rocketeerH

rocketeerH t1_jefdbba wrote

Awesome! I’ve read the series twice and thought it was a made up word like Orogene. I imagined it as just a circle. This makes so much more sense, since the Orogenes generally did not freeze themselves to death. Assumed they were just immune to the power of their own torus

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rocketeerH t1_is40puc wrote

Do you know what labor and capital are? Labor is literally the primary resource of our current economy. Workers are by definition resources. Resources generate wealth. Owners and capitalists increase profits by reducing labor costs - by paying their workers less.

You don’t owe the rich your discounted labor. You deserve a bigger piece of the pie than some rich guy wants to give you. You’re worth it.

There are three non-violent ways to get it. You can make yourself perfectly indispensable to the point you can essentially blackmail your boss into paying fairly. You can unionize and force them to pay everyone fairly. Or you can tax them and use that income to build infrastructure and provide services - services that you would be able to afford if they were to pay your fairly in the first place

The Waltons are worth hundreds of billions of dollars, yet most of their employees need government assistance to survive. A flat tax would both increase the need for those programs - by burdening the poor more - and decrease the funds available by reducing taxes on the rich.

Oh, do you know about the standard deduction? That person making $1000/mo may have taxes withheld from their check, but at the end of the year they get it back because their tax burden is 0%

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rocketeerH t1_is3pp0z wrote

Wealthy people spend more, but they spend a lower percentage of their income.

Say you have a sales tax if of 7%. Someone making $1000/mo and spending 100% of it would owe $70 or 7% of their monthly income

Someone making $100,000/mo and spending $50,000 is living an extremely lavish lifestyle, no? They’d be paying $3,500 in taxes/mo. That’s 3.5% of their total income.

So while the rich person is paying a higher amount, they are paying a significantly lower percentage of their total income. The tax is a much higher burden on a person who must spend all of their money to survive than it is on someone who has a significant excess. This is why flat tax rates, like sales taxes, are called regressive - because they actively harm the poor.

The way to fix loopholes is to eliminate them from the tax code preexisting Progressive tax code, which taxes wealthy individuals at a higher rate, not change the code to something deliberately burdensome for the poor.

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