You could point out the inconsistency, but I really think the cognitive dissonance of constant and pervasive hypocrisy is the point. Truth is whatever the party tells you today, and we have always been at war with EastAsia.
Every single proposal for a national sales tax, consumption tax, or 'flat' tax put forward by the right has been shown over and over again to not be regressive - usually through the implementation of prebates (literally a check written to lower income people every year/quarter to cover a portion of the taxes they will pay).
Whether or not these schemes would work is debatable, but to claim that they show an MO of regressive taxes is just false.
It's a smart play for a flat tax. Baseline at 15-20% on imports (proxy for flat tax on income). Then push to eliminate income tax. It's very much aligned with conservative view points on income tax and it's progressive nature.
I don't necessarily disagree, a federal sales tax / VAT could make sense. But so far all it's been is conflicting objectives for tariffs: eliminating income tax, trade deal negotiations, and bringing jobs back. I don't think you can have all three of those simultaneously.
Many governments, at least the ones that matter, are bankrupt. Quick google shows all G8 countries run a deficit.
My "smart play" wasn't on the merits of idea, largely the game theory aspect of moving forward to their policy goals after decades of having no traction. It's a unique idea, policy wise. Don't know if it will be effective. Neither do you.
Sadly I'm not. I'm objectively stating facts. This criminal cabal of spectacularly incompetent clowns is absolutely ransacking the final days of an empire. It is astonishing how Americans are unaware of this.
>Many governments, at least the ones that matter, are bankrupt. Quick google shows all G8 countries run a deficit.
The US ran a $2.3 trillion dollar deficit over the last 12 months, and spending has gone absolutely wild. At the same time it's handing out massive tax cuts to corporations, and has absolutely no path to get back on track. Quite the opposite, the Trump cabal is basically making it impossible to get back on track. Which is why they're looting everything they can as quickly as they can.
>Neither do you.
Yes, I know that it was harebrained and literally zero economists with a functioning brain have called it a "smart" play. Only absolute cultists or the most profoundly gullible ever found the arguments by the criminals convincing.
Further, as is classic with Trump's lies (that only spectacularly gullible and/or stupid people fall for), he sells every angle of the same play simultaneously. Not only will tariffs eliminate income tax -- a notion that is so mathematically stupid it is instantly dismissible -- simultaneously all of those jobs are going to be repatriated and there will be no imports. These two notions are absolutely at odds -- and both are just utter fantasy nonsense -- but stupid people believe what stupid people do.
And yeah, bro, tariffs are not a unique idea. There is no novelty here.
Yeah, it is an interesting bubble to be in. I worked with a company that could not keep up with the rising SWE salaries and thus attracted a different kind of SWE. I definitely felt the difference in education with the new hires. Reading comprehension/attention was weak. AI will easily replace them, I guess.
Finding the data on this would be convenient but its still unclear to me. I'm not a fan of how that article from NU cites its sources loosely, including lazily citing Wikipedia.
>I worked with a company that could not keep up with the rising SWE salaries and thus attracted a different kind of SWE.
Maybe im misunderstanding you but I would think that any level of SWE skill would be a minimum amount of competence such that they wouldn't fall for Trumps tricks? SWE is rearranging bits accordance to logic...so you need to know logic no?
Oh, I WISH that was the case but I'd estimate only 10% of SWE would fit your model of minimum competence... and yeah a lot of that 10% are browsing HN. I recall in 2016 asking coworkers why they voted trump. "My 401k" was a frequent answer.
Vibe coding existed long before AI, especially in web/startup/enterprise information systems. You don't need to be a critical thinker to make a successful RoR app.
How do we fix this should be the question asked. Is it even possible at this point?
I guess there is no free lunch, each person who realizes the importance of education has to start taking it seriously right now and spend their lives getting their community to start taking it seriously and maybe hopefully the next generation can emerge much better off. We let this mess fester for decades and now we are paying for it for the rest of our lives because there is no free lunch.
Education is a public good, therefore good education is socialist, and Americans are very hyper-individualist (aka antisocial). History suggests that Americans generally only move toward communal support systems during extreme crises, like the shift during the Great Depression. Even Covid wasn't enough to get people asking for universal healthcare, it has to be much worse.
Overcoming 'American Exceptionalism' to adopt a successful model like the Finnish education system would probably require a massive crisis. The current system will just limp along until then.
I'd argue from the founding of the country all the way up to Nixon/Reagan the country took education seriously. It wasn't due to economic crisis as there were many since the founding. There was this sense of societal responsibility that has disappeared.
> People without a college degree went Trump 56-43. People with a college degree went for Harris 56-42.
One made more promises to the poor and working class. It seems baked into your comment that the distribution should be 50-50 which seems crazy. A swing of ~5 points isn't that much.
It should be more complicated but the way the Trump admin did this isn't complicated. Tariffs were used to punish countries that didn't bend the knee. When they did, the tariffs were removed. So no-one was ever going to build a factory in the US because of tariffs, everyone knew they might go away tomorrow.
This back and forth is the entire issue if you ask me. Whoever you ask in the administration on any given day is going to say the tariffs exist for different reasons. It’s on purpose though - it’s so whoever is arguing for the admin can curate the answer.
Don’t like the cost? It’s a negotiation tactic. Want manufacturing back? That’s what it’s doing actually, it’s definitely a longterm play to bring it back. Worried about the debt? The tariffs are going to be a huge, permanent revenue generator that gets back at countries that “cheated” us. It can't be all these as multiple elements contradict each other.
I’ll take my Fox News slot now please and thank you.
We can’t? Are south Florida, southern California, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, are they not “here”? There is literally a banana variety called California Gold.
>Onshoring manufacturing is something that has to be incentivized and that has positive externalities outside of dollars and cents.
That's what the CHIPS act did. Indeed, everyone talking about TSMC, Intel, etc -- that's all because of the CHIPS act.
Toddler tantrum tariffs, which in reality are a vehicle for massive level corruption (see how Vietnam got a "deal" by approving a Trump resort. Or how every business leader is stuck to Trump's anus lest they be targeted by his tyrant tantrums), are not an incentive. It has had the opposite effect, and new builds have basically dried up.
Ironically I was mildly in favor of tariffs from the left pov. Reduced consumption and getting more taxes to help pay down the debt.
Consumption was likely mildly reduced (and still is with the 15% tax) but now we have more inflation coming our way when those billions start flowing and our debt just keeps going up.
Rich people consume a lot more, so a consumption tax would be ideal if you eased other tax categories like income tax and/or capital gains. It's easy to administer and would boost investment across the economy IMO.
Well, government spending could go down along with that too. Obviously, that ain't happening with Republicans (see: the OBBB and failed DOGE project) but in theory you could do major reform and craft coherent policy while not triple dipping tax-wise. I think you could implement quite a high consumption tax model and be okay -- you'd have the added benefit of very simple collection and enforcement since it's all at the tail end.
I don't see why this would be even slightly surprising: that is a common right-wing position and has been for a while? They even made a big run of it in 2023.
The same as the tax rate on a blessing of unicorns that I also couldn't buy.
Our domestic manufacturing industry is so far gone, it's doubtful whether even skillfully-applied tariffs could encourage any of it to come back on their own. Never mind this clown show, which apparently didn't even do the basic political work to make sure the tariffs would stay in place more than a year, despite having both houses of Congress.
It's such an old and standard and basic playbook. They cultivated fear among the poor about immigrants or some bit of social progress like pronouns. To win power and take whatever actions they believed would enrich themselves. There's never anything more to it than that.
Tariffs (or something like land value tax) are one of the less intrusive forms of taxes since imported goods are already scrutinized and tabulated at the border anyway under the border 4A exception. In theory tariffs are a lot less dystopic in their financial surveillance than stuff like income tax, but you were supposed to drop the income tax when you pick up tariffs, not just use it to make the Swamp larger.
National sales tax would be significantly better than income tax. Per head would be even better
Unfortunately replacement doesn’t seem to be on the table for anyone.
If your argument is that taxation at sale is harder to dogdge than with income, and thus an obviously regressive scheme would still be advantageous for the average American, then I'm not buying it at all.
I see no evidence whatsoever that the wealthy would have any more difficulty in dodging sales tax than income/capital gains taxes.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a more regressive tax scheme. Bill Gates and I consume approximately the same amount of resources. I don’t see why he should have to pay a significantly different rate than I do.
I'd argue that ressource consumption/pollution are on the contrary pretty strongly correlated with wealth.
But I don't see the primary justification for taxes as "keeping consumption in check" (whatever that would mean for you): In my view, we pay taxes to keep our society functional.
Progressive taxation is required to prevent escalating wealth inequality (and I'd argue that US administrations have done a really poor here over the last decades).
Regressive taxes ruin society by nurturing pseudo-parasitic rent-seekers controlling most of the wealth (=> exaggerated for clarity), and the situation is already bad enough without allowing those to basically skip taxes.
If you want to shift tax burden from very wealthy Americans onto average citizens, what do you hope to achieve with that?
What is the purpose of taxation then, in your view?
> I don’t think that wealth inequality is a problem
I have a very hard time understanding this perspective.
Wealth can already buy (directly or indirectly) all forms of property, political power and even legal outcomes. I see no real way to remedy any of that, so it seems clear to me that (wealth) inequality must be somewhat kept in check to prevent our society from degenerating into some form of neo-feudalism.
What is your view on that? Do you want a society more strongly stratified by wealth? (why?)
Would you want to provide less equal opportunity in life for Americans is general, or would that be an undesirable side-effect?
Sorry for asking apparently loaded questions-- I'm genuinely trying to understand your viewpoint, and attacking the points that seem most critical from my view.
I don’t see it as “shifting” burden onto the middle class - it’s more about shifting the burden away from the upper class, who carry a disproportionate amount of the burden.
Both wealthy Americans and the middle class consume approximately the same government resources, and it’s not fair that the upper class should have to shoulder the majority of the tax burden.
> What is the purpose of taxation then, in your view?
To fund the government.
> Wealth can already buy (directly or indirectly) all forms of property, political power and even legal outcomes.
I don’t agree with this claim. Bloomberg outspent his opponents to an absurd degree, which resulted in him losing by an embarrassing amount.
> Would you want to provide less equal opportunity in life for Americans is general, or would that be an undesirable side-effect?
I don’t agree that wealth inequality results in less opportunity for anyone.
> it’s not fair that the upper class should have to shoulder the majority of the tax burden.
I don't know what the definition of "upper class" is to you, but from my view anyone that earns most of his income not by working himself but by others working for him in some form (capital gains, rent, employees, ...) draws wayyyyy outsized use from the state compared to an average citizen. Not only does the state provide enforcement, but also infrastructure, education for workers, a framework to solve disputes, ...
So those people should also pay morefor that privilege. Note especially how companies taking over the roles of a state is not really a thing anymore (company towns, providing education, solving disputes, internal paramilitary, etc): Everyone realizes they are getting a brilliant deal, and no one actually wants to take over those functions (despite lots of people whining about government inefficiency all day long).
All this is much more valueable and useful the bigger your whole money making enterprise is, obviously.
> I don’t agree with this claim. Bloomberg outspent his opponents to an absurd degree, which resulted in him losing by an embarrassing amount.
What is your claim? Media/campaign spending most obviously has a large effect on voting outcomes, because otherwise people wouldn't spend billions on it.
I'm not saying that by spending money you can literally win every election ever, my point is just that sufficient media spending alters voting outcomes most drastically. You don't even need to play the political circus yourself to get access (just consider Musk spending a good chunk and basically getting the DOGE thingy in return).
> I don’t agree that wealth inequality results in less opportunity for anyone.
In a very obvious way, wealth already buys you time, the most valuable opportunity cost for anyone-- time that an average person would need to spend breadwinning for themselves/family.
Education, business contacts, employees and machinery of all kinds are up for sale as well.
If wealth is stratified, the number and kinds of opportunities available to people will necessarily become much more different as well.
You could point out the inconsistency, but I really think the cognitive dissonance of constant and pervasive hypocrisy is the point. Truth is whatever the party tells you today, and we have always been at war with EastAsia.
> we have always been at war with EastAsia
Isn’t the new line that we’ve been at war with Iran for 47 years?
Even better "imminent" war with Iran.
For 47 years.
Imminent.
Which happens to be in Asia. Close enough...
Yes, that is how cults operate.
How is it mind boggling? It's a regressive tax. That's literally their MO.
They've been pushing the national sales tax to replace income tax since the 2000s (and probably longer).
Every single proposal for a national sales tax, consumption tax, or 'flat' tax put forward by the right has been shown over and over again to not be regressive - usually through the implementation of prebates (literally a check written to lower income people every year/quarter to cover a portion of the taxes they will pay).
Whether or not these schemes would work is debatable, but to claim that they show an MO of regressive taxes is just false.
It's a smart play for a flat tax. Baseline at 15-20% on imports (proxy for flat tax on income). Then push to eliminate income tax. It's very much aligned with conservative view points on income tax and it's progressive nature.
Smart if you ignore mathematics
I don't necessarily disagree, a federal sales tax / VAT could make sense. But so far all it's been is conflicting objectives for tariffs: eliminating income tax, trade deal negotiations, and bringing jobs back. I don't think you can have all three of those simultaneously.
[flagged]
You're ranting.
Many governments, at least the ones that matter, are bankrupt. Quick google shows all G8 countries run a deficit.
My "smart play" wasn't on the merits of idea, largely the game theory aspect of moving forward to their policy goals after decades of having no traction. It's a unique idea, policy wise. Don't know if it will be effective. Neither do you.
>You're ranting.
Sadly I'm not. I'm objectively stating facts. This criminal cabal of spectacularly incompetent clowns is absolutely ransacking the final days of an empire. It is astonishing how Americans are unaware of this.
>Many governments, at least the ones that matter, are bankrupt. Quick google shows all G8 countries run a deficit.
The US ran a $2.3 trillion dollar deficit over the last 12 months, and spending has gone absolutely wild. At the same time it's handing out massive tax cuts to corporations, and has absolutely no path to get back on track. Quite the opposite, the Trump cabal is basically making it impossible to get back on track. Which is why they're looting everything they can as quickly as they can.
>Neither do you.
Yes, I know that it was harebrained and literally zero economists with a functioning brain have called it a "smart" play. Only absolute cultists or the most profoundly gullible ever found the arguments by the criminals convincing.
Further, as is classic with Trump's lies (that only spectacularly gullible and/or stupid people fall for), he sells every angle of the same play simultaneously. Not only will tariffs eliminate income tax -- a notion that is so mathematically stupid it is instantly dismissible -- simultaneously all of those jobs are going to be repatriated and there will be no imports. These two notions are absolutely at odds -- and both are just utter fantasy nonsense -- but stupid people believe what stupid people do.
And yeah, bro, tariffs are not a unique idea. There is no novelty here.
You are definitely ranting. The facts that might be there are buried in the rhetoric.
> It's laughable mathematical fantasy
I mean 2.5 / 3.4 = ~ 75%. A measly 75% tariffs will allow the abolition of income tax.
In 2023, 28% of U.S. adults scored at or below Level 1 literacy, indicating significant difficulty with everyday reading tasks. https://www.nu.edu/blog/49-adult-literacy-statistics-and-fac...
You guys are surrounded by other college-educated SWE, you have no idea how bad it is out there.
People without a college degree went Trump 56-43. People with a college degree went for Harris 56-42. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...
Yeah, it is an interesting bubble to be in. I worked with a company that could not keep up with the rising SWE salaries and thus attracted a different kind of SWE. I definitely felt the difference in education with the new hires. Reading comprehension/attention was weak. AI will easily replace them, I guess.
Finding the data on this would be convenient but its still unclear to me. I'm not a fan of how that article from NU cites its sources loosely, including lazily citing Wikipedia.
>I worked with a company that could not keep up with the rising SWE salaries and thus attracted a different kind of SWE.
Maybe im misunderstanding you but I would think that any level of SWE skill would be a minimum amount of competence such that they wouldn't fall for Trumps tricks? SWE is rearranging bits accordance to logic...so you need to know logic no?
Oh, I WISH that was the case but I'd estimate only 10% of SWE would fit your model of minimum competence... and yeah a lot of that 10% are browsing HN. I recall in 2016 asking coworkers why they voted trump. "My 401k" was a frequent answer.
Vibe coding existed long before AI, especially in web/startup/enterprise information systems. You don't need to be a critical thinker to make a successful RoR app.
How do we fix this should be the question asked. Is it even possible at this point?
I guess there is no free lunch, each person who realizes the importance of education has to start taking it seriously right now and spend their lives getting their community to start taking it seriously and maybe hopefully the next generation can emerge much better off. We let this mess fester for decades and now we are paying for it for the rest of our lives because there is no free lunch.
Education is a public good, therefore good education is socialist, and Americans are very hyper-individualist (aka antisocial). History suggests that Americans generally only move toward communal support systems during extreme crises, like the shift during the Great Depression. Even Covid wasn't enough to get people asking for universal healthcare, it has to be much worse.
Overcoming 'American Exceptionalism' to adopt a successful model like the Finnish education system would probably require a massive crisis. The current system will just limp along until then.
I'd argue from the founding of the country all the way up to Nixon/Reagan the country took education seriously. It wasn't due to economic crisis as there were many since the founding. There was this sense of societal responsibility that has disappeared.
> People without a college degree went Trump 56-43. People with a college degree went for Harris 56-42.
One made more promises to the poor and working class. It seems baked into your comment that the distribution should be 50-50 which seems crazy. A swing of ~5 points isn't that much.
This math would work on any demographic.
Much of that was his lie that "other countries pay the tariffs" that, somehow, a huge number of his supporters swallowed completely.
It's really more complicated than this.
Onshoring manufacturing is something that has to be incentivized and that has positive externalities outside of dollars and cents.
But some tariffs were really dumb, like on bananas. We can't grow bananas here...
It should be more complicated but the way the Trump admin did this isn't complicated. Tariffs were used to punish countries that didn't bend the knee. When they did, the tariffs were removed. So no-one was ever going to build a factory in the US because of tariffs, everyone knew they might go away tomorrow.
This back and forth is the entire issue if you ask me. Whoever you ask in the administration on any given day is going to say the tariffs exist for different reasons. It’s on purpose though - it’s so whoever is arguing for the admin can curate the answer.
Don’t like the cost? It’s a negotiation tactic. Want manufacturing back? That’s what it’s doing actually, it’s definitely a longterm play to bring it back. Worried about the debt? The tariffs are going to be a huge, permanent revenue generator that gets back at countries that “cheated” us. It can't be all these as multiple elements contradict each other.
I’ll take my Fox News slot now please and thank you.
> We can’t grow bananas here…
We can’t? Are south Florida, southern California, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, are they not “here”? There is literally a banana variety called California Gold.
It’s not that complicated. People got mad that gay people existed and they had to press “2” for English and here we are.
> But some tariffs were really dumb, like on bananas. We can't grow bananas here...
Trump and his cabinet don't understand this.
Hey, Chiquita needs to start paying for its own wars now.
Tariffs aren't incentives, the whole thing is upsidedown.
>Onshoring manufacturing is something that has to be incentivized and that has positive externalities outside of dollars and cents.
That's what the CHIPS act did. Indeed, everyone talking about TSMC, Intel, etc -- that's all because of the CHIPS act.
Toddler tantrum tariffs, which in reality are a vehicle for massive level corruption (see how Vietnam got a "deal" by approving a Trump resort. Or how every business leader is stuck to Trump's anus lest they be targeted by his tyrant tantrums), are not an incentive. It has had the opposite effect, and new builds have basically dried up.
Ironically I was mildly in favor of tariffs from the left pov. Reduced consumption and getting more taxes to help pay down the debt.
Consumption was likely mildly reduced (and still is with the 15% tax) but now we have more inflation coming our way when those billions start flowing and our debt just keeps going up.
Such a regressive tax to get behind.
Now if tariffs had only been applied to, I don't know, yachts, private jets…
From 1991-1993 there was a luxury tax on yachts, private jets...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxury_tax#United_States
Rich people consume a lot more, so a consumption tax would be ideal if you eased other tax categories like income tax and/or capital gains. It's easy to administer and would boost investment across the economy IMO.
"Rich people consume a lot more…"
Working class often live paycheck to paycheck. Unless rich are also living paycheck to paycheck I'm not sure I the two really compare.
That's of course the idea behind a progressive tax: it scales to what an individual "can afford".
I wouldn't ease any taxes - we simply can't afford lower taxes. Debt is nearly $40T (125% of GDP)!
Well, government spending could go down along with that too. Obviously, that ain't happening with Republicans (see: the OBBB and failed DOGE project) but in theory you could do major reform and craft coherent policy while not triple dipping tax-wise. I think you could implement quite a high consumption tax model and be okay -- you'd have the added benefit of very simple collection and enforcement since it's all at the tail end.
I'd go for a more progressive tax if it was on offer. But there is so much debt that I'm pretty worried that taxes are simply unsustainably low.
Note that it's less than 15%, only what the importer pays, so less than a VAT would be
> Ironically I was mildly in favor of tariffs from the left pov.
The ironic part is not that you were mildly in favor from the left, the ironic part is that they came from the right.
Pre-Trump, the right was very anti-tariff and only a portion of the left was pro tariff, the Bernie Sanders type.
Eliminate income tax and replace with flat sales tax is a libertarian-conservative policy goal for some time
Anything flatter than a progressive tax means, by definition, that the poor will pay more, and the rich less.
I suppose that sounds pretty good if you're rich.
I don't see why this would be even slightly surprising: that is a common right-wing position and has been for a while? They even made a big run of it in 2023.
https://pettersen.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?Documen...
Populist energy
What was the tax rate if you bought things made in the US with US materials?
What if there was no alternative that was US-made?
Even if there was a US version, you'd still pay more regardless. This goes against one of the main grievances in the 2024 cycle: prices are too high.
Please direct me to the nearest grocery store that sells US bananas made with US materials
How many bananas have you been eating since tariffs were put in place?
The same as the tax rate on a blessing of unicorns that I also couldn't buy.
Our domestic manufacturing industry is so far gone, it's doubtful whether even skillfully-applied tariffs could encourage any of it to come back on their own. Never mind this clown show, which apparently didn't even do the basic political work to make sure the tariffs would stay in place more than a year, despite having both houses of Congress.
It's such an old and standard and basic playbook. They cultivated fear among the poor about immigrants or some bit of social progress like pronouns. To win power and take whatever actions they believed would enrich themselves. There's never anything more to it than that.
illegal immigrants are taking jobs from legal immigrants. thats why so many hispanic and black voters defected from the democrats lately
Even in the US, I don't think right wing == capitalist. There are the people in it for the economics and others for the ideas/values.
Tariffs (or something like land value tax) are one of the less intrusive forms of taxes since imported goods are already scrutinized and tabulated at the border anyway under the border 4A exception. In theory tariffs are a lot less dystopic in their financial surveillance than stuff like income tax, but you were supposed to drop the income tax when you pick up tariffs, not just use it to make the Swamp larger.
National sales tax would be significantly better than income tax. Per head would be even better Unfortunately replacement doesn’t seem to be on the table for anyone.
Better for whom? Wealthy people?
If your argument is that taxation at sale is harder to dogdge than with income, and thus an obviously regressive scheme would still be advantageous for the average American, then I'm not buying it at all.
I see no evidence whatsoever that the wealthy would have any more difficulty in dodging sales tax than income/capital gains taxes.
That’s not my argument.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a more regressive tax scheme. Bill Gates and I consume approximately the same amount of resources. I don’t see why he should have to pay a significantly different rate than I do.
I'd argue that ressource consumption/pollution are on the contrary pretty strongly correlated with wealth.
But I don't see the primary justification for taxes as "keeping consumption in check" (whatever that would mean for you): In my view, we pay taxes to keep our society functional.
Progressive taxation is required to prevent escalating wealth inequality (and I'd argue that US administrations have done a really poor here over the last decades).
Regressive taxes ruin society by nurturing pseudo-parasitic rent-seekers controlling most of the wealth (=> exaggerated for clarity), and the situation is already bad enough without allowing those to basically skip taxes.
I agree that the purpose of taxation is not to keep consumption in check.
I don’t think that wealth inequality is a problem, and therefore don’t agree that taxation should be used to address it.
If you want to shift tax burden from very wealthy Americans onto average citizens, what do you hope to achieve with that?
What is the purpose of taxation then, in your view?
> I don’t think that wealth inequality is a problem
I have a very hard time understanding this perspective.
Wealth can already buy (directly or indirectly) all forms of property, political power and even legal outcomes. I see no real way to remedy any of that, so it seems clear to me that (wealth) inequality must be somewhat kept in check to prevent our society from degenerating into some form of neo-feudalism.
What is your view on that? Do you want a society more strongly stratified by wealth? (why?)
Would you want to provide less equal opportunity in life for Americans is general, or would that be an undesirable side-effect?
Sorry for asking apparently loaded questions-- I'm genuinely trying to understand your viewpoint, and attacking the points that seem most critical from my view.
I don’t see it as “shifting” burden onto the middle class - it’s more about shifting the burden away from the upper class, who carry a disproportionate amount of the burden.
Both wealthy Americans and the middle class consume approximately the same government resources, and it’s not fair that the upper class should have to shoulder the majority of the tax burden.
> What is the purpose of taxation then, in your view?
To fund the government.
> Wealth can already buy (directly or indirectly) all forms of property, political power and even legal outcomes.
I don’t agree with this claim. Bloomberg outspent his opponents to an absurd degree, which resulted in him losing by an embarrassing amount.
> Would you want to provide less equal opportunity in life for Americans is general, or would that be an undesirable side-effect?
I don’t agree that wealth inequality results in less opportunity for anyone.
> it’s not fair that the upper class should have to shoulder the majority of the tax burden.
I don't know what the definition of "upper class" is to you, but from my view anyone that earns most of his income not by working himself but by others working for him in some form (capital gains, rent, employees, ...) draws wayyyyy outsized use from the state compared to an average citizen. Not only does the state provide enforcement, but also infrastructure, education for workers, a framework to solve disputes, ...
So those people should also pay morefor that privilege. Note especially how companies taking over the roles of a state is not really a thing anymore (company towns, providing education, solving disputes, internal paramilitary, etc): Everyone realizes they are getting a brilliant deal, and no one actually wants to take over those functions (despite lots of people whining about government inefficiency all day long).
All this is much more valueable and useful the bigger your whole money making enterprise is, obviously.
> I don’t agree with this claim. Bloomberg outspent his opponents to an absurd degree, which resulted in him losing by an embarrassing amount.
What is your claim? Media/campaign spending most obviously has a large effect on voting outcomes, because otherwise people wouldn't spend billions on it.
I'm not saying that by spending money you can literally win every election ever, my point is just that sufficient media spending alters voting outcomes most drastically. You don't even need to play the political circus yourself to get access (just consider Musk spending a good chunk and basically getting the DOGE thingy in return).
> I don’t agree that wealth inequality results in less opportunity for anyone.
In a very obvious way, wealth already buys you time, the most valuable opportunity cost for anyone-- time that an average person would need to spend breadwinning for themselves/family.
Education, business contacts, employees and machinery of all kinds are up for sale as well.
If wealth is stratified, the number and kinds of opportunities available to people will necessarily become much more different as well.