"Unreasonably wealthy" means able to buy a house, by the way.
A culture that devalues its own metrics for "success" is going through a significant transition. presumably towards different metrics. That's not "utterly destructive", though change is often accompanied by some destruction.
(*) for example, many tenured research scientists today earn more in real dollars and have more material wealth and comfort than almost any of the mid-20th century superstars. But who is the more successful scientist, Richard Feynman or someone you've never heard of with a great job at a big research university, lots of grant money flowing and a headstart from their upper-middle class parents?
>A culture that devalues its own metrics for "success" is going through a significant transition. presumably towards different metrics. That's not "utterly destructive", though change is often accompanied by some destruction.
Any modern western nation which sees a collpase of its industry will see its population quickly drift into poverty. It is an essential threat to disregard economic output.
As with anything else, the answer is to "raise everyone up", not "pull those down who have obtained something". And for the record, I am OK with taxing those with higher incomes at a higher rate. What I'm not OK with is the quite literally insane concept of "take all that money in one tax year", or "make sure no one can ever stay wealthy".
The absurd notion of "if you have more than $x, we'll take it ALL!" is pure socialism, lacks any idea of how monetary systems work, how taxation works, and how much value doing that brings.
For example, if you took every billionaire's liquid cash in the US, you'd barely notice it at the federal level, and then next year? There's be nothing to take.
This is primarily because to 'take that billionaire's net worth!!', you'd have to take ownership of a massive amount of stocks, commodities, and so on. Let's say billionaire G owns 70% of Big Corp H, and that ownership is worth $2B.
Great. So you 'tax' it. So how does that work?
Does the billionaire have to sell if off, and give cash? How does that happen? Remember, all other wealthy people are having their fortunes stripped, so who do you even sell it to?
And if you just hand over the shares to the government, what are they going to do with it? Sell it? To whom? No one has large amounts of disposable cash now, it's all been taken!
None of these weirdo comments about "fuck people with $10 in their pocket!" make sense.
As an aside, I very much dislike progressive tax rates. It essentially punishes productivity, as each additional hour worked reduces your money earned. Most of the working population should have the same tax rate.
>And if you just hand over the shares to the government, what are they going to do with it?
In Europe many states are large shareholders into companies. In the US you have e.g. pension funds who own very large amounts of capital. In Europe you have many companies where regional governments own a lot of shares.
It is trivially fixable, with taxes.
It is less trivially fixable via cultural changes such that in-organization compensation multiples are held below a relatively low number (I'm would lean in the range of 5-10x, but the precise value isn't as important).
> As an aside, I very much dislike progressive tax rates.
Progressive tax rates reflect the basic economic concept of the "marginal utility of money". If you earn $10k/yr, and extra $1k is a big deal, and can have profound impacts on your life. If you earn $100k/yr, an extra $1k is much less of a big deal. If you earn $1M/yr, an extra $1k is just noise.
So it is with taxes, but in reverse: the impact of taking $1k in taxes from the $10k/yr person is very large, but extremely small for the $1M/yr.
It would be preferable if we used a continuous function for this, rather than income brackets, but the concept is not hard to grasp: the impact of taxes, not the actual amount, should be the same for every $ earned. That requires progressive rates, because the impact of a 20% tax rate on the first (and only) $10k is huge, whereas the impact of a 20% tax rate on the final $10k of $1M is extremely small.
This an economic fallacy. It only makes sense if you believe the only utility of money is is to buy basic necessities and you can't imagine doing things that require larger amounts of capital to start.
No, it is clearly not, not ever has it functioned. It is also destructive to do.
>Progressive tax rates reflect the basic economic concept of the "marginal utility of money".
I know, but so what? The exact same goes for constant rates.
>If you earn $10k/yr, and extra $1k is a big deal, and can have profound impacts on your life. If you earn $100k/yr, an extra $1k is much less of a big deal. If you earn $1M/yr, an extra $1k is just noise.
Why are you arguing against some fantasy? Nobody pretends to want taxes as a fixed amount. That is some absurd thing you just made up. Why even reply if you make this bad faith arguments?
You even completely ignored my argument about progressive taxes devaluing work. As your hourly rate sinks with amount worked.
>It would be preferable if we used a continuous function
Indeed. Namely a constant function.
