Formerly u/CanadaPlus101 on Reddit.

  • 5 Posts
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Joined 3 年前
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Cake day: 2023年6月12日

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  • There’s lots of history you can look at to see how this works. The same thing does get invented more than once, but sometimes there’s different technologies that could each become dominant, and then there’s a real first mover advantage.

    In Russia, they don’t really have highways. Everything is built around rail lines. In the Inca empire, they had highways, but highways with stairs because there was no widespread wheel usage (which itself might be down to limited available wagon pullers and rough terrain).










  • What argument are you making here? Government won’t do it because raising any taxes is bad?

    Unpopular in practice is different from unpopular in concept (look at cutting emissions, for another great example), and both are different than bad. Other than that, pretty much: The government won’t raise taxes because it’s unpopular when they do. (Thank you for asking, by the way, It’s hard to just insert “this is my thesis”)

    Sure, they might be forced to raise taxes eventually. Probably, even; it’s happened before. Or, maybe some socialist firebrand will come in and make extremely progressive taxes their signature policy (meaning they have to go with the flow elsewhere). But, this is descriptively, factually, why hikes don’t happen that much.

    Now, normatively, you can make whatever you want of that.


  • So, that puts the cutoff at 20 million. Most people don’t know anyone that rich, but if you ask someone with just a few million, they might, and they’ll probably be against it. And guess what, they’re going to know a lot of people with just hundreds of thousands, and those are the white picket fence people who vote and donate the most.

    It’s slanted, not the original question, in that it passes the buck to some distant third party. Politicians don’t have the luxury of just ignoring that they have one big interconnected populace to satisfy, and none of them are an island. They raise taxes, and the big narrative is that they raised taxes for no reason, and that can cost an election.

    It has nothing to do with it being a good idea or not. It’s just politically difficult, and not because of anything spooky. (And FWIW OP was about income taxes; wealth taxes have additional complications)