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not_IO @lemmy.blahaj.zone

how is less budget supposed to make bureaucracy faster

78 comments

  • I wrote this on a similar post a day or two ago, so I’ll repost it here:

    There were very few people this applied to.

    The real reason is the corporate tax rate.

    It was 52%. Today it’s 21%., and it’s effectively close to zero for many corporations with the tax loopholes used to avoid taxation. Shell corporations, deferring taxes, what have you.

    So the US has lost more than 50% of the corporate taxes by % since the ‘50s.

    E: the decline in tax % is pretty closely followed by the dramatic rise in CEO compensation. The wealth being funneled to the top by cutting corporate tax got us the billionaire oligarchs we’re dealing with today.

    • Your comment is a bit misleading. Part of the point of why we need to raise the top marginal tax rate to 100% above $250,000 is because the accumulation of wealth is itself a threat to liberty and democracy. The New Deal was designed to save capitalism—the grand irony being that capitalists are so greedy they can’t even live with less in order to simply exist.

      So yes, we need to raise all sorts of tax rates to previous levels and even higher when possible, no question. We just need to understand that these are guardrails on the way to socialism in order to have real freedom and democracy after capitalism is fully abolished.

      • I said that the cutting of corporate taxes was part of the rise in CEO compensation that led to us having oligarchs.

        That’s accumulation of wealth. There is nothing misleading about what I said. Both can exist at the same time, but cutting the corporate taxes is by far the greater loss to federal tax vs the relatively few billionaires.

    • The top-tier tax bracket motivated businesses to increase their spending. When the IRS is going to take 91% of any additional profits you are going to make, it is better for you to spend that money on tax-deductible "business expenses" than to keep those excess profits.

      Those "business expenses" are someone else's paycheck, so even if they were bullshit, they were a benefit to society.

      Now, they just take those profits, invest them, and expect the economy to return more money to them than they put in. They converted that money from someone's paycheck into a debt owed back to them.

78 comments