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this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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Sorry, the fact you're being downvoted for this is kinda funny.
As a generally left-leaning person, lemmy absolutely has a leftist demographic, and most politics-related threads are full of upvoted low effort hot takes, while relevant but unpopular opinions tend to get downvoted.
But, then again social media is gonna social media...
Yeah, I saw it coming from a mile away.
What relevant but unpopular opinions do US right wing people even have?
Taxing the billionaires is not actually enough money to fund single payer healthcare for the country.
There are a few pieces that involve actually taxing the wealthy and businesses that would fund both single payer and UBI.
Since billionaires' net worth is mostly based on their businesses, taxing businesses instead of giving them massive tax exemptions would add a huge tax revenue stream. Removing caps on social security would as well. Then we raise capital gains taxes back up to reasonable levels again, put reasonable caps on deductions for stuff like interest on home loans and depreciating assets. Things that the wealthy use to pay a far lower percentage of their income and wealth than the average person. They use infrastructure for their businesses and personal use more than the average person, so they should be paying a higher share.
Basically, getting rid of all the tax advantages that come with being wealthy. Just make them pay taxes as their wealth increases and actually make businesses pay taxes. Use that to fund basic necessities and more people will be able to actually climb the economic ladder.
Trickle down economics has never worked, and any excuse to not actually tax the wealthy at a progressive rate is just shilling for the wealthy. Even if it isn't a dollar for dollar exchange, the taxes should be raised on the wealthy so they pay their fair share of what they got out of society because lowering taxes has been counterproductive.
You're not wrong fundamentally, but my point is that all of these actions would have various effects on the rest of the economy, and none would exclusively affect billionaires. There's this misconception that if only Bezos, Musk, and their friends paid some taxes for once, we could have single payer healthcare, and that math doesn't math.
Additional business taxes simply get passed on to the consumer in the price tag. You can say it's worth it, but it certainly doesn't exclusively affect the executive suite. Raising the Social Security cap would be a significant tax increase on the upper middle class. I don't have that much pity for them, but there are a lot more of them than a handful of billionaires, and they tend to be pretty important for winning elections. One of Biden's campaign promises was to not raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000, and this would violate that. Raising capital gains taxes would have ripple effects throughout the economy, leading to less business investment overall, fewer new jobs, and more layoffs. Plenty of normal homeowners take advantage of tax breaks on home loans.
I'm not saying that any of these steps are inherently wrong, and they're all perfectly legitimate tools. But they do have real consequences, and we can't pretend that they don't. You can say that they'd be worth it - and hell - I'd probably agree with you, but the family in suburban New Jersey with two parents in middle management who will suddenly see a big tax increase is probably going to be less of a fan. There is no giant pot of 100 billionaires' money that we can raid without any consequences.
You are just repeating trickle down talking points and justifying the wealthy paying less than their fair share.
And you're not engaging with literally anything I said, even the most basic things like the social security cap affecting far more non-billionaires, so I suppose I'll just give you the same amount of effort in return and dismiss you as a scientifically illiterate child, and we can both go on with our days.
Well, your point being about only billionaires was stupid in the first place so I replied about the wealthy to try and steer it into a reasonable discussion about taxing the group that billionaires are in.
Why are you worried about multimillionaires paying more taxes?
Hey, it's one of those low-effort hot takes I was talking about!
Asking for an example is low effort?