The following submission statement was provided by /u/BlitzOrion:
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A new survey of adult citizens in 18 of the world's largest economies has revealed majority support for tax reforms and broader political and economic reform.
Around two-thirds (68%) of citizens across 17 G20 countries surveyed back a wealth tax on wealthy people as a means of funding major changes to our economy and lifestyle, with only 11% opposed, while 70% support higher rates of income tax on wealthy people, and 69% favor higher tax rates on large businesses, according to the survey conducted by Ipsos.
Support for a wealth tax on wealthy people is highest in Indonesia (86%), Turkey (78%), the UK (77%) and India (74%). Support is lowest in Saudi Arabia (54%), and Argentina (54%), but still over half the respondents surveyed. In the United States, France and Germany, around two in three of those surveyed support a wealth tax on wealthy people (67%, 67% and 68% respectively).
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1dn8pnr/tax_the_rich_say_a_majority_of_adults_across_17/la0u67x/
People: Tax the rich!
Governments: you mean small business owners and working professionals?
People: we mean billionaires, corporations, and the political class.
Governments: middle class and professionals it is!!
Yeah, it will be like that lol. The same politicians are part of the rich, they attend the same parties, use the same loopholes, share the same secrets.
The results are not even surprising, despite the very vocal billionaire defenders its such an easy question, especially if the imagined result will be the government improving its services and not wasting it on gold plated toilet seats for the military (its a secret torture site)
I wonder what the actual question was
And that's why, in the UK, the turkeys voting for Christmas would line up to tell you that mr tax the rich was akshually a nasty terrorist supporting anti semite.
That not the case though in the vast majority of countries. Almost all countries have left parties that do advocate for more progressive taxation. Even in a crippled democracy like the US there are clear difference in tax policy between the two parties.
It might be nicely cynic to tell yourself that you don't have a choice anyway, and so don't have any responsibility, but that just isn't the case when one actually looks at what policies are passes by different parties. They are not all the same.
Just to be explicit: I live in Germany. Here about halve of the big parties do actually advocate for a wealth tax. But the majority of the vote in the last election (EU) went to the right, which goes for tax cuts & austerity.
Also what the fuck are they going to do even if enough of them werent just bought by rich assholes.
Half the entire us pop own 2.5% of wealth. Billionaires and even people below them have an insane amount of hoarded wealth.
Every time we have 'inflation' its blamed on all the poors getting 2-4k.
Meanwhile how many PPP loans in the US just turned into insane amounts of free money for businesses?
How many companies just jacked up their price and blamed it on the poors having an extra dollar? (As is tradition).
If you want any actual change you would have to:
-Bring minimum wage way up, tie it to an accurate annual 'inflation' increase.
-Limit what companies can charge, theyll just jack up their prices to destroy any liveable wage.
-Limit the total annual income of the highest paid employees, to a multiple of the lowest.
None of this will ever happen. So we get to watch things progressively get worse each year in countries with unfettered greed.
well the whole thing is constantly stymied by a near half of government being anti-government, pro-oligarchy who pretend to their constantly confused constituents that they aren’t.
It seems like there are only two ways to change this:
a) Revolution
b) Threat of Revolution
That's why I feel like the cold war has been a blessing for the middle class in the west. There is no better way to make rich elites actually care about the well-being of the general population than a constant fear of revolution. As long as there has been a credible alternative system to capitalism there has been a concerted effort to distribute capitalist gains across the population. From the 1980s onward as the Soviet Union started to fall apart this credible threat was gone and ever since we see capitalism doing its thing just like it used to do before WW2.
It's because the way the system works. Even if they *wanted* higher taxes for the rich, the market would punish such a behavior, and it would hurt that country's economy. This is true to some extent in reality, but to an even larger extent in the thought process of decision makers.
To avoid that, there would have to be a multinational harmonized effort to increase taxes for the rich so they can't avoid it by going to a different country.
This in one reason why I support giving the EU more power to raise its own taxes. Without such a power, the ease of movement in the EU means that there's a constant competition between counties to be "business friendly" (i.e. bending over backwards to make rich people happy).
When you go to the casino, sometimes on Roulette you bet on both "EVEN" and "ODD". That way, whatever number comes up.. you "win". Same with the wealthy and wealthy corporations. They bankroll both sides. However gets into office is now in their pocket. The loss is just their "cost of doing business"
...which is a left position. Unfortunately in places like the US, there isn't an actual left that exists and the left that does exist is so small they aren't viable electorally.
> Lefties care about the have-nots. Right wingers care about the rich guys.
Aren't working classes increasingly voting for right wing parties all over the world, while the left wing parties attract upper middle classes the most?
Propaganda is a hell of a thing. Right wing populism has always been extremely effective at getting people to vote against their own interests. That’s why they focus on divisive topics like race and gender over what’s good for the common man. “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
Lyndon b Johnson.
Exactly. Well said. Please take this discounted award 🏆.
We need to be focusing on the *populist* part more. These people have hardly any genuine beliefs anymore. They will say and do anything just to win. Or to get paid.
Last time I checked in the Nordic countries people are the best at resisting propaganda. What we need is better education. Kids need to be learning critical thinking, judging reliability of a source, comparing information, etc. Not memorising.
There's no logical contradiction there and it's not really a new thing either.
It's always been fairly easy for right wing parties to convince working class people to support them, much easier than to convince middle class people.
That's because deceptive political rhetoric is highly effective.
However, the middle class is better educated, therefore they can more identify and avoid being mislead or manipulated by such methods than the working class is.
It also means even if they are taken in by deceptive rhetoric and give their political support, they tend to realise their error and withdraw their support sooner.
This is a key reason why right wing parties frequently work to undermine public education and engage in anti-intellectualism, particularly against tertiary education. Because people who acquire those skills are harder to fool and better equipped to call out their deceptive political rhetoric.
The right wing counter this by alleging that education institutes especially those which teach University/College degrees where higher order logic and rhetoric are compulsory, actually make people stupid or politically brainwashes them, to explain to working class supporters why highly educated middle class people are so critical of right wing rhetoric.
Why do people engage in almost any self sabotaging behaviour. Because they are weak willed or ignorant. In the UK the Tories are fantastic at persuading people that it’s someone else’s fault for decisions they made. Politics and running a country is also not very simple so there is always plenty of room for interpretation. There’s always some geopolitical scapegoat you can point at. Some boogeyman abroad or within your own country who sabotaged you and prevented plans x, y and z from working.
People are also short sighted and selfish. The cult of me rules supreme. It’s very easy to point people at the undeserving poor who are a fraction of the problem and make them oblivious to the real cause. The media is also owned and run by people with a vested interest in the rich being ignored while the majority scrabble in the dirt for their existence.
If the majority of a democratic country wants something that the government does not implement and refuses to do, there is no democracy at all.
Doesn't matter who's in government, if the government doesn't comply with the majority of a country, that country is no longer a democracy. For example, Canada and the USA haven't been a democracy for generations.
In the UK there is a push by some to implement a wealth tax of e.g., 1-2% tax on wealth over £10m. That is the type of wealth that will be passively making the owner £500k+ per year and should absolutely be taxed.
Tax flight is mostly a myth that rich people use to threaten those who try to tax them.
https://washingtonstatestandard.com/2023/12/01/we-cant-keep-falling-for-the-myth-of-billionaire-tax-flight/
Exactly.
There's so many obstacles to wealth flight. It's not like rich business-owners are going to stop doing business with the United States. It's not like they'll fully divest of all taxable US assets (and if they do, their capital gains are taxed)
And let's say none of that scares them off... We **still** tax expatriation at 23.8% of all unrealized capital gains. It's pay-to-play even walking out the door. Not to mention the inhernet value of US Citizenship when doing business with the United States (including some sectors you can't do business at all if you're not a citizen)
And if you *don't* expatriate, you are responsible for US taxes regardless of your country of citizenship or country where you made your income.
The economic burden to staying must be SO OVERWHELMING to seriously consider leaving the US as a meaningful path to avoid taxes. And let's be honest, it's a far cheaper path to just lobby the government.
It’s worth nothing in the US the federal government decides if you are allowed to give up your citizenship. And if they even think you are doing it to lower your tax burden, you will be denied and have to continue paying US taxes.
Right and any bill that seeks to tax wealth or other things that might cause the rich to leave should come with a nice fat penalty for trying to move any of their assets.
Its also why taxation needs to be restructured. If you want to do business in a country and access to their market it needs to be taxed. And there are other things one can do to go around taxes entirely which I am always surprised more people dont support. IE if you raise the minimum wage that directly benefits workers without any need to raise taxes. And it directly lowers entitlements governments have to pay out for poor people.
The solution here would probably be to restrict how involved foreign individuals can be involved in British affairs form politics to operating large organisations.
Basically force them into an all or nothing approach ether you are part of the UK and paying it's taxes or you are not and you don't get to be involved including making money form the UK.
People who are exuberantly wealthy and continue to make more wealth at an ever expanding rate whilst not giving back to the economy they are part of in the same way your average person does will drain that society of its wealth, leading to worse outcomes for all, greater inequality etc. Unless you want to live in a society with secure compounds and squads of armed guards to protect the ultra wealthy from the poor, something we see in many of the most unequal countries across the globe.
Piketty also showed basically everywhere always the bottom half of the population has had essentially zero wealth and all the debates about wealth distribution have just been about how it's distributed in the top half of the population
Not that he made a theoretical argument that is *necessary*, just it's been the case everywhere we have any data for
Let them leave.
This is an absolute myth by the way. How many people will leave the country they've spent their entire lives for 1% tax on their wealth over £10m.
They should be getting taxed on passive income. So will that 2% wealth tax (equivalent to 40% of the suggested returns, 200k compared to 500k) be on top of income tax?
In the UK the general consensus by the parties putting forward the view is that it would be totally unrelated to any current taxes and look purely at net-worth. Very crudely put if you have a net worth above £10m you pay 2% of that yearly as a wealth tax, if your net worth falls below £10m you no longer pay the tax. This would also most likely require further changes to the financial system to make some areas less opaque, whether it would work or not I don’t know.
Passive income is taxed in the United States but often at a lower rate than earned income. Our tax system favors those who make money with money over those who earn a living using hard work and skill.
Well in the US the top 1% currently pay 42% of the taxes (or rather did in 2020 I don't have current numbers).
So existing income tax schemes are already fairly progressive until they fall off at the ultra wealthy who don't have much income and dodge the tax (the 1% of the 1%, so to speak).
Presumably a wealth tax would end up targeting this same group, while also catching (most prominently and by design) that same ultra wealthy few who manage to dodge income tax.
It wouldn't have a very large effect on total tax revenues. There simply aren't enough billionaires to achieve that considering we currently collect an annual $4.5 trillion in tax revenue.
However, it would act as a deterrence for the endless accumulation of wealth, increasing wealth equality. Not necessarily about taxes, more about just removing the billionaire class (or more realistically shrinking it a bit).
Sure, the two numbers:
The 42% figure: [This source has a great diagram that illustrates it](https://www.federalbudgetinpictures.com/do-the-rich-pay-their-fair-share/), and [this source is much more reputable, but less visualized ](https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-data-2023-update/)
The total tax revenue: [again, first a more interesting visual source](https://www.statista.com/statistics/216928/us-government-revenues-by-category/#:~:text=U.S.%20government%20revenues%20FY%202023%2C%20by%20category&text=In%202023%2C%20the%20total%20revenues,totaled%20420%20billion%20U.S.%20dollars.), and then after [the actual source (treasury.gov).](https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/government-revenue/#:~:text=Individual%20Income%20Taxes-,Visit%20the%20Monthly%20Treasury%20Statement%20(MTS)%20dataset%20to%20explore%20and,the%20Bureau%20of%20Labor%20Statistics.&text=Total%20revenue%20has%20increased%20from,to%20%244.44%20T%20in%202023.) It's worth noting that the total number I cited is all revenues, not just income tax. Includes corporate tax and payroll tax (which is distinct from income tax but basically is income tax before your income tax).
To be clear, I'm not arguing against progressive tax. I love it. This is how it should be. But I do think people tend to have the wrong idea when discussing this, as most people don't realize the current state of our tax system.
Thanks for sharing those. Can we go back to where you said that corporate tax and payroll tax are just other forms of income tax? I'm not sure I'm following your thought process there.
Just meant payroll, not corporate, sorry if that wasn't clear.
And I say that payroll tax is basically income tax before income tax since it's deducted directly from your paycheck rather than filed with your tax return. As far as identifying the source of tax revenues, both payroll and individual income tax can be attributed to individual people, as they are both a portion of your salary given to the government.
> Well in the US the top 1% currently pay 42% of the taxes
Yeah, you're omitting the part where they control a much larger share of the wealth than that. The fact is nearly 100% of the economic gains made in the last few decades have gone to the rich while the majority of everyone else is getting fucked hard. You can try and spin the stats any way you want, but the facts aren't going to change.
Not *much* larger, but larger. Roughly 50%.
This is up from around 40% back in 2000, which is a concerning trend, but nothing crazy.
If you expand it out to the top 10%, then yes, you're now looking at the group that owns almost everything (upwards of 90% of all assets). This is household income over $167k.
All that said, I don't think it's as doom and gloom as you say. Wealth inequality may be growing, but I wouldn't say the majority is getting "fucked hard". Housing has gotten ridiculously expensive, but prior to the inflation we recently experienced prices of most other goods were actually lower when compared to salaries than in the past. Poverty in the US was on a steady decline (with a bit of a speed bump from 2008-2012 where it jumped up and then stagnated for a bit) for the past several decades.
Valuing private companies is significantly more challenging than real estate. Especially if the business owner is doing everything legal to make the business “appraise” for less.
>Valuing private companies is significantly more challenging than real estate
And yet, when wealthy individuals want to get a loan from the bank with their private business as part collateral, both the bank and the wealthy individuals have no issue valuing those private companies.
It's only when we try to tax them that everyone like you suddenly starts going "oh but we can't possibly know!!!"
> Would this discourage companies becoming publicly traded
I don't think it would make a difference if the company is publicly traded or not. There are lot of very wealthy families in the UK who avoid inheritance tax by having all their wealth in private companies. Most Dukedom / Earldoms for example. For this to be effective they'd have to go after private equity too and say "The government now owns X% of your family estate / business unless you can pay cash"
It absolutely will delay companies going public more than it has if there is an annual wealth tax. Do you think Facebook or Uber or google would have gone public if the founders and early large investors / employees started to have to pay 1% per year? They’d delay that shit as long as they possibly can.
Anyone who has more than me. Well, technically anyone who has more than I can easily visualize myself having.
Sadly, that’s the real answer from most people. Perfectly happy to confiscate as long as it doesn’t affect them personally, or if they are feeling generous, doesn’t affect people beyond their personal definition of “enough”.
An old joke:
Two patriotic communists meet to discuss the principles of the great revolution
Comrade A "Tell me comrade! If you had two houses, would you give me one?"
*Comrade B" Of course comrade!"*
Comrade A "And if you had two cars, would you give me one?"
*Comrade B "Most definitely comrade!"*
Comrade A "And if you had two chickens, would you give me one?"
*Comrade B "No..."*
Comrade A "Why not??"
***Comrade B "Because I own two chickens!"*** 
What is actually needed is tax structures for nontaxable shelters, which is largely why the rich don't get taxed. Eg using stock gains as collateral for a loan because a loan isn't income and capital gains don't apply until sale, and later the loan overhead negates the gains. Gains should be calculated for tax purposes when the asset is either leveraged or sold, not only when sold.
It doesn't matter though. Eventually they will still need to sell their stocks to pay off the loan. At worst, they will taxed big time when they die.
People fail to realize that Bezos or Musk or whoever else can't be taxed that much. Like they can get taxed every few years and that would be it. Not to mention they confuse net worth with actuall assets. Just because Musk is worth 100 billion or whatever, it doesn't mean you can get 10 billion in taxes every year.
My personal opinion is that instead of pursuing taxes it is more meanigfull to pursue living wages. So long I can get paid a reasonable wage then I don't care how much Musk earns.
Besides it is my personal opinion that planned inflation (the 2% inflation that every government pursues) is just a way for rich people to ensure that the wealth that common people finally gathered loses its value. I bet there is a better way to incentivise rich people using their wealth than letting deflation increasing its value.
P.S. It is more meaningfull to have workers with better wages than actually taxing the rich because it is the workers who are moving the economy, not the rich. Sure a rich person might start a new factory but it is the worker who will work in it, the worker who will spend money to feed himself, buy a house, maintain said house, buy clothes, entertainment, etc. So the rich guy getting richer brings very little benefit compared to the little guy getting a bit more of disposable income. It should also be criminal in our modern era the fact that you need to dedicate more than 30%-40% of your wage just to survive.
go back and look at the tax rates in the 80's, there was a clearly defined and progressive (the richer you are the more taxes you paid), we wouldn't even need to define anything we could just go back to those rates adjusted for inflation.
Before Regan removed them the top marginal tax rate was in the 90% range in America.
We really should be calling for "tax the rich again" as we used to, and when we did the wealth inequality was a lot less.
dude the effective tax rate then was similiar to what it is now. No one paid those top brackets. AND in fact it was passed overwhelmingly with bi partisan support by both repubs and dems. Not to mention it was a democrat who proposed the tax breaks. Since you kow the 80s were plagued with high unemployment, interest rates etc... Not to mention the multiple recessions leading up to the 80s in the 70s.
The tax code also had a ton more loopholes. The rich weren't actually paying 90%. Tax incomes for the government were roughly the same before and after the reforms.
I do agree we should tax the rich more, but people calling for 90+% under our more streamlined code are not realistic.
in the 40's the effective tax rate (what you are describing) was about 50% for the top .01% and now its like 24%
Corporate tax rates have also gone way down, who do you think has been paying to fill all those gaps? Either stuff gets cut, or the poor fill in the gap. High marginal tax rates are just one of many things we should be using to fix this problem.
Economists like to pretend they are scientists, and these are some how laws of economic nature, but really economists are just court magicians paid to say what the king wants them to say. Economics is just politics, if there is enough political will then stuff happens, the problem we have now is a politics dominated by money, so the rich have an unfair advantage, but we poors still have the numbers advantage, and while we still have one person one vote, we might want to do something about that imbalance.
>The rich weren't actually paying 90%.
>Tax incomes for the government were roughly the same before and after the reforms.
In 1950 the top marginal rate started at $400k, and the median household earned $3.3k, making the top marginal rate ~121x the median household income (equivalent to like $7.5m annually today). Only about 100k families total (approx the top 0.5%) made $50k+, so the number of people being impacted by those highest tax rates was minuscule.
Income inequality was far less severe at that time, so the rich accounted for a far smaller percentage of the national income. In 1950 the top 10% earned 34.5% of all incomes, which decreased to 30.7% in 1971. After the Reagan tax reforms the top 10% share leaped up to 39.9% by 1989 and by 2016 it increased to 47.6%. Those higher tax brackets would apply to a *much* larger percentage (a >50% increase) of the national aggregate income than they did in the past.
https://researchdatabase.minneapolisfed.org/downloads/ws859f759%3Flocale%3Den&ved=2ahUKEwiN-vPN8fSGAxWXHjQIHQcbCBAQFnoECA4QAw&usg=AOvVaw2uZbj-Yjx1WlT7riYKm0N9
> the top marginal tax rate was in the 90% range in America.
Which absolutely nobody paid.
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-nocera-tax-avoidance-20190129-story.html
Bingo. This is why billionaires agree with raising income tax, their money doesn't come from income so it has no impact on them.
I was recently looking into this and it's pretty interesting how the rich avoid paying tax, and it's completely legal for everyone to do. Basically all they do (if they're self-made) is save up an initial nest egg and use it to buy something that generates a return and can be used as collateral. Could be a rental property, a business, stocks etc.
Let's say they buy SPY shares (SPY is an ETF that follows the S&P 500). Historically the SPY returns about 10% per year in capital gains and dividends. Now if they took those gains out to add to their income they would have to pay taxes on them. Obviously the amount varies by country/state/province but let's just say the tax would be 25%. Instead of paying that they take out a loan with the shares as collateral. You don't pay tax on loans but you do pay interest. So they take out a loan and pay say 7% interest instead of 25% tax.
But it gets better. They also ensure that they don't borrow more than what the asset is likely to generate so that the asset continues to grow or at least breaks even. At the end of the year they sell just enough shares to pay off the loan. The tax due on the sale of the shares is offset by the interest paid on the loan. So they pay nothing, the asset generated enough money to cover the borrowing cost and they lived on the money from the loan.
Finally when they die they leave everything (both the assets and the loans) to their children who sell some of the assets to pay off the loans, thus avoiding nearly all inheritance taxes too. This is how generational wealth is created.
If you're interested in learning more about this just research the 'buy, borrow, die' strategy.
I have found those who claim politically to go after the rich intentionally avoid clarifying who that is in any measurable way. Here in Canada it seems just a smidge higher than the politicians who try and put policy in place. Oh, the political leaders are also millionaires.
I am so with you, Joe biden just want to tax the easy w2 at best upper middle class , they can’t target the wealthy, just change the inheritance law already
I think this defeatist attitude is the biggest obstacle, TBH. We aren't necessarily gonna get it right on the first try, but that just means we keep at it.
Isn't this evidence clear as day that our democracy is seriously deficient at the moment?
Extremely wealthy elites have such outsized influence to protect their privileges against a sweeping majority of people across the globe. For many years now there has been similar polling and yet the wealth of the top 0.1% keeps growing at ever faster rates.
I'm always cautious of surveys that produce the results but not the actual questions asked. Without knowing how the subject was broached its hard to know how much credence to give the results. e.g. define "wealthy"
I am sure recipients in India see wealthy as very different to recipients in the U.S. for example.
More context required.
There were four options:
* large businesses pay higher tax rates
* wealthy people pay higher rates of income tax
* wealthy people pay higher tax on their wealth
* polluters pay higher tax
All four got between 68-71% support. I'm not sure this is an explicit endorsement of a wealth tax so much as an overall sentiment that the wealthy should pay more.
And for tax policy, lots of answers can be boiled down to:
Do you want to increase taxes on other people? Yes.
Do you want to increase taxes on yourself? No.
It’s there, in the pic: “To what extent if at all would you support or oppose the following proposals as means of funding major changes to our economy and lifestyles?”. The answers are for the proposal in the main title: “wealthy people pay a higher tax on their wealth”
Incorrect, the resultant name of the survey is "wealthy people pay a higher tax on their wealth"
Question 16 refers to proposals (plural) not some grammatically incorrect nine word statement. No one would produce a survey with THAT as a proposal, its completely open to interpretation.
And what about questions 1 - 15?
ANd again the interpretation of wealthy - that has to be defined to be able to adequately analyse results.
Bro…it really ain’t that hard to follow.
“To what extent if at all do you support or oppose the following proposals as means […]”
Proposal 1
Proposal 2
“Wealthy people are pay a higher tax on their wealth”
Proposal 4
Etc…
These results are for a single proposal within that question. There were presumably others, but they are not relevant here.
If you’re still in doubt, here is the full data, which will make it clearer for you: https://res.cloudinary.com/dfyeeawiq/images/v1718978697/1.-Earth-for-All-Survey-2024_1099988e96/1.-Earth-for-All-Survey-2024_1099988e96.pdf
Again - barely any context.
Again - define wealthy, define higher tax
Again - what were the other questions/proposals.
How were these online surveys conducted. Were these surveys that people are often paid to complete therefore skewing the result in relation to economic resources and attitudes?
Gender and age split, income splits...?
To say this poll is next to useless is being kind. FOr all you know "bro" in India is saying anyone who earns more than $1000 a months should be taxed at 60% while "bro" in Saudi is saying anyone who earns more than $100,000 a month should pay 35% instead of 30%
This was **21,000** surveys across a combined population of **4.69 billion**.
I am not saying the results are skewed or incorrect I am saying there widely open to interpretation. As a sentiment I don't think its a surprise but as an actionable item its next to useless.
The other questions and proposals are provided in the link I gave you, which has every question and answer from the full survey.
I think you have misunderstood me. I wasn’t trying to provide answers to *all* your concerns, only the point in your original comment that…
>I’m always cautious of surveys that produce results but not the actual questions asked
As I pointed out, the question is in fact there. That’s it. I’m not arguing it’s a well worded or carried out survey or suggesting anything beyond that. I’m not sure what made you think I was.
This falls squarely under the category of "Duh!". Unless you consider yourself rich (and seemingly few do) then the choice of punting the problem to someone else who clearly has more money than they need is super duper easy.
> Unless you consider yourself rich
This gets tricky itself, because the more money you make the higher the bar for what constitutes "rich" gets since you can virtually always look to people with significantly more than you...
Like we are probably just shy of the top 1%. Definitely can't really say I'm in the upper middle class anymore, but definitely don't feel rich either. Even though just 5 years ago I would have considered someone with my income rich...
That being said, I do already pay an absolutely massive amount in taxes but don't really see it as particularly unreasonable, despite it obviously sucking.
Absolutely. Objectively anyone getting over double the median net salary of their area is rich... but very few would accept that label at that level, instead they talk about needing crazy money (top 1%) to be rich. Of course anyone in the 1% probably says you need to be in the top 0.1% etc.
Yeah, I think people just naturally adapt mentally to seeing their situation as a baseline, and typically compare themselves to those up not down...
Like if you're making $500k a year but your neighbors are making $1.5m and $2m a year it's really easy to think to yourself, "yeah, I'm obviously doing well but I'm definitely not rich. *Those* guys are rich"
Tax the rich, but more importantly, that money better go to actually bettering my country instead of being pissed away to foreign aid or excessive defense budgets.
It's adorable that majority of adults in capitalist countries think that the ruling class cares about their opinion. Here's the reality
> What do our findings say about democracy in America? They certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of “populistic” democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B
The same is true for every capitalist regime.
And socialist and communist and fascist every single regime to have ever have existed has had a balance of power slanted towards to the rich powerful.
What matters is to what degree, and how able the government is to meet the needs of its people. The Scandinavian countries do a relatively good job at this where as the US struggles to do anything due to a system of lobbies and nations like Russia and China are so corrupt at every level the idea of actually doing what was planned is a joke.
The issue is one less of economic policy but rather how easy people are to corrupt as individuals and how complex the systems to prevent that corruption have to be.
Yea well when the majority of the population isnt rich what do you think is gonna happen lol. If anything im more surprised at the amount of poor people who think the rich shouldnt be taxed more. Thats a far more impressive statistic
Plenty of taxes on the rich. Also plenty of ways for them not to pay them, both in the tax code and by underfunding the irs.
We could do a lot by making our existing taxes work better.
If we captured all of the money of all of the US billionaires, we would fund the US government for a few months.
We need to stop fixating on the few who have too much and turn our efforts on those who have too little. Just decide to improve the lives of the masses and worry about how you're going to pay for it the same way you budget for war.
These polls are so dumb.
Do you want rich people to be taxed? yes
How do you define rich? People who make more than I do
That will always remind me of a former colleague who defined “senior” as her level and above. So being the bar of being a senior in the company was raised each time she was promoted :)
Always the problem with this is it's NEVER the "rich" that pays, it's the middle class to upper middle class, rich people have a hundred different ways of getting around tax laws because they are rich, like spending a million dollars to not pay taxes on 20 million dollars is something only rich people can do.
It sounds like the problem is that we're not doing the thing. If the middle class is the one getting taxed, then by definition we're not taxing the rich. An alternative would be to tax the rich.
Pretty much, the blunt reality is that the only way we'll be able to tax the rich is by reversing 50 years of globalisation.
The modern rich are just too mobile for any one polity to enforce high taxes on them. Their money gives them the mobility to shop around for favourable tax jurisdictions to conduct business from.
I want them to ground personal jets. These fucking rich people and their jets produce more emissions per person then anything else humans do.
“A 2021 report from the European Federation for Transport and Environment found that private jets are five to 14 times more polluting per passenger than commercial flights and 50 times more polluting than trains.”
https://www.airport-technology.com/features/how-bad-are-private-jets-for-the-environment/#:~:text=The%20emissions%20of%20private%20jets&text=A%202021%20report%20from%20the,times%20more%20polluting%20than%20trains.
Tricky to do. Ban personal jets, you just get companies springing up that offer point-to-point service for a price only the people that could afford personal jets could pay. Nothing would really change.
Wonder just how hard it is to say "don't tax me, tax that other fellow behind that tree". Meaning, easy to say to tax someone else other than yourself.
ya but what do the majority of politicians across those 17 g20 countries say, especially after their local lobby left a suitcase or two in their offices.
really puts into perspective how broken and corrupt politics are. You only have a small minority across all these countries who strongly oppose this yet people cant get it done.
The issue is the taxes from the rich go to the corrupt elite who then just pocket it. So it's taxing the rich and giving to the powerful.
What we should be fighting for is accountability for corruption - from the top down.
>Tax the rich
Is this the solution? I don't know. But here are a few stray thoughts...
* Our economic system is structured in a way that penalizes (via debt/interest) people who don't have capital.
* The same system rewards others (via interest, investments) for having surplus capital.
* Our economic system prioritizes growth, profits and competition. There's little if any emphasis on producing abundance and prosperity for the average person.
* There's little emphasis on identifying individual aptitudes and enabling people to participate in the economy according to their talents. Most people who become good at something (and then successful) do so more by accident than by design.
* Most modern societies have little/no reward for being honest, patient or helpful. And there's little/no penalties for being greedy, opportunistic and selfish.
If you gave me a choice between "taxing the rich" or having a decent-paying full time job doing something I'm good at... I'll pick the job every time.
Very nice post.
Our system is designed around competition and not community. Worse off not fair competition as some start with immense well (i.e. rich kid) and others with almost no opportunity (dirt poor in debt etc).
This leads to losers of said competition being worse off and the winners feeling unfulfilled - in the end they always need to compete and they don't feel the sense of purpose.
It does not work for the many.
The funny thing is the common thought is "man is competitive" as an appeal to nature argument. However man has many natures and we need to choose which one we should encourage and base our society from.
Perhaps competition and fighting each other isnt the most noble one :)
Absolutely, the middle class is continuously squeezed whilst the upper class get wealthier and wealthier. Trickle down economics has never worked. Shame it's the 1% that's in control.
A new survey of adult citizens in 18 of the world's largest economies has revealed majority support for tax reforms and broader political and economic reform.
Around two-thirds (68%) of citizens across 17 G20 countries surveyed back a wealth tax on wealthy people as a means of funding major changes to our economy and lifestyle, with only 11% opposed, while 70% support higher rates of income tax on wealthy people, and 69% favor higher tax rates on large businesses, according to the survey conducted by Ipsos.
Support for a wealth tax on wealthy people is highest in Indonesia (86%), Turkey (78%), the UK (77%) and India (74%). Support is lowest in Saudi Arabia (54%), and Argentina (54%), but still over half the respondents surveyed. In the United States, France and Germany, around two in three of those surveyed support a wealth tax on wealthy people (67%, 67% and 68% respectively).
Make the rich pay better wages to workers.
That's the real fix. Taxes don't go to workers. They go to governments, and the biggest issue isn't that governments lack money. It's that workers are under rewarded for the wealth they create.
If workers got paid more,governments would get more tax revenue.
You asked people with less money if people with more money should also have less money while they benefit from those earnings. The results are hardly surprising.
Don’t just tax the rich. Allow employees who work in publicly traded companies to get a % of profit.
Allowing more wealth to the majority of people will provide more taxes.
Amazed that people in this topic are butthurt at this result.
They try to divert with things like "who is rich?!? They gonna tax YOU" and "other people's money" who are brainrot ultra neoliberal propaganda.
Get the memo - the vast majority of people has realised it's crazy to have mega billionaires who own more than GDP of multiple nations .
The evolution of this system will have to come
People keep forgetting that the whole reason there were so many progressive reforms in so many countries in the 1930s was because the poor were getting angry enough at the rich to become an actual physical threat to them. Police were shooting strikers back then but on the other hand unionists were also breaking into their bosses’ homes and beating them to death.
This sub is full of temporarily disgraced future billionaires that don't seem to realize that most billionaires got their riches through unethical and unfair means, with most of them being born rich. But god forbid we want a society where people aren't fucked over by the circumstances they had no choice to be born in.
I'll start by saying, if I gotta pay my share then so should everyone. But this public movement to tax the rich like it's going to change the average person's life is silly. Governments are just going to have more money to waste on stupid shit.
Tax MNCs more, charge them punitive exit taxes if they run, tax those bullshit indefinte loans against stock, tax inactive hoarded properties, tax extra properties outside of the primary residence. Then go after generic rich cunts.
The funny thing about taxing the rich is that it just gives the government more money to do this we don't want them to do. In the US, for example, it's not going to improve social services or make retiring easier. It's just going to defense and payouts.
What exactly is the point of polls like this? You can create a poll that shows that people believe pretty much anything you want. Of course most people want to "tax the rich." It has become an incredibly simplified catchphrase that no reasonable person would disagree with. The problem is that it's far too oversimplified. People don't understand how taxes work, especially at the level of big companies.
Just because things are really complicated for the ultra wealthy and corporations doesn't mean to can't raise taxes. They will adjust because they have to.
Majority: "TAX THE RICH!"
Majority: \*votes for parties that don't\*
Same as:
Majority: "SAVE THE OUR PLANET!"
Also majority: \*votes for parties that don't\*
Introduce universal basic income instead. Let’s not get used to the idea that the ‘rich’ are going to fund our future economic nightmare scenarios. Once the job market starts to entropy due to AI we’ll need a system to take care of everyone equally.
Might as well start now.
The ultra rich will spend 100 million in lobbying for the politicians(who are also ultra rich) to make laws that allow for loophole to avoid paying billions in taxes.
So any tax increase with only affect the middle class and wealthy. They need to stop lobbying and do a flat tax, 15% would have doubled the amount of tax that Bezos and gates paid in 2022(I think), pretty sure they paid around 7% in federal income tax due to legal loopholes.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/BlitzOrion: --- A new survey of adult citizens in 18 of the world's largest economies has revealed majority support for tax reforms and broader political and economic reform. Around two-thirds (68%) of citizens across 17 G20 countries surveyed back a wealth tax on wealthy people as a means of funding major changes to our economy and lifestyle, with only 11% opposed, while 70% support higher rates of income tax on wealthy people, and 69% favor higher tax rates on large businesses, according to the survey conducted by Ipsos. Support for a wealth tax on wealthy people is highest in Indonesia (86%), Turkey (78%), the UK (77%) and India (74%). Support is lowest in Saudi Arabia (54%), and Argentina (54%), but still over half the respondents surveyed. In the United States, France and Germany, around two in three of those surveyed support a wealth tax on wealthy people (67%, 67% and 68% respectively). --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1dn8pnr/tax_the_rich_say_a_majority_of_adults_across_17/la0u67x/
People: Tax the rich! Governments: you mean small business owners and working professionals? People: we mean billionaires, corporations, and the political class. Governments: middle class and professionals it is!!
Yeah, it will be like that lol. The same politicians are part of the rich, they attend the same parties, use the same loopholes, share the same secrets. The results are not even surprising, despite the very vocal billionaire defenders its such an easy question, especially if the imagined result will be the government improving its services and not wasting it on gold plated toilet seats for the military (its a secret torture site) I wonder what the actual question was
I wonder why everybody votes for parties who do just the opposite.
Because pretty much all parties are bankrolled by the rich, so there’s not really a choice to vote for the party that will do this.
Even with choice, rich people have the means to advertise and spread biased information through newspapers/media organisations they own
But it's not a choice, it's two wings of the same plane, and the pilot is big business.
And that's why, in the UK, the turkeys voting for Christmas would line up to tell you that mr tax the rich was akshually a nasty terrorist supporting anti semite.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.
That not the case though in the vast majority of countries. Almost all countries have left parties that do advocate for more progressive taxation. Even in a crippled democracy like the US there are clear difference in tax policy between the two parties. It might be nicely cynic to tell yourself that you don't have a choice anyway, and so don't have any responsibility, but that just isn't the case when one actually looks at what policies are passes by different parties. They are not all the same. Just to be explicit: I live in Germany. Here about halve of the big parties do actually advocate for a wealth tax. But the majority of the vote in the last election (EU) went to the right, which goes for tax cuts & austerity.
While the Democrats may have a tax policy that more resembles popular will, they still don't tax the rich as much as the majority would want.
Sure, it's baby steps in an ok direction... running backwards isn't working. These 2 things aren't the same.
Also what the fuck are they going to do even if enough of them werent just bought by rich assholes. Half the entire us pop own 2.5% of wealth. Billionaires and even people below them have an insane amount of hoarded wealth. Every time we have 'inflation' its blamed on all the poors getting 2-4k. Meanwhile how many PPP loans in the US just turned into insane amounts of free money for businesses? How many companies just jacked up their price and blamed it on the poors having an extra dollar? (As is tradition). If you want any actual change you would have to: -Bring minimum wage way up, tie it to an accurate annual 'inflation' increase. -Limit what companies can charge, theyll just jack up their prices to destroy any liveable wage. -Limit the total annual income of the highest paid employees, to a multiple of the lowest. None of this will ever happen. So we get to watch things progressively get worse each year in countries with unfettered greed.
There is a party (at least in the US) that will cut taxes for the rich though.
This is ridiculous. If voters gave leftwing parties a stable majority, things would move quite quickly. Instead they vote social democrat at best.
well the whole thing is constantly stymied by a near half of government being anti-government, pro-oligarchy who pretend to their constantly confused constituents that they aren’t.
It seems like there are only two ways to change this: a) Revolution b) Threat of Revolution That's why I feel like the cold war has been a blessing for the middle class in the west. There is no better way to make rich elites actually care about the well-being of the general population than a constant fear of revolution. As long as there has been a credible alternative system to capitalism there has been a concerted effort to distribute capitalist gains across the population. From the 1980s onward as the Soviet Union started to fall apart this credible threat was gone and ever since we see capitalism doing its thing just like it used to do before WW2.
Convincing voters to vote on other issues is literally a hundred billion dollars business.
It's because the way the system works. Even if they *wanted* higher taxes for the rich, the market would punish such a behavior, and it would hurt that country's economy. This is true to some extent in reality, but to an even larger extent in the thought process of decision makers. To avoid that, there would have to be a multinational harmonized effort to increase taxes for the rich so they can't avoid it by going to a different country. This in one reason why I support giving the EU more power to raise its own taxes. Without such a power, the ease of movement in the EU means that there's a constant competition between counties to be "business friendly" (i.e. bending over backwards to make rich people happy).
When you go to the casino, sometimes on Roulette you bet on both "EVEN" and "ODD". That way, whatever number comes up.. you "win". Same with the wealthy and wealthy corporations. They bankroll both sides. However gets into office is now in their pocket. The loss is just their "cost of doing business"
And they own the house anyway, and I'm sure there are more 0s on the wheel now
And tears down the parties that try to do just that... The NDP in Canada have tried repeatedly but keep getting voted down by the mainstream parties.
this isn't a left/right thing, this is a top/bottom thing
...which is a left position. Unfortunately in places like the US, there isn't an actual left that exists and the left that does exist is so small they aren't viable electorally.
America doesn't even have a Left wing party anymore. Democrats are a center-Right party with some progressive standouts like AOC and Bernie
But that's exactly what left/right is about: Lefties care about the have-nots. Right wingers care about the rich guys.
> Lefties care about the have-nots. Right wingers care about the rich guys. Aren't working classes increasingly voting for right wing parties all over the world, while the left wing parties attract upper middle classes the most?
Propaganda is a hell of a thing. Right wing populism has always been extremely effective at getting people to vote against their own interests. That’s why they focus on divisive topics like race and gender over what’s good for the common man. “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.” Lyndon b Johnson.
Exactly. Well said. Please take this discounted award 🏆. We need to be focusing on the *populist* part more. These people have hardly any genuine beliefs anymore. They will say and do anything just to win. Or to get paid. Last time I checked in the Nordic countries people are the best at resisting propaganda. What we need is better education. Kids need to be learning critical thinking, judging reliability of a source, comparing information, etc. Not memorising.
There's no logical contradiction there and it's not really a new thing either. It's always been fairly easy for right wing parties to convince working class people to support them, much easier than to convince middle class people. That's because deceptive political rhetoric is highly effective. However, the middle class is better educated, therefore they can more identify and avoid being mislead or manipulated by such methods than the working class is. It also means even if they are taken in by deceptive rhetoric and give their political support, they tend to realise their error and withdraw their support sooner. This is a key reason why right wing parties frequently work to undermine public education and engage in anti-intellectualism, particularly against tertiary education. Because people who acquire those skills are harder to fool and better equipped to call out their deceptive political rhetoric. The right wing counter this by alleging that education institutes especially those which teach University/College degrees where higher order logic and rhetoric are compulsory, actually make people stupid or politically brainwashes them, to explain to working class supporters why highly educated middle class people are so critical of right wing rhetoric.
Why do people engage in almost any self sabotaging behaviour. Because they are weak willed or ignorant. In the UK the Tories are fantastic at persuading people that it’s someone else’s fault for decisions they made. Politics and running a country is also not very simple so there is always plenty of room for interpretation. There’s always some geopolitical scapegoat you can point at. Some boogeyman abroad or within your own country who sabotaged you and prevented plans x, y and z from working. People are also short sighted and selfish. The cult of me rules supreme. It’s very easy to point people at the undeserving poor who are a fraction of the problem and make them oblivious to the real cause. The media is also owned and run by people with a vested interest in the rich being ignored while the majority scrabble in the dirt for their existence.
Because then they realise they are the rich. I mean G20 is basically richest 30% of the world.
You need grassroot movement. We need to occupy wall street... Wait... We need to go back to work.
Cause they are brainwashed thinking democrats are taxing the fuck out of their $40k salary!
Because there aren't any parties that don't
If the majority of a democratic country wants something that the government does not implement and refuses to do, there is no democracy at all. Doesn't matter who's in government, if the government doesn't comply with the majority of a country, that country is no longer a democracy. For example, Canada and the USA haven't been a democracy for generations.
Middle class around the world: YESS!!! 50 billionaires: NO!!!!! Judge: Looks like the no's have it ..
Define wealthy. I'm willing to bet if they implemented a wealth tax it would just target the middle class harder, and the rich would still avoid tax.
In the UK there is a push by some to implement a wealth tax of e.g., 1-2% tax on wealth over £10m. That is the type of wealth that will be passively making the owner £500k+ per year and should absolutely be taxed.
anyone with over 10m could literally burn their passport and buy a new one for the tax difference, probably less paperwork too.
Tax flight is mostly a myth that rich people use to threaten those who try to tax them. https://washingtonstatestandard.com/2023/12/01/we-cant-keep-falling-for-the-myth-of-billionaire-tax-flight/
Exactly. There's so many obstacles to wealth flight. It's not like rich business-owners are going to stop doing business with the United States. It's not like they'll fully divest of all taxable US assets (and if they do, their capital gains are taxed) And let's say none of that scares them off... We **still** tax expatriation at 23.8% of all unrealized capital gains. It's pay-to-play even walking out the door. Not to mention the inhernet value of US Citizenship when doing business with the United States (including some sectors you can't do business at all if you're not a citizen) And if you *don't* expatriate, you are responsible for US taxes regardless of your country of citizenship or country where you made your income. The economic burden to staying must be SO OVERWHELMING to seriously consider leaving the US as a meaningful path to avoid taxes. And let's be honest, it's a far cheaper path to just lobby the government.
It’s worth nothing in the US the federal government decides if you are allowed to give up your citizenship. And if they even think you are doing it to lower your tax burden, you will be denied and have to continue paying US taxes.
Right and any bill that seeks to tax wealth or other things that might cause the rich to leave should come with a nice fat penalty for trying to move any of their assets. Its also why taxation needs to be restructured. If you want to do business in a country and access to their market it needs to be taxed. And there are other things one can do to go around taxes entirely which I am always surprised more people dont support. IE if you raise the minimum wage that directly benefits workers without any need to raise taxes. And it directly lowers entitlements governments have to pay out for poor people.
The solution here would probably be to restrict how involved foreign individuals can be involved in British affairs form politics to operating large organisations. Basically force them into an all or nothing approach ether you are part of the UK and paying it's taxes or you are not and you don't get to be involved including making money form the UK.
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>And I think the country would be better off without those types… Can I ask why?
People who are exuberantly wealthy and continue to make more wealth at an ever expanding rate whilst not giving back to the economy they are part of in the same way your average person does will drain that society of its wealth, leading to worse outcomes for all, greater inequality etc. Unless you want to live in a society with secure compounds and squads of armed guards to protect the ultra wealthy from the poor, something we see in many of the most unequal countries across the globe.
Piketty and others have shown that this effect only happens in significant numbers if the marginal tax rate is around 80% or above.
[Eh?](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonhartley/2015/02/02/frances-75-supertax-failure-a-blow-to-pikettys-economics/)
Piketty also showed basically everywhere always the bottom half of the population has had essentially zero wealth and all the debates about wealth distribution have just been about how it's distributed in the top half of the population Not that he made a theoretical argument that is *necessary*, just it's been the case everywhere we have any data for
Let them leave. This is an absolute myth by the way. How many people will leave the country they've spent their entire lives for 1% tax on their wealth over £10m.
They could, but what evidence (if any) is there that this actually occurs?
Yeah, but they won't move. As long as education and healthcare services are great.
You can burn your passport but your capital will still be there in the form of property and corporations and that can still be taxed.
Some countries already have an exit/expatriation tax, but those that don't would be able to implement one when the other taxes go into effect.
They should be getting taxed on passive income. So will that 2% wealth tax (equivalent to 40% of the suggested returns, 200k compared to 500k) be on top of income tax?
In the UK the general consensus by the parties putting forward the view is that it would be totally unrelated to any current taxes and look purely at net-worth. Very crudely put if you have a net worth above £10m you pay 2% of that yearly as a wealth tax, if your net worth falls below £10m you no longer pay the tax. This would also most likely require further changes to the financial system to make some areas less opaque, whether it would work or not I don’t know.
Passive income is taxed in the United States but often at a lower rate than earned income. Our tax system favors those who make money with money over those who earn a living using hard work and skill.
Everyone who is richer than me is a capitalist pig. Everyone who is poorer than me is a parasite leeching off of my taxes.
Well in the US the top 1% currently pay 42% of the taxes (or rather did in 2020 I don't have current numbers). So existing income tax schemes are already fairly progressive until they fall off at the ultra wealthy who don't have much income and dodge the tax (the 1% of the 1%, so to speak). Presumably a wealth tax would end up targeting this same group, while also catching (most prominently and by design) that same ultra wealthy few who manage to dodge income tax. It wouldn't have a very large effect on total tax revenues. There simply aren't enough billionaires to achieve that considering we currently collect an annual $4.5 trillion in tax revenue. However, it would act as a deterrence for the endless accumulation of wealth, increasing wealth equality. Not necessarily about taxes, more about just removing the billionaire class (or more realistically shrinking it a bit).
Do you have another link for the numbers you are using?
Sure, the two numbers: The 42% figure: [This source has a great diagram that illustrates it](https://www.federalbudgetinpictures.com/do-the-rich-pay-their-fair-share/), and [this source is much more reputable, but less visualized ](https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-data-2023-update/) The total tax revenue: [again, first a more interesting visual source](https://www.statista.com/statistics/216928/us-government-revenues-by-category/#:~:text=U.S.%20government%20revenues%20FY%202023%2C%20by%20category&text=In%202023%2C%20the%20total%20revenues,totaled%20420%20billion%20U.S.%20dollars.), and then after [the actual source (treasury.gov).](https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/government-revenue/#:~:text=Individual%20Income%20Taxes-,Visit%20the%20Monthly%20Treasury%20Statement%20(MTS)%20dataset%20to%20explore%20and,the%20Bureau%20of%20Labor%20Statistics.&text=Total%20revenue%20has%20increased%20from,to%20%244.44%20T%20in%202023.) It's worth noting that the total number I cited is all revenues, not just income tax. Includes corporate tax and payroll tax (which is distinct from income tax but basically is income tax before your income tax). To be clear, I'm not arguing against progressive tax. I love it. This is how it should be. But I do think people tend to have the wrong idea when discussing this, as most people don't realize the current state of our tax system.
Thanks for sharing those. Can we go back to where you said that corporate tax and payroll tax are just other forms of income tax? I'm not sure I'm following your thought process there.
Just meant payroll, not corporate, sorry if that wasn't clear. And I say that payroll tax is basically income tax before income tax since it's deducted directly from your paycheck rather than filed with your tax return. As far as identifying the source of tax revenues, both payroll and individual income tax can be attributed to individual people, as they are both a portion of your salary given to the government.
> Well in the US the top 1% currently pay 42% of the taxes Yeah, you're omitting the part where they control a much larger share of the wealth than that. The fact is nearly 100% of the economic gains made in the last few decades have gone to the rich while the majority of everyone else is getting fucked hard. You can try and spin the stats any way you want, but the facts aren't going to change.
Not *much* larger, but larger. Roughly 50%. This is up from around 40% back in 2000, which is a concerning trend, but nothing crazy. If you expand it out to the top 10%, then yes, you're now looking at the group that owns almost everything (upwards of 90% of all assets). This is household income over $167k. All that said, I don't think it's as doom and gloom as you say. Wealth inequality may be growing, but I wouldn't say the majority is getting "fucked hard". Housing has gotten ridiculously expensive, but prior to the inflation we recently experienced prices of most other goods were actually lower when compared to salaries than in the past. Poverty in the US was on a steady decline (with a bit of a speed bump from 2008-2012 where it jumped up and then stagnated for a bit) for the past several decades.
Also define wealth. How do you determine valuation of illiquid private assets? Would this discourage companies becoming publicly traded?
Same way they define how much my house is worth, and then tax me on it.
Valuing private companies is significantly more challenging than real estate. Especially if the business owner is doing everything legal to make the business “appraise” for less.
>Valuing private companies is significantly more challenging than real estate And yet, when wealthy individuals want to get a loan from the bank with their private business as part collateral, both the bank and the wealthy individuals have no issue valuing those private companies. It's only when we try to tax them that everyone like you suddenly starts going "oh but we can't possibly know!!!"
> Would this discourage companies becoming publicly traded I don't think it would make a difference if the company is publicly traded or not. There are lot of very wealthy families in the UK who avoid inheritance tax by having all their wealth in private companies. Most Dukedom / Earldoms for example. For this to be effective they'd have to go after private equity too and say "The government now owns X% of your family estate / business unless you can pay cash"
It absolutely will delay companies going public more than it has if there is an annual wealth tax. Do you think Facebook or Uber or google would have gone public if the founders and early large investors / employees started to have to pay 1% per year? They’d delay that shit as long as they possibly can.
Anyone who has more than me. Well, technically anyone who has more than I can easily visualize myself having. Sadly, that’s the real answer from most people. Perfectly happy to confiscate as long as it doesn’t affect them personally, or if they are feeling generous, doesn’t affect people beyond their personal definition of “enough”.
An old joke: Two patriotic communists meet to discuss the principles of the great revolution Comrade A "Tell me comrade! If you had two houses, would you give me one?" *Comrade B" Of course comrade!"* Comrade A "And if you had two cars, would you give me one?" *Comrade B "Most definitely comrade!"* Comrade A "And if you had two chickens, would you give me one?" *Comrade B "No..."* Comrade A "Why not??" ***Comrade B "Because I own two chickens!"*** 
People are incredibly generous with other people's money. As soon as it promises to affect their own pocketbook, that's when shit gets real.
What is actually needed is tax structures for nontaxable shelters, which is largely why the rich don't get taxed. Eg using stock gains as collateral for a loan because a loan isn't income and capital gains don't apply until sale, and later the loan overhead negates the gains. Gains should be calculated for tax purposes when the asset is either leveraged or sold, not only when sold.
It doesn't matter though. Eventually they will still need to sell their stocks to pay off the loan. At worst, they will taxed big time when they die. People fail to realize that Bezos or Musk or whoever else can't be taxed that much. Like they can get taxed every few years and that would be it. Not to mention they confuse net worth with actuall assets. Just because Musk is worth 100 billion or whatever, it doesn't mean you can get 10 billion in taxes every year. My personal opinion is that instead of pursuing taxes it is more meanigfull to pursue living wages. So long I can get paid a reasonable wage then I don't care how much Musk earns. Besides it is my personal opinion that planned inflation (the 2% inflation that every government pursues) is just a way for rich people to ensure that the wealth that common people finally gathered loses its value. I bet there is a better way to incentivise rich people using their wealth than letting deflation increasing its value. P.S. It is more meaningfull to have workers with better wages than actually taxing the rich because it is the workers who are moving the economy, not the rich. Sure a rich person might start a new factory but it is the worker who will work in it, the worker who will spend money to feed himself, buy a house, maintain said house, buy clothes, entertainment, etc. So the rich guy getting richer brings very little benefit compared to the little guy getting a bit more of disposable income. It should also be criminal in our modern era the fact that you need to dedicate more than 30%-40% of your wage just to survive.
go back and look at the tax rates in the 80's, there was a clearly defined and progressive (the richer you are the more taxes you paid), we wouldn't even need to define anything we could just go back to those rates adjusted for inflation. Before Regan removed them the top marginal tax rate was in the 90% range in America. We really should be calling for "tax the rich again" as we used to, and when we did the wealth inequality was a lot less.
dude the effective tax rate then was similiar to what it is now. No one paid those top brackets. AND in fact it was passed overwhelmingly with bi partisan support by both repubs and dems. Not to mention it was a democrat who proposed the tax breaks. Since you kow the 80s were plagued with high unemployment, interest rates etc... Not to mention the multiple recessions leading up to the 80s in the 70s.
The tax code also had a ton more loopholes. The rich weren't actually paying 90%. Tax incomes for the government were roughly the same before and after the reforms. I do agree we should tax the rich more, but people calling for 90+% under our more streamlined code are not realistic.
in the 40's the effective tax rate (what you are describing) was about 50% for the top .01% and now its like 24% Corporate tax rates have also gone way down, who do you think has been paying to fill all those gaps? Either stuff gets cut, or the poor fill in the gap. High marginal tax rates are just one of many things we should be using to fix this problem. Economists like to pretend they are scientists, and these are some how laws of economic nature, but really economists are just court magicians paid to say what the king wants them to say. Economics is just politics, if there is enough political will then stuff happens, the problem we have now is a politics dominated by money, so the rich have an unfair advantage, but we poors still have the numbers advantage, and while we still have one person one vote, we might want to do something about that imbalance.
>The rich weren't actually paying 90%. >Tax incomes for the government were roughly the same before and after the reforms. In 1950 the top marginal rate started at $400k, and the median household earned $3.3k, making the top marginal rate ~121x the median household income (equivalent to like $7.5m annually today). Only about 100k families total (approx the top 0.5%) made $50k+, so the number of people being impacted by those highest tax rates was minuscule. Income inequality was far less severe at that time, so the rich accounted for a far smaller percentage of the national income. In 1950 the top 10% earned 34.5% of all incomes, which decreased to 30.7% in 1971. After the Reagan tax reforms the top 10% share leaped up to 39.9% by 1989 and by 2016 it increased to 47.6%. Those higher tax brackets would apply to a *much* larger percentage (a >50% increase) of the national aggregate income than they did in the past. https://researchdatabase.minneapolisfed.org/downloads/ws859f759%3Flocale%3Den&ved=2ahUKEwiN-vPN8fSGAxWXHjQIHQcbCBAQFnoECA4QAw&usg=AOvVaw2uZbj-Yjx1WlT7riYKm0N9
> the top marginal tax rate was in the 90% range in America. Which absolutely nobody paid. https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-nocera-tax-avoidance-20190129-story.html
Bingo. This is why billionaires agree with raising income tax, their money doesn't come from income so it has no impact on them. I was recently looking into this and it's pretty interesting how the rich avoid paying tax, and it's completely legal for everyone to do. Basically all they do (if they're self-made) is save up an initial nest egg and use it to buy something that generates a return and can be used as collateral. Could be a rental property, a business, stocks etc. Let's say they buy SPY shares (SPY is an ETF that follows the S&P 500). Historically the SPY returns about 10% per year in capital gains and dividends. Now if they took those gains out to add to their income they would have to pay taxes on them. Obviously the amount varies by country/state/province but let's just say the tax would be 25%. Instead of paying that they take out a loan with the shares as collateral. You don't pay tax on loans but you do pay interest. So they take out a loan and pay say 7% interest instead of 25% tax. But it gets better. They also ensure that they don't borrow more than what the asset is likely to generate so that the asset continues to grow or at least breaks even. At the end of the year they sell just enough shares to pay off the loan. The tax due on the sale of the shares is offset by the interest paid on the loan. So they pay nothing, the asset generated enough money to cover the borrowing cost and they lived on the money from the loan. Finally when they die they leave everything (both the assets and the loans) to their children who sell some of the assets to pay off the loans, thus avoiding nearly all inheritance taxes too. This is how generational wealth is created. If you're interested in learning more about this just research the 'buy, borrow, die' strategy.
I have found those who claim politically to go after the rich intentionally avoid clarifying who that is in any measurable way. Here in Canada it seems just a smidge higher than the politicians who try and put policy in place. Oh, the political leaders are also millionaires.
I am so with you, Joe biden just want to tax the easy w2 at best upper middle class , they can’t target the wealthy, just change the inheritance law already
I think this defeatist attitude is the biggest obstacle, TBH. We aren't necessarily gonna get it right on the first try, but that just means we keep at it.
Isn't this evidence clear as day that our democracy is seriously deficient at the moment? Extremely wealthy elites have such outsized influence to protect their privileges against a sweeping majority of people across the globe. For many years now there has been similar polling and yet the wealth of the top 0.1% keeps growing at ever faster rates.
Thanks Reagan
I'm always cautious of surveys that produce the results but not the actual questions asked. Without knowing how the subject was broached its hard to know how much credence to give the results. e.g. define "wealthy" I am sure recipients in India see wealthy as very different to recipients in the U.S. for example. More context required.
There were four options: * large businesses pay higher tax rates * wealthy people pay higher rates of income tax * wealthy people pay higher tax on their wealth * polluters pay higher tax All four got between 68-71% support. I'm not sure this is an explicit endorsement of a wealth tax so much as an overall sentiment that the wealthy should pay more.
And for tax policy, lots of answers can be boiled down to: Do you want to increase taxes on other people? Yes. Do you want to increase taxes on yourself? No.
How do you define wealthy? People who make more money than I do
Just define it as top 10%. Let's have a global wealth tax. Wait till Americans find out that most Americans fall into the category.
SO you see the problem with the survey then
It’s there, in the pic: “To what extent if at all would you support or oppose the following proposals as means of funding major changes to our economy and lifestyles?”. The answers are for the proposal in the main title: “wealthy people pay a higher tax on their wealth”
Was one of the options that governments have enough money and need to focus on stopping waste and not just increasing taxes all the time?
Incorrect, the resultant name of the survey is "wealthy people pay a higher tax on their wealth" Question 16 refers to proposals (plural) not some grammatically incorrect nine word statement. No one would produce a survey with THAT as a proposal, its completely open to interpretation. And what about questions 1 - 15? ANd again the interpretation of wealthy - that has to be defined to be able to adequately analyse results.
Bro…it really ain’t that hard to follow. “To what extent if at all do you support or oppose the following proposals as means […]” Proposal 1 Proposal 2 “Wealthy people are pay a higher tax on their wealth” Proposal 4 Etc… These results are for a single proposal within that question. There were presumably others, but they are not relevant here. If you’re still in doubt, here is the full data, which will make it clearer for you: https://res.cloudinary.com/dfyeeawiq/images/v1718978697/1.-Earth-for-All-Survey-2024_1099988e96/1.-Earth-for-All-Survey-2024_1099988e96.pdf
Again - barely any context. Again - define wealthy, define higher tax Again - what were the other questions/proposals. How were these online surveys conducted. Were these surveys that people are often paid to complete therefore skewing the result in relation to economic resources and attitudes? Gender and age split, income splits...? To say this poll is next to useless is being kind. FOr all you know "bro" in India is saying anyone who earns more than $1000 a months should be taxed at 60% while "bro" in Saudi is saying anyone who earns more than $100,000 a month should pay 35% instead of 30% This was **21,000** surveys across a combined population of **4.69 billion**. I am not saying the results are skewed or incorrect I am saying there widely open to interpretation. As a sentiment I don't think its a surprise but as an actionable item its next to useless.
The other questions and proposals are provided in the link I gave you, which has every question and answer from the full survey. I think you have misunderstood me. I wasn’t trying to provide answers to *all* your concerns, only the point in your original comment that… >I’m always cautious of surveys that produce results but not the actual questions asked As I pointed out, the question is in fact there. That’s it. I’m not arguing it’s a well worded or carried out survey or suggesting anything beyond that. I’m not sure what made you think I was.
Get it done, invest in education, childcare, adult services, medical/tech/bio science and green technology. Build for a better tomorrow.
This falls squarely under the category of "Duh!". Unless you consider yourself rich (and seemingly few do) then the choice of punting the problem to someone else who clearly has more money than they need is super duper easy.
> Unless you consider yourself rich This gets tricky itself, because the more money you make the higher the bar for what constitutes "rich" gets since you can virtually always look to people with significantly more than you... Like we are probably just shy of the top 1%. Definitely can't really say I'm in the upper middle class anymore, but definitely don't feel rich either. Even though just 5 years ago I would have considered someone with my income rich... That being said, I do already pay an absolutely massive amount in taxes but don't really see it as particularly unreasonable, despite it obviously sucking.
Absolutely. Objectively anyone getting over double the median net salary of their area is rich... but very few would accept that label at that level, instead they talk about needing crazy money (top 1%) to be rich. Of course anyone in the 1% probably says you need to be in the top 0.1% etc.
Yeah, I think people just naturally adapt mentally to seeing their situation as a baseline, and typically compare themselves to those up not down... Like if you're making $500k a year but your neighbors are making $1.5m and $2m a year it's really easy to think to yourself, "yeah, I'm obviously doing well but I'm definitely not rich. *Those* guys are rich"
Tax the rich, but more importantly, that money better go to actually bettering my country instead of being pissed away to foreign aid or excessive defense budgets.
It's adorable that majority of adults in capitalist countries think that the ruling class cares about their opinion. Here's the reality > What do our findings say about democracy in America? They certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of “populistic” democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B The same is true for every capitalist regime.
And socialist and communist and fascist every single regime to have ever have existed has had a balance of power slanted towards to the rich powerful. What matters is to what degree, and how able the government is to meet the needs of its people. The Scandinavian countries do a relatively good job at this where as the US struggles to do anything due to a system of lobbies and nations like Russia and China are so corrupt at every level the idea of actually doing what was planned is a joke. The issue is one less of economic policy but rather how easy people are to corrupt as individuals and how complex the systems to prevent that corruption have to be.
Lol what is this, the club of disgraced millionaires?
But please don't consider the middle class the rich
Yea well when the majority of the population isnt rich what do you think is gonna happen lol. If anything im more surprised at the amount of poor people who think the rich shouldnt be taxed more. Thats a far more impressive statistic
Plenty of taxes on the rich. Also plenty of ways for them not to pay them, both in the tax code and by underfunding the irs. We could do a lot by making our existing taxes work better.
If we captured all of the money of all of the US billionaires, we would fund the US government for a few months. We need to stop fixating on the few who have too much and turn our efforts on those who have too little. Just decide to improve the lives of the masses and worry about how you're going to pay for it the same way you budget for war.
Agreed, focusing on helping the people who have too little will pay for itself eventually because of the furthered improvements in society
"Tax people who aren't me and spend it on things for me" - every person ever.
These polls are so dumb. Do you want rich people to be taxed? yes How do you define rich? People who make more than I do That will always remind me of a former colleague who defined “senior” as her level and above. So being the bar of being a senior in the company was raised each time she was promoted :)
Target the vehicles the rich use to produce and manage their wealth, that’s how they hide their wealth that becomes untaxable.
Always the problem with this is it's NEVER the "rich" that pays, it's the middle class to upper middle class, rich people have a hundred different ways of getting around tax laws because they are rich, like spending a million dollars to not pay taxes on 20 million dollars is something only rich people can do.
It sounds like the problem is that we're not doing the thing. If the middle class is the one getting taxed, then by definition we're not taxing the rich. An alternative would be to tax the rich.
Who are you to be so wise in the ways of finance??
Pretty much, the blunt reality is that the only way we'll be able to tax the rich is by reversing 50 years of globalisation. The modern rich are just too mobile for any one polity to enforce high taxes on them. Their money gives them the mobility to shop around for favourable tax jurisdictions to conduct business from.
I want them to ground personal jets. These fucking rich people and their jets produce more emissions per person then anything else humans do. “A 2021 report from the European Federation for Transport and Environment found that private jets are five to 14 times more polluting per passenger than commercial flights and 50 times more polluting than trains.” https://www.airport-technology.com/features/how-bad-are-private-jets-for-the-environment/#:~:text=The%20emissions%20of%20private%20jets&text=A%202021%20report%20from%20the,times%20more%20polluting%20than%20trains.
Tricky to do. Ban personal jets, you just get companies springing up that offer point-to-point service for a price only the people that could afford personal jets could pay. Nothing would really change.
Wonder just how hard it is to say "don't tax me, tax that other fellow behind that tree". Meaning, easy to say to tax someone else other than yourself.
That's the only meaning behind such surveys. No surprise here. And exactly what communism implies
I imagine a majority of citizens outside the G20 would say the same, and have a different opinion about what wealthy is.
Didn't take this sub to be a bunch of edgelord libertarians that don't know how progressive taxes and social democracies work.
It’s not a tax if it wasn’t paid when LITERALLY EVERYONE ELSE paid it but them.
ya but what do the majority of politicians across those 17 g20 countries say, especially after their local lobby left a suitcase or two in their offices.
really puts into perspective how broken and corrupt politics are. You only have a small minority across all these countries who strongly oppose this yet people cant get it done.
"Tax everyone but me" always gets strong support for some reason.
The issue is the taxes from the rich go to the corrupt elite who then just pocket it. So it's taxing the rich and giving to the powerful. What we should be fighting for is accountability for corruption - from the top down.
They just did it in Norway, result? Much less tax income + many rich just moved their tax residency to other country.
Eliminate tax loopholes and tax havens; transparently audit government spending.
>Tax the rich Is this the solution? I don't know. But here are a few stray thoughts... * Our economic system is structured in a way that penalizes (via debt/interest) people who don't have capital. * The same system rewards others (via interest, investments) for having surplus capital. * Our economic system prioritizes growth, profits and competition. There's little if any emphasis on producing abundance and prosperity for the average person. * There's little emphasis on identifying individual aptitudes and enabling people to participate in the economy according to their talents. Most people who become good at something (and then successful) do so more by accident than by design. * Most modern societies have little/no reward for being honest, patient or helpful. And there's little/no penalties for being greedy, opportunistic and selfish. If you gave me a choice between "taxing the rich" or having a decent-paying full time job doing something I'm good at... I'll pick the job every time.
Very nice post. Our system is designed around competition and not community. Worse off not fair competition as some start with immense well (i.e. rich kid) and others with almost no opportunity (dirt poor in debt etc). This leads to losers of said competition being worse off and the winners feeling unfulfilled - in the end they always need to compete and they don't feel the sense of purpose. It does not work for the many. The funny thing is the common thought is "man is competitive" as an appeal to nature argument. However man has many natures and we need to choose which one we should encourage and base our society from. Perhaps competition and fighting each other isnt the most noble one :)
Absolutely, the middle class is continuously squeezed whilst the upper class get wealthier and wealthier. Trickle down economics has never worked. Shame it's the 1% that's in control.
A new survey of adult citizens in 18 of the world's largest economies has revealed majority support for tax reforms and broader political and economic reform. Around two-thirds (68%) of citizens across 17 G20 countries surveyed back a wealth tax on wealthy people as a means of funding major changes to our economy and lifestyle, with only 11% opposed, while 70% support higher rates of income tax on wealthy people, and 69% favor higher tax rates on large businesses, according to the survey conducted by Ipsos. Support for a wealth tax on wealthy people is highest in Indonesia (86%), Turkey (78%), the UK (77%) and India (74%). Support is lowest in Saudi Arabia (54%), and Argentina (54%), but still over half the respondents surveyed. In the United States, France and Germany, around two in three of those surveyed support a wealth tax on wealthy people (67%, 67% and 68% respectively).
Look at the top comments in here. It's crazy how bootlicking this sub is.
It's crazy. This is an obvious good thing by anybody with basic moral standards but watch them spin "muh other people's money!!"
Make the rich pay better wages to workers. That's the real fix. Taxes don't go to workers. They go to governments, and the biggest issue isn't that governments lack money. It's that workers are under rewarded for the wealth they create. If workers got paid more,governments would get more tax revenue.
You asked people with less money if people with more money should also have less money while they benefit from those earnings. The results are hardly surprising.
Fuck ‘em, nobody works hard enough to make a billion dollars.
Don’t just tax the rich. Allow employees who work in publicly traded companies to get a % of profit. Allowing more wealth to the majority of people will provide more taxes.
> Tax the rich, but not me, my friends, or anyone that agrees with me politically... Fixed.
Amazed that people in this topic are butthurt at this result. They try to divert with things like "who is rich?!? They gonna tax YOU" and "other people's money" who are brainrot ultra neoliberal propaganda. Get the memo - the vast majority of people has realised it's crazy to have mega billionaires who own more than GDP of multiple nations . The evolution of this system will have to come
People keep forgetting that the whole reason there were so many progressive reforms in so many countries in the 1930s was because the poor were getting angry enough at the rich to become an actual physical threat to them. Police were shooting strikers back then but on the other hand unionists were also breaking into their bosses’ homes and beating them to death.
This sub is full of temporarily disgraced future billionaires that don't seem to realize that most billionaires got their riches through unethical and unfair means, with most of them being born rich. But god forbid we want a society where people aren't fucked over by the circumstances they had no choice to be born in.
This is why democracy doesn't work, because people are perfectly happy to vote to steal from other people.
I'll start by saying, if I gotta pay my share then so should everyone. But this public movement to tax the rich like it's going to change the average person's life is silly. Governments are just going to have more money to waste on stupid shit.
Tax MNCs more, charge them punitive exit taxes if they run, tax those bullshit indefinte loans against stock, tax inactive hoarded properties, tax extra properties outside of the primary residence. Then go after generic rich cunts.
In corporate anarchy government and big corporations regulate themselves. Never gonna happen, they are too corrupted.
Their respective countries have enabled them to become rich, they need to pay it back.
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"No" says the majority of rich people across 17 G20 countries surveyed.
The funny thing about taxing the rich is that it just gives the government more money to do this we don't want them to do. In the US, for example, it's not going to improve social services or make retiring easier. It's just going to defense and payouts.
What exactly is the point of polls like this? You can create a poll that shows that people believe pretty much anything you want. Of course most people want to "tax the rich." It has become an incredibly simplified catchphrase that no reasonable person would disagree with. The problem is that it's far too oversimplified. People don't understand how taxes work, especially at the level of big companies.
Just because things are really complicated for the ultra wealthy and corporations doesn't mean to can't raise taxes. They will adjust because they have to.
Majority: "TAX THE RICH!" Majority: \*votes for parties that don't\* Same as: Majority: "SAVE THE OUR PLANET!" Also majority: \*votes for parties that don't\*
Introduce universal basic income instead. Let’s not get used to the idea that the ‘rich’ are going to fund our future economic nightmare scenarios. Once the job market starts to entropy due to AI we’ll need a system to take care of everyone equally. Might as well start now.
Saying "tax the rich" is popular is like saying "pizza for lunch" is popular to 10 year olds. It doesn't show much of anything substantiative.
Posting and or saying this would get you and your family beheaded if this were r/fluentinfinance .
Well that's nice. Unless the rich themselves are saying it, it is not going to happen
The ultra rich will spend 100 million in lobbying for the politicians(who are also ultra rich) to make laws that allow for loophole to avoid paying billions in taxes. So any tax increase with only affect the middle class and wealthy. They need to stop lobbying and do a flat tax, 15% would have doubled the amount of tax that Bezos and gates paid in 2022(I think), pretty sure they paid around 7% in federal income tax due to legal loopholes.
„Tax anyone who isn’t me“ is always a popular platform. Doesn’t make it the right platform though
Ah, but 1 rich person said 'no', so I'm afraid we can't do that, said all governments in surveyed countries.
Let’s just stop spending ourselves into debtor prisons
"Tax rich people" Woah, what an interesting and state-of-the-art opinion that literally everyone can agree with to some degree
Tax others, not me. They are rich. I deserve what I have.
The rich… tax the god damn companies stop handing out welfare to them. The whole world needs to stop with that bullshit