Please don't tax the rich people, it's the fault of poor old people you see and bad budgets.
Fuck off.
this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2026
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The economist's credibility problems were always bad, but they went super sketchy over the last 10 years. I used to enjoy reading them. Now it's just a clown show of billionaire penis polishers. They don't even pretend to have objectivity anymore.
They are desperate, and its going to get a lot worse.
You can smell the desperation.
The things, nobody else can get taxed to fix the budget, and nobody is going to cut anything like the military aid for Israel.
they are trying to avoid the inevitable, like global corporation tax minimum
Knob gobblers.
The Economist is weird, since there's a huge gap between their journalism, which is generally of a very good standard (especially for non-UK news), and their opinion section, which consistently parrots whatever idiocy the Conservative Party is currently spouting, though they do bleat a little when the Tories get too authoritarian (which, especially since Thatcher, they usually do).
Not only do the rich not pay enough taxes, they are the greatest beneficiaries of taxpayer funded programs like SNAP since it allows them to underpay their employees. So we basically subsidize their gains.
Please don't go after Smaug! He's so misunderstood and taking a bit of gold from his gigantic pile will fix nothing.
Just go mine more gold, or maybe mithril from the Mines of Moria. Nevermind the rumors of orcs or a Balrog!
It's not as if the rich became rich in a vacuum and then appeared in society. They used society to get rich, and the money came from literally everyone else in that society - everyone who struggles to make ends meet is struggling because the rich are hoarding their share of the money.
They're hoarding our share of the money.
Booming stockmarkets, meanwhile, have reinforced the idea that inequality is too high
Oookay couldn't take the article seriously after reading that.
Lol, I couldn't get past the headline.
The premise that the people want to go after the rich 'to fix broken budgets' is absurd. The rich must pay their fair share. Separately many budgets can be improved, but saying one is only sought to do the other is wrong
Don't go after the rich
That's rich.
So, creating structures to send more money upwards is fine, just don't seek out anything to reverse that trend? I think whoever wrote this think piece needs to go fuck themselves.
I sympathize, but respectfully disagree. Whoever wrote this should get fucked by an angry mob hellbent on vengence.
Nobody wrote this...
They don't even post the bootlicker author's info. Even if this was AI, a human still decided to publish this propaganda. It would be nice to have a public record for accountability.
Even if we try to tax the Epstein class income, the tax system is still designed to be rigged by them. They take out loans on their stocks to avoid paying taxes. And captialism is still designed for "number line go up"
if we try to tax the Epstein class income
Disagrees with
the tax system is still designed to be rigged by them
Defeatism is not a desirable trait.
No but tearing down the system is
Say what you will about the Economist; at least they're consistent in their "will nobody think of the rich?" point of view.
Both the standard of living in a society and the rate of innovation are strongly positively correlated with the progressivity of the tax system. Yet we should believe the author's unsourced "research" that supposedly proves having wealthy people live in slightly smaller mansions will dampen innovation somehow. Horseshit. Both the Netherlands and Switzerland, countries that are more prosperous and more innovative than the US, have wealth taxes (albeit not very high ones) and far more progressive income tax brackets as well (albeit not at Nordic levels).
Why not have the 1950s once more?
Only pining for the structural racism and sexism and so on is okay, pining for the tax system of the 1950s is "fringe" territory, I guess.
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Fuck the economist
Wealth caps, now! Nobody should be worth over 1 million
You clearly don't understand what it costs to fund even a modest retirement.
Cap wealth at a level that, if annuitized, will generate a revenue stream that's a small multiple of median earnings. And make inheritance tax steeply progressive. That'll prevent people from hoarding money to the point at which they can distort the political process, and will also reduce unearned wealth that comes to people because of who their parents happened to be.
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This whole debate is completely moot. We continue to have it because people still do not understand how fiat currencies work. The US Federal government is a sovereign currency issuer. The Federal Reserve LITERALLY creates its own money. And I'm not talking about actually printing physical dollars or minting coins, I'm talking about going into a computer and typing in some numbers and, boom, money is created. The VAST majority of transactions these days do not involve any physical currency. That's why the physical currency in circulation is significantly less than the total money that's out there. Today, money is numbers on a computer, and we can create an infinite amount of it.
But, I know, inflation. I know. People still think that modern monetary theory is unrealistic because it would cause runaway inflation. But, modern monetary theory isn't a theory, it's just how money works in the 21st century. People are creating money all.the.time. and it's not just central banks. Do you know how many crypto currencies have been created on various block chains? Millions. Millions of coins, worth trillions of dollars. But that's just crypto, and crypto is NOTHING compared to fiat currencies, like the dollar.
I said the Federal Reserve creates its own money, and that's true, but most of the dollar creation doesn't actually happen at the Federal Reserve. Banks create money everyday. Every time a bank creates a new loan, they are creating money. Out of nothing. I know, people will swear up and down that banks aren't creating the money, they're lending out depositors money, but that's not true. It used to be kind of, sort of true, if you squinted and looked at it just right, back when we had fractional reserve banking. Banks used to be required to hold SOME depositors money in reserves, but it was a ridiculously small amount, like 5% to 10%. As of 2020, the Federal Reserve lowered the reserve requirement to 0%, and it ain't going back up. There's no need for it to. Banks don't use the money in your savings account to make loans, they just create the dang money. Banks make a loan and disperse the loan proceeds without taking the money from anywhere. Again, they don't take the money from your savings and give it to the borrower, they just create the money. The borrower has the loan proceeds and you still have the money in your savings account that you can withdraw at any time.
That is how our monetary system works. We use debt to create money, and we use interest rates to control inflation. That works well enough for funding profit making organizations. The idea is the business will borrow the money to fund their business, with the expectation that they will generate enough revenue from their business operations to repay the money, with interest. As long as the business generates enough revenue to repay the loan, it all works ok. But this system DOES NOT WORK FOR PUBLIC SERVICES. If a public entity provides a public service, but does not charge for that service (or doesn't charge enough), that public entity cannot repay a loan. When we force public entities to borrow money to pay for public services, we doom those public entities to taking on debt that they have no means of repaying. We could tax to repay the loans, but why do that when we could just tax to pay for the public services in the first place? Why? Because people don't like paying taxes, that's why. So we force public institutions into borrowing money to pay for public services, money they can't repay WITHOUT RAISING TAXES! (or charging fees for the service, but if you have to charge a fee for a public service, it's not really a public service, it's just a service for those who can pay) It's complete nonsense.
This whole thing is especially ridiculous at the Federal level. Because, again, the Federal Reserve LITERALLY creates its own money. Do you know how much the US Treasury Department owes the Federal Reserve? $4.5 trillion dollars. We have to tax people to get dollars to payoff debt, in dollars, that we owe to the institution that creates dollars. How fucking stupid is that?
There is absolutely no reason why the Federal Reserve couldn't just create money and give it to the Treasury Department to use to fund all government services. I don't see any reason why this would cause significant inflation. But if it did, we could raise taxes. Not to fund public services, but to control the amount of money in the money supply to keep inflation under control. But I don't see any reason why we couldn't just continue to use interest rates to serve that purpose. Again, when a business borrows money, it has to repay that loan at interest. During periods of higher inflation, raise rates, raising the cost of borrowing, businesses borrow less, less money creation is happening at banks, inflation slows down. And because none of this would affect public services, because public services would be funded without debt or taxes, higher rates don't have to mean governments taking on expensive debt that they will have no way of repaying.
Your description of how things should work, is pretty dang close to how they do work. You say inflation should not be a problem under MMT, yet it clearly is. We are suffering a global period of persistent high inflation.
Care to share your thoughts on why such high persistent inflation is everywhere if not due to the ever expanding money supply?
Care to share your thoughts on why such high persistent inflation is everywhere if not due to the ever expanding money supply?
There's no denying that inflation is persistent, and that's by design. Because money is created through debt, and the debt has to be paid back at interest, there's no way that would be possible without persistent inflation. Hence why the Fed has an annual inflation target of 2% (which is admittedly completely arbitrary).
But the real driver of inflation is simply supply and demand. Prices go up when there is greater demand for products and services than there is supply of products and services to meet that demand. Disruptions to the global supply chain during the pandemic led to a supply demand imbalance and thus higher inflation. Trump's tariffs have contributed to a recent higher than target inflation, as well.
However, there are also systemic problems that have contributed to higher inflation, and they come down to US capitalism just generally failing.
Capitalists want to invest their capital where they think they will make the highest profit and get the highest possible return on their investment. The theory is that this should result in capital flowing to productive endeavors that generate a sufficient supply of the goods and services that are most in demand, but that doesn't necessarily happen. Capitalists aren't in the business of meeting consumer demand, they're in the business of maximizing their profits, and often those two things are incongruous. And that's why it's so hard to keep inflation under control. Domestic producers are simply not producing enough of the goods and services to meet demand, because doing so just isn't profitable enough for them, and that's creating an imbalance, where demand constantly outpaces supply, causing prices to go up too fast.
The Fed could address this by raising rates, tightening the money supply, reducing demand and causing a recession. That's one way, but almost no one wants that. The other, better way to address higher than target inflation is to get the damn greedy capitalists to stop prioritizing their own maximum profits and start producing the quality, affordable products and services that people actually want.
We were able to mask many of the negative impacts of greedy capitalists running everything for some decades thanks to globalization. We couldn't get our capitalist scumbags to produce enough quality, affordable products and services domestically to meet domestic consumer demand, because doing so wasn't profitable enough for them, so we let them go overseas to produce stuff, where taxes were lower, regulations were minimal, and the workers were extremely poor and thus dirt cheap. That worked for a while. It made it possible for some things to remain relatively affordable, even get much cheaper in some cases, while maximizing profits for the greedy scumbug capitalists. But, globalization was a one time deal, and it came with its own problems, so now there's a big push to reshore a lot of our production. But the greedy scumbug capitalists won't produce domestically because they can't make the profits they want making products and services people want to buy at prices people want to pay. So there just isn't enough domestic supply being produced to meet demand.
An example would be cars. Making low margin, affordable mass market vehicles just isn't profitable enough for the greedy scumbug capitalists, even if it is what most consumers want, so instead they make higher margin, lower volume luxury vehicles. This has driven up the average cost of vehicles.
Inflation will remain persistently high so long as the supply of affordable products and services is insufficient to meet consumer demand.
Love it! Well said.
We couldn’t get our capitalist scumbags to produce enough quality, affordable products and services domestically to meet domestic consumer demand, because doing so wasn’t profitable enough for them, so we let them go overseas to produce stuff, where taxes were lower, regulations were minimal, and the workers were extremely poor and thus dirt cheap.
Even leaving out the exploitation, there will always be goods and services that it's more economical to import than to produce locally. Attempts at autarky always fail.
Inflation will remain persistently high so long as the supply of affordable products and services is insufficient to meet consumer demand.
Almost everyone wants more than they can afford. That's probably constant, and is probably a consequence of human nature. But inflation isn't constant. So I don't buy that explanation.
Even leaving out the exploitation, there will always be goods and services that it's more economical to import than to produce locally. Attempts at autarky always fail.
I'm not necessarily advocating for total reshoring. I don't think it's necessary. However, as I said, globalization led to its own problems. We saw during the pandemic how fragile complex global supply chains can be. Plus, there's a certain amount of autonomy lost when a country is dependent on another country for some vital resource or product. That's a great way for an independent country to become a vassal state.
Almost everyone wants more than they can afford. That's probably constant, and is probably a consequence of human nature. But inflation isn't constant. So I don't buy that explanation.
You are clearly unfamiliar with Japan in the 90s. Despite falling prices, Japanese consumers didn't go out and spend mindlessly. They saved, causing prolonged deflation. It got so bad they had to make savings rates negative to try and get people to spend the money the government was printing instead of saving it.
Insatiable consumption is a cultural thing, not necessarily "human nature." Here in the US where I am, the culture of endless consumption has been carefully, deliberately cultivated over generations. Here, if you put money in someone's hands, generally they will spend it, that's true, not save it like the Japanese did. But clearly not every country is like the US.
And not every person is that way, either. Here in the US there are people who aren't so loose with their money. Or at least there were. My grandparents lived through the Great depression and they were quite thrifty, regardless of what the Federal Reserve's policies were at any given time.
But it isn't just my explanation. That's just how it works. Supply and demand determines price. Prices go up when demand outpaces supply. The amount of money in the money supply can influence that, because, as we've established, under many circumstances at least, if people have money to spend they will try to spend it. But central banks rarely just print money and hand it to people. When they do, yeah, that can definitely be a recipe for runaway inflation.
I'm not an expert but I think you have "inflation" and "price increases" confused, the difference matters here, inflation is headed back to normal but prices are remaining up
No confusion here. I believe central banks, responsible for inflation are also prone to "creative accounting" and narrative adjustments to wash away the guilt and blame for their failures. It's not any different than the police investigating themselves and unsurprisingly finding nothing wrong.
The basket of goods is cherry picked, the methodology is dubious at best, frequently taking reasonable economic assumptions and abusing them beyond legitimacy. You can't put that much power in the hands of people and not expect corruption.
At my most generous, our current measure of inflation doesn't measure what people think it does, yet we use it every day as if it did like COLA riders. The suitability of inflation calculations and the applications is a sprawling topic for another post at another time.
inflation is headed back to normal but prices are remaining up
"Remaining up" is not the same as "still increasing."
Care to share your thoughts on why such high persistent inflation is everywhere if not due to the ever expanding money supply?
The "high persistent" US inflation rate is currently 2.4%. Having lived in places with actual high inflation, I question your premise.
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Not just taxes, I want wealth caps
Nobody should have a networth over 1 million
Net worth of over a million? That's way too low, sorry. If you buy even one house and pay it off, you are practically in that territory now.
I'd be fine with a cap of one billion, adjusted for inflation every year.
I'd go with half a billion, just to be sure nobody gets near a billion.
I said million, not billion
Nobody NEEDS a million (less even a billion). Normal houses don't cost anywhere remotely need a million to build these days. Everyone can live a great life without ever being worth more than a million dollars
Either way, the million dollar is just an arbitrary point, it depends on where you live, etc, and more likely it should be a limit pushed by the average income, but I think it's a good number to start with, a good number to promote
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Inflation is calling. They wanted to let you know that a very very modest homeowner in an unfashionable part of town in many cities around the world, is over 1 million. The people squeeking by aren't the problem. Aim higher.
No
I've kept inflation out to keep things simple. Yeah, the exact number will be different and depending on many factors, but the basic idea and the basic number are there.
For housing, I'd add one extra rule where for profit companies are not allowed to own houses for renting purposes.
If nobody can own more than a million, a couple with kids could own up to two million. Since people can't afford to own multiple houses, and companies won't be able to either, housing prices can go down to "what it cost to build plus a little extra" instead of "whatever some billionaire company can afford just to push the prices up"
I think the number is way off, but I share your desire to definancialize homeownership through regulation. The only for profit home ownership outside of a single personal residence should be purpose built rental appartment buildings, not buying up condos.
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