You can thank Nixon and the abandoning of the Gold Standard in 1971 for this problem.
It allowed government to print $ unchecked. When new $ gets printed, it goes to the corporations/rich first, causing inflation for everyone else. This artificially creates an extremely wealthy class.
Not saying the Gold Standard is the solution - it had its own set of problems. But the untying of money from a real, hard asset is what makes the existence of the ultra-rich possible.
Is money printing the problem? I'd say the amount of money in circulation since the 2000s has massively increased not by government printing but by overvaluation of virtual financial products, including stocks.
"The years from the end of World War II into the 1970s were ones of substantial economic growth and broadly shared prosperity. Beginning in the 1970s, economic growth slowed and the income gap widened."
There were substantial policy and economic philosophy changes around this time. The 1970s are the rise of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics, which led to the Reagan Revolution in the US and Thatcherism in the UK, as well as the Washington Consensus within the IMF & World Bank. Those were the philosophies that drove the privatization and anti-union movements over the following half-century, which decimated the power of labor and removed restrictions on the accumulation of wealth, which directly led to the current state of affairs.
Try an experiment: the current levels of richness may be too much, and we seem to be learning that through lived experience; it may be that we have to dial down the richness and if we go too in the other way we lift the restrictions.
As it currently stands, wealth concentration is at about the same level as in the Gilded Age:
So perhaps adjust tax rates to what they were from about 1950-70. Certainly there were other factors that helped prosperity (in the US) during that time period, but it's probably worth tweaking this variable.
The problem with this approach is that to someone out there, any amount is "too much" Should we start with confiscating all earnings in excess of $100 per month and adjust from there if needed? No matter how ridiculous a thing I propose, if you don't agree then I can easily just say
> Should our inability to unanimously agree on something prevent us from doing anything? No. Let’s start somewhere. We can adjust if we need.
Of course! But looking at the reality of the policy, don't you think that barring a person who turns 18 tomorrow from voting but allowing some other person to vote who is 12 hours older is kind of silly?
We do have to draw a line somewhere in order to get things done, but we should be honest and aware of how arbitrary such a line is. We shouldn't just grab some random number out of our ass and say "we have to start somewhere." My point above is that argument can be used to justify anything no matter how draconian. We need a better standard than just "we have to start somewhere"
Also there is a practical difference between voting and drinking (your examples) and taxation levels (the subject matter). Most reasonable people acknowledge that somewhere around 18 to early 20s people become "adults." Everyone develops at different levels, but the main idea there is not to have children voting in horrible politicians (clearly we adults are good enough at that already, sadlol). Same with drinking. We know that young people are often irresponsible and dangerous with it, and it can damage their brains. They also aren't able to make informed rational decisions as their frontal lobes aren't complete. Compare that to "how much money is too much" and you're going to get a huge and inconsistent range of answers, compared to "at what age should people be able to vote or drink."
I think everyone on this thread is aware that it's an arbitrary line.
That's where the "how rich is too rich?" comment comes from.
That's where the "Let’s start somewhere. We can adjust if we need."
The "start somewhere" is meant to be read in good faith as something achievable.
The history of US taxation shows us that 94% on taxable income over about $2.5 million is achievable, while you have no evidence that 100% taxation above $100 per month is doable.
You can nitpick my examples, but there's plenty more I can do. Why is a 29 year old adult prohibited from being Senator? Why is 65 mph a legal speed limit but 65.1 mph illegal? Why is the reporting limit for cash payments at $10,000 and not $15,000 or $8,000?
When road speed limits for machines were first put into place, the idea wasn't to start and 1 mph and work up from there. They already had vehicles that could do 10mph, and the 4 mph limit was a good walking speed for the flag bearer.
And the recent feedback from Wales is that lowering the urban speed limit from 30 mph to 20 mph reduced the number of people who were killed or seriously injured, by 28 per cent, suggesting the limit was too high, if human lives are important.
You don't need anything beyond that. At that point you're basically just keeping score. There is no need and few wants that would be beyond your grasp.
Sorry, I should have tagged my sarcasm. It should cover every person in the population. A billion dollars is enough money that you and your family for untold generations will never have to work again.
To put some math on that - assuming a market rate of return of ~7% and an inflation rate of, hell, we’ll call it 4%, that’s $30M/yr inflation adjusted forever.
You invest $30M at the same rates, and it generates $900k/yr inflation adjusted forever. That’s the combined income of 10 median families, give or take - which means a billion dollar fortune throws off enough money to comfortably support 10 families per year forever, forever.
Doesn't need to be a binary choice (above/below threshold) - it can be a spectrum -- also known as progressive taxation.
Would this prevent people from working hard and being enterpreneurial? Not sure but I think not -- for 2 reasons:
(i) success at that level requires more than just desire for money, because it requires pushing hard when the going is tough, and unless you care about it you will give up. we have heard this before from others (Steve Jobs?)
(ii) a successfull entrepreneur will still make more money than an employee, so the financial incentive is still there, even with greater taxation.
Take the longest any human being has ever lived, subtract the age of the given person, multiply that many years by the the top 1% of US income, everything over that at the end of the year gets taxed at 100%. Reasonable place to start?
Let's start at $1B. I cannot think of any earthly reason a single individual needs more than $1B worth of wealth. After all, the US presidency apparently only costs $250M to buy.
I would fully support a 100% wealth tax for everything over $1B.
Now, of course, the implementation of such a thing would be enormously complicated. There are a million places to hide your wealth, squirreling it away behind shell companies and dark LLCs which you or a designated agent are a controlling member of.
But in concept, I cannot fathom why a human being could possibly say, "You know, $1B really isn't enough for <this>."
Let's say the maximum amount allowed by a company is determined by the number of people that have a controlling share in the company. If one person controls the company, it's still $1B; if there's 8 people holding 51% of the shares it can hold $8B, etc.
The highest paid person of a company can never be paid more than 10x what the lowest end is earning. Including external contractors like cleaning staff. Very simple.
In school the max grade we can get is 100%, and everyone seems fine with that. People don't seem to complain that there's a cap.
In videogames there tend to be max levels, or max scores. People play them knowing they won't ever hit them, and no one seems to mind.
No one starts a job thinking they can get infinite raises. A lot of people tend to have a general idea of what the max compensation they can expect in their line of work is, and seem to be fine with that.
I think people tend to be pretty ok with theoretical or even hard limits, especially if they're far from them.
And how do you measure riches? Part of the game is hiding the amount of money you actually make so that you’re not taxed on it and it’s not “yours”.
Rich people understand this and exploit it. And those who have the power to change this structure have NO incentive to do so… because they’re also rich.
>And those who have the power to change this structure have NO incentive to do so… because they’re also rich.
And yet we did just that. FDR came AFTER the roaring 20s
All it takes is Americans willing to vote for someone who says "rich people shouldn't exist", but currently Americans seem ideologically opposed to that, and millions instead seem to subscribe to "rich people are the only ones able to accomplish anything" despite ample contrary evidence.
2% on wealth over a billion, simplify tax code to reduce loopholes, add increasing rates at higher income levels like we used to have. That should help.
Importantly, not on income, but on wealth in general. It removes the ability for extremely wealthy people to get around paying much tax with things like capital gains.
Fine by me, a billion is an obscene amount of wealth. I think a smaller percentage is more likely to be passed. Maybe 1% over 100 million 10% over a billion. Too many fools think they might be billionaires someday while the billionaires keep siphoning off wealth. Speedrunning it now that we have the oligarchs in charge in the US.
In the modern world, Elon Musk bought his way into controlling the federal government, Larry Ellison is proposing an autocomplete panopticon, Mark Zuckerberg is building a survival bunker on Hawaii, and the leading cause of bankruptcy for everyone else is medical debt.
what, the modern world in which thousands are allowed to starve while tax dollars are spent on weapons used to commit genocides abroad? the world in which everybody in america needs to own a car because it's not profitable enough to build modern rapid transit systems? oh no, please don't destroy that, it would be terrible
