You can overthrow the rich, you can reclaim the assets of the rich, you can even kill the rich but you can’t create a society in which rich people face ongoing oppression because people can’t be simultaneously rich and oppressed.
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That’s an interesting distinction. Killing the rich is not oppressing the rich because once you shoot them they aren’t rich anymore. Taking everything a rich person has and putting them on starvation rations in a hard labor camp isn’t oppressing the rich because once you’ve taken everything they aren’t rich anymore.
It’s a distinction, I grant you, but I’m just not sure when it applies. People talking about the oppression of the rich as a concept pretty much always talk about it in terms of the rich facing a punishment or ill-treatment above and beyond being rendered no longer rich or, in case of the private property fetishists, talk about being rendered no longer rich as the oppression.
“You know, it occurs to me that the best way you hurt rich people is by turning them into poor people.” – Billy Ray Valentine, Trading Places
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Actually, the goal of tax policy should be to raise enough money to do the things we think the government should do. It has clearly failed to do this since some time during the Clinton administration.
If we are agreed that the tax on the super rich is not going to fund all the things which should be done, then perhaps we can go about it the right way.
(1) Figure out what things like the green new deal, and tuition free college, and Medicare for all, are actually going to amount to in terms of increased government expenditures. Be sure to allow for “unexpected” cost overruns as there will be a Big Dig or two that crops up along the way.
(2) Take a well-informed guess as to what effect (1) will have on the larger economy. There may be things which help and things which hinder its performance. The Congressional Budget Office has people who are very, very good at this. Let them do their work.
(3) Considering the result of (1) and (2), determine who should be taxed and how much in order to cover the whole net increase in spending. A little bit to reduce the debt would be nice too. Use the people at the CBO and IRS to help figure out what behaviors people may adopt in response to the tax changes, and take that into account.
In other words, let’s do the things in (1), but let’s do them with a red pencil and a green eyeshade as part of the toolkit.
Those high tax rates in the 1950s and 1960s encouraged equality and growth in other ways as well. When marginal tax rates are high, sticking it to The Man - Uncle Sam in this case - meant spending money on wages, benefits, research, design, investment and so on. With low tax rates, that kind of stuff comes right out of “shareholder value”. Think of high marginal rates as an invisible hand. It actually encourages the people running companies to build businesses rather than liquidate them.
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Did you hear the latest legislation
being pushed by
Little Mitchy?
I watched Bernie on C-Span today,
mocking mitchys latest …
The legislation being put forward
protects 1700 ultra-rich “people”
from the Death Tax
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“Don’t you want to pay down the national debt?”
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Tax policy has been used as a tool for achieving various other policy goals for centuries. For example, tariffs are regularly imposed to help control trade deficits.
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One of the main policy goals that taxes and tariffs provide is protection for the business models of politically well-connected corporations and industries.
See “homebuilders and realtors” for the tax side and “the American sugar industry” for the tariff side. By the way, the latter has the lovely side effect of incentivizing the use of HFCS rather than real sugar in processed foods.
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