[mndgs]

"tax the wealth to remove about 25 trillion dollars globally." And what do you think happens once the tax is collected by the government? It is spent. And the money goes back into market, which will earn its returns and will be taxed again. Rarely a government has enough willpower to terminate the money supply collected in the form of taxes...

[lifeisstillgood]

This is one of the main points of MMT - with modern economies (and possibly ancient) there is no need to tax in order to spend. The US gov is the only one able to create more US dollars. And they can do so without taxing - they just press buttons on the Fed’s laptop and they have a billion to spend.

Of course that can easily get out of hand so, lots of controls, but those controls should, IMO, be based around how money is created and flows not around some medieval ideas about taxation.

Anyhow, the point is money should equal production capacity else it creates inflation (or stifles demand) - it eventually balances out but the pain in eventually is real.

And is governments with poor willpower a problem - yes of course. But that’s like the manager blaming their employees - they work for us you know.

[qwytw]

> And what do you think happens once the tax is collected by the government? It is spent

Well yeah, I kind of thought that was the whole goal? If we assume/believe that governments generally are capable of spending that money in a more equitable way that would benefit a larger proportion of the society (while also resulting in higher productivity growth) than allowing it to be (effectively) hoarded by the wealthy.

[lifeisstillgood]

Yea that’s kind of the point as well - Jeff Bezos is unlikely to spend much on Mississippi’s rural road network.

[lazide]

Is spending a ton of money on Mississippi’s rural road network a useful use of the money?

[lifeisstillgood]

Missippians (#) think so :-)

(#) ok, that’s a fairly low value comment that I frankly should have not clicked send on, but I just spent ages getting that one blasted word past my own spell checker, user friendly piece of shit, and realising not for the first time that typing anything on a textbox on a mobile is its own piece of hell. Sysiphus I am with you. And yeah Musisippians is probably the wrong collective noun but at this point I don’t care. Kamala and Trump will both just avoid campaigning there because their speech writers simply won’t let them.

[lazide]

Mississippi has been a reliable Republican voting block since the parties switched platforms in the 60-70’s.

So republicans don’t need to spend money there to get votes.

And even if democrats spent all that money there to ‘buy’ the vote - would it be enough to work, considering the socio-political aspects?

An argument could be made vis-a-vis gdp improvements. But are good roads good enough to drive major GDP improvements in Mississippi, considering other factors? Probably not.

[Wytwwww]

> Mississippi has been a reliable Republican voting block since the parties switched platforms in the 60-70’s.

In presidential elections? Yes. On the local level the Democrats controlled the Mississippi House of Representatives every single year until 2011 (almost the same for the Senate).

Even federally, the Democrats usually won most of the house seats (occasionally all 5 of them like in 90, 92) until 1998. Last time they won the majority was in 2010.

> So republicans don’t need to spend money there to get votes.

Only over the last ~10 or so years (and the Democrats still have 1 mostly safe seat there).

The party "switch" wasn't really a switch to such a huge extent on the local/state level. The Southern Democrats lost most of their relevance on the national level but locally the it didn't really happen until the generation that held offices in the 60s retired/died out

IMHO even nationally it wasn't even that obvious, the Democrats "abandoned" the South but the Republicans more or less just stuck to the same positions that were mostly mainstream in the party for the last 20-30 years outside of the progressive wing. On the whole even Nixon was relatively progressive and liberal by modern Republican standards (probably much too progressive considering his stances on healthcare reform and the environment).