In the Beginning, There Were Taxes

Re:In the Beginning, There Were Taxes by tomdell on Friday April 16, 2021 @08:05PM (#26840392)

Public benefit, not hatred, is the primary motivation behind higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy. These taxes were at their highest in America around WWII and following - the money was used to fund the war. These taxes are at historic lows in America thanks to waves of major tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy since the 80s. Social services have been defunded in parallel. Taxes are raised for corporations and the wealthy because people who push for those raises want to live in a fairer society where everybody's right to a decent life is more important than a handful of people and corporations' right to hoard far more private property and power than they have any use for. Extreme inequality destabilizes societies and progressive taxes are a lever for the government to use to try and prevent that. Europe was at its historically highest level of inequality just before the outbreak of WWI. Everyone who enjoys living in a relatively stable society should have an interest in preventing extreme inequality.

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Re:In the Beginning, There Were Taxes by ObserverNeutral on Saturday April 17, 2021 @07:17AM (#26843380)

> Public benefit, not hatred, is the primary motivation behind higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy

All taxes are essentially a re-do or a refund at the socieatal level

Corporations sell a product or a service, citizens see such product/service and think they might use it to improve their lives.

Then they decide to exchange some social status (represented by their net worth in USD) for the quality of life provided by that product or service.

Then they collectively realize that everybody had the same idea and that the corporation and its owners accumulated so much social status in the form of net worth flowing out of citizens and into the corporation/owners coffins.

Now they want all want a re-do/refund even though they voluntarily agreed to exchange part of their social status for quality of life and the corporation delivered on that.

What pushes people to claim a refund is :

1) They regret that everybody had the same idea as themselves and that they contributed to socially elevate that person so much

2) Hedonistic treadmill kicks in so the quality of life provided by that product/service doesn't feel as good as the first day you used it...so you are now even more regretful that you purchased it.

Witnessing the social elevation of somebody other than self (and having contributed to such social elevation) plus the hedonistic treadmill which makes the product/service not feel like something that is so special anymore compels people to come together and claim a refund in the form of taxation against those who were socially elevated

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Re:In the Beginning, There Were Taxes by tertius on Saturday April 17, 2021 @09:17AM (#26844022)

Instead of looking at tax rates, look at how much the government actually collected as a % of GDP. It's fairly flat.

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