/r/50501 Mirror

Let them keep enough wealth to still be in the top 10%, but hit them hard and fast.

That's fine for the ones who cooperate.

What people in the US are failing to understand is that there are still good manufacturing jobs in the US today. Pharmaceuticals, aerospace, biotech, etc. They’re just on the higher end and require some type of technical or bachelors degree. Although, with the current regime and how they want to run (or not run) education, makes it seem like they want to bring us back to a developing country status where labor standards are low and manufacturing jobs are “low skilled.”

Also, define success. Please, seriously, just do.

Billionaires have failed as humans. They are complete failures. Zero respect for them or their means of money grabbing.

Agreed. Also, billionaires like Musk would still be able to skirt around those taxes by sharing his wealth with his 50 children and baby mamas so it wouldn't even hurt him, it would just limit how much power a single person could have.

I agree, capital gains shouldn't be treated as special and privileged. But as long as they are, an ultra-high top tax rate on regular income is just empty PR and will not effectively tax the rich.

What you're saying about expenditures doesn't make sense though, because if you take in $10 but spend $8 to do it, you should only be taxed on the $2 you gained, because you don't have the $8 anymore. The term "writing off" is just accounting slang for keeping track of costs.

There are, however, phony write-offs that shouldn't exist because they don't represent reality. For example, real estate depreciation. Depreciation, if you don't know, means spreading out an eventual cost over a long period of time. For example, a factory machine will have to be replaced in say 10 years, so instead of waiting until you actually have to spend that money to replace it, you're allowed to take 1/10th of that loss per year. That makes sense because the eventual expense is real.

But if you own rental property you're allowed to depreciate it as well - as if the property will gradually wear out and become worthless like a factory machine. This is ridiculous because the value of real estate almost universally goes UP over time. Fake but totally legal writeoffs such as this are just a gift to property owners, and should be eliminated from the tax system.

At that time the simplest solution was to sell war bonds, which are essentially loans from the public. In the years following the war people cashed in their bonds and earned interest. To pay that, the government used new tax revenue people paid on their salaries, which were higher because business was booming with everybody buying more stuff. The economy spiraled up until the late 1950s when wartime savings finally ran out. At that point the boom should have ended, but the business world didn't want that so they started handing out consumer credit like candy. The public, also not wanting to end their spending spree, happily took them up on it. Credit spending became an ingrained habit, and now the average American family maintains several monthly salaries worth of credit card debt.