Not that I condone tactless communication, but if China invades Taiwan because some person (president elect of the US or otherwise) calls someone in Taiwan a president, that's wholly on China, not on the person who used those terms. I mean, seriously...
As for welfare, UBI, or whatever: ultimately this has to result in some decision of society to decide if it really cares about wealth inequality or not. On one hand, people like the idea of wealth inequality because they seem to think that they might be able to strike it rich and be one of wealthy few (improbable as that may be). On the other, wealth inequality is terrible because unchecked it inevitably (mathematically) results in more wealth inequality.
My personal hope is that we end up with a system where the general public is granted a guaranteed, irrevocable share of ownership of productive capital. I don't think it should be 100% state-owned, but it shouldn't be zero and it shouldn't be "only if an individual could afford it."
Consider all the talk of UBI - one of the questions is always "where does this originate", which is typically answered by some form of tax. What if, instead, UBI was generated by requiring as a condition for incorporation, all corporations to issue a dividend of no less than (say) 5% revenue minus payroll minus direct expenditures (so it doesn't include goofy things like depreciation or "other charges" write down), and at least (say) 5% of the shares of the company are to be allocated to the public. That is - the "tax" is levied as part of the dividends, not as an income tax. This has a couple neat effects - one it stops the dumb argument about double taxation on capital gains, and you can't dodge "revenue minus expenses" by things like "oh we have a bunch of factories with lots of depreciation, so even though our net cash flow was +$10 billion, we don't pay any taxes."
If you are also serious about wealth inequality, you tax income not on the amount of income, but on the amount of wealth a person already holds. And I would do it based on relative percentile of wealth, not on nominal wealth value - maybe something like "your income tax rate is 99% times your wealth percentile squared". So if you are in the 1% wealth bracket, your income tax rate is 0.99% (0.99 x 0.01 * 0.01); if you are in the 50% wealth bracket your tax rate is 24.75%, and if you are in the 99% wealth bracket your income tax rate is ~97%. So if you have $0 but then get a job that pays you $100k, you pay essentially nothing on that income the first year. But also, if you have $1M in savings but have $0 income - you also pay zero tax. This means you can't be "property taxed" to death if you are retired, it means you don't get penalized for getting a windfall, etc.
Of course there are details about how to compute "income"; I would do the simple thing and just say "any time your account increases." So some definite weird effects, like loans would now count as income (one trick the super-wealthy use today is taking out loans against assets - loans are not income!) So things like mortgages will have to change because those are loans, but overall it's shaping up to a fairly interesting idea...
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Topic: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American: T+0 (Read 1425268 times)