I have no idea what the best solution is but the road to serfdom we are all on is unsustainable.
Keeping productivity and personal choice at the forefront means people have to keep getting value. I can switch away from Netflix at any time. I can't switch away from my local council or choose to stop paying them. And so my local council is allowed to have a terrible track record and keep on existing.
I also don't know the detailed answer, but I think more choice where people individually decide where to spend their money is a big part of building useful things that don't result in crippling expense on an economy.
I completely agree with your second sentence.
We need to balance the books by not having unsustainable vote-buying policies that cost outsize amounts of money.
> For example the average tax rate paid by the top 400 wealthiest people in the US was just 8.2%
Citation needed. What does "average" mean? What is the denominator on the fraction that generated the percentage?
Thinking if only we could take other people's money forever to pay for things is pointless.
If it's expensive to do things, for whatever reason, then inflation goes up for everyone. If it's pointless to start things, because the government will dip in whenever it likes, then the endless progress-train will stop.
100. That's what "per cent" means, percentages are a way of comparing ratios without needing to worry about scaling both numbers. The % sign is shorthand for /100
100. That's what "per cent" means, percentages are a way of comparing ratios without needing to worry about scaling both numbers. The % sign is shorthand for /100 .
As for the citation im not the op but it was the 400 richest families and it was the white house itself https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2021/09/23/...
The numerator is theoretically their tax bill.
The denominator is not 100. It should be their income - but that's complicated to count.
> For the denominator, we use changes in the reported wealth of the Forbes 400 to estimate the income of the 400 wealthiest families.
Balanced budgets with perpetual motion machine money is unsustainable. It is simply mathematically impossible.
>then the endless progress-train will stop.
There is no such thing.
There needs to be some way of taxing the ultra rich effectively to be able start balancing the books. Every time this is discussed people start talking about high earners and never about the types of people lending the government hundreds of millions of dollars.
For example the average tax rate paid by the top 400 wealthiest people in the US was just 8.2% (2010-2018) and that is on additional income not the billions they already have. Let's not get started with Trusts handed down generationally to avoid inheritance tax completely.