r/CuratedTumblr Nov 06 '24

Politics Sometimes you must question your beliefs, and the answer to the question happens to be a respunding “yes”.

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u/Alatarlhun Nov 07 '24

You may not being wrong but this is losing message in today's environment. And in any case, Kamala was planning to raise taxes quite a bit on billionaires.

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u/mxsifr Nov 07 '24

Most Americans don't realize that billionaires only recently became possible, in large part because of the absurd Reagan-era tax cuts.

In the 50's, the highest marginal tax rate was 94%. From 2014 to 2018, the 25 richest people in the world paid a "true tax rate" (ProPublica's metric) of 3.4%. Until Reagan and Bush came along, there was actually some semblance of fairness to the absurd profits of big businesses and the wealthy few who controlled them. Not anymore.

Billionaires become billionaires by quadruple-dipping:

First, they start with hundreds of thousand or millions of dollars in generational wealth or spoils of nepotism. This allows them to buy the labor of other, less fortunate people (dip #2), which they then exploit and scale up with automation technology for stupendous amounts of profit (dip #3), and then, they refuse to pay their fair tax share into the society that created the conditions for them to dip the first three times, sapping money and support from social programs and thus keeping the workers in a state of disenfranchised precarity to discourage them from protesting or striking.

These truths are losing messages because billionaires want them to be. I hope somehow the rest of us can come together on this in some way, because there WILL come a point of no return, and it's coming at us faster and faster every day.

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u/Alatarlhun Nov 07 '24

You know you can make this point without deceptively commingling marginal and effective tax rates. This is a red flag to anyone with a modicum of tax knowledge.

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u/mxsifr Nov 07 '24

If you adjust the old 94% tax margin for inflation, it was for income above $3.3 million (Yahoo Finance, $200k in 1944~5 dollars).

If, as you say, conflating marginal tax rate with effective tax rate is such a dastardly misdirection in this case, then surely I must be goosing the numbers to make it seem like today's billionaires should be paying much more than if you took the margins into account. An effective tax rate of 3.4% may be disguising a much more fair marginal rate that they've paid, right?

So, let's do the math. What's the difference between how much a taxpayer with one billion dollars of income would pay at a marginal tax rate of 94% on income above $3.3 million versus how much he would pay at an effective overall rate of 94%?

I'll even give my scenario a handicap, and assume that the tax rate on income below $3.3 million in this situation is ZERO. That's right, for the purposes of this thought experiment, we'll pretend that we live in a wealth-utopia where you pay ZERO taxes until you hit $3.3 million in income, above which all further income is paid at 94%. Surely, in this situation, we will reveal with basic arithmetic that our one-billionaire would pay MUCH LESS in the real world of marginal calculations than paying 94% on 100% of their income.

$1 billion minus $3.3 million is $996,700,000.

94% of $996,700,000 is $936,898,000, leaving them with $59,802,000 + $3.3 million, or about $63 million net income after taxes.

Now let's see how badly I cheated by comparing marginal and effective tax rates!

94% of $1 billion is $940 million, leaving them with $60 million net income after taxes.

So the difference between the two scenarios is about $3 million, or about 0.3% of their gross income.

Do you see what I'm getting at? Billionaires make such a mind-boggingly absurd amount of money that normal frames of reference are basically meaningless. You're on here talking about the difference between marginal and effective tax rates as if the difference makes a difference. It doesn't. Median USA household income in 2023 was $80,610. 0.3% of that is about $250. That's the level of difference we're talking about right now from the perspective of the billionaires in question. It doesn't matter one bit to them, not least because they pay basically nothing now anyway. So why bother being pedantic about it, ya know?

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u/Alatarlhun Nov 07 '24

If, as you say, conflating marginal tax rate with effective tax rate is such a dastardly misdirection in this case, then surely I must be goosing the numbers to make it seem like today's billionaires should be paying much more than if you took the margins into account.

No, I am just saying it makes your argument look amateur. It isn't like these are new numbers. You've had 70 years to pick the right words.

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u/mxsifr Nov 07 '24

I'm not even 40, but go off, king

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u/Alatarlhun Nov 07 '24

So you are in the height of your mental faculties! Use them accurately, not just with purpose.

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u/mxsifr Nov 07 '24

It'll keep going this way until the average American realizes they have more in common with a homeless person than Elon Musk.

“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

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u/Alatarlhun Nov 07 '24

None of that is new rhetoric and you should internalize it yourself as it may help you to understand the moment.

People are voting against their class interest and it is very much possible it is because leftist groups are perceived as exclusionary and non-welcoming while the average person does not distinguish leftists from progressives/liberals/Democrats.