United States Politics Thread 46

[Raphael]

As Feudalism would view serfs as property, so is Capitalism perfectly contented to consider human beings as potentially capital. The fortunate timing of the Enlightenment (at least for some sectors of the population) curbs the excess somewhat, but "renting" from your "landlord" is not all that notionally different from being a tenant farmer or some other person required to pay in a portion of one's proceeds to some overclass.

just wait til you find out about "property tax"

Property tax is something the wealthy pay to the public, so it works in the opposite to the forces Rounin Ryuuji is describing.

(However, Rounin Ryuuji's argument is partly based on playing word games specific to the English language, which makes it fairly unconvincing.)

Kinda weird that Nort is so insistent that I'm really poor, given that he's politically close to a camp whose members have apparently, in other contexts, asserted that everyone who owns a cellphone and whose clothes aren't rags is wealthy.

I don't know what you're referring to

Oh, for instance, I've seen right-wingers pass around annotated photos of AOC that called her a phony for having a cellphone and drinking coffee from cups with lids.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

As Feudalism would view serfs as property, so is Capitalism perfectly contented to consider human beings as potentially capital. The fortunate timing of the Enlightenment (at least for some sectors of the population) curbs the excess somewhat, but "renting" from your "landlord" is not all that notionally different from being a tenant farmer or some other person required to pay in a portion of one's proceeds to some overclass.

just wait til you find out about "property tax"

Are you suggesting I might be unaware nearly all human civilisation has taxation, or do you mean to imply it isn't something that predates feudalism even though it certainly does predate it?

Wait. They're both retirement plans? That's like a built-in function in the European countries I know.

It's a built-in function in the USA too, but apparently, everyone who can afford to prefers to have something else in addition to it.

yes - Social Security is unlikely to pay out at all for my generation (and it wasn't a good idea anyway - consider all the negative externalities of the tyrant FDR creating a govt-mandated identity number)

Tyrant? I don't quite get what you're on about there. Another sequence of fanciful ideas, I suppose? And not a good idea anyway? Is that to suggest the State ought to do nothing to care for the aging?

[Travis B.]

As Feudalism would view serfs as property, so is Capitalism perfectly contented to consider human beings as potentially capital. The fortunate timing of the Enlightenment (at least for some sectors of the population) curbs the excess somewhat, but "renting" from your "landlord" is not all that notionally different from being a tenant farmer or some other person required to pay in a portion of one's proceeds to some overclass.

just wait til you find out about "property tax"

Are you suggesting I might be unaware nearly all human civilisation has taxation, or do you mean to imply it isn't something that predates feudalism even though it certainly does predate it?

It's a built-in function in the USA too, but apparently, everyone who can afford to prefers to have something else in addition to it.

yes - Social Security is unlikely to pay out at all for my generation (and it wasn't a good idea anyway - consider all the negative externalities of the tyrant FDR creating a govt-mandated identity number)

Tyrant? I don't quite get what you're on about there. Another sequence of fanciful ideas, I suppose? And not a good idea anyway? Is that to suggest the State ought to do nothing to care for the aging?

Remember who you are quoting - much of this seems to just be right-wing blather to me.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Remember who you are quoting - much of this seems to just be right-wing blather to me.

I suppose it probably is, but the temptation to point out its absurdity is, well, tempting.

[Moose-tache]

1. Social Security will be solvent for as long as old people are the most crucial voters for the ruling party, regardless of short-term fiscal viability. Remember, SS does not come out of the payments you made when you were young; it is paid out of current government revenues. If the government robs the SS fund to pay for things on Tuesday, they can always borrow on Wednesday when pensioners knock on their door.

2. The SS number system was never meant to be an identification number, which should be obvious from its design. Its subsequent use as an identification number post-dates FDR, and is a consequence of the combination of resistence to an actual national identity system and the need for exactly such a system.

3. FDR was a piece of shit who pushed the limits of democratic government, so call him whatever bad names you want. Fuck Capitalism. Hail Satan.

[Travis B.]

3. FDR was a piece of shit who pushed the limits of democratic government, so call him whatever bad names you want. Fuck Capitalism. Hail Satan.

Somehow the Japanese Internment seems to be a far worse crime than introducing Social Security Numbers, which does not seem to be a crime at all.

[Ares Land]

just wait til you find out about "property tax"

Property tax is indeed pretty awful and should be replaced by a progressive tax on net wealth.
That may not be what you had in mind.

yes - Social Security is unlikely to pay out at all for my generation (and it wasn't a good idea anyway - consider all the negative externalities of the tyrant FDR creating a govt-mandated identity number)

I get FDR is kind of the ultimate evil for the American conservative, but I don't think he was particularly tyrannical.
If social security didn't exist, you'd have such a number anyway for tax purposes.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

just wait til you find out about "property tax"

Property tax is indeed pretty awful and should be replaced by a progressive tax on net wealth.

I like this

[Travis B.]

just wait til you find out about "property tax"

Property tax is indeed pretty awful and should be replaced by a progressive tax on net wealth.

I like this

The problem with property taxes in the US is that they are levied by individual local governments, and are used to fund things like public schools, so public schools in poorer areas end up being far less-funded than public schools in rich areas. What is needed is a national progressive wealth tax, which is apportionated down to local governments on a per-capita basis (with local governments being forbidden from levying their own taxes), e.g. each public school district in the country gets an equal amount of funding per student no matter what.

Of course, Nort's kind of people would have a fit if we ever tried to enact this.

[Travis B.]

I get FDR is kind of the ultimate evil for the American conservative, but I don't think he was particularly tyrannical.

The main tyrannical thing he did was the Japanese Internment - but of course this is the tyrannical thing that American conservatives overlook.

[Hallow XIII]

FDR is mostly the ultimate evil for his utter failure slash refusal to ensure proper succession. He purposefully centralized power within his own person, but by informal means, with the result that when he died the bureaucracy became autonomous and largely responsible only to congress. So really in the long term he wasn’t tyrannical enough.

[Linguoboy]

The problem with property taxes in the US is that they are levied by individual local governments, and are used to fund things like public schools, so public schools in poorer areas end up being far less-funded than public schools in rich areas. What is needed is a national progressive wealth tax, which is apportionated down to local governments on a per-capita basis (with local governments being forbidden from levying their own taxes), e.g. each public school district in the country gets an equal amount of funding per student no matter what.

That's not the only solution. States can also step in and equalise funding for public education. And, of course, local governments have other sources of revenue besides just property taxes and could use these to fund education if they wanted. (One of the historical selling points of statewide lotteries, for instance, was that the money raised would be spent on education. Of course, this was a misleading promise at best, since what most governments have done is simply reduce education funding from other sources so that the actual amount spent remains constant or even declines.)

Of course, Nort's kind of people would have a fit if we ever tried to enact this.

And yet they have no problem accepting millions in State or Federal funding for infrastructure projects, which is far less justifiable. It's in the common interest for all children to be well-educated, wherever they live. It's not in the common interest for people who want to live on one-acre lots to have their roads, transit, electric, water, sewerage, gas, etc. heavily subsidised so they don't have to pay the real cost of low-density living.

[Raphael]

And, of course, local governments have other sources of revenue besides just property taxes and could use these to fund education if they wanted.

Those would all be heavily dependent on how much money there is in the local area in question, though.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Of course, Nort's kind of people would have a fit if we ever tried to enact this.

Why? They supposedly love the Constitution!

Article 1, Section 8:

"The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;"

Congress is specifically vested with the power to actually do this, by the actual words of the actual Constitution.

[Nortaneous]

Of course, Nort's kind of people would have a fit if we ever tried to enact this.

Why? They supposedly love the Constitution!

Article 1, Section 8:

"The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;"

Congress is specifically vested with the power to actually do this, by the actual words of the actual Constitution.

If you want to quote the Constitution at your imaginary friend "They", perhaps you could also do the amendment that was deemed necessary to make an income tax legal.

The idea of a wealth tax is nonsense promoted by illiterates who think Elon Musk is hoarding billions of literal dollar bills in a vault like a dragon. A wealth tax would have one of three results: an explosion in creative accounting, massive capital flight (as happened in France), or USG making the Berlin Wall look like an episode of the Teletubbies. (The US is already one of two countries to tax citizens living abroad. The other is China.)

The main tyrannical thing he did was the Japanese Internment - but of course this is the tyrannical thing that American conservatives overlook.

That wasn't even FDR's only internment campaign, but who cares about the other ones?

...OK, apparently since I last checked (which would've been around 2009) some state government issued a formal apology for FDR's Italian internment camps. Who knew - Italians haven't been white for over a decade!

And yet they have no problem accepting millions in State or Federal funding for infrastructure projects, which is far less justifiable. It's in the common interest for all children to be well-educated, wherever they live. It's not in the common interest for people who want to live on one-acre lots to have their roads, transit, electric, water, sewerage, gas, etc. heavily subsidised so they don't have to pay the real cost of low-density living.

Getting big mad unprompted about people having space on which to live is an extremely normal thing to do.

It actually is in the common interest for the government to enable its subjects to have better lives - same rationale as for meat subsidies and food safety regulations, neither of which go anywhere near far enough.

Realizing the Jeffersonian ideal of widespread ownership of land is especially necessary since we have such poor food safety. It's not hard to get to a point where you don't have to buy tomatoes, but replacing the industrial agriculture of monocrop grain cultivars optimized for bushels per acre with a revival of the Eastern Agricultural Complex will take a lot of land. Not that much labor, though - they all grow like weeds.

[Ares Land]

The idea of a wealth tax is nonsense promoted by illiterates who think Elon Musk is hoarding billions of literal dollar bills in a vault like a dragon. A wealth tax would have one of three results: an explosion in creative accounting, massive capital flight (as happened in France), or USG making the Berlin Wall look like an episode of the Teletubbies. (The US is already one of two countries to tax citizens living abroad. The other is China.)

Billionaires are not sitting on a pile of gold or dollar bills: there wouldn't be a problem if they did. They own stock, financial instrument, real estate, and everybody benefits if ownership of this was as widespread as possible.

OK, here's the deal. You've seen the curves I've seen earlier. Wealth is concentrated in relatively few hands; the process has been continuous since about the 80s; the 1% went from owning 25% of total US wealth to 40%.
This feeds from, and has consequences on the distribution of income. Your average American is making about the same he did in 1980s, even though GDP has tripled (adjusting for inflation) over the period.

That's not a very healthy situation. Americans, like the Red Queen, have been running very fast to stay in the same place.
It's not very good for business overall either: concentration of capital stifles growth and innovation. GDP has grown a lot since the 1980s, of course, but not as much as it did before. The US haven't been innovating as much as they used to. Trump noticed, correctly, that America isn't as great as it used to, or as it could be.

This wealth accumulation is a purely mechanical process. I don't think billionaires are evil, and really whether they're evil or not is irrelevant: no matter what, investment is just a very efficient way to draw income. It's all just compound interest.
If you want to slow the process, there's no solution but take some of the wealth away.

The French wealth tax is an interesting example. It really was a very moderate tax, with plenty of room for improvement (the rates were around 1%). Revenue from the wealth tax went from 2.3 billion in 2003 to 5.2 billions in 2015.
Evidently, if revenue increased, there wasn't that much capital flight. Some of that increase is due to increased wealth concentration, some of it is due to stricter laws against tax evasion and stricter enforcement.
I think this goes to prove that neither tax evasion nor capital flight are show stoppers. There will always be capital flight or tax evasions (in any case, a country like France needs some serious tax revenue and will never be able to compete with Luxembourg or the Cayman Islands!), but a) you can fight against it b) no matter what, you can't move everything to the Cayman Islands.

The Berlin Wall analogy is interesting. The problem with that take -- and conservatives would do well to keep that in mind -- is that when people point out a problem, and you answer that there's no solution except communism, people naturally start considering communism seriously.

As an example, I'd like to point out the many, many conversations we've had on that board and the surprising turn they've taken over the last few years. I never expected to discuss socialism seriously with Americans and I never would have imagined that I would be the moderate one in the debate!

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Why? They supposedly love the Constitution!

Article 1, Section 8:

"The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;"

Congress is specifically vested with the power to actually do this, by the actual words of the actual Constitution.

If you want to quote the Constitution at your imaginary friend "They", perhaps you could also do the amendment that was deemed necessary to make an income tax legal.

While we can debate whether or not that was legal (the Supreme Court waffled extremely on it), wealth taxes (a property tax is one) have a long precedent. Unless you're about to argue property tax is also unconstitutional (good luck with that), I don't see why you felt the need to comment.

The idea of a wealth tax is nonsense promoted by illiterates who think Elon Musk is hoarding billions of literal dollar bills in a vault like a dragon.

He actually is hoarding valuable things in this way.

A wealth tax would have one of three results: an explosion in creative accounting,

Which is why we fund the IRS and have it prioritise auditing those likely to attempt large-scale tax fraud.

massive capital flight (as happened in France),

Moving money or wealth to avoid paying taxes is, get this, tax evasion. You can also — again, get this — make capital flight itself a crime with severe penalties.

[Hallow XIII]

Redistributing equity in corporations away from wealthy individuals is the stupidest idea I have ever heard. Publically-traded corporations are already subject to a lot of pressure to behave extremely shortsightedly, because stockholders win when the market price of shares in the corporation rises; executives in these corporations being remunerated in shares thus incentivizes goosing the stock price in the short term to sell at a profit and then leave after a few years with no regard for the long-term health of the organization. The same applies to the large asset management firms who usually hold the majority of the voting rights; they don't care if the company is still around in thirty years or whether it contributes anything to society.

If you are now also going to force individual majority shareholders of public corporations or even owners of private corporations to surrender control of their corporations to large institutional investors, then they will become the exact same kind of shitshow and you will have made it completely impossible for any large commercial venture to operate for the long term. The fact that the proposed measure is a tax on unrealized capital gains is telling -- it's sold politically on the back of resentment of publically visible billionaires, but the average american is nowhere near as likely to benefit from such a tax as are asset managers who can buy increased shares of corporations that their current owners would otherwise not give up to the market.

[zompist]

Redistributing equity in corporations away from wealthy individuals is the stupidest idea I have ever heard. Publically-traded corporations are already subject to a lot of pressure to behave extremely shortsightedly, because stockholders win when the market price of shares in the corporation rises; executives in these corporations being remunerated in shares thus incentivizes goosing the stock price in the short term to sell at a profit and then leave after a few years with no regard for the long-term health of the organization.

You have a point: American corporate management prioritizes stock value above anything else. However, the eternal Republican policy of giving rich people more money does nothing about this problem and indeed makes it worse.

The people most interested in the "long-term health of the organization" are the employees and the local community. The rich owner, who also wants his shares to rise quickly in value, has no interest in helping them, and directly benefits when they're screwed. The only way to make their voices heard is to give them a share of either managerial or ownership power.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Redistributing equity in corporations away from wealthy individuals is the stupidest idea I have ever heard.

Please have a look round the Internet, you will find many, many brain-meltingly stupid ideas. This one does have sense to it.

Publically-traded corporations are already subject to a lot of pressure to behave extremely shortsightedly, because stockholders win when the market price of shares in the corporation rises; executives in these corporations being remunerated in shares thus incentivizes goosing the stock price in the short term to sell at a profit and then leave after a few years with no regard for the long-term health of the organization. The same applies to the large asset management firms who usually hold the majority of the voting rights; they don't care if the company is still around in thirty years or whether it contributes anything to society.

We probably shouldn't have these large asset management firms, or structures that incentivise this bad behaviour.

If you are now also going to force individual majority shareholders of public corporations or even owners of private corporations to surrender control of their corporations to large institutional investors,

Who is suggesting this, exactly? Most schemes of redistribution redistribute equity to the people actually doing the work, who, as Zompist points out, have a very strong interest in the continued health of the organisation.

...you will have made it completely impossible for any large commercial venture to operate for the long term.

Do we even want many particularly large commercial ventures?

The fact that the proposed measure is a tax on unrealized capital gains is telling -- it's sold politically on the back of resentment of publically visible billionaires

Bezos fleeces his employees and uses the proceeds to fly into space. The one thing he has earned in his life is public resentment.

but the average american is nowhere near as likely to benefit from such a tax as are asset managers who can buy increased shares of corporations that their current owners would otherwise not give up to the market.

So we should eliminate asset management firms? Sounds good to me. Let's go ahead with eating the rich.