Comment on Borrowing money against their stuff to get more stuff to borrow money...
chuckleslord@lemmy.world 6 days agoAccepting your premise as true, that still doesn’t make the tax valueless. The real value in a wealth tax is breaking up the money from individuals, the revenue is just a bonus. Even if it is all used to pay the accountants, that’s still money that’s now actually moving through the economy rather than zombie wealth sitting in some rich fuck’s paws, doing nothing but contribute to inflation.
damnedfurry@lemmy.world 4 days ago
And the mask comes off, revealing the true motivation. You’d happily waste the taxpayer money that is the poor’s lifeline in many cases, reducing overall tax revenue, because hurting the rich matters more to you than helping the poor.
chuckleslord@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Taxes in the US are overwhelmingly used for the military and to enrich rich fucks, not to help the poor. Don’t be disingenuous. Rich fucks sitting on assets aren’t “not hurting anyone”. Their assets have real world value, that’s why they’re valued like that. By letting someone sit on them to “allow them to appreciate” is letting someone doing nothing accumulate the wealth gains of society that we all work for. Because those assets appreciate faster than inflation, they create inflation pressure as more asseted people have income to burn that doesn’t reflect actual economic movement. Decreasing the value of money that other people need to use to buy things to live.
No one lives in a vacuum and letting people hoard assets has a negative impact on everyone else. So yes, wealth redistribution is a net positive not because “it punishes rich people” but because it allows our money to better reflect who actually produces the value in society. The workers who do the labor of running everything, rather than rich fucks who normally reap all the monetary benefit of that with almost no actual contribution to the effort it required.
If everyone became a laborer with proper compensation, society would thrive. If everyone became an asset hoarder, society would break apart as there would be no one to operate the machinery of society. Increased wealth inequality pushes us towards the second scenario(asset ownership is rewarded over value producing behaviors, pushing individuals towards more asset accumulation in order to not be left behind, increasing the price of those assets, devaluing other ways of earning money, creating more pressure to own assets), reducing wealth inequality pushes us towards the first.
damnedfurry@lemmy.world 4 days ago
“Overwhelmingly” is a bit of a ridiculous way to describe 13% of the budget, don’t you think?
Cite a figure for this nebulous category, if you can.
Actually, welfare spending is barely less than military spending, at 11.8% of the budget.
The same can be said of anyone who owns a house. There is nothing wrong with a thing you already own becoming more valuable to others.
This is a very confused couple of statements; most egregiously, you’re conflating asset price inflation with consumer price inflation, and only the latter has a direct effect on the working class.
The ultra-wealthy have a low ‘marginal propensity to consume’. If Jeff Bezos gains $10 billion on paper, he does not spend $10B on consumption goods; most gains remain invested. Appreciation alone does not automatically translate into CPI inflation, because unrealized gains are not income.
It’s objectively nonsensical to refer to the notion of purchasing something, and its market value increasing while you merely continue to own it, as “hoarding”. Not to mention, again, that net worth is a valuation, a price tag. It is not money. Stop acting like when the price of a stock goes up, that amount of cash money is magically vacuumed out of the wallets of the working class.
People want to be able to own things (aka assets), though.
Ownership isn’t hoarding.
Except this literally cannot ever happen because the demand created by the market is the whole reason those assets appreciate in value in the first place. It’s a self-correcting issue: if too many people try to just ‘own assets’, the demand will drop, and said assets’ value will start depreciating, incentivizing those people back in the other direction, to laboring.
Asset appreciation is not income, stop equivocating the two.
Not necessarily; it’s entirely possible for everyone to have identical wealth, and also all be poor. In fact, that was the default state of humanity for the vast majority of its history.