Mmm, I believe I heard him talking about raising the taxed percentage for the upper tax brackets more, but if so it was during a long interview - or I may be mistaken. But he is targeting the upper class with several of his policies. Per his policy page he is for ending the favorable tax treatment of capital gains and carried interest.
Propose an end to favorable tax treatment for capital gains and carried interest. Ending the carried interest treatment loophole alone would generate $18 billion per year in revenue and ending favorable treatment of capital gains would generate tens of billions more.
As well as a financial transaction tax that would mostly effect the rich gaming the markets.
Propose a 0.1% financial transaction tax that would raise as much as $50 billion per year that will be used to help fund Universal Basic Income.
And finally a modest VAT tax aimed at corporations who excel at shuffling money around to avoid taxes. Many European countries use this to pay for their various social programs.
Other than the VAT maybe effecting some people directly to a degree, I am not sure which of his policies will shift the burden on the rest of society. It is specifically outlined in the VAT policy:
Corporations move money around to avoid paying their fair share of taxes
The burden of paying for social services falls disproportionately on those who earn the least
The Freedom Dividend should be funded by those who benefit most from the structure and work of society
So it’s ok that Amazon pays little to nothing in corporate taxes because that would just be passed on to the suckers as well?
VAT taxes is one way many of the nations people wish to emulate help pay for their programs.
That said, Yang’s tax scheme may not be the best one out there, but he seems to be attempting to get the top corporations who can afford it to pay their share and close loop holes.
I may be mixing up two different issues I’ve heard him talk about. I’ll remove that edit.
Not at all. But a VAT is harder to police because it relies on various supplier relationships instead of straight corporate profit.
Amazon can game both systems of course, but VAT is a system that raises prices on every little item, and that usually makes it regressive, because it forces bigger direct impacts on prices faced by the smaller consumers then taxes on the company’s activity as a whole.
There’s already people wanting to re-litigate every civil rights law. This would make those battles mandatory and generally unavoidable, even in places where people didn’t want to re-stage the political battles that forged them.
I’m sure you know this already, but the poster advocating against “purity tests” seems to only mean purity tests relating to race, sex, gender, and sexual orientation. He’s perfectly ok with ideological purity tests or even guilt-by-association:
I had only heard about the VAT, with regards to taxation directly related to funding the UBI to counteract automation, so more details are good here. But a VAT is still a tax that will more deeply impact the people with the least means of dealing with it - even with the UBI, which is only a grand. There still needs to be more effective price controls on things like housing.
A .1% transaction tax? Hm. could be higher. It strikes me that taxing wealth more broadly should be the goal, especially wealth that’s not for term retirement, etc…
Last, the entire underlying principle still seems to be resting on the notion of constant growth, rather than sustainability. That’s where we need to focus. Once again, just assuming constant growth based on the economy as it exists (consumption based) has huge problems that won’t be solved by taxing alone (but it’s the best place to start right now, I’d argue).
You know, I had this exact idea about 10 years ago.
Now, maybe not EVERY law. There are certain core laws that should stand the test of time. But for every Civil Rights Act you have thousands of laws that are poorly constructed, custom constructed for a specific purpose (like loop holes in the tax code), or made with the best intentions, but end up either not fixing the problem they were made for, or made it worse, actually.
I still can imagine where we live in a world where laws are assessed and at a point we can grade them on whether they DID anything positive or not. If so, rubber stamp them and move on, other wise let them sunset. I envisioned a third brand of legislation that only dealt with review and renewal of laws. It would be “allowed to sunset”, “renew”, or “kick it back up to congress to debate and pass”.
But let’s go ahead and put that thought experiment to bed. It won’t happen.
You can pick and chose specific policies he is for and disagree with them. Obviously I don’t like his “gun safety” policy. But overall, his points don’t read much different than most of the other democrats out there, with a few notable exceptions I don’t see anyone talking about. He has over 3 dozen points on that page, and I think many if not post people would agree with most of them. I am not even a huge supporter, per se, but the handful of long form interviews I have seen of him have impressed me and I was wondering if he was on anyone elses’ radar.
I think his focus on “growth” is to counter the point that many people see these programs as a DRAIN on the economy. When social programs do generally get cycled right back into the economy directly. At least that is what I see when he is being interviewed by right leaning interviewers who see everything as just a freebee handout.
Even though I agree with a lot of what he says in that comment about Clinton, it is somewhat odd that someone so worried about circular firing squads would still be re-litigating the 2016 primaries. Especially since, in the case of the composite image, no-one is really being attacked.
In doing that he’s just fighting on the opposition’s chosen terms, which has been one of the over-arching errors of the Dem establishment for 30 years.
If he really wants to stand out from the pack he could take @anon61221983’s approach about sustainability being as if not more important than growth. But given his background it would be an alien concept to him.
I get the impression, and I may be wrong, that when he objects to the “circular firing squad” he’s not objecting to the self-destructive aspect, but that the (hypothetical) shooters aren’t aiming at everyone but Bernie.
Agreed. I don’t think he will because he’s likely blindly supportive of capitalism as is and unwilling to dismantle or fundamentally change the system that he benefits from. He’s operating from personal experience rather than a historically and factually based world view that takes into account that his personally experience is unique rather than typical.
we’ll need plenty of people for cleaning up after climate induced disasters, people for guarding prisons full of displaced immigrants, workers for building border walls, for reenforcing protections around costal mansions, soldiers for gathering oil.
It’s more than that, because he lives in America and would have to be voted in by Americans, and than includes communicating in ways that the average person understands and sway them to support him. So you might not feel those terms are correct or favorable, but that is how many people relate to the world.
You can use what every language and terminology you want, but if it alienates people, it’s not going to get you votes.
I dunno, his words on human centered capitalism seems to want to shift the idea of “success” to mean more than just an increase in GDP, and include other economic and social metrics as a more accurate grade on how we are doing. He even points out the concept of GDP and economic progress wasn’t really tracked until the Great Depression in an effort to see if things are getting better or not, and thus shouldn’t be really the primary metric we use to gauge success.
Combine this with the tenants of: 1. Humanity is More Important Than Money
2. The Unit of an Economy is each Person, not each Dollar, 3. Markets Exist to Serve Our Common Goals and Values. He points out capitalism should be used to serve man, not the other way around. That doesn’t sound like a business as usual capitalist IMO. (Is Capitalism serving man just Socialism under a different name?)
Though I am curious who does use the right words and have the right policies in your minds?
So mostly old rich suburban white people vote for Trump (including the ones that normally wouldn’t vote), but it’s Scalzi’s article that’s low-effort and not Pargin’s take that the primary base of Trump are ones who are poor and rural?
