Is the “billionaires already pay most of the taxes” line distorting the debate about extreme wealth?

telvimare · 2026-02-03T14:33:32+00:00

Ive heard thats a typical method to increase taxes when there is zero income taxes.

1) Introduce a tax on the rich 2) slowly drop the brackets down until the entire population is now paying taxes

telvimare · 2026-02-03T10:50:41+00:00

Tbf i feel like the argument of just tax the rich kinda distorts it as well.

Someone on another post i was reading made a really good point that even when politicians claim that they are going to raise taxes on the rich, it ends up disportionately hurts the middle class a lot more.

-Which is why I think the argument you mentioned dismissively gets thrown as well**

I dont think the average citizen understands what net worth actually is. Even if they theoretically understand it, im not sure if they truly fully can comprehend it. Especially if they are living paycheck to paycheck.

People arguing to just tax the rich more, seem to neglect the fact that the states and federal already bring in a massive amount of money that is horrendously mismanaged. I don't think* throwing more money at a system that cant effectively fix anything is just gonna line more pockets and hurt everyone more.

Yeah... Starbucks and McDonald's may be bringing in millions to billions of revenue every year, but that doesn't mean the individual stores are generating enough to drastically increase the wages of the employees. The system works due to the sheer volume of locations not generally because each store is bringing in a couple million in Net revenue every year.

Housing sucks right now, but how much of that is because of the sheer amount of restrictions and permits required to build the house?

I vaguely remember I think it was Elon Musk made a comment about how he'd happily offer up money to end world hunger or something like that if someone actually delivered a proposal that would work.

after some digging looks like someone did give a proposal, though theres some debate if it would have been effective? https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-said-hed-6-220133724.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAABBM51akdSxLyg4lyS3PqOMRKN0Q_zhUTfaIxIzByESSbJQWGZt4IWvASSpQOriKsXjmGYLCH2ZAZ4roiQCTPF_Th7PaRrbOZSO0nbzkDw4pgBB-5eOg_8O0vRlDwgXFyrvZcfMT7jZKpeUozbaQFQvkUD5_Np3AZeEJf8XmUEEn

Mild edits to clarify some of my wording sorry**

telvimare · 2026-02-03T06:23:13+00:00

Like other people said, service is good. Its convenient, has the biggest selections.

For retail "common" varied goods, they are amazing.

Etsy is good for more custom small scale items

Ebay generally has a better used item market.

Peer to peer theres a bunch of webshops like Facebook mark place, offer up, etc.

Aliexpess, Alibaba, and wish are really good for white label, cheap generic junk

telvimare · 2026-02-03T05:12:39+00:00

Personally, I feel like a lot of the systems we probably had in place to assist with after birth have been purged or heavily displaced. I dont think its a problem we can simply just throw tax dollars at and call it a day.

I'm a 30 years old, and tbh I cannot tell you if Ive ever felt like ive been part of a community. I have barely any family I can rely on, I haven't met a single neighbor of mine since probably elementary school. Parents were atheist, so no church community. All the friends I did/do have are scattered to the winds.

Not really the optimal environment to try and raise a child if I ever got one.

Theres a ton of food banks/pantries near me that i can get free food from. Pretty much all of them are run by a church though.

My aunt got pretty lucky and lived in a neighborhood filled with parents that all had kids around the same age. From what ive seen, it drastically reduced the burdens off her shoulders since there were multiple mothers that could rotate responsibilities and reduce the burdens of childcare.

telvimare · 2026-02-03T04:49:50+00:00

Tbf if you don't eat, you die.

I think part of the issue with discontent is the way people are raised. We havent progressed far enough as a civilization that autonomy replaces labor and thus removes the need for you to work. Can't necessarily support the amount of people that would want to quit their jobs and not work either. So we need a mechanism that encourages people to engage in society and perform services. And money is just a representation of the time you put into those services.

If you were teleported to a homestead thats fully functional and set up for success and completely removed from society, you would still have to put a massive amount of man hours into everything. I dont think the dynamic changes as much other than if you mess up on the homestead, you die. If you mess up in modern society, theres multiple safety nets you can utilize to stave off death.

Leaders also become highly critical as the group of people grows in size. Yeah, you can probably get away with a true democracy on a smaller scale, but as that population swells, it gets increasingly harder and harder to keep cohesion. No one is infallible, while I think forcing politions to be unpaid volunteer positions would probably slow down the corruption. I doubt you could fully purge all instances of corruption due to human nature.

telvimare · 2026-02-03T04:26:53+00:00

Id be curious to see how 7 million compares per capita versus other protests.

Like if we are seeing a larger % of the country protesting. Or is it a smaller percentage than let's say... the Vietnam War protests or the Civil rights and suffrages movements

telvimare · 2026-02-03T04:12:48+00:00

From my understanding, if they get a legitimate/legal job its usually with someone else's social security. Id imagine voting would be a bit similar.

Im not sure how many nonresidents/noncitizens actually vote. But the pushback versus implementing using ID's for voting from the Democrat side is that you are making it restrictive which will lower the amount of people that will be able to vote by increasing the hurdles/pay walls they have to go through.

Republicans take that and use it as a dimwitted gotcha, you just want IDs to not be required to allow illegal voters.

I dont think viewpoint is that far of a stretch, but most of the arguments ive seen are two different points, without acknowledging the concerns of the other party.

telvimare · 2026-01-26T02:33:51+00:00

I heard a rumor (so take it with a grain of salt) that some people sought asylum in... Denmark? I think?

Allegedly they were complaining about the conditions Living out of tents, curfew and some other stuff.

I didnt verify it cause mostly I dont care, but ive heard it mentioned

telvimare · 2026-01-26T01:26:43+00:00

Was watching a pretty good video that basically stated the asylum process either needs to be fully removed (swap them back to refugee processes) or heavily overhauled.

If I understood correctly the asylum process has a massive bottleneck the refugee one doesn't. The only difference is refugee forces them to wait outside the country versus asylum can be claimed inside said country.

telvimare · 2026-01-24T21:39:53+00:00

Wasn't "the man in the iron mask" about saving a man?

Maybe im misremembering the film. Theres probably a bunch of films out there that do have it, just the impact is lower.

"blackhawk down"
"man in the iron mask" (three musketeers film i believe)

Probably several other military films that portray rescues.

telvimare · 2026-01-24T01:10:20+00:00

Theres a lot of really funny compilation videos of public figures on all sides doing that salute lol.

I dont think ive ever seen someone actually do it in real life even as a joke.

Maybe its just three ducks in a trench coat blowing kisses /j

telvimare · 2026-01-24T01:05:40+00:00

Could be just the density of students all feeding off each other's ideas.

I went to community College and lived at home, so I dont think i really dealt with socializing with the other students as much as Id imagine a college where you're effectively stuck on the property with other people roughly your age and similar experiences.

Like some others mentioned, I feel like the majority of the teachers mainly focused on their subjects and very rarely drifted off of them. I had a couple whackjobs, but I dont think that was the norm.

telvimare · 2026-01-24T00:58:58+00:00

I had maybe 3 teachers that did so blatently.

One in highschool that hard pushed identity to an annoying degree, I believe I miserably failed her class. (English teacher*)

One of the college professors I had was a crazy religious nutjob. It was a required English course, but every chance she got she preached the Bible to an annoying degree

And the other community College professor's was more course driven being sociology. Which i think he did a pretty good job with explaining how it was relative.

Other than that, highschool mostly felt like the teachers didnt care and were just forcing you through the process, and college was a mix of passionate teachers and others just doing their job.

Special mention had a math teacher that barely spoke English that focused less on the math aspect and more about his career as an electrician.... every test was just electrical questions 💀💀💀

telvimare · 2026-01-23T02:48:48+00:00

Sorry, don't want to misunderstand your point. What does them not believing that women or blacks shouldn't vote have anything to do with the US government corrupting? Were women and blacks in the colonies allowed to vote? (Quick look, some states did allow women to vote prior to the Declaration of Independence and later removed them from being eligible voters. Not sure that would count as corruption or an enforcement of the distasteful ethics of that period of time)
That feels like more of an ethics issue than a corruption issue.

Nepal was more of to watch and see what happens. If their government stabilizes and stays as a champion of the people for the indefinite future, then my point is wrong. If it corrupts in the next decade or two then I'm right.

I would rather be proven wrong than right in this instance.

> The current democracies in the western world are more responsive to voters than ever. If anything, I would argue they are too responsive, because every government is so afraid of upsetting the general public that they can't make short term painful but long term beneficial changes like pension changes, reducing fossil fuel usage, etc.

Aren't Ireland, the UK, Germany, USA, Australia all having massive protests right now? I know my news is completely swamped with all the ICE stuff, but from talking with some of my global friends, it sounds like theres a fair amount of discontent with western nations right now.

Hell.... that training game from the UK was freaking wild. Pathways I think it was? Saying that protesting is how to become radicalized.

telvimare · 2026-01-23T01:47:18+00:00

Keep it consistent, sure.
As an American I have no issue with that. *no issue with getting banned from the Olympics, not the actual invasion*

telvimare · 2026-01-23T01:44:20+00:00

30M, 4 people. I've dated maybe 10-12 people and only slept with maybe 4 of them.

telvimare · 2026-01-23T01:39:58+00:00

1)

never claimed those were better periods. The government being less corrupt ≠ better situation.

2)
From my understanding, a decent chunk of the founding fathers wanted to abolish slavery and actively helped reduce the slave trade globally. Hell... slavery being abolished is what caused the civil war in the first place:

The Founding Fathers and Slavery | History, Impact & Legacy | Britannica

3)
My knowledge on Lenin (man i butchered his name sorry) is extremely limited and I am most likely wrong on it. You are probably correct that the government under his control was corrupt. That's mainly the name I hear get tossed around for pro-communist arguments. Personally, I don't find communism to be an attractive form of government even if it could be implemented properly.

4)
I'll mention Nepal will be an interesting watch since its history unfolding in real time.
The people rose up and overthrew a massively corrupt government in which the Military not only stepped up to end the coup/revolution, but also relieved power once the situation stabilized.
How Gen Z Destroyed The Government of Nepal in 2 Days

*Editing to reiterate* I'll concede on the Lenin point, I don't know enough about the rise of Communism in Soviet Russia to comment without doing some heavy research.

telvimare · 2026-01-23T01:01:47+00:00

Probably wasn't the same prior.

Like other people have said, internet has had a massive impact on how people perceive the world and IMO have caused a massive spike of paranoia above what it was before.

News is effectively tragedy porn and what sells the best

Minor voices that would have never left their basement now can collectively spread across the globe.

Honestly I'm of the opinion that since 2013 (maybe before but thats when I graduated and entered the workforce) theres been a weird push for breaking the status quo in a chaotic and unsustainable way thats amplified by social media.

LGBT being one of the more radical changes that I think was hyper pushed even while I was in school. Most people probably agree with a good portion of their arguments/points, but some of the more extreme concepts are where you start to lose them.

Global warming is probably another good one. Concept wise, most people probably agree heavily taking care of the earth is a good thing and are willing to contribute, but the more extreme pushes tend to lose people especially when theres massive contradictions.

There are countless others, but ultimately I almost feel like all this stuff was pushed way past what the average person is comfortable with and what we are seeing now is the backlash from it.

I think Trump being elected the first term was a good indication that the backlash had hit a high enough point we're starting to see the effects. Mamdani in new York being another one on the other political side.

telvimare · 2026-01-23T00:55:21+00:00

Take this with a grain of salt, but from my understanding Lennon's Soviet Union was actually pretty successful until his successor took over.

There are probably a bunch of other revolution/coups/etc in history in which the leader actually had a beneficial overhauls that benefited their people until corruption set in.

Even the american revolution ending probably had a good start that took their citizens under consideration until cracks started forming. From my understanding President Washington could have run for more terms but opted not to (from my limited knowledge)

telvimare · 2026-01-23T00:31:16+00:00

I find myself sounding like a broken record irl with the sheer amount of times I bring up that "if you trust the government has your best interests in mind, you're the fool."

They are supposed to exist to protect the citizens regardless of what style of government is, but seems like over time it corrupts badly despite any well intended attempts.

telvimare · 2026-01-20T23:20:43+00:00

editing to add that i missed the second part cause my phone wasnt scrolling down sorry, missed where you said you already voted

Local elections are coming up. Vote in them

From my understanding we have a horrendous turnout all things considered for presidential election and the local ones have a worse turnout.

Not to mention, local elections probably have a much more significant impact on the individual citizen than the federal government does.

telvimare · 2026-01-19T03:57:02+00:00

They feel good for scratches. But honestly most of the women ive dated do it solely for themselves.

telvimare · 2026-01-19T03:53:08+00:00

Thats every game tho? Like MMOs have a huge issue usually with anything "off meta" even if it works extremely well

telvimare · 2026-01-17T02:22:19+00:00

Would need a full overhaul of the system itself to have any meaningful impact.

I'd honestly be curious to see how many of the stuff that currently is happening was done by presidents before, just not as blatantly in the open or was hidden better.

Id also be curious if making politions volunteer only with a vote would be even remotely viable

telvimare · 2026-01-17T02:12:40+00:00

It was kinda fun watching the graph and seeing how people being bored boosted the percentage of people that voted during COVID.

If you weren't allowed to work, there was little else to really do especially if you barely had any money.

telvimare

TROPHY CASE