Do you consider yourself more left or right wing?

[RolStoppable]

bdbdbd said:

RolStoppable said:

We are talking about taxing people who have more money than they need. Your premise that they should keep earning as much after a tax increase as before the tax increase is inherently flawed.

If we tax people who have more money than they need, this is very marginal group and have virtually no effect on people's welfare, but they still want their wealth to generate more wealth which turns to higher prices. This is also monet they invest to prevent the earnings to lose value due to inflation. 

Since this discussion spawned based on a German survey, I'll just continue there. Right now the German state has problems to finance everything they need to spend money on, from infrastructure to military to getting their struggling economy going. They have an expected deficit in the ballpark of €80 billion for next year's budget, so the state is going to take on debt. But the only reason they have to take on debt is because the conservative party in the government refuses to raise taxes on the rich. A study has found that a wealth tax of 1% would bring in €35 billion annually in Germany, which is pretty striking. This means that taking just a measly 3% from the rich would fill the entire hole in the budget and leave some extra money too, which could be used to allow welfare programs to keep up with inflation, as opposed to the current German proposal of making no inflation-adjusted increases at all because the available money is so tight.

You are either gullible or stupid if you believe the lie that taxes on the rich will hurt the regular citizen. It's a popular lie that keeps being told by rich people every time the topic of taxing them appropriately comes up. Their motive is plain greed.

Also, the unsubstantiated hypothesis that all the rich people would raise the prices of their companies' goods quickly falls apart when there are laws against collusion and cartels. They'd lose far more money than via taxes that way.

Remember, we are talking about raising taxes on individuals, not corporations. That's a big difference. A corporation can maintain all their profit margins, because increased taxes on individuals merely mean that people in high management positions get less money out of their overall salaries. It's also incredibly bad PR for corporations if it comes out that the reason for increased prices on goods come down solely to already overpaid board members looking to earn more money for themselves, so that's yet another reason why prices of goods wouldn't go up when taxes for the rich would be increased.