Do You Prefer Capitalism or Socialism?

Discussion in 'Political Opinions & Beliefs' started by Libhater, Apr 16, 2021.

  1. Bluesguy

    Bluesguy Well-Known Member Donor

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    Again you dodge, you claim the current distribution of the tax burden is not fair.

    I don't care whether it's your wealth tax or the income tax or what tax. Give me the distribution numbers that you would consider fair.

    Top 1% wealth or income =
    Top 10% wealth or income=
    Bottom 50% wealth or income=

    What percent of the burden should each pay.


    What is false about it. We don't tax wealth at the federal level and only with real property at the state level. I posted earlier about the 11 European countries that tried and 9 gave up on taxing wealth and the other two very limited. It doesn't work.

    Simply exposing you confusion as the wealth means high income and high income means high wealth. As explained younger and middle aged people make the most income but have the least wealth, older people make the less income but have high wealth. So what you want to do is shift the tax burden from the younger high income earners to the retired people living off their investments. And that somehow would be fair.

    No you have not explained because wealth goes up and it goes down and if you are going to do it monthly then you are going to have to assess everyone's wealth on a monthly basis. How are you going to do that, how are you going to hire enough accountants to do that. And why should we the taxpayers be forced to disclose to the government everything we own, all our possessions, and how is the IRS going to confirm all those inventory list?

    Why would you necessarily owe more tax, that is entirely dependent of the rate that is being applied. And it makes no sense. What are you going to do tell someone "Let's see you have $1,000,000 in wealth and the tax is 28% so you have to come up with $280,000 in cash? What if their income was only their $32,000 in income?
     
  2. bringiton

    bringiton Well-Known Member

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    Nonsense. Socialism is defined by ownership, not democracy. The actual socialist countries we have seen -- the USSR, Cuba, PRC, etc. -- have been anything but democratic.
    Don't you believe it. I have had numerous conversations on the Net with true believers in communism.
    Russia? Russia is a capitalist kleptocracy.
    No, they just made less noise.
    More accurately, he didn't know what socialism is.
     
  3. Pred

    Pred Well-Known Member

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    Sure it’s been repeated but those who love socialism never lived under it. I know Cubans and Venezuelans and neither have fond memories of their time living under those regimes...closest thing.
     
  4. Hoosier8

    Hoosier8 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    You dismiss the fact that Trump's economy created the lowest unemployment in all demographics which is the only way the US can fund government.
     
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  5. Hoosier8

    Hoosier8 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Funny to watch entitled liberal college students diss capitalism while sporting everything they bought only available due to capitalism.
     
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  6. bringiton

    bringiton Well-Known Member

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    I have not dodged once, so you can stop makin' $#!+ up any time.
    Oh, OK. If you want it broken down that way instead of by the statistical form of the distribution, I can dumb it down for you. In the USA, the top 1% in wealth own nearly 40% of all the wealth, so a fair tax distribution -- i.e., one that is somewhat more unequal than the distribution of wealth -- would have them paying ~45% of the taxes. The top 10% own about 80% of the wealth, so they would pay ~85% of the taxes. The bottom 50% own about 2% of the wealth (the bottom 20% have negative wealth), so they would pay about 1% of the taxes.
    It falsely says that taxes cannot be changed, that there is no way to tax anything that is not currently taxed.
    And local.
    Their wealth taxes were constructed to be unworkable so that the politicians in question could claim they were serving the people while they were actually serving the rich. If the goal of a wealth tax is actually to tax wealth rather than to exempt it from taxation, there is no difficulty in constructing a workable system.
    No, that claim is just objectively false, as your own testimony proves: you had low wealth but high income when you were younger, and now have high wealth but low income.
    Proving you wrong. In fact, older people often have higher incomes than young people because they have a lot more wealth, are collecting retirement benefits, etc.
    It would be fairer than continuing to tax income.
    Computers can easily do it. The ownership of shares and real estate is a matter of record. Likewise bank account balances and most debt instruments. As I said before, there is no need to tax people's personal effects as they do not impose a burden on the community. Ideally, privilege would be taxed rather than wealth, but most asset value other than personal effects is in fact privilege value.
    I have told you more than once that a fair and workable wealth tax would make no effort to tax people's personal effects. You always just ignore that fact and repeat your false claim that it would.
    I said you would owe more, not me.
    Where on earth did you get an absurd rate like 28%? The amount of wealth is vastly greater than the amount of income, so why on earth would you imagine that the tax rates would be similar? The rate would be in the low single digits.
     
  7. bringiton

    bringiton Well-Known Member

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    A friend of mine spent some time with some idealistic young socialists in West Germany in the 80s. After listening to their nonsense for a while, he asked if any of them had ever lived in East Germany or any other socialist country. Nope. He then asked how many of them wanted to live in East Germany. Silence.
     
  8. hellofromwarsaw

    hellofromwarsaw Well-Known Member

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    You are a classically misinformed English-speaking conservative who hears socialist and thinks communist. Every socialist party ever in Democratic countries has been democratic. And that makes all the difference. Don't listen to communists and Nazi propaganda like their names which claim socialism but only in the purest most obscene form. A dictatorship and all the craps that entails. Canada and every other modern country already have everything that Bernie and AOC want.. since you are totally brainwashed, I would just say, pass a living wage health care daycare great infrastructure ID card to end illegal immigration cheap college and tax the rich like everyone else does. This is a god awful GOP mess of inequality and horrible upward mobility at this point. And the worst propaganda ever. Finland is socialist. Its society is the end product of socialist parties winning in democracy for 100 years at least.
     
  9. hellofromwarsaw

    hellofromwarsaw Well-Known Member

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    For the millionth times, that is communism -a dictatorship. Socialism everywhere but super capitalist brainwashed English speaking countries is simply fair capitalism with a good safety net. France is the product of socialists winning elections for 100 years. Jesus you people are brainwashed.
     
  10. hellofromwarsaw

    hellofromwarsaw Well-Known Member

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    Venezuela has not been communist yet. Most people still support their socialist government but recently there has been violence. Fighting back against their old oligarchy and Trump covert action. They still prefer socialism to American hypocrisy violence and theft of the last 150 years. Especially from the GOP obviously. Oh right the GOP base doesn't hear about that kind of thing. Real news.

    Your friend did not know what socialism means either lol....
     
  11. bringiton

    bringiton Well-Known Member

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    Get a better dictionary.
     
  12. bringiton

    bringiton Well-Known Member

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    Get a better dictionary.
     
  13. bringiton

    bringiton Well-Known Member

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    Wrong. I am an English speaker, which is how I know what English words mean.
    Ruling parties calling themselves socialist is not the same as socialism any more than ruling parties calling themselves democratic is the same as democracy.
    Which is not socialism.
    Nonsense.
    The means of production in Finland are privately owned. So it's not socialist.
     
  14. dairyair

    dairyair Well-Known Member

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    I prefer the ism that got us this.

    http://politicalforum.com/index.php?threads/the-economy-grew-6-4-in-q1.587493/
    6.4% growth in Q1
     
  15. crank

    crank Well-Known Member

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    We're back to you being unable to defend the position you've never actually thought through.
     
  16. crank

    crank Well-Known Member

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    And do these banks do the unethical and police their customers for 'mood', which is beyond the basic financial information that all banks extract?
     
  17. Derideo_Te

    Derideo_Te Well-Known Member

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    WTF are you blathering about NOW? :eek:
     
  18. Cybred

    Cybred Well-Known Member

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    I defend it just fine.
     
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  19. hellofromwarsaw

    hellofromwarsaw Well-Known Member

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    To have state-owned business and industry takes a dictatorship and that is communism. France Germany Spain Italy Scandinavia Russia have all had socialist and communist parties at the same time and that is the difference. Only English speaking conservatives conflate socialism and communism. Oh and lying stinking communist s....
     
  20. bringiton

    bringiton Well-Known Member

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    Wrong on both counts. Communism is abolition of private property, not dictatorship, and state ownership of business could be chosen democratically.
    The difference from what??
    I have stated clearly what the difference is.
    And your point would be....?
     
  21. Bluesguy

    Bluesguy Well-Known Member Donor

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    That's what it is now and you said it is not fair, Biden proclaims it is not fair, the MSM proclaims it is not fair.

    Right now what can be taxed is limited by the Constitution. So you gotta get around that first and then explain how you're gonna do it.

    They were constructed by their brilliant economist and they proved to cost MUCH more to enforce than they imagined and did not bring in near the revenue.

    Yes so you are going the shift the tax burden to the retired sector and tax away the wealth they need to live on. Every year taking a chunk of it.

    No we older people put our wealth in less risky lower growth investments to protect the principle which you now think you have a right to tax away.

    What makes it more fair?

    Wait above you argued that EVERYTHING would be subject to the wealth not just what is taxed now. And now I have to list everything I have in government computers, what they get to spy in on my accounts? And what stocks I own change on a daily basis and the values of those stocks change on a hourly basis. At what point do you declare the value they will be taxed at? And how are you going to tax debt instruments as wealth? Who pays it the person who got the money or the person who lent it out?

    People will put their money on collectables, art, gems, books, if you limit it to just cash and securities people aren't to be in cash and collectibles and they will own land outside the US, how does the US tax land overseas, their going to send IRS agents over to appraise it?

    And you would love that, me paying your fairshare.

    Says how it would be that low to make up for the income tax especially limiting what can be taxed as you ended up saying you would. Especially after those with lots of wealth get out of the wealth you intend to tax.
     
  22. bringiton

    bringiton Well-Known Member

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    No it isn't. You are just makin' $#!+ up again. The distribution now is based on income, not wealth. You could with equal "logic" claim that if the heaviest 1% of the population pays 40% of the taxes, the heaviest 10% pays 85%, and the lightest 50% pays 2%, that would be just as fair as the current or the proposed distribution because the form of the distribution is the same. It's just fallacious, absurd, and disingenuous bull$#!+.
    The CURRENT distribution is not fair because it is based on INCOME, not WEALTH. A similarly unequal distribution could based on weight, height, education, IQ, hair length, or serum cholesterol, and would still not be fair.

    GET IT?????
    Which has been amended dozens of times as needed.
    It would be easy to start by just apportioning the tax among the states by population. Once people realize that introduces perverse incentives, they will quickly amend the Constitution.
    Modern mainstream neoclassical economists serve the super-duper uber-rich, not science or the public. See "Inside Job."
    They were designed to fail. It's obvious when you look at how they were structured.
    Garbage. Most retirees are not wealthy and would owe almost no wealth tax. Retirees who are wealthy can by definition afford to pay more tax.
    GARBAGE. The less wealth someone owned, the less tax they would pay. Someone who has $1M in net worth doesn't "need" it to live on. They can live perfectly well on $970K, $942K, etc. and you know it. Those who actually do need their few $K to live on would owe a pittance in tax on it.
    A very small and decreasing chunk. A 3% wealth tax would take ~25 years to reduce their wealth by half. How many retirees are even still alive after 25 years?
    The community has far more right to tax away the value of privilege, which IT CREATES, than to tax away working people's earned incomes.
    It's based on recovering value the community creates instead of stealing value the taxpayer creates.
    No I didn't. You are just makin' $#!+ up again. Only real estate is subject to wealth-based taxation now, and only on the state and local levels. My proposal is also to tax wealth in the form of company shares and debt instruments, including deposit accounts.
    No, you don't have to report anything. The ownership of your accounts is already a matter of record -- indeed, the tax on your accounts could be paid directly by the institutions that maintain them, rather than getting you to do it. You'd just get a bill every month for what you owe, like your utility bills.
    Each person's assets would be valued on a random day each month and they would then be billed at the end of the month. Most people would just set aside some cash for each month's taxes, as they do now to pay their utility and credit card bills, mortgage payments, etc.
    They are assets of the creditor.
    It is an asset of the creditor, not the debtor.
    Let them. Someone else will just own whatever they sold to buy the trinkets, which don't yield income; and if the trinkets are valuable enough to insure, their insured value can just be taxed. But I think you greatly overestimate the degree to which the wealthy are willing to cut off their noses to spite their faces.
    If someone owns land overseas, that is a cost to the community overseas, not the USA. Real estate should be taxed in the owner's hands no matter who owns it, as it is now. However, you don't seem to be aware of the fact that international treaties are in place to ensure taxes can be collected from people who try to dodge them by moving their assets and financial activities to other countries.
    One's fair share of the tax burden is based on the "ability to pay" and "beneficiary pay" principles, not equal shares for each citizen. But I realize you love not paying your fair share.
    Real estate, company shares, debt instruments and institutional deposits account for ~95% of all assets by value, and insured personal effects account for most of the rest.
    That's the advantage of taxing privilege: someone has to own it. What are the wealthy going to do, sell their income-yielding assets and buy $200M worth of jelly beans just to avoid paying taxes?
     
  23. hellofromwarsaw

    hellofromwarsaw Well-Known Member

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    Try the real world. Abolition of private property takes addicted ship I carumba. Every Democratic country that has socialist party knows it is always democratic and communist means dictatorship. Only supercapitalist brainwashed conservatives do this ridiculous conflation of yours. Now they even think it means nazi. Unbelievable.
     
  24. Jolly Penguin

    Jolly Penguin Well-Known Member

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    To answer the title of the thread,

    I wouldn't want to live under either pure Capitalism or pure Socialism. Either would be a dystopian nightmare. A good workable society needs a mix of the two.
     
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  25. bringiton

    bringiton Well-Known Member

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    No, some small, voluntary communes have done it.
    No, in theory communist means no government at all. And dictatorship doesn't mean communist.
    I'm not a capitalist, as the capitalists here could inform you if you were willing to be informed.
    Silliness.
     

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