It’s not hatred of the wealthy, but hatred of the greedy. I know multi-millionaire capitalists who take this view, if only because they know they won’t remain as such if the capitalist system is rendered unsustainable by greedy guts.
It’s not nearly as poisonous as the resources brought to bear by said greedpigs to make sure that the policy went unconsidered for many decades.
Until we live under a one-world government, that’s a distraction, one deployed regularly using the resources I just described to convince the rubes that they’re rich.
What the Vox video does not state and most people don’t realize is the vast majority of Americans on the income curve already pay a few to several percentage points on all or most of the wealth they own (or even don’t own). For the plebs, we just call it property tax.
I’m already paying 4+% property tax and I will never see $50M in my life. Let’s have a wealth tax on all wealth and have it go up a lot higher than 2-3%.
Although the video includes primary residence in the calculation, most estimates of household or individual wealth in the U.S. exclude the value from total net worth. There are a lot of Americans who own (or have a deed on) homes valued at $1-million+, but who couldn’t come up with $400 to pay for an emergency expense – they are not considered millionaires by the financial services industry or, in most cases, the government.
In the unlikely event that Warren’s proposal became law, I’m almost certain that the value of the primary residence below a certain level would be excluded from the assessment.
Why bother creating the loophole. Even a $2M home is a far distance from $50M.
Keep it simple, just count it all and keep the threshold where it’s high enough to not need to worry about exceptions. Any exception loophole just creates reasons to shift money into it. The demand for $50M+ houses located in low property tax (less than 2%) jurisdictions to trade between ultra wealthy as a way to “hide” the investment. A huge pain for everyone involved.
The video also showed debt reducing net worth. How many of those $1-million+ houses that can’t come up with $400 actually own the entire house?
If you buy a $1,500,000 home for $300,000 down and borrow the remaining $1,200,000 your net worth isn’t anywhere near $1.5M. Assuming your cash flow covers the mortgage and all your other expenses, not leaving even $400 left and have no other assets. Then, your net worth is actually negative $1.2M. You’re way over on the left side of the graph. Even paying off $40K of principal a year (not likely since that’s not how loan payments work), it’ll take 13 years just to get to a $0 net worth and a full 30 years before you hit $1.5M.
If you own a $50M+ house, and have no other assets, paying 2% on the amount over $50M is the least of your problems. Regular property taxes and maintenance will already be killing you. The extra 2% could just be the difference between two property tax jurisdictions.
I agree. I’m just saying what would be likely to happen in regard to homes under a wealth tax like this in the land of the “American Dream”* of home ownership. See also the federal mortgage tax credit.
Not quite. If you buy a 1.5M asset for 300k, then your net worth is the value of the asset less the value of the mortgage. In other words, your net worth is positive 300k, not negative 1.2M.
Now if you borrowed 400k to go to college and law/medical school, then your net worth IS negative 400k, because your degrees are not considered to be assets, even though they may be extremely valuable in generating future income.
Hatred isn’t a resource - it’s anti-resource that costs us votes.
Let’s take an analogy. I hate the harms caused by victims of crime. Reducing the suffering of the victims is the primary goal. Would I even consider the policies of someone who is obviously motivated by the hatred of the criminal? No, even if their policy reduces the most harm, they’ve already lost my vote because I don’t trust their hate not to overwhelm their policy choices. I’m certain they’re more interested in punishing the criminal than in reducing crime.
How are we going to win a majority of support for wealth taxes when many supporters find the guillotines to be a suitable icon?
Wealth taxes are an idea whose time has come, and our choice to mix dreams of vengeance with a real opportunity to help society makes the implementation of that idea much less likely.
Or worse, you grow that hate among the populace until you have a Trump or a Chavez.
(Honestly, I’m slightly horrified that we can have a discussion of the value of “harnessing hate” to achieve policy objectives when we have the living example of it’s “success” in office. But that’s the other characteristic of hate - it builds an equal hatred in the other side that usually ends with the levelling of the society that embraced it. We’ll see if we escape that fate.)
In this context, hatred of the greedy (again, not of the wealthy) is a rhetorical and memetic position. It’s an old and powerful one – you might remember a certain Galillean preacher’s discussions of camels and needles’ eyes and sharing with the poor.
(He also preached about hating the sin, not the sinner, so let’s adjust to call it hatred of greediness rather than of the greedy. But greed is an active and willful character flaw, so it amounts to the same thing for practical purposes).
Now, that rhetorical power comes from greed being an obvious sin – hard to argue the opposite. And yet, over the past 40 years in the U.S., a certain element of ultra-wealthy person and their well-paid servants have indulged in greed and actively tried to paint it as a good. See the mischaracterisation of Gordon Gecko’s Wall Street speech, Ayn Rand’s philosophy of selfishness, Reaganism and Thatcherism, and (going to the point above) Prosperity Gospel.
All of this poisonous “greed is good” propaganda has been pushed on the American public via the application of appropriately massive resources, to the point where at least 1/3 of the electorate believes it and we have growing inequality. The pushers deserve our hate and contempt as much as any heroin distributor does.
As has been explained many, many times before on this site, the icon is used here as a dark (and sometimes darkly humourous) warning about what happens when greed gets out of control, rather than as a hoped-for prescription. With perhaps a couple of exceptions, none of us here who raise the spectre of the guillotine want our comfortable and peaceful lives up-ended by violent revolution – least of all Cory. Understanding that, you can stop wringing your hands over its evocation here.
Absolutely. That’s why it’s so seductive. If you want action then fueling people to anger (especially using hatred) is a perhaps the most effective way to do it, which is why it’s so widely embraced.
It’s only if you care where about the results of that action that anger and hatred reveal their weakness as motivating agents. And yes, they’ve had a few victories, but if you measure success by improvement to people’s lives rather than punishment of the targets, not many.
Failing to use hatred and anger may delay our cause by years. But using it means the very high likelihood of having it hijacked by someone who is a lot better at manipulating hatred than we are.
We get our nominal victory, and the results set us back generations, as our cause is inextricably linked in people’s minds with destruction and malfeasance.
Of course you’re not hoping for violent revolution. But this sort of thing has a way of getting away from us. And, of course, our humour will be used against us politically. Why do both sides feature clips of the other sides commenters to scare voters?
And we’re in greater danger now when we see so many good reasons to be angry and even to hate.
Sorry, gracchus, but when the hatred meter goes into the red, expect me to be tiresome and chip in again.
Victory of the left is inevitable. It’s been a 5,000 year march of progress, and the last 20 aren’t going to rewrite history. But I will not let the one thing that can pervert that victory into ashes pass without a comment - and you can safely ignore my comment.
We can achieve our victory without that hate (if perhaps a little more slowly - but it will be a real victory, not a nominal one).
Who cares? Yes, we call conservative racists out when they fall back on the “just joking” excuse, but there’s a substantive difference about what we’re joking about and what our fundamental feelings are on the matter. I see no problem in “just joking” about putting greedy idiots under the guillotine, especially when the majority of people making that joke are pacifists opposed to capital punishment. I see a big problem in “just joking” about lynching African-Americans or “just joking” about shooting or imprisoning a political opponent.
Fair enough. But if you want to wring your hands when people here express their hatred of greedy people, expect us to question why you’d waste your time doing so.
People with my academic background call that attitude “Whig History” and consider it a bad habit of mind.
