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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 15th, 2023

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  • The top 10% of income is not upper class. The error that people make, including you, is to focus on income.

    People like Elon Musk have incomes smaller than $100K.

    Upper class are the people who do not need to work and who live off of capital.

    We need to shift our focus on wealth equality.

    Look, the economy needs capital. If we want to be less dependent on the capital of rich people, then middle class people need to take over that role.

    The people making $100-300K per year are key, because they can provide an alternative source of capital if their tax burden is lowered.

    The people making $50K will not be able to provide large amounts of capital.



  • Which is why the tax system needs to be reformed.

    The political right actually has one good point that we on the left don’t always appreciate: taxes on middle class people should be lower.

    Specifically, very liberal tax exemptions on things like 401Ks, including the ability to transfer wealth across generations.

    Combine that with higher taxes on the wealthy, and it will be possible to shift power to the middle class.

    Consider the total market cap of the S&P 500, rounded up it’s about 50 trillion. Divide that among 130 million households and each household should own about $400K in stock on average.

    Full equality is neither achievable nor desired by most people, so a good scheme would be to let every household hold up to $1M in wealth, tax exempt.

    And then progressively tax everything above that.