this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2024
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You’ve got cause and effect backwards. They are the 1% because they own such a large percent of the wealth.
Low taxes just help to maintain and widen the gap.
The gap is the problem. There will always be a 1%. That’s basic statistics. The problem is how far away that 1% is from the median.
Taxing accrued wealth, and closing loopholes for using wealth to leverage loans and avoiding income tax, increasing taxes for the highest income earners, reducing tax for everyone for lower brackets, taxing housing sales heavily when not your primary residence, same for running costs so as to not make rentals too lucrative.
Do all of these, and you'll have a lot more budget to also fix a lot of the other inequality issues... Not that anything of this really matters in the long run, since will capitalism will happily gouge natural resources until it's not profitable to do so. So, do all of the above, and also offset the destruction of natural resources with regulations and further taxation.
Ps: The word tax has been mentioned 6 times, which will likely upset some people. However, this would arguably be good for most Americans. And just... Less good for the obscenely rich. Everyone should want that trade. Even the very rich should want that... except for the sociopathic ones, they don't have the ability to understand why that would be a net good change.
With you up until the property tax thing.
Short of fully subsidized housing, there will always be a demand for rental properties. And even then…socialized housing would just make renting the premium option for people who can’t wait their turn. You’d end up with either premium apartments, or a lot of “Extended Stay” hotels.
Giant companies buying up properties and letting them sit vacant in order to game the unit costs of rentals are a problem.
Small independent landlords are not. Their services will always be needed as long as there’s a commercial housing market. And housing is historically a very safe place to invest savings for a lot of middle class Americans. Taxing rental properties is fine, but is should be a progressive tax on number of units, with some sort of a penalty for a large percentage of vacant unit-months. Otherwise such a tax ends up seriously fucking a lot of hardworking middle class Americans.