Agreed 100%. It will be interesting to see how much traction these ideas can get in today's political climate.
If their use of public goods and services are greater that people making less money, is that use at a rate that would justify taking 70% of their income? Sincerely curious....
Your mental model of taxes is wrong, or at least unconventional.
Taxes aren't a bill for public services personally consumed. For instance, we don't charge poor welfare recipients more tax because they use more services, and to do so would be nonsensical. Taxes typically also serve an economic leveling function.
I think that overstates things, you'd have to venture pretty far into libertarianism before you find much of the latter view.
Having universal health care is good because a healthy society can function better, when done correctly it can also improved the level of medical care that the wealthy receive if only due to the fact that private healthcare now needs to be that much better.
Same goes for education more people with better education means a richer society as a whole.
Even public housing and unemployment benefits are a societal security improvement tool people with homes and with food on their tables are less likely to resort to criminal activities.
If anything you need to go pretty much to the left to find people that think that taxes are or should be used as a direct means of wealth redistribution.
I'm still struck by a few ideas. The first is that economic leveling needs to be done by force through the state. The second being that any new program needs to be funded by the wealthy - also by force of the state.
I would think using incentives would be the better approach? For example, let corporations repatriate overseas cash with a lower penalty and use that money to fund green R&D
We can't count on noblesse oblige to do it, and involving the state is how we involve democracy in the process.
> I would think using incentives would be the better approach? For example, let corporations repatriate overseas cash with a lower penalty and use that money to fund green R&D
In some ways that may depend too much on noblesse oblige to work (i.e. that the corporations won't subvert the goals of the incentives to benefit themselves) and in other ways be too much like a command economy (government closely directing private industry).
With regards to: >We can't count on noblesse oblige to do it, and involving the state is how we involve democracy in the process.
I believe it's the democratic part that bothers me - as, and excuse me if this is a poor analogy, like 3 wolves an one sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
I don't want you to think that I am ignorant of the fact that we do need some level of economic leveling for a well functioning society. My concern is how to best achieve that while preserving an individual liberty.
Again, appreciate the response.
Exactly the problem. If the people with the big resources were taking care of the big problems, government would have a lot less to do.
And although I get that the taxation system is ultimately undergirded by the threat of force, so is most property ownership. E.g., consider John McCcain's 4-8 houses. [1] He obviously could only be in 1 at a time. If homeless people took the rest over, they would be ejected by force. Government force in specific. That's how democracy works: we come to agreements on how things should be run, and people who disagree sufficiently end up complying at the point of a gun. Libertarians who get the vapors at the violence underlying taxation but not property are not actually concerned about violence.
[1] https://www.politico.com/story/2008/08/mccain-unsure-how-man...
Why are you suspicious on the noblesse of people who run companies but not on that of people who run governments?
Bureaucrats are not noble angels who came from heaven to help us. They are people acting on their own self-interest like everyone else.
Also why are all these people who object to use of "of force" to levy and collect taxes but not you know, literally everything else that the state uses force to do?
It's not like rich people just sit around on piles of money like Scrooge McDuck. They put that money to work so that they can earn some interest. The government will happily just spend it, though. So should it be doled out by congresspeople to their friends, or should it be invested by someone shrewd enough to be making $10m/yr in the first place?
They put the money in things that will generate the highest return. The government will (hopefully) put the money in things that will benefit people, even if they don't have an especially high ROI in the short term.
I am not at all confident in the ability of capitalism to save the environment, for example.
"Look at this problem a government caused that those nasty rich people haven't fixed!" is not a fantastic argument for making them give more money to the government.
Not all congresspeople are corrupt and not all those making $10m/yr are shrewd. These are classic government-bad capitalism-good strawmen.
Personally, I doubt most of the folks capable of spending/investing $10m/yr are actually making that money themselves.
In that case I would prefer the semblance of accountability I get from Uncle Sam instead of the supposed benevolence of random individuals spending money that fell in their laps.
Then everyone will be making >$10m/yr as the value of the dollar drops to zero.
Look at it from the company perspective. There is a skill that is worth a lot of money to them which they want to acquire. If they are willing to pay $1mm more than their competitor for that skil, for that amount of money to actually go to recipient, it will now cost the company $7mm of profit.
That skill is no less valuable or essential to the company, it’s just effectively impossible to pay for it now. The extra money paid in taxes in order to acquire that skill comes off the balance sheet — and effectively is being taken away from the same pool of money that is being spent to hire workers at $50k/year.
The $50k/year worker can not do the job of the $10mm/year worker. 100 of them cannot do the job either (because so much key labor is not actually divisible).
It’s hurting the company balance sheet to effectively pay their most important employees, which hurts the company.
Likewise, the employee making $10mm+ per year is a visionary who, like an Elon Musk, is contributing to the economy in ways a lot more profound than a few extra cents in everyone’s welfare checks.
“No one needs more than a million dollars a year, just take everything above that to even things out” means you never have people willing to lay it all on the line to try to do something more as well.
And so it’s basically a ceiling on what that company can pay an employee versus what the employee could go make on their own or elsewhere.
At $50k-$100k you can assume there are limits to what an employee can do. At $10m plus anything is on the table.
So instead of taking a raise, I take a day off per week. Or two.
Why not have skin in the game: We should tax anything above the federal poverty level at 100%. After all the government knows better how to spend the money.