Ike? And speaking of age, is Hillary any younger than Sanders? God but I just want this election to go away.
I did not know that! And I falsely thought Hillary was 70 already. I guess MoJorgeMan is having his desired effect on here.
So 60 years and he just got done saving the free world of fascism. None in the modern TV debate era I can think of.
Wait a minute. Where does Bernie say he wants to tax married people with great educations and great jobs at 90%? He hasn't even released many details about his tax plan, has he? Maybe he will propose a 90% tax for earnings over a billion dollars. Or maybe over three billion. It could be that very very few people may fall into that 90% bracket. Why don't we wait and hear the details of his plan before we make up our minds that it's "insane".
Good post and I agree with you. But, I'm also at a bit of a loss of what lever even a president can pull to change the relative bargaining power of capital and labor. Technology is empowering capital by reducing the dependence of value creation on workers, which gives the investors a much strong negotiating position with labor. If you want to treat the cause instead of the symptom, you'd need to strengthen labor's hand, while not damaging value creation itself and without doing anything artificial. I think there's some things you can do -- better mass education to equip US workers to focus on higher-skill industries being the primary thing -- but mostly not even government can really change this.
The thing that I always come back to is taxation levels. We tax capital at a lower rate than labor, and thus are favoring capital there. That's silly. Me making $1000 off my own labor should be taxed equally or less than me making $1000 by investing capital in something else. Similarly, payroll taxes being pushed onto low-wage workers but being capped for higher wage people makes it more expensive to hire lots of low-level employees, and making automation a better option. Health care being pushed onto corporations has the same effect. Further, we actually tax-advantage investment in equipment with things like accelerated depreciation, so we further push capital investment over labor investment. There are lots of things like this, where we have artificially made labor more expensive than capital simply through government policy. The simplest solution is to equalize this. You could also go even farther - instead of only charging Soc Sec taxes to the first $100k or whatever of wages, you could exempt the first $20k or something like that. Then you go the other route and artificially favor labor. But you could partly justify that in that every person that's employed saves the government money in safety net costs.
Actually, he's leading Hillary out west. First and most important, the wealth is already being redistributed. It has been redistributed a certain way for a long time. Bernie is not proposing suddenly redistributing wealth. He is proposing a different distribution pattern. You are right, redistributing the wealth does not address the core problems which led to this income inequality, but there is more to repairing this than fixing the leak. You also have to put the water back where it's supposed to be. That money belongs to working class and middle class Americans. The rich didn't earn it, they just took advantage of the core issues you outlined and then they used it to exponentially expand the leak. So while fixing those issues will allow the working and middle class to finally start competing fairly in the economy, there is still the matter of getting back what never should have been funnelled from them to the top 1% in the first place. Hillary constantly talks about how you have to occasionally save capitalism from itself. Well, this is it. There is a big problem right now, there are people whose wealth is completely disconnected from the value they add to the economy. No CEO is really worth 400 times his employee. No 1% of people are worth more than 40% of the rest of the country. People rely on each other much much more than that. Time to save capitalism from itself.
Well said. People being obscenely wealthy is not a good thing. Being rich / wealthy is not a bad thing, where you don't need traditional loans to live, or have a need to work. That is fine. Nothing wrong with that. But when your wealth reaches a level where it becomes power, that is not good. Too much corruption, too much influence, it leads to nothing good. There must be large dis-incentives (high taxes) to deter people from reaching that bracket.
For 50 years we have been told that unions are bad and taxing oligarchs, er, job creators is bad and we have let the 'money' buy our laws, representatives and create their version of truth. There will be a lot of smokescreens and repeated falsehoods becoming "folk truth" about Bernie because the he challenges the income of those who own and pay for manipulation of public opinion. If you want to discuss his positions you should limit it to his quotes and campaign press releases. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-tax-the-rich_5622670ae4b0bce34700f168
I think good points all around, some I hadn't thought of. But, it still feels like nibbling at the edges. When companies are making choices between labor and tech, tax effects may move things on the margin, but generally tech is going to keep winning. I think the biggest one you mention is healthcare, and the way we've hung so much of that on employers has had a lot of negative consequences. We've started on something to fix that with Obamacare, but that's still got a long way to go. In the end, while I wouldn't neglect these things, I lean toward treating the symptoms. I think its a great boon for humanity that we have all this technology and we're finding ways to create value without much work. But instead of leveraging that to just make work easier on everyone, we use it to disenfranchise people who can't find a way to create value on the higher standard. We're not subsistence farmers anymore. It's not imperative we have everyone doing a ton of valuable work for everyone to live healthy fulfilling lives.
No that's not what he said or I wrote. He hasn't released details of his plan but his context is MARGINAL TAX RATE not income tax rate. So yes, I expect he would like to redo and expand the tax bracket to create a better distribution based on marginal tax rates. Yes they are. A married couple's taxable income of $464,851 dollars would have their last $1 dollar taxed 39.6%. So effectively that $1 would be worth .60 cents to them. Any millionaire(s) and billionaire(s) single dollar(s) over $450,850 would also be worth about .60 cents. The fact that they have many many more dollars is irrelevant. From a tax perspective the couple and the millionaires dollar looks the same.
But their effective tax rates would be dramatically different. Which is far more meaningful than the marginal rate.
I feel like the majority of the country doesn't understand this when the subject of raising taxes on the top brackets comes up.
There are generally two different and legitimate conversations when it comes to taxes - one is "fairness" while the other is "incentive to work". The former is all about net effective tax rate. The latter is about marginal net rates.
Sorry, to clarify, he's good in the Pacific NW, but not in most of the rest of the western half of the country or the deep south. There's too much of the country and too much of the party that he has very little appeal with. In a 5-way race like the GOP, he could pull of a Trump style lead with 30% of the vote, but it's not really going to work in a 2-person race unless something bad happens to the Hillary campaign. He's going to run into a lot of the same issues as Howard Dean, IMO - and he was in better shape than Bernie at this point. Northeastern extreme liberal / self-proclaimed socialist just doesn't have the needed national appeal.
