Also the trickle down proponents, however middle-class, think of themselves as wealthy and have the misconception that it’d be their money being reallocated.

Run the numbers, the billionaires don't actually have that much money compared to the hordes of doctors, lawyers and managers. If you want to cut the masses a meaningful sized check (lump sum or over time really makes no difference) you're going to need to take it from more than just the very top. Look at how Europe pays for its social safety nets. That's on the order what the tax burden would look like. You can't just snap your fingers and make that happen. Well you can, but that's a great way to get you and your like minded buddies shot in the hole you just dug. That frog needs to be boiled slowly and doing it that way isn't a sure thing. Basically you have to convince enough of the middle class that something that is very much not worth their while is the right thing to do.

Wouldn’t those professions listed be uppper-middle class or something else? I’ve never thought of doctors and lawyers as middle-class professions or income.

Your average lawyer isn't a partner at a prestigious firm that prints money. Your average manager isn't a PM making 250k+ at FAANG.

https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm#00-0000

I probably shouldn't have included doctors though. I always forget how grossly overpaid they are.

Afaik middle income in most places is like $60-75k so even $120k is upper-middle income in most of the country.

The problem with that argument is it happens all the time. just the other way around. The problem is we're in the worst situation. where people who trust the market don't want to create laws that help the working class and people that want government to create more laws to help the working class argue amongst themselves and the rich and powerful slowly slip in more laws that help them.

> where people who trust the market don't want to create laws that help the working class

I would say even that is a straw man. The argument is that I’d rather trust the market than governments with that task given their respective track records.

>Because that would require taking from some people and giving to others through government, which is a very inefficient way to do it.

I mean where do you think defense contractor profits come from? How about medical and Pharma? Medicare is the largest single payor in the US and they deal exclusively with the elderly who require more prescriptions and medical care. Many large industry's largest client is the federal, state and local governments. Where does that money come from? Our taxes; not only ours but the taxes of future generations through debt. We do it all-the-time with business to prop them up. That doesn't even get into tax incentives.

> I mean where do you think defense contractor profits come from?

So what? What’s the argument here? Because we have programs that take X amount of dollars, burn a portion of it and give the rest to people in group Y, we should have other programs doing the same for the people in group Z1,Z2,…?

Call me crazy, but IMO the solution is not having programs that burn our collective wealth.

>So what?

Follow the thread:

>> I haven't ever heard trickle down proponents suggest we give the money to the working class.

>Because that would require taking from some people and giving to others through government, which is a very inefficient way to do it.

The argument is even though trickle down proponents don't suggest we give the money to the working class, they're fine with giving money via several mechanisms to business, thus trickle down.

>Call me crazy, but IMO the solution is not having programs that burn our collective wealth.

Our collective wealth should be spent on helping the "collective," i.e. citizenry directly. It's been hijacked with trickle down theory. Trickle down theory basically says if you give all the collective wealth to business, it will be spent helping the citizenry. I guess it does in the form of jobs, but the businesses certainly get most of the cut.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics

"...means to stimulate business investment in the short term and benefit society at large in the long term."

Of course it's a sham, but it's been going on since at least Reagan.

>I mean where do you think defense contractor profits come from? How about medical and Pharma?

Inefficiency

Regulatory capture is not inefficiency, it is an extremely efficient result of a system designed to serve capital. At some point we have to stop pretending like we aren’t successfully achieving what our economy is optimized for.

Regulatory capture is impossible without government enforcement.

The way to fight it is not by giving more powers to government but giving less.

I’m not sure what Libertarian-minded people think the era of peak neoliberalism was all about, but defanging the powers of government 50 years ago is how we’ve arrived at the modern corporatocracy. It turns out that taking power away from government doesn’t result in an anarchist paradise, it just swings the balance of power in favor capital.

This is your paradise, your side won. Move the goalposts all you want, but we’re at the logical consequence of letting “the market” make every social, economic, and political decision.