Democratic Socialism in the U.S and How to Pay for It?

[Torrocca]

Thanks for making it known you didn't check your source in depth there :^)



See how it says, "USD," in there, implying a conversion of units? Because I sure did.

Yeah, somehow Zimbabwe has the lowest individual living cost when Egypt has it at $2, 3/4ths less than Zimbabwe. Would you mind putting effort on your arguments and stop this intellectual dishonesty?

Sure, I'll admit to that error, so long as you admit you lied about people being able to live a decent life in most of those countries there on $1-$2 a day.

[Costa Fierro]

40% is too low an income tax.

40% is on the higher end of the income tax for developed countries and the OECD. Where I live, the maximum tax rate is 33%.

Corporation tax is the key - too low for a start, and even then multinational corporations find it so easy to weasel their way out of paying it it's essentially a 'please pay us' sticker with no real enforcement behind it.

Which would mean closing loopholes in the US and US territories and actually enforcing tax collection. Something which Congress will gawp at.

There is also zero reason a functioning public healthcare system should cost 14x the US government's revenue, that's a ludicrous figure. It could even be done without instituting any of these reforms; the US already spends more of its GDP on healthcare than most countries with public healthcare systems.

Because the predictions are based on worst-case scenarios.

[Great Minarchistan]

Define "a good life" lol

Financially comfy

I'd be interested to see you head somewhere like these countries and try living on $2.50/day, just to tell us how it is, since you say you can live such a wonderful life or whatever lol

Considering Egypt's situation (PPP disparity of 25x as per the difference between US living wage and Egypt living wage), it'd be akin to living in the US with $1900 a month, per person.

[Thermodolia]

Thanks for making it known you didn't check your source in depth there :^)



See how it says, "USD," in there, implying a conversion of units? Because I sure did.

Yeah, somehow Zimbabwe has the lowest individual living cost when Egypt has it at $2, 3/4ths less than Zimbabwe. Would you mind putting effort on your arguments and stop this intellectual dishonesty?

You have proof of this yes?

[Washington Resistance Army]

I’m sure that laissez-faire capitalism and neo liberalism is better lol

Well, apparently the "neoliberal capitalist" America has survived the Armageddon of automation ever since 1950s without any changes on the consistently of the job market

Automation in the 50's is not comparable to the upcoming wave of automation, something like 40% of jobs are at risk of being replaced lol

[Great Minarchistan]

Sure, I'll admit to that error, so long as you admit you lied about people being able to live a decent life in most of those countries there on $1-$2 a day.

Sorry, I don't commit to corruption in order to trade arguments :^)

And I wasn't wrong, let's take a random example on the family living wage in Africa: Togo. It's in the order of 235000 XOF/mo., which converts to $413 a month. Take the average family size in Togo -- 4.5 births per woman + 1.5-2 parents -- and you get it to $2.30/day. That's for a living wage.

[Great Minarchistan]

You have proof of this yes?

Search "1100 EGP to USD", divide by 30 to get a daily basis.

[US-SSR]

Our own president brags how he’d avoid paying as much taxes as possible

Thats because taxation is theft.

No, property is theft, taxation is reparation.

[Great Minarchistan]

Automation in the 50's is not comparable to the upcoming wave of automation, something like 40% of jobs are at risk of being replaced lol

The growth on the density of machinery per unit of labor (i.e. a proxy of automation) has been on a constant long-term pace ever since that period. And within the last 60ish years, such density has increased by about 300%.

[Torrocca]

Sure, I'll admit to that error, so long as you admit you lied about people being able to live a decent life in most of those countries there on $1-$2 a day.

Sorry, I don't commit to corruption in order to trade arguments :^)

And I wasn't wrong, let's take a random example on the family living wage in Africa: Togo. It's in the order of 235000 XOF/mo., which converts to $413 a month. Take the average family size in Togo -- 4.5 births per woman + 1.5-2 parents -- and you get it to $2.30/day. That's for a living wage.

Togo wasn't on the list, so it doesn't count :^)))

[Unstoppable Empire of Doom]

Pointless thread. The left answers and the right says "no raising taxes or shifting funding and the absurd price gauging must remain!!!!!!"

Fine.

The US will use it's bloated military to invade countries and loot everything of value that isn't nailed down. Even the fucking credit cards. Between gold reserves and the prisoners we will ransom there should be enough for a few years.

/Thread

[Washington Resistance Army]

Pointless thread. The left answers and the right says "no raising taxes or shifting funding!!!!!!"

Fine.

The US will use it's bloated military to invade countries and loot everything of value that isn't nailed down. Even the fucking credit cards. Between gold reserves and the prisoners we will ransom there should be enough for a few years.

/Thread

That's actually not a bad idea

[Torrocca]

Pointless thread. The left answers and the right says "no raising taxes or shifting funding!!!!!!"

Fine.

The US will use it's bloated military to invade countries and loot everything of value that isn't nailed down. Even the fucking credit cards. Between gold reserves and the prisoners we will ransom there should be enough for a few years.

/Thread

o shit we vikings now

[Thermodolia]

A lot of rich people are corrupt yes. So what.

[insert vague statement that doesn't mean anything]
Your claim is as valid as saying that a lot of poor people are poor because of their own life choices.

I think you are getting me and another poster confused.

A lot of rich people are crooked and corrupt. I really don’t care that they are corrupt and crooked that doesn’t bother me at all.

I’m sure that laissez-faire capitalism and neo liberalism is better lol

Well, apparently the "neoliberal capitalist" America has survived the Armageddon of automation ever since 1950s without any changes on the consistently of the job market

The US went neo-liberal in the 70s and 80s. And ever since it’s been pretty shit. Having people having to work three jobs just to feed themselves isn’t exactly success. Neither is the fact that people aren’t buying homes as they used too anymore

And while the US was capitalist in 1940-1969 it was also very different from now. It would have been closer to many modern day European nations. Hell the tax rate under Ike was very high. Basically the US is not and has never been a laisséz-faire Capitalist state

[Thermodolia]

You have proof of this yes?

Search "1100 EGP to USD", divide by 30 to get a daily basis.

A link or a picture will do. I don’t trust your word

[Thermodolia]

Pointless thread. The left answers and the right says "no raising taxes or shifting funding!!!!!!"

Fine.

The US will use it's bloated military to invade countries and loot everything of value that isn't nailed down. Even the fucking credit cards. Between gold reserves and the prisoners we will ransom there should be enough for a few years.

/Thread

o shit we vikings now

Prepare yo butts Europe!

[New haven america]

Yeah, somehow Zimbabwe has the lowest individual living cost when Egypt has it at $2, 3/4ths less than Zimbabwe. Would you mind putting effort on your arguments and stop this intellectual dishonesty?

You have proof of this yes?

They're lying.

Their own source says that Egypt (The richest country in Africa, btw) has reached an all time high of 2580 EGP as a living wage per month, which converts to $144.48, so $4.82 a day. (144.48/30=4.8167, round up the 1)

[Thanatttynia]

Only if you think coming into any wealth at all that you don't inherit qualifies as earning it.

TIL that being smart is bad

Yes, that is the point I was making

At his level, pretty much.

So a morally ideal system is one who has people stuck on poverty due to low economic efficiency and widespread malinvestments, hooray

No, a morally ideal system is one in which poverty is non-existent because economic inequality has been reduced to negligible levels.

You're trying to compare economics and ethics. Ethics and capitalism don't mix well, granted.

This can be said to socialism, anarchism, fascism and any other proponent of another economic system. So it's not an individual quality to capitalism.

Ethics and capitalism don't mix well.

I'm not saying Bezos doesn't know how to further his own aims under capitalism, he evidently does. What I'm saying is that that is unethical.

til that expanding job creation and wealth generation is bad

Again with the strawman! Hitting it out of the park here buddy

Lol in a world where children are dying... one man exploits labour on a scale no one has seen before...

What an exploitative country, where child mortality has been reduced by 90% over less than a century!

What's the correlation between exploitation and child mortality pls?

If you sincerely believe being 'an entrepreneurial genius' means you deserve to be this obscenely wealthy whilst concurrently people are dying because they do not have enough money to live then I don't know what to tell you other than that your morality is way off

Bezos has his whole money invested, which contributes to create jobs. Can't see how contributing to social progress while being rich is obscene.

It's obscene because, as I keep repeating and you keep ignoring, there are people in this world who are dying because they do not have enough money. Having this much money whilst that is happening is morally indefensible. Having an economic system which encourages such stark inequality is even more indefensible.

Even by the rules of neoliberal capitalism they're particularly exploitative and unscrupulous.

[insert vague loaded statement that doesn't mean anything at all]

Lol if you don't understand something you can always ask. Making snarky comments and ignoring my points isn't helping your case here

They rely on their size to underprice other competitors

Size doesn't mean everything, especially when factoring economies of scale and the fact that they represent only 40% of e-commerce and a minuscule 5% of total retail.

[insert unrelated statistics to obfuscate the fact that they underprice other competitors]
Size does mean everything, unfortunately. The brand of unfettered capitalism the world has been hooked on for decades incentivises monopolies. If you are big enough to take an economic hit, you can easily capture entire market (e.g. books) and leave your smaller competitors to die; you end up with an effective monopoly once that process is done, and then you can push up prices and push down expenditure as much as you want.

they dodge taxes

Their profit isn't even large enough to cut for a corporate tax, but of course it's dodging if they're abiding taxation laws

Their engineering profits to be low is dodging taxes. This riff on how capitalism should work is representative of the wider attitude they have which has allowed them to be so successful. It's really quite something if you ignore all the human misery that that attitude has caused.

and, yes, they underpay and overwork their workers.

Then why don't their workers move elsewhere? Especially under a period where unemployment for unskilled people has been near 5%, long term (>27 weeks) probably at 1.5 or 2% and job vacancies are popping up everywhere.

I couldn't tell you that, but you should stop shifting the blame for their being underpaid and overworked on to the workers themselves. They underpay and overwork their workers, those are the facts.

I could go on but I think your love for Bezos is clouding your judgment over what are and what aren't morally acceptable things to do.

Your ideal of the "simple poor man" just makes your judgment hazy enough for you to ignore the fact that he himself was raised straight out of poverty. You claim to be for social progress but you despise the model of individual that becomes successful through it.

You're attacking a belief I don't hold. I respect Bezos for being smart enough to overcome personal challenges; simultaneously I understand that it is unethical to be a billionaire whilst there are people dying because they do not have enough money. As for this supposed ideal, I have no idea where you got that from. If people weren't literally dying in poverty all the time, I think we would be a lot closer to real social progress than we are now, where one person out of a million manages to make something of themselves in extremely testing circumstances.

[Torrocca]

Well, apparently the "neoliberal capitalist" America has survived the Armageddon of automation ever since 1950s without any changes on the consistently of the job market

The US went neo-liberal in the 70s and 80s. And ever since it’s been pretty shit. Having people having to work three jobs just to feed themselves isn’t exactly success. Neither is the fact that people aren’t buying homes as they used too anymore

And while the US was capitalist in 1940-1969 it was also very different from now. It would have been closer to many modern day European nations. Hell the tax rate under Ike was very high. Basically the US is not and has never been a laisséz-faire Capitalist state

Also before 1865, plenty of the USA had Individual Anarchism tendencies in regards to subsistence/small-scale farms and self-managed peasant mercantilism. We were more Libertarian then than we've ever been since.

[Thermodolia]

The US went neo-liberal in the 70s and 80s. And ever since it’s been pretty shit. Having people having to work three jobs just to feed themselves isn’t exactly success. Neither is the fact that people aren’t buying homes as they used too anymore

And while the US was capitalist in 1940-1969 it was also very different from now. It would have been closer to many modern day European nations. Hell the tax rate under Ike was very high. Basically the US is not and has never been a laisséz-faire Capitalist state

Also before 1865, plenty of the USA had Individual Anarchism tendencies in regards to subsistence/small-scale farms and self-managed peasant mercantilism. We were more Libertarian then than we've ever been since.

And automation destroyed that.

[Torrocca]

Also before 1865, plenty of the USA had Individual Anarchism tendencies in regards to subsistence/small-scale farms and self-managed peasant mercantilism. We were more Libertarian then than we've ever been since.

And automation destroyed that.

Well, not automation really but industrialization and the fact that mass-production cheapened prices for a factory owner compared to a countryside family laboring to make the same product.

Still a shame though in that regard.

[Kramanica]

When was this?

In the 30s. :c

No, I mean when did I have pro-Franco talk lol

[Kramanica]

Because I don't believe it's the catch-all solution to our problems like you do.

No, I don't either. However, I think this underused source of money (rich people) could be a welcome contribution to the problem: 'democratic socialism' in the U.S. and how to pay for it.

"Underused"

They pay most income taxes in this country.

[Torrocca]

In the 30s. :c

No, I mean when did I have pro-Franco talk lol

Oh no I was just pointing out the NatSynd part is also pro-Franco lol

[New haven america]

No, I don't either. However, I think this underused source of money (rich people) could be a welcome contribution to the problem: 'democratic socialism' in the U.S. and how to pay for it.

"Underused"

They pay most income taxes in this country.

And yet they're still not paying enough.