taxes

Could taxing people with massive fortunes pay down the national debt?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Could taxing Elon Musk and other people with massive fortunes 80% be the solution to paying down the national debt in the USA?”

The answer is quite simple and beyond evident to anyone with eyes and a mind that’s capable of connecting simple dots from a simple table of numbers:

Here are a few points to address regarding regurgitated soporifics routinely employed by the enablers in the crowd.

  1. Taxing the billionaires won’t be enough money. — Well… DUHHH!!!! That’s not the point. The point is multifold, but let’s cover some leading characteristics. a. Force Multiplier and b. Speed of Money
  2. A healthily functioning economy is highly contingent upon “the speed of money flowing” through the system — like arteries in a human body. The more plaque there is that obstructs the flow, the less healthy the system is and the more prone to systemic collapse it becomes. The low tax rates that we have now and that we had leading up to the Great Depression encourage hoarding and are a leading cause of numerous social issues guaranteed to result in a dramatic economic collapse — mainly as automation speeds up.
  3. The more money the bottom end of the economy has, the more demand for goods and services, and the more businesses grow in a feedback loop. Even more beneficial to the economy is that when more people have more resources to invest in themselves and their futures, more innovation is introduced into a system that feeds on innovation to grow.

These two concepts alone, together, make up for what the useful idiots who defend the hoarding billionaires who lack imagination for humanity’s future beyond building space penises fail to account for. It is bloody disheartening that trickle-down stars can so thoroughly blind people and make them so addicted to the taste of billionaire orifices to understand how their misanthropic stupidity is the equivalent of suicidal ideation for humanity.

The graphic above screams the economic solution in our faces.

The lower the taxes =, the more unimaginative parasites and predators horde = the more sociopathically stupid they become =, and the more of a threat to our future as a species they become.

We create laws to mitigate the impact of excessive behaviours because we understand the destructive effects of unrestrained freedom on society. We know that if laws don’t exist to prohibit murder, many more murders would occur. The laws don’t end murder, but they function as a valve on society to mitigate and minimize the impact of widespread murder on society.

We create laws to restrain an entire host of issues resulting from the toxic extremes of human behaviour. Still, for some reason, the notion of building dynasties to rule humanity isn’t viewed as the threat that it is… even when the numbers add up to our extinction.

The main reason the billionaires should be taxed isn’t even economic, at least not quite directly the most important. The main reason they need to be restrained is that if they are not, they will destroy human civilization, and they don’t care because they have enough to build bunkers to ride out the apocalypse.

The people answering this question who are defending the atrocities of unrestrained wealth are as guilty of crimes against humanity as the MAGAts who are guilty of treason against the United States.

An astute argument was raised in response to this post that I’ve included here:

One point I would make is that taxing income and taxing wealth are two completely different things. Elon Musk may be worth $300 billion but that’s his wealth, not his income. If we start taxing wealth, be prepared to start paying taxes on the increased value of your house every time it appreciates in value. Politicians that tell you they would set a minimum of $100 million before taxing are telling half truths. They may set a limit initially but over time that can change. The original income tax was 0.5% of incomes over $1 million. How’s that working out for everyone ?

That argument sounds much like the fearmongering cynicism against raising the minimum wage — inflation will go up, or robots will replace jobs.

The reality is that property ownership is not the same thing as stock wealth, and there’s a fix for that — eliminate the corporate ownership of residential real estate.

Furthermore, the number of tax brackets that exist today is an unrealistic reflection of the historic levels of wealth disparity. For example, there are only seven tax brackets today. I checked to see how many existed during more realistic tax assessments. It was strange that learning how many tax brackets existed historically took more effort to identify than my bias believes it should.

This link below shows that in 1952, there were 28 tax brackets. Eliminating tax brackets benefits only the wealthiest in the land. The more tax brackets, the more granular the taxation rates and the less discriminatory tax rates are to the lower classes, and the more progressive taxes become — as they have always been intended to be. As it stands, the radical reduction of tax brackets has just been a means of waging a class war against the little people by allowing them to skip responsibilities that are inherently theirs while redistributing tax responsibility downward.

Historical Federal Individual Income Tax Rates & Brackets, 1862–2021

Should the rich not help the poor?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/Should-the-rich-not-help-the-poor/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1“

People who ask this question have entirely missed the point.

It’s like asking the con artist who stole all your money if he can lend you a few dollars to feed yourself on a promise that you’re going to pay him back.

The rich are both responsible for the poor and are not responsible for them.

How does this work?

Simple.

The rich do what they do best, and they make as much money as they can so they can become rich.

How do they do that?

They spend all their time and energy scheming ways to extract every penny of value out of every moment in their lives and through every micro-transaction they have that most people think of as just spending time with friends.

Since they have the resources to influence legislation in ways that enrich them, that’s what they do.

Most people would take advantage of any opportunity they can to enrich themselves. Most people don’t have the resources to do that. Most people also don’t obsess about every penny everything costs or how much they can make from any interaction.

Life is transactional for the wealthy, not interpersonal.

The only true friends that some of them have are those they cannot extract wealth from and that are not a threat to their financial well-being. That means most of their interpersonal relationships are shallow and transactional. They experience very little to no emotional vulnerability. That part of them has been shut down.

What that means is they cannot feel anything for the poor. They can’t empathize with poverty on any level. Poor people are an abstraction to them, as inevitable as night and day. They don’t see themselves as responsible for the poor, nor should they because they have their own lives to live, and poverty has existed since the dawn of human civilization.

They were not the first contributors to poverty. Even up until a few decades ago, their wealth-building activities helped people rise out of poverty, and that’s where their imaginations live today.

They cannot conceive of how their successes are now responsible for creating poverty because they view themselves as above reproach. How could they be so wrong if they’re so wealthy?

That’s why people like Elon Musk can become such an overt egotist. It doesn’t matter how utterly disgusting any of his words or actions are because he’s so wealthy; he cannot accept that anything he does is wrong.

The real problem here is that the wealthy are the victims of their success, and that success has manifested in a system that automatically feeds that wealth. Instead of a system which regulates wealth to ensure it is adequately distributed throughout society to continue raising people out of poverty, it’s now become a system of parasitically draining people to the edge of existence. People now cannot survive without additional measures to enable their survivability.

During the heyday of middle-class growth, society spread money more equitably, and the economy grew at its most rapid rate ever. Few people want to believe this, but that was due to taxes.

High taxes on the wealthy were responsible for raising the most people out of poverty and contributed to the most growth of the economy.

Have a look at this tax chart:

Notice how the years circled by a red border comprise the highest level of taxes, the most aggressive economic growth, and the most expansive growth of the middle.

How does this work? It’s simple beyond belief.

High taxes on corporations, in particular, incentivize them to hire more people — voila, an instant job growth formula for the economy. Paying people more is much easier to bear when it means a tax deduction on the other end. High employment rates and fair compensation (also guaranteed by union negotiations) stimulate economic growth. Everyone benefits. People rise out of poverty. More people have more disposable income to buy the stuff that corporations make, which corporations benefit from.

High taxes on the wealthy contribute to fair wealth distribution throughout the system and allow prices to maintain some sanity so that the middle class isn’t deprived of their dream of home ownership.

Since the wealthy, through their corporations, need to keep investing their money to keep it growing, it means they begin encroaching in areas that would otherwise be accessible to the lower classes — and that mostly means real estate and real estate is a finite resource. Suddenly, most rental accommodation is no longer small mom-and-pop entrepreneur but a multi-trillion-dollar entity whose goal is to squeeze profit from every transaction. Living expenses skyrocket as a result.

What was once available for living accommodations on a standard metric of 30% of one’s income is now 70%-80% of people’s income — for just a roof over their heads.

Since real estate is a finite resource and the appetite for wealth acquisition is an immense monster feeding the people employed by this system, they’re constantly looking for new opportunities. In the real estate market, that’s now become mobile home lots and campgrounds.

One used to be able to rent a piece of land from a local owner and plant their mobile home on that lot and pay a small fee to maintain services. Since all the lots are now owned by corporate entities instead, fees have to increase every year at a minimum to keep up with inflation and a little extra profit built-in on top to make their budgets balance. It’s an automatic decision-making system where no one cares to pay attention to the few extra dollars being asked of people, nor do they care that every corporation is doing the same thing so that the few extra dollars asked of by each adds up to lots of extra dollars from consumers whose incomes have remained flat or shrunk throughout the decades.

Voila… an instant formula for making the poor ever more poor.

Now… have another look at that tax table and pay close attention to the tax rates outside the red lines — particularly before the red-lined years begin.

Notice how they coincide with major events like The Great Depression and World War 2.

Then, look closely at the tax rates after the red lines. Notice how we are repeating history.

That’s right. We are repeating history, and it shows in the tax rates.

What’s next is an economic collapse and worldwide conflict that may or may not escalate into an outright global war. We are at a point where global conflict is a certainty. As the American economy collapses due to the radical incompetence of a grifter whose primary motivation is self-aggrandizement, the rest of the world will be busy jockeying for position in an emerging new world order.

The wealthy are okay with this because they stand to benefit from it, just like they have with the boom and bust economies. It means excellent deals for themselves as they pick the bones of the casualties who won’t survive the meltdown. They are not loyal to any nation because the entire globe is their playground. Nationalism is for the sheep they manipulate to do their bidding.

How can Donald Trump truly believe his act of kissing the American flag when his bread is buttered from Russia? In this respect, he’s no different than most who place their loyalties in the hands of those who feed them.

The people he convinced to be loyal to him sincerely believe he will help them improve their lives. If the best they can expect is to destroy the lives of their enemies, at least they’re okay with that. As long as they can laugh at their fellow citizens, whom they’ve been taught to hate, they can accept impoverished conditions for themselves.

That’s when the mask will fall off, and they begin to realize that the impoverished conditions they live in that they’ve accepted also make them the most vulnerable to the destructive efforts of a corrupt leader whose sole purpose for leadership was personal benefit at the expense of a nation.

The real lesson here is that the only way out of poverty is to embrace the notion that we are all in this together.

United, we stand and divided, we fall.

A historic wedge has just been hammered into a cultural divide that’s been slowly growing over the decades as the wealthy have been pitting the little people against each other to distract us from their efforts at ripping us off to increase poverty levels.

Imagine, within a small group of friends, one with the highest income always manages to forget their wallet and sponges off their comrades when they go out to dinner together. Imagine how angry everyone gets, not by their sponging, but by their constant whining about how shitty the service is that they get and how expensive everything is.

Most won’t notice because they value loyalty to their friend and will displace their subjective resentment of their sponging and project it onto the wait staff and restaurant they dine at. Eventually, they get so pissed with the restaurant that they burn it down.

Meanwhile, none of them notice how they’re going to miss that restaurant, nor how they got pissed at it because one of their dining comrades needed a scapegoat to distract them from their sponging.

That’s where America is today.

Tomorrow, without the restaurant, everyone goes hungry while the one comrade who sponged off everyone gets to rely on their hoarded stash because they didn’t spend any of their own money on eating at the restaurant.

It’s not up to the individual rich people to help out individual poor people because that’s like pissing in an ocean. No single rich person can solve poverty. However, all of them working together to restore sanity to a broken system can function like creating a rule for the person who sponges off the rest that mandates they pay their fair share or be denied access to the restaurant.

Expecting a few altruistic wealthy people to make up for the greed of the rest is unfair to them.

Our system has been corrupted to punish those with good intent and reward those with evil intent.

That’s why we’re doomed to repeat history.

People watched Gordon Gecko’s claim, “Greed is Good!” and interpreted that as an inspiration instead of a warning.

Why do the rich spend so lavishly instead of helping those in need?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/Why-do-the-rich-spend-so-lavishly-instead-of-helping-out-those-in-need/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1“

…because they can, and because they’re being rewarded for their success in accruing large sums of money with more money by the puppets they pay to play the role of a government representative of the people.

Why should they care about helping those in need if that fundamentally changes nothing about the existence of those in need?

Why should they cut back on their trips across the globe for their favourite ice cream to ease someone’s suffering for only a few moments while they continue to suffer throughout their lives?

Isn’t it just easier to let the suffering die so that they can be done with their misery once and for all?

Don’t we shoot horses when they break their legs?

https://youtu.be/qsKQiVJkEvI?si=gfT7KT5PNSX-G4rJ

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969) ⭐ 7.8 | Drama

The real problem here is the concept of altruism. In an economically just world, altruism would be moot.

We already know that the executive boardroom is populated with the same density of psychopaths as a prison. Yet, we somehow expect they will be charitable enough with their money to sacrifice their luxuries to temporarily ease the pain of those suffering from unmet basic needs.

As individuals, they can only accomplish a little of anything.

As a group, however, we can ensure our system holds them accountable for their fair share of contributions to the world in which they disproportionately benefit from its bounties.

If they were held accountable for how they were at our height of middle-class growth, they would be more successful at helping all in need in proportion to their contributions as a whole because no one would benefit more or less from an act of altruism.

By returning tax rates on the wealthy to an Eisenhower level of progressive taxation, replete with the rules restricting corporations from benefitting from loopholes that permit them to escape a tax burden, we would resolve the needs of those in need on a systemic level.

We would not need to rely on a delusional expectation of the mega-wealthy to voluntarily practice austerity as has often been imposed upon the little people.

Have a close look at what happened to tax rates in the 1920s. That era was called the “Roaring 20s” because it had a booming economy due to the wealthy having much more disposable income. The same thing happened in the 1980s when Reagan dropped tax rates. The economy boomed briefly, and everyone loved Reagan because of it.

In both cases, those boom periods were finite and led, in the first case, to a worldwide war, while in the second case of Reagan’s tax cuts, it led to the “Great Recession.”

That’s what happens when large sums of money are released “out to the wild” for the peasants to get their trickle-down benefits. In the first case, that form of “voodoo economics” was called “Horse and Sparrow” economics because the Sparrow would benefit from all the food the horse hogged and shat out the other end.

That’s what trickle-down has always been. The little people get what the wealthy shit out as waste for them, and we’re supposed to find ways to live in dignity with that disgusting degree of indignity mounted onto our lives while we labour to make the rich wealthy.

It is precisely this dynamic that has been responsible for every social meltdown in history.

Meanwhile, if you look at that tax table, you’ll see the higher taxes resulted in the most tremendous growth ever for the middle class while the most significant number of people were lifted out of poverty.

None of it occurred because we relied on the generosity of greedy people but because we had our system tuned to maximize the benefits of a capitalist system.

“Trickle-down economies” are also called “boom and bust economies” because they go through cycles of recession and growth. The wealthy class loves this dynamic as the little people must suffer through periods of belt-tightening austerity. For the little people, austerity means having to go without essential needs being met, while for the wealthy class, austerity means excellent deals on going out of business sales. This is where they make their most significant cash grabs.

When small businesses thrive in a booming economy, they grow in value and expand while taking on more debt. That debt eventually crushes them when the cycle of a bear economy rears its ugly head. Many are forced to sell or go personally bankrupt and become devastated entirely for life. Many accept giving up the business that they grew out of love for what they were doing and allowed “an Elon Musk” to step in and claim credit for all their years of hard work while benefitting from that work to win humungous profits when the economy turned back into a bull.

It’s a class warfare game they have been playing with us as they corrupt the capitalist economy like it were a casino, and they’re the house that always wins, no matter how lucky any of the little people are.

This is why the guillotines come out whenever the little people figure out how badly rigged the game is against them.

The rich spend lavishly because they can and because they have rigged the game in their favour to specifically allow them to spend our money while programming the gullible among us to run interference for them as they victim-shame their fellow little people and accuse them of all the disgusting behaviours exhibited by the wealthy class, such as accusing the working class of wanting to steal the “hard-earned money of the rich” instead of demanding the money they stole returned to their victims.

The Disturbing Link Between Psychopathy And Leadership

Why are there more psychopaths in boardrooms?

Some care about those in need, but about 20% don’t, and they make it impossible to change the system because they invest billions in making it unfair while the rest reap the benefits of their corrupt activities. As a whole, they intentionally aim to strip the little people of our value precisely so they can spend gobs of money feeding their egos.

Due to their unrestrained behaviour, our species is on a trajectory toward extinction. Should we not push back on their greed and restore economic sanity, we won’t be able to continue at this pace, and we’ll be so severely humbled as a species that we may never recover, even if we survive the naive stupidity of our time.

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