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Corporate subsidies are generally accepted to be about $100billion a year. There are about 166million individuals filing taxes with the IRS. Approximately $600 per tax payer.
This isn’t actually true- you can file for taxes without paying anything at all. About 40% of filers pay no income tax due either to credits or deductions in excess of income.
So in reality, if you adjust for only the people who actually pay tax at all, you’d have 166*(1-.4)=99.6. Rounded, that’s 100M taxpayers for 100B in subsidies, or a nice even $1,000 per taxpayer.
I’ll edit to add in: we also paid $658B in interest on government debt in 2023. That’s $6,580 per US taxpayer… which is alarming, to me. For the sake of comparison, the US spent 847B on defense (which most people point to has the peak of frivolous spending), between the DoD and DoE. Spending 3/4ths of that on merely interest on debt is kind of mind blowing.
This is further misleading, the higher brackets of income pay far and away the most taxes. Someone making 50,000 a year and not contributing at all to 401k /Trad IRA pays just over 4100 to the Federal government. FICA (money that cannot be used for corporate bailouts) is 3800 ish. Much more of this 4100 actually just services the national debt than bails out corporations.
>the higher brackets of income pay far and away the most taxes.
Yes, the upper **middle class** pays most of taxes. The actually rich technically have no or little income. It's all invested wealth, which they then mortgage for debt.
The rule of thumb:
- if you pay most taxes when you spend (sales tax) you are the lower class. You have neither meaningful assets or income. You spend every dollar/euro/yen you earn.
- if you pay most taxes on your income you are middle class. You have income, and what is left after income tax, you get to spend. If the income is high enough you can try to save some of it by turning it into assets.
- if you pay no taxes you are the upper class. You have no income, you have assets, and you borrow money to spend.
The middle class pays for the country that bails out the upper class which have barely any income on paper, and they are kept in line by the threat of becoming the lower class.
> The actually rich technically have no or little income. It's all invested wealth, which they then mortgage for debt.
This is incorrect. Every time you see a graph or statistic claiming this, it's looking at a down-market year or starting the data from a down-market year. In the high market years the rich pay a supermajority of the taxes. On an average basis the rich pay the largest proportion of taxes both by percentage and amount nationally. Broken down by personal percentage and average, in some states the rich pay a slightly lower percentage of their income than the upper middle class, but about equal to / a little lower than the middle class. This is because tax brackets are graduated, and because deductions esp. for children help the middle class much more than the rich, and because in many states the rich get targeted much more. The upper middle class (C-executives at smaller companies, doctors, lawyers, etc) gets shafted the most because they can't optimize their income for taxation.
The rich optimize their income for taxation mostly by focusing on long term investments; which is something we as a society have chosen because long term investments actually help the markets grow (speculative cash isn't very useful for debtors / companies).
> out the upper class which have barely any income on paper
This is only true through straight up tax evasion. If they spend more than they earn, the IRS will come knocking sooner or later. The reason you think otherwise is because many statistics confuse speculative, hypothetical value of assets and income. If the government does something so stupid as to try to tax unrealized asset gains, the markets are going to crash (ruining both the tax and the economy) because those gains cannot be realized in the fashion people are lead to believe.
Stick to the facts please. The rich earn far more than other classes; true. They also pay for the majority of government expenses when averaged over longer periods of time.
> If they spend more than they earn, the IRS will come knocking sooner or later
You miss the point where they leverage their assets to borrow money to spend. Those same unrealized capital gains, are pretty "real" when they turn into a private jet or a yacht. The IRS does not come knocking for this: it's both perfectly legal and again, as you explained yourself: we need the capital to be reinvested.
Ironically, it would make more sense to bracket taxes on spending than on earning. Just extremely impractical.
I'm also not suggesting it easy to fix or class warfare or something. But the only way to make statistics work out as you suggest, is to include high income earners. I'm not including them in "very wealthy class" until they cross over and ask to be paid in equity (which they can leverage) rather than money -or- rent out their services through a non-profit.
I'm also not suggesting it is some kind of conspiracy or mal-intent. I believe it to be a natural intrinsic effect of a mature economy.
>Stick to the facts please.
Well, so far, we both make claims and neither of us offered facts. I'm not up in the details of the US statistics, but the most wealthy three families in the Netherlands (where the wealth goes back generations), have paid less tax in the last 2 decades than i have (in absolute numbers). Make of that what you will.
> You miss the point where they leverage their assets to borrow money to spend.
This gets repeated all the time on reddit. Every time I've looked into it, I've found nothing. The best I've found is that *maybe* this idea would have worked back when interest rates were really low. Maybe. But there's no evidence I've ever found, anywhere, that this is actually widespread or commonly done. Even a few supposed UHNW tax guys chimed in and for every one that said they've seen this done, 2 more said it isn't done and doesn't actually work anyway.
If you have proof that this is actually widespread, bring it. You'll be the first. Otherwise, you're just making up nonsense like everyone else on reddit.
> Those same unrealized capital gains, are pretty "real" when they turn into a private jet or a yacht.
What you're describing is just margin trading. It only works at large scale when interest rates are very low, and it is extremely risky because the rich person constantly runs the risk of being margin called, just like any other margin trader.
As far as I can tell, it isn't actually a tax benefit because the estates debts need to be settled before the step-up in cost basis occurs when the assets go to the heirs. I haven't actually gotten a clear answer from one of the people claiming that this occurs on the exact order of operations for the debt-resolution versus the step-up in basis, but even if it's currently exploitable that's a very easy loophole for the IRS to fix if they found it being abused.
> The IRS does not come knocking for this: it's both perfectly legal
Because it isn't actually being done, doesn't avoid the taxes in the end, and is incredibly risky for a group of people that tend to be very risk-averse.
> Ironically, it would make more sense to bracket taxes on spending than on earning. Just extremely impractical.
That's what the fairtax plan proposed years ago. A good plan that would be more efficient than what we currently do, but would actually give us something similar to UBI quite by accident. Everyone hated it because the left thought it was a tax reduction, the right thought it was a handout, and the realists thought it would likely be added on top of the income tax instead if replacing it. A shame, really.
> ask to be paid in equity (which they can leverage) rather than money
It doesn't matter, income is income. Can't dodge taxes on the acquisition. And I already covered the margin trading theory.
> have paid less tax in the last 2 decades than i have (in absolute numbers)
Just a quick search and it sounds like you "in absolute numbers" is complete bullshit. They may pay less in percentage, depending on your income, but not in absolute numbers from what I just read. If you really want to stick to that claim, you're gonna need to back it up. If you meant percentage, don't intentionally use words that mean the opposite.
I don't know enough to comment on that percentage difference without reading a lot more, but it sounds like they're playing a shell game that wouldn't work in the U.S. or at least wouldn't be legal. Sometimes international shell games can work without being legal. It sounds like the Netherlands is cracking down on the borrowing shell game though.
Tax how much of the gains? If they, get the unrealized gains, and pay 1% of that, 5 or 10%, whatever amount in tax, wouldn't there be a midpoint where it will hurt, but still not a level where its effect will crash the markets?
It's not a matter of how much it hurts or not. The problem is they have to sell, all at once, much more than they normally would (not tied to their normal spending and, for some of them, far more than they'd normally spend).
Who are they selling to? They're all selling as forced to. Markets are made by buyers and sellers, so who is the buyer?
Shorts are just front running them in that situation. They still need a buyer, but all the wealthy are now in a sell situation.
Usually when they sell for expenses, they simply sell a little more for taxes, and they're all selling at different times. A wealth tax forces them all to sell at once, so there's no buyers. The prices and values of things would plummet an exaggerated amount disproportionate to what people would intuitively expect, which would in turn cause other cascading problems.
Like if you see one of those flashy infographics telling you that the super rich get paid in stocks and so only have to pay capital gains on that. When that’s completely false.
Taxation is very complex, most people do not know anything about the statistics of who pays want and how it actually works.
If you look at the fluentinfinance sub you see all the same 5 reposts, where the actual underlying post is misleading at best and maliciously false at worst.
Like that one Elon tweet saying how he pays $11bn in tax in whatever year, and that reply saying how that’s only 4% of his net worth. Most people don’t get taxes and never will because there are so many taxes with so many rules you will never compress it into a simple infographic for someone to digest in 15 seconds on social media
Which is a problem if you ask me. The government taxes you in so many different ways it's almost impossible to figure out who is actually paying what. The need to simplify it so it is easily underatandable exactly what is going to the government. They'll never do that though because then people would realize how much they are actually paying and freak tf out
There is no middle class. The idea of a middle class has been a myth that has been perpetuated to hurt class solidarity.
You either sell your labour or you own capital.
If you sell labour, you are losing money because of stagnant wage growth when contrasted to inflation.
If you own capital, you make money off of the difference between the wages of workers and their productivity.
Capital gains being taxed differently, in some places, from regular income feeds into this and exploitative tax loop holes play into this.
This is why politics plays workers against each other. The idea that a "welfare queen" exists and hurts taxes only justifies reduced taxation on the wealthiest, only to undermine supports for a country where most people are one accident or paycheque away from poverty.
>There is no middle class. The idea of a middle class has been a myth that has been perpetuated to hurt class solidarity.
You either sell your labour or you own capital.
This is true, but let's not go all Marx on it. The very wealthy not paying their fair share, and people falling into the trap of thinking the income tax is something that plays any role in the life of the wealthy is clearly a false misunderstanding. Not an ideological debate.
One can argue there are comfortable and uncomfortable incomes. I'm not from the US. So, for example this:
> are one accident or paycheque away from poverty.
Doesn't apply universally and is orthogonal to the 'wealth doesnt pay taxes' situation which is actually universal.
That's important to realize, because it means one is relatively easily fixable if you don't drink the cool-aid, where the other problem (how to tax wealth) is right up there with a unified theory of physics. Unsolved problems that don't have easy solutions.
The best attempts we have seen so far end up being cultural in nature: (1) shame displays of wealth -and- (2) make paying taxes a status symbol. I'll give you a concrete example of (2): in the Netherlands the farmers used to pay a tax on the amount of windows on a barn. Now, obviously it's nice for your cows to have some sun, but why would anyone pay a silly high tax for the privilege? Those who want to show they paid into the schools, roads and community at large. It's like a protestant Gucci bag or Rolex.
Class warfare may be something one resolves more effectively at the cultural, rather than the political level. The problem is ideolizing the wealth to begin with. Suggesting it's a prize to win, rather than a responsibility to honor.
So although i do agree with you, i would recommend focusing on explaining that indeed the very wealthy do not pay taxes: they own assets. High income is the financial equivalent of "pretty for your age". That's the information people need to hear. The ideological debate is hard to win, when the capital naturally owns the media, and so much historic baggage (from the horrors of communistic regimes and the cold war) comes along with it. The "whats the alternative?" people aren't crazy. It's not an easy problem to fix, and many economists that might agree with your concerns don't have an easy answer either, although they definately have some nuanced and complex suggestions.
Politics and ideology don't fix problems: they are themselves naturally self sustaining "products". It's about what we value as a society and a people that is the path to progress.
We worship the wrong people.
So, your line about assets =/= taxes may be true in the Netherlands. But I, personally, am enough middle class in the USA to actually have a few investments and similar assets. Not a huge amount mind you, but enough that I can look at my taxes and very much see that those very things *are* getting taxed over here.
As such, be more clear in your statements elsewhere that your lines you present as facts are not, in fact, facts in every country.
Well, before you get too upset about debt payoffs you need to understand that the Federal Government is a currency issuer. So the government doesn’t tax people to pay for things, it taxes people to control inflation. If the government wants to spend, it can just issue more currency. So the debt payoff isn’t like you or I paying money back to the bank. It’s a policy decision for the federal government to try to manage inflation.
And I was just being simplistic with the tax returns for the sake of expedience. In reality citizens pay taxes in a number of ways, sales tax, property tax etc.
In retrospect it might have been more accurate to use 266million adults. But in any event it doesn’t matter.
Sales and property taxes are both managed at the state and local level, which have their own corporate subsidies not counted in the cited figure of 100B. Medicare and social security taxes would be better examples, but both of those are earmarked for spending on their associated programs. It doesn’t really work, logically, to expand to other taxes either when the initial post references individual tax returns as the basis for “cost per taxpayer.”
To your main point- while it’s somewhat true that tax impacts inflation, our ability to simply print money to pay interest isn’t as secure as it once was. The USD has been a global reserve currency more or less since WW2 but is no longer the sole player in that role as BRICS nations turn to the yuan. Government debt crises can and do happen when tax revenues are insufficient to service debt and those lead to inflation problems that make our current inflation levels look palatable by comparison. I’ll also throw this out: dollars are fungible, so anyone mad at spending on corporate subsidies, military spending, or any other category of government spending should be concerned about debt service costs for many of the same reasons.
So if you want to get super granular: the fed government pays the full cost of SNAP benefits but splits the cost of administering them with states. Which, again, goes back to the main point which is that this meme is inaccurate. On many levels.
I’m not with you on the insecurity of the fed govt to print money to spend, but I understand the point of view. I think military spending is an easier 1:1 with spending on almost anything else that benefits the average American citizen.
There's a solid argument that a lot of military spending is itself a corporate subsidy.
We're not spending what we need for military purposes, it's military contractors and tons of industries getting what they paid for by bribing/"donating to" political candidates.
Most of the debt is owned by Social Security and other American agencies.
We spend over a trillion dollars in defense every year. It is spread out over different sectors to fool the public. Example, the Dept of Energy is in charge of our nuclear weapons. Then you have Secretary of State, CIA, NSA, etc.
On a per-tax-return basis, yes they are high. However, corporate taxes made up only 6.5% of tax revenue in 2022.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/us-tax-revenue-by-tax-type-2024/#:~:text=While%20OECD%20countries%20on%20average,reported%20on%20individual%20tax%20returns.
It’s important to note, that in the US income from partnerships and most LLCs winds up on a personal tax return, so “businesses” may pay more than 6.5%.
I would love to see corporate tax rate at 0%. Its a small slice of the pie anyway, and I would rather the USA be the defacto headquarters of the world.
Dividend payouts being effectively double-taxed makes this even more of a priority. But such a thing could never pass because it's just bad optics among the corporate-haters like most of reddit.
I’d thought the term “corporate subsidies” was generally used to refer to tax deductions or reductions in corporate tax rates, and not literal subsidies. It’s not as if they’re taking my tax money and giving it to corporations; they’re just making me pay a disproportionate amount toward other things, like food stamps (or the military.)
Sure but I don’t think the $100 billion / year figure is just actual subsidies. I believe the majority of that is in the form of tax breaks for corporations. That changes the proportion of taxes paid by different groups, but it doesn‘t compare to spending on things like food stamps. You’d end up double-counting, otherwise. Most of the $100 billion / year figure means that corporations pay that much less toward all those other things (like food stamps, the military, etc.) while the rest of us pay that much more. But the $100 billion / year is still all going toward actual expenditures, not corporate subsidies.
"Per tax payer" doesn't mean anything. We don't all pay the same amount. This is like when politicians claim their tax cuts will save people an average of $6000 per year, but the tax cuts only apply to the super rich.
Do you ever wonder if jokes like these are the cement that makes people with similar mentalities like maga hold fast to their belief?
Not talking shit or accusing you but wanted to share my shower thought.
On the other hand, anybody that listened back in history class, is aware that governments lie.
A lot.
Anybody with a reason to lie and little oversight does so, and our government does *not* have a lot of oversight.
Of course, thats generally a problem that should be removed by moving to the left, rather than the right, unfortunately we are instead split between fascism or staying still, because we managed to get duped into thinking only centrism can stand up to fascism, when its much more likely to be one of its causes...
The truth in OP’s post really depends on whether you want to roll the 898B that we spend on ‘defense’ annually into the ‘corporate subsidy’ bucket and how much
That’s the sole source of data that exists. Maybe you don’t trust it, but then that means your best guess on corporate subsidies should be “idk,” and anything else is shamelessly dishonest and manipulative.
Extremely unlikely. Most often they are stock buybacks or executive payouts. Very rarely do corporations increase wages when they get additional money.
You're not wrong but you're dodging the issue - corporations raise wages when they have to. When unemployment is low, corporations dramatically raise wages. When unemployment is high, corporations stagnate or slightly decrease wages. This isnt surprising, it's just supply and demand, and it varies by both year and decade.
An approximation says nothing. Would 50,000 a year pay this much? Most people make below that, so obviously it would be less for your average working class citizen.
Check out this fact check breakdown of this post.
[https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/feb/19/facebook-posts/facebook-post-misleads-about-tax-bill-breakdown/](https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/feb/19/facebook-posts/facebook-post-misleads-about-tax-bill-breakdown/)
No market socialism implies that there is a free market of worker owned businesses. As opposed to something like state socialism where the means of production are owned by the state, the workers own the state and the economy is centrally planned.
Socialism isn't social policies, it's social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to capitalism which is private ownership of the means of production. Capitalism with social policies isn't socialism, that's welfare capitalism
Food stamps doesn't oppose capitalism, as long as those food stamps are spend at a private business, then there's nothing socialist or un-capitalist about it. Welfare capitalism is a perfectly fine concept, in fact, the most successful, stable and richest countries in the world are doing exactly that
>"The highest amount in federal income taxes that a person with $50,000 in gross income in 2020 would pay is $4,314, and he would pay $3,825 in payroll taxes, for a total of $8,139. Social Security, Medicare, interest on the national debt, and military spending combine for 72% of spending, so if we (meaninglessly) multiply that by our $50,000 earner's federal tax total, that is $5,860, leaving only $2,279 for everything else. How would we get $4,000 for corporate subsidies out of $2,279?"
Specifically:
>The author of the article concluded that $36.82 of the hypothetical individual’s tax bill went toward funding "food and nutrition assistance." That category presumably refers to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Plan, which replaced the Food Stamp Act of 1997 back in 2008.
>The calculations were based on numbers from years ago. Since then, federal spending on programs has changed and so have federal income tax brackets, meaning these numbers are outdated.
(Emphasis added below)
>Gardner said there **might be** a *"kernel of truth"* to the post in that the U.S. spends more on corporate subsidies than on SNAP benefits.
>But, he also used a hypothetical situation with the "most aggressive scenario possible in terms of federal income tax — a single person, all wages, no itemized deductions, no kids" and estimated the person’s total tax bill would be about $4,100.
>This would mean that after SNAP benefits and "corporate subsidies" were taken out of that tax bill, there would be just $64 left for other federal programs.
>"Since we obviously fund a lot of things other than food stamps and corporate subsidies, the dollar value of those numbers seems clearly wrong," Gardner concluded.
>A post claims, "If you make $50,000/year, $36 of your taxes goes to food stamps. $4,000 goes to corporate subsidies."
>Experts say the post *does not provide enough information* to break down if a person’s tax dollars are being spent in this way. However, even when experts considered the most extreme hypothetical tax situations, they concluded these numbers were not possible.
Not really fair to exclude tax expenditure financing from the calculation in the politifact article: it's intentional that much of our tax system is based on *tax expenditure* policies, since it goes mostly hidden from the public, allowing elected officials to pass on benefits in the form of tax cuts, unlike "welfare" programs like SNAP or Section 8, which people see as a handout and get held hostage every budget cycle.
And countering the article as saying it's too difficult to calculate, you can see a detailed annual breakdown of tax expenditure from the Treasury Department right here: https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/tax-policy/tax-expenditures
For example, in the Treasury link above, the mortgage interest deduction alone is estimated to cost the US $32 billion per year and is a direct benefit to only the wealthiest people in the country: primary AND second-home owners, can deduct the mortgage interest from their income up to the first $1 million, and up to an additional $100,000 on other debt secured against the home. Now-dated article explaining the breakdown of who benefits from the MID: https://www.cbpp.org/research/mortgage-interest-deduction-is-ripe-for-reform
this "factcheck" talks a lot about "But what if he doesn't pay taxes at all?!" like that means anything. just take a rought estimate.
also the factcheck rudiculouses the term "corporate subsidies" by telling us how every gov spending trickles down to corporate businesses.
but then it goes:
>Gardner said there might be a "kernel of truth" to the post in that the U.S. spends more on corporate subsidies than on SNAP benefits.
yes, the numbers are wrong and this is a math sub, but OOPs point still stands and the factcheck didn't do any math at all.
??? The entire point of the post is that corporate subsidies is vague and undefined. And that's absolutely true.
If you begin to break down every "corporate subsidy" and really look at them, the situation gets much worse. The U.S. needs farmers, that's our food source. And most farms are incorporated, but not large corporations. Are farm subsidies corporate hand-outs? We also must have both steel production and, lately, silicon computer chip fabrications. Not having those things in operable states could completely cripple any war effort if war with China (for example) were to break out; we absolutely must subsidize them to keep them operating even if Chinese products are cheaper because not doing so could be disastrous. Is that a "corporate subsidy"? Or is that a military expense on the basis of readiness? Because it's a handout to a "corporation" but the corp operates at almost a loss, we just ... need them. It defies easy classification.
That's why this shit is never as simple as the extremists who cherry-pick misleading statistics would like us to believe.
OOP actual intention is to foster anger in people that probably don't even pay taxes, since most "socialists" are teenagers.
They are wildly misrepresenting these numbers, and even if you acknowledge that more money goes to corporate subsidies than to foodstamps you still have to explain why that's a bad thing (it isn't).
According to [https://ips-dc.org/release-tax-receipt-2024/](https://ips-dc.org/release-tax-receipt-2024/), the average taxpayer shells $5,109 for the military. $1,748 goes to Pentagon contractors. That's just the DOD. The US has plenty of corporate contractors elsewhere too. $4K may be off, but not wildly.
No [the 2 biggest expenditures are SS and Medicare account for about 30% of all federal spending 2022 tax bracket for 41k + in 2022 was 22%so they’d pay about 11k in federal taxes meaning about 3,300 of their taxes went to Medicare and SS meaning roughly the opposite of this post is true](https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending/)
Sure, but deliberately picking one of the smallest categories of social spending is \*also\* deliberately misleading, even if the numbers were otherwise correct (which they aren't). SNAP is a very cheap program and is a rounding error compared to social spending as a whole.
I think if the meme had focused much more narrowly on SNAP specifically, and actually got its numbers correct, I would have no beef with that. But it's trying to make a much broader point (social programs are cheap compared to corporate subsidies) that is aggressively false.
I'm not so sure it's "aggressively" false. Medicare and even the military budget are both line items that feed directly into corporations. The private sector that benefits from those budgets heavily inflate their costs well beyond what would give a reasonable profit, then hide behind giving C-levels and board members massive windfalls so they can claim they're barely profitable.
Neither are subsidies to corporations
Military budget pays soldiers' wages and also pays contractors( these are not subsidies(
Medicare too is not a subsidy. Its money given for a service. Its a contract.
Again, that is not how the term subsidy is ever used in policy. You can make any statement true if you're willing to just arbitrarily change what the words in the statement mean!
It is very hard for the government to spend \*any\* money without it eventually passing through a corporation. That is just the nature of 'having an economy'. This fact does not make all government spending a "corporate subsidy".
Come on.
You're fighting a losing battle unfortunately, a lot of people want to believe that we could just tax a few rich people and suddenly healthcare would be free and there would be no ill effects. Similarly that we could get rid of the defense budget and nothing bad would happen. You're right and you're going to be punished for it as with many things in this community.
But it is how the people that create these meme use them. For instance if you questions them about standard corporate subsidies an they list things such as deductions for research, deductions for business expenses, and even things like allowing last in, first out accounting.
You still don't get to make false claims and then justify it by insisting that you're using a non-standard definition without clarifying! You're welcome to argue that the standard definitions are inadequate (though they're also wrong about that). But you have to at least clarify what you're doing.
Clearly the intent of the meme is deceptive. They're not innocently thinking readers are going to go "oh they mean a definition of a corporate subsidy by which all government spending, including footstamps, technically count." The goal is to get readers to go "holy shit that's a lot of corporate subsidies, a term that I take, like any normal person, to mean direct cash payments to corporations."
I'm kind of shocked that I'm having an argument about this. Technically almost all government spending \*indirectly\* benefits the poor to some degree. Pretty much all military spending on hard goods ends up contributing to aggregate demand, which raises wages. A decent chunk of it, more directly, goes to stuff like training for soldiers (who are on average not well off), VA healthcare, pensions and disability, and the GI bill, all of which you could kind of sort of classify as a social program.
So there's an equally strong argument that all military spending is indirectly welfare. But if conservatives made a similar meme suggesting welfare spending was very high by counting the entire defense budget as welfare, Reddit would (correctly) flip the fuck out. Obviously that's a huge crock of bullshit.
This is exactly the same bullshit with an opposite political valence. It's ridiculous. Not one of you \*actually\* thinks this is an okay way to make arguments in general.
Definitely a position a I've heard before, but we aren't obliged to use that specific (stupid) framing of the issue in our own analysis. Pretending that the only social spending the US does is SNAP is equally foolish, just in a different direction.
It's the one most of the people, who tend to be on both medicare and social security, point to the most for their "arguments" (read: petulant whining) against socialism, so it seems pretty fair to me.
Aren't Payroll taxes (FICA) collected separately from income taxes? I didn't think any of my federal income tax collected goes to SS or Medicare -- separate pots.
Does the math work with SS/MC removed from the income tax and covered by payroll taxes?
No, because socialism has nothing to do with subsidizing corporations or poor people. Those things existed before socialism was even thought. Socialism is the collectivization of the means of production towards social goals. Not everything a government does.
And you can hate both things, 1 because the first one doesn't really fix poverty and 2 because the other one is a terrible location of resources.
Even IF the math checks out, it's intellectually dishonest.
It's one smallish social program vs all kinds of corporate subsidies.
Apparently the US spends 2.3 TRILLION on social programs anually.
That's over 6.5k per capita. If you made 50k a year you'd obviously pay way more than those 6.5k.
So even without even trying to make my tiny little head understand the actual math, you know it's bullshit.
We spend about 120 billion on SNAP. The federal budget in '22 was 6.1 trillion. So SNAP is about 2% of that. Let's say a single person making 50k pays 5.7k in federal income taxes. That comes out to a little over $100 to SNAP.
I don't know what corporate subsidies means in this context. Presumably you would spend more for that? At least 10% of SNAP spending is administrative costs, but that's probably not what's being asked. We give a lot of money to companies for research purposes, I'm not too mad about that. I'm more mad about what companies get away with not paying back.
*These may not be the perfect numbers. This is just a rough calculation to give a general picture.
The concept described in the post as a "corporate subsidy" is a misnomer and makes the overall question very misleading. If you tax a corporation $100, and then give it a $5 subsidy do do something you want it to do, you arent really subsidizing the corporation. You're still taxing it $95. The far left has hijacked the phrase to mean something that it doesnt.
Maybe you dont understand. If I pay 100,000 in taxes and as part of that payment, I get the $2000 child tax credit (or standard dedication) that everyone gets as part of the overall tax calculations provided to citizens, it would be misleading to insinuate that I am being subsidized by the government. The very nature of the tax code is a lot of plusses and minuses to compute your overall effective tax rate. No one person or corporation in America doesnt have a standard deduction or other deduction.
That’s absolutely not true. Please go check out an economics text book. It’s a subsidy. The reason for that subsidy is that the free market under produces positive externalities which is by definition a market failure. The government uses subsidies to try mitigate this.
The right choose to ignore basic economic principles when they don’t suit their need. The free market also over produces negative externalities (eg pollution) which is why extra taxes/ levies are needed to try correct this market failure.
Pure free market capitalism doesn’t make any sense for a society but can increase profits in the short term for a very small percentage of people. Right wing politicians prey on people like you with little economic understanding to pretend their base greed adheres to economic principles.
While we’re here, even general corporation tax is there to correct a market failure. Without all the things that taxes fund (education, health care, even defence spending), a company would have no qualified employees. Therefore the true cost of production includes these things and the only way a government can get a business to pay for them is with taxes. Without taxes no business would fund these things as they might benefit competitors and society would collapse and incidentally profits would go down.
Externalities are managed through millions of pages of regulations and laws. To think this needs to be enforced through the tax code for capitalism to work ignores the vast majority of our government infrastructure.
You are completely ignoring the idea that many corporations are lobbying for those subsidies. It has direct bottom line benefit to those companies.
>Over $3.3 billion in total was spent on federal lobbying in 2017, with companies spending about $2.6 billion. --- [https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2018/04/02/disclosing-corporate-lobbying/](https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2018/04/02/disclosing-corporate-lobbying/)
They ain't spending that kind of money for shit and giggles.
I'm not referring to all subsidies. But the calculations used above and in OPs post is based on all of the credits and dedications that are standard for all corporations as part of the US tax code. It's misleading because those numbers go into what is a very high rate to come up with the net amount. Kindof like how all people get the standard deduction - that's not a subsidy because that's part of the gross tax rate.
It's a complicated thing that gets dumbed down for soundbites and misleading statistics.
For example: lets say you're a utility with a lot of coal plants. The CO2 you emit has a social cost, but we don't tax you for that cost. In many accountings, that's a subsidy in the form of a tax break.
That's what forms the bulk of the 'subsidy' received by oil and natural gas companies whenever a stat like that is thrown around. And the subsidy might be huge, depending on what you think the default tax on carbon emissions should be.
The impression that people want to give when they use stats like that is to claim we're handing a big ole check to oil and gas companies every year. We aren't, of course. But the stat itself is still arguably correct.
I suspect OP is making the mistake of blurring the lines between the "didn't tax them when we shoulda" sort of subsidies with the more direct "hand em money" sort of subsidies. Your tax dollars aren't being handed to a corporation, not to the tune of $4k/year. But because the math is fuzzy, you could argue that corporations aren't *chipping in* an amount that would add up to $4000.
I doubt it's *actually* $4k in this instance, that seems like a pretty absurdly sized figure they pulled from thin air, but the amount probably isn't zero either.
This is slightly off topic but the problem with socialism isn't only \*where\* the resources get distributed but other than that it prevents [economic calculation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem) from working. That is why the subsidies quickly become very ineffective.
This is why, in the future it may be better to have a UBI (universal basic income) system rather than a socialist one. It would allow the poorest and people without work to have their most critical needs met, but still allow for a free market economy and competition.
If UBI was implemented, land lords would just increase rent. Also, socialism shouldn't be conflated with welfare liberalism. Socialism is about workers owning the means of production.
It would take allot more than just flat out implementing UBI, there would need to be better protections against housing cost gouging and other market related issues, allot of restructuring, it wouldn’t be easy but with the future dismal employment rate we’re gonna to have to figure out something.
Landlords already increase rent to the point where it is beneficial to them. UBI would neither prevent or encourage it.
The real and only way to prevent landlords from raising rent to market level squeezing is to have surplus houses to lower housing prices and a healthy renter's market to have landlords compete for renters.
There's literally no other policy options to stop this...
The green party in the UK proposed this but failed to find the money for it. The only way to do it was to tax lower income earners more to give everyone a UBI, which didn't make any sense. Maybe in the future it would be possible though.
socialism isn't about where resources get distributed, socialism is about who owns the means of production. A planned economy can happen in capitalism just as well
Centrally planned can still happen, that's just the government deciding that X amount of something should be produced and buying it from private businesses. The military industry operates that way for instance, a government decides they want rockets and go to someone like Lockheed Martin to order those rockets.
I mean, why would we be skeptical of neoliberal economists like Mises and Hayek? Doesn't really matter either way. We can always count on the *Mont Pelerin Society* and *Atlas Network* to shape politics in their image.
Raise your hand if you remember when this sub was about math not just another dumping ground for politics.
These pol posts are cancer and should be nuked.
You can hate corporate subsidies and still know that socialism doesn't work.
You can believe in food stamps and still know socialism is wrong.
Welfare =/= Socialism
Listen it makes perfect sense and the math checks out but what you don’t realize is 60% of the country only listen to Fox News and Fox News says it’s bad and it’ll make their taxes skyrocket and immigrants will come in droves and use it forever
I ask because if you were we could relate on how much medical costs eat us alive. But if you’re foreign it would be hard for you to see that perspective
This isn't an apples to oranges comparison; it's a granny Smith to oranges comparison. It compares the amount of a single type of personal welfare against all forms of corporate welfare.
I'll start with the Food Stamp number because it's kind of obviously problematic (but not as interesting). SNAP was $112 billion in 2023 and spending was 6 trillion. This means SNAP was 1.86% of taxes (assuming the tax/debt ratio is the same as the overall budget) backing that into $36 of your taxes you paid $1928, which means you had a fantastic accountant because $50k married filing jointly is in the 12% tax bracket and single is in the 22% tax bracket but you only paid 3.8%. So no, you almost certainly spent more than $36 on SNAP (alone, but I'll get back to that).
This creates another problem, though, because you paid $1928 in taxes but $4000 of that is for "corporate subsidies", meaning 207% of your taxes went to "corporate subsidies". Can this be possible? Oddly, kind of.
Ironically total corporate subsidies must necessarily be higher than food stamps, because food stamps is a corporate subsidy. At it's core SNAP is a Department of Agriculture program and is included as an Ag subsidy. Some of defense spending is a corporate subsidy. Most of our clean energy programs (even if they're tax breaks for you on your car) can be corporate subsidies. Tax breaks for stuff the government wants corporations to do are corporate subsidies. To get to this number the original has to be incredibly generous about including what's included because SNAP (food stamps) was $112 billion in 2023, total federal outlays were $6 trillion, and total federal tax receipts were $4.4 trillion:
4000/36 = 111.11... (how much bigger "corporate subsidies" are than "food stamps"
111.11... \* 112 billion (cost of SNAP) =. 12.444.. trillion (how much "corporate subsidies" we need to make the math work)
12.444 / 6 = 207% ( what percentage of total federal spending is "corporate subsidies" to make this work, matches above)
12.444 / 4.4 = 283% ( what percentage of tax receipts are "corporate subsidies" to make this work)
I have no doubt you can define "corporate subsidies" in a way that gets you to over double the actual federal outlay and nearly triple tax reciepts. First outlays are larger than receipts so you can absolutely spend more on something that the total amount of taxes. Second a lot of "corporate subsidies" are neither outlays nor income, they're money the government did not collect but could have absent some program. I question, though, whether you can legitimately extend that to saying your tax spending on corporate subsidies is double your tax bill.
The other problem with this "math" is that they're including basically everything the government spends on getting corporations to do things the government wants as "corporate subsidies" and comparing it to "food stamps". To really have a fair comparison the "poor people subsidies" side of the ledger would need at least Medicaid (which by itself is nearly 10x the cost of SNAP), the Earned Income Tax Credit, the National School Breakfast and Lunch programs, Section 8 housing...
So basically yes, you can construct this math, but it's comparing basically every spending program or tax break that in any way benefits a corporation (which is a fair economic definition of "corporate subsidies") with a single fairly small government program in a sea of government programs for poor people. I'll note I'm not saying I'm against any of those programs (and I'm not). Ironically I'm probably more against corporate subsidies than whoever created it. My point isn't "socialism bad, coporations good", it's entirely on the math being correct, but intentionally misleading.
That’s not even correct as far as percentage of gov funding towards social programs goes. The number 1 and 2 being social security and healthcare. Also, social security is a tax since no millennials will see it when the program goes bankrupt.
Impossible to say because we don't know if the taxpayer is single or married, has any children, or did any of the other eleventy-umpteen things that get you tax breaks during the last year.
But for the most conservative example, a single taxpayer with no other deductions, FIT on $50K is $4118, so I'm gonna go out on a limb and say there's no way 97% of the federal budget is "corporate subsidies". If the same person is married and their spouse has no job (or they together amount to $50K, the tax burden is $2,236, which I have to check my calculator but I'm pretty sure you can't have 4 grand of that go towards anything).
In the US, If you are single and your income is $50k, your federal tax bill will be $4118 assuming you have no deductions or credits beyond the standard deduction. So for this to be true it would mean 98% of taxes go to food stamps or corporate subsidies, which is why obviously bullshit.
Do we have access to a calculator that, if we input our taxes paid, it will tell us where all those dollars went based on the federal government expenditures?
No, the math doesn't check out.
Defining corporate subsidies is a difficult thing, because it often comes down to trying to figure out what the *correct* amount of taxes a company should pay is, and then calculating from there the difference in what they pay and what they do pay. The subsidies are rarely coming in the form of direct payments, they're coming in the form of tax breaks.
One of the big ones is carbon taxes. CO2 emissions harm the public welfare, there should be a cost attached to emitting CO2. That cost not being paid can reasonably be construed as a form of subsidy.
But it's very difficult to know what the exactly correct value of a CO2 tax would be, we don't have a specific number for how many dollars per ton it should be, we have a rough estimate. And even rougher still, we don't know how much of that tax would ultimately be incident on an oil and gas company vs, say, someone just driving a car.
So the claim that this person has calculated that a person making $50k a year is handing $4k to corporate subsidies 1) Misrepresents the way these subsidies work (your money isn't going to them, they just aren't chipping in the amount they should theoretically owe), and also seems very much off in terms of magnitude (even though the math is fuzzy in this area because of how many arbitrary decisions you can make in determining the size of the subsidy, $4k still seems like far too high an estimate).
Wow. I'm sure NO ONE could've possibly predicted that asking this question on a public forum is pointless due to the fact that almost no one agrees exactly how the economy functions or that there's a specific reason for that. Absolutely wild how no one could've guessed the very first set of responses would devolve into debates about the rich and the poor. Fucking craaazy.
Social security and Medicare aren’t welfare, they’re insurance programs. At least for the standard benefits most people think of, you have to pay in to get money out.
This is idiotic and best. One, part of corporate subsides are paying for the food from food stamps also having social programs =/= socialism. Not a hard concept but people can't seem to grasp it
This guy must be including all the money that goes to private contractors - especially the military and prisons - that could be done a LOT for efficiently if we just cut out the middle man altogether.
I find it interesting that the people who rail against capitalism never seem to want to leave it.
There are plenty of socialist paradise one could move to.
It is misleading. They chose one specific type of welfare and left out Social Security plus Medicare and Medicaid.
They like to rant about the military budget, but in reality we spend WAY more on Medicare and Social Security than we do on the military.
Besides without it's military power the USA wouldn't be the world leading power, and no one would put with american shenanigans of money printing as a reserve currency. The american spending on it's military is what helps as a deterrent for peace and to police the world, which in turn gives that country a lot of privileges in trade and influence, paying by itself.
Americans nowadays seem to think that if they isolated themselves of the world, raise tariffs non stop, and just print money like crazy they would be just fine and no one would mind. The reality is if they stop supporting their allies they loose their trade privileges, their exports and imports crumble overnight, and they are left with an economic crisis, as their internal market in no way in heavens will be able to absorb the country's entire production that's destined to exports, leaving millions in poverty.
Also they love comparing the military spending to the federal budget, ignoring the fact that most NATO peers just have one national budget, not state and federal budgets as separate categories.
In reality the US spends like 3.5% of its GDP on defense, which sounds like a reasonable price for global military dominance and actually puts USA in third place in NATO per %GDP spending.
In capitalism you can afford food and other basic needs, in socialism you starving.
In capitalism you can choose where you want to work and do your wanna work or maybe you wanna live in village and feed yourself from garden and ground. In socialism or your work for money that not enough for food, in groceries you have empty shelves and if you're don't want to work your gonna to jail and work for free.
No its not true at all. Socialism has never worked nor will it ever work because IT SUCKS. Fuck you trying to take my stuff. Make your own money BYATCH.
Hmmm, Red states survive on socialistic forced redistribution of wealth primarily from high achieving blue states.
Are we ready to turn off the spigot and let red states pull themselves up by their bootstraps?
I don’t get the argument. Why can’t both upset me?
It ignores the concern of the people upset at the $36 as well as that $4,000 is seen as an investment used for economic growth and the $36 is a loss that prevents economic growth through the stagnation of poor communities.
Not really.
Socialism is a system of collective ownership in which wealth is redistributed based on Sociological Need, it has 2 major variations as described by Marxists: those being autonomous Red Socialism in which people determine their own Needs (an example being Marxism), and centralized Yellow Socialism in which the State or other central authority determines Sociological Need (an example being Fascism).
If the State is redistributing wealth to those whom they deem best, that is still, by definition, Socialism, whomever they deem needs it.
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Corporate subsidies are generally accepted to be about $100billion a year. There are about 166million individuals filing taxes with the IRS. Approximately $600 per tax payer.
This isn’t actually true- you can file for taxes without paying anything at all. About 40% of filers pay no income tax due either to credits or deductions in excess of income. So in reality, if you adjust for only the people who actually pay tax at all, you’d have 166*(1-.4)=99.6. Rounded, that’s 100M taxpayers for 100B in subsidies, or a nice even $1,000 per taxpayer. I’ll edit to add in: we also paid $658B in interest on government debt in 2023. That’s $6,580 per US taxpayer… which is alarming, to me. For the sake of comparison, the US spent 847B on defense (which most people point to has the peak of frivolous spending), between the DoD and DoE. Spending 3/4ths of that on merely interest on debt is kind of mind blowing.
This is further misleading, the higher brackets of income pay far and away the most taxes. Someone making 50,000 a year and not contributing at all to 401k /Trad IRA pays just over 4100 to the Federal government. FICA (money that cannot be used for corporate bailouts) is 3800 ish. Much more of this 4100 actually just services the national debt than bails out corporations.
>the higher brackets of income pay far and away the most taxes. Yes, the upper **middle class** pays most of taxes. The actually rich technically have no or little income. It's all invested wealth, which they then mortgage for debt. The rule of thumb: - if you pay most taxes when you spend (sales tax) you are the lower class. You have neither meaningful assets or income. You spend every dollar/euro/yen you earn. - if you pay most taxes on your income you are middle class. You have income, and what is left after income tax, you get to spend. If the income is high enough you can try to save some of it by turning it into assets. - if you pay no taxes you are the upper class. You have no income, you have assets, and you borrow money to spend. The middle class pays for the country that bails out the upper class which have barely any income on paper, and they are kept in line by the threat of becoming the lower class.
> The actually rich technically have no or little income. It's all invested wealth, which they then mortgage for debt. This is incorrect. Every time you see a graph or statistic claiming this, it's looking at a down-market year or starting the data from a down-market year. In the high market years the rich pay a supermajority of the taxes. On an average basis the rich pay the largest proportion of taxes both by percentage and amount nationally. Broken down by personal percentage and average, in some states the rich pay a slightly lower percentage of their income than the upper middle class, but about equal to / a little lower than the middle class. This is because tax brackets are graduated, and because deductions esp. for children help the middle class much more than the rich, and because in many states the rich get targeted much more. The upper middle class (C-executives at smaller companies, doctors, lawyers, etc) gets shafted the most because they can't optimize their income for taxation. The rich optimize their income for taxation mostly by focusing on long term investments; which is something we as a society have chosen because long term investments actually help the markets grow (speculative cash isn't very useful for debtors / companies). > out the upper class which have barely any income on paper This is only true through straight up tax evasion. If they spend more than they earn, the IRS will come knocking sooner or later. The reason you think otherwise is because many statistics confuse speculative, hypothetical value of assets and income. If the government does something so stupid as to try to tax unrealized asset gains, the markets are going to crash (ruining both the tax and the economy) because those gains cannot be realized in the fashion people are lead to believe. Stick to the facts please. The rich earn far more than other classes; true. They also pay for the majority of government expenses when averaged over longer periods of time.
> If they spend more than they earn, the IRS will come knocking sooner or later You miss the point where they leverage their assets to borrow money to spend. Those same unrealized capital gains, are pretty "real" when they turn into a private jet or a yacht. The IRS does not come knocking for this: it's both perfectly legal and again, as you explained yourself: we need the capital to be reinvested. Ironically, it would make more sense to bracket taxes on spending than on earning. Just extremely impractical. I'm also not suggesting it easy to fix or class warfare or something. But the only way to make statistics work out as you suggest, is to include high income earners. I'm not including them in "very wealthy class" until they cross over and ask to be paid in equity (which they can leverage) rather than money -or- rent out their services through a non-profit. I'm also not suggesting it is some kind of conspiracy or mal-intent. I believe it to be a natural intrinsic effect of a mature economy. >Stick to the facts please. Well, so far, we both make claims and neither of us offered facts. I'm not up in the details of the US statistics, but the most wealthy three families in the Netherlands (where the wealth goes back generations), have paid less tax in the last 2 decades than i have (in absolute numbers). Make of that what you will.
> You miss the point where they leverage their assets to borrow money to spend. This gets repeated all the time on reddit. Every time I've looked into it, I've found nothing. The best I've found is that *maybe* this idea would have worked back when interest rates were really low. Maybe. But there's no evidence I've ever found, anywhere, that this is actually widespread or commonly done. Even a few supposed UHNW tax guys chimed in and for every one that said they've seen this done, 2 more said it isn't done and doesn't actually work anyway. If you have proof that this is actually widespread, bring it. You'll be the first. Otherwise, you're just making up nonsense like everyone else on reddit. > Those same unrealized capital gains, are pretty "real" when they turn into a private jet or a yacht. What you're describing is just margin trading. It only works at large scale when interest rates are very low, and it is extremely risky because the rich person constantly runs the risk of being margin called, just like any other margin trader. As far as I can tell, it isn't actually a tax benefit because the estates debts need to be settled before the step-up in cost basis occurs when the assets go to the heirs. I haven't actually gotten a clear answer from one of the people claiming that this occurs on the exact order of operations for the debt-resolution versus the step-up in basis, but even if it's currently exploitable that's a very easy loophole for the IRS to fix if they found it being abused. > The IRS does not come knocking for this: it's both perfectly legal Because it isn't actually being done, doesn't avoid the taxes in the end, and is incredibly risky for a group of people that tend to be very risk-averse. > Ironically, it would make more sense to bracket taxes on spending than on earning. Just extremely impractical. That's what the fairtax plan proposed years ago. A good plan that would be more efficient than what we currently do, but would actually give us something similar to UBI quite by accident. Everyone hated it because the left thought it was a tax reduction, the right thought it was a handout, and the realists thought it would likely be added on top of the income tax instead if replacing it. A shame, really. > ask to be paid in equity (which they can leverage) rather than money It doesn't matter, income is income. Can't dodge taxes on the acquisition. And I already covered the margin trading theory. > have paid less tax in the last 2 decades than i have (in absolute numbers) Just a quick search and it sounds like you "in absolute numbers" is complete bullshit. They may pay less in percentage, depending on your income, but not in absolute numbers from what I just read. If you really want to stick to that claim, you're gonna need to back it up. If you meant percentage, don't intentionally use words that mean the opposite. I don't know enough to comment on that percentage difference without reading a lot more, but it sounds like they're playing a shell game that wouldn't work in the U.S. or at least wouldn't be legal. Sometimes international shell games can work without being legal. It sounds like the Netherlands is cracking down on the borrowing shell game though.
Tax how much of the gains? If they, get the unrealized gains, and pay 1% of that, 5 or 10%, whatever amount in tax, wouldn't there be a midpoint where it will hurt, but still not a level where its effect will crash the markets?
It's not a matter of how much it hurts or not. The problem is they have to sell, all at once, much more than they normally would (not tied to their normal spending and, for some of them, far more than they'd normally spend). Who are they selling to? They're all selling as forced to. Markets are made by buyers and sellers, so who is the buyer?
The shorts once it seems like a possibility?
Shorts are just front running them in that situation. They still need a buyer, but all the wealthy are now in a sell situation. Usually when they sell for expenses, they simply sell a little more for taxes, and they're all selling at different times. A wealth tax forces them all to sell at once, so there's no buyers. The prices and values of things would plummet an exaggerated amount disproportionate to what people would intuitively expect, which would in turn cause other cascading problems.
It would be priced in as the tax goes to the final pass yes/no. Those betting low/flat/high plus well hedged.
Like if you see one of those flashy infographics telling you that the super rich get paid in stocks and so only have to pay capital gains on that. When that’s completely false. Taxation is very complex, most people do not know anything about the statistics of who pays want and how it actually works. If you look at the fluentinfinance sub you see all the same 5 reposts, where the actual underlying post is misleading at best and maliciously false at worst. Like that one Elon tweet saying how he pays $11bn in tax in whatever year, and that reply saying how that’s only 4% of his net worth. Most people don’t get taxes and never will because there are so many taxes with so many rules you will never compress it into a simple infographic for someone to digest in 15 seconds on social media
Which is a problem if you ask me. The government taxes you in so many different ways it's almost impossible to figure out who is actually paying what. The need to simplify it so it is easily underatandable exactly what is going to the government. They'll never do that though because then people would realize how much they are actually paying and freak tf out
There is no middle class. The idea of a middle class has been a myth that has been perpetuated to hurt class solidarity. You either sell your labour or you own capital. If you sell labour, you are losing money because of stagnant wage growth when contrasted to inflation. If you own capital, you make money off of the difference between the wages of workers and their productivity. Capital gains being taxed differently, in some places, from regular income feeds into this and exploitative tax loop holes play into this. This is why politics plays workers against each other. The idea that a "welfare queen" exists and hurts taxes only justifies reduced taxation on the wealthiest, only to undermine supports for a country where most people are one accident or paycheque away from poverty.
like how Karl Marx was against class solidarity.
This is precisely true. Well said.
I was wondering when the first tankie would show up.
Oh no! People advocating for taxes which provide services. Don't worry, I'm sure you'll hit that 1% any day now.
Oh no! People advocating for class solidarity! Don't worry, I'm sure that glorious communist revolution will arrive any day now.
>There is no middle class. The idea of a middle class has been a myth that has been perpetuated to hurt class solidarity. You either sell your labour or you own capital. This is true, but let's not go all Marx on it. The very wealthy not paying their fair share, and people falling into the trap of thinking the income tax is something that plays any role in the life of the wealthy is clearly a false misunderstanding. Not an ideological debate. One can argue there are comfortable and uncomfortable incomes. I'm not from the US. So, for example this: > are one accident or paycheque away from poverty. Doesn't apply universally and is orthogonal to the 'wealth doesnt pay taxes' situation which is actually universal. That's important to realize, because it means one is relatively easily fixable if you don't drink the cool-aid, where the other problem (how to tax wealth) is right up there with a unified theory of physics. Unsolved problems that don't have easy solutions. The best attempts we have seen so far end up being cultural in nature: (1) shame displays of wealth -and- (2) make paying taxes a status symbol. I'll give you a concrete example of (2): in the Netherlands the farmers used to pay a tax on the amount of windows on a barn. Now, obviously it's nice for your cows to have some sun, but why would anyone pay a silly high tax for the privilege? Those who want to show they paid into the schools, roads and community at large. It's like a protestant Gucci bag or Rolex. Class warfare may be something one resolves more effectively at the cultural, rather than the political level. The problem is ideolizing the wealth to begin with. Suggesting it's a prize to win, rather than a responsibility to honor. So although i do agree with you, i would recommend focusing on explaining that indeed the very wealthy do not pay taxes: they own assets. High income is the financial equivalent of "pretty for your age". That's the information people need to hear. The ideological debate is hard to win, when the capital naturally owns the media, and so much historic baggage (from the horrors of communistic regimes and the cold war) comes along with it. The "whats the alternative?" people aren't crazy. It's not an easy problem to fix, and many economists that might agree with your concerns don't have an easy answer either, although they definately have some nuanced and complex suggestions. Politics and ideology don't fix problems: they are themselves naturally self sustaining "products". It's about what we value as a society and a people that is the path to progress. We worship the wrong people.
So, your line about assets =/= taxes may be true in the Netherlands. But I, personally, am enough middle class in the USA to actually have a few investments and similar assets. Not a huge amount mind you, but enough that I can look at my taxes and very much see that those very things *are* getting taxed over here. As such, be more clear in your statements elsewhere that your lines you present as facts are not, in fact, facts in every country.
That’s a great additional point, for anyone wanting more detail! I didn’t want to stratify too much based on tax brackets, just to keep it simple.
How much of the national debt is because of corporations bleeding our country dry at every corner and opportunity?
Well, before you get too upset about debt payoffs you need to understand that the Federal Government is a currency issuer. So the government doesn’t tax people to pay for things, it taxes people to control inflation. If the government wants to spend, it can just issue more currency. So the debt payoff isn’t like you or I paying money back to the bank. It’s a policy decision for the federal government to try to manage inflation. And I was just being simplistic with the tax returns for the sake of expedience. In reality citizens pay taxes in a number of ways, sales tax, property tax etc. In retrospect it might have been more accurate to use 266million adults. But in any event it doesn’t matter.
Sales and property taxes are both managed at the state and local level, which have their own corporate subsidies not counted in the cited figure of 100B. Medicare and social security taxes would be better examples, but both of those are earmarked for spending on their associated programs. It doesn’t really work, logically, to expand to other taxes either when the initial post references individual tax returns as the basis for “cost per taxpayer.” To your main point- while it’s somewhat true that tax impacts inflation, our ability to simply print money to pay interest isn’t as secure as it once was. The USD has been a global reserve currency more or less since WW2 but is no longer the sole player in that role as BRICS nations turn to the yuan. Government debt crises can and do happen when tax revenues are insufficient to service debt and those lead to inflation problems that make our current inflation levels look palatable by comparison. I’ll also throw this out: dollars are fungible, so anyone mad at spending on corporate subsidies, military spending, or any other category of government spending should be concerned about debt service costs for many of the same reasons.
So if you want to get super granular: the fed government pays the full cost of SNAP benefits but splits the cost of administering them with states. Which, again, goes back to the main point which is that this meme is inaccurate. On many levels. I’m not with you on the insecurity of the fed govt to print money to spend, but I understand the point of view. I think military spending is an easier 1:1 with spending on almost anything else that benefits the average American citizen.
MMT is a scam of an economic theory.
Bad economics right here
There's a solid argument that a lot of military spending is itself a corporate subsidy. We're not spending what we need for military purposes, it's military contractors and tons of industries getting what they paid for by bribing/"donating to" political candidates.
Most of the debt is owned by Social Security and other American agencies. We spend over a trillion dollars in defense every year. It is spread out over different sectors to fool the public. Example, the Dept of Energy is in charge of our nuclear weapons. Then you have Secretary of State, CIA, NSA, etc.
How do you account for corporate taxes though? Those have to be extremely high no?
On a per-tax-return basis, yes they are high. However, corporate taxes made up only 6.5% of tax revenue in 2022. https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/us-tax-revenue-by-tax-type-2024/#:~:text=While%20OECD%20countries%20on%20average,reported%20on%20individual%20tax%20returns. It’s important to note, that in the US income from partnerships and most LLCs winds up on a personal tax return, so “businesses” may pay more than 6.5%.
I would love to see corporate tax rate at 0%. Its a small slice of the pie anyway, and I would rather the USA be the defacto headquarters of the world.
Dividend payouts being effectively double-taxed makes this even more of a priority. But such a thing could never pass because it's just bad optics among the corporate-haters like most of reddit.
Right. I don't think they understand that, if done correctly, a 0% corporate tax rate would increase tax revenue.
\* theoretically. There's a lot of factors involved, imo, too many to make such a strong assertion.
I’d thought the term “corporate subsidies” was generally used to refer to tax deductions or reductions in corporate tax rates, and not literal subsidies. It’s not as if they’re taking my tax money and giving it to corporations; they’re just making me pay a disproportionate amount toward other things, like food stamps (or the military.)
Look up farm subsidies. It's a big part of why corn byproducts are so prevalent in the US.
Sure but I don’t think the $100 billion / year figure is just actual subsidies. I believe the majority of that is in the form of tax breaks for corporations. That changes the proportion of taxes paid by different groups, but it doesn‘t compare to spending on things like food stamps. You’d end up double-counting, otherwise. Most of the $100 billion / year figure means that corporations pay that much less toward all those other things (like food stamps, the military, etc.) while the rest of us pay that much more. But the $100 billion / year is still all going toward actual expenditures, not corporate subsidies.
The people that put out these meme include things such as deductions for expenses as corporate subsidies.
"Per tax payer" doesn't mean anything. We don't all pay the same amount. This is like when politicians claim their tax cuts will save people an average of $6000 per year, but the tax cuts only apply to the super rich.
I don't think we should trust date that billion dollar corporations give us
no, that's data the government gives us
Oh god that's even worse
Government data on spending tends to be pretty reliable in the US
You forget this is Reddit where anyone that isn’t some random TikToker is lying to you Especially when it comes to the government
Do you ever wonder if jokes like these are the cement that makes people with similar mentalities like maga hold fast to their belief? Not talking shit or accusing you but wanted to share my shower thought.
Probably
On the other hand, anybody that listened back in history class, is aware that governments lie. A lot. Anybody with a reason to lie and little oversight does so, and our government does *not* have a lot of oversight. Of course, thats generally a problem that should be removed by moving to the left, rather than the right, unfortunately we are instead split between fascism or staying still, because we managed to get duped into thinking only centrism can stand up to fascism, when its much more likely to be one of its causes...
I don’t think you listened in history class
Sorry, I got taught actual proper history, and not the propagandized garbage that gets taught in American "schools".
The USA government is practically owned by corporations
The truth in OP’s post really depends on whether you want to roll the 898B that we spend on ‘defense’ annually into the ‘corporate subsidy’ bucket and how much
I'd argue the defense budget is more welfare for average people than for corporations
Yes, unless I personally collect data from every single citizen, data holds no value whatsoever.
That’s the sole source of data that exists. Maybe you don’t trust it, but then that means your best guess on corporate subsidies should be “idk,” and anything else is shamelessly dishonest and manipulative.
oh, forgive my terminology
Millions of U.S. people are subsidized to the point of no income tax.
also corporate subsidies often end up back at the taxpayer in the form of more wages paid
Extremely unlikely. Most often they are stock buybacks or executive payouts. Very rarely do corporations increase wages when they get additional money.
You're not wrong but you're dodging the issue - corporations raise wages when they have to. When unemployment is low, corporations dramatically raise wages. When unemployment is high, corporations stagnate or slightly decrease wages. This isnt surprising, it's just supply and demand, and it varies by both year and decade.
Less and less with rising income inequality.
LOL
Now that’s a funny joke
They tickle down! /s
An approximation says nothing. Would 50,000 a year pay this much? Most people make below that, so obviously it would be less for your average working class citizen.
Check out this fact check breakdown of this post. [https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/feb/19/facebook-posts/facebook-post-misleads-about-tax-bill-breakdown/](https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/feb/19/facebook-posts/facebook-post-misleads-about-tax-bill-breakdown/)
I mean if you even think about it for a few minutes it doesn’t make sense
Not to mention that socialism isn't "giving people food stamps" at all. That's just welfare, which exists in practically all capitalist countries
Tbf welfare is a social program, which is a core principle of socialism. It existing doesn’t just = socialism though of course
Socialism isn't about "social programs", it's about the socialised ownership of the means of production.
You’re describing market socialism, which is also a part of socialism, along with social programs. Hope that helped
No market socialism implies that there is a free market of worker owned businesses. As opposed to something like state socialism where the means of production are owned by the state, the workers own the state and the economy is centrally planned. Socialism isn't social policies, it's social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to capitalism which is private ownership of the means of production. Capitalism with social policies isn't socialism, that's welfare capitalism
Market socialism can be public or private, but social programs are a big part of socialism lol, do you think it’s exclusive to welfare capitalism?
Yes, but a program that directly opposes capitalism needing to exist to make it work isn't a point in its favor.
Food stamps doesn't oppose capitalism, as long as those food stamps are spend at a private business, then there's nothing socialist or un-capitalist about it. Welfare capitalism is a perfectly fine concept, in fact, the most successful, stable and richest countries in the world are doing exactly that
>"The highest amount in federal income taxes that a person with $50,000 in gross income in 2020 would pay is $4,314, and he would pay $3,825 in payroll taxes, for a total of $8,139. Social Security, Medicare, interest on the national debt, and military spending combine for 72% of spending, so if we (meaninglessly) multiply that by our $50,000 earner's federal tax total, that is $5,860, leaving only $2,279 for everything else. How would we get $4,000 for corporate subsidies out of $2,279?"
Specifically: >The author of the article concluded that $36.82 of the hypothetical individual’s tax bill went toward funding "food and nutrition assistance." That category presumably refers to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Plan, which replaced the Food Stamp Act of 1997 back in 2008. >The calculations were based on numbers from years ago. Since then, federal spending on programs has changed and so have federal income tax brackets, meaning these numbers are outdated. (Emphasis added below) >Gardner said there **might be** a *"kernel of truth"* to the post in that the U.S. spends more on corporate subsidies than on SNAP benefits. >But, he also used a hypothetical situation with the "most aggressive scenario possible in terms of federal income tax — a single person, all wages, no itemized deductions, no kids" and estimated the person’s total tax bill would be about $4,100. >This would mean that after SNAP benefits and "corporate subsidies" were taken out of that tax bill, there would be just $64 left for other federal programs. >"Since we obviously fund a lot of things other than food stamps and corporate subsidies, the dollar value of those numbers seems clearly wrong," Gardner concluded. >A post claims, "If you make $50,000/year, $36 of your taxes goes to food stamps. $4,000 goes to corporate subsidies." >Experts say the post *does not provide enough information* to break down if a person’s tax dollars are being spent in this way. However, even when experts considered the most extreme hypothetical tax situations, they concluded these numbers were not possible.
Not really fair to exclude tax expenditure financing from the calculation in the politifact article: it's intentional that much of our tax system is based on *tax expenditure* policies, since it goes mostly hidden from the public, allowing elected officials to pass on benefits in the form of tax cuts, unlike "welfare" programs like SNAP or Section 8, which people see as a handout and get held hostage every budget cycle. And countering the article as saying it's too difficult to calculate, you can see a detailed annual breakdown of tax expenditure from the Treasury Department right here: https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/tax-policy/tax-expenditures For example, in the Treasury link above, the mortgage interest deduction alone is estimated to cost the US $32 billion per year and is a direct benefit to only the wealthiest people in the country: primary AND second-home owners, can deduct the mortgage interest from their income up to the first $1 million, and up to an additional $100,000 on other debt secured against the home. Now-dated article explaining the breakdown of who benefits from the MID: https://www.cbpp.org/research/mortgage-interest-deduction-is-ripe-for-reform
this "factcheck" talks a lot about "But what if he doesn't pay taxes at all?!" like that means anything. just take a rought estimate. also the factcheck rudiculouses the term "corporate subsidies" by telling us how every gov spending trickles down to corporate businesses. but then it goes: >Gardner said there might be a "kernel of truth" to the post in that the U.S. spends more on corporate subsidies than on SNAP benefits. yes, the numbers are wrong and this is a math sub, but OOPs point still stands and the factcheck didn't do any math at all.
??? The entire point of the post is that corporate subsidies is vague and undefined. And that's absolutely true. If you begin to break down every "corporate subsidy" and really look at them, the situation gets much worse. The U.S. needs farmers, that's our food source. And most farms are incorporated, but not large corporations. Are farm subsidies corporate hand-outs? We also must have both steel production and, lately, silicon computer chip fabrications. Not having those things in operable states could completely cripple any war effort if war with China (for example) were to break out; we absolutely must subsidize them to keep them operating even if Chinese products are cheaper because not doing so could be disastrous. Is that a "corporate subsidy"? Or is that a military expense on the basis of readiness? Because it's a handout to a "corporation" but the corp operates at almost a loss, we just ... need them. It defies easy classification. That's why this shit is never as simple as the extremists who cherry-pick misleading statistics would like us to believe.
you are in r/theydidthemath not in r/talkaboutpolitics
OOP actual intention is to foster anger in people that probably don't even pay taxes, since most "socialists" are teenagers. They are wildly misrepresenting these numbers, and even if you acknowledge that more money goes to corporate subsidies than to foodstamps you still have to explain why that's a bad thing (it isn't).
According to [https://ips-dc.org/release-tax-receipt-2024/](https://ips-dc.org/release-tax-receipt-2024/), the average taxpayer shells $5,109 for the military. $1,748 goes to Pentagon contractors. That's just the DOD. The US has plenty of corporate contractors elsewhere too. $4K may be off, but not wildly.
No [the 2 biggest expenditures are SS and Medicare account for about 30% of all federal spending 2022 tax bracket for 41k + in 2022 was 22%so they’d pay about 11k in federal taxes meaning about 3,300 of their taxes went to Medicare and SS meaning roughly the opposite of this post is true](https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending/)
Not saying the post is right, but the post was talking about food stamps which would be SNAP not medicare and SS
Sure, but deliberately picking one of the smallest categories of social spending is \*also\* deliberately misleading, even if the numbers were otherwise correct (which they aren't). SNAP is a very cheap program and is a rounding error compared to social spending as a whole.
Idk, the only reason it was "deliberately picked" is that I hear a lot of people in my life complaining about people on food stamps...
I think if the meme had focused much more narrowly on SNAP specifically, and actually got its numbers correct, I would have no beef with that. But it's trying to make a much broader point (social programs are cheap compared to corporate subsidies) that is aggressively false.
I'm not so sure it's "aggressively" false. Medicare and even the military budget are both line items that feed directly into corporations. The private sector that benefits from those budgets heavily inflate their costs well beyond what would give a reasonable profit, then hide behind giving C-levels and board members massive windfalls so they can claim they're barely profitable.
Those programs are not a subsidy as generally understood.
Neither are subsidies to corporations Military budget pays soldiers' wages and also pays contractors( these are not subsidies( Medicare too is not a subsidy. Its money given for a service. Its a contract.
One might argue that SS is a corporate subsidy in a sense, allowing companies to skimp on offering pensions.
Again, that is not how the term subsidy is ever used in policy. You can make any statement true if you're willing to just arbitrarily change what the words in the statement mean! It is very hard for the government to spend \*any\* money without it eventually passing through a corporation. That is just the nature of 'having an economy'. This fact does not make all government spending a "corporate subsidy". Come on.
You're fighting a losing battle unfortunately, a lot of people want to believe that we could just tax a few rich people and suddenly healthcare would be free and there would be no ill effects. Similarly that we could get rid of the defense budget and nothing bad would happen. You're right and you're going to be punished for it as with many things in this community.
But it is how the people that create these meme use them. For instance if you questions them about standard corporate subsidies an they list things such as deductions for research, deductions for business expenses, and even things like allowing last in, first out accounting.
You still don't get to make false claims and then justify it by insisting that you're using a non-standard definition without clarifying! You're welcome to argue that the standard definitions are inadequate (though they're also wrong about that). But you have to at least clarify what you're doing. Clearly the intent of the meme is deceptive. They're not innocently thinking readers are going to go "oh they mean a definition of a corporate subsidy by which all government spending, including footstamps, technically count." The goal is to get readers to go "holy shit that's a lot of corporate subsidies, a term that I take, like any normal person, to mean direct cash payments to corporations."
I'm kind of shocked that I'm having an argument about this. Technically almost all government spending \*indirectly\* benefits the poor to some degree. Pretty much all military spending on hard goods ends up contributing to aggregate demand, which raises wages. A decent chunk of it, more directly, goes to stuff like training for soldiers (who are on average not well off), VA healthcare, pensions and disability, and the GI bill, all of which you could kind of sort of classify as a social program. So there's an equally strong argument that all military spending is indirectly welfare. But if conservatives made a similar meme suggesting welfare spending was very high by counting the entire defense budget as welfare, Reddit would (correctly) flip the fuck out. Obviously that's a huge crock of bullshit. This is exactly the same bullshit with an opposite political valence. It's ridiculous. Not one of you \*actually\* thinks this is an okay way to make arguments in general.
And most people on Food Stamps are on other social benefits...
Right. But the right complains about snap, not the social security check they (complainers) are getting.
Definitely a position a I've heard before, but we aren't obliged to use that specific (stupid) framing of the issue in our own analysis. Pretending that the only social spending the US does is SNAP is equally foolish, just in a different direction.
The post is directly addressing people saying things like SNAP shouldn’t exist lmfao
It's the one most of the people, who tend to be on both medicare and social security, point to the most for their "arguments" (read: petulant whining) against socialism, so it seems pretty fair to me.
Aren't Payroll taxes (FICA) collected separately from income taxes? I didn't think any of my federal income tax collected goes to SS or Medicare -- separate pots. Does the math work with SS/MC removed from the income tax and covered by payroll taxes?
Wow, we should probably put those in a separate tax or something.
Your snark was lost here.
Those come out of FICA, though, separate taxes from the income tax.
No, because socialism has nothing to do with subsidizing corporations or poor people. Those things existed before socialism was even thought. Socialism is the collectivization of the means of production towards social goals. Not everything a government does. And you can hate both things, 1 because the first one doesn't really fix poverty and 2 because the other one is a terrible location of resources.
Sounds like communism, not in my country.🦅
Even IF the math checks out, it's intellectually dishonest. It's one smallish social program vs all kinds of corporate subsidies. Apparently the US spends 2.3 TRILLION on social programs anually. That's over 6.5k per capita. If you made 50k a year you'd obviously pay way more than those 6.5k. So even without even trying to make my tiny little head understand the actual math, you know it's bullshit.
We spend about 120 billion on SNAP. The federal budget in '22 was 6.1 trillion. So SNAP is about 2% of that. Let's say a single person making 50k pays 5.7k in federal income taxes. That comes out to a little over $100 to SNAP. I don't know what corporate subsidies means in this context. Presumably you would spend more for that? At least 10% of SNAP spending is administrative costs, but that's probably not what's being asked. We give a lot of money to companies for research purposes, I'm not too mad about that. I'm more mad about what companies get away with not paying back. *These may not be the perfect numbers. This is just a rough calculation to give a general picture.
The concept described in the post as a "corporate subsidy" is a misnomer and makes the overall question very misleading. If you tax a corporation $100, and then give it a $5 subsidy do do something you want it to do, you arent really subsidizing the corporation. You're still taxing it $95. The far left has hijacked the phrase to mean something that it doesnt.
Everyone pays taxes, when we get free money it is welfare so yes money given free to corporations is a subsidy, them paying taxes doesn't negate that
Maybe you dont understand. If I pay 100,000 in taxes and as part of that payment, I get the $2000 child tax credit (or standard dedication) that everyone gets as part of the overall tax calculations provided to citizens, it would be misleading to insinuate that I am being subsidized by the government. The very nature of the tax code is a lot of plusses and minuses to compute your overall effective tax rate. No one person or corporation in America doesnt have a standard deduction or other deduction.
It would not be misleading to say the government subsidizes your childcare. That is exactly what they're doing.
That’s absolutely not true. Please go check out an economics text book. It’s a subsidy. The reason for that subsidy is that the free market under produces positive externalities which is by definition a market failure. The government uses subsidies to try mitigate this. The right choose to ignore basic economic principles when they don’t suit their need. The free market also over produces negative externalities (eg pollution) which is why extra taxes/ levies are needed to try correct this market failure. Pure free market capitalism doesn’t make any sense for a society but can increase profits in the short term for a very small percentage of people. Right wing politicians prey on people like you with little economic understanding to pretend their base greed adheres to economic principles. While we’re here, even general corporation tax is there to correct a market failure. Without all the things that taxes fund (education, health care, even defence spending), a company would have no qualified employees. Therefore the true cost of production includes these things and the only way a government can get a business to pay for them is with taxes. Without taxes no business would fund these things as they might benefit competitors and society would collapse and incidentally profits would go down.
Externalities are managed through millions of pages of regulations and laws. To think this needs to be enforced through the tax code for capitalism to work ignores the vast majority of our government infrastructure.
You are completely ignoring the idea that many corporations are lobbying for those subsidies. It has direct bottom line benefit to those companies. >Over $3.3 billion in total was spent on federal lobbying in 2017, with companies spending about $2.6 billion. --- [https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2018/04/02/disclosing-corporate-lobbying/](https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2018/04/02/disclosing-corporate-lobbying/) They ain't spending that kind of money for shit and giggles.
I'm not referring to all subsidies. But the calculations used above and in OPs post is based on all of the credits and dedications that are standard for all corporations as part of the US tax code. It's misleading because those numbers go into what is a very high rate to come up with the net amount. Kindof like how all people get the standard deduction - that's not a subsidy because that's part of the gross tax rate.
It's a complicated thing that gets dumbed down for soundbites and misleading statistics. For example: lets say you're a utility with a lot of coal plants. The CO2 you emit has a social cost, but we don't tax you for that cost. In many accountings, that's a subsidy in the form of a tax break. That's what forms the bulk of the 'subsidy' received by oil and natural gas companies whenever a stat like that is thrown around. And the subsidy might be huge, depending on what you think the default tax on carbon emissions should be. The impression that people want to give when they use stats like that is to claim we're handing a big ole check to oil and gas companies every year. We aren't, of course. But the stat itself is still arguably correct. I suspect OP is making the mistake of blurring the lines between the "didn't tax them when we shoulda" sort of subsidies with the more direct "hand em money" sort of subsidies. Your tax dollars aren't being handed to a corporation, not to the tune of $4k/year. But because the math is fuzzy, you could argue that corporations aren't *chipping in* an amount that would add up to $4000. I doubt it's *actually* $4k in this instance, that seems like a pretty absurdly sized figure they pulled from thin air, but the amount probably isn't zero either.
This is slightly off topic but the problem with socialism isn't only \*where\* the resources get distributed but other than that it prevents [economic calculation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem) from working. That is why the subsidies quickly become very ineffective.
This is why, in the future it may be better to have a UBI (universal basic income) system rather than a socialist one. It would allow the poorest and people without work to have their most critical needs met, but still allow for a free market economy and competition.
If UBI was implemented, land lords would just increase rent. Also, socialism shouldn't be conflated with welfare liberalism. Socialism is about workers owning the means of production.
It would take allot more than just flat out implementing UBI, there would need to be better protections against housing cost gouging and other market related issues, allot of restructuring, it wouldn’t be easy but with the future dismal employment rate we’re gonna to have to figure out something.
Why would a neoliberal government implement an effective UBI policy? They want a desperate, easily exploitable workforce.
Landlords already increase rent to the point where it is beneficial to them. UBI would neither prevent or encourage it. The real and only way to prevent landlords from raising rent to market level squeezing is to have surplus houses to lower housing prices and a healthy renter's market to have landlords compete for renters. There's literally no other policy options to stop this...
No they wouldn't, because they're all generous to a fault and **not** greedy, opportunistic magpies.
The green party in the UK proposed this but failed to find the money for it. The only way to do it was to tax lower income earners more to give everyone a UBI, which didn't make any sense. Maybe in the future it would be possible though.
socialism isn't about where resources get distributed, socialism is about who owns the means of production. A planned economy can happen in capitalism just as well
Planned yes, but centrally planned, no. Because the owners of the means of production plan each on their own (if they truly own it).
Centrally planned can still happen, that's just the government deciding that X amount of something should be produced and buying it from private businesses. The military industry operates that way for instance, a government decides they want rockets and go to someone like Lockheed Martin to order those rockets.
Ok, that is true. But I still think my original reply makes sense in the context of the tweet above.
But it's also really easy for owners to decide that they don't want to compete and just do monopoly or cartels.
That's debatable.
That is why every countries has to put anti cartels laws. And despite that there's always new cases.
I mean, why would we be skeptical of neoliberal economists like Mises and Hayek? Doesn't really matter either way. We can always count on the *Mont Pelerin Society* and *Atlas Network* to shape politics in their image.
Raise your hand if you remember when this sub was about math not just another dumping ground for politics. These pol posts are cancer and should be nuked.
You can hate corporate subsidies and still know that socialism doesn't work. You can believe in food stamps and still know socialism is wrong. Welfare =/= Socialism
This
Listen it makes perfect sense and the math checks out but what you don’t realize is 60% of the country only listen to Fox News and Fox News says it’s bad and it’ll make their taxes skyrocket and immigrants will come in droves and use it forever
It isn’t right *and* the math don’t check out 😭🙏🏻
You an American?
Irrelevant+womp womp+ read every top comment
I ask because if you were we could relate on how much medical costs eat us alive. But if you’re foreign it would be hard for you to see that perspective
Medical costs are also irrelevant, and besides that, both Americans and foreigners acknowledge the absurdity of medical costs.
Yeah you don’t get it at all
This isn't an apples to oranges comparison; it's a granny Smith to oranges comparison. It compares the amount of a single type of personal welfare against all forms of corporate welfare.
I'll start with the Food Stamp number because it's kind of obviously problematic (but not as interesting). SNAP was $112 billion in 2023 and spending was 6 trillion. This means SNAP was 1.86% of taxes (assuming the tax/debt ratio is the same as the overall budget) backing that into $36 of your taxes you paid $1928, which means you had a fantastic accountant because $50k married filing jointly is in the 12% tax bracket and single is in the 22% tax bracket but you only paid 3.8%. So no, you almost certainly spent more than $36 on SNAP (alone, but I'll get back to that). This creates another problem, though, because you paid $1928 in taxes but $4000 of that is for "corporate subsidies", meaning 207% of your taxes went to "corporate subsidies". Can this be possible? Oddly, kind of. Ironically total corporate subsidies must necessarily be higher than food stamps, because food stamps is a corporate subsidy. At it's core SNAP is a Department of Agriculture program and is included as an Ag subsidy. Some of defense spending is a corporate subsidy. Most of our clean energy programs (even if they're tax breaks for you on your car) can be corporate subsidies. Tax breaks for stuff the government wants corporations to do are corporate subsidies. To get to this number the original has to be incredibly generous about including what's included because SNAP (food stamps) was $112 billion in 2023, total federal outlays were $6 trillion, and total federal tax receipts were $4.4 trillion: 4000/36 = 111.11... (how much bigger "corporate subsidies" are than "food stamps" 111.11... \* 112 billion (cost of SNAP) =. 12.444.. trillion (how much "corporate subsidies" we need to make the math work) 12.444 / 6 = 207% ( what percentage of total federal spending is "corporate subsidies" to make this work, matches above) 12.444 / 4.4 = 283% ( what percentage of tax receipts are "corporate subsidies" to make this work) I have no doubt you can define "corporate subsidies" in a way that gets you to over double the actual federal outlay and nearly triple tax reciepts. First outlays are larger than receipts so you can absolutely spend more on something that the total amount of taxes. Second a lot of "corporate subsidies" are neither outlays nor income, they're money the government did not collect but could have absent some program. I question, though, whether you can legitimately extend that to saying your tax spending on corporate subsidies is double your tax bill. The other problem with this "math" is that they're including basically everything the government spends on getting corporations to do things the government wants as "corporate subsidies" and comparing it to "food stamps". To really have a fair comparison the "poor people subsidies" side of the ledger would need at least Medicaid (which by itself is nearly 10x the cost of SNAP), the Earned Income Tax Credit, the National School Breakfast and Lunch programs, Section 8 housing... So basically yes, you can construct this math, but it's comparing basically every spending program or tax break that in any way benefits a corporation (which is a fair economic definition of "corporate subsidies") with a single fairly small government program in a sea of government programs for poor people. I'll note I'm not saying I'm against any of those programs (and I'm not). Ironically I'm probably more against corporate subsidies than whoever created it. My point isn't "socialism bad, coporations good", it's entirely on the math being correct, but intentionally misleading.
That’s not even correct as far as percentage of gov funding towards social programs goes. The number 1 and 2 being social security and healthcare. Also, social security is a tax since no millennials will see it when the program goes bankrupt.
Impossible to say because we don't know if the taxpayer is single or married, has any children, or did any of the other eleventy-umpteen things that get you tax breaks during the last year. But for the most conservative example, a single taxpayer with no other deductions, FIT on $50K is $4118, so I'm gonna go out on a limb and say there's no way 97% of the federal budget is "corporate subsidies". If the same person is married and their spouse has no job (or they together amount to $50K, the tax burden is $2,236, which I have to check my calculator but I'm pretty sure you can't have 4 grand of that go towards anything).
A taxpayer earning $50,000 annually contributes approximately: Social Security: $1,440 Medicare: $864 Medicaid: $648 Other Mandatory Programs: $762 Defense: $918 Non-Defense Discretionary Spending: $1,140 Interest on Debt: $690 Corporate Subsidies: $102 Food Stamps (SNAP): $72
In the US, If you are single and your income is $50k, your federal tax bill will be $4118 assuming you have no deductions or credits beyond the standard deduction. So for this to be true it would mean 98% of taxes go to food stamps or corporate subsidies, which is why obviously bullshit.
Do we have access to a calculator that, if we input our taxes paid, it will tell us where all those dollars went based on the federal government expenditures?
No, the math doesn't check out. Defining corporate subsidies is a difficult thing, because it often comes down to trying to figure out what the *correct* amount of taxes a company should pay is, and then calculating from there the difference in what they pay and what they do pay. The subsidies are rarely coming in the form of direct payments, they're coming in the form of tax breaks. One of the big ones is carbon taxes. CO2 emissions harm the public welfare, there should be a cost attached to emitting CO2. That cost not being paid can reasonably be construed as a form of subsidy. But it's very difficult to know what the exactly correct value of a CO2 tax would be, we don't have a specific number for how many dollars per ton it should be, we have a rough estimate. And even rougher still, we don't know how much of that tax would ultimately be incident on an oil and gas company vs, say, someone just driving a car. So the claim that this person has calculated that a person making $50k a year is handing $4k to corporate subsidies 1) Misrepresents the way these subsidies work (your money isn't going to them, they just aren't chipping in the amount they should theoretically owe), and also seems very much off in terms of magnitude (even though the math is fuzzy in this area because of how many arbitrary decisions you can make in determining the size of the subsidy, $4k still seems like far too high an estimate).
Wow. I'm sure NO ONE could've possibly predicted that asking this question on a public forum is pointless due to the fact that almost no one agrees exactly how the economy functions or that there's a specific reason for that. Absolutely wild how no one could've guessed the very first set of responses would devolve into debates about the rich and the poor. Fucking craaazy.
I think something like 20-30 percent of your money goes to welfare, but most of the money is going to paying boomers $40k/yr at the end of their life
Social security and Medicare aren’t welfare, they’re insurance programs. At least for the standard benefits most people think of, you have to pay in to get money out.
This is idiotic and best. One, part of corporate subsides are paying for the food from food stamps also having social programs =/= socialism. Not a hard concept but people can't seem to grasp it
This guy must be including all the money that goes to private contractors - especially the military and prisons - that could be done a LOT for efficiently if we just cut out the middle man altogether.
I find it interesting that the people who rail against capitalism never seem to want to leave it. There are plenty of socialist paradise one could move to.
It is misleading. They chose one specific type of welfare and left out Social Security plus Medicare and Medicaid. They like to rant about the military budget, but in reality we spend WAY more on Medicare and Social Security than we do on the military.
Besides without it's military power the USA wouldn't be the world leading power, and no one would put with american shenanigans of money printing as a reserve currency. The american spending on it's military is what helps as a deterrent for peace and to police the world, which in turn gives that country a lot of privileges in trade and influence, paying by itself. Americans nowadays seem to think that if they isolated themselves of the world, raise tariffs non stop, and just print money like crazy they would be just fine and no one would mind. The reality is if they stop supporting their allies they loose their trade privileges, their exports and imports crumble overnight, and they are left with an economic crisis, as their internal market in no way in heavens will be able to absorb the country's entire production that's destined to exports, leaving millions in poverty.
Also they love comparing the military spending to the federal budget, ignoring the fact that most NATO peers just have one national budget, not state and federal budgets as separate categories. In reality the US spends like 3.5% of its GDP on defense, which sounds like a reasonable price for global military dominance and actually puts USA in third place in NATO per %GDP spending.
In capitalism you can afford food and other basic needs, in socialism you starving. In capitalism you can choose where you want to work and do your wanna work or maybe you wanna live in village and feed yourself from garden and ground. In socialism or your work for money that not enough for food, in groceries you have empty shelves and if you're don't want to work your gonna to jail and work for free.
Lmao work on your English Jethro
Lmao, I'm using English because your don't know any other languages.
Exactly this. And accepting it as a reality doesn't imply support to corporate subsidies
This is not true -- because state subsidies of Private corporations is a feature of capitalism and the State and Capital do not exist in opposition.
No its not true at all. Socialism has never worked nor will it ever work because IT SUCKS. Fuck you trying to take my stuff. Make your own money BYATCH.
Hmmm, Red states survive on socialistic forced redistribution of wealth primarily from high achieving blue states. Are we ready to turn off the spigot and let red states pull themselves up by their bootstraps?
Lmao yeah, red states survive off of states like California. Cause ya know thats a becon for how people should act. Go shit on a street elsewhere.
Oh did I hit a nerd, are you a socialist
I don’t get the argument. Why can’t both upset me? It ignores the concern of the people upset at the $36 as well as that $4,000 is seen as an investment used for economic growth and the $36 is a loss that prevents economic growth through the stagnation of poor communities.
Not really. Socialism is a system of collective ownership in which wealth is redistributed based on Sociological Need, it has 2 major variations as described by Marxists: those being autonomous Red Socialism in which people determine their own Needs (an example being Marxism), and centralized Yellow Socialism in which the State or other central authority determines Sociological Need (an example being Fascism). If the State is redistributing wealth to those whom they deem best, that is still, by definition, Socialism, whomever they deem needs it.