Comment on ‘We deserve more’: US workers’ share of the pie dwindles
alvvayson@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months agoIt’s not just Reagan. The same is happening all over the world, including Europe. And his policies were 40 years ago. At some point, we need to own our own problems.
The real issue is that the rich people worldwide have figured out how to mostly avoid paying taxes, while the middle class bears the brunt of taxation - which prevents them from becoming wealthy - and the lower class gets nothing.
That wasn’t Reagan, it would have happened even if FDR had become an immortal vampire and had the New Deal lasted a century.
What we really need is to start taxing the rich and to greatly reduce taxation on the middle class. And we need to really get serious about it.
The US government can spend millions to track down and kill a Shepard in Syria, but they can’t find the capital gains on Jeff Bezos portfolio.
And his policies were 40 years ago. At some point, we need to own our own problems.
I’ve been echoing this online for a while now, glad to know I’m not alone. Ronald Reagan isn’t some ghost controlling the country like a Sith Lord. That fuck’s been dead for decades by now. Everytime I see someone dredge up Reagan’s name for problems we’re experiencing right now, I can only think about how the people perpetuating those problems are getting off essentially blameless.
Nobody’s arguing that he’s still pulling strings man. They’re saying he got the ball rolling. That is policies have reverberated up until this day. That he started a trend that others continued.
Reagan had one of the highest approval ratings in modern US history; he didn’t force these policies on an unwilling country and he sure as hell didn’t draft them himself. My original point still stands that blaming current problems on an administration from forty years ago is harmfully reductive. The people we should be blaming are alive today and hold seats in Congress right now. We can worry about the historiography later.
Do you feel anyone who’s blaming the Reagan policies is claiming we shouldn’t do anything about today? Are you suggesting they’re all pining for time machines? In fact I’ll go further and ask this do you really think you can address the problems of today without understanding how they began? How can you even approach economic policy reform without looking back and understanding what went wrong?
Also there’s a long long history in our world of horrible evil brutal leaders being popular at the time. So I don’t think we need to go into that absurd argument any further.
Well said, I regret that I have but one upvote to give you, PP boy.
darthelmet@lemmy.world 6 months ago
The core problem isn’t tax policy. That’s a symptom of the problem. The problem is power. Capitalists have it as an inherent property of their class. Workers can have power, but only collectively. Individual workers can’t exercise much power. Therefore, in the absence of a check to their power, capitalists use it to enhance it further.
Make people poor and dependent on employment and consumption so that they’re desperate enough to accept poor pay and working conditions.
Atomize workers so they can’t realize their collective power.
Use ownership over media and communications platforms to put out favorable propaganda and discredit those opposed to capitalist interests.
Use ~bribes~ campaign contributions to subvert democracy and shape the government to their will, such as tax policy , labor law, business and financial regulations, and imperialist foreign policy.
No lasting gains can be made for the working class while capitalists hold this power. Any policy can be watered down, repealed, or resisted by capitalists given time. There is no structural way for a system built by and for capitalist interests to reign in the power of that class.
alvvayson@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
Dude, I’m really sorry, but the 19th century sent a letter by pony express and they want their economic theory back.
There are struggling “capitalists” that own their own little manufacturing company, restaurant, hair salon or other small business.
And then there are rich as hell “workers” like Taylor Swift who have become billionaires through their own labour. She can fill football stadiums full of people willing to pay top dollar to see her perform, I simply can’t.
And I think most people don’t have a problem with Taylor being a billionaire.
But the problem arises when middle class people pay half of what they have in tax, while rich people have effective tax rates of <10%. Jeff Bezos had a five figure tax bill as he became the richest man in the world.
A million middle class Americans making $100K are still out earning Jeff by a huge margin, but they are collectively also paying way more tax than Jeff, so Jeff can keep investing his money, while those million Americans live paycheck to paycheck.
darthelmet@lemmy.world 6 months ago
These are kind of exceptions that prove the rule. Small business owners may often be workers themselves, but they also still profit from minimizing costs and maximizing revenue. They have the same incentives as any other capitalist, even if they have less ability to act on them due to lack of resources and competition keeping them in check. Even to the extent that these are more acceptable forms of capitalists, the trend in the economy for a long time has been towards consolidation and large companies putting smaller ones out of business.
Similarly, while some artists make it big, far more of them end up exploited by record labels, studios, etc. In fact even some of the successful artists have stories about their awful contracts.
There’s also the aspect of this which is that once you have enough money to invest it in significant amounts, you indirectly enter into the role of a capitalist, since the profit you derive from those stocks is the same as the profit made from the companies exploiting workers.
More to the point though, I ask you why/how they end up paying so little in taxes? Tax law didn’t fall from the sky. It isn’t just that the politicians were stupid or that most people wanted it this way. This is the result of the structure of political power in a capitalist nation.
So how do you address the problem: “Rich people don’t pay enough taxes and poorer people pay too much.” I can come up with any number of clever policies to solve our problems, but what good does that do if you can’t make the government adopt these policies?
This is why you need a theory for understanding how power is distributed, used, and perpetuated in a society. Otherwise you’re doomed to keep asking the question “Why don’t they just do this?” It’s not a new idea, but it’s still relevant.
If you disagree, I challenge you to be able to explain how we got here or how we move forward without any kind of structural critique.
alvvayson@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
You are stuck at step 1, I invite you to move on to step 2 and actually start looking at how we are gonna solve problems.
You can go back all the way to colonial times and feudal times and even earlier to discuss how societies have become less egalitarian since the invention of agriculture.
But we are here, right now and it’s best to identify the actions we can take today, for a brighter tomorrow.