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ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
18m ago
Uniquely, the Afghans saw the American Empire's cultural exports as the net-negative that they are (the bombs themselves didn't help either), were in a very unique position to reject them, so they did.
Transing other countries very observably makes them weaker, and as such doing so is generally in the US' interests. That this also applies to the US itself is not as much a concern.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
40m ago
A 1% yearly wealth tax is pretty high though - you have to compare that to interest rates and inflation. Ten year treasuries are 4.5% right now, so this is like another 20% capital gains tax, and thats low due to the circumstances in the US - relative to Euribor its 50%.
anon_
42m ago
What can be implemented by one government can be overridden by the next government.
What is the point of my team advancing the football if the next possession by the other guy can advance it right back the other direction?
Well, for one, each administration starts whether the last one left off. So at the very least they have to spend effort and political capital overriding what you've done rather than on advancing their interests (in the counterfactual where you didn't have office last).
BurdensomeCount
Messenger Status: Shot
44m ago
Trusts and foundations can also be taxed like the UK does today (6% of their assets every 10 years, but equivalent to a 1% yearly tax is more like 10.5% every 10 years). The foreign cousin problem is harder to fix, but then again, if you're in the top 1% do you really trust your foreign cousin enough to not run away with your $40 million you've just put in his name legally? Very likely you'd want to insure against this risk and I think the yearly rate for such insurance would be above 1%. At that point it's just cheaper to pay the tax...
anon_
52m ago
Why then would the wealthy hold such taxable property in their own name? It will be in a trust or foundation or in the name of their foreign cousin.
Second order effects dominate here.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
55m ago
The FairTax would make it so the truly rich couldn’t spend money without the government getting a quarter of it.
The FairTax proposal does not tax anything rich people spend a lot of money on.
The section of Wikipedia page on FairTax titled "Taxable items and exemptions" says:
Also excluded are investments, such as purchases of stock, corporate mergers and acquisitions and capital investments. Savings and education tuition expenses would be exempt as they would be considered an investment (rather than final consumption).
It also says that rent would be taxed. It's not specified there, but reading into the sources, I see buying a house would not be except for new construction (unclear exactly what that means if most of the price of the house is the land it is on? Is that amount re-taxed every time a new building is built on it?).
Sure, rich people spend more on food and other everyday expenses than poor people, but not a lot more. Many more expensive purchases (housing, education, companies) are exempt from the tax or could easily just be made in a different country (yachts, private planes) and carefully never "imported". Those purchases are currently made with money that's at least theoretically taxed as income.
BurdensomeCount
Messenger Status: Shot
58m ago
Facilitating the underclass' antisocial tendencies/addiction to corn syrup is worse long term.
Oh I completely agree, but the solution to the underclass lies outside the usual democratic process just because there are so many of them. You can't cut their entitlement and at the same time let them have the vote. One or the other has to be given up.
BurdensomeCount
Messenger Status: Shot
1hr ago
There is no place on God's green earth free from the clutches of the IRS; well, at least no place that a normal American would want to live in. The US already taxes Americas overseas on their worldwide income and the IRS has enough fangs that the victims have to pay up or face real consequences. Doesn't make too many Americans renounce their citizenship each year. I am also proposing to extend the long arm of the IRS to American assets abroad too at the same time you start taxing wealth, that way there's no point for the Americans to move their money overseas as it's gonna get taxed anyways...
Of course, as you say, there will need to be an exemption for temporary residents in the USA otherwise people aren't gonna want to come here, but those people are on average much poorer than US citizens and so the loss of income from not taxing their wealth would be minimal.
BurdensomeCount
Messenger Status: Shot
1hr ago
Yes, and that is exactly why it, unlike say the UK, is perfectly set up to start taxing American wealth overseas too!
yofuckreddit
1hr ago
As a longtime "Reduce Defense!" hawk and a former left-libertarian, it's just not enough. The Pie Chart doesn't lie.
I have enough friends in the MI complex to know how fatty and corrupt the whole thing is, but if you're serious about cutting spending, you actually shouldn't start there for two reasons:
- The scale of personal welfare is such that small moves here mean big benefits
- The defense industry spend at least trickles down into technology that eventually benefits the human race (after extracting some blood). Facilitating the underclass' antisocial tendencies/addiction to corn syrup is worse long term.
BurdensomeCount
Messenger Status: Shot
1hr ago
Top 1% wealth for a household requires a minimum of something like $15 million these days. So basically for the top 2% (who all have wealth above around $5 million) the median wealth is around $15 million and the mean will be significantly higher than this. A 1% yearly tax on wealth for those in the top 2% will thus raise at least $150k per person (in reality a lot more because of the skew). The US has about 130 million households. So even if we assume we don't hit anybody below the top 2% at all we'll raise at least 1.5*10^5*0.02*130*10^6 = $390 billion.
Note that this is a gross underestimate because it fails to account for the skew. The US budget deficit is around $1.6 trillion (and this is with the super expensive Trump tax cuts, naturally if they expire things will look much better) so this is *only* 25% of the full deficit, but like I said, it fails to account for the skew. Gemini 2.5 Pro thinks the mean wealth in the top 1% is $37.7 million (so ~40 million) while for those in the 2%-1% bracket is probably around 10 million. Using these numbers the 1% yearly tax on the top 1% will generate $520 billion and on the 2%-1% will generate another $130 billion and so together we get $650 billion, that's 40% of the deficit gone like that...
It's precisely the obscene levels of wealth in the US that allow this sort of tax to be viable. A similar wealth tax in Europe would fail for precisely the reason you are talking about: In Europe they really don't have enough wealthy to make taxing them raise significant money (besides not taxing their citizens world wide); in the US they do and the IRS is perfectly set up already to make this a much easier task than say for the Germans.
TIRM
1hr ago
Adam Friedland is neither charismatic nor funny. He won't be the next generation's John Stewart or Bill Maher or the left's Joe Rogan or whatever he is trying. He can get around a guest per month on his show and he's not a good interviewer. This is going nowhere.
I heard the first few minutes of the Hasan Piker interview. He says he invested his life savings in this failing show. He will have to give up eventually. I suppose when he can't pay his help or make rent. So sad he squandered his Cum Town millions on this. He won't get a second chance since he is so unfunny.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1hr ago
It seems it really depends on what you do with it. If you borrow from your children to build a something that gets a positive return after interest, it seems like a win still. There are legitimate business reasons to take on debt that aren't fatal spirals, and for various reasons printing cash looks more like printing shares, which can also be a positive.
The general question of which debts are useful is not trivial. And it doesn't just apply to debt: spending your capital assets for this isn't really much better even if it doesn't accrue interest.
FtttG
1hr ago
My understanding is that he intentionally drove into a crowd of pedestrians, but it wasn't political or a nihilistic mass murder: he was just on a lot of drugs. It doesn't appear to have been an accident.
Bartender_Venator
1hr ago
From my limited reading on the Wars of the Roses, this was also a factor there - Henry IV's usurpation of the throne meant that all the various cadet branches of the Plantagenets felt they had some kind of a claim.
Pongalh
1hr ago
Definitely messier, but that's what happens when you relax rules of expression. I for one like the democratization of ads. So random now, showing Americans' quirky idiosyncrasies in all their guy-or-girl-next-door glory.
Disclosure: I'm a proud producer of what is arguably definitely AI slop. (Check out my cheeky YT shorts channel, in fact: https://youtube.com/@ShockJonesy/shorts)
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
And where did "this one thing" come from? It didn't fall out from the sky, it wasn't a preexisting institution that managed to resist takeover by happenstance, it was built from scratch. If progressive propaganda was limitlessly effective this wouldn't happen in the first place, and they wouldn't be pulling their hair out at their inability to reproduce it.
nopie
1hr ago
Not true. There have been times when printing money was correct policy, for example, after big crises of 2008.
ChickenOverlord
1hr ago
Isn’t the solution to reduce executive power so whoever wins the next election can’t just destroy whatever’s been built? On the other hand, much of what restrained the executive was convention and tradition, which has been razed in the last 10ish years.
10 years? Try 200. There hasn't been any real appetite in the general public (nor amongst elected officials) to reduce the power of the executive since Andrew Jackson. Jackson, Lincoln, and FDR are some of the starkest examples of executive power increasing significantly (and never really decreasing after).
AnonymousActuary
1hr ago
I think the argument would be that the deficit will eventually trigger some sort of economic death spiral that would be very unpleasant. So if your party can be reasonable, it might postpone said death spiral a few more years.
AnonymousActuary
2hr ago
because the cost of social security benefits and the cost of medical spending are growing at two very different rates.
Fiscal responsibility appears likely to lose elections. Fiscal irresponsibility seems likely to win elections. spending political power to do something that the other side gains political power for undoing seems notably different from your football metaphor.
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