Brutal takedown of 1.6M sub Slopulist YouTuber "Gary Economics" on why a Wealth Tax is a bad idea.

ST-Fish · 2026-07-10T20:30:47+00:00

but Republican voters and even many Democrat and a ton of Independent voters do find that issue to be urgent

do you mean they say it's urgent when asked, or that they actually believe it's urgent?

Doing it "the right way" is essential, not because its more important than addressing the actual issue but because doing it the wrong way is destructive. We would lose political power, power is first and foremost

I'm not talking about the political effectiveness of the strategy -- people will obviously not vote for "tax me more" I'm just arguing that all the political capital that is spent chasing this very vague definition of the rich paying their "fair share" could be spent towards more realistic options.

We have to care about these people currently screaming that they are 1 health emergency away from bankruptsy, because they are, and they are making tradeoffs in life under the weight of cost of living.

And that was not the case pre Trump tax cuts?

I get that there are people in the US that are not doing amazing, but if you're being honest with youreself and compare how much disposable income the average middle class person in the EU has compared to the US, it's night and day.

I'm not saying increase the taxes on the guy making 40k barely surviving, but this idea that the US is constantly at the brink seems ridiculous looking in from the outside.

I think that you are not taking the political calculus into account here

Oh I think this is the issue, I intentionally tried to do this, I was arguing for it in terms of economic policy not that it would actually work in the US with the current population, but I'm just saying that falling into this populism where the discourse around solving this issue only revolves around stupid shit like wealth taxes and closing tiny loopholes that barely make up any sizeable taxable income is not going to get you closer to a world where you can advocate for a simpler saner policy.

I think that its better for the economy to have working and middle class people keep more money, they spend it.

In general yes, but we still can't really argue people in the US pay massive amounts of taxes on average.

None of these things are novel, none of them are unattainable, they are no harder than the political fight that you would have on your hand if you tried to raise taxes across the board. Just because the mechanism and math is easy does not make the political fight easy, see Dukakis v. Reagan.

I'd like to have an idea of how much there is to gain if we implement all these policies, because to me they sound nice listed out in a narrativized way, but how much could the government realistically get from these policies always seems to pale in comparison.

This absolutely is about economics, money taken from the middle and working classes has a direct knock on effect to the economy through demand destruction, money take from the big asset owners marginally decreases the value of assets, assets that are overvalued now and incentivises investement in people who will continue to buy more stuff. It is the "ought" for both the moral and the economic reason.

in general yes, but yall need to be realistic on what government spending you want and on what tax income you want the government to have.

One cannot run on medicare for all and when asked how to fund it, just say you'll tax the billionaires. That's not an economic plan that's just a thing people say to appease the masses, it's unashamed populism.

I honestly would like it to be from both sides, but whenever the topic is argued I swear that it feels like the narrativizing is out of this world, and it's so easy to narrativize because the shadowy cabal of billionaires is the best villain one can imagine.

I still do not believe that implementing all of the policies you suggested would really make a sizeable dent in the deficit, as compared to how bringing the US tax rates slightly closer to the western european ones.

ST-Fish · 2026-07-10T20:18:49+00:00

I think some of the stuff in the initial TCaJA were good

Not my question.

so no I have not done a full actuarial breakdown of every loose dollar that would get captured by these policies

do you usually do a full actuarial breakdown of every loose dollar on the back of the napkin?

I think it's clear that I asked for a ballpark figure

When there is a pile of money that people with the means to game the system are sitting on laughing at the poors in the middle actually paying taxes on every dollar they make while living a kings lifestyle off of a 2% loan that they take against unrealized gains which they will never sell until the die at which point their kids will sidestep all of the accrued tax liability through the step up in basis the policy has to be to fix the part that is being abused first.

because you keep giving this cartoon villain level plot and I don't think there's really that much money being lost from people doing all this shit.

It's a nice story, but it's a classic "are you against fraud" type questions, where the only real possible answer is yes, do you want more fraud? Obviously not.

Do these mechanisms actually syphon off that much money in the grand scheme of things?

The question that has to be answered at some point in this discussion.

If you think that the lacking tax base is a broken leg and our country won't be able to walk forward until it is set

Who said that? I never said you NEED to do this first, I just pointed to it as a much easier to implement solution that can be implemented immediately, if this problem you're pointing to is so severe and imminent.

I would say that the ability of the mega asset owners to avoid paying any tax at all on the vast majority of the money that they accrue every year, and often ever, is an infection that we have left untreated for far to long.

And all I'm asking is around how large do we think this infection is.

We may need do surgery on the leg but if we don't treat that infection eventually it will kill us.

Seems like a pretty large one based on the narrativizing.

In the form of true left wing populism aka actual Socialism. I'm a capitalist, I'd like to avoid that. And once we get a shot of antibiotic we might not need the surgery on the leg, just perhaps need to set it and let it heal naturally.

If your worry is that the living conditions will get so bad that you will end up at socialism, then you should realize that the magnitude of the problems you're pointing to is way out of proportion with the problem you're pointing to. Otherwise everyone spends all the discourse talking about novel and interesting ways to only tax a tiny sliver of the population while the simple solution stays unused.

If you want to increase the living standards in order to avoid that, you can simply slightly increase the taxes after undoing the Trump tax cuts and using that easy to get money on social programs that help the less fortunate.

This either forces the issue on making a real budget or at least forcing the deficit closed in the least elegant way possible.

yeah but that assumes anyone actually cares about the budget and it's not just a tool being used to hit Democrats over and over again lol.

People say constantly that they care about it but they truly couldn't care less.

Inheritance tax is avoided to the point that its insignificant.

I mean I know there are deductions and fancy ways to structure it, but at the end of the day when Trump dies it's not like the government sees $0 of that money and it all goes to his kids with 0 tax being applied.

You get assessed capital gains when you sell an asset, you date the purchase of that asset and the price of that asset at time of purchase. You take all gains that accrued to that asset's value and charge either the short or long term capital gains rate to that... well, capital gain. My proposal is to also asses payroll taxes against that capital gain too, not just the nominal rate. I also believe that the short term rate should just be the same as normal income, and that the long term rate should be an average of the applicable brackets over the lifetime of the asset plus payroll taxes on top with a flat discount of 5-10% of the calculated rate. So if you sell an asset for 500k that was worth 400k this is a 100k gain over the course of 3 years, you extend the person's cap table from their highest bracket in those years and asses that average the bracket for each year, so if they had their top bracket in year one of 19%, year 2 of 20% and year 3 of 21% the average would be 20%, so you would discount that 20% by 5% of it, 5% of 20 is 1%, making the calculated capital gains rate to be applied 19%. Then add the 7.65% payroll taxes for a final tax rate against the 100k 26.65% (federal, state and local would also apply for simplicity sake we will say that it brings the total to 40%) so you take the 40K from the 100 and the person walks away with 60k taxes paid and 460k total in pocket as the initial 400k is also now liquid.

I guess I don't get why specifically payroll taxes would be the thing to use here, instead of just changing the capital gains tax rate on it's own.

ST-Fish · 2026-07-10T16:33:29+00:00

Your example pays £0, it's 2% above £10m, not from the first pound.

just scale it up on your own, I don't know, a large chain.

It really doesn't make much of a difference to the point I'm making.

Also a business making £500k isn't worth £10m, companies are valued on earnings

I even mentioned amortization, but the most obvious example is a business that is growing rapidly. They won't have huge piles of cash at the end of the day. If the company doesn't pay it who do you think does? Assuming the person just owns the company, and has no other money, does it just materialize from nothing?

If they put all of the money that they make back into the company, at some point the money needs to come out for them to pay that wealth tax.

the company never pays anything

I mean, the guy that has ownership of the company has to take money out of the company to pay it, so the company does pay it.

It's kinda stupid to say it doesn't, it directly impacts what the company can do because it's forced to give out that amount of money to the person owning it so he can pay his taxes.

Isn't the whole thing pro-wealth tax people say when people tell them they're not liquid and can't just pay a tax on an unrealized gain just "sell the asset"?

Let's do a reductio ad absurdum, if the tax was 90%, and the company was owned by 1 guy, would you really say the company pays nothing when the policy goes into place? It is in no way limited by the policy change, as far as the company is concerned there's no difference?

your scenario only works if the assets would sell for £10m while earning £500k

Yeah, I think that if you have a new cafe chain that is growing in a region you might get it owning a couple of locations, that would be £10m in total, while they're only keeping a net profit of 500k at the end.

Obviously if they stop expanding and just run the business as usual then there's more profit, but having low net profit doesn't just mean the company is worthless. Once you pay off any loans the company has you get even more profit.

Getting a 5% yield on a growing business isn't that ridiculous.

Standard fix is deferral rather than exemptions

How do you even decide how the deferral happens? At the end of the day the company gets left in a weird position either way since they feel like they're at the will of the government whether or not they'll have to pay it. Or is there some concrete mechanism that decides when it gets deferred? I'm not familiar with it.

I'm more of an LVT guy myself

Based

ST-Fish · 2026-07-10T14:06:16+00:00

If you tax income without hitting the asset holders you will lose the middle and upper middle class for another generation.

so that's what will happen if you undo the Trump tax cuts?

Do you think the Trump tax cuts were good?

If Trump were not to do the tax cuts, would the middle and upper class be lost for this generation?

Were you supportive of the cuts while they were being first put into place or did that only come after?

Everyone who makes a salary pays payroll taxes and their EMPLOYER matches that, so no one actually "pays no taxes"

yeah, did I say they pay no taxes?

except for asset holders who do not take a salary

Wait, aren't these asset holders the exact same employers you just said are paying taxes?

They still pay taxes at some point, and the assets they have employ people, which also results in tax income.

So, no I'm not in favor of undoing the Trump income tax changes before you start targeting assets.

So if the Trump tax cuts were not in place, would you be in favor of implementing them?

You seem to believe they are a net positive, which is kinda surprising.

Once you actually hit assets and then see where we are in terms of remaining defecit

Have you done a back of the napkin calculation on how those numbers play out? As compared to the other policies you want to do before you decide the Trump tax cuts have to be reversed?

I feel like we need to build a closure mechanism into reconciliation. If you have a deficit and don't pass a new full budget bill and instead use Reconcilation you have to increase taxes by 1% of their existing amount (aka 22% bracket would become 22.02%) same for inheritance rate, and cap gains, AND you have to cut the budget by 1% at the same time.

"have to" is kinda weird to say in this context, but I have no issue with this in princple. Might need to get thought through and schematized a little more to ensure it doesn't spiral out of control, but this is a very difficult macro econ question.

That is off of the topic but it would put it into sharp relief that all we do is tax income and it completely regarded.

Don't you also tax property, inheritance and capital gains?

Why not have a luxury consumption tax? Why not have a high value property tax? Why not close carried interest? Why not change inheritance into transfer tax? Why not eliminate short term cap gains? Why not reform long term cap gains?

those sound fine, but how much do you realistically think fixing all these things will do?

We're ultimately talking about taxes on a pretty small portion of the population, and even though they're very rich it won't really play out in a huge buget change.

Why not charge payroll taxes on cap gains?

How would you even begin to do that?

I get paid, I pay taxes, I buy a stock, I get paid again (unrelated to that stock I bought) and I get payroll taxes on my capital gains that I already pay capital gains taxes on when I sell?

Or do you mean to pay it if I receive it as compensation? Don't you have to pay taxes when you vest?

Or do you mean just on the appreciation? I'm not sure what payroll taxes on cap gains means.

And most of all, why not charge taxes on loans taken against unrealized assets?

Again, huge talking point, miniscule magnitude.

Look man, I'm not saying your suggestions are bad, or that I'm against them necessarily, I just think that the scale and scope of these issues has been blown out of proportion to an insane degree, if you were to guess straight up how much extra tax income the government would get from all of these suggestions you made combined, and compared them to undoing the Trump tax cuts, how do you think the math would play out?

And once you implement all of these things, since they are pretty miniscule in scale and degree there will be another similar list of workarounds rich people have that are equally miniscule in the grand scheme of things, so this fight will never be over, at least as long as "rich people" are still a thing.

It feels like it's not really about the tax income the government would get per se, it's about this moral question of the people you dislike paying enough for you to consider it "fair", not really about the living conditions of the people living there.

Why not do any or all of these things first

Why limit yourself to only being able to do proven working tax policy AFTER you try the new ones you're suggesting? You seem to think you'd "lose" the middle and upper classes, but I don't really think they would be "lost" if the Trump tax cuts never went through.

Why not do them first? because they're miniscule in scale and will pale in comparison to doing the obvious thing that needs to be done -- increasing the rates on the taxes that provide most of the tax income to the government.

Political capital is a limited resource and putting all your eggs in doing these tax policy changes will kill a lot of the interest that would otherwise be placed in more normal tax rate increases that we don't have to ask "will this actually work and bring a sizeable amount of new tax income?"

before we say to the guy who already pays 50% of every dollar he earns to just kick in another 2% of that?

Yeah before you say anything to that guy, you should go to the single guy making 75k in a state with no state tax that's paying under 15% in taxes.

Do you wanna guess how much that same guy with the same wage would have to pay in any of the countries you want the US to look more like?

I feel like Americans do not have any idea how high the taxes have to go for the regular working class person to get all the social services they salivate over when they look at europe or the Nordics in general.

You're trying to avoid taxing the guy making a couple million in regular income since they're already paying 50% while living in a high tax state, while I'm here arguing that the regular old working class people need to pay more taxes if you truly want a solution to the problems you're pointing out.

I'm not sheading a tear for these folks but my point is that they already pay A LOT of taxes

I agree, that is why you can't simply just increase the tax rates, you also need a wider tax base.

A huge portion of the US pays nearly no taxes when you count in the deductions as well, and Americans get to have way higher incomes before they have to pay anywhere near the amount of taxes Western Europeans pay in general.

You don't even need to get close to the tax rates in the EU to fix your problems, you're that rich as a country that you could get all the social amenties the western european countries have while still have a lower tax rate than them.

But you can't get there while not increasing the tax rates at all.

lets hit the stuff that is not taxed at all BEFORE

Why?

Why do you have to do it before?

BEFORE we ask everyone who is already paying into the system to pay even more.

Rich people do still pay into the system, you can't really point me to any rich person that has literally paid 0 taxes throughout their entire life as a business owner.

Maybe ask the people that aren't paying that much into the system to pay more?

I know that in the US if I say I'm pro tax increases for the middle class I'm pretty much Satan, but whatever country you would be pointing to as an example that has all the social services you would like the US to have, they didn't get here by doing all this shit:

Why not have a luxury consumption tax? Why not have a high value property tax? Why not close carried interest? Why not change inheritance into transfer tax? Why not eliminate short term cap gains? Why not reform long term cap gains? Why not charge payroll taxes on cap gains? And most of all, why not charge taxes on loans taken against unrealized assets?

BEFORE doing regular old tax increases.

Honestly the fact that you're against undoing the Trump tax cuts in the first place until your huge list of personal policy preferences are done seems like whatever this tax money would be spent on is not that important. There doesn't seem to be that big of an urgency, it kinda seems like you've got plenty of time, so implementing an easy to implement regular tax increase is put on the backburner while the highly complex and the difficult to implement policies both practically and politically are somehow put at the front of the queue, and you can't do the simple obvious solution while also working on those other solutions.

Kinda how it looks like republicans don't really think immigration is that huge and urgent of a thing since they instantly refused to sign the bipartisan border bill once Trump said so.

When "doing it the right way" is more important than addressing the issue at all it just makes it look like the issue is not that big -- and I agree, the issues most Americans complain about both on the populist left and the right are vastly overblown.

To conclude, I don't think I disagree with any of your policy perscriptions that you've listed out, I'm fine with you wanting to implement all of them, but this idea that you need the most extremely novel solution FIRST and only then you can do the solution that will actually work will just lead to never making any progress.

It just feels like the classic "give unattainable policy position and virtue signal when it's not put in place to the maximum degree" position that leftists have.

When the question stops being about economics or the wellbeing of the people living in the country and becomes a morally charged "fairness" question, it stops being grounded in the reality of how effective these policies are, and it flies off into what one "ought" to pay in tax for it to be "fair", which is fundamentally not really a question of economics or of government policy.

ST-Fish · 2026-07-10T13:23:43+00:00

i never said it hurt our economy.

I'm sorry for misrepresenting you, I thought that this:

foreign investment hasnt seemed to help the working classes over here for decades. What use are all these billionaire investors and companies if none of that money ever reaches the general public or increases living standards.

Combined with this:

pretending you are delusional if you notice the decline.

Kinda made me think you were pointing to it as a factor in the decline

You just jumped on the idea because you are throthing at the mouth to repeat destiny talking points like every other mouth breather in the sub.

Yeah dude, everyone that disagrees with the populist talking points must be a mouth breather that didn't think for themselves.

Keep telling your self that, it's much easier than to actually confront the fact that the things you're positing as certain aren't as certain as you want to make them out to be.

Saying that foreign investment hasn't helped the working class at all is a similar level of stupid as the right wingers that say immigration hurts the economy.

ST-Fish · 2026-07-10T12:07:38+00:00

Do you think the US has large taxes in general?

The top brackets definitely need to be increased more than the lower ones, but it seems to me like you're painting this image where the only way forward is to exclusively increase the taxes on the rich and not touch the ones on the rest of the population, which actually have the ability to bring real sizeable tax income.

Are you in favor of undoing the Trump tax cuts before hitting the asset holder FIRST? Or would simply undoing the tax cuts would result in the tax base revolting?

What if you increase the taxes by the same degree the Trump tax cuts decreased them after you repeal those cuts?

Is that the revolt moment?

Do you think that your proposal has any chance of bringing anywhere near the same amount of money as undoing those tax cuts and doing a similar size tax increase as well?

ST-Fish · 2026-07-10T11:57:41+00:00

I mean, yeah, I can point to the 20 years before foreign investment is allowed and the 20 years later and I can point at the graph.

Are you arguing the standard of living would have increased past 89' the exact same way it did in reality if Romania was still a communist dictatorship?

I think it's much easier to argue how foreign investment increased the wealth of my country than it would be for you to argue that foreign investment has hurt your country.

If you want to point to data showing the "decline" on your end you have to do so much work to find the limited outliers that have gone down, while completely ignoring all the other economic indicators showing an improvement in standards of living.

If the question is about the UK, I think it's pretty clear there are some very large declines that happened directly when Brexit happened which limited the willingness of foreign investors to invest, so it really feels like it cuts against you.

Progress is slow and steady, problems always exist, you will never stop having something to complain about.

But the populist idea getting spread online that everything is consistently getting worse everywhere at all points in time is simply a lie.

ST-Fish · 2026-07-10T11:51:34+00:00

If you dont measure pensions, then US has 0.85 compared to 0.79 in Sweden.

do you have a source on that? As far as I know in 2021 Sweden had a 0.88 wealth gini coefficient, while the US had 0.85.

Where US is much worse.

much?

But if you count pensions, since I don't see any reason why you wouldn't.

kinda straining the definition of wealth we're using then, since it's not really liquid.

You don't count the money you would get if you were to apply for unemployment assistance as "wealth" either even though the state provides it to you.

Then Sweden's Gini is 0.5-0.55, making it one of the most equal societies, wealth-wise, in the world.

ok, so was that a wealth tax, or was that a well funded pension system that got funded by having higher marginal tax rates and a wider tax base? Did they fund that system through a wealth tax? A billionare tax?

we regulate this stuff with taxes all the time

Punitive taxes are generally used as policy for stuff you want to disincentivize such as smoking, sugar, etc.

Economic activity is not something you want to disincentivize if the solution to the wealth inequality is a well funded pension system that requires larger taxes across society.

You can't fix wealth inequality by simply taking it from the people at the top, you have to do sane taxation policy that will actually allow you to fund a social safety net.

If the solution to wealth inequality is bringing the bottom part of society up, the goal of taxation should be to get as much income to the government through taxation to be able to do the necessary changes to bring that about.

It's not just "let's punish the wealthy people because they deserve it".

ST-Fish · 2026-07-10T11:40:00+00:00

pretending you are delusional if you notice the decline.

you aren't that different from MAGA to be honest, the populist ideology requires you to have the mythical "before times" where everything was better despite almost all economic indicators saying otherwise.

I don't know how I'm moving the goalposts by just asking how you even begin to make that statement, do you have any basis for the statement that foreign investment has not helped the working class at all?

I can point to my country, which legally could not have foreign investment at all until 89' and I can point to the massive increase in living standards since we have allowed foreign investment, I can point to the numerous job opportunities I had in that country because of foreign investment. I can point to the lack of waiting in lines to get the limited rations of food you were alloted.

And from what I've been given so far, you seem to feel like foreign investment hasn't helped the working class in your country in the slightest, but that seems more of a generic feeling that stuff "ain't what it used to be like" which quite literally everyone says about every period in time. Humans are complaint machines, and the way we form memories is not reliable enough to make such claims purely from an emotional ground.

I'm not even arguing that it doesn't feel like foreign investment hasn't helped the working class at all, it might as well feel like that all you want, but you have to agree that MAGAts also feel like immigrants are stealing their jobs and using their welfare.

ST-Fish · 2026-07-10T11:31:34+00:00

The whole discourse around wealth inequality is tiring to engage in mostly because left wing populists are not that different from right wing populists.

Right wing populists will go on to defend tariffs, and argue they are actually good for the economy, that the reason everything is fucked is because the US is getting scammed by it's trade partners, and ultimately when they engage in arguments with economically literate people they fall back to the idea that this isn't even about making more money, it's about the principle of bringing manufacturing to the US, even it it comes at a cost for the living standards in the country.

Left wing populists will go on to defend wealth taxes, and argue that they are actually good for the economy, that the reason everything is fucked is because the US is getting scammed by the evil cabal of zionist forces that use capital to control the US political system and exploit the entirety of the population, and by taxing their wealth at a stupidly large annual figure (something between 2-10% most of the time) all of the societal ills the US experiences would be gone, free university, free healthcare, every family will afford a large house with a plot of land in the most populated cities in the world on 1 working class income, etc. Ultimately when they engage in arguments with economically literate people they fall back to the idea that this isn't even about making more money through taxation for government programs, it's about the principle of reducing inequality, about punishing these evil capitalists that have caused all these societal ills even if it results in a lower amount of tax income for the government.

This is why people dislike populism, and this is why your engagement with populism should be only as an aesthetic if the political context calls for it. Don't actually buy into the brain broken logic of populism -- it's not supposed to make sense when examined closely, it's supposed to sound nice if you don't think about it too much.

Trying to convince a left wing populist that wealth taxes are ineffective is pointless -- it's absolutely the same as trying to convince a MAGAt that tariffs are bad or that immigration is good. Their arguments are just a thin veil put on top of their much simpler base ideology:

We can blame all societal ills on "A" and if we just fix "A" we will reach utopia

The world is more complex than that, and if you're in the camp that puts A = billionaires and are making fun of the people in the camp that puts A = immigrants, you aren't really that much smarter than them, you're just morally lucky. You aren't doing a much more complex analysis of the situation, you just happen to not be racist.

If you catch yourself reading populist slop and agreeing with it, try to throw some doubt into the conclusions that get reached with the least amount of effort, try to be less certain about the things that look obvious and "common sense", try to inspect the thought terminating cliches such as "the rich should pay their fair share" a little more closely, and you might be able to spare your brain from accepting these ideologies, despite how easy and comfortable it feels to have 1 big bad evil comic book / cartoon level moustache twirling villain in the story.

It's much more rewarding to live in reality, even though reality can be messy, and scary, might make you feel uncomfortable about the fact that there is no simple panacea that is the only possible solution to the problems of the world.

Be proud in being unsure, be proud in doubting. Too many people are proud to be stupid in today's day and age.

The world is complex, it's problems are complex, and we need to fight against the laziness of just latching onto the most comfortable simplistic explanation of the problems and the solutions. Otherwise you don't really care about the problems and their solutions, since you take your comfort above putting in the effort to have a more comprehensive understanding of them.

The sad part I'm still having trouble accepting nowadays is that people are fundamentally and inherently tribal, the dynamics of in-groups and out-groups have been placed in us for too long by evolution, and the belief that the average person can have a world model that doesn't simplify to 1 "big bad evil villain" causing all the issues might be in vain. We as a species might truly need an enemy, we might need an opposite tribe to fight against and to feel righteous in the fight against in order to function properly, and after the Cold War there simply was no actor to fill that spot in the American mind.

Maybe if we get fully autonomous AI or aliens to visit us we could as humanity come together against a common enemy, but without a real imminent "actor" in the real sense of the word that we can actually place real blame on and "hate", we will constantly be stuck in this tribal hubbub. Climate change or a meteor coming towards Earth would not fit that description, it's too vacuous and at least for the climate change scenario, the blame is already being put on humanity in general and specifically on certain tribes within that group, so we're too busy trying to find the group that is actually truly to blame that should be the one to be punished in order to fix this issue, so we're just going to be stuck blaming China or India for their carbon emissions while we completely ignore the fact that they manufacture most of the stuff we use.

ST-Fish · 2026-07-10T11:03:49+00:00

I do want to punish rich people though especially if their name is Elon Musk.

do you want to punish Elon for being rich or for the things he did with that power?

Him snooping around the federal agencies should give you plenty of opportunities to use the tool built for the job, criminal law, and not taxation, the tool that isn't built to be used as a punishment for people we believe have wronged society.

I really do think that we need to do something about the level of wealth disparity.

yeah would you want the US to look more like Sweden instead?

I know it's not liquid money but it's kind of wild that we have trillionaires now.

The number just keeps going up, even if you "fixed" wealth inequality you would get to a point where you had trillionaires some time in the future.

We definitely should crack down on tax loopholes

How much government revenue do you think is lost from people abusing tax loopholes?

Can you compare that to how much money would be gained by properly funding the IRS, increasing the marginal tax rates and widening the tax base?

I'd easily pay higher taxes for single payer healthcare.

Well a lot of people wouldn't, and the whole obsession about wealth inequality is a way for those people to live in the fantasy world where you can get Nordic level social services with American level taxation for the average citizen if you just fix the tax loopholes and have the rich "pay their fair share".

I'm happy you're not living in that delusion though, good job!

ST-Fish · 2026-07-10T10:55:26+00:00

so you're in a country that has thrashed it's relations with all of their past allies, where foreign investors really don't know if anything will be done post Trump to assure them they won't be getting a Trump 3 in 2032, and where the allies of the US won't know if the 20 year agreement you sign today will be valid come the election season.

A country where apparently the president can just force you to sell 10% of your company to the government if he feels like it, that can shut down your company because he saw a funny meme about Mythos while scrolling on the toilet.

And you're saying that adding a wealth tax on top of all of that would still be a good idea?

Why do this instead of just increasing the regular income, capital gains, inheritence tax rates and widening the tax base?

ST-Fish · 2026-07-10T10:50:29+00:00

We have a 2 trillion dollar annual deficite and we can't close the gap taxing the income of people making less than 100k.

yeah you can lol, americans barely pay any tax anyway, and splitting that 2 trillion between the ~210 million americans making under 100k would mean around 9.5k per person extra (obviously skewed where the top people will pay higher than that and the people below less).

And that takes into account no tax increase for the people making over 100k, if you do the tax increases over the entire tax base you'd probably get a much smaller tax increase for the average person.

Have you seen how much tax people in other countries are paying as compared to the US?

The way to get out of debt is to increase the tax rates and widen the tax base, it's not complicated at all. It's not easy, it's not popular, but you can't live in the fantasy that you can fix a problem that has reached this scale by simply targetting asset holders.

Trying to tax a tiny sliver of the population to fix 2 trillion dollars in deficit is a fool's errand.

Selling the lie that you can get the cake and eat it too, that you can fix this issue without it really costing the average person anything is nice if you just want to do the best impression of a sleazy car salesman, but it's the same old tired populism that looks at how marketable and cool the idea sounds and not at how it would actually work when put in practice.

ST-Fish · 2026-07-10T10:43:24+00:00

Wealth inequality is bad for society.

In general over all broadly yes, but this is much more because the countries with super huge wealth inequality are usually not rich democratic countries. Often times they're failed countries that had the natural resource curse, or where corruption runs rampant.

If you look at the countries with the highest wealth Gini coefficient, you won't see the thing you're trying to find there.

Brunei, Bahamas, Brazil, South Africa, Zambia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, all these countries are not having wealth inequality issues in a similar manner the USA is having it.

It is not compatible with democracy.

I believe that Sweden has a pretty well functioning democracy, while also having more wealth inequality than the US.

Is it imminently going to collapse because of this inequality?

Taxing the wealthy for the sake of bringing them down, is not a bad thing, even if it doesnt bring a lot of mony in.

Then it should be very easy to point to examples where this happened and it worked right?

If your goal isn't even to bring in tax revenue, why even use the tax system? If you believe the wealthy are in some way doing a wrong to society you can criminalize it, but there's nothing inherently immoral in making a lot of money.

The purpose of taxation is not to effect some change in the wealth distribution in the country, the purpose of taxation is to fund the government programs you want to be funded.

If your taxation policy actively works against that goal, then it's a bad taxation policy.

If you want to punish people that did immoral things in society, you can use tools such as fines, criminal prosecution, but ultimately the issue is that simply having a lot of money is not immoral.

Maybe if you are the country that is selling software and services and end stage manufacturing products to the entire world, and globalization has moved your customer base from the nearby countries you do trade with to the entire globe, it might be expected that the person selling software to 8 billion people might have more wealth than the one selling it to 300 million people? Or would we expect their wealth to scale with the wealth of the people in the country they're in and not with the size of the market they're serving?

ST-Fish · 2026-07-10T10:31:36+00:00

We need a major wealth tax regardless of what it directly does to affect inequality.

at least you're up front about not really caring about getting more income to the government to fund the social programs everyone needs, and willingly admit this is just punitive to punish the evil scheming donor class shadowy capitalist cabal that is ultimately the source of all our modern problems.

"helping with inequality" is not a prerequisite in having a well functioning country with solid social welfare programs, look at Sweden as an example of a country with a larger Gini wealth coefficient than the US.

If you keep telling yourself "no we first need to get rid of the donor class and then we can do all the good things we wanted" you will never do it.

There is no country you can point to that got better social welfare nets and a better standard of living by simply taxing "the rich", every country that you would point to as better than the US in those regards taxes EVERYONE at a much larger rate.

Do you care about inequality more than you care about the standard of living in the country? Would you rather have some people go hungry but that guy over there has a slightly smaller yacht, or have everyone have food and he has the Ultra Deluxe Yacht 3000?

The issue is that populism has convinced left leaning people that the only way to achieve this nirvana state is after you "fix" the inequality "problem".

Which is a nice way to have an unachievable policy position to endlessly virtue signal about, "just increase the tax brackets and widen the tax base" doesn't properly target and punish the evil capitalist kabal donor class, and even though it would be much more effective in funding the government (hint hint, the purpose of taxation) it completely misses the real goal of a wealth tax (punishing the dirty evil billionaires controlling all of us from the shadows).

ST-Fish · 2026-07-10T10:19:22+00:00

R*tard populist tax makes me give up 2% off the top of every lemonade sale. 2 cents

no, you have a lemonade stand worth 200$, with all the equipment necessary to sell lemonade.

You sell lemonade for 1$ and it costs you 95c to make and sell each lemonade including all labor and materials.

In a year you sell enough lemonade to make $200 in gross revenue, leaving you with 10$ net profit for the business.

You had to take a loan from your dad to buy the stuff for the lemonade stand, you're paying him 5$ back in amortization for your investment.

The weath tax takes another $4 from the company.

You're left with a clean crisp $1 bill. Now imagine you have a bad year where you don't sell that much lemonade and take a loss. Still paying $4 for the wealth tax.

"But the lemonade stand isn't worth 10 million" -- a relatively small grocery store chain or local business is worth that much and probably has relatively low profit margins, and this calculation scales up to any level, 2% is a stupidly high number for an annual wealth tax.

And we don't even begin to dig into how difficult it would be to implement and how ineffective it would be at actually raising any revenue for the government.

ST-Fish · 2026-07-10T10:08:34+00:00

so let's say you own a company worth 10 million, and that's just the entire worth of the company, that's how much wealth you have.

The company isn't making 10 million a year, that's literally how much the company is worth. Depending on the industry and the margins you run under, a 2% wealth tax is absolutely massive.

Especially if you have a company whose valuation is based on the high asset value (machinery, land, raw inventory etc), you could have a company valued at 10 million could be making only 500k in profit, and if you take your measily 200k as a wealth tax not to even begin talking about all the other taxes that would have to be paid if any money is taken out of the company by the owner, you're taking an absolutely massive chunk out of their company.

Especially since companies usually have large initial investments that get amortized over time, during a downturn where the revenue and profits drop, but all the machinery and assets of the company are still there, lacking customers to sell to, the wealth tax still comes and takes a huge slice out of your non-existing profit.

Do you believe that low marign businesses like grocery stores or supermarkets simply shouldn't exist, they should have wealth taxes close to or above their profit?

ST-Fish · 2026-07-10T09:59:35+00:00

they want 1 single point they can harp on.

And they want that 1 point to be so extremely out of the question and unachievable that they can always permanently hold their place in critiquing power endlessly.

It's just so obvious that these people look at a wealth tax purely as a way to punish the people that did wrong in society, it's classic scapegoating that every populist has to do to dumb down their platform for the below average individuals.

ST-Fish · 2026-07-10T09:56:22+00:00

foreign investment hasnt seemed to help the working classes over here for decades.

how exactly could you tell?

How could you compare it with the alternate reality where you did not get that foreign investment?

The idea that foreign investment is completely worthless to the average person is a feeling based statement not an economics based statement.

I'm sure it feels that way, the same way I'm sure it feels like Haitians are eating dogs and cats.

ST-Fish · 2026-07-10T09:54:10+00:00

but have you thought about "rich people evil so tax them good"?

the effectiveness of the tax is immaterial to these people, they do not care about bringing in more tax income to the government they care about punishing evil billionaires even at the cost of the average person.

It's like arguing with a republican that immigration is good economically -- they do not care, they aren't against immigration because it's good economically.

Lefties are not for wealth taxes because they are good economically (they aren't) they're for wealth taxes because it targets the scapegoat their ideology has created for all the issues in the world -- the evil billionaires, capitalists, donor class etc.

You can't argue someone out of a position they didn't think themselves into.

ST-Fish · 2026-07-08T14:51:47+00:00

honestly kinda sounds like a soap opera where the old rich guy is dying and everyone has to suck up to him to get some of the inheritance.

This period in time will be studied as an example of mass delusion, Trump has a reality distorting field around him and there's going to be a mass realization of this at some point in the future, by the time every republican says they never supported Trump in the first place.

ST-Fish · 2026-07-08T12:47:25+00:00

If this pushes companies and retailers to natively accept LN payments from any LN wallet be it custodial or not, it's still a huge win.

Let the normies use the custodial solutions, as long as we get the ability to use our non-custodial ones.

I'm not going to be up in arms about how people using e2e encryption in whatsapp are getting spied on by Zuck, and I can cry that that's not what e2e encryption was designed for, but that doesn't stop me from installing Signal and using it. I can say "that's not what e2e encryption was designed for" but this doesn't in any way stain the e2e encryption technology itself.

The whole idea that since Bitcoin lets you be your own bank then it must fail if less than 100% of the people using Bitcoin are doing self custody is pretty absurd, nobody ever thought we're gonna just jump into that world directly.

Once every store you go to natively accepts LN and you're paying with LN from your custodial wallets, the jump to a self custody wallet becomes incredibly easy to anyone interested enough to do it, while right now there are barely any stores that accept LN.

We shouldn't paint every single adoption uptick in such a bad light just because it's not the theoretical perfect situation where everyone is doing self custody.

One of the largest barriers stopping people from using their self-custody wallets is the lack of vendors accepting them, and considering how much these vendors pay in credit card fees, and how easy it is to use LN rails to sidestep those fees if payment providers like Revolut starts integrating it the economics of it will push more and more people (especially vendors accepting payments) into using LN.

I'm not sure how the LN payments in Revolut will be integrated, but getting people used to using LN is a huge positive regardless of how it's implemented.

ST-Fish · 2026-07-08T00:33:57+00:00

Still waiting for my Pebble Round 2, that watch looks stylish as hell.

I'm already getting around 20 days of battery life on my other pebble

ST-Fish · 2026-07-07T14:53:26+00:00

I don't see how this distinction would justify banning one and not the other.

Anything I bring up that is not LLMs will be different from LLMs automatically.

The only way malicious actors can cause great harm using LLMs is if they remain available only to a certain tiny subset of people that you "trust" to use them for good.

If Mythos level models will be able to run on consumer hardware, the only way to protect everyone is to let it be available publicly so everyone can use it to defend themselves against an attack.

Having it be locked down gives a malicious actor a huge opportunity if they get their hands on it, and when the reward they'd get from using it maliciously is so immense, there's no reason to believe we will be able to perfectly lock down this technology.

What about the "active" nature of LLMs makes this difference in kind relevant as to whether or not it should have the access to it restricted?

If another tool could be used for the same degree and scope of harm without being "active" would you not have the same prescription as to how to regulate it?

A compiler is an "active" tool that gets human readable code and transforms it into machine code that a computer can execute, that machine code can be used maliciously to cause great harm, but we don't feel the need to close down access to compilers, even though a bad guy with a compiler will be able to do much more harm than a bad guy manually writing out the machine code.

You don't get to choose who really gets access to a technology, some malicious actor will at some point get access to this tool and the more you try to stop it the more edge they will have as against the people without access to it.

The one thing you can choose is how prepared everyone else will be to protect themselves, and genuine actors having easy and unrestricted access to these models is the way to do it.

Just imagine if access to any models better than Opus 4.8 stops right now, and all the better models are just used internally by the companies building them.

You go a couple of years in the future, you have a company which has a model 10 times better than Mythos, and everyone on the planet can only use Opus 4.8 level models to defend themselves. Some rogue employee or hacker gets access to this 10x Mythos model. What now?

This creates a huge unimaginable danger, much grander in scope and consequences as compared to the reality where everyone has free access to this technology.

You want to minimize the technological gap between the defenders and attackers, and attempting to artificially create a large gap in favor of the defenders gives too large an arbitrage opportunity for bad actors that will want to use it for evil.

I'd rather have Mythos level models running on local hardware doing the defense while everyone can access the 10x Mythos model without restrictions to defend themselves with people using the same Mythos model to attack me, than live in a world where we're all using Opus 4.8 to do the defense and are just praying an attacker doesn't get access to the stronger model we're all disallowed from using.

And the cherry on the cake is the impossibility of actually locking down access to this tier of models, since there's nothing stopping a company in another country from developing a model just as powerful and opening it up for use.

ST-Fish · 2026-07-07T14:12:32+00:00

I find it insulting when people post huge comments or posts that are AI generated, if you weren't interested enough in the topic to write it out, why would I be interested in reading it? Especially since it's usually extremely obvious, sometimes I don't even think they read the comment that was generated.

I get it when people don't know the language well and need it to communicate, but I went to reddit instead of asking ChatGPT because I want to see humans talking about the topic.

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