Subject: Re: Biden's billionaire tax rate fact checked
I am SHOCKED to discover that untaxed earnings are being accumulated by people investing in businesses! Round up the usual suspects!

The two party system seems to be a race to the bottom. When the Republican's nominated a boorish mean-spirited philanderer with a TV-trained relationship with the truth to be president in 2016, did the Democrats rise to the opportunity by being sure to nominate a centrist who could be a competent technocrat and protector of a great country? No, THEIR fringe figured it was open season on America and they could nominate the person who, somehow, deserved it most. In America, you do not rise to opportunities, you fall to them.

So in 2020 given a second chance, all the domocrats could provide that was even vaguely centrist but still acceptable to their fringe was a guy who had been too old for a while. And many of us, somewhat more of us than in 2016, thought this is a responsible alternative to a candidate who defined a "stolen election" as one that somebody else won. Surely, Biden would caretake and lead his party to pick a young (60 year old?) centrist candidate who could be kind to the less fortunate without sounding like an economic illiterate. Certainly his choosing Kamala Harris for VP was not a good sign, but strategically you gotta give something to the nut-fringe for their votes.

Jimmy Carter cursed America when he opined that:

All I want is the same thing you want. To have a nation with a government that is as good and honest and decent and competent and compassionate and as filled with love as are the American people.

A few million shy of half the electorate thinks that government should be lead by Donald Trump. Those who don't have as their only choice a Joe Biden, 4 years even olderer than he was too old last time, and carrying Kamala Harris as the heir apparent this time instead of just as a dangerously placed place holder.

So yay. We live in an America which is a Stupidity Contest, and nearly all of us are winners!

So what do we talk about?

1) The evils of corporate buybacks of their stock
2) The evils of not taxing rich people on the basis of what Forbes SAYS they are worth in order to gain clicks.

Meanwhile there are a small minority of us out here who are not surprised at all that when you retain wealth instead of spending it, you can invest it in things, and that at some point eventually Death and his midget twin Taxes will come for you AND your unrealized wealth. And that while we are waiting, reasonably competent people "save" their money (i.e., not spend it) for use later, and that that savings allows an economy which invests more and more and more into improving its ability to keep us alive and happy and warm and stylish and employed gainfully and sometimes, even healthy with increasing competence.

But of course, brought to you by the people who think policy is best made by threatening to not allow the government pay its debts, we have the idea that leaving wealth in the hands of people that DEMONSTRABLY KNOW how to invest it to increase it makes less sense than rousing a populist crowd of people who can't count up to one without picking their noses to come and take those savings away and use it to pay brown children to be mutilated when they express confusion about their identity.

At the risk of suggesting that some people know more than others, and that much of the success of the west has been, at least better than the communists have managed, we often choose the competent to do the things they are competent at over either government officials or gangs of populists who consider Math to be "fake news". But not always. In perhaps the greatest tradition of democracy, a right-wing know-nothing populism is most effectively countered with a left-wing know-nothing populism.

What's wrong with technocracy? What's wrong with having the many important things that government enables to be run by people who know how to make those things thrive and are so boring they are excited by the prospect of being allowed to do so? Why do we have to choose between Q-anon and the victimhood theory of value?

We'd probably be best off going a step further than allowing unrealized wealth to go untaxed. Robert Frank (among, I'm sure, many others) has suggested that we should have consumption taxes instead of income taxes. The way I envision that is, your realized income would go into accounts from where it could be invested in productive enterprises without being taxed. As long as you left that money and the money it earned in the account, no taxes would be due. But as soon as you removed $20 for a really good hamburger, you would pay consuption tax on $20. And when you removed $75,000,000 for a yacht, you would pay $75,000,000. I hesitate to say that these accounts would function very much like traditional IRAs, except that would only make sense if I was talking to a population of peopple so elite that they had some idea how traditional IRAs function around taxation.

Then WE THE PEOPLE would be the custodian's of the future wealth of the nation, including its future ability to consume and therefore future expected tax revenues. Instead of making sure my net worth never rose above $40,000 or whatever populist number eventually chills out the innumerate envy-addled masses, my net worth could rise as high as I could get it as long as I didn't spend it. With the realization that eventually Death and her evil twin Taxes would come for me and take many millions for taxes that would not have existed if I had not been allowed to invest on behalf of an ungrateful government.

I got to do my taxes, bye for now.

R: