thebartermyth [he/him]

  • 4 Posts
  • 19 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: September 15th, 2023

help-circle
  • I looked up their WY SOS filing, and yeah this is almost definitely an S-Corp. (S for small). That status is already an protectionist measure: it bypasses the corporate tax level so long as xyz conditions are met. One of those conditions is having no foreign ownership. (‘nonresident alien’). I don’t even really mean this as a hypocrisy gotcha, the whole article’s vibe is propaganda by juxtaposing two forms of corporatist protectionism and setting the pre-justification for raising prices.

    Also the focus on racist cowboy garbage and electoralism disguises how important this stuff can be. Like I have no idea what the price of 10-gallon hats is because it doesn’t matter in the way that food or electricity or rent does. The target audience is libs who will say “haha maga ppl won’t be able to buy their 10-gallon hats anymore if trump wins but they’re so brainwashed that they support him anyway haha” It’s just ridiculously condescending.


  • Tariffs would make it harder for people to distinguish between price increase for the sake of profit and price increases from supply chain inflation. This makes it easier for large businesses to charge more and consolidate out the smaller players in an industry. It’s a short/medium term solution to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. This is just crocodile tears from an entirely irrelevant intermediary capitalist, presumably to get some kind of cushy small-business tariff exemption or tax credit.

    Also the Tax Foundation is a very right wing (libertarian?) lobbying group who should not be taken seriously for any opinions on any topics.

    Sellers Inflation the-podcast




  • The main thing for me is how libs nitpick and fight into fake ideas that they think are a ‘progressive middle ground’ which are just extremely evil and unserious. I distinctly remember a lib explaining an elaborate plan of how they would have NATO build a giant wall to enforce a two-state-solution and I just kinda started losing it and showing them pictures of the west bank barrier on my phone. They kept insisting that if NATO ran the wall it would stop israel from expanding.


  • I think the performative caring about anything gets undercut by how fickle and useless libs are as allies. Maybe a year or two ago I’d say that libs agreeing with the left with trump in office would be a silver lining, but honestly they’re just kinda useless. It seems harder to persuade libs than it is to persuade people entirely disconnected from politics even if they get the performative anti-trump benefit. Idk maybe I’m just in a doomer mood.




  • imo the site would just be shut down in some way. Many of the state’s domestic repressive functions are more easily carried out by non-state actors. Like FICO score or getting categorized as ‘extremist’ in an HR consulting database. This sort of thing materially pushes people into situations where they’d be arrested for something more mundane.

    Other than that, there are other forms of carcerality or social ostrisization if people fall outside of social norms in real life. So maybe in IRL we say “hey isn’t making kids say the pledge of allegiance every day sorta weird and bad?” and someone responds that it would be unamerican not to and that their dad died in iraq or something and that the pledge honors them… and etc etc… suddenly vaguely left people irl who were gonna join the DSA but didn’t ever get around to it are indistinguishable from maoist guerillas because US body politic is ridiculous.











  • I really think you should re-address your idea on a theoretical framework. It’s difficult to imagine that a new set of income tax rates would address extreme wealth or address the crises of capitalism regardless of the numbers you have in your spreadsheet. For example, OP suggests using total wealth as a tax base to alleviate inequality which would be a new way of approaching the issue.

    If you’d still like to use income tax rates to approach inequality, I would suggest starting with high negative percentages and increasing them through your table. Kinda like this:

    base * { -99%, -98%, ....., 99%}

    Sorry if this comes off as harsh, I appreciate that you’re looking to for a way to address these issues.



  • That sounds like a sales tax, no? Which would be regressive unless you charged sales tax on purchase of debt / equity. Doesn’t matter if it’s only a sales tax on yachts or whatever because they would have to buy like every single yacht to come close to comparing with their spending on further means of production as expressed by ownership / debt.

    Edit: Honestly, I’m not sure if it would stop being regressive even if there was sales tax on buying stock or whatever. Mostly going off vibes with that one.


  • I think taxes are supposed to be in cash, but it’s not as though that couldn’t just be changed (I think lol). Probably easier to implement on the corporate tax side, like “20% of shares go to gov per year” and it would dwindle down until the companies are public. I think this would get weird with rich ppl having a bunch of debt instead of shares though(?).


  • I may be dumb here, but how a real version of this tax would work? This example is basically pocket change and they’d pay cash (numbers on a computer} through some form of credit (against equity, etc}.

    But if the tax left them with 1 million remaining for example, I assume that it’d basically be impossible to pay without changing the underlying ownership / means of production, no? The boring liquidity thing people say would actually apply because there wouldn’t be enough cash (even as computer numbers) to pay the tax. So the gov would have to “print” the money for it. And then the rich would get a loan from the fed to pay the tax,(?) which seems circuitous, but also it seems circuitous even if they got a loan from a normal bank. The super-rich would essentially then just be constantly building this really large debt that would exceed the total amount of money. Because no underlying ownership or production would change, it would basically be the same as now, right? literally just numbers on a computer? Taking debt forever with unlimited credit to pay the people who gave you the money?

    I’m sorta falling into a weird spot where:

    1. Taxes seem to not really be about funding government in the sense that the gov controls the money supply (unless that’s not true actually?), so, uh, are taxes a very dull game that everyone has to play? Is this what people are talking about when they say “providing base demand for the currency”?
    2. All of these numbers seem much larger than they need to be…? In that you could only really buy ‘investments’ with them. Mostly being further means of production or scams. I get that there are markets for really expensive things (yachts come to mind), but honestly comparatively those don’t really seem expensive. Is there some other use for money that I’m too poor to understand?
    3. Money does seem kinda fake as well tbh.

    So am I being uncharitable and there is a way for a tax to actually un-rich billionaires? Would they have to sell shares/debt to the state eventually building state ownership? It all seems a bit difficult and roundabout, but maybe that’s just my lack of understanding. Also please don’t respond with something from an econ class.