $400,000 in year one of this? you have that, you own the entire Levant?
it’s actually impossible to argue against you for not “weighting for inflation” because money does kind of make sense back then, and now, because it’s more efficient than shuttling goats around as currency, or investing in shitcoins.
$400k per WORKING DAY. If you did that for 2025 YEARS, you’d still be short.
People don’t get how stupid this is in human terms. Sure, just rewards for effort, but this is insane. It makes no sense on a human scale. And these people have us so worried about everything that we can’t step back and comprehend.
Now in touch form: https://eattherichtextformat.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
Look up for assholes; they’re above us and they keep shitting.
I use Christtimes as a rallying call for people who call themselves Christian. Is this what Christ would want? Luke 18:25, Matthew 19:21, John 13:34-35.
I’m sick of this country talking about Christ while this shit is happening. This isn’t Christian. It isn’t moral. I don’t pretend to know the answer: the problem is obvious if you think about it in human terms.
✌️ & 💜
unfortunately I can’t respond on any bible quotes. i’m just saying, $400k is not a meaningful concept 2000k years ago. That was Antony and Cleopatra type ultra trash drama. Fantastic costumes, there’s always some child teetering inside the monstrous costume head.
Run the numbers for yourself. I tried to make it easy. :/
Do you think it’s fair a median US household should work 3125 * 2025 = 6,328,125 years of work to catch up to Jeff? I don’t.
dear crypto bro or m’lady. fuck jeff. I am here from the future and I have immense wealth from assaulting Virtua Arcade Fighter 2 machines.
Do I have a moral obligation to use my time machine to invest in AI from the past?
Ah the basilisk.
I like to imagine it’s evolved past the human desire for revenge.
I’d like to hope I’m beyond crypto. Was a strange period in my life.
I hope you got wings on your chariot, or at least a really bulletproof legal document
Run the numbers for yourself. I tried to make it easy. :/
Do you think it’s fair a median US household should work 3125 * 2025 = 6,328,125 years of work to catch up to Jeff? I don’t.
i didn’t mean to argue about the value of work. it doesn’t mean anything in coins to me
Seems absurd to me compare the value of shekels 2,000 years ago to modern shekels, even before attempting to translate an ancient culture to ours today
IRS expects DOGE cost the country half a trillion dollars so far. Bankruptcy is the point.
What would be REALLY new is if people understood how little the top income tax rates matter because almost nobody pays them. Income tax rates only apply to salaries. Wealthy people get almost all their income from capital gains - i.e. buying and selling stocks and other investment items. Capital gains tax has always been much lower than income tax, currently I think 10-15% depending on how long the item is held before being sold. Raising top income tax rates back above 90% would not “tax the rich” or provide enough tax money to take any burden off the rest of us. It’s a silly PR slogan.
To ACTUALLY tax the rich we need to increase capital gains taxes. Or create new wealth taxes. Or even a ceiling on individual wealth. That last one would have the greatest effect, by limiting how much money any one person has available to influence politics - which really seems like the root of the whole problem. Secondly, abolish Citizens United, the congressional act that made corporations “people”, to stop corporate wealth from buying politicians.
The difficulty is how to get anything like this past the people whose power it would eliminate. A good first step tho would be whenever you feel like you understand something because of some meme you saw, remind yourself that you don’t, and then stop scrolling and do some real reading on the subject.
There is truth here.
I think rich people will have assets, like stock, and they’ll get a loan out with the stock as collateral. They pay like 2% on the loan, but they get like a million dollars cash. If that was treated like income, they’d pay a lot more taxes.
Not sure the best way to address this, but it should be addressed.
Simple really
When you use unrealized gains as collateral for a loan, those gains have now become realized, and they are taxed.
Oh, did your stock valuations go up? Did you use that stock to take out a personal loan? You’ve realized those gains. Apply a progressive tax until those loans look more like minimum wage. Make it not worth it to invent value out of fractional reserves in order to bankroll oligarchy.
The fact that this is apparently not done now is the single biggest loophole in the whole system. This is what allows the “unlimited money glitch”.
Making it illegal to consider investments a form of collateral for a loan would be the first step. Prove you can repay based on your annual income or that there’s actual physical assets that can be seized or fuck off.
Make loans above a certain amount count as income. Exempt mortgages below a million dollars. The rich would just have to take out larger loans to offset the taxes. Force taxes to be paid at time of loan receipt. Like payroll taxes. Like everyone else they can get a tax refund if they overpay.
It’s 1000% possible, they just don’t want to do it.
So true. The ultra wealthy don’t “earn” anything on paper, so they literally don’t collect a paycheck like you or I do…
Oh, not to worry. I’m not satisfied with taking a couple percent of them anymore. I have become way too radicalized by these leeches turning everything to shit. I won’t be sated without eating the rich at this point. They could willingly give up their wealth and I’d still call for blood for the harm they have caused.
It would already help if they would actually pay those 37%. But with the tax avoidance they can afford to get, they usually pay nothing at all.
Tax cheats abound among the rich, how else do you think they afford their yacht parties. Yachts are expensive!
BuTt they CreAte JerBs!
The same way cutting the budget of poorly performing schools makes students more successful.
Hack and slash your children’s education away, they say
At higher marginal rates we see larger amounts of avoidance, evasion, and fraud. In 1983 the US cut their top tax rate and took in more tax revenue than they had under the previous higher rates.
This worked once. There is no reason to believe that further cuts would produce similar results. There are other things we should be doing to pursue greater income equality such as funding the IRS fully.
Instead of cutting it they could have just enforced it.
Plus the odds are fairly high that a significant number of wealthy people complied after the cuts as a tradeoff of good will from the masses for future cuts. If it hadn’t worked out, they could have just gone back to cheating the system harder than they currently do.
Nah, it’s easier and less risky to not have to park ypur money in theoretically less stable nations with looser banking rules than to have it parked here. We might be too low but there’s no math supporting going back to 70+%.
I feel like if we had spent the money lost to tax cuts on enforcing existing laws, like really throw the book at tax cheats, like put them in orange jumpsuits and make them rot in a cell, we’d have had better outcomes.
The ultra rich should be afraid.
Yes
Less popular opinion. If we drive taxes up on the rich they’ll just get more creative with tax avoidance or move to Panama.
The ultra wealthy don’t pay income taxes and they didn’t in 1950 either. They’re mostly paying capital gains which was lower back then then it is now.
What we really need to do is remove all the massive loopholes in the current tax code and maybe do something like having progressive tax brackets on capital gains (some people are legitimately just using capital gains as retirement income).
Also, fund the IRS more. They’re not the evil tax man. They are finding the people who aren’t paying their legal fair share.
sarcasm: that’s why all countries in europe who do tax their rich have zero billionairs, they all fled to the us where you can’t even study abroad without being detained and tortured
European countries have scaled back taxes on the rich because they started fleeing. That’s exactly what I’m referencing. NPR article
I bet Drumpf cuts taxes completely for the mega rich. You wait and see.
It doesn’t seem like the marginal rate is the issue as long as it’s about income.
What if it were about net worth. That’s why it seems the rich aren’t paying. Sure some people’s net worth drops like elons recently, but that could result in a refund from the previous year.
