But stuff like the rich dodging taxes,
he's planning on saying "fuck you" to the rich and getting them to hand over money.
Oh, wow. Uh... Okay. There are so many reasons why "just tax the rich" is not a viable solution and why you should slap anyone who thinks that it's a miracle unlimited pot of honey and rainbows. You can tax the rich more, but only up to a certain point, and it's not going to get you as much money as you think it will. Because math, which I learned over the years from my father, who works in the finance industry. So let's go over the reasons why this is a dumb idea, shall we?
- Most taxes you can enact on corporations or businesses only has one end result: That cost being passed along to the consumer via an increase in price for goods and services. This also really only hurts small businesses that get by at median price, so anytime you enact or increase a corporate tax, you're killing ma & pa stores and allowing Walmarts to continue their unimpeded takeover of every small town in America.
- You will earn far, far more in taxes if you do slight increases on the poor & middle class rather than large increases on the rich, which you may not believe, but it's true. If you have a million people and you tax each of them ten dollars, you will earn more money than if you tax a hundred dollars from a thousand people. (10 million versus 100K.) Therefore, whatever social polices you enact (police, firefighters, roadways, medicare, et cetera) the burden will always be shouldered more by middle class and the poor than the rich. If, for no other reason, than that there are far, far less rich people to even tax in the first place.
- Most taxes target property values or incomes. That's not going to take away the already massive amounts of money the rich possess. Taking the money from the bank accounts of the rich (ex: taxing bank accounts) to try and equalize the playing field, only causes the rich to deposit their money in foreign banks, like Swiss banks, which can't be touched. If you then punish the rich by preventing them from getting their money from those banks to spend in the local economy, their only choice literally becomes to leave... And most rich people would, because they didn't get to be rich by being timid, they got that way by being cutthroat businessmen.
- Even if, hypothetically speaking, all the above was not true, and increasing taxes on the rich actually did result in making more money... You would lose it in the end. Because, most money the rich have, they... You know... Already have. So if you take away large swathes of their money, that's one influx of cash you get to the treasury that you get to spend. Just one. Then, guess what? They fall a tax bracket, because you just took most of their money. If you spent that money increasing the size of social services, where exactly are you going to find more money once the rich are gone?
There's a few effective taxes on the rich, but they're almost always
anti-aristocracy taxes as much as they are taxes on the rich. The Estate Tax for example is just as much used to prevent the rise of aristocratic families owning large swathes of property and creating a serf class, and forces the children of the super rich to be competitive. The original copyright laws lasted only about twenty years, which gave an incentive to inventors and creators to keep putting out content if they wanted to make money.
The greatest ills America has seen with its megacorporations have fallen on laws that have killed the need to compete and created a massive, grotesque government that resembles the obesity epidemic the country is facing. Copyright lasting the lifetime of the creator + 70 years is absurd. The attempts to destroy the estate tax are absurd. The calls to attack the very concept of corporations only causes harm to small businesses that
want to be viable competitors to big business are absurd.
This is why I've mentioned previous that Bernie is really just as awful a choice as Hillary and Trump. His social policies are not as bad, but his economic policies are absolutely, mentally insane, and merely demonstrate a profound lack of understanding of economics. You cannot take that which isn't there, and any social programs you wish to enact will be shouldered by the populace. That's why Canada's healthcare is called a
public system: We all shoulder the burden of the cost in exchange for the service.
But then, Canada's government doesn't spend several hundred billion on shadow services that nobody gets to see.
Y'all want to fix the US? Audit your shit, get your budget under control, cut your government's size down, let the states manage some aspects locally (that's why they're there in the first place), and end the unlimited funding scheme the pentagon has got going for itself, and lower the amount of non-existent money banks are allowed to borrow. No socialist programs are going to work when the people are already overburdened by the cost of living there. Oh, and fight domestic job loss--the less jobs you have, the greater the strain will be on your social services, and the greater your taxes will need to be to compensate.
You can't build utopia off of nothing. Everything costs something and if it's related to taxes, the middle class will always burden the cost more than anyone else. No matter how good intentioned. Remember that.