Excerpt: America’s top 1% enjoy a fifth of the economy’s income and pay nearly a third of its federal taxes. Many politicians think they should cough up much more. Zohran Mamdani, New York’s mayor, wants a new 2% city levy on incomes over $1m. Virginia, Rhode Island and Washington state are weighing up similar measures; Californians are likely this year to vote on a “one time” 5% levy on billionaires’ wealth. In Europe, too, there is a similar clamour to target the wealthy. France has seen a popular campaign for a wealth tax. And with Sir Keir Starmer weakened or doomed as prime minister, the left wing of Britain’s Labour Party may implement one of its own. The “Robin Hood” state, which takes from the rich to give to the poor, has obvious appeal. Governments across the developed world are strapped for cash. Budgets are burdened by legacy debts, ageing populations and the need to spend more on defence. But few politicians will countenance raising broad-based taxes at a time when voters, scarred by the high inflation of the early 2020s, are worried about affordability. Booming stockmarkets, meanwhile, have reinforced the idea that inequality is too high. And it always sounds good to say someone else will foot the bill.
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Please don’t tax the rich people, it’s the fault of poor old people you see and bad budgets.
Fuck off.
The economist’s credibility problems were always bad, but they went super sketchy over the last 10 years. I used to enjoy reading them. Now it’s just a clown show of billionaire penis polishers. They don’t even pretend to have objectivity anymore.
They are desperate, and its going to get a lot worse.
they are trying to avoid the inevitable, like global corporation tax minimum
You can smell the desperation.
The things, nobody else can get taxed to fix the budget, and nobody is going to cut anything like the military aid for Israel.
Knob gobblers.
The Economist is weird, since there’s a huge gap between their journalism, which is generally of a very good standard (especially for non-UK news), and their opinion section, which consistently parrots whatever idiocy the Conservative Party is currently spouting, though they do bleat a little when the Tories get too authoritarian (which, especially since Thatcher, they usually do).
Not only do the rich not pay enough taxes, they are the greatest beneficiaries of taxpayer funded programs like SNAP since it allows them to underpay their employees. So we basically subsidize their gains.
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Please don’t go after Smaug! He’s so misunderstood and taking a bit of gold from his gigantic pile will fix nothing.
Just go mine more gold, or maybe mithril from the Mines of Moria. Nevermind the rumors of orcs or a Balrog!
It’s not as if the rich became rich in a vacuum and then appeared in society. They used society to get rich, and the money came from literally everyone else in that society - everyone who struggles to make ends meet is struggling because the rich are hoarding their share of the money.
They’re hoarding our share of the money.
Booming stockmarkets, meanwhile, have reinforced the idea that inequality is too high
Oookay couldn’t take the article seriously after reading that.
Lol, I couldn’t get past the headline.
The premise that the people want to go after the rich ‘to fix broken budgets’ is absurd. The rich must pay their fair share. Separately many budgets can be improved, but saying one is only sought to do the other is wrong
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Don’t go after the rich
That’s rich.
So, creating structures to send more money upwards is fine, just don’t seek out anything to reverse that trend? I think whoever wrote this think piece needs to go fuck themselves.
I sympathize, but respectfully disagree. Whoever wrote this should get fucked by an angry mob hellbent on vengence.
Nobody wrote this…
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They don’t even post the bootlicker author’s info. Even if this was AI, a human still decided to publish this propaganda. It would be nice to have a public record for accountability.
Say what you will about the Economist; at least they’re consistent in their “will nobody think of the rich?” point of view.
Even if we try to tax the Epstein class income, the tax system is still designed to be rigged by them. They take out loans on their stocks to avoid paying taxes. And captialism is still designed for “number line go up”
if we try to tax the Epstein class income
Disagrees with
the tax system is still designed to be rigged by them
Defeatism is not a desirable trait.
No but tearing down the system is
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Why not have the 1950s once more?
Only pining for the structural racism and sexism and so on is okay, pining for the tax system of the 1950s is “fringe” territory, I guess.
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Add in no fault divorce and women owning property and being able to have a banking account, The Pill and access to abortion (what the cons call “on demand” which they think is a real slam but is really telling on themselves), is something that really drives a lot of conservatives crazy. Most of those things happened in the 70s.
Some of them definitely want to roll all of that back. They say so. They already did a body blow on abortion, that’s for sure.
Both the standard of living in a society and the rate of innovation are strongly positively correlated with the progressivity of the tax system. Yet we should believe the author’s unsourced “research” that supposedly proves having wealthy people live in slightly smaller mansions will dampen innovation somehow. Horseshit. Both the Netherlands and Switzerland, countries that are more prosperous and more innovative than the US, have wealth taxes (albeit not very high ones) and far more progressive income tax brackets as well (albeit not at Nordic levels).
