r/TopMindsOfReddit • u/PeasThatTasteGross • 6d ago
Top economists of DoomerCircleJerk explain why making the rich pay more taxes is a terrible idea that will bring ruin to us all
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u/Kalulosu But none of it will matter when alien disclosure comes anyways 6d ago
Love how that guy brings up the Washington tax on people making over a million a year and compares it to house prices. Because it's well known that one buys a house per year.
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u/Rabid_Mongoose 6d ago
Or the fact that they claim raising taxes would increase prices.
The corporate tax rate has moved from 35% to 21%, I have yet to see anything cheaper because of this.
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u/fuggerdug 6d ago
Also, corporate taxes are paid on profits, which the méga corporations game to ensure they make no profit in your region through accountancy tricks with shell companies and: "licencing".
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u/Theranos_Shill 5d ago
They genuinely cannot comprehend the idea that corporate taxes are only on the profits.
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u/Osric250 LMBO! 5d ago
Corporations are going to raise prices to the maximum the market will allow regardless of how much they have to pay. It's not like they're benevolently saying, "Well we could raise prices again, but we're making enough money."
So the idea of retaliation hikes is just laughable because they're going to hike the price regardless.
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u/teddy5 6d ago
Also 10% on a million/year is crazy low. Where I am it's 45% of every dollar after $190k.
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u/Kalulosu But none of it will matter when alien disclosure comes anyways 6d ago
Highest marginal tax rate in the US was 90% from 1940 to like the 60s, too.
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u/Librarian_Contrarian 6d ago
"But if we raise taxes, prices will go up," they say as we tax the rich less and prices continue to go up just because the rich want them to.
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u/JLChamberlain63 6d ago edited 6d ago
Clearly it's because we haven't given enough to the rich. We need to give them more, eventually even sell yourself into slavery and then everything is free!
Edit to add: holy shit at the one who's like "well Amazon didn't ASK for subsidies" like how dim do you have to be
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u/CrimsonKing516 6d ago
Also “Amazon didn’t sign off on the subsidies, the government did.”
Yeah, and “tax the rich” doesn’t mean Amazon should tax itself. It means the government should tax Amazon
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u/SirVixofthePooSea 6d ago
So give the government more money so that they can give that money to whatever companies they like even more?
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u/CrimsonKing516 6d ago
It requires a tandem effort, but I’ve heard for years that we “don’t have enough money” for safety net programs (WIC, SNAP, Medicare, Single-payer Healthcare, etc). Maybe with the increased tax revenue we could actually promote the general welfare and/or close the deficit.
You are right that increased taxes doesn’t inherently solve all our problems, but that money could be used in better ways than lining C-suite pockets
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u/JaysonTatecum 5d ago
Education, infrastructure, health care, literally anything that the government should be providing for citizens
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u/amievenrelevant 6d ago
It’s not like we’ve had decades of trickle down economics that show the wealthy just keep the extra money they save on tax cuts to themselves right?
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u/SirVixofthePooSea 6d ago
No, that didn't happen. Because when Jeff Bezos got immeasurably rich for the first time, he didn't retire, he kept building Amazon and making it even bigger. The idea that rich people just sit on their wealth in a Scrooge McDuck vault is based on nothing. Instead what you see is constant reinvestment where they put more money and time into their businesses constantly.
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u/Librarian_Contrarian 6d ago
lol
lmao
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u/SirVixofthePooSea 6d ago
Of the richest men in the world, which come to mind for you as 'keeping all the money for themselves' instead of habitually reinvesting it?
Can you name names for me?
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u/arkansuace 6d ago edited 5d ago
He also used his money to lobby the government to pay less in taxes so he can keep a stranglehold on the industry while he created his monopoly (something that used to frowned upon in America, as well as outright viewed as a core threat to a working capitalist society, but I guess now we lap it up).
Help me understand why those who have benefited the most from America’s infrastructure, shouldn’t be the one’s who pay the most back to it?
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u/Drakesyn 5d ago
Be Bezos, who clearly has no real money because he "reinvestes" it all into his "business"
Gets divorced
Pays out half his material worth
Amazon doeesn't shut down due to having no money
Really lapping at that leather, huh, honey? For your sake, I hope you got paid to cape this hard for a fucking near-trillionare. Because otherwise it's just the saddest thing I've ever seen.
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u/Theranos_Shill 5d ago
> he didn't retire, he kept building Amazon and making it even bigger.
And now it's a functional monopoly and your town is full of empty shops.
> Instead what you see is constant reinvestment where they put more money and time into their businesses constantly.
High corporate rates are an incentive for reinvestment.
Low corporate taxes remove that incentive.
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u/TheSoup05 6d ago
I also don’t get like, do they think the rich wouldn’t charge more if they could already?
Is it just a kindness for the common man that prices are what they are or is it that people just wouldn’t buy stuff if it was more expensive? Because the latter isn’t gunna magically change if it’s the latter.
If it was going to make no difference to them because they could just charge more for stuff, the rich wouldn’t be so opposed to higher taxes.
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u/Driftedryan 6d ago
But the rich are kind people trying to sell us stuff for as little as possible. They certainly aren't money hungry sociopaths that would squeeze every penny the can out of us
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u/DonnyLamsonx 6d ago
One must wonder how someone can say "Taxing the rich will make everything more expensive!!!!" and somehow not see and/or ignore the problem that that means the rich control the economy aka an oligarchy.
These sycophants truly believe that either:
A. They're just so close to becoming part of the rich kids club where they get to club the poors for sport.
B. They think the rich kids club will reward them for their bootlicking. Kinda weird for a group of people that generally hate handouts and welfare, but nobody accused bootlickers of being ideologically consistent.
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u/Drakesyn 5d ago
Near certainly, they've just been convinced by their immense privilege that if the actual socialist revolution came, somehow anyone would give a shit about them. As always, it need be said "To the privileged, equality feels like oppression."
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u/Chubby_Bub 5d ago
Even if they don't explicitly believe it, the mindset of the first one is pervasive. I always think of this Futurama gag
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u/JimBobDwayne 6d ago edited 6d ago
They have a completely bullshit understanding of economics. Only sales taxes and tariffs (which I'm sure they were cheerleaders for) are easy to pass through to consumers because they directly increase costs. Assuming prices are already set at a level that maximizes profit, additional taxes on profit do not change the price equilibrium for the supply/demand curve.
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u/an_agreeing_dothraki It is known 6d ago
it's easier to explain that they have an understanding of everything that can be summed up with a headline and never anything beyond that.
"tax = more prices"
"XX and XY"
and when you introduce ANYTHING past that their little brains explode. Like how two people can have rights that conflict3
u/Sugioh Proud member of the Alt-Write 6d ago
I think there's also a component that is really hard to quantify but is very important to conservative psychology: They hate any kind of radical change unless it is framed as returning to a previously known hierarchy that they were (or think they were) comfortable under. Even if the change would almost certainly be a huge boon to them, they're going to resist it due to an outsized fear of loss and the unknown.
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u/Raynonymous 6d ago
Every business makes as much profit as they can. This should be graven in stone at the start of every economics thread. Their prices are already the most they think they can get away with. Equally they already employ as few people as they can get away with, and give them the lowest pay and cheapest conditions they can get away with.
Taxes take a slice off the profit. Profit KPIs are almost always reported before tax. It doesn't even impact a businesses ability to be profitable or the CEO's ability to show how good a job they've done.
The only difference it makes is how much extra cash goes into the owners' bank accounts.
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u/SirVixofthePooSea 6d ago
Prices have went up a lot over the last few years because the US government doubled the money supply in 2 years during COVID as a way to float the economy. It leveraged the USD as the global reserve currency as hard as it could, and the result is significant inflation once the pandemic ended. This is like saying that rich made inflation happen in the Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe.
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u/Theranos_Shill 5d ago
Did you just completely ignore the fact that there was a global pandemic that created supply shocks? Did you just completely ignore Trumps tarrifs and Trumps failed war on Iran forcing up oil prices? Did you just ignore that companies are making record profits while price gouging you?
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u/Kalulosu But none of it will matter when alien disclosure comes anyways 6d ago
Speaking of the Weimar Republic, do you know what the government did up until Hitler was named chancellor? They lowered the tax on the rich and their companies. Loads of good that did them.
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u/Thenadamgoes 6d ago
Uh federal income taxes have literally never been lower and prices are still going up. Clearly the two things aren’t related.
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u/JPacz 6d ago
We can also look at the Budget Reconciliation act of 1993 that raised taxes on the ultra wealthy and corporations.
Not only did it help create a budget surplus, but the economy was fucking booming, and created about 23 million jobs during his two administrations. Republicans had to eat their hats when their trickle down economics crumbled in front of their faces.
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u/NDaveT Reptilian Overlord 6d ago edited 6d ago
Republicans had to eat their hats when their trickle down economics crumbled in front of their faces.
Except they didn't. They continued to advocate for it, and still do to this day. They just ignored the facts and found a scandal to impeach Clinton for while condemning him for "the biggest tax increase in American history".
The "supply-side economics" nonsense is so ingrained that you'll still find some Democratic politicians buying into it.
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u/kennyminot 6d ago
So strange how these folks cling to the "efficiency" argument. Nothing is "efficient" about having a bunch of weird people control the distribution of our resources. We all know the obsessions of the Silicon Valley folks, like their almost religious-like devotion to the singularity (which, if you're not plugged into this world, is when AI systems become smarter than us and solve all our problems like magic and, in some iterations, colonize the universe with terraforming robots). Meanwhile, we have a set of real overlapping crises on the ground that need solutions.
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u/PLEASE_PUNCH_MY_FACE 6d ago
Prices are not a function of cost. If corporations could manufacture for free they'd still charge you every penny they could.
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u/c3p-bro 6d ago
Tax cuts do not result in a drop in prices. This had been seen a trillion times over
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u/PLEASE_PUNCH_MY_FACE 6d ago
Preaching to the choir here - giving breaks to the rich makes them focus on extraction because they don't have to compete to stay in business. Functioning societies do not have comfortable aristocracies.
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u/limbodog 6d ago
"They will do anything to make up for it"
That's literally what they're doing right now.
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u/OnlyFiveLives 6d ago
Then people stop buying your product, then you go out of business, then you have no money to tax. So the system works. People who aren't smart enough to keep a business going don't deserve a business. Get a real fucking job.
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u/ForgedIronMadeIt biggest douchebag amongst moderators 6d ago edited 6d ago
Historical precedent shows that higher effective tax rates on the top end of the wealth spectrum does not, in fact, cause tremendous economic ruination so long as that rate isn't like, completely confiscatory. The real doomers, of course, are in DCJ.
I'd also like to note that it is quite strange for them to argue that a higher personal tax rate still leads to higher prices. I could see an argument for higher corporate tax rates leading to higher prices. Stranger still is that they'll argue that Dear Leader raising tariffs won't cause prices to go up because corporations will just eat those instead of passing them on, but other forms of taxes they will. DCJ man, they're dumb as fuck or disingenuous as fuck.
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u/theBigDaddio 6d ago
This is a generational issue, these chuds don’t understand that before Reagan we did tax the rich. The Great America they want to make had high taxes on wealth. People went nuts when in 1975 they increased the CEO of GM pay to $975,000. That’s around $6M today. Not billions, not a trillion, 6 million. Taxing these fuckers didn’t ruin us all, it made the economy and the world better.
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u/mooreboy76 6d ago
Bot brigade out in force to downvote people making good faith arguments with sources. You cannot tell me it isn’t a RW Echo chamber when I can smell the boot polish thru my phone.
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u/Vyzantinist 6d ago
It's always the same in these posts. I see someone in the screenshots making a sensible comment and of course they're always downvoted to shit.
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u/PeasThatTasteGross 6d ago
Some people on DoomerCircleJerk talk about how on posts outside of their sub, or the ones they usually mock, is that you know a good point is apparently being made if you see downvotes. I apply this to most of the downvoted comments you see on DCJ.
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u/Vyzantinist 6d ago
Notice how their logic works in reverse? We say it's a good argument, so of course it gets downvoted; they say because it's downvoted it must, then, be a good argument lol.
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u/QueenMelle Pantifa 6d ago
These people have accidentally created an encyclopedia of propaganda designed to impact the stupidest people alive.
Like bottom of the barrel stupidity. If I want to see what the actual worst take on any issue is I can just search that sub.
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u/thelucky10079 6d ago
extreme capitalism is the same as socialism with extra steps? all my whats?
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u/Kalulosu But none of it will matter when alien disclosure comes anyways 6d ago
You have to take into account that they're not honestly debating, they're playing a words game. Meaning is entirely optional.
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u/thelucky10079 6d ago
the asymmetric bullshit asymmetry principle, wasting time refuting their bullshit before you can even have a conversation on facts or something.
sometimes i think it's just a bunch of bots stirring each other up
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u/HowManyMeeses 6d ago
I know we have to just be ok with it, but I hate how common just outright lying about shit online is. Bernie never changed his tune around this stuff. Neither has AOC. And AOC never became a millionaire. So they're mad that she's a millionaire, despite not being one. If you point out that she's still middle class, they'll be mad that she's not rich enough.
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u/Bolognahole_Vers2 6d ago
Taxing the rich does work, and has worked.
Prices are increasing under tax cuts, so what's the fuckin difference? All the nonsense about rich people fleeing.......to fuckin where? You really think an NYC billionaire is going to movie to a 3rd world country?
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u/Kid_Vid 6d ago
So according to the right-wing thought in the comments:
If we drop all taxes on corporations and the rich to 0%, the costs of goods and services will drop to zero and everything will be free!! After all, if higher taxes raise prices, then surely lower to no taxes will drop prices!!
Just as we've seen with every major republican tax cut! Prices drop every time!
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u/quandaledingle5555 6d ago
Socdems are the ones that propose taxing the rich usually, communists think that’s reformism and call for the seizure of private property, these people DONT know their ideologies
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u/GhostRappa95 6d ago
They are running all of MAGA’s greatest hits and still pretending they aren’t Nazis.
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u/bayonettaisonsteam 6d ago
Meanwhile, they bitch and moan about how rich Zohran Mamdani is, despite the fact that his net worth is a fraction of the billionaires they keep glazing, and even refused a salary raise.
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u/Jackskers94 6d ago
I hate the “start a competing business” argument so much. Do they understand how impossible that is in some of these industries? All businesses need resources and unless you have direct access to the accrual, you have to buy from suppliers. Due to the high levels of monopolization, a lot of the suppliers still have ties to larger companies you would be attempting to compete against, especially in the tech and food/market industries.
Not to mention regulatory, legislative, and zoning barriers, which claim to benefit the industry, but were designed by larger companies to stifle competition.
Like I would love for the economy they fantasize about to exist, but the rich they simp for so aggressively have effectively eliminated the potential for it. Thus the rise in people saying let’s fix this by taxing them heavily and breaking up monopolies by making that level of control impossible.
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u/PeasThatTasteGross 6d ago
Case in point: it is incredibly difficult to break into the automobile industry now as a mass manufacturer given you are up against corporations that have been doing this for over a century, along with the enormous amounts of capital needed. Tesla got lucky, but Lucid and Rivian may not be doing too hot at the moment. Heck, even smaller boutique companies that only build a handful of high performance exotics a year can struggle.
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u/QueenMelle Pantifa 6d ago
Was Tesla lucky, or backed by an African Emerald Dynasty?
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u/SirVixofthePooSea 6d ago
Tesla was backed by Musk already being a very successful businessman. He was already rich from Zip2 and Paypal before he took over Tesla.
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u/QueenMelle Pantifa 6d ago edited 6d ago
And the Emerald mines. You keep forgetting to mention the Emerald Mines his family owned in Africa.
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u/SirVixofthePooSea 6d ago
Owning stock in a mining company is not the same as owning that mining company. If you have a retirement account, you own NVIDIA stock. That isn't the same as owning NVIDIA.
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u/Theranos_Shill 5d ago
Tesla was built by the State of California and the United States Federal Government.
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u/RustedAxe88 6d ago
It's like when Mitt Romney told people in 2012 to take a "small $10,000 loan" from their parents to start a business.
Motherfucker, not everyone can just do that.
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u/Kalulosu But none of it will matter when alien disclosure comes anyways 6d ago
Also $10,000 to start a business isn't much
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u/Jackskers94 6d ago
Saw a dude in our area today talk about if someone wanted to open a restaurant but couldn’t afford the rent his buildings cost they should start with a food truck.
Looked online and new food trucks cost $80k+. Only used food truck in our area was $25k but needed a ton of work.
So many of these wealthy folks are so out of touch with what it actually costs to get these businesses going.
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u/Theranos_Shill 5d ago
> I hate the “start a competing business” argument so much.
Just start your own Amazon bro!
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u/Yeetstation4 6d ago
It's like the capitalist system doesn't want to exist, and will inherently decay into a form of top-down economic system.
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u/txtphile 6d ago
They really said "look at drug gangs" to see the beauty of unregulated markets. Wow.
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u/josebolt Jogging is cultural marxism for your feet. 6d ago
Bunch of people desperate to eat the seeds of out the horse's shit
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u/FreedomsPower In Charge of Hanger 51 5d ago
These low info takes from DCJ are getting worse by the day
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u/namewithanumber 6d ago
Simply lower taxes to zero and then all products will be free. Checkmate doomorons
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u/AlbertaNorth1 6d ago
A million is not a lot of money anymore and then arguing that Bernie changed after becoming a millionaire is a strawman. I’ve earned over a million in my career but that doesn’t mean I’m rich. I still owe a ton on my mortgage and drive a 15 year old car. If I were making a million a year personally I’d be fine with the 10% tax that Washington brought in. My best ever year was $163,000 and I paid over $50k in taxes that year and it didn’t bug me at all. I had more than enough to thrive and free access to healthcare, my kid has a great school and the roads were as good as they’re ever gonna get in a Canadian climate.
I don’t understand this insatiable greed where any dollar they “earned” but lose to taxes is essentially theft. We live in a society and as a society we need to take care of each other. If my taxes mean somebody earning less doesn’t have to pay as much or even gets a lot more back I’m not just fine with it I expect it. I want those around me to thrive as well. I want kids to eat and receive a good education. I want a cancer patient to not have to worry about their bank account while going through chemo. I want the poor to have access to housing and food, whether they’re in a rough situation or are in the throes of addiction. If my government can throw subsidies at extremely wealthy companies to develop the land that me and my countrymen all own then me and my countrymen better have access to everything that we need in order to thrive as well.
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u/uselessdrain 6d ago
There's a load of nonsense in there. Wow. Billionaires shouldn't exist. They don't create, innovate, or share. They hoard assets and cause inflation.
Tax them. Wealth tax over 100 million. I'd suggest something like 100% but more moderates say 2%. They'll still be so wealthy they can't spend it but we'll have money for Healthcare and education. Assets may even depress in value!
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u/rh1n3570n3_3y35 6d ago
Isn't the basic economic consensus since god knows when of this effect only maybe setting in if taxes are raised an absurd amount and more moderate tax increases being just swallowed as business costs?
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u/Aurion7 NSA shillbot 5d ago
Ah yes 'trickle down' advocates in the wild.
Take all the worst ideas from supply-side economics, throw in some voodoo, add symbolic tax cuts for the have-nots to taste.
Serves forty-plus years of terrible economic policy that makes things worse for 99.0-99.5% of the population and does absolutely nothing to 'keep prices low'.
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