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They don’t want a faster bureaucracy, or more efficient government. The goal in cutting funding for public services is to decrease the quality of services so that they can then trick people into supporting private companies in being awarded the contracts to provide those services (cut costs in the short-term so that they can justify higher costs later).
The goal is to DESTROY government and REPLACE it with profit-driven private interests. Capitalists are the enemy.
Writing this as an opinion makes you seem like a conspiracy theorist.
You need actual quotes about Dark Enlightenment
I appreciate your response and that you also did the legwork to include the citable quote that I was negligent to omit.
Glad to help. You are sounding the alarm, but not in a way that people will listen.
Just like project25 these guys have already told everyone exactly what they are going to do. And it will happen quickly.
Taxing the rich built the strongest most wealthy nation in the world that landed a man on the moon.
Ever since then, the greatest thing they've done is manipulate number charts to convince everyone that they shouldn't tax the rich.
Twelve men on the moon. We did it six times, out of seven attempts.
But then they've have to find something else to do with that money. In the old days, they just kept reinvesting it in the company's reputation and their employees. They wanted that same company to pay out them and their family for a hundred years.
Is that really what we want to encourage?
I get what you’re saying but yes, I think that’s what we want. When a company pays its employees a good salary the employee will stay for a couple of years. When a company pays its employees a great salary ($50-80k+ more than the avg in that area) it encourages employees to stay and work for that same company. You’re getting paid well, you have healthcare, if the company has good benefits(stock, pensions, long term investments), why leave?
Employees will be happier, product quality will increase, and the company is supplying the community in that area with more money and local taxes. We saw that in the 40’s, 50’s and then yea kinda down hill from there.
Yes
I wrote this on a similar post a day or two ago, so I’ll repost it here:
There were very few people this applied to.
The real reason is the corporate tax rate.
It was 52%. Today it’s 21%., and it’s effectively close to zero for many corporations with the tax loopholes used to avoid taxation. Shell corporations, deferring taxes, what have you.
So the US has lost more than 50% of the corporate taxes by % since the ‘50s.
E: the decline in tax % is pretty closely followed by the dramatic rise in CEO compensation. The wealth being funneled to the top by cutting corporate tax got us the billionaire oligarchs we’re dealing with today.
Your comment is a bit misleading. Part of the point of why we need to raise the top marginal tax rate to 100% above $250,000 is because the accumulation of wealth is itself a threat to liberty and democracy. The New Deal was designed to save capitalism—the grand irony being that capitalists are so greedy they can’t even live with less in order to simply exist.
So yes, we need to raise all sorts of tax rates to previous levels and even higher when possible, no question. We just need to understand that these are guardrails on the way to socialism in order to have real freedom and democracy after capitalism is fully abolished.
I said that the cutting of corporate taxes was part of the rise in CEO compensation that led to us having oligarchs.
That’s accumulation of wealth. There is nothing misleading about what I said. Both can exist at the same time, but cutting the corporate taxes is by far the greater loss to federal tax vs the relatively few billionaires.
To answer your question, it's not.
The Republicans, as proxies for the 1% and Evangelicals, have been trying to break the Federal government at least since Reagan, if not longer.
They've been trying to break the federal government since before the nation was founded. These are the descendents of the same people that wanted to count "non-humans" like slaves towards their population but without giving those slaves the same rights as them.
You're not wrong, but post WWII Republicans were more than willing to play along so long as big business got theirs.
IMO, it was when the CRA, the EPA and other "anti-business" initiatives came into existence that "small government" because a buzz word for them.
They made a completely wrong turn when they teamed up with Evangelicals in the 80's and let them into positions of power in the party in the 90's culminating in the bat-shit-crazies we have now.
And how did they accumulate the wealth to be able to pull this off?
Ignoring laws long enough to get them changed in their favor.
Shitty people devite the vast majority of their time working on tearing things down. Non-shitty people want to spend time doing positive things instead of fighting the people tearing things down. Add to that how much easier it is to tear down than build up and shitty people have a huge advantage.
Imagine life was a game. You lived for 2025 years. You worked 260 days / year. You made the median US salary.
You would need to relive that process 3,145 times to match an Oligarch.
That amount of wealth is unethical while humanity suffers. No one can really fathom “1b dollars.”
Who has 105 days off in a year‽
EDIT I forgot weekends, man it's time to sleep.
BuTt they CreAte JerBs!
Narrator: They did not, in fact, create jobs.
IRS expects DOGE cost the country half a trillion dollars so far. Bankruptcy is the point.
The funny thing is the path to MAGA is taxing the rich, but the dummies are doing the opposite.
“Make America Great Again” was also Reagan’s campaign slogan:
It’s always been the calling card for letting the rich get richer and accumulate more power.
It would already help if they would actually pay those 37%. But with the tax avoidance they can afford to get, they usually pay nothing at all.
What would be REALLY new is if people understood how little the top income tax rates matter because almost nobody pays them. Income tax rates only apply to salaries. Wealthy people get almost all their income from capital gains - i.e. buying and selling stocks and other investment items. Capital gains tax has always been much lower than income tax, currently I think 10-15% depending on how long the item is held before being sold. Raising top income tax rates back above 90% would not "tax the rich" or provide enough tax money to take any burden off the rest of us. It's a silly PR slogan.
To ACTUALLY tax the rich we need to increase capital gains taxes. Or create new wealth taxes. Or even a ceiling on individual wealth. That last one would have the greatest effect, by limiting how much money any one person has available to influence politics - which really seems like the root of the whole problem. Secondly, abolish Citizens United, the congressional act that made corporations "people", to stop corporate wealth from buying politicians.
The difficulty is how to get anything like this past the people whose power it would eliminate. A good first step tho would be whenever you feel like you understand something because of some meme you saw, remind yourself that you don't, and then stop scrolling and do some real reading on the subject.
There is truth here.
I think rich people will have assets, like stock, and they'll get a loan out with the stock as collateral. They pay like 2% on the loan, but they get like a million dollars cash. If that was treated like income, they'd pay a lot more taxes.
Not sure the best way to address this, but it should be addressed.
Simple really
When you use unrealized gains as collateral for a loan, those gains have now become realized, and they are taxed.
Oh, did your stock valuations go up? Did you use that stock to take out a personal loan? You’ve realized those gains. Apply a progressive tax until those loans look more like minimum wage. Make it not worth it to invent value out of fractional reserves in order to bankroll oligarchy.
The fact that this is apparently not done now is the single biggest loophole in the whole system. This is what allows the “unlimited money glitch”.
Making it illegal to consider investments a form of collateral for a loan would be the first step. Prove you can repay based on your annual income or that there's actual physical assets that can be seized or fuck off.
Oh, not to worry. I'm not satisfied with taking a couple percent of them anymore. I have become way too radicalized by these leeches turning everything to shit. I won't be sated without eating the rich at this point. They could willingly give up their wealth and I'd still call for blood for the harm they have caused.
Access to the domestic American market is what made most of these guys billionaires in the first place.
But the laws don't require them to return the favor.
A sensible solution would be to find a way to make the loopholes more expensive than returning some of those spoils in the form of some kind of tax.
Ideally that tax would create a positive feedback loop such as free higher education or other benefits to humanity that would continue to make the USA a better place to live and survive.
If the tax is too high or is used in a way that seems frivolous to the rich they will fight it so hard that it could never succeed.
What's absolutely crazy to me, the 50's were some of the best times economically in this country, every time we tax the rich less the country goes further to shit. More so when these non taxed assholes spend their non taxed wealth on corrupting politicians to tax them even less.
Less popular opinion. If we drive taxes up on the rich they’ll just get more creative with tax avoidance or move to Panama.
The ultra wealthy don’t pay income taxes and they didn’t in 1950 either. They’re mostly paying capital gains which was lower back then then it is now.
What we really need to do is remove all the massive loopholes in the current tax code and maybe do something like having progressive tax brackets on capital gains (some people are legitimately just using capital gains as retirement income).
Also, fund the IRS more. They’re not the evil tax man. They are finding the people who aren’t paying their legal fair share.
sarcasm: that's why all countries in europe who do tax their rich have zero billionairs, they all fled to the us where you can't even study abroad without being detained and tortured
European countries have scaled back taxes on the rich because they started fleeing. That’s exactly what I’m referencing. NPR article
The same way cutting the budget of poorly performing schools makes students more successful.