I don't know how this is different from filing income taxes.

When you are convicted of committing tax fraud, you may get incarcerated in a prison. Most often, you pay a fine.

Call the prisons re-education camps or the tax people jackboots, if you like.

You made quite a few significant leaps there.

"The slippery slope is a fallacy!" quoth those actively greasing the slope.

So did the NKVD!

Started as regular police, ended up doing purges 13 crazy years later.

lol, put the meth pipe down

The US used to tax up to 90% or so at the highest brackets. Rich people survived.

The US also used to have no income tax. Lots of people survived then too.

Many fewer, actually. People lived significantly shorter, harder lives; many more died young.

Of course the economy was much smaller then, especially on a per capita basis, and modern capitalism hadn’t had time to create the safe, abundant, filled-with-medical-marvels lifestyle we enjoy today.

> Of course the economy was much smaller then, especially on a per capita basis

Indeed, and even more on an aggregate basis, the population also being much smaller.

> modern capitalism hadn’t had time to create

You're assuming that was created by modern capitalism, which I think is a major flaw. Capitalism contributed certainly, but so did democracy, freedom, rule of law, government investment, civil society, etc. etc. Just look at most of the education system, courts, security, roads, most of science, soldiers, etc etc etc.

> abundant, filled-with-medical-marvels lifestyle we enjoy today.

A great many, maybe most people in the US don't live in that world.

Now that tax rates are lower again compared to the "90%" rates, is the same saying not true for today compared to that time period?

So, surely, you will agree the people who live the easiest and highest quality lives are people today, and lowering tax is actually fully indicative of increasing life expectancy and quality of life.

Be consistent.

As we've cut taxes beginning in the 1980s, most people in the US have been living worse. Now life expectancy has been dropping, iirc home ownership, access to education, etc.

I don't mean there's a 100% direct correlation, but that investment is needed for returns. If we don't invest in healthcare, we'll have worse health. If we don't invest in education, etc.

> investment is needed for returns

What returns? A very important part of "investing" is ensuring your losing positions are cut early and cut fast, its not continuously putting money into a black hole hoping one day the worst of the worst magically becomes the best of the best.

The rest of your comment is you being quite inconsistent, and frankly, a position that is full of lies.

No it didn't - there were multitudes of loopholes. Nobody paid that much.

The real way to measure the size of the state is % of GDP. This includes shadow taxes such as printing-induced inflation and deficit spending.

And guess what? The size of the state skyrocketed from a historic baseline of 1-2% to 35% in recent decades. Every now and then there's a war or a crisis and spending pops up like crazy, but it always used to go back down. Not anymore.

The only time it's been higher than this year is in WW2 and during Covid.

https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA

I'm trying to parse if this is meant to be an argument against enforcing limits on wealth, and if so, point out the humor that we already reached the road of monitoring through having corporations have uncapped power.

An argument could be made that the big social media companies are also taking care of re-education, although through less overt means.