Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "The Secret to Actually Taxing the Rich | Robert Reich" video.

@STScott-qo4pw Personally, I prefer the kind of win where both the oligarchs and the tax attorneys are pushed off the decks of those super yachts, but I'll take what I can get. 😛
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@johnmartin4641 That's bullshit. Taxes aren't punishment, they are the payment for benefiting from society. The richer you are, the more you have to benefit from society's continued existence. A homeless person would barely suffer if society were to suddenly crater. A billionaire would suddenly have to actually provide value or starve to death. Big, big difference. Just because you choose not to understand how taxes work, doesn't change reality.
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The sad thing is that people actually believe that we don't have the money for things like ending homelessness in America, free college for anybody that wants it or medicare for all and paying off the national debt. The thing is that it's not that expensive, ending the illegal wars and collecting the tax debt already owed by billionaires would be enough to achieve all of those things and still have money left over. What we have is a lack of political will to do it by politicians that are being paid not to have the will to do it.
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That sort of thing does work. Usually it's a graduated tax rate where at some point it's nearly 100% of the income earned above that point. And we had a top tax rate of roughly 90% back during the golden years of the '50s and '60s when things were great for most people, economically speak, socially it was a nightmare if you weren't a white man. The thing it does is greatly discouraging the interest in hoarding wealth by not paying workers as most of the ill-begotten gains just have to be paid to the government in taxes which can be used to fund social safety net programs.
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Isn't that already the case? The problem as much as anything is that the people who know are mostly people being paid to engage in tax fraud. Even in the best case scenario, they'd be behind where they were if they narced their bosses out.
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Sort of, it was a masterful way of shifting tax burdens onto the poor. They cut government services in order to "balance" the budget. Most of those services were legitimately essential, so the states and localities wound up having to pick up the tab. But, in most areas, the taxes are things that poor people have to pay and can't easily avoid, like sales tax, and so they wind up paying that. The end result is that the poor wind up with a higher effective tax rate as they're paying for things that used to be funded via the federal income tax. In some areas the stuff just isn't done, so they don't get the services they need either. It's brilliant in an evil genius sort of way.
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@Q_from_Star_Trek As long as the cost to the tax cheats for defense is high enough, and they're personally forced to spend enough time in meetings dealing with it, they'd be punished. It would be better if they'd just pay their taxes, but if the best we can do is make them spend so much money and time trying to avoid paying that they don't benefit from the tax evasion, then at least that's something.
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@johnmartin4641 47% of the population pays no income tax, but it's because they don't make enough money to be taxed. Also, that's just federal income tax, there have been tax cuts and service cuts over the years handing off more and more to states and localities. Those taxes regular people do pay, nobody, even the homeless around here, are allowed out of the sales and use taxes. It's a flat up lie when people say that there are nearly half of the people not paying taxes, it's just income taxes and it's just because employers refuse to pay workers well enough to be taxed.
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@dragonore2009 Bill Gates stole most of the ideas that made Microsoft from Xerox and pretty much held the work ransom. He didn't create anything, after Basic that want already out there.
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@dragonore2009 As opposed to the alternatives that pretty much all result in some form of oligarchy. If a minority group can't convince the majority of something, perhaps they shouldn't get it.
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