Horseshoe Theory is the third dumbest political theory, behind the Laffer Curve and whatever the hell “Reganomics:” tried to be.
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I agree. All of the Right-wing triangulation from dumbfuck pundits and podcasters and red-brown alliances in the world won’t make horseshoe theory - at least in the modern sense - a useful lens for modern politics on the whole.
I won’t deny it has some uses in specific situations(ie, when discussing antisemitism, or in cases like the Nazi Party and The Black Front, which is one of the first recorded uses of the hoseshoe metaphor in that fashion), but it’s common usage as an overall theory of modern politics is pointless and often very stupid.
It’s both, along with a heavy dose of luck that comes intrinsically tied to a refusal to acknowledge the role of that luck, as is so often the case with rich Americans.
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Yeah, I’ll have to agree on the dumbness of Horseshoe Theory. However, as Greenwald has shown, there are always a few nutjobs who hangout with other nutjobs just because they’re fellow nutjobs, irregardless of their political persuasions. Are they the majority? Of course not, but there’s always going to be a few stragglers.
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These three things are all wrong, but I feel weird seeing them all put together.
Horseshoe theory strikes me as just a typical tautology fallacy. “____ extremists are the same as ____ extremists because they are extremists.” The premises add nothing to actually verify the conclusion, so the conclusions truth value depends entirely on itself. There are probably similarities between certain far whatever people, so if you want to paint the picture that they’re the same you can cherry pick whatever you want and then conflate whatever you wanted to into propaganda. If you happened to pick a true conclusion, you might still have a true conclusion, it’s just the whole horseshoe thing didn’t contribute.
Laffer curve is just an extrapolation of a very simple position (0% tax rates! 100% tax rates! Something has to happen in the middle!) while ignoring all the complex stuff… or even simple stuff like by definition efficient taxes. Or the extrinsic value added by those taxes, for example being able to track data. And on and on.
Whereas Reganomics a bundle of bullshit that I guess we’ve given a collective name to. Maybe if you had picked “trickle down economics” instead I’d categorize that as playing the same game as the Laffer curve, pick a minor truth and extrapolate it as if it were the whole picture, but Reagonomics strikes me as more the sum of all the political theater, interest groups, self-fulfilling prophecy, etc.
Don’t get me wrong, they’re all bad… but various kinds of bad?
I mean, I want 100% tax rates. I legit want a tax bracket that is 100%.
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That’s kind of why it’s only useful for a small selection of things - to use a previous example, the Black Front compared to the Nazis. The Black front were basically just the Strasserites - a truly socialist wing of the Nazi party - after the original Strasserites found themselves on the pointy end of the Night of Long Knives. It works there, because you have two groups which are, essentially, Nazis, but one is deeply right-wing genocidal facists, the other is deeply left-wing genocidal fascists. The reason it works is not because of the left-right divide, but because they’re both Genocidal fascists, they’re just approaching the same goals and beliefs from opposite angles.
It doesn’t work for politics in general, because you don’t have the same goals at the outset. There’s no horseshoe between socialists and the American right, because they want different things as a core belief. There’s no commonality there, no central goal the ends are bending toward. Sure, there might be some factions that come together over common things(Ie, Red-brown alliances, a lot of fash fucks loving chapo, Russia interference denialists like Greenwald, Talbbi and Tracey,etc basically talking the same shit as Right-wing talking heads), but when looking at the whole picture, it just doesn’t work.
Of course, if you want a truly dumb theory with zero political applicability, try Fishhook theory. It started as a joke about horseshoe thoery, but as the internet tends to do with jokes(eg, PC Master Race), pretty much immediately people started taking it seriously, and a lot of utter fucking morons treat it like a legitimate, if simple, political theory.
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Can revenue collected in that final tax bracket be redirected explicitly to a UBI? Because that would be pretty fun.
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Huey Long was big into that, for better or worse.
I’m not sure if a 100% tax bracket is a good idea, though I can’t quite say why. However, something more like a 90% tax bracket (which we have had as recently as the 1950s) is something I could more easily get behind.
A more narrow 100% tax bracket may not be a bad idea in general as well. If you’re making money in a way that isn’t contributing to the overall economy but only making you personally wealthier (e.g. profiting from hedge funds), tax all of it. If you make a ton of money by doing something like starting a company that ends up giving a lot of people good paying jobs, eh, I think you need some more leeway to keep more of what you’ve made. But, as with everything, the devil is in the details and these are both over-generalizations.
I want there to be an income cap. There’s a line above which you are unable to legally acquire more money in a single year.
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I propose income caps for people who make money outside of normal employment, like through investment, and a cap for how wide the margin can be between the highest and lowest paid employee at a company, such as the lowest paid employee must be paid at least 10% of what the highest paid employee, likely CEO, makes.
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Okay, and what is this line? What is an appropriate amount? And what are the ramifications if this is in fact set?
I get where you’re coming from, at least from a moral/ethical point of view, and I can sympathize with it to an extent. However, I think it falls flat in the light that people are, in general, greedy bastards who are only going to do stuff if it results in personal gain to them. Sadly, getting a “warm fuzzy feeling in the cockles of your heart” isn’t going to do it for most people.
An income cap on income acquired via certain methods, that I can get behind. Certain forms of capital gains, for instance, I’d be completely down with a 100% bracket on those as past a certain point all they tend to do is make wealthy individuals wealthier without any benefit to others in the economy. It’s the ultimate failure of trickle-down economic theory.
An income cap on labor, I’m not so fond of, although admittedly it’s hard to reach a huge income cap via labor, but I suppose it’s hypothetically possible.
More realistic is getting wealthy by doing things that legitimately boost the economy as a whole, provided they’re done fairly and benevolently: e.g. starting a company where you pay all your employees good, appropriate, living wages and benefits, ideally with some sort of profit sharing as well.
@Clinton’s suggestion, that he just posted, is pretty much in line with I’m in favor of. There may be some wiggle room in the details (there always is), but that’s pretty darned close.
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1MM a year. Full stop. Money above that better get a tax credit or go to a charity, or you lose it. Regardless of the source of the income.
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I want a wealth cap. Total global assets under your control, including trusts and the like from which you benefit directly, are capped at… 200MM?
Yeah, 200MM. Can’t ever have more money than that. It gets taken if it’s found. Assets get seized. Don’t like it? Give up your US citizenship.
While we’re at it, you can’t inherit more than 1MM in assets. Ever. That’s the limit.
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I like the idea of an inheritance cap. Definitely something worthwhile for many reasons and I don’t see the problems in it that would be in other caps. 1MM is way too small though. A decent middle class home in much of the country alone can be worth $500K. If you have a family farm, the value of the farm land can easily exceed 1MM. The 1MM inheritance cap won’t be hitting the super rich, which is what it should be targeted at, and potentially actually hitting a good number of average folks.
I think your income and wealth caps are too small and, in many ways, impractical, for reasons I will get to later.
The fact is, if there is an income or wealth cap, a good number (perhaps the majority) of people who are capable of exceeding it for whatever reason won’t bother, so you won’t get that money going into charity or whatever else it would normally be used for.
An extremely high tax on the highest bracket, however, at least gives some incentive for people to still try to earn money at the highest bracket. 1% of a shit ton of money is still a shit ton more than 0%.
The troubling scenario I see with an absolute, universal cap, as opposed to an extremely high but not 100%, tax rate, is the new business problem. Let’s take the example of Richard Moneybags, a rich person who hit the income and wealth caps and who only cares about two things: himself and making money. Now, you have Joe Inventor, who came up with this awesome business idea, an idea that could potentially provide hundreds, if not thousands, of people with good, high paying jobs. Joe Inventor is also a decent person in that he will make sure his employees are paid fairly with respect to how much he makes (just to rule out the scenario of Joe Inventor hogging all the spoils of his business as CEO without appropriately giving back to his employees as well). However, said business needs a lot of startup cash to get off the ground, more than he has. So he seeks out Richard Moneybags to invest in that business. Richard Moneybags, however, is already making as much as he legally can, so he has no interest in risking any of his money for 0% return on that investment. So Joe Inventor can’t start his business, and the economy as a whole is worse off.
Now, if we instead had a 99% tax instead of a 100% tax in the highest bracket, Richard Moneybags may actually be tempted to invest something as a potential 1% return would be worth his while.
Good. No human contributes that much to society or enterprise. It’s just not possible.
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That would depend on just how high said cap is. I think the numbers you gave are actually woefully small for various reasons.
They’re smaller than what Huey Long was proposing in the 1930’s (he was proposing a $5MM cap)!
I dislike making it a fixed number because the numbers will vary with inflation.
Instead, I’d like to go through the thought experiment of defining the maximum as a function of the minimum.
In part, I want people to sit down and say out loud “yes you should be able to earn 1000 times whatever the poorest person earns.” I want to see who believes what. I want them to face that, and I was us to see people facing that.
Justify your ludicrous-ass salary to me, or to the guillotine you go.
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I agree that’s a better solution than a fixed number. Defining the maximum as a function of the minimum strikes me as a far more balanced method that also encourages benefiting the economy as a whole as, for your own pay to go up, you need to make sure that those at the bottom also have their pay go up. The exact function is probably tricky to derive, but conceptually I like the gist of this idea.
I’m also in favor of a 100% wealth/income cap on earnings that result from activities that are not productive to society as a whole. If you make all your money by pushing virtual pieces of paper around at extremely high frequencies, then cap that shit. If you make your money by selling useful goods and/or services and therefore providing jobs to people who produce them, either directly or indirectly (i.e. by funding people who start companies who create those jobs, goods, and/or services), you deserve more leeway as your wealth does provide a net benefit to society and the general economy. Yeah, maybe you should be taxed at 99% once you pass a certain point, but so long as you’re still providing a net benefit, you should be able to claim some sort of reward for what you’ve done. Again, I have a lot of wiggle-room on the details here, of course.
There’s an aspect of what you are saying that keeps grating against me, and I think it’s that you are assuming the social utility of a capitalist class. Their ability to support and invest is only a function of the choice to allow them enough money instead of shifting that responsibility to another player in the economy. Small banks, community investment funds, I’m not sure, it’s not an area I know a lot about.