Poor people spend 100% of their income on being alive. Taxing them is quite literally more costly than doing nothing. There is nobody but the rich to go after for balancing budgets.
Weirdly enough, if you want poor people to live (big if), then taxes need to be levied on people who… have disposable money.
Unfortunately, under capitalism, taxes will always be a temporary fix. The bourgeoisie, almost by definition, have the power to shift an unlimited amount of tax burden back down to workers anyway. Still, I’d enjoy the temporary fix…
Don’t go after the rich
That’s every article they’ve ever written.
Economist
“A journal which speaks for British millionaires”
In the 1860s, The Economist stood nearly alone among liberal opinion in Britain in supporting the Confederacy against the Union, all in the name of access to cheap Southern “Blood Cotton” […] and fear of higher tariffs if the North triumphed. “The Economist was unusual,” writes an historian of English public opinion at the time; “Other journals still regarded slavery as a greater evil than restrictive trade practices.”
from https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/economist-has-slavery-problem/
Liberal economics is not a science but based on bad philosophy and assumptions about human psychology, dreamt up by “economists” with no background in psychology nor based on any empirical research, which have never been demonstrated in practice. Not only aren’t they demonstrated, but they build mathematical models on top of these assumptions, but if the assumptions are meaningless, all the models are meaningless.
If you point this out, they will tell you, “sure, these assumptions aren’t literally true, but they’re just approximate.” But in any rigorous science, if you approximate something, you’re expected to calculate your error bars, so you can have an idea of just how approximate it is. If you don’t, then for all you know, the error bars can be so big it has no relation to the real world. No liberal economist can tell you any way to actually determine how inaccurate their assumptions are, so you end up with a lot of maths, but none of it points back to anything real.
Conveniently, though, their maths just so happen to always work out to prove the conclusions they started with: free markets are inherently good, state controls are inherently bad. They have never updated their theories after witnessing their complete failure in eastern Europe, they in fact try to rewrite history to pretend like it was state controls that destroyed Russia’s economy and free market anarchy that saved China’s, which, as this video shows, the most basic overview of the facts shows to be the exact opposite of what happened.
Libertaryans of the Austrian School of economics flat-out reject empiricism. I don’t mean they go in a roundabout way of rejecting it. I mean Murray Rothbard actually wrote the following (emphasis mine):
Most writers on the 1929 depression make the same grave mistake that plagues economic studies in general — the use of historical statistics to “test” the validity of economic theory. We have tried to indicate that this is a radically defective methodology for economic science, and that theory can only be confirmed or refuted on prior grounds. Empirical fact enters into the theory, but only at the level of basic axioms and without relation to the common historical-statistical “facts” used by present-day economists.
Suffice it to say here that statistics can prove nothing because they reflect the operation of numerous causal forces. To “refute” the Austrian theory of the inception of the boom because interest rates might not have been lowered in a certain instance, for example, is beside the mark. It simply means that other forces — perhaps an increase in risk, perhaps expectation of rising prices — were strong enough to raise interest rates. But the Austrian analysis, of the business cycle continues to operate regardless of the effects of other forces. For the important thing is that interest rates are lower than they would have been without the credit expansion.
From theoretical analysis we know that this is the effect of every credit expansion by the banks; but statistically we are helpless — we cannot use statistics to estimate what the interest rate would have been. Statistics can only record past events; they cannot describe possible but unrealized events.
–excerpt from America’s Great Depression
They claim some things are “simply self-evident” and can’t be proven, but are obviously true. Then they build “proofs” based on these assumptions through what they consider pure logic. Fuck me I guess if invisible hands and unpredicted outcomes aren’t accounted for. “The system is simply too complex.”
Libertaryans
I’m
stealingredistributing this one.
Lib “economists” are a few steps below astrology. “If I plot my ideology on a chart and put some numbers on it that means I’m objectively correct!”
Dual-price system… cool!
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I made it to the first sentence before I got pissed off.
America’s top 1% enjoy a fifth of the economy’s income and pay nearly a third of its federal taxes.
If there was one guy and he had all the wealth, he would have the highest income by far (else he would not have all the wealth), he would be paying 100% of federal taxes. And these baby brain quacks would be saying he’s already taxed too much. A large percentage of tax being paid by very few is a sign of extreme wealth inequality. And if you tax him very heavily, eventually the percentage of federal taxes paid by him would go down. That is good. That is wealth inequality being reduced. And these baby brain quacks would say the tax isn’t even working because he’s paying less tax over time.
That’s actually a good explanation and use of reductio ad absurdum. Suppose only one person did all of the country’s jobs by themselves using superpowers or a time machine or whatever the fuck. They would be making 100% of all the country’s income. Everybody else would be making 0%.
According to these libs, it’s everybody else who should have to pay taxes (even though they can’t and are on the verge of dying because they have no money to buy anything), while the 100% person should pay only a flat amount or some shit (despite making trillions).
Back to the real world, billionaires do not do even 1/100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000th. of the nation’s actual labor (unlike time traveling Superman). And the nation’s poor are in the same position as the hypothetical where they don’t have enough money to actually live, except they do work instead of watching Mr. Kent do everything on his own.
Also notice that they’re conveniently using income instead of wealth.
Slightly harder to argue, even to a lib, how unfair it is that America’s top 1% hoard nearly a third of the country’s wealth and pay nearly a third of (federal) taxes!!!
c/goodboomerhumor
As someone that grew up with physical newspapers while Gary was still prominent I absolutely adore farside comics.
The folk younger than us tend to be well aware of how great Calvin & Hobbes is but they’re sleeping on the Far Side, for sure.
Looks like I am gonna have to start Far Side posting.
“Whoa whoa whoa! Austerity is magically bad when the HAVES need to settle for less!”
Here, then, is the problem with the magazine: readers are consistently given the impression, regardless of whether it is true, that unrestricted free market capitalism is a Thoroughly Good Thing, and that sensible and pragmatic British intellectuals have vouched for this position. The nuances are erased, reality is fudged, and The Economist helps its American readers pretend to have read books by telling them things that the books don’t actually say.
How The Economist Thinks | Current Affairs
ok cool, lets balance it by cutting business subsidies and “defense” budgets
I am merely going after the rich because I want them to be miserable and suffer for what they have done to society and the planet, and I don’t really care about the budget or the economy.
The archive link is broken for me. Do you have the original link?
EDIT: Nevermind, it was a VPN exit point issue.
It’s semi broken but should show the full text when you scroll down
Edited my original reply, but it was due to a VPN exit node location issue
