If you are born poor it is extremely difficult to escape poverty, especially because of high taxes that you are going to experience as soon as your education and determination lands you a good job. This severely inhibits your means to save or to invest. The progressive taxation is like a back-stop to keep everyone in check and prevent people from going up the class ladder.
Meanwhile the rich, that are supposed to be the target of progressive tax, laugh and carry on paying very little.
> If you are born poor it is extremely difficult to escape poverty, especially because of high taxes that you are going to experience as soon as your education and determination lands you a good job
That's very easy to test, by comparing social mobility in countries with more or less progressive tax rates. I think the results say the opposite: progressive tax rates encourage greater mobility (because those taxes go to pay for free higher education, better public transport, mobility initiatives etc)
Most countries (at least here in Europe) have very high taxes, so whenever you go, you'll pay pretty much the same. So if people move, they do it for what they can get back for the money they pay.
However the problem is that the system is setup so that it penalises ambitious people while protecting the rich.
In many countries the governing parties see people as their clients and in their interest is to keep everyone dependent on benefits or being on the verge of needing them. That's how you game democracy and as a side effect you severely inhibit growth. (Good example is how little "unicorns" Europe has)
> whenever you go, you'll pay pretty much the same
Perhaps in terms of tax you are right (though I know of at least 10+% differences even between the richer countries, so I doubt it), but the cost of living varies dramatically even within Europe. You don't need to move to a poor/bad part of Europe to profit either, as for example Lissabon is relatively cheap.
It reads like you think progressive taxation is not bracketed. Which is something often found with people from poor background.
Let's say you have some system where your taxed 0% for income < $20k, 10% between $20k and $40k and 30% for $40k+. You currently earn $39k. You have to pay 10% of $19k so $1900, you keep $37.1k after tax. You're offered a $2k raise. Lot of poor people think that you'll suddenly have to pay 30% * $41k so $12k and lose money. But the 30% is only applied to the portion of revenue you get over $40k. With your raise you know have to pay 10% of $20k + 30% of $1k so $2.3k so you keep $38.7k after taxes, so your raise end up being $1.6k. You have not lost anything.
Now the problem comes from social benefits which usually are not regressive and work on a all or nothing system.
The problem is when you get a good job that pays $100k or more. You are not rich, but you are targeted by a tax supposedly for the rich (which they don't pay as they have means to avoid it).
Do you have any examples of countries where progressive taxation would be a hindrance for escaping poverty? This frankly sounds like a made-up argument against taxation.
Spain. There are levels of taxation that provokes the following: your small company (1 to 10 employees) is doing really well so you try to increase the number of employees and business. And what happens is that when passing some threshold you will have to pay the next level of taxes and end up earning less after taxes than when you were smaller. So we have a lot of small companies that cannot or don't want to take that risk.
Good example is UK. As a specialist you would be in area of 40% effective tax rate, but going over 50% is not uncommon (after IR35 changes some workers have to pay employer's NI) plus there are other taxes like council tax or high VAT.
I would think a specialist paying 40% in taxes has already escaped poverty? That's my confusion here, poverty suggests such a low income that progressive taxation shouldn't really affect yet.
The thing is that the costs of living are so high in cities that offer such pay, you can hardly save anything and if you started with 0, it will take decades to have some security. Sure you make a lot of money, but you are still essentially living paycheck to paycheck. My definition of poor is someone who doesn't have their own home or flat, savings that let them withstand at least a year of unemployment without having to use state benefits and so on.
Taxes isn't the reason why more people aren't richer. In fact, taxes is the reason why more people aren't poorer, because they pay for essential social services. At least in most countries, when receiving hospital bills you're not afraid to end up with crippling debt.
The reason more people aren't richer is because of private property and the capitalist system. As a whole, humanity is pretty rich and is severely destroying the environment to make sure of that. Only a fucked up economic system with all the wrong incentives makes sure some people starve when we produce more food than needed to feed the entire population, sleep on the streets when there's millions of empty/abandoned housing units, etc.
So, to be honest with you, i don't think taxes is the solution, because as long as money and private property are a thing, taxes will only be a band-aid on this cancer. Arguably, taxes are also often misused to fund more human misery in the form of military and police services and other harmful institutions we should entirely get rid of. But i would say claiming high taxes is responsible for poverty is really missing the point of how capitalism works.
Give a viable alternative that doesn't descend into fascism. Capitalism is called the 'least worst' system for a reason, and some countries have an excellent QoL under it.
Social market economy. Socializing some things does not mean you have to put up red flags everywhere, hold big party meetings and kill all the intellectuals. You can still keep markets where they make sense and outcompete others in a global capitalist system. Extremists are always wrong.
Go read a history book. Rejecting slavery wasn't extreme, in fact, America fought a civil war in no small part due to it. Something with half the support of a country is not extreme.
> This is a false dichotomy and huge oversimplification.
Exactly. It is more or less the oversimplification Americans thinking about socialism do.
You are taking my human sentences and try to work with them like code. This conversation makes no sense. There is even an obvious nitpick counter to your slavery example (are/have been) but you are not interested in what I originally said anyway.
Absolutely true, but the sad reality is that after a while with a comfortable living situation people tend to vote against their own self-interest. This then leads to dismantling of safety nets, which certainly doesn't help radicalisation.
> after a while with a comfortable living situation people tend to vote against their own self-interest
There's probably some truth to that, but i don't think getting cozy is the only explanation. The "engineering of consent" is a thing, and in an era of mass corporate media owned by vicious psychopaths, proper information/journalism is hard to come by. Noam Chomsky has plenty to say on that topic, if you're interested
Capitalism is only called "least worst" by capitalists themselves. Much of humanity considers capitalism "the worst".
> Give a viable alternative that doesn't descend into fascism
So, to give some historic perspective, capitalism is precisely the root cause of fascism. All totalitarian systems are capitalist by essence, and historic fascism in France, Germany, Italy, Greece (etc) was pushed not by popular support but by industry leaders. Mussolini himself even argued fascism should be called "corporatism" because such was its true nature. If you'd like to learn more about this, i strongly recommend a documentary called "Fascism Inc".
Now, i'm guessing you believe the USSR was a fascist alternative to capitalism. As an anarchist, i understand the USSR to be a form of State capitalism, not communism. Communism is when power and resources are shared, which is what the Soviet (workers councils) revolution was about before the Bolsheviks (Lenin's sect) seized power and murdered the revolutionaries to establish their dictatorship ("of the proletariat", or so they say).
To people in the USSR, the police was the same. The prison was the same. The factory was the same. The same cult of control and productivity plagued their lives under Lenin as it did under the tsar. And the same political persecution hit them with Trotsky's Red Army as with the Tsar's Okrana. If it looks like capitalism, that's because it is capitalism.
So, now that "dictatorship of the proletariat", "fascism" and "capitalism" have been ruled out as potential candidates for making society better, what about an actual democracy (anarchy)? What about a society in which nobody has to worry for a place to sleep and food to feed their children? In which nobody has to work side gigs to pay for education or health bills? In which regulations are decided not by a national parliament full of the worst psychopaths this planet holds, but by a local assembly of peers where people can decide for themselves?
Our current political systems in the west claim to be democracies but those claims fail any form of scrutiny. The designers of our political systems (in France and USA at least) were either slave owners or colonization advocates, and were in any case strongly opposed to women having political rights. For example Jules Ferry, who is revered in France as the founder of public schools, is less famous for his take on how "superior races" had a duty to civilize "inferior races"... which explains how and why the french public school system was used as a tool of colonization to destroy local cultures.
If you really think you live in a democracy, think about it. Were you given any occasion to vote on actual topics? If your neighborhood opposes a national law, are you free to have your own local regulation supersede the national law? Are you free to study how power applies in your country, and to report on it for your peers? At work, are you free to decide with your peers how to manage the company, or is a boss deciding for you? Are you reaping the benefits of your work, or is a boss and some shareholders reaping them for you?
This system is hated by most because it's ruining lives and killing millions of people. Capitalism is just as rude as Mao's rule, you just can't see it if you're part of the tiny privileged elite (as most of us on HN are). If you're looking for alternatives, please read some anarchist/liberation literature. There's centuries of social criticism and ideas on how to improve things... it just so happens the people formulating these are hunted/jailed/assassinated by those in power. A few names to get started: emma goldman, kropotkin, bell hooks, noam chomsky, david graeber, angela davis...
You are making the same mistake as all the revolutionaries you mention - you completely disregard the problem of efficiently allocating limited resources, and that there are vast differences in capabilities of different people to do it. In other words, merely putting the means of production into hands of workers and asking them to manage these by consensus does not guarantee "society in which nobody has to worry for a place to sleep and food to feed their children". There are some cases which succeeded, yes, but also many that failed.
State capitalism is the only viable implementation of communism. Humans will not share unless co-opted, so the use of violence is required for the proletariat to seize resources.
> What about a society in which nobody has to worry for a place to sleep and food to feed their children?
We have this society, today. There are a few outliers, and yes, life is tough for many (most?), but we are way way better off as compared to any other time in history.
> In which nobody has to work side gigs to pay for education or health bills?
This is an issue with America, not capitalism. Fight for single payer and to cap student loans to ~$10,000/year like most other countries did.
> Communism is when power and resources are shared, which is what the Soviet (workers councils) revolution was about before the Bolsheviks (Lenin's sect)
This is an issue in itself though. If state violence is required to force people to share, then anyone who co-opts control of the state is suddenly in the position of a dictator, with effectively unlimited power over all resources. Capitalist parliaments are a magnet for psychopaths, true, and it's worse in a communist system because the only way you can survive is by making sure the ones in charge like you.
> Capitalism is just as rude as Mao's rule, you just can't see it if you're part of the tiny privileged elite (as most of us on HN are)
Excuse me, but I make ~O(£20k) per year. I am not rich, nor am I poor, but you can fuck right off calling me part of "the tiny privileged elite".
To be honest, after that statement, I cannot any further path for good faith debate here, so I will leave it at that.
There's ample evidence otherwise in the body of social sciences. Cooperation is a fundamental characteristic found all across nature and is a pillar of human civilizations throughout the ages. I would argue it takes a lot of resources/energy to coerce people into NOT sharing, like when school teachers will try to make you believe copying is cheating despite your guts telling that helping one another is perfectly fine.
You could read Kropotkin on Mutual Aid, if you're interested on more information (though outdated by over a century of research) on how selfishness is definitely not a natural state of things.
> This is an issue with America, not capitalism.
No, it's a problem with money and profit and does not only affect America. The same issues have reached the UK and every other place where "neoliberalism" got a foothold. In fact, even in France where neoliberalism isn't quite established just yet and education is still rather cheap (<500€/year in public universities), most students are forced to have a sidejob because the study grants they receive are not enough to live (hardly pays for rent) and the student status does not grant you other social benefits (need to be over 25 to have support from the State).
> If state violence is required to force people to share
It is not. In fact, state violence can only be used to PREVENT people from sharing. If there was no police, there would be no poverty because we'd have expropriated the rich long ago, as the vast majority of people agree that's the only sane thing to do. Or do you know a lot of people defending banks and billionaires? Personally i don't know a single one in my neighborhood.
> I make ~O(£20k) per year (...) calling me part of "the tiny privileged elite"
So depending on where you live you're either very rich or rather poor. In the UK that's definitely not a rich income, but in other parts of the world £20k/year makes you a rich person. In any case, any form of salary in the Global North makes us considerably richer than most people in the Global South.
Also, please note i did not call you part of the tiny privileged elite, as i do not know you. The "you" employed was a generic, impersonal you. The tiny privileged elite was "most of us on HN", which you and me are apparently not a part of (i make < €10K/year).
EDIT: Also worth noting about the human tendency to sharing. Marxism-leninism never was a form of sharing. There were richer and poorer folks in the USSR, as in every "dictatorship of the proletariat". In fact, the political police hunted down people who wanted to share, such as the peasants cooperatives of Ukraine (defended by the Makhnovtchina peasant's army) or the soviet of Kronstadt... both of which were eradicated in blood by Lenin and Trotsky's red army because they were actual communists and not power-hungry tyrants.
> There's ample evidence otherwise in the body of social sciences. Cooperation is a fundamental characteristic found all across nature and is a pillar of human civilizations throughout the ages. I would argue it takes a lot of resources/energy to coerce people into NOT sharing, like when school teachers will try to make you believe copying is cheating despite your guts telling that helping one another is perfectly fine.
Selfishness absolutely is a human characteristic too. We are not inherently bad, but we are not inherently good either. Our entire evolutionary chain is defined by ruthless competition, wars, etc... We as humans do not tend to play well with more than a few dozen people outside "our tribe". It's the reason I would die for my one individual in my family, but don't bat an eyelid at Covid death statistics.
> No, it's a problem with money and profit and does not only affect America. The same issues have reached the UK and every other place where "neoliberalism" got a foothold. In fact, even in France where neoliberalism isn't quite established just yet and education is still rather cheap (<500€/year in public universities), most students are forced to have a sidejob because the study grants they receive are not enough to live (hardly pays for rent) and the student status does not grant you other social benefits (need to be over 25 to have support from the State).
Higher education is supposed to be an investment. Not free. Personally, I love the idea of becoming an indie developer, but until I've produced something valuable enough for others to enjoy, why should I get to do it without having another job alongside? Remember, as a student, the taxpayer (your parents, your grandparents, friends, enemies, friendly robots, etc...) are all paying for you to go to university in the first place. It's not for you, but for greater society as a whole.
The fact that school is cheap in France is a boon for arts and culture. There is nothing wrong with having to put in hard work for dreams.
> It is not. In fact, state violence can only be used to PREVENT people from sharing. If there was no police, there would be no poverty because we'd have expropriated the rich long ago, as the vast majority of people agree that's the only sane thing to do. Or do you know a lot of people defending banks and billionaires? Personally i don't know a single one in my neighborhood.
Stealing from the well-to-do is a really generous redefinition.
Let's say we gut the 1% and take everything they have. What happens next? Some of that money will undoubtedly go towards building businesses, etc... and then the next 1% comes around. The smartest ones will flee the country, because they know that any success will be punished by having their life work taken by the state. It actively dis-incentives any innovation or development that isn't rewarded top-down.
