At the end of the day, countries would rather destroy themselves on a fundamental level than raise taxes on the rich. They want you to live in the delusion that house prices are going up, when reality is your income went down.
Comments
Log in with your Bluesky account to leave a comment
Yes, and their value hasn't risen at all. Some might have risen, and others fallen. But the aggregate value has remained constant. French people had their salaries cut in half in that time period. But they know if they told you that to your face, you'd revolt.
broseph. the currency is manipulated to create the illusion that your salaries are staying roughly the same over time, but the underlying currency is being devalued. You could, if you wanted to, manipulate the currency to hold house values constant, and you would see the your salary is going down.
So when do you suppose this "mass currency manipulation" started? Can you point a date and time as to when multiple Western countries just suddenly started manipulating their own currencies in order to undermine the already struggling common folk?
I get what you’re saying, but if anything, the post pandemic economy has shown people only care about nominal changes. Real wages went up across the board, outpacing inflation, but all people saw was that “muh egg is more expensive.”
The issue is that the problem was inverted due to tax evasion, so now countries are in competition to keep the wealthy with them by continuously lowering taxes. This needs to change.
Taxing wealth where it is produced, instead of where the owner lives, would be a massive change & kill tax havens.
It's not the sole solution obviously but would be a good start. Also needs to unify the tax system at the european level. Subsidize Malta & Luxemburg if that's what needed to kill their tax haven status. But nobody should make wealth in the EU that isnt taxed. And it's too big of a market to ignore
Every country you see today in the western world, they are all suffering from taxes being too low. the UK is a prime example. The US as well. Same with Germany, France. Cost of living is exploding in these countries due to low taxation.
UK is a prime example? Tax burden is the highest it has ever been 45% tax on high earners is hardly low and it has been shown, increasing the rate reduces tax income as people a. hide it/get paid in different ways or as is being seen now, leaving the country.
the problem in the UK is the state machine has become too big and burdensome - and costly. whilst i'm not in anyway suggesting a DOGE like US, if the private sectorq wealth generators is too small for the state we have, taxing more wont fix that.q
You are correct about the tax burden, but that 'burdensome state' is mostly pensions and health services. The high tax rate therefore reflects the age profile of the population which has aged dramatically in recent decades.
yes, the UK is a prime example of exactly what I am talking about. And if you are talking about taxing poor people, that is not what is being discussed. If you have a salary or get paid a wage, you are poor and not part of the discussion. This is a discussion about wealthy people.
France is an interesting case because here taxes on revenue could definitely be higher, but taxes on wages is something between 50 and 60% even on low wages.
The idea was that social security had to be funded by the work of workers so that they would be legitimate to control it, but with the population getting older and productivity not growing fast enough to keep French work competitive the model is in danger
There is the CSG which was an attempt to tax dividends and capital earning, but it is half-hearted and should be much higher for every capital related earning, and removed on salaries
Some countries are further ahead or further behind on the spectrum, and at slightly different stages of rot, but they all share this fundamental problem. You see it in the way stock prices always go up, house prices always go up, land value always goes up.
But the thing to understand is that these values are not changing. They are remaining constant. So then you must ask what is in fact changing? How much you get paid. That is what is changing. You are paid less money now than you were 10 or 20 years ago.
Your salary may have gone up, but your actual wage went down. Substantially. In some countries, you are paid 3 to 5 times less today than 20 years ago.
You have to stop the resource hoarding at the top to stop this spiral into poverty. And for that, you need to recognize that your salaries have fallen dramatically. Especially since covid. And the only way to address this is by raising taxes on resources.
The resources cannot be owned by a small number of people selected for and protected by the government. The resources have to be available. You achieve this by prying them away from those hoards using taxes, and then the government uses those resources to fund itself, injecting back into the economy
And the republican policy is to extend tax cuts. The tax cuts in their first term shrunk the economy, and now they will shrink it even more. But in the process, more of the economy will be in the hands of 5 or 6 people. Which, as we have seen, is all republicans care about.
Propaganda is why that is. "The evil socialists will tax you more, vote for us for tax relief". Even when you say it's taxes on the ultra-rich, they think they'll get impacted ("temporary embarassed billionaires" is how many americans see themselves)
Comments
Also, our income didn't go down, it just stagnated, for the very reason you said - rich people are assholes.
Taxing wealth where it is produced, instead of where the owner lives, would be a massive change & kill tax havens.
https://youtube.com/@garyseconomics?si=5458sXT59vTE3Uu2