Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds

Welcome to the late-stage capitalism.

Unless capitalists start paying the same tax rate as W2 workers, the inequality will continue to favor capitalist class and exploit the worker class.

This will not happen until the working class wakes up and demands to lower W2 wages massively and simultaneously tax everything and everyone who has been evading and decreasing their corporate/ultra high net worth taxes thus far. Every single loophole must be chased and closed leaving only a standard deduction

> Unless capitalists start paying the same tax rate as W2 workers, the inequality will continue to favor capitalist class and exploit the worker class.

I wanted to do a snarky "fixed that" comment where I crossed out everything before "the inequality will continue," but actually I'm curious now: capitalism fans (which includes liberals), do you genuinely believe you can have capitalism in a way where the inequality doesn't continue to favor the capitalist class? So long as power can be purchased with capital, how could this ever not be the case?

Should we chase equality for everything? Or should we ensure basic rights are guaranteed and let everyone do as they prefer?

The only equality on paper we chase is before the law, everything else is up to luck and decisions.

>The only equality on paper we chase is before the law

When have the rich ever been held to the same standards as the average American?

I think we should avoid extreme inequality. We should talk distributions not "equality" vs "everything else".

Hence why I said on paper.

The most prosperous moment of the USA was when rich people paid 97% of their income in taxes.

I would change that to extreme poverty. There should be a guaranteed minimum standard of living which is humane, basically access to food, housing, education and health. After that, is up to every individual.

I remember a previous discussion here about ozempic, and how one commenter was asking how to force his father to become healthy, as it was using ozempic as a crutch and leaning back to it when he needed to, while going back to his vices (smoking, drinking, being overweight by eating junk food). The answer was, unless you remove his self agency or can convince him so he does it himself, he won’t change.

The highest marginal tax rate in the US was 94% in the mid 1940s, and that doesn’t even mean people were paying 94% of their income to taxes. If you look at federal revenue as a percentage of GDP in decade intervals, starting from 1944, you’ll find that the ratio hasn’t changed much since then [1]. Funny enough, it has actually crept slightly upward.

1. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S

Thanks for the 94% correction. But there is no need for the percentage of GDP to increase, it's only enough that the richer pay more, so less will be payed by the lower classes. Not only that, but a reduction in loopholes is also needed. The goal is not to prevent people from making more but to prevent concentration of wealth, so we need to make it harder and harder for huge fortunes to accumulate instead of supporting it.

While I would like that as well, I think inequality is easier to define than poverty (for inequality you can consider only wealth and income), easier to explain and easier to act on.

I think that even two like-minded people can spend too much time talking about what exactly is "basically access to food, housing, education and health", before doing anything.

> I think inequality is easier to define than poverty (for inequality you can consider only wealth and income), easier to explain and easier to act on.

Au contraire, I think inequality while easy to define is hard to act on, and it also merits the question if you should act at all, we have seen several experiments on forcing equality and millions died.

Defining food, housing, education and health is not hard. We have guidelines on being healthy already, so you need access to preventive care to do so. Education you would just need easier/less onerous access to university education. Food requires a change of culture, which has been happening over the past 20 years. Housing, at least a studio place should be enough.

> we have seen several experiments on forcing equality and millions died.

I've not heard of this. Which experiments "forced equality" and then as a result caused millions of deaths?

I'm aware of the experiment of capitalism failing in India to the tune of about 100 million dead, is that what you mean? With capitalism's attempts to equalize through meritocracy?

URSS, Mao's china, other communist regimes throughout the 20th century. Capitalism doesn't equalize, it tries to maximize.

They used equality as a rhetorical pretext for empowering a different narrow elite that the one than the revolutionary cadre replaced.

Weird though that every time the same thing ended up happening.

USSR and Maoist PRC indeed took actions that killed millions, but so did capitalist India or mercantilist Britain or hegemonic America. I don't see a correlation between "forcing equality," which I'm not really even sure those regimes did (since Party members were clearly unequal in their power and quality of life), and the deaths. Just politics.