Comments by "James Adams" (@ExPwner) on "The Failure of Trickle-Down Economics | Robert Reich" video.

@Zombinejerry not at all correct. Marginal tax rates are not EFFECTIVE tax rates. Reagan didn't really change effective rates that much. So yes, it is a conspiracy theory to suggest that there was some massive "trickle down" thing going on when in reality it was a tax reform that made effective rates look more like the marginal ones.
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That and Fed policy, yes. This man is full of shit. He pushes anything and everything as evidence against what the other guys have done while accepting none of the blame for his own policies. He is a political hack.
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@SurroundedByIdiots that's utter nonsense. Not taking someone's stuff isn't "distributing" it upwards. That's not how economics works. And no, Cenk didn't have ANYTHING right. We can immediately dismiss the rest of that entire video after that sentence alone.
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@callidusvulpes5556 wrong dumbass. Tax cuts are not "paid for" at all. Not taking someone else's stuff does not require any funding source whatsoever. This is not how taxes work, and it's not how they ever have worked. Me not paying does not create additional tax burden for you. You're victim blaming here. The state steals your money. The people not paying taxes are not.
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@SurroundedByIdiots "I expected a more intellgent response." You wouldn't know intelligence because you're parroting Cenk. I'm not confusing anything. Taxation is theft. "Cenk got everything right because economic history proves him right." No, he didn't, dumbass. This is obvious to anyone who knows anything about the history of tax rates, GDP growth or government spending. Notice how you just assert that he's right with no proof? That's because you are doing what you accuse others of doing.
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@SurroundedByIdiots " No, those prices aren't passed on to the consumer because those are taxes on profits, not on capital expenditures. " Blatant non-sequitur.
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@SurroundedByIdiots " most people don't realize that the economy flourished at tax and union levels that sound "socialist" by today's standards." Again, the effective rates weren't considerably higher. That you keep referring to marginal rates rather than effective shows you have no clue what you're talking about here.
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@SurroundedByIdiots "The worst recessions of the 100 years both happened under a system of low taxes." No they didn't! The Great Depression happened AFTER a massive increase in marginal rates, not before. You can clearly see this by when the rates were made effective. "No period is perfect, but where we are now is a period where 80% of American workers were struggling to get by, paycheck to paycheck, and this was before the pandemic." No we do not, dumbass. This is a leftist talking point that has NO evidence to support it. Go find the underlying attempt at evidence. You will NOT find that such a claim is validated.
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@callidusvulpes5556 "you sound like a fucking ancap" Yes.
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@callidusvulpes5556 "Someone has to pay for our institutions, infrastructure, and ridiculous military spending " You're getting closer. Spending is the problem and the driver of government taxing. Now if you accept that such ridiculous spending isn't set in stone then you get closer to a solution. Namely paying for it privately. Producers getting paid by consumers through contractual agreement rather than everyone trying to make everyone else pay for stuff that they want. Starting with things like SS, Medicare and the bloated military. I'll opt for private alternatives, thank you very much.
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@callidusvulpes5556 how are we defining "nation" here? By that I mean why would we automatically assume that the correct size for the territory of defense for a given entity providing "national defense" (even if we accept the premise that it is an economic public good for the purposes of this discussion, which I am more than happy to grant) must be current nation-state borders (ie US, Mexico, Canada, etc) as opposed to say more firms and smaller geographical areas? Would it not be just as easy (if not easier) for California to have a different entity responsible for defense from say Maine than for North Dakota and parts of Canada? After all, most European nations are roughly the same land mass as US states if I recall correctly, yet they have different providers. Even if one counts the EU as one "nation-state" for purposes of defense, you have nations that are in Europe but not a part of the EU.
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@callidusvulpes5556 again, that begs the question: how big do you think that a "nation" must be? At really small levels of scale, we know how to defend people from low level criminals with police or private security, but they're not prepared for bigger forces. At the larger scale, people start talking about things like anti-missle defense and nuclear weapons. To my knowledge, many countries do not have massive defense programs like the latter. However, they are still recognized as sovereign and virtually no one questions whether or not they should remain as sovereign or be absorbed into another union. So the million dollar question is: how small can one make a "nation" where it still functions for purposes of defending itself (and avoids the freerider problem) but isn't blowing a lot of money on defense unnecessarily. As an AnCap, I recognize that we likely won't be without a government in my lifetime. I also recognize that large-scale defense programs are generally regarded as a public good which opens the path for free riders if participation isn't mandatory. This is an area that I think could both benefit from and be improved upon by compromising towards decentralization for the US, and my main argument for that is that the US government currently has multiple nukes which could be split among multiple new "nations" and still work out just fine. In particular, the argument is that nations with nukes do not get invaded due to the concept of mutually assured destruction. I think that this would result in other nations across the world still respecting the sovereignty of the new nations, lower overall defense spending, fewer wars, and more accountability with respect to citizens being able to more effectively reign in spending on defense if they don't want to buy it.
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@callidusvulpes5556 Actually I'm full AnCap, but I would be very satisfied if the world made it to eliminating government with the only exception being a state for large-scale defense. I'm also willing to compromise there if that gets us to a freer society. I fail to see how socialism is decentralized or stateless. Every time I talk to self-professed leftist "anarchists" they make excuses for leftist economic policy through the state. I'm more than willing to hear your side of things, but of all of the people who label themselves as you do, 99% are hardcore statists just pretending that they aren't. How do you see society moving forward to your preferred system, and how does that involve getting the state out of the economy rather than more involved?
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@callidusvulpes5556 it does if you intend to deprive private owners of their property to get to said communal approach. As for government, are you saying that we should basically eliminate the federal and state governments then and make decisions at the local level instead? "I see our society moving toward it through reform or revolution depending on if we determine that the government, as our founding fathers would say “has become destructive of these ends” (these ends are our rights of course)." 100% agreed with you here, at least in principle. However I do not see revolution as being something that fares well empirically. "If you want some examples that illustrate my ideology pretty accurately and suggest that they can function economically look at Rojava and the Zapatistas" I don't find this to be a convincing argument. From my understanding, Rojava has largely turned to property rights and the Zapatistas are just outright terrorists. Not familiar with Ukraine, so I'll have to check that out, but I'm also not at all convined by Catalonia which committed massive crimes/terror. That's not libertarian, my dude.
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@callidusvulpes5556 no, the state is not "the people." This constitution is directly contradictory. If I have a right to private property then I can use it however I want. Then again so is the US one too. I do respect that they have at least claimed that private property rights are to be respected. It just makes little sense to essentially nationalize parts of the economy.
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@callidusvulpes5556 on the contrary, the document explicitly says that some things will be public. That's nationalizing. Trying to get around that with rhetoric of calling it something else doesn't change the substance. If they are dictating how I can and cannot use my property then they're controlling it. That's statism. The state is NOT the people. Otherwise the Holocaust was just a mass suicide, which it was not. No, everyone does not participate. If people want to voluntarily organize then that isn't the same as a state. A state has a territorial monopoly over the use of force. Big difference there.
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@parkeverywhere2621 it wasn't even really a deregulation, as shown by the numerous economic analyses of the actual impact of the partial repeal of GS which show it to be minimal at best. Virtually no serious economist is saying that tax policy or that partial repeal were the main causes or even contributors to the financial crash. The biggest ones were Fed policy (google "the Greenspan Put" for a more comprehensive view of this), GSEs and the CRA.
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@parkeverywhere2621 you definitely would NOT have read it from several economists. The wide agreement is that the partial repeal did very little, and you can verify this by cross referencing which firms were NOT mergers of commercial and investment (of which there are multiple) or firms whose mergers would not have been prevented by GS. Virtually no one is claiming that the partial repeal was to blame. Just political hacks that can't be bothered to look up this information. I do agree that some portions of the CRA are overstated, but in other ways it really isn't. I don't think you can really measure this since banks aren't just held to not doing redlining but even the APPEARANCE of redlining. You know how affirmative action came out of the Civil Rights Act? Think that but for geography and lending practices. Banks can get in hot water for just avoiding certain areas. Plus it wouldn't have to be a majority of loans. Just 5% of loans being bad could bankrupt a lending institution.
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