High taxes don't work, that's why Europe is stagnating badly, and declining in many areas.

When you directly compare the US to Europe, the gap is widening rapidly.

Pretty clear that the high tax model is a complete failure. Not to mention a European brain surgeon is paid like a slave compared to an American one, and you can make those comparisons across any industry.

A Senior Engineer in Stockholm makes less than a new grad in the US, for example. And pays higher taxes!

All the "social Democrats" of Europe will be downvoting this. Too bad they don't have their own HackerNews. Europe just can't come up with stuff like YCombinator.

Do low taxes in the US work for anyone other than the Epstein class? Ancient, crumbling infrastructure, rising cost of living & basic necessities, stagnate wages, shrinking middle class, massive transfer of wealth from the working class, worsening education and healthcare, corrupt government at all levels (corrupted by the benefactors of those tax cuts), market consolidation and collusion resulting in less choice, higher prices, and on and on. It's not all bad of course, for example some luxuries are cheap (such as phones or TVs.)

Sweden may have fewer billionaires flying child models to tropical paradises for coke and popper fueled orgies, but I'm guessing their senior engineers plans for long term unemployment or serious injury/illness don't often include choosing between suicide or homelessness so maybe they're doing something right? I'm sure a happy medium exists and we don't need to go back to our 'great' (1950s) era tax rates though

the epstein class has low effective tax rate, because they are able to write off a lot of their consumption.

large SUV? written off via accelerated depreciation.

hotel or travel or leisure? written off as a business expense.

W2 workers are taxed on wages (income), while capitalists are taxed on profits (so they are able to deduct a lot of stuff).

plus capital gain tax is 10%, while marginal income tax rate (fed+state) can be 50%+

10 million white people isn't remotely comparable to the US population, and government and will don't remotely equate.

We have to stop with these dumb extrapolations.

It's kinda like bitching about administrations for government spending when Congress controls it all.

>Do low taxes in the US work for anyone other than the Epstein class?

Yes, as long as you don't allow companies to flood the job market with low cost foreign labor.

the issue is not nominal tax rates (whats written in the tax code), the problem is effective tax rates (how much of actual cash is paid to IRS).

there is a huge gap between working class and capitalist class.

https://taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/effective-income-tax-rate...

Again, the problem is a flooded labor market. When you get growth, the demand for labor increases. What should happen is the amount you can demand for your labor goes up, but if you have programs like H-1B and you effectively throw open the border, that won't happen.

you are too low IQ to discuss this topic.

I am here to discuss Tax policy, not your racist jingoism

That sort of crime-stop thinking is what keeps working class people just scraping by. I said nothing about race or tax policy. You're so busy looking for "code words" only you can read you've missed the point.

Tax policy is a red herring even if you don't realize it. Wealthy people never pay more than about 25% in tax. If you raise the actual tax rate more than that their tolerance for risk goes down and you gimp your economy.

why do you care about wealthy people's tolerance for risk ? nobody thinks of my tolerance for being overtaxed

I have far more in common with tech visa workers who are overtaxed on their W2 wages, than with big capitalist who never sells and never pays a dime to irs

I'd sooner see offshoring banned than programs that bring in potentially motivated/skilled workers here (though they should still have limits), and I think it'd be more impactful. Theres the obvious dev/IT impact, and we also have companies like Google and Tesla eliminating humans from the workforce with AI and farming out oversight of that AI overseas. When your Waymo or Cybercab makes an oopsie some guy in Manilla or Nairobi is going to be handling it while the out of work uber/taxi driver is shivering in a tent under a bridge.

Offshoring restrictions tend to founder on practicalities. Exactly what constitutes offshoring? If a company creates a subsidiary in another country and hires people to produce a product, is that offshoring? What about when it buys a product from an independent company in another country?

If I fire a bunch of people in the US and hire the same number of people in another country to work on the same project, that's clearly offshoring. But what if I don't fire anyone in the US? What if I fire them five years later?

The whole thing is a mess for regulation and I suspect if you wrote regulations that weren't easy to bypass you'd hamstring local producers.