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Musk Secretly Used Starlink to Foil Ukrainian Drone Attack on Russian Ships
(www.thedailybeast.com)
this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
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Wealth taxes are fantastic in theory, but in practice have never worked. They're too hard to implement. I agree with the spirit of what you're saying, but I just don't think a wealth tax is the answer.
I mean, the truth is that we've never found a way to prevent some people from hoarding huge amounts of wealth. Probably not a great sign for the future of our species.
Guillotine was pretty effective in France for a bit…
There's more good people than bad people. The only way the bad people win is by convincing the good people to give up.
Yes shitty people will always be fucking up things for everyone else. But that doesn't mean working to stop that is pointless. It's more the opposite, it means we have to be continually working to stop the assholes from fucking things up for everyone.
It's a seriously hard problem. The IRS already can't keep up. In order to implement a wealth tax they would not only have to do what they do now, but also assess the value of every estate of every wealthy person. They would need experts in all sorts of things to even attempt to pull that off. Experts in fashion, jewelry, cars, planes, boats, art, etc... as soon as you let even one of those things slip through, that's what becomes the new wealth sync. Previously it's been attempted by they excluded art because that's notoriously hard to assess the value of. So the wealthy bought and traded a bunch of art to hide their wealth.
I got down voted for my previous comment, but it's the truth. The concept is simple and if it worked I would be all on board. It's the process for implementing it that is the hard part and has historically always caused a wealth tax to fail. It's not a new concept, but there is a reason it isn't used. I'm not saying we should do nothing, but that we should do something different. We could start with adding back some income tax brackets.
Maybe but we were doing better at it before Reagan came along.
But it isn't a silver bullet. If we want to deal with the root of today's problems we need to focus on a number of solutions around anti-trust, pro-labor, wealth tax, lobbying, campaign finance, etc.
We agree on all of those points.