Microblog Memes

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.

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.

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.”

I wrote this on a similar post a day or two ago, so I’ll repost it here:

There were very few people this applied to.

The real reason is the corporate tax rate.

It was 52%. Today it’s 21%., and it’s effectively close to zero for many corporations with the tax loopholes used to avoid taxation. Shell corporations, deferring taxes, what have you.

So the US has lost more than 50% of the corporate taxes by % since the ‘50s.

E: the decline in tax % is pretty closely followed by the dramatic rise in CEO compensation. The wealth being funneled to the top by cutting corporate tax got us the billionaire oligarchs we’re dealing with today.

The funny thing is the path to MAGA is taxing the rich, but the dummies are doing the opposite.

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.

What's absolutely crazy to me, the 50's were some of the best times economically in this country, every time we tax the rich less the country goes further to shit. More so when these non taxed assholes spend their non taxed wealth on corrupting politicians to tax them even less.

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.

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.