@50
I'm sorry that you had a bad experience. As I said I think that current politicians are money-to-the-rich types. But like many, I must say that I think you are failing to understand two important factors.
First, I'm glad that you're fortunate enough to have overcome blindness and to be employed etc. I have too. But most haven't, and in all honesty most won't. And if you go blind later, you aren't going to be able to just go back to your old profession without years and years of rehab at best, and at worst you're never going to recover from it. It's not like people *want* to sit at home on SSDI, but when the choice is between making minimum wage or less at some shitty job that the rehab agency got you, quite possibly working in the rehab agency, or being on SSDI and having a life, I know which I'd choose, and even if I chose employment I'd still be looking at using it for 5 to 10 years minimum to get to that point. At the end of the day most blind people will end up on benefits at some point in their lives, and a really, really large percent will stay there for lack of good options to do otherwise. Though beside the point, I personally believe in a universal basic income, so I don't see any moral problem with that--safety nets should be there for a reason, and though we like to tell ourselves otherwise, blindness is honestly a hell of a reason.
Second, no level of tax penalties to the rich are going to satisfy you because the nature of percent gains is that the rich will always win. You can raise the taxes on the rich all you want, but you'll still be living in a world where the rich seemingly get a bunch of tax breaks that you don't have by investing in things that give you a percent return instead of a flat salary. In all honesty I'd be willing to bet most rich people don't care about whether you decide to tax the rich, because anything short of "we the government hereby declare that you aren't allowed to have over a million dollars" or something will still make the investments return percents instead of fixed dollars, and as long as you have that your growth is exponential.
And once you've done that you quickly find out that the amount of money you can extract from the rich is still way, way too little to do all the things people think it'll let us do. Will it help sure, but there's hundreds and hundreds of times more money to be had by figuring out better tax structures for the rest of us, or reallocating things, or etc.
If someone came out tomorrow and said "I am the magic king of taxes and I will now be taxing the rich an extra 40% a year" or something I'd be for it. But it'd get us one of the enumerable projects we might want to use the money for. It's an improvement. But the rich are still basically the same amount of rich afterwords, we've only got the one project of many, and frankly to some extent all that did is redirect money from charities to the government who will redistribute it, possibly to do less good less efficiently than those charities. So I don't think it's so clear cut as all that, just throwing some extra taxes on it, because to some extent you're just saying that you're going to redistribute money from people like the Gates Foundation or fighting malaria or whatever to the government under the hope that the government can do better. I land on the side of taxing the rich, sure, and some years ago I was as vehemently for it as you, but when you look into it it just isn't really solving anything much in the grand scheme. There's a hell of a lot of other inefficiencies you could tackle, like making it easier to get drugs approved, or making it possible for doctors to function without having to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for liability insurance per year each, or doing government-sponsored healthcare, or reforming copyright and patent law to stop giant monopolies like the drug companies from existing, or I could go on for a while.
I'm not saying that I think we efficiently allocate tax money. I'm not saying that you don't have the right to be mad that things like scholarships can get taxed. I'm not saying that you should be taxed for living in the U.S. as a noncitizen, or that as a citizen you should be taxed if you're not contributing to the U.S. economy, or anything else along those lines. I don't even know for sure what my opinion is on all those issues. I'm only saying that you're blaming the wrong thing for the wealth disparity
What I blame is this: we didn't tie the minimum wage to inflation, we didn't keep the real estate market under control, we didn't keep the healthcare market under control. My father was able to get a giant house with a yard nearish downtown on the salary of a teacher in the early 90s. Nowadays an apartment costs what their mortgage did, roughly. We went from 10% to 20% of your money being spent on housing to 30+%. Medical care costs have been rising exponentially for the last 20 years. Lots of things have been rising exponentially along with it. The rich don't get ahead by being taxed less, they get ahead by managing to save enough money that the annual return from their investments can make up for the frankly horrid conditions of the U.S. economy. All you need to be wealthy by modern standards when you retire--a couple million dollars in other words--is $10000 a year starting around the time you're 18. That used to be somewhat manageable. Now it's not. But taxes isn't what changed. What changed is, I don't really have a better summary than runaway capitalism and us becoming okay with runaway capitalism, but that's not quite exactly the thing that I see there. It's hard to put into words.
And, personally, I think we were at a breaking point before this. The youngest generations have realized they're fucked over by this kind of stuff and that climate change and such are coming right behind it and it's kind of a ticking time bomb, in that the only thing really keeping things as they are is that most of those people are too young to vote still.
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