Comments by "coolmodelguy" (@coolmodelguy6304) on "That's Debatable: Is Corporate Wealth Out of Hand?" video.

@Nine-Signs - I agree with you that it is the system. It seems that you and I are also students of Professor Richard Wolff, who advocates for democracy in the workplace. I also agree that the rich used their wealth to undo all the reforms that FDR put in place. What we have is a situation where over the entire span of capitalism's reign, the wealthy have proven to be reckless and irresponsible, using their wealth to tear down every single reform put into place to help ordinary people. There is not a single reform that they have not attacked and tried to remove when the purpose of the reformed system is to help citizens. So therein lies the problem, wealthy people believe they should rule over everyone else, but they are the ones who cause virtually every problem mankind has ever known outside of havoc nature itself is capable of. My belief is that no reform will ever hold until we deal with the wealthy themselves, by forcing them to become as ordinary as everyone else. No one should be allowed to hold so much wealth, that they can therefor influence politics though think tanks and non-profit organizations their wealth pays for. That does not mean that everyone is the same or that people cannot be wealthy, just the opposite. In order for reforms like workplace democracy to gain a lasting foothold, in order to end the wars, provide healthcare for all citizens and do the dozens of reforms on progressive agenda's, we must first defeat the stranglehold the wealthy and corporations have on our governments. We cannot do so by fighting dozens of simultaneous battles, thus diluting our power, because that is exactly what the wealthy want us to do. No, we must behead the hydra once and for all by restricting the individuals capability to accumulate morbid wealth in the first place. Only then can we make headway on making life better for all citizens of this planet.
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A wealth tax is the wrong approach and is fraught with problems. There is a solution to wealth and income inequality that will function wonderfully while not changing the capitalist economic model, that solution is a hard cap on individual wealth. A hard cap on wealth is easily enforced when no one is allowed to exceed the cap. Under a wealth cap, capital will flow horizontally instead of vertically. Just think about the evolution of the steam engine. In the beginning, boilers blew up and engines burned up. Eventually, boilers got release valves and the steam engines got governors. Both devices when subjected to a hard cap became reliable and profitable. The same thing must be done to wealth because wealth inequality is the same thing as an exploding boiler.
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I'm with you until your last line about Larry Summers. You must have missed what Yanis said about wealthy people making money in their sleep. If 40% of wealth is owned by the 1% in the USA, that comes out to $38.8 trillion of household wealth (2019 household financial assets $97 trillion). Since that wealth is held in "financial assets", the interest at 5% is $1.94 trillion. That interest sum is 9.05% of the entire 2019 GDP ($21.43 trillion). I just demonstrated that wealth grows faster than the economy with just the 1%'s share of wealth, now look at the interest that all household wealth generates ($4.85 trillion) as a percentage of GDP (22.63%). There is just no way that wealth can grow like that without draining all of our citizens wealth and without looting the United States Treasury. The 2019 GDP was $21.43 trillion, which increased 4.1% over 2018 by growing $848.8 billion. The wealth generated by financial assets in 2019 far outstrips and outruns the economic GDP growth of 2019. We don't need a wealth tax, we require an individual wealth cap. Otherwise what we have is the economic equivalent of exploding boilers during the steam engine era.
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Do both by placing a hard cap on individual wealth. A wealth cap is easier to enforce than wealth taxes and capped wealth cannot buy political systems.
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Put a hard cap on individual wealth. Much easier to enforce than wealth taxes and will solve a lot of structural economic problems.
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Here is something easier and more effective to manage. Put a hard cap on individual wealth. Much easier to enforce than wealth taxes and will solve a lot of structural economic problems.
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