Comments by "Kristopher Driver" (@paxdriver) on "" video.
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If we accept that a million in savings is necessary for an average comfortable retirement then we have to accept there ought to be a path to that with the average salary. Absent that congruence we have to accept that those earning a lifetime of wealth on investment income annually are disproportionately benefitting from the coerced labour of the rest, ie slavery or indentured servitude by threat of homelessness (which some are trying to make illegal btw) or starvation.
The remedy is a sliding scale of incomes from the top and bottom ends. The richer the top end gets, the more the tax burden should skew for the opposite bottom right down to zero except sales taxes. At the top end a 70% tax is reasonable to anyone considering how much easier it is for them to make an extra 100k without more work or effort expended in their lives. 1% ROI on 100mln in assets means a person who doesn't notice that amount of money is extracting it from several persons who can't work because of homelessness and starvation, which is a waste of lives but also a waste of tax relief since it doesn't affect the wealthy person's quality of life or ability to risk a productive enterprise at all.
If a wealthy person wants to retain their investment income all they have to do is apply it to productive startups like a local bakery, for eg. By encouraging dividend seeking or offshore havens or umbrella LLC we're not getting the benefit that tax relief was intended to provide the wealthy.
In other words hoarding wealth in safe assets should not protect them from taxation, only risky ventures like a local construction company ought to provide that benefit. If wealthy people believe they deserve that ROI because they're so smart then surely they can apply those smarts to both earn their roi and improve the city's small businesses in the process.
Thus goes for universities too. They should not be allowed to apply student loan revenues to concerts or waterparks when many students struggle for bus fare. Local students ought to sit on boards of campus operations as part of faculty credit and funds ought to be raised by arts, débats, student concerts, and student sales drives led by students with products and services produced by students. Universities are supported by the public with land, grands, tax relief, and transit to name a few, there's no reason Monsanto should get patents on their research and then overcharge farmers who are subsidized feeding those students. If drug discovery is assisted by universities there's no reason marketing budgets exceed R&D for those companies who benefit while students work at Starbucks while also publishing the research they conducted but earning no dividend from the company.
It should be simple to assume profit sharing across all jobs. That little change would significantly lessen income disparity and simplify taxation without disincentivizing investors at all. Nobody would choose to make no money just because they're now making less money when they did nothing to earn it except for already having too much money. Nobody with assets would choose to sit on it unproductively if they simply got taxed the same on it as workers, they would actually be incentized to put it to more productive use where they'd not only get higher roi but get taxed less on that return. It would jump start the economy to tax risk averse roi and award preferential tax relief for returns on productive enterprise, where they're encouraged to diversify 100k to 10 startups rather than 100k leveraged to 500k on a stable blue chip for stable returns and guaranteed tax relief anyway.
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