The current issue I feel with taxing is that, at least in USA, it mostly taxes based on Salary on Employees, but never tax on the capital or the actual wealth.
Tax the rich means: Increase W2 tax and property tax which, takes money away from me to feed lower middle class
Tax cut means: Reduce the estate tax and cooperate tax, keep the W2 tax flat, and cut the benefits that most critical to the bottom: Food stamps while keep other unnecessary programs unchanged: Discounted Toll for low income when driving in HOV lanes.
A lot of the poor and middle classes don't understand how a billionaire earning millions of pounds per week in passive income is any problem for them - or where it comes from
1, billion, 2 billion, 100 billion individuals makes no difference to the average person
In fact there's a misguided sense that they earnt that money through work and not rent seeking
But the sad truth of the matter is - the rich are on the other end of your mortgage or indirectly your rent - the other end of that business loan to your favourite coffee shop controls the price of your coffee - you pay them interest directly or indirectly through everything you pay for and they use that money to buy more of the assets you use - they are a massively increasing rent seeking class
Their wealth growth is exponential it compounds on itself some particularly rich people are seeing 40% annual returns and the overall economies wealth growth is 1 or 2%
It's analogous to a black hole things like capital gains tax and income tax mean nothing to these people because they don't sell and they don't have a "working" income because that's not how the ultra rich accumulate wealth
The sad thing is for people on benefits the government look automatically into your personal bank account and track anything coming in - they have built a massively invasive infrastructure to track the poor so they can remove their benefits if they try to earn £5 selling music or selling IT services - but if you're rich the government don't even know how wealthy you are - the government doesn't know how many billionaires there are - let alone any talk of having to tax them - so they get to pay very close to - if not nothing - whilst software engineers (as an example relative to this forum) in the UK get to be the high rate tax payers where 50% or more is taken
Everyone else has to fund their free ride and its absurd - they're the group that need the least support financially
The paper talks about economic growth, income distribution and unemployment.
I'm mostly interested in economic growth, so looked at what the paper claimed about that.
It found that major, sudden reductions in taxes on the rich did not have any statistically significant effect on the trajectory of economic growth over the following five years.
But:
- Their sample is small. They only looked at relatively large, discrete declines in their home-grown measure of taxes on the rich. They did not look at all tax-rate changes.
- They did not look at effects beyond the five-year horizon, which means it would probably exclude the impact on people starting startups, as the successful ones usually take more than 5 years to start making serious money. (or did during the period the paper considered, even if timelines have subsequently accelerated.)
- Big sudden tax cuts don't happen in a vacuum, and I don't see a way to control for confounding.
The thing I don't like about this is that it treats trickle-down economics as if it's something that needs to be debunked. Trickle-down economics has never been a real economic policy, and never been seriously advocated by federal policy-makers. It is an entirely pejorative term created by detractors of supply-side economics.
The policies of supply-side economics, however, are much more defensible, but it seems people would much rather pick on the strawman.
If we started the society/economy from scratch today, the current situation would seem absurd, inhumane and unacceptable. Imagine an inequality in scale of 10000s while you are only 1.5 more capable than the average.
(Very) rich people with their legal (eg tax loopholes) and illegal (eg sold politicians) tactics cost middle class people almost 100% their optimal income. Not to mention qualities of life like social state and safety. Calculations need a blog post.
This is basically what happened in Orbán's 16 years in Hungary. He gave indirect tax cuts for the rich, or just generally everyone who is not living pay check to pay check (by hungarian standards it means you are rich). So for example installing solar panels came with a tax writeoff but the whole thing was setup that it only benefit who already have had enough money to install a full brand new solar panel system. So it didn't help at all those who are really in need. Same happened with EV cars. If you already have money for a brand new EV car you got it cheaper. For the rest? Good luck. Mind you this is eastern Europe where everyone is driving +15 year old diesels from Germany. The rich got richer.
No shit. If you want a tax cut to have an economic impact, cut taxes for the poorest, the ones with the least disposable income.
EDIT: Seems like the article is suggesting that giving more disposable income to the rich, results in them using that extra income to buy capital rent seeking assets. So it is a double fuck you to the poor. Because not only do the rich end up paying proportionally less in taxes, but they also use the extra money to compete with you for your home, buy the home and rent it back to you, putting you in an even worse financial situation.
Take the inverse stance: take a country that taxes its citizens to death, like France or Belgium. How are they doing? Very badly.
France is concerned that the IMF main jump in and take things under control because the government's public deficit is out of control. With a GDP of about $3.6 trillion (american trillion, not french) and public spending representing, officially, 57.2% of those $3.6 trillion, that's a cool $2 trillion spent, yearly, by the state. This is where wealth goes to die.
If you were to seize, just fully seize (and consider it's liquid, which it is not), the wealth of all the billionaires in France (there aren't even 50 of them) you'd end up with $500 billion.
So if you were to just take all the wealth from all the french billionaires, you'd only pay a quarter (!) of the budget of the french state. For one year.
And that's it. 25% for a year.
Another way to see it: the french public deficit is more than $100 billion, yearly. If you were to seize the wealth of all french billionaires, you'd only have enough money to prevent the public debt from growing (which has to be at around 140% by now) for five years.
I'm not listening to talks about "taxing the rich" anymore until that caste called politicians stops spending money it doesn't have, enslaving future generations that shall be taxed to death to pay the insane public debt their governments are creating.
Wanna talk about what's happening to the city of Brussels (Belgium), my native city? 40% right at the poverty line. Immense deficit. Conditions of living going down the drain. First political party in the poll is now the PTB, a full on communist party (and communist in the EU have noticed that, at the moment, they could get the votes of islamists, so strangely enough in a "the enemy of my enemy of my friend" way, communists in countries like France and Belgium happen to be very welcoming to religious extremism [in France the communist party literally has been forced, when it created a coalition with others party at the left, to sign a paper saying it condemned islamism terrorism for they've been so cosy with the idea that it really wasn't clear at all that they actually were against islamist terrorism]).
And you want to get me started on that wonderful discovery the left made recently: that by importing millions of poor migrants and then giving them the right to vote, by a very surprising coincidence these poor imported migrants happened to not vote for the right?
How... Convenient?
Several countries are discovering that: "you eventually end up of the money of others" and "when the rich becomes poor, the poor dies".
The one thing that really irks me in this is the full-on hypocrites I know who believe that anyone richer than them should be taxed to death: to them "trickle down economics" do not work but that they live a middle-class lifestyle more preposterous than 99% of the planet doesn't bother them. They want lower taxes but not for those richer than they are.
I cannot understand that mindset.
I hate the Zuck: really, screw that guy and his faked 3D legless avatar demo for his dystopian VR world (how did that one turn out btw? As well as the Meta AI race?) and screw his PHP+JavaScript "punch the monkey" abusive ad world. Just fuck it. But I don't give a single crap in the world that he's got two $250 million Yacht or whatever they cost and however many he's got.
Good. For. Him.
I'd rather be poor and free than live under communism. And doubly so if we're talking about living in a society dictated both by religious intolerance and communism (which is where several countries are headed).
And if you want to "help the poor", go give all your money, open your house/appartment to pooor migrants and give me a fucking break.
All the brain dead marxists here - please remember, any artificially promoted slogans whether it’s “tax the rich” or “cut the taxes” are there only to get your votes. The real problem is never as simple as turning few knobs.
Can we please tax the negative effect that big money has on the rest of us?
I mean I'm perfectly fine with people who work hard making a lot of money. But that changes once that money is used against me. From that moment on I want to be compensated for damages, and the best way to do it is through taxes.
The scientists who worked for the cigarette companies couldn't find a link to cancer. Economists who work in academia can't find working economic policies for the same reason. Private sector economists on the other hand...actually place bets and get rewarded or punished for being wrong. Not shockingly, they have very different opinions from the academic economists.
PS And you wonder why Mississippi is richer than the UK.
PPS The Laffer curve is real, has a mountain of evidence and disproves this paper.
Tax cuts for the wealthy only benefit the rich (2023)
(lse.ac.uk)188 points by mooreds 7 August 2026 | 205 comments
Comments
Tax the rich means: Increase W2 tax and property tax which, takes money away from me to feed lower middle class
Tax cut means: Reduce the estate tax and cooperate tax, keep the W2 tax flat, and cut the benefits that most critical to the bottom: Food stamps while keep other unnecessary programs unchanged: Discounted Toll for low income when driving in HOV lanes.
1, billion, 2 billion, 100 billion individuals makes no difference to the average person
In fact there's a misguided sense that they earnt that money through work and not rent seeking
But the sad truth of the matter is - the rich are on the other end of your mortgage or indirectly your rent - the other end of that business loan to your favourite coffee shop controls the price of your coffee - you pay them interest directly or indirectly through everything you pay for and they use that money to buy more of the assets you use - they are a massively increasing rent seeking class
Their wealth growth is exponential it compounds on itself some particularly rich people are seeing 40% annual returns and the overall economies wealth growth is 1 or 2%
It's analogous to a black hole things like capital gains tax and income tax mean nothing to these people because they don't sell and they don't have a "working" income because that's not how the ultra rich accumulate wealth
The sad thing is for people on benefits the government look automatically into your personal bank account and track anything coming in - they have built a massively invasive infrastructure to track the poor so they can remove their benefits if they try to earn £5 selling music or selling IT services - but if you're rich the government don't even know how wealthy you are - the government doesn't know how many billionaires there are - let alone any talk of having to tax them - so they get to pay very close to - if not nothing - whilst software engineers (as an example relative to this forum) in the UK get to be the high rate tax payers where 50% or more is taken
Everyone else has to fund their free ride and its absurd - they're the group that need the least support financially
I'm mostly interested in economic growth, so looked at what the paper claimed about that.
It found that major, sudden reductions in taxes on the rich did not have any statistically significant effect on the trajectory of economic growth over the following five years.
But:
- Their sample is small. They only looked at relatively large, discrete declines in their home-grown measure of taxes on the rich. They did not look at all tax-rate changes.
- They did not look at effects beyond the five-year horizon, which means it would probably exclude the impact on people starting startups, as the successful ones usually take more than 5 years to start making serious money. (or did during the period the paper considered, even if timelines have subsequently accelerated.)
- Big sudden tax cuts don't happen in a vacuum, and I don't see a way to control for confounding.
There's an observation.
They can avoid both through schemes such as taking low salaries and borrowing against assets they will never sell for a profit.
The tax system would need a complete overhaul to plug those holes, but it would always be a game of whack-a-mole.
The policies of supply-side economics, however, are much more defensible, but it seems people would much rather pick on the strawman.
(Very) rich people with their legal (eg tax loopholes) and illegal (eg sold politicians) tactics cost middle class people almost 100% their optimal income. Not to mention qualities of life like social state and safety. Calculations need a blog post.
The only reason this isn't common sense is because the rich have fought it for millennia.
EDIT: Seems like the article is suggesting that giving more disposable income to the rich, results in them using that extra income to buy capital rent seeking assets. So it is a double fuck you to the poor. Because not only do the rich end up paying proportionally less in taxes, but they also use the extra money to compete with you for your home, buy the home and rent it back to you, putting you in an even worse financial situation.
France is concerned that the IMF main jump in and take things under control because the government's public deficit is out of control. With a GDP of about $3.6 trillion (american trillion, not french) and public spending representing, officially, 57.2% of those $3.6 trillion, that's a cool $2 trillion spent, yearly, by the state. This is where wealth goes to die.
If you were to seize, just fully seize (and consider it's liquid, which it is not), the wealth of all the billionaires in France (there aren't even 50 of them) you'd end up with $500 billion.
So if you were to just take all the wealth from all the french billionaires, you'd only pay a quarter (!) of the budget of the french state. For one year.
And that's it. 25% for a year.
Another way to see it: the french public deficit is more than $100 billion, yearly. If you were to seize the wealth of all french billionaires, you'd only have enough money to prevent the public debt from growing (which has to be at around 140% by now) for five years.
I'm not listening to talks about "taxing the rich" anymore until that caste called politicians stops spending money it doesn't have, enslaving future generations that shall be taxed to death to pay the insane public debt their governments are creating.
Wanna talk about what's happening to the city of Brussels (Belgium), my native city? 40% right at the poverty line. Immense deficit. Conditions of living going down the drain. First political party in the poll is now the PTB, a full on communist party (and communist in the EU have noticed that, at the moment, they could get the votes of islamists, so strangely enough in a "the enemy of my enemy of my friend" way, communists in countries like France and Belgium happen to be very welcoming to religious extremism [in France the communist party literally has been forced, when it created a coalition with others party at the left, to sign a paper saying it condemned islamism terrorism for they've been so cosy with the idea that it really wasn't clear at all that they actually were against islamist terrorism]).
And you want to get me started on that wonderful discovery the left made recently: that by importing millions of poor migrants and then giving them the right to vote, by a very surprising coincidence these poor imported migrants happened to not vote for the right?
How... Convenient?
Several countries are discovering that: "you eventually end up of the money of others" and "when the rich becomes poor, the poor dies".
The one thing that really irks me in this is the full-on hypocrites I know who believe that anyone richer than them should be taxed to death: to them "trickle down economics" do not work but that they live a middle-class lifestyle more preposterous than 99% of the planet doesn't bother them. They want lower taxes but not for those richer than they are.
I cannot understand that mindset.
I hate the Zuck: really, screw that guy and his faked 3D legless avatar demo for his dystopian VR world (how did that one turn out btw? As well as the Meta AI race?) and screw his PHP+JavaScript "punch the monkey" abusive ad world. Just fuck it. But I don't give a single crap in the world that he's got two $250 million Yacht or whatever they cost and however many he's got.
Good. For. Him.
I'd rather be poor and free than live under communism. And doubly so if we're talking about living in a society dictated both by religious intolerance and communism (which is where several countries are headed).
And if you want to "help the poor", go give all your money, open your house/appartment to pooor migrants and give me a fucking break.
Also just because someone benefits, that doesn't mean that other people have to suffer.
I mean I'm perfectly fine with people who work hard making a lot of money. But that changes once that money is used against me. From that moment on I want to be compensated for damages, and the best way to do it is through taxes.
PS And you wonder why Mississippi is richer than the UK.
PPS The Laffer curve is real, has a mountain of evidence and disproves this paper.