Certainly not calling you out individually here, your post just reminded me of something....when did everyone start calling it rentS instead of rent? I've known it as 'rent' my entire life, until very recently
Besides the fact that your claim "everyone wants to tax the ultra wealthy to death" is clearly false. The current distribution of wealth is parabolic towards heaping ever greater resources upon the people who already have the most resources, while depriving resources from those to have the least. Morals aside, this seems to be an obviously terrible and inefficient way to allocate the resources of the planet. Just extrapolate it out to it's logical conclusion, and you have one guy with all of the resources and everyone else with 0. I would argue that a more logical allocation would be parabolic in the inverse. More resources should be provided to the deprived, with an ever diminishing allocation to those who have plenty. Increasing taxes on the ultra wealthy just makes our distribution of resources more efficient.
Taxes aren’t about paying for things. We can do that with no taxes. Taxes exist to control inflation, limit inequality, and (hopefully) change behavior. That’s it. That’s why we tax - not to pay for anything.
Increasing taxes limits inflation and can be used to minimize inequality. That’s why we tax - not to pay for things or balance a budget.
I think I’ve heard both throughout my life, but I’d agree there’s probably been an uptick in “rents” usage. Maybe it’s more about policy level discussion than individual situation discussion?
How many peasants were allowed to open up their own business whenever they wanted? Did the church and kings provide small business loans? Do you count entrepreneurs as ones that work significantly more than peasants?
Medieval peasant life was certainly worse than modern day life. If we admit that will you stop fucking talking about it? You're like Michael Scott in the episode where he gets his feelings hurt because people joke that they'd rather go to prison than work at Dunder Mifflin
Odd that every other industry aims to equal demand but you think builders have intentionally held off the last 12 years and timed it perfectly with Covid to barely build just to hit a high per house margin. Seems like a liberal QANON idea. I think local polices and NIMBY’s prevented builders from building, especially here in Nashville. I also think the freedom of remote work caused a massive wave of relocation, making a housing shortage even worse.
It’s such a ridiculous argument. Everyone pays their fair share, except the ultra rich, who are allowed to skirt these laws on the condition that they pay the people who make the rules money. If you watched the amount of money the ultra rich made during a crippling pandemic that people are now beginning to try and claw your way out and your opinion is who will look out for those poor billionaires, walk in front of a speeding train.
The guy from the state that takes the highest amount of federal money while putting the least in makes an interesting point. If these motherfuckers believe this, change the laws so you only to from the government what you put in. Fuck I despise these people.
1.) Zero 2.) No. They only financed projects for the ruling class. 3.) No. Not sure what point you think this this makes, but I would argue that the greatest contribution to quality of life has come from public social projects, such as sewer systems and clean water.
Because even tho that is the case, we as a country have been propagandized and conditioned to believe that isn’t the case. Which effectively means it’s not that case, so now the populous believes we need to tax the rich to pay for things. Actual reason to tax the rich is to reduce wealth inequality as a means to mitigate their outsized influence over our institutions.
Good pints. I’d rather modify our spending and then look at readjusting the top 1% wealth if it’s not enough.
Any upward mobility for peasants? Could an ordinary peasant become a politician, king, etc? Just trying to understand the logic that peasants had it better than current us citizens.
This is like believing you can only use your left hand to play basketball. Then upon learning you can use both hands, still insist on just using the left.
Oh, I see. Yeah that's not the point I think. I think the point is that peasants had significantly more free time, to pursue life as they saw fit. Today, people spend a significantly larger portion of their time "being productive" in activities that don't directly benefit them, and in activities where they have no agency. This concept is called alienation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx's_theory_of_alienation I could be reading my own biases into it, but that's the message I took from it.
It’s weird that we used to tax the rich at a much higher rate but people now act like we’re just stealing all of their money
This analogy truly misses the nuance that makes the discussion so difficult(and why even Democrats struggle with making the decision). Student loans track with higher levels of education. Higher levels of education track with higher salaries. Cancer unfortunately doesn't track with higher incomes nor do you typically have an advantage from having once had cancer.
I wish that we were all peasants rn so we could demand that the king do this to you. give it a rest, dude
It's weird everyone is arguing about the taxation point(which he's wrong about obviously) instead of discussing his main point, "if homelessness was so easy to solve why don't we just solve it?"
it's not easy to solve, but it would be a hell of a lot easier if billionaires and their bootlicking minions didn't drag their feet at even the notion that a better world is possible.--if only they would think of someone other than themselves for one fucking second. if you're on the side of keeping people's lives as shitty and as miserable as possible via homelessness, student loan debt, you name it, maybe take a look in the mirror for a second and wonder if this is the kind of person you really want to be? Because I gotta be honest, it seems like a pretty miserable existence to look out and think -- yep, these are all the best ideas we've got. society is as good as it possibly can be -- better sit around and bitch about any attempt at improving things via one vapid argument after the next. edit: and it's not that complicated. build more houses for people without houses to live in!
Idk how anyone who is at least moderately informed would ever think we've tried to end homelessness. We've given almost no effort
Who is effected by canceling student loan debt? Not like the federal government is going to not be able to pay for all its programs without it..
The first bold is the part people are avoiding. The second bold, I think we all want to end homelessness and student loan debt. We just have different ways on how to go about solving those issues. The third bold, severely underestimates the difficulty in homelessness. Which is why the issue isn't easily solved. Where do you build the houses? How do you determine who gets the houses? How do you repair and maintain the housing? How do you encourage exist owners to maintain their housing if it's free for others? There are probably hundreds of other questions that have to be addressed that are more difficult to answer.
People have already purchased those government created and subsidized cash flow streams, so redeeming those contracts is stealing, obviously!
1. on top of other houses. maybe even call them duplexes? quadplexes? row housing? apartments? idk just spitballing words here. 2. anyone that needs somewhere to live! hey, you don't have shelter? here's some shelter. 3. hey, wouldn't it be great to provide more good-paying jobs! would be a real shame if we trained people to repair and maintain houses, especially with retrofitting capabilities and heat pumps and other energy-efficient appliances. 4. literally what are you talking about lol
It's the bigger picture. You punish the people who didn't take out student loans with lost opportunity costs. You reward borrowers who likely already had a head start in life over the people who didn't further their education. Then what do you do with the next generation? If you just give everyone a lifetime forgiveness of $50,000 to offset giving the existing borrowers $50,000 then you're just going to increase the amount of people who go to college. Which is just going to create inflation in the education market and rise the price of tuition which results in the next generation getting in a smaller benefit than the past generation. Student Loan forgiveness is truly "picking winners" policy.