Talk Elections

Yes, I believe that rich Americans should pay a bit more in federal and state taxes to pay for nat'l health care, etc. but how much can we tax the rich? In NJ, NY, CT, the rich people are all leaving and moving their businesses with them.

Would rich people still be rich?

I'm no fan of socialism, but the "WHAT ABOUT THE RICH" meltdown from right wingers whenever its mentioned, as if they're some kind of vulnerable group that needs to be protected, is never going to stop being both ridiculous and hilarious.

I am not a right winger. Aren't rich people entitled to keep their money like everyone else?

There is no tax plan currently being proposed by any politician of any stripe in America under which rich people would not still make tons and tons of money.

Sanders is basically a European-style social democrat/New Dealer. Go figure.

Until you tax wealth (and confiscate property etc) and not income, the rich are still going to be mega rich even if their tax rate was 99%

Even if you were to tax somebody like Bezos with 70% rate, he'd still be incredibly rich.

Yes.  As long as the means of production are privately owned, the capitalist has the incentive and ability to exploit the laborer.

There are 16,000 Americans who earn over 10 million per year. This amounts to 0.005% of the population. And keep in mind:

1) Most of those people probably make in the 10-15 million range, and thus most of their income wouldn't be affected
2)This is an extremely tiny number of people, and I would bet they tend to be very insular and not connected to the general population. Your archetypical rust belt Trump voter certainly doesn't know anyone at this income level.

Sadly, yes. The complete elimination of opulence would require far more radical measures than just a return to 1970s-level marginal tax rates. It's still a goal to strive for, of course.

Well yes, but considerably less. This poses the problem of why should we work hard if all of our work will end up in taxes

Even under Lenin there were rich people (the beneficiaries of NEP).

the inflation rate will beat Zimbabwe circa 2008 so no.

Wealthy people drive innovation. When cellular phones were first being developed, they were sold for thousands of dollars because wealthy people bought them as a status symbol. The R&D departments at these companies only managed to create smaller, more efficient devices because they had that initial influx of revenue from expensive sales to the "1%." If it weren't for that segment of the population that had the resources to purchase those devices, they never would've been sold.

Under socialism, there will be no rich people because everyone will be consigned to brutal, crushing, inescapable poverty. Because of this, there will be no innovation either. The only advancements you see under socialism are in the realm of military technology (socialists, despite all else you might say about them, are great at killing people).

I mean, aside from everything else, this is not how business actually works here in the real world. If a business tried to fund investment entirely from retained earnings, it would very quickly find that it was no longer in business.

(especially in the case of mobile phones, where so much of the technology they use was either the direct or partial result of government investment or research)

Congrats on the argument from emotion though.

Many of the proposals from the Democratic left would not have been unfamiliar to the 1930s New Dealers. Rich people seemed to do okay for themselves there.

This is a great way to sum up the far-left of the Democratic Party


Great post!!

This is an...odd way to describe life in midcentury Britain (the closest thing to a realistic historical point of reference for "AOC/Bernie-style American socialism"), even if it wasn't the most ~innovative~ economy God ever created.

Yes, there is an enormous gap between the social democracy which Sanders/AOC advocate for and the Leninist dictatorship "of the proletariat" that Mr. John here is hand-wringing about.

"[Republican Senator Robert] Taft explained that the great issue in this campaign is 'creeping socialism.' Now that is the patented trademark of the special interest lobbies. Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years.

Socialism is what they called public power.

Socialism is what they called social security.

Socialism is what they called farm price supports.

Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance.

Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations.

Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.

When the Republican candidate inscribes the slogan 'Down With Socialism' on the banner of his 'great crusade,' that is really not what he means at all.

What he really means is, 'Down with Progress — down with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal,' and 'down with Harry Truman’s fair Deal.' That is what he means."

~ Harry Truman.

Asking the rich to pay a bit more still leaves then with plenty of money, and it's not like they'll all just leave the US, as people create jobs in the US for many reasons not just tax rates. Even if the marginal tax rates do end up at 70%, it wouldn't tax their entire income or even take 70% of their income, just their income above a certain level. It's possible if marginal tax rates are too high (maybe 70% is too high) it will create a disincentive to work for those rich people that could have some undesirable economic effects but there's plenty of room to increase income taxes and other taxes on the rich between current rates and 70% and still leave people with plenty of income and little negative economic impact. Bare in mind too that the revenue raised from increased taxes on the rich will likely be spent on very positive things that benefit the economy, universal healthcare for instance would eliminate the trillions in waste in the current US healthcare system and have positive social outcomes. The rich won't lose all their money, they will still be very rich, but there is also a lot of money that they can pay back to society (which helped them become rich) and could be much more beneficial to society.

Yes. Unfortunately.

They'd be richer from all the money saved just letting the government do what it was tasked with doing.

They won't have to go on food stamps or anything.

No, their mansions will be confiscated and subdivided into apartments that dirty homeless people will move into.

No Mercedes or Bentleys will be sold in America anymore. Instead, all Americans will take the bus or subway or drive used Mitsubishi Mirages.

Everyone will wear unattractive and poorly fitting Walmart clothes.

Everything will be gray and covered in soot for some reason.

/s

You don't get it SNJC, Progressivism in America is not Communism, and look at Kalwejt's post again and explain how Europe isn't Communist again.

That might be enough to make even me leave the country.

Under AOC/Bernie-style capitalism, the American proletariat would subsidize the college careers of the children of the American petit-bourgeois while the haute-bourgeois gets to shift the burden of paying for insurance onto the State. Everyone... wins?


It certainly isn't. Case in point:


Marx knows all about this.


Imagine wanting to sell social reform for no other reason than to sell social reform, heedless of the actual end aimed at by it.

What a disgusting mindset. Its one thing to say lets help the poor by hurting the rich but now you are just saying  the rich.

To him, everyone to the left of Ben Nelson is a Communist.

Having such rich people is a problem in itself. Money = political power, and concentrated political power = oligarchy.

There are always rich people, but it is more likely to be those with political connections than those with business ideas.

It's a little unclear exactly what "Bernie-style socialism" is. If it actually means something like Northern Europe lol yeah. It would primarily mean that high-paid professionals wouldn't be rich, only people like entrepreneurs etc. But those groups would still be fine.

I sometimes get the sense though that Bernie has no idea what Scandinavian economies look like and actually would like to go a lot further and also in drastically different directions. In that scenario you'd probably have a lot of wealth reduction as well as redistribution.