This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
It's a bit more complicated than just 0.38% because the tax rate is progressive, plus there is a municipal tax that is a percentage of the cantonal tax added on top (typically around 50%). I think you can get up to around 1% in the worst case, but it's mostly theoretical because in practice rich people move to a place where they get taxed less, unless they are either extremely principled or they really want to live in one of the major cities no matter the cost.
The point is that these taxes are charged every year. 38% would be insanely high: in just 10 years you'd have lost >99% of your wealth. That's not reasonable.
By comparison, at a 0.5% rate you pay e.g. $5000 per million dollars in savings. Over 70 years, you'd lose 30%. If you have a top rate of 1%, then you lose 9,5% in 10 years, or 50% in 70 years. This strikes me as reasonable, especially since you can usually generate some return on your wealth too (the US stock market has yielded >10% on average in the past decade even compensating for inflation).
I understand that there are some people who want that, but I don't think those are realistic proposals, in that you wouldn't be able to pass them into law even at the state level, and if you could, the main effect would be driving out billionaires and businesses, rather than generating a huge amount of tax revenue.
I'm rather more interested in proposals that:
Right, it's impossible for Musk to raise $400 billion all at once, that's why the wealth tax should be a small annual percentage instead. Selling 1% of his shares each year wouldn't tank the stock price the way that selling 30% would. But you're still getting 10 billion a year out of him alone.
I don't buy the concern about Musk losing control of the company. Musk already uses his class B shares with 10x voting power to maintain >80% control with <50% of the shares. He can sell 75% of those shares and maintain majority control. Or use tricks like equity swaps to raise money without losing his shares. Or just make the company pay 1% dividend per year (though that requires it to become actually profitable). Plenty of ways to pay taxes while remaining both CEO and majority shareholder.
So given that Musk can stay in control and pay a hypothetical wealth tax, it's not clear to me what value you think is being destroyed by taxing wealthy people somewhat. Unless you say it's always better for billionaire to have a dollar than the government, on the basis that billionaire's investments are more beneficial to society than whatever the government wastes it's money on (healthcare, pensions, education, foodstamps, the military), but that's highly debatable.
Okay, but you do understand that the entire point of my comment was to explore possible policies that would be in line with what those "some people" want, right? What you want seems reasonable enough, but what you want isn't the topic of discussion.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link