No, if the middle quintile (20% of the households ordered by wealth) owned half of the pie, it would not be the middle quintile, it would be the top quintile. Math matters.
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First off, the wealth tax proposals are progressive and heavily skewed to the ultra-wealthy. Only a handful of “farmers” are in that group, and we’re talking about people who own swaths of land in the west larger than the whole of New England.
Second, the wealth calculation includes debt. The vast majority of family farmers in the US operate on a heavy debt load (especially thanks to the predatory practices of the farming machinery and agribusiness monopolies). Real farmers won’t be paying a cent in wealth tax. The only ones who will be paying a wealth tax are hobby-farmers and hobby-ranchers, most of whom are hedge fund managers who wear $1000 cowboy boots a couple of weeks a year.
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I was speaking more of the “middle class,” which did in fact hold 70% of the wealth in the US in the mid-20th century. But your point is well-taken.
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pie is not a zero sum game either, and also subject to time. there will be more pie ( i hope ), and there definitely will be less pie. if it’s any good.
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This is a charity. Contributions are deductible.(There are countless other examples, but this is the most recent shithole corporation that I’ve been looking at.)
It’s the personal instrument of Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow and his family, now that God had Pat Robertson offed. Fund-raises by hard-sell scamming people who can’t afford it, for things that are contrary to their interests.
The slightest examination of their Form 990s show that the IRS should send in tactical mecha auditors.
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We aren’t progressing towards national equality, we’re sprinting in the opposite direction at a rate unprecedented in modern history. That’s the point.
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That is a shitty organization. No doubt about it.
But if we have the IRS decide what causes are just and shitty… well, let’s be honest, this one will be stamped as good, and the NAACP, ACLU, the Equality Foundation, and any LGBTQ+ organizations are going to be cut out.
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I wasn’t commenting from the viewpoint of the GOP, or the dems, or any political party for that matter. I’m absolutely behind the idea of taxing the rich, but, pray tell, where will that money go? More to the point, who will be left out of the picture? Presuming another era of wealth taxation is upon us, I wonder if it’ll be the same folks that were left out during what you note was the “time of greatest prosperity”?
Yup. The answer can only be no tax or wealth distribution such that everyone gets the exact same amount. There is no other option.
Shhhhhh
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Right. But it’s a GOP (as well as neoliberal) talking point that “it’s always been like this and there’s nothing to do about it.” That’s just false.
It’s also a separate discussion to determine where the tax revenues are disbursed. Taxation, both of income and wealth, is a beneficial policy on its own merits. Funding of programs is determined by where we need to appropriate funds and to whom. Since the US does not couple revenue and spending, it’s counterproductive to predicate tax policy on destination spending.
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Maybe, but it’s not my talking point.
Hardly, though it’s easy to say.
You advocate for taxation for taxation’s sake? I must be missing your point altogether.
Do you disagree that revenue and spending are completely divorced from each other? Because that’s the reality in the US. The only time someone wants to talk about how to fund a program is when they oppose it.
Of course. That’s really the topic of this thread: inequality. The most effective means the government has to reduce and reverse inequality is through progressive tax policy. It is basically the government correcting the mistake of income and wealth aggregation.
So the next question will be, why is wealth inherently bad? Because we know that the wealthy will spend money to gain unfair advantages to make even more money. Since that’s counter to the fundamental function of a democracy, it needs to be corrected.
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Or more to the point, grossly disproportionate wealth is bad. I’m all on board with bringing everyone increased prosperity but if a tiny number of super-rich dudes have as much as everyone else put together then it’s impossible to have anything approaching a democratic society even if everyone else has all their basic needs covered (which they don’t).
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How about “to the various publicly-funded services that we, as a democratic society, have decided we want our government to provide?”
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Yes, of course, and that much, I would think, should be obvious. (Not sure where your quote is coming from, BTW.) In addition, I would hope that groups that have historically been, for whatever reason, unable to access Gov services, or otherwise left out of the picture, would rather be included.
I think that it is instructive to look at what the government spent the money on while we had the high tax rates in the '20s through the late '30s, when the US got involved in WWII.
There was a lot of infrastructure creation, rural electrification and telephone networking, ensuring that rural postal delivery was available. There were the CCC projects which employed a lot of people to build public recreational facilities that were open to everyone. There were urban renewal projects and breadlines everywhere. Lots of poverty elimination programs, of various levels of success. There were model towns built and populated.
Was it perfectly colorblind? Nope. There was still a ton of institutional racism in the system that they didn’t even realize was there; although I think they made a more concerted effort to include African Americans than most programs had before, and a better effort to raise African American standards of living. They could have done better. But at least, for one of the first times… they tried.
What would I have them spend the money on this time?
Infrastructure. Lots and lots of infrastructure. Rebuilding the Interstate system, replacing bridges, rebuilding our Rail network, building a passenger rail network, better public transportation infrastructure.
Poverty Elimination. Training - college, job training, skills training, ect; free for everyone.
Better social support network.
Universal Income. Honestly, giving everyone $1,000 a month would help our economy explode.
I would say Universal Health Care, but honestly, that would save us money.
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They did not.
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I would say that there was an extensive system of systematic racism that prevented the government’s plans from working. I would also say that the government kicked off 80 years of anti-poverty assistance for urban poor people which managed to completely and stupendously fail with absolutely every step; spending a ton of money on the problem and managing to make it worse with each attempt.
Perhaps worse if you can see a thread of good people trying to do the right thing which horribly, horribly backfires on them with each step.
As the Wiki link mentions, the HOLC itself didn’t redline. But the agents that sold the loans did, often illegally. The real estate agents did their racist part too. This caused a stunning disinvestment by the people who lived in the community, which led to absentee landlords refusing to invest in their properties but wringing the wealth of the community out via rent while the houses rotted to sub-code, uninhabitable messes.
Which prompted the cities to try to move people out by destroying the neighborhoods using the infrastructure budget. Which made the landlords whole but displaced the residents, destroyed the community, and set them even further back into poverty.
Which then prompted the government to hire social scientists to figure out how to build utopian communities to provide them a place to live while they found success. Well, they couldn’t have bungled that up any worse.
And that led the government to 40 years of trying to rebuild the “projects”, trying new things to fix the problems. Hint: they were never able to fix the problems.
Which led to housing vouchers. Which again, helps landlords but does nothing to build generational wealth. I mean, it does- for the landlords.
And it means that we have the absolutely bonkers situation where people rely on certain neighborhoods being so completely and utterly toxic that no one wants to live there in order to be able to live there.
I guess the bottom line is they tried. They failed, miserably. But they tried.
Yes. The government very much played a role in that. That’s the whole point of systemic racism, that it’s enacted and enforced via a institution, often a state.
Or people who very much wish to sustain the status quo, which again, the government often does.
They often did not, no.
There is by now a long historiography of the intentional and willful support of segregation, in both the north and south by the federal government:
It was not just a case of grassroots racism or incompetence or a few bad apples. Segregation was very often top down in federal housing policy. And the benefits of programs like the postwar subsidies were likewise segregated and the benefits accrued primarily to the white working classes. That’s the history. It doesn’t make people comfortable, but there is tons of supporting evidence for this.
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