Only the richest ancient Athenians paid taxes

Re:Only the richest ancient Athenians paid taxes by jquery on Friday January 06, 2023 @10:47PM (#34284958)

Whatever they’re paying, it’s not enough, because inequality is increasing. In other words, they’re paying an outrageous amount of the taxes because they make an extraordinarily amount of the income (and wealth). I’m not talking about someone who got a bunch of RSUs and paid 50% on their $2m payday, it’s the billionaires like Trump who treat tax evasion as a game because the consequences are lower than the expected rewards.

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Re:Only the richest ancient Athenians paid taxes by alchemist1e9 on Saturday January 07, 2023 @12:05AM (#34285403)

I will speculate there is a completely different mechanism for inequality than taxation policies. Let’s call it crony capitalism and specifically originating within the financial system. Federal reserve policies and bailouts and socialized losses with privatized gains are what cause inequities, imho.

I can give a few specific examples that might help.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maiden_Lane_Transactions

https://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/programs-archive/large-sc...

Central banks engage in civilization level money laundering and cause the inequality increases. These programs are crony capitalism that is specifically directed to an established globalist western oligarchy. That’s not capitalism even remotely, it’s global oligarchy.

$80B/month was regular dispensed in exchange for collateral which was worth significantly less. That’s 80 modern skyscrapers per month.

It will be interesting if censorship can be successfully reigned in and someone more articulate and with public credibility can attempt to explain the outright theft mechanism that was and continues to be obfuscate by jargon and games and corruption.

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Re:Only the richest ancient Athenians paid taxes by jquery on Saturday January 07, 2023 @12:28AM (#34285528)

Of course The Fed is a generator of inequality, but if taxes were set properly, it could be counterbalanced. We can see this in European countries with much lower rates of inequality because of high taxes on excessive wealth and income. They also have central banks printing money at insanely low interest rates (or even negative rates)… until recently… perhaps they have raised their rates in tandem with the US.

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Re:Only the richest ancient Athenians paid taxes by alchemist1e9 on Saturday January 07, 2023 @12:45AM (#34285592)

There was an analysis which showed that lower european inequality vs the US is attributable to immigration at both the bottom end and the top end. No European nation has even remotely similar levels of poor and rich immigrants. The analysis showed if you exclude those populations the US inequality is lower.

I can’t find the paper done on US data but this is one discussing similar idea:

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cag...

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Re:Only the richest ancient Athenians paid taxes by jquery on Saturday January 07, 2023 @03:12AM (#34286191)

But we can’t exclude those populations. They’re here regardless of whether they’re convenient for our Gini coefficient, and the immense inequality is leading to structural problems with our society. We spend a lot more on health care for much worse overall results, for example.

Anyway I’m under no illusion that inequality can be fixed with tax policies alone… but let’s at least try to do better. What Trump got away with shouldn’t be possible. It’s not like he was a sneaky mastermind, he was vulgar and brazen and open about it. God only knows what actual clever wealthy people are getting away with.

Maybe for a start, we don’t change any tax policy. Instead, we make all tax returns public, or at least any returns involving seven figures or more. Watch the roaches scatter in the sunlight.

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Re:Only the richest ancient Athenians paid taxes by refurb on Saturday January 07, 2023 @04:41AM (#34286641)

Inequality is not a great target alone. Look at inequity measures - it tends to improve during recession because equity holders (which makes up much of the wealth of the rich) takes a massive hit.

Can anyone really claim that the lower income people are better off when inequality drop during a recession?

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Re:Only the richest ancient Athenians paid taxes by utopcell on Saturday January 07, 2023 @01:07PM (#34290757)

My argument was that in absolute terms, the 1% already pays ~100x more than the median tax payer, which seems pretty close to stating that the median tax payer reaps the benefits of modern civilization essentially for free.

Regarding inequality, this can't be the metric for taxation policy. Would you rather the 1% pay all taxes but inequality be 100x worse ? Are you optimizing for a better standard of living for the median, or for imposing the psychotherapeutic sentiment of "if I can't make that much money, nobody should" ?

Capitalism has been around for a long time. The argument of "whatever they’re paying, it’s not enough [..]" has already been played out. In the 70s UK, investment income was taxed at a rate of 98% (after an inflation-adjusted income of 221k). It didn't work.

Thatcher had famously summarized the inequality argument here: [1].

[1] https://youtu.be/pdR7WW3XR9c

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