Of course we can tax billionaires:
"Taxing the ultra-rich isn’t like the secret of embalming Pharaohs – it’s not a lost art from a fallen civilization. The US top rate of tax in 1944 was 97%. The postwar top rate from 1945-63 was 94%, and it was 70% from 1965-80. This was the period of the largest expansion of the US economy in the nation’s history. These are the “good old days” Republicans say they want to return to."
— Cory Doctorow ... https://mitchw.blog/2024/10/16/of-course-we.html
The tax rate after WW2 explicitly existed to discourage wealth inequality. It was recognized as a result of the shared sacrifice the nation had just experienced that huge wealth imbalances were destabilizing and nations that controlled runaway concentration of wealth were healthier, happier more productive counties. It was a deliberate social policy, and it worked, until Reagan fucked it all up.
@mitchw the times when we taxed the Rich and literally went to the Moon to the times now when we pay the Rich to piss about in LEO and destroy it with a Starlink derived Kessler Syndrome...
@mitchw YouTube has recently been showing me one of those long form informercial style ads that opens with, "When have you ever heard of an economy that was taxed into prosperity?" And I just want to shout at the screen "EVERY TIME WE'VE HAD PROSPERITY IN THIS COUNTRY MOTHER FUCKER!" so hard.
@mitchw this doesn't explain anything. It states it is known, but doesn't mention how and what.
@mitchw I agree that we can and should tax wealth, but if that Doctorow quote is accurate then I think he's mistaken about which Good Old Days the conservatives want to return to. I think they hanker for the Reagan era (1981-9), rather than Eisenhower (1953-61), and there's some irony in that because Reagan supported Eisenhower (having previously supported Democrats).
@mitchw we can't tax the rich because the politicians decide who is taxed and the rich pay the politicians not to tax them.
Why don't people get this?
@mitchw
Some truth about the US economy.
Not all the truth, but a part of it that is rarely discussed.
https://medium.com/@colingajewski/americas-coolie-economy-feaf95b0303c
@mitchw I would argue that if we do not do it anymore than apparently it _is_ "a lost art from a fallen civilization".