Keith Levenberg
Keith Levenberg
I'll be the judge of that.
They'll be the judge of that.
Ridiculously stupid point which is obvious just from your use of the passive voice.
Aux Armes, Citoyens!
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I'll be the judge of that.
They'll be the judge of that.
Keith Levenberg
Keith Levenberg
If that was the question, then we're done, because nobody would contest that extremely narrow and extremely uncontroversial proposition. But of course one question leads to another and the question you say wasn't the question was a question naturally implied by the question.
Jonathan Loesberg
Jonathan Loesberg
If there is a more just situation then the present one, one change might be to tax wealth and very large incomes (AOCs proposed 75% tax starts at 10 million a year which is both a higher salary and a lower rate than was the case in the 1950s) and use the money to fund single_ payer health care in the manner of Scandinavian countries rather than post-Thatcher UK. There may be ideological objections to such income redistribution, but one can't object that it can't be done since it has been done.
You benefit by being able to buy cheap Chinese made goods but at what cost to society? Mounds of cardboard that may or may not get recycled. A lot of plastic that will not. Shipping costs of air or water transport. Pollution in China that you will never see but that effects us all over the world. Dead downtowns. Loss of social space. Lower wages for American workers and loss of jobs manufacturing items that used to be made in the USA. Social isolation. Sounds like a huge public good to me.
Keith Levenberg
Keith Levenberg
No, it hasn't been done. There are about 10,000 articles out there that explain how those old rates are illusory because almost nobody actually paid them (vastly more deductions than we have today).
On the waste issue, pretty amazing the types of calculations that happen these days. Cheaper to destroy brand-new never-sold junk than to store it. Amazon for the win.
Jeff Grossman
Jeff Grossman
Honestly, folks, why are you arguing with Keith? He isn't really interested in debate. He likes his dog-eat-dog philosophy and will say anything, disparage anyone, conflate all issues, and cherry-pick the evidence in support of it.
Oswaldo Costa
Oswaldo Costa
I don't think this is fair to Keith; he is defending his class interests, which is perfectly in keeping.
Oswaldo Costa
Oswaldo Costa
Yes, my formulation was Manichean for didactic purposes, and Western Europe has some examples of reasonably successful compromise that imo should be the way to go.
Pavel Tchichikov
Pavel Tchichikov
Hah! Could you save that just in case you need to cut and paste when I accuse anyone else in this thread of the same?
Oswaldo Costa
Oswaldo Costa
Consider it cut.
Pavel Tchichikov
Pavel Tchichikov
Altruism.
Those articles (at least the correct ones) are referring to the top corporate marginal rates. They make the point that all of the complaining about the high rates charged to corporations (prior to the disaster of a tax bill enacted in 2017) was a lie be ause few wealthy corps actuLly paid taxes at those rates . From at least 1921 (when the top marginal rate on individual income in excess of $1m was 65%) through 1980 top marginal rates on average exceeded 75%. Yes eventually a few of the very few subject to this rate figured out how to avoid it, leading to the adoption of the alternative minimum tax (but that is a whole ‘nother story). During that time income inequality was not really a societal problem. And during the latter part of that period the American economy had robust growth and health. Then Reagonomics, the “no tax” pledge and other uses of the IRC to aggregate wealth at the top and eliminate redistribution took over and American society began its descent into the morass we are in now.
Jonathan Loesberg
Jonathan Loesberg
My point was that universal, singer-payer health care has been achieved. I have no doubt that there was plenty of tax avoidance in the 1950s.
It's also true that CEOs in the 1950s made about 20 times what an average worker made, whereas now they make something over 350 times that. The only way to avoid high wealth taxes entirely is to make less in salary, even after avoidance, which would itself be a benefit. Meanwhile, the current percentage of people who earn more than 2 million a year is a tenth of a percent. I can't, with a quick google, find the figures for people who earn more than 10 million (there are probably too few to register). I doubt that even if that handful of baseball players, movie stars and investors, all stopped working tomorrow, anyone would really notice.
Keith Levenberg
Keith Levenberg
Your snideness didn't deserve anything more, and frankly I was juggling 5 things when I saw your post and didn't have the time. But since you're still sitting there so smugly convinced you're right, I'll engage you on the merits.
This nastiness originated in a simple question - how do I personally benefit from someone else's billions? My simple answer was that they provide services I want and reinvest their profits in technologies that will improve my life, among other things. You came in dropping stink bombs and nastily told me I suffer from false consciousness and don't benefit from the services that I've decided I benefit from, even though you have no idea what they are or how or why I use them. The level of ignorance and arrogance it takes to make such a comment is off the charts. Stay in your own damn lane. You then ignorantly added that investing in space and medical research and philanthropy are "silly replications of things that governments are designed to do and that individuals can't really pull off and probably can't even fund." I found your use of the passive voice striking. Who designed governments to do those things? What governments were so designed?
As it happens, I have on my desk a four-volume set containing all the primary source documents related to the debate and ratification of the Constitution. It goes into great detail about what our government was designed to do, as it contains the actual words of the designers recorded in real-time as they were doing the designing. I guess you'll be surprised to learn that no, our government wasn't designed to do any of those things. ("I'm assuming you don't know anything about this sector," you sniffed at me in apparent reference to things miscellaneously Science-y. That's actually another incorrect and ignorant presumption you had no basis to make, but you weren't making any claims drawing on your own expertise; you were making arguments about history (not your lane), law (not your lane), and economics (not your lane).)
As it happens, the word "science" appears in one place in the U.S. Constitution - the patent clause giving Congress power "[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." So the extent of the manner in which our government was "designed" to promote technological research was to incentivize it in the private sector. Now, you are fully entitled to think those people were stupid and primitive and if only they had the benefit of the wisdom of Marx and Keynes and Ocasio-Cortez they would have realized that it's way more efficient to confiscate private wealth, shut down the pharma industry, and fund these things publicly. But it is simply wrong and ahistorical to state, as you did, that private R&D is a "silly replication[] of things that governments are designed to do," when the facts are literally the other way around at least when it comes to the government you and I live under. Maybe the design of the Soviet government supports your point better.
And then there is the matter of philanthropy. I mentioned the Gates Foundation, which has done absolutely amazing things to help large numbers of the absolute worst-off people in the world. Maybe your reaction would have been different if I'd mentioned the Clinton Foundation instead. You nevertheless declared that you find this kind of charitable work offensive because you think only the government should be able to make decisions about how to allocate Bill Gates' charitable dollars, and that the government will allocate those dollars better. I have no idea what leads you to believe that this is true. We know how the government allocates the trillions of dollars it already has (vastly more than the Gates Foundation has), and the government doesn't place a high priority at all on the causes served by the Gates Foundation. I am not sure why you think that would change if the government confiscated all the Gates Foundation's assets and shut it down. American voters vastly prefer entitlement programs that benefit Americans to aid programs that benefit the worst-off people in other countries. I appreciate the fact that you think you are the smartest person in the world and that if you were in charge of everybody's money, you'd spend it better. I'm sorry to tell you that you're not the one who gets to be in charge.
To be fair, government design did not end in the late 18th century. Thankfully!
And it's not because they were stupid or primitive. Societies change and government is now designed to be much more active than it was in the 18th century. Of course it may change again in the future and evolve in different directions. But citing the constitution for technical details like this does not seem like the strongest argument.
Keith Levenberg
Keith Levenberg
That much is true, but it hardly supports the notion that tech investment in the private sector is a "silly replication[] of things that governments are designed to do." At most, what you are arguing is that the government has expanded to replicate things the private sector was designed to do.
Incidentally, it's not like replicating things the government was designed to do is self-evidently silly, anyway. One of the other things our government was constitutionally designed to do is the Post Office, but that doesn't make Fed Ex worthless.
Incidentally, it's not like replicating things the government was designed to do is self-evidently silly, anyway. One of the other things our government was constitutionally designed to do is the Post Office, but that doesn't make Fed Ex worthless.