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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • IMO the most valid argument is that there are way more people making a middling income than people making a high income, so any reduction in taxes for those people would need a proportionally much larger increase in the upper brackets to maintain the same level of tax revenue, if it’s possible to make the numbers work at all depending on how much of a tax break you want to give. The minimum amount to be taxed is set based on where the tail end of the bell curve is, the number of people who are poor enough not to be taxed is small.

    Of course there’s also the fact that the richest people don’t get their money from having a job at all, it’s all in investments, so messing with income tax rates doesn’t even affect them.


  • But I think the point is, the OP meme is wrong to try painting this as some kind of society-wide psychological pathology, when it’s rather business people coming up with simple reliable formulas to make money. The space of possible products people could want is large, and this choice isn’t only about what people want, but what will get attention. People will readily pay attention to and discuss with others something they already have a connection to in a way they wouldn’t with some new thing, even if they would rather have something new.


  • The biggest reason that is often overlooked is wealth inequality. The rich keep accumulating wealth, and real estate is a scarce form of wealth that holds value, produces a return, and can be accumulated. It probably accelerated recently because of the large amount of money that was dumped into the system around covid; that was yet another opportunity for the wealthy to grab a bigger share of the pie.

    If things keep going this way, we’re going to get into a situation where regular people don’t own houses anymore, and rent is a much larger percentage of your income.