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Captain Obvious
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1 year ago
in Barstool Economics (on Taxes) on Ready Fire Aim
Leo,
I found your posts interesting. I always liked Barstool Economics, mainly because of it's ability to be readily explained and understood by any heavily inebriated joe. Unfortunately you seem to lack the mental capacity of a piss drunk high school drop out so let me point out some flaws in your interpretation.
It seems you've somehow melded Marxism with Sheer idiocy and produced their retarded bastard offspring, lets call it Leoism. Allow me to summarize from your post the six most basic tenants of Leoism:
1) The Rich are rich because they suck money out of the Poor, manage to trick everyone into paying them more than they're worth, exploit the system, and in general make life miserable for everyone but themselves. They are also fat cats.
2) Removing incentives from any economy has no ill effects on it.
3) Taxes are used to buy buildings, hotels, and airplanes for the rich, which poor people are not allowed to or do not use.
4) The Military only protects the rich and their property, the poor have no need for a military for they are bullet proof.
5) The only proper justification for taxes is to pay for the great costs an economy incurs from wealth generation, because wealth is the great satan and taxes are the only cure.
6) The Rich can never pay enough in taxes to make up for the sin of being rich
As revolutionary as your ideas are Leo, I think there may be a little more under the surface here. I hope you don't mind if I apply the analytical skills of a second grader to your theory to give it some more clarity.
1) In free markets economic agents accumulate resources (money) roughly in proportion to the worth of their contributions. There are instances where political corruption, legal loopholes, market failures, or imperfect information can reward someone more than they deserve, but the nice thing about markets is that they adapt, and eventually compensation moves back to its equilibrium. Any economy that fails to adapt for some reason or another will eventually collapse.
Example: Bill Gates probably the world's richest fat cat (Carlos Slim?). He got that way by developing and selling products that singlehandedly changed the world. The products he developed influence and enrich the lives of every person who has lived in the last two decades. Because his contributions were so great he now has resources equivalent to roughly 50 billion US dollars. He did not get that way because he found a creative way to steal from the poor.
2) Incentives are crucial parts of any economy. Monetary incentives are what we're debating here so lets stick to those. The market benefits from incentivizing in two ways. First, entities (people and groups of people) who contribute more get paid more, this makes more entities want to contribute and the aggregate effects benefit everyone. Second, higher contributers are more likely to better utilize additional resources so incentives tend to place additional resources in the hands of people who can use them more efficiently. Warren Buffet, is a perfect example of this principal.
3) Taxes actually serve three key purposes.
First they redistribute wealth. This one is self explanatory, but note that it's different than your idea that taxes are actually payments for government programs that protect wealth.
Second they pay for government. Leo, may be surprised to learn that the majority of government programs benefit the poor more than the rich. Things like social security, medicare, public schools, public transportation, unemployment, federal housing programs, foreign aid, disaster relief, public broadcast systems, grants, and medicare all benefit and are targeted to help poor people, most rich people don't need or want to utilize these services.
Third they can discourage behaviors that may have negative externalities and also help pay for the negative externalities associated with these behaviors. This means stuff like polluting the air when you drive a gas powered vehicle or burn coal for power.
Please note that taxes do not usually buy hotels, airplanes, and most buildings and give them to the rich. These are actually private assets and you are actually a moron. Moving on.
4) Taxes also pay for National Defense, but security is what we call a public access resource, meaning that you can't really protect one person in a country without protecting everyone. Interestingly if there was a large scale military invasion rich people would probably be better able to protect themselves than poor because they could purchase travel to a safe place, pay off the enemy, or contract personal security so you could actually make the argument that National Defense benefits poor people more. Unfortunately poor people not bullet proof, but it'd be awesome if they were.
5) You may be interested to learn that wealth generation and capital accumulation in an economy is actually not bad for it. In fact when people work hard and produce things of value that helps an economy. I know this is probably counter intuitive to you, but if a government taxed its citizens only when they did things that benefited their economy that government would not only be as stupid as you are, if they did it enough they'd manage to either make everyone who was productive leave or just stop being productive.
6) You're not smart.
Taxes are not all bad, in fact if they're used appropriately they're extremely helpful to an economy. The moral of the story here is that tax rates tend to disrupt an economy if they are too progressive because the good people go elsewhere. The US's taxes are too high at higher levels of income and our most productive citizens are also least likely to gain from tax funded programs. The solution however isn't raising taxes on the poor, but slashing bloated federal and state budgets which fund some horribly inefficient programs and spend too much on military deployments and not enough on defense and R&D.
I found your posts interesting. I always liked Barstool Economics, mainly because of it's ability to be readily explained and understood by any heavily inebriated joe. Unfortunately you seem to lack the mental capacity of a piss drunk high school drop out so let me point out some flaws in your interpretation.
It seems you've somehow melded Marxism with Sheer idiocy and produced their retarded bastard offspring, lets call it Leoism. Allow me to summarize from your post the six most basic tenants of Leoism:
1) The Rich are rich because they suck money out of the Poor, manage to trick everyone into paying them more than they're worth, exploit the system, and in general make life miserable for everyone but themselves. They are also fat cats.
2) Removing incentives from any economy has no ill effects on it.
3) Taxes are used to buy buildings, hotels, and airplanes for the rich, which poor people are not allowed to or do not use.
4) The Military only protects the rich and their property, the poor have no need for a military for they are bullet proof.
5) The only proper justification for taxes is to pay for the great costs an economy incurs from wealth generation, because wealth is the great satan and taxes are the only cure.
6) The Rich can never pay enough in taxes to make up for the sin of being rich
As revolutionary as your ideas are Leo, I think there may be a little more under the surface here. I hope you don't mind if I apply the analytical skills of a second grader to your theory to give it some more clarity.
1) In free markets economic agents accumulate resources (money) roughly in proportion to the worth of their contributions. There are instances where political corruption, legal loopholes, market failures, or imperfect information can reward someone more than they deserve, but the nice thing about markets is that they adapt, and eventually compensation moves back to its equilibrium. Any economy that fails to adapt for some reason or another will eventually collapse.
Example: Bill Gates probably the world's richest fat cat (Carlos Slim?). He got that way by developing and selling products that singlehandedly changed the world. The products he developed influence and enrich the lives of every person who has lived in the last two decades. Because his contributions were so great he now has resources equivalent to roughly 50 billion US dollars. He did not get that way because he found a creative way to steal from the poor.
2) Incentives are crucial parts of any economy. Monetary incentives are what we're debating here so lets stick to those. The market benefits from incentivizing in two ways. First, entities (people and groups of people) who contribute more get paid more, this makes more entities want to contribute and the aggregate effects benefit everyone. Second, higher contributers are more likely to better utilize additional resources so incentives tend to place additional resources in the hands of people who can use them more efficiently. Warren Buffet, is a perfect example of this principal.
3) Taxes actually serve three key purposes.
First they redistribute wealth. This one is self explanatory, but note that it's different than your idea that taxes are actually payments for government programs that protect wealth.
Second they pay for government. Leo, may be surprised to learn that the majority of government programs benefit the poor more than the rich. Things like social security, medicare, public schools, public transportation, unemployment, federal housing programs, foreign aid, disaster relief, public broadcast systems, grants, and medicare all benefit and are targeted to help poor people, most rich people don't need or want to utilize these services.
Third they can discourage behaviors that may have negative externalities and also help pay for the negative externalities associated with these behaviors. This means stuff like polluting the air when you drive a gas powered vehicle or burn coal for power.
Please note that taxes do not usually buy hotels, airplanes, and most buildings and give them to the rich. These are actually private assets and you are actually a moron. Moving on.
4) Taxes also pay for National Defense, but security is what we call a public access resource, meaning that you can't really protect one person in a country without protecting everyone. Interestingly if there was a large scale military invasion rich people would probably be better able to protect themselves than poor because they could purchase travel to a safe place, pay off the enemy, or contract personal security so you could actually make the argument that National Defense benefits poor people more. Unfortunately poor people not bullet proof, but it'd be awesome if they were.
5) You may be interested to learn that wealth generation and capital accumulation in an economy is actually not bad for it. In fact when people work hard and produce things of value that helps an economy. I know this is probably counter intuitive to you, but if a government taxed its citizens only when they did things that benefited their economy that government would not only be as stupid as you are, if they did it enough they'd manage to either make everyone who was productive leave or just stop being productive.
6) You're not smart.
Taxes are not all bad, in fact if they're used appropriately they're extremely helpful to an economy. The moral of the story here is that tax rates tend to disrupt an economy if they are too progressive because the good people go elsewhere. The US's taxes are too high at higher levels of income and our most productive citizens are also least likely to gain from tax funded programs. The solution however isn't raising taxes on the poor, but slashing bloated federal and state budgets which fund some horribly inefficient programs and spend too much on military deployments and not enough on defense and R&D.
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