[AnthonyMouse]

> Americans have allowed the rich to become too wealthy.

This consistently happens in a very specific way. A corporation that dominates a concentrated market becomes excessively large, which makes its early shareholders billionaires.

In other words, if you want to change this, you need to enforce antitrust laws and break up large corporations.

[nielsbot]

As well as tax like we used to in the 50s. (Ok, we can argue about the specifics, but you get the idea)

[actionfromafar]

Yeah, the regressives (can't call them conservatives anymore with a straight face) never want to go back to that part of the 50s, for some odd reason.

[account42]

This othersideism helps no one. Your beloved democrats haven't squat to reign in big tech either.

[actionfromafar]

What should we do? Where do we go from here?

[AnthonyMouse]

Stop trying to pretend that higher taxes on Larry Page or the estate of Steve Jobs would change the size of Google or Apple and instead break them up.

[nielsbot]

We can (in theory) do both.

[bpt3]

Look at the effective tax rates and get back to me.

You have a lot of thoughts on something you know very little about.

[nielsbot]

Are you're saying nominal tax rates have no correlation to effective tax rates? (Also, I am in favor of closing tax loopholes.)

[JumpCrisscross]

> you're saying nominal tax rates have no correlation to effective tax rates?

For the rich, yes. Across societies. Despotic regimes have ridiculously high nominal tax rates because they just steal stuff, but that only applies to the poor.

[bpt3]

No, I'm saying that the marginal rates you're salivating over produced effective rates on the highest earners that weren't much different from today.

[AnthonyMouse]

It seems like I post this graph here a lot. Federal receipts as a percent of GDP:

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

Basically flat since WWII, despite significant growth in GDP per capita, and before that it was lower.

The high marginal rates in the mid-20th century were fictional because at the time there were so many loopholes that nobody actually paid them. If you think there are a lot of loopholes now, you have no idea. When the marginal rates were lowered, enough of the loopholes were closed at the same time that if you tried to guess when it happened by looking at that graph, you wouldn't be able to tell.

Also, some of the loopholes are still there, but what does that imply for the theory that lower rates are the relevant change? When Richie Rich (or Microsoft) is claiming no taxable income, 60% of nothing is the same as 20% of nothing.

But if that isn't the change, what is? Well, in 1995 the largest company by market cap was GE at ~$92B. In today's dollars that's ~$197B. The largest company today is $4154B. More than 2000% bigger even adjusted for inflation.

And it's the corporations buying the politicians anyway. Who is paying the money, Larry Page or Google? It's Google. If the company is that big, it doesn't matter if it's owned by one person or a million, the CEO has control of enough resources to buy the government, and then does.

Make business small again.

[nielsbot]

But does that mean we shouldn't raise taxes?

"Effective Income Tax Rates Have Fallen for The Top One Percent Since World War II" https://taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/effective-income-tax-rate...

[AnthonyMouse]

> "Effective Income Tax Rates Have Fallen for The Top One Percent Since World War II"

That link has an agenda. Choosing the height of WWII as the baseline is cherry picking. Effective rates were higher during WWII than they were before or since, but that was eight decades ago, not for very long, and for an obvious reason.

They're also achieving even that much difference by applying speculative math to capital gains, which is meaningless because doing that in real life would result in major behavioral changes.

And it's still not clear how any of that is supposed to solve it. Suppose the founder of MegaCorp has to sell more of their shares to pay the money in tax. They sell them to BlackRock or China or whatever. Is that going to cause MegaCorp's lobbyists to stop trying to capture the government? How? You need there to be more, smaller companies, not change who owns the shares of the predatory megacorps.

[bpt3]

It just means to me that you haven't put much thought into this.

What about the federal government gives you the impression that they'd be responsible stewards of the money you want to confiscate and redistribute?

[andrekandre]

  > enforce antitrust laws and break up large corporations

agreed, but there is a problem when a corporation becomes strategically important to a country; now the incentive is to protect it all costs (though ironically too-big-to-fail can also be a strategic/security issue!)