The major western countries aren't "broke". They simply stopped taxing their richest citizens like they did in the 50's and 60's. If they taxed them again like that all would be fine as it was in the 50's and 60's. Spending does NOT need to be cut.

unkorrupted · 1 year

Its not the amount of spending - its not even the amount of debt.

Its what the money is being spent on that is the problem. Any choice creates an opportunity cost, so when your emergency solutions involve huge subsidies to broken corporations and financial special interests, it doesn't really matter if the budget is balanced or how much you can get the rich to give back from their gifts.

deuteros · 1 year

Spending does NOT need to be cut.

Nice try, politicians.

DrRichardCranium · 1 year

I believe the right criterion for defining if the country is broke is the debt as % of GDP. Have a look at this Eurozone map and if you understand the meaning of GDP you will realize that even if the "rich" (whatever the definition you have) will pay more taxes, the graph will not change significantly, it may even worsen the situation as the Laffer curve suggest.

So the only way to address the equation is by controlling spending as growing the revenue by taxation has limits.

slinkymaster · 1 year

Did it ever cross anyone's mind that maybe the 50's and 60's were so prosperous for us because we were the only modern country not rebuilding from war?

All of our competition was rebuilding roads, bridges, and houses while we were building everything else.

wdreamer · 1 year

I honestly don't know enough to make commentary, but here's some of the income brackets during the 50's and 60's to go along with the OP's suggestions.

http://www.stanford.edu/class/polisci120a/immigration/Federal%20Tax%20Brackets.pdf

Torquemada1970 · 1 year

The UK tried taxing the rich, more than once - and the majority became tax exiles (some famously, like the Rolling Stones and Michael Caine).

While tax havens/ non-dom options still exist, I fail to see how trying it again will be any different.

ascii · 1 year

You have submitted the following links as evidence of your claims:

2 Google searches. I don't know what others are seeing since Google customises search results based on location, but I'm seeing nothing to directly support your evidence. A Wikipedia page about public debt. A map of how public debt varies over the globe, things like that. It is a really bad idea to submit Google search results as evidence, since based on locale, people will get completely different results, even when searching at the same time.
Your third link is a slide show that shows how the inequality (presumably this is the income gap? Couldn't find a definition of what type of inequality they mean... Might be penis length too, I guess.) has varied from the sixties to the nineties. First of all, the data ends during the mid nineties, so it's more or less useless based on that alone. But aside from being fifteen years old, to the extent that the trends in that data are still true, it doesn't even support your own point - the US and large parts are marked as light blue in all maps since 1981, which means «constant or slightly increasing inequality». There is no colour to mark completely constant inequality, and a light shade of red means slight decrease. So we don't know from the graphs if these countries in fact have completely stable inequality or a very slight increase, but either way, there is no support in those maps for a noticeable rise in inequality. I find the map disingenuous as a country with constant inequality will be shown in the map using a tone of the colour used for countries with increasing inequality.
Your fourth link is useless. It shows that rich people have an increasing income. Given the existence of inflation, that should not be surprising. It also shows that rich people earn more than the poor people. This should also not be surprising. But because of the graph type and the scales chosen, it is impossible to determine if non-rich people also have an increasing income or not.
Your fifth link is a historical text about taxes. It is mostly about taxation before the American revolution. Relevance?

If you want to be taken seriously, please find a few authoritative links that actually support your opinion. That said, to the extent that we need taxes and government, as a libertarian I support a flat rate taxation system with positively no loop holes and as strong economic deterrents for tax evasion as we can come up with.

ayesee · 1 year

You wanna cite some sources or figures for this? Or is it just up to the rest of us to do your research for you?

shenpen · 1 year

I wonder why your view stops at the 50's and the 60's. What about the serious stagflation of the 70's? Doesn't it seem likely that these policies had something to do with that? The revival of neo-liberal economic policies didn't come out of nowhere, but out of a disillusionment with these policies because of the general economic lethargy + inflation they managed to cause by 1973.

matthewtb · 1 year

You couldn't be more wrong. Tax revenues work on a bell curve, when rates get too high total revenue actually drops. This is because people lose motivation and incentive to innovate and create wealth. Further, why do you believe we should punish success here? And to even suggest spending does not need to be cut is dangerously foolish, and shows you lack any real understanding of economic theory. (see debt to GDP %) This is nothing mroe than socialist propaganda

OpenSourceFuture · 1 year

You do realize in the 50's and 60's we were the manufacturing power house of the world because everyone else had been bombed to shit so:

There was no where else for capital to fly to.
Laborers in the US could demand higher wages and such because their was almost no competition.
Lack of communication technology inhibited outsourcing.

Thwart · 1 year

This is absurd without mentioning the war machine and new personal spending that makes any comparison to the 50'-60's naive.

prqd112 · 1 year

haven't increased their spending? hahaha.... what is the stimulus, bailouts, wars, healthcare, etc.? just look at our deficit this year.

[deleted] · 1 year

Go back to /r/politics.

Tyekanik · 1 year

Well. Could it be that public spending has increased in the West since 1950?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d9/Us_gov_spending_history_1902_2010.png

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c4/Public_vs_private_consumption_Norway.PNG

Did not western countries have deficiets in the 1950s?

http://traxel.com/deficit/deficit-percentage-50-years.png

logrusmage · 1 year

Also: You're fucking dreaming if you think the rich wouldn't pack up and leave your nation high and dry.

fubuvsfitch · 1 year

Spending doesn't need to be cut? That may be. But if spending is cut, then taxes won't have to be raised again. That being said:

WASTE certainly needs to be cut.

hanlon · 1 year

What I like about this topic is that the chances of even 1 person that falls under this super rich classification even coming within a mile of a computer that is reading this is almost zero. I'm amazed at how many people come to the super rich's defense. What harm is there in that 1% making some sacrifices for the betterment of everyone (including themselves)?

mrrazz · 1 year

But Europe and Japan already tax their citizens as you suggest, and their sovereign debt problems and recessions/depressions are at least as bad as what the U.S. is contending with.

frogking · 1 year

[deleted]

logrusmage · 1 year

However it is not relevant because it simply hides the fact that he doesn't pay in proportion to the benefit he gets from the societies laws that protect his wealth and status.

This is probably the stupidest thing I've ever heard. A man that wealthy who is not a crook contributed far more to society than government contributed to his success. In fact, government probably hindered him.

dsk · 1 year

If they taxed them again like that all would be fine as it was in the 50's and 60's.

The stupid, it burns.

solyanik · 1 year

Whether rates are high or low, evidence shows our tax system won't collect more than 20% of GDP.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704608104575217870728420184.html

mijj · 1 year

if you start taxing wealthy people at reasonable levels the Diamond Encrusted Toothpick industry will be destroyed.

Would you want that on your conscience?

dumky · 1 year

It is scary to see that people consider this as some kind of moral option or even obligation.

The first role of government is protecting the individual's rights, not raping their wallets and private property.

Secondly, some well-intentioned people who propose this tend to ignore how the rich get rich. They do so by providing services of value, with either great value or value to many. Assuming those were uncoerced transactions, the buyers already profited once from the transaction.

Bill Gates has already done tremendous good to society by selling a product that many wanted. Now, we're talking about stealing the profits he rightfully generated to fund wasteful and unaccountable government programs... Now, that's a good ethics to teach our children.

mwarden · 1 year

http://www.heritage.org/BudgetChartbook/top10-percent-income-earners

troller10 · 1 year

Are you a government employee?

samteezy · 1 year

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

Sorry, but no thanks. I'll let the super rich be as rich as they want. We can either be unequal in wealth or all equal in poverty.

ChaosMotor · 1 year

Its government spending that is the issue, not cutting taxes. Government doesn't produce anything, it only takes from those who do produce against the producer's will. Government gleefully "allocates" more in their "budgets" than the taxation provides, mostly on useless and wasteful programs to enrich the friends of the people who make up the government, and then complains taxes aren't high enough to support governmental "budgetary requirements", as if a budget's limitations stem from what all we desire and not the amount that we actually have.

What we are provided for in exchange is a morbidly obese military that spends more money lining the pockets of contractors and the military industrial complex than it does in developing and caring for its soldiers, a police force that sees its citizens as the enemy, public services that provide anything but, and a deteriorating infrastructure; while what we do still have is continually stolen from us to support welfare queen corporations who wouldn't survive six months on the open market due to fundamental flaws in their business plans i.e. they depend on the government, not the market, for their survival.

So, while I think it is an utter travesty that 99% of American income goes to 1% of the population, I think this is more because of government regulation than in spite of it, and I think that making a horribly inefficient and unaccountable government - remind me, again, the historical approval ratings of Congress, the President, and the SCOTUS - in charge of even more of the wealth of this once-fine nation to be similarly mis-managed is astonishingly, well, irresponsible; but we haven't seen responsibility from the body politic since long before my time.

A nation is made strong when it is decentralized, in wealth, in politics, in society, and in making and breaking contracts. Like the borg, if one part of a decentralized system breaks, it keeps functioning, whereas like a house of cards, if one part of a centralized government breaks, it all does.

IMJGalt · 1 year

Rubbish. Spending has been a higher percentage of GDP than revenue for decades and the chickens are coming home to roost. The problem here is that no matter how much the political class confiscate to buy votes they always spend more.

slenderdog · 1 year

No evidence, no analysis, just some vague notion that things were better in the past when taxes on wealthy people were higher.

GTFO.

TenzingNorgay · 1 year

This is mostly nonsense. However ... just for the sake of doing the mental experiment, lets pretend you're right. There's a very simple way to increase the tax burden on the rich and reduce it for most everyone else: Go to a Fair Tax/Flat Tax system exclusively for everyone. No exceptions for charities or churches. EVERYONE pays one and only one tax every time they buy something. No other kind of tax would be permitted and people found avoiding this one tax would be severely punished. Richer people spend more and thus would create more in taxes. It's not regressive because of the "fair" provisions.

This will never happen because the political ooze that runs things won't be able to socially engineer the society to suit themselves by paying off corporations/crack whores/losers/special interests with hand tuned tax policies. Also, it would mean IRS employees and tax lawyers/accountants around the country would have to go find real work.

Oh, and one other thing. At this point, almost nothing will work. The drooling slobs running D.C. have spent so much in the last 18 months that they make W looks like a fiscal conservative. It is going to take several generations to clean up the mess Obama alone is leaving behind. The ONLY way I can see to fix this in less time is reinstate the Federal inheritance tax for estates over, say, $1M. Since the elders now retiring are only too happy to collect on programs they never ever paid for (drug benefits, full healthcare, etc.), let their estates pay back the nation instead of sticking their grandchildren with the bill. In fact, I'd make it mandatory by forcing anyone that wants these unfunded benefits to put their estates in escrow now so the money is guaranteed to be there later.

ElectricWizard · 1 year

The statism in this thread is nauseating. God forbid somebody who is successful actually gets to keep some of the money he earned. And I beg of you not say that they don't earn it. What do you really want the super rich to do? Work in fucking mines 12 hours a day? Give me a break.

kubutulur · 1 year

He is so a government employee

PissinChicken · 1 year

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve

Seriously, even if you took a the Rich peoples money you would not have enough to pay for the government.

Plus they would all leave take their money with them. Take the firms offshore stop paying the 60% of taxes they do now ans you won't have shit.

Rich people put their money in stock market which generates capital for firms so they can expand. Which creates jobs lowers the cost of the things we buy and gets us more pay.

betabob · 1 year

My guess is that the poster wants more of someone else's money.

twoodfin · 1 year

reddit: Not your blog.

HeroicLife · 1 year

Taxation is theft.

Sadist · 1 year

This reddit is so far removed from actual supported arguments made even in the basic undergrad courses, that I'm not really surprised anymore by bullshit blanket statements like some people make here.

Dangger · 1 year

I just want to say 99% of the comments in this thread are retarded. Including this one.

youaretheother · 1 year

it doesn't matter if they pay a high percentage of the total taxes - it only matters if they pay taxes that are proportionate to the percentage of the wealth they own

Why should the rich have to pay for the poor's shortcomings? That's now how a capitalist society works. The more wealthy people don't owe anything to anyone, and it is an insult for them to be taxed at such an unfair rate relative to poorer people. Here is a tax bracket calculator in case you are unaware of what tax rates actually are right now.

It absolutely does matter that they pay a high percentage of total taxes. The wealthy are picking up more than their fair share in paying taxes. Why should we continue to bleed them dry to pay for benefits to which they are not entitled?

Additionally, the government is spending beyond its own limits, hence the $1.17 trillion budget deficit coming up in the next fiscal year. Revenue isn't going to solve this problem - they're not even spending within their current limits. Costs must be cut if we want to have a fiscally sound budget.

They simply stopped taxing their richest citizens like they did in the 50's and 60's. If they taxed them again like that all would be fine as it was in the 50's and 60's.

The answer to the government "sovereign debt" issues is simply tax the rich in the percentages that worked so well in the 50's and 60's and society will boom just like it did then and without the fake debt and tax evasion chicanory that caused the fake economic growth spurts since then.

If you cut spending so much that you hurt your middle class then you will shrink the economy. We have reached that point.

Cite some sources. I'm not sure where you got the information that the wealthy were taxed so much more in the 1950's and 1960's, or why that means that the government's budget was more balanced. You wrote this post like a letter to the editor for your college newspaper. Check your facts, then come back when you're prepared to intelligently debate issues.

stmfreak · 1 year

TL;DR: big-government shill thinks bureaucrats know better than the super wealthy how to invest their money.

SmokeyDBear · 1 year

You totally don't understand. If we weren't benefiting from wealth trickling down due to reduced taxes on the rich then the drastic increase in wealth disparity over the past thirty years would surely have been even higher!

aletoledo · 1 year

So the solution is violence and theft? No principle of peace is possible, must you take from people what is theirs? Why not kill them while you're at it or are you afraid of killing the goose that laid the golden egg? Yes, it's better to leave people alive and in slavery, so that they will produce for you.

mccoyn · 1 year

I'm not sure we can go back to the 50's and 60's very easily. We had just come out of WWII, which gave the US a huge industrial advantage over the rest of the world. A number of things have combined to deplete our industrial capabilities since then (relative to the rest of the world). The biggest is global competition for labor. Also, the low tax rate for the rich has meant that the way to get ahead in the US is to create a business, outsource the manufacturing and collect a healthy chunk of the profits. Those profits are primarily collected by the super-rich and distributed, inefficiently, through our society by the service industry. This is the hidden source of money in the "service economy".

If we increase the tax rate on the rich, by a large amount, those companies will move to another country and the service economy will collapse. We don't have the healthy industrial economy to pull us through. We may be able to remake our economy again, but we need to move slowly and deliberately for decades to do it.

latro · 1 year

Government spending as a percentage of GDP has been rising steadily since the start of the 20th century.

Since the end of WWII, tax receipts have bounced around an average of 18% of GDP in the US.

It doesn't matter who you tax and when, it spending outpaces receipts, you're system can't work.

inquirer · 1 year

Why would you think the rich actually paid the full 90% back in the day?

The rich will never pay taxes. Ever. You either get rid of rich people or they don't pay taxes, there is no in between.

bigattack · 1 year

Can't speak for other Western countries, but in the US the wealthy are already taxed disproportionately higher than those earning less. The top 1% of the taxpayers, who earn about 19% of the income pay 36% of the taxes paid in the US, where as the bottom 50% of earners earn about 13% of the income and pay 3% of the taxes.

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