So, how much should we tax the rich? 70%? 90%?

ml1 said:
it's not that my analogy is all that compelling.  It's that the "I don't want to pay for other people" argument is pretty arbitrary when applied to health insurance.  Virtually all of our taxes go to pay for stuff for "other people."  In fact, we're already paying for other people to get health care through our taxes, provided those people are over 65.  It's also how private health insurance premiums work.  And insurance of all sorts for that matter. 
That was probably the source of his frustration.  He probably knows he's making an arbitrary distinction.  And it's a distinction that virtually no other developed nation on earth makes.  

I think car insurance is a good example.  Yes, there is no "universal" car insurance but in NJ you are required to have it.  It's the same analogy, we pay premiums to pool our resources and decrease risk.  We hope it's never needed but our money goes to help pay other claims. My guess is that almost all car accidents are a result of someone's personal choice.

Almost all "accidents" are a result of personal choice. The term accident is an unfortunate one to use, but we're stuck with it.

Scandinavian countries are almost always Exhibit A when people argue about universal health coverage.  But the fact is that virtually every developed country on earth except the U.S. has some form of universal health coverage. Even countries that Americans probably don't consider "developed" like Mexico, has almost universal health insurance coverage, with everyone who can't afford their own private insurance receiving government funded health insurance.  Virtually everyone in the country is now covered.  It was enacted ten years ago, and one could speculate that it's contributed to the current negative net migration with the U.S.  People are going back to Mexico because it's becoming harder for working people to live here than there.

Mexico is a very big country.  A huge land mass, almost half the population of the U.S., a lot of diversity, and perhaps more noteworthy, not nearly as wealthy as the U.S.  And they provide universal health coverage for their people.

To suggest that universal coverage can't be done effectively unless a country is small and homogeneous flies in the face of a number of examples that contradict.  Canada is more diverse than the U.S.  It's also a huge country geographically with many people living very remotely from large population centers.  

The evidence is very strong that U.S. doesn't have universal health coverage not because we can't or shouldn't, but because we won't.

ml1 said:

To suggest that universal coverage can't be done effectively unless a country is small and homogeneous flies in the face of a number of examples that contradict. 

 Sensible argument. I asked about size and homogeneity in the context of tax policy, which is a related but somewhat different question.

Another point I think would be important to raise is that people in favor of universal health coverage should consider moving incrementally.  Personally, I think it's really important that all women receive prenatal care, and all kids under 18 should have health coverage.  If I was running for office, I'd be bringing on people to do the research on what it would take to extend a form of "Medicare" to cover prenatal and pediatric care. The "personal choice" argument against covering other people's bad health choices goes out the window to a great extent when you're talking about kids who really can't consent to their own health choices. And with prenatal care, even if the women are making bad health choices, their unborn children are certainly not.  And there are almost certainly good arguments to be made that an entire society benefits if all children are raised to adulthood with good health care.  

And it wouldn't just be for poor people.  Every child and every pregnant woman, wealthy or poor would be covered.  Then it wouldn't be some "welfare" program for "other people."  It would be for every family.

I agree that the process will need to move slowly, and each step will need to be successful before moving on.  My solution in part is to go through the VA.  Make that a shining star of a system, using tax money and money pried from Defense.  Then move all federal employees into it.  Then offer it to states, municipalities, etc.  Eventually let companies buy their employees in, and basically call that a tax.  Meanwhile, steadily align Medicare with that system and start lowering the eligibility age.  Eventually it will get to everyone.  But by starting with providing vets with the care they deserve we can get support from both sides of the aisle.

FilmCarp said:
I agree that the process will need to move slowly, and each step will need to be successful before moving on.  My solution in part is to go through the VA.  Make that a shining star of a system, using tax money and money pried from Defense.  Then move all federal employees into it.  Then offer it to states, municipalities, etc.  Eventually let companies buy their employees in, and basically call that a tax.  Meanwhile, steadily align Medicare with that system and start lowering the eligibility age.  Eventually it will get to everyone.  But by starting with providing vets with the care they deserve we can get support from both sides of the aisle.

 That's an interesting approach. I like it.

DaveSchmidt said:

How big of a wrench, PVW, do you or the Swedes you know think demographic differences throw into “If they can do it there, why not here” discussions?

So the demographics question is interesting, because like a lot of European countries, and the US, questions of identity and immigration have become politically volatile. Sweden just this week managed to form a government after several months without one as the major parties tried to figure out a way to keep the Sweden Democrats -- basically the Swedish UKIP -- out of government
(a couple of brief articles here and here, with plenty more discoverable for those interested). There's a sizeable immigrant community from Africa and the Middle East, and some tension (there've been a few riots over the last few years). I haven't gotten into the topic at length with anyone I personally know, but that tension between the Swedish self-image as tolerant and progressive (and many Swedes do hold this) and managing changing demographics is a real one.

I actually think this is one area the US does much better overall than Europe. Even now under Trump, I think we absorb immigrants much easier. Or at least, the tension we have with immigration and diversity isn't quite the same as it is in Europe -- maybe not better or worse but just different. The idea of the nation being identified with a single ethnic group was always shaky even at the height of explicit white supremacy in this country, whereas a typical European country's name generally translates to "Land of the [ethno-mythical group] ".

Edit -- looks like the software doesn't like angle brackets. Repalced with square ones instead.

Angle brackets usually means html code to a browser

Dumb browser.

Angela Bracketts came thisclose to being chancellor of Germany.

basil said:

terp said:
My point is that there seems to be a groundswell of support for this tax change.  However, there doesn't seem to be any consensus on what, if anything, it will accomplish.   It reminds me of a wall. 

I am pretty sure everyone on this thread agrees on the fact that it will increase IRS revenue.

 As pointed out in a previous post, the increase in revenue is likely to be a rounding error in the scheme of things.  If that's your reason for supporting the tax, I think its questionable at best. 

PVW said:
 Knowing only two things -- that I know Swedes and have been to Sweden, and that I disagree with you, your conclusion is that I must be ignorant of these issues. I'll grant that perhaps "ignorance" should be added to "venal or stupid" as a third category, but it's certainly in the broad category of unwarranted uncharitable conclusions.
Though to be fair to you, your attitude here is fairly typical online. In fact, you yourself are often on the receiving end. It's just too bad, because you are a rare poster here who not only has a point of view radically different from mine, but that point of view is a coherent and articulated one. It's not every discussion that leads to a discussion of de Tocqueville, after all.

But having to make the effort to sift out the substantive points from the peevish, self-congratulatory slights means that, in the worst case, it doesn't seem worth the effort to engage or, in the second-to-worst-case, it leads to my own falling short and responding in kind. Again, not unique to you, but still an unfortunate example of how the standard cultural norms of online discussion tend to promote less frequent and more shallow exchanges.
Anyway, that aside, let's give responding a go.

Thank you for the first 2 paragraphs.  I appreciate that sentiment, mostly.   

I'm going to make my defense.  I have read through that thread you link there.  If you read through that thread, and I'm not saying that I was all warm and fuzzy.  But, I had a point, and really I was looking for an answer to a question.  

Then what happens?  I get a lot of responses.  I just don't get a any responses to my question.  Most responses are just strawmen of what I must think for asking the question.  I get insults like:

Are you seriously claiming that absolutely none of the wealth under your control was created thanks to the work of the government? Are you just floating some perfect vacuum out in space, farting out gold bricks, and saying the government has no right to those shiny metal blocks? Congratulations, in that case you're right, and the government has zero claim to your wealth. If not, well, this idea that everything you own is 100% a result of your own labor, dependent on no one else, is pretty absurdly narcissistic.

But never a response to the question I ask.  For the most part, I earnestly answer everyone's question.  Looking back, I wonder what motivated me.  

I do state my opinion here, and I will question.  But, for the most part it is respectable.  Though, I get pulled into the muck more often than I'd like.    However, I rarely, if ever, start the insults.  

Many here who are self righteous will, usually obliquely, deride others.   But that's fine.  Because they think what everyone else thinks.   I mean that's expected.  But, to those people think I'm the bad guy.  All I'm saying is a look in the mirror every once in a while wouldn't hurt. 

Everything that governments do involves coercion. From paying your taxes to how your doctor disposes of medical waste, there are consequences for noncompliance. 

So what then? Should driving slower in a school zone only be a suggestion because coercion is bad?

What was your question?

Ya see? The 70% marginal rate proposal is just a stepping stone in re-allocating all of this "wealth" to where it should go.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) will propose a new “wealth tax” on Americans with more than $50 million in assets, according to an economist advising her on the plan, as Democratic leaders vie for increasingly aggressive solutions to the nation’s soaring wealth inequality.
Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, two left-leaning economists at the University of California, Berkeley, have been advising Warren on a proposal to levy a 2 percent wealth tax on Americans with assets above $50 million, as well as a 3 percent wealth tax on those who have more than $1 billion, according to Saez.
The wealth tax would raise $2.75 trillion over a ten-year period from about 75,000 families, or less than 0.1 percent of U.S. households, Saez said.

Eventually we'll have enough to buy nice things.

good twitter thread on the wealth tax

https://twitter.com/PatrickRuffini/status/1088618891146919936

The opening tweet tries to scare people off from the tax (with some dubious math) but the responses are not buying it.

drummerboy said:
Ya see? The 70% marginal rate proposal is just a stepping stone in re-allocating all of this "wealth" to where it should go.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) will propose a new “wealth tax” on Americans with more than $50 million in assets, according to an economist advising her on the plan, as Democratic leaders vie for increasingly aggressive solutions to the nation’s soaring wealth inequality.
Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, two left-leaning economists at the University of California, Berkeley, have been advising Warren on a proposal to levy a 2 percent wealth tax on Americans with assets above $50 million, as well as a 3 percent wealth tax on those who have more than $1 billion, according to Saez.
The wealth tax would raise $2.75 trillion over a ten-year period from about 75,000 families, or less than 0.1 percent of U.S. households, Saez said.

Eventually we'll have enough to buy nice things.

Terp, do you seriously think $2.75 trillion over 10 years is a rounding error?

leaving aside whether or not people resent or hate the rich, how can this kind of thing be good for any country?  CEO of a global investment firm buys a $238 million apartment in NYC that he probably will never live in.  Sure the article mentions his philanthropy, and I suppose it's good that he gives away lots of money.  But the money goes to whatever his idiosyncratic preferences are.  For example, does Harvard really need his $150 million?  I doubt it.

To put $238 million in perspective, the median income in our upper middle class town of Maplewood is around $100K annually.  Not too shabby.  But it would take our average family 2380 years to earn the price of this guy's apartment.  And he has a handful of similar properties around the world.  Again leaving aside any emotional reaction to this -- can this possibly be good for an economy or a society to have this kind of concentration of wealth in a few hands?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/24/nyregion/238-million-penthouse-sale.html

basil said:

Terp, do you seriously think $2.75 trillion over 10 years is a rounding error?

 Well, to be fair, the way the deficit is ballooning under the current misAdministration, in the near future it may be.

Reading the account in the Times about the scumbag who is paying 275 million dollars for a penthouse apartment in NYC, I can't help but thinking that he could be paying a hell of a lot more in taxes.

Klinker said:

basil said:

Terp, do you seriously think $2.75 trillion over 10 years is a rounding error?

 Well, to be fair, the way the deficit is ballooning under the current misAdministration, in the near future it may be.

to me it's a red herring to talk about how small these amounts are relative to the total federal budget.  The tax on income over $10MM is estimated to bring in a tiny amount of the overall budget -- but it is a substantial portion of the "Green New Deal" that AOC was proposing it in relation to.  She did not talk about that tax in relation to reducing the federal deficit.  But iIt would be roughly 10% of the annual cost of the Green New Deal. That's a pretty good start to paying for it.  And as I wrote earlier, add in a carbon tax, repeal the 2017 tax deal, and you're more than halfway to the estimated $700bn annual cost of a Green New Deal.

And down the road, we get the benefits of cleaner, renewable, more efficient use of energy.  And maybe bend the curve on the progress of climate change.

The other TomR,

Thanks for the Wiki link to progressive taxation, but I gotta ask; what it was about the subject that you thought I didn't understand?

---------------

Random thoughts and ruminations:

No matter which income tax structure we choose, flat or progressive rate, the high income folk ("HIF")are going to bear more of the tax burden than the lower income folk ("LIF"). And the ten million folk are going to bear a greater burden than the one million folk; and the 100 million folk a greater burden than the ten million folk, and so-on and so-on.

Comment has been made that the HIF use more of the government provided resources than the LIF, using the interstate highway system as an example. I doubt that many HIF are running 4,000 ton tractor/trailer combos down I-78. They may own an interest in the tractor/trailer; but each of those tractor/trailers pay use fees to each of the States in which they operate. Also, the interstate highway system was largely built with income tax revenue. Income tax money collected, mostly from previous HIF.

Should the HIF pay more in income taxes than the LIF; sure! In fact, they already do.

Should the HIF pay more, and leave everybody else paying that which they do now; I say NO.

The HIF are already paying a disproportionate part of our bill. Let's not tell them that our shortcomings, our debt, our wants or needs are their problems only; and not the shortcomings, debts, wants and needs of the entire body politic.

TomR

P.s. Before anybody goes off track, I think the recent personal income tax rate schedule changes was a very bad idea. The previous tax rate schedule doesn't make much sense to me either; but reducing personal income taxes, whilst enlarging the national debt, was just foolish.

ml1 said:

Klinker said:

basil said:

Terp, do you seriously think $2.75 trillion over 10 years is a rounding error?

 Well, to be fair, the way the deficit is ballooning under the current misAdministration, in the near future it may be.

to me it's a red herring to talk about how small these amounts are relative to the total federal budget.  The tax on income over $10MM is estimated to bring in a tiny amount of the overall budget -- but it is a substantial portion of the "Green New Deal" that AOC was proposing it in relation to.  She did not talk about that tax in relation to reducing the federal deficit.  But iIt would be roughly 10% of the annual cost of the Green New Deal. That's a pretty good start to paying for it.  And as I wrote earlier, add in a carbon tax, repeal the 2017 tax deal, and you're more than halfway to the estimated $700bn annual cost of a Green New Deal.
And down the road, we get the benefits of cleaner, renewable, more efficient use of energy.  And maybe bend the curve on the progress of climate change.

Also, on a side note, it's always amusing how these folks opposing millionaire taxes often talk from both sides of their mouth. It goes something like this:

'OMG, if we do that all businesses and investors are going to leave and that will have a major impact on the economy, and then they won't pay taxes at all anymore and that will have have a major impact on our tax revenues and deficit. The sky is falling! The end is near!'

And then:

'It barely has any impact, it won't produce any meaningful revenue, nobody is going to notice it, so why bother at all?'

Tom_R said:
The other TomR,
Thanks for the Wiki link to progressive taxation, but I gotta ask; what it was about the subject that you thought I didn't understand?
---------------
Random thoughts and ruminations:
No matter which income tax structure we choose, flat or progressive rate, the high income folk ("HIF")are going to bear more of the tax burden than the lower income folk ("LIF"). And the ten million folk are going to bear a greater burden than the one million folk; and the 100 million folk a greater burden than the ten million folk, and so-on and so-on.
Comment has been made that the HIF use more of the government provided resources than the LIF, using the interstate highway system as an example. I doubt that many HIF are running 4,000 ton tractor/trailer combos down I-78. They may own an interest in the tractor/trailer; but each of those tractor/trailers pay use fees to each of the States in which they operate. Also, the interstate highway system was largely built with income tax revenue. Income tax money collected, mostly from previous HIF.
Should the HIF pay more in income taxes than the LIF; sure! In fact, they already do.
Should the HIF pay more, and leave everybody else paying that which they do now; I say NO.

The HIF are already paying a disproportionate part of our bill. Let's not tell them that our shortcomings, our debt, our wants or needs are their problems only; and not the shortcomings, debts, wants and needs of the entire body politic.
TomR
P.s. Before anybody goes off track, I think the recent personal income tax rate schedule changes was a very bad idea. The previous tax rate schedule doesn't make much sense to me either; but reducing personal income taxes, whilst enlarging the national debt, was just foolish.

Under our current tax structure  and economic policy, every year more and more of the nation's wealth (yes, "the nation's") is going to a handful of people.

This is a bad thing, for any number of reasons. If you think it's a good thing, then you're obligated to explain why.

The only way to fix this is to change tax and economic policy.

It's that simple. It has nothing to do with the arguments in your post, some of which are just strawmen. 

Does anyone try to argue that this increasing wealth disparity is good, or sustainable?

What's the end game?

this is why tom_r's post up above is just diversionary. You either need to acknowledge that the wealth disparity is sustainable and good for us, or it's not.

If you believe the former, than the argument against greater taxation is simply "this is the way the system works, tough noogies, deal with it". You don't need to hide behind ideas of "fairness" or try to come up with rationalizations that the wealthy "deserve" this crazy amount of wealth because of reasons.

If you believe the latter - that it's bad for us - well then, let's try to fix it.

tom said:
Does anyone try to argue that this increasing wealth disparity is good, or sustainable?


What's the end game?

 I haven't seen anybody. Have you?

TomR

tom said:
Does anyone try to argue that this increasing wealth disparity is good, or sustainable?


What's the end game?

It is totally unsustainable. If it continues it will lead to increasing social instability. You could argue that the first sign of that is that people voted for Trump.

Interesting twitter thread on inequality from Davos. Watch the video in the first post.

https://twitter.com/nowthisnews/status/1090045108064579584