The language they're using is genuinely hilarious. Yeah it like trickles down to them! Lower housing prices definitely won't benefit them in the long run and NYC will literally run out of people...
Exemplary
The language they're using is genuinely hilarious.
(after calling the tax shameful) “I provide a lot of money to people who are blue-collar workers who work for me, servers in restaurants. If we’re not there, there are going to be less people being paid.”
Yeah it like trickles down to them! Lower housing prices definitely won't benefit them in the long run and NYC will literally run out of people willing to eat there.
these governments are going to crush that person,
Absolutely destroying them with a tax on their second apartment.
"What Mamdani just did to me, and more broadly is doing to the city of New York, is triggering of the trauma I went through in Chicago,”
He's acting like they suggested shooting his dog.
We’re in purgatory. We just don’t know until we see what’s going on.”
Literally separated from heaven by God
The Miami-based chief executive with a condominium on the West Village’s Hudson River waterfront is sick of being vilified.... “A lot of these people who have pied-à-terres are real people.”
Yeah, real chief executives!
They can own two homes and pay the tax or sell their spare. This is absolutely ridiculous rhetoric by the oppressed wealthy class.
It’s not even that progressive. Many countries have this already. France for example: if you have more than one residence, you’re only exempt from property taxes on your main residence. Some...
It’s not even that progressive. Many countries have this already. France for example: if you have more than one residence, you’re only exempt from property taxes on your main residence. Some struggle to find affordable housing while others tie up two or three properties, it’s really not unfair to tax that.
There's one executive they quote that's like "yeah everyone's fussing but this isn't the reason anyone leaves.". Because it really isn't that much money if you can afford two homes in NYC. I think...
There's one executive they quote that's like "yeah everyone's fussing but this isn't the reason anyone leaves.".
Because it really isn't that much money if you can afford two homes in NYC. I think IL has this to some extent because I do have to indicate if I live in my owned property or not.
Yeah, I mean, if you can afford a second home in NYC, you're going to keep that home in NYC no matter what it costs. It's one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world. You don't own...
Yeah, I mean, if you can afford a second home in NYC, you're going to keep that home in NYC no matter what it costs. It's one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world. You don't own a second home there to save money.
Not sure about that. Like other real estate, it could be treated as an investment, and some could decide to sell if they don't have many other ties. Enough people might sell that prices go down a...
Not sure about that. Like other real estate, it could be treated as an investment, and some could decide to sell if they don't have many other ties.
Enough people might sell that prices go down a bit. One would expect a drop in asset prices when maintenance costs are higher. It's similar to how raising interest rates put a damper on the real estate market. But I don't think New York City needs to worry about that?
Does that mean people who own just one home don't pay property tax in France? I've often wondered why we don't at least exempt the average house price from property tax. If you want something...
Does that mean people who own just one home don't pay property tax in France?
I've often wondered why we don't at least exempt the average house price from property tax. If you want something fancy, pay extra. But why penalize people who just want someplace normal to live in?
It used to be that everyone paid property tax. Now it’s only on your secondary residences. There is still a local tax due by the registered owner that depends on surface and value of the house,...
It used to be that everyone paid property tax. Now it’s only on your secondary residences.
There is still a local tax due by the registered owner that depends on surface and value of the house, but it’s only a part of the original tax.
The idea being that it would either make up for the prejudice or nudge people into not hoarding houses and depleting the housing stock.
I didn't even know what a pied-à-terres was. If you use a fancy french name for your expensive ass second home that costs more than most people's lifetime earnings, you're in fact, not a real...
I didn't even know what a pied-à-terres was. If you use a fancy french name for your expensive ass second home that costs more than most people's lifetime earnings, you're in fact, not a real person in my book.
EDIT Also, I had to edit this comment because how much the snippet that “I provide a lot of money to people who are blue-collar workers who work for me" annoys me.
These assholes don't "provide" anything. They pay as low of a market rate as they can in exchange for labor. It would be much more appropriate to say that the people who work for him provide a lot of labor to him.
In reality though, he's not providing anything. If he could get away with paying his workers nothing, he would. He's forced to pay them because that's what he needs to do to siphon an incredible amount of money from the City.
These people view themselves as demigods that have deigned to reward the mere mortals at their heels with resources out of the goodness of their hearts. In reality, they're not smarter, harder working, or more deserving of their wealth than anyone else. Simple matters of chance put them in a good position that they were able to compound. The more rich assholes internalized that fact, the better off we'd be.
The real people line was the one that really got me, like what’s even their intended implication there? We’re real people, who are suffering the ultimate inhumanity of… paying slightly more for an...
The real people line was the one that really got me, like what’s even their intended implication there? We’re real people, who are suffering the ultimate inhumanity of… paying slightly more for an enormous luxury asset that’s still going to appreciate in value? Do they genuinely believe that no other person has ever had to pay a bit more for something than they’d want to before?
I propose anybody in this situation who complains about a tax like this that does not result in them paying 50% of their income toward housing be immediately stripped of this immense burden. And...
I propose anybody in this situation who complains about a tax like this that does not result in them paying 50% of their income toward housing be immediately stripped of this immense burden.
And that any tax that doesn't get them to that median percentage is too damn low.
Some are definitely owned by corporations, but corporations are ... People? One article I read said Bloomberg established his primary residence in two different neighboring buildings with two...
Some are definitely owned by corporations, but corporations are ... People?
One article I read said Bloomberg established his primary residence in two different neighboring buildings with two different LLCs which, unless they connected the buildings I don't even know how that works.
But yeah I mean, it's telling that he's separating himself from the Griffen's of the world and their quarter billion dollar second homes.
First of all: I applaud extra tax on extra homes. That said The general idea that people just spontaneously produce good outcomes left to themselves is trivially debunked by the lack of worker...
First of all: I applaud extra tax on extra homes. That said
These assholes don't "provide" anything. They pay as low of a market rate as they can in exchange for labor. It would be much more appropriate to say that the people who work for him provide a lot of labor to him.
The general idea that people just spontaneously produce good outcomes left to themselves is trivially debunked by the lack of worker cooperatives competing in the market. If zero value was being provided outside the people at the extreme leaves of a company why does anyone work for them? I really don't get it. Nothing is stopping anyone from bandying together. I get that you are going are probably going to point at union busting at larger companies and other egregious anti competitive behaviour in certain markets from large multi-nationals, but there is still a ton of space all over the place for people to do their anarchist vegan co-op thing and control the means of production themselves. People in aggregate are shitty. They need to be bullied and cajoled to get anything done. The average person is simply not that interested in doing much of anything productive, and left to their own devices has no clue whatsoever how to fend for themselves or make anything at all. I realise that's probably a little too cynical a take for most, but that general baseline of incompetence is what allows such a belligerent capital class to exist. We can't opt-out because we collectively lack the skills and will to do it. Having worked at just about every level from mcdonalds, to supermarkets, to investment banking (software), startups, faang, and finally to being on the board of my own thing the most exhausting thing has never been the work, it's the endless stream of shitty selfish behaviour at every level. The communist man doesn't exist. He never has. He never will.
I am the first in my family to have an level of university education at all (dad orphan and mum from solidly working class background), I have paid off the entirety of my student loans myself, I have been working to pay for my education since I was 16, I have given 7 days a week / 365 days a year for 4 years straight to build something interesting and because I am white and male I am regularly told that apparently this was handed to me on a plate, and I don't provide "anything" and that by having the temerity to compensated more highly than the people that we employ I am stealing from them, that the company should be a cooperative. We have an options pool, we'll probably mint a few millionaires out of the early starters. Still I am told that it's not enough, I need to be more generous, as they go on holiday, enjoy dinners with their families etc, while I work.
I'm not saying anyone is a saint, but this idea that there is some morally superior working class being oppressed and abused by the immoral incompetent rich who achieve nothing of their own merit, and who provide nothing is simplistic, boring, and wrong.
Well, I'm not a communist or a socialist, so I mostly agree with you, but I'd add a lot of qualifiers onto that. Firstly, the biggest predictor of whether someone becomes wealthy and part of the...
Exemplary
Well, I'm not a communist or a socialist, so I mostly agree with you, but I'd add a lot of qualifiers onto that.
Firstly, the biggest predictor of whether someone becomes wealthy and part of the entrepreneurial leadership class we're talking about is whether their families are wealthy.
There's not some innate genetic marker that makes someone better at business that correlates to the people running businesses. It mostly comes down to how wealthy your parents are, which decides what kind of school you get to go to, what kinds of connections you have, how many risks you're able to take before you end up destitute and homeless and so on.
Almost every extremely successful friend I have also coincidentally have successful parents. I of course have personal experience with the inverse, people with wealthy parents that aren't successful, and also have met people who came from nothing and did the mythical bootstrap thing, but by and large, the people who are successful are successful due to pure happenstance of birth, and the data supports this as well. Rich people aren't somehow more deserving of being rich than anyone else. They just happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right set of skills and specific motivation to become rich. I can see this in myself, even. I'm pretty successful (not rich by any means, but I do pretty well). I just happened to be interested in computers at the exact right time before e-commerce completely exploded. I'm smart, but I'm not a genius. I'm not a particularly hard worker or well focused or eloquent, but I have been living and breathing computers and computer networking since I was 12 years old, so I have an innate understanding and feeling for how they behave. People treat me like an expert because of that, but that's not particularly because of any hard work or focused study that I forced myself to do. It's because of years of messing around with things I thought were interesting to mess around with.
If my family wasn't able to buy me a computer, or wasn't attentive enough or educated enough to be supportive of that hobby of mine as a kid, I probably wouldn't have continued it. If they weren't able to support me through multiple fuck ups in childhood, I wouldnt have been able to be where I am today. If I was born in the 1930s instead of now, I'd be fucked.
Secondly, the drive to become financially successful comes entirely from self interest. Yes, successful people employ others. Yes, they create businesses where none existed before, but they do this so that they can make a lot of money. It's not a favor for their workers. If they could make the same revenue but not pay anyone, they would.
Thirdly, the economy is mostly a zero sum game. The labor and resources put to work at a specific business are labor and resources that can't be used at other businesses. Just because someone employs other people doesn't mean they're doing something that benefits society.
Phillip morris employs a lot of people, uses up a lot of farmland, and lots of factory space to make products that kills millions of people a year.
Meta employs some of the most intelligent technically adept people in the world and has them spend all of their time creating technology that lets you have a puppy dog filter that tracks your face on Instagram, or better profiles you to put ads in front of your face.
So yes, Mark Zuckerberg employs a lot of people, but overall, I'd take a stab and say the world would be better off if all of those extremely talented people got paid slightly less money and spent all day working out how to cure dementia, or more efficient ways to combat poverty, or how to grow crops more efficiently.
The framing that the rich are somehow doing us all a favor by paying people for their labor is just a complete farce. They're paying people for their labor to benefit themselves, just like the people working for them are giving them their labor to benefit themselves. Neither is doing the other a favor. It's a purely transactional relationship.
General comments about generational wealth: I am very pro big inheritance tax, fwiw. It is also true that having access to better education, opportunities etc does grant the talent to run shit....
General comments about generational wealth: I am very pro big inheritance tax, fwiw. It is also true that having access to better education, opportunities etc does grant the talent to run shit. Not having these things means that you can't. My comment isn't about what's fair it's simply a rail against the general sentiment that leadership / management across the board is contributing nothing, and is preventing the people from living their own unmolested lives and that everything would keep ticking along without intervention.
On computers / merit. People treat you like an expert because you are. You could have chosen to not engage with computers. You didn't absorb this by osmosis. You could have done anything else. You would be worse off.
[I also imagine that we probably have a lot more in common that not. I got my start on computers because my dad managed to convince his boss that he needed a 286 at home which he absolutely did not, and I needed to boot from dos to get quake to run, and so on].
On shitty companies: yes. Push back: the idea that if that capital swapped hands and went to the public sector it would somehow be immediately deployed usefully and efficiently is also straying into the realms of fantasy, because the same shit heels climbing to the top of the private sector also climb to the top of the public sector. I am currently watching the guardians of the NHS sign away all of our patient data to Palantir.
On the framing that the rich are doing us all a favour: agree. Companies employ people precisely because they believe the people that they employ produce more economic value than they are paying them. This wasn't the framing that I was going for. I agree that they're in it for themselves. What I am saying is that the relation is symbiotic. I disagree with idea that everyone could be be better off if they quit and did their own thing (which maybe you aren't actively arguing, but that seems to be the corollary of your original "they don't add anything" statement).
I spent a couple seconds on Google searching "difficulty setting up worker cooperative" and it turned up this reddit post, where a tech worker asked about what makes starting a cooperative...
The general idea that people just spontaneously produce good outcomes left to themselves is trivially debunked by the lack of worker cooperatives competing in the market.
I spent a couple seconds on Google searching "difficulty setting up worker cooperative" and it turned up this reddit post, where a tech worker asked about what makes starting a cooperative difficult. Response:
It's not that the legal setup is that much harder, the tougher part is finding capital. The traditional startup model is that a small number of wealthy folks contribute the capital and own the large majority of the company, getting full control as well as most of the hoped-for profits.
Worker coops can't sell control (otherwise it wouldn't be a coop anymore), so they need to either get the capital from the worker-owners (tough since most people don't have that kind of money to risk), get people willing to buy non-voting shares (a tough sell for wealthy folks used to control), or take on debt (tough if you don't have assets and a track record).
Not impossible by any means - it's something I'm working on myself - but definitely a challenge!
^ that feels like it refutes the notion of a trivial debunk, at least? But may I ask if you've run into anything else concrete which could constitute a systemic disadvantage against co-ops that can't be traced back to investors wanting to exploit labour? For instance, in papasquat's example, the business owner takes out cheap loans then squeezes employees for profit. In the linked example, private equity cuts out the middleman and refuses to finance business owners that will not crush labourers for cash.
... also I read the rest of your comment, which I'll acknowledge, but not address if that's acceptable. Hopefully you'd agree that it's acceptable to mutually disagree on a topic.
I think the great beauty of tildes is people disagreeing and it being fine! It is absolutely true that getting capital is harder if you go a different route. In the first instance though most...
I think the great beauty of tildes is people disagreeing and it being fine!
It is absolutely true that getting capital is harder if you go a different route. In the first instance though most funding comes from friends, fools, and family, followed by angels. None of these people need to be sophisticated investors, you don't need to give up control or voting rights to them, you just have to work harder at getting smaller cheques. If you want effectively two or three people to bankroll you then sure, they are going to want a big say, but that seems reasonable to me? I think there is a generally a lack of imagination when it comes to building businesses today. I will stick to tech because it's what I know, but I see criminally profligate spending all of the time, from people that could have taken small cheques, grown sustainably, and retained as a consequence significantly more control over their businesses. It generally seems that almost no one wants to start small. Well if you want to start big you either need to accept someone else's terms, or have a bunch of money yourself. See my other comment as to why I think co-ops don't actually work out in practice. Either the overhead of decision making will cause you get lapped by someone more nimble, or there is in fact some hierarchy, someone is calling the shots and the group is in denial.
Perhaps bully is too strong a word, but I think a lot of people default state of being is sitting on the couch absorbing entertainment. We all know it's "bad" and yet that is where the trendline...
Perhaps bully is too strong a word, but I think a lot of people default state of being is sitting on the couch absorbing entertainment. We all know it's "bad" and yet that is where the trendline seems to be inexorably heading. It would be nice to find some way to go back in time, but I don't know how we wouldn't end up in the same place. I enjoyed this article that was linked on lobste.rs.
Also, it is very exhausting and difficult for the brain to maintain cooperative organizations in the modern day.
I think that's going a little far. If you go to a fancy restaurant then you expect it to be "worth it." If it's not then I can see being kinda annoyed by it. If they add some extra fee for no...
I think that's going a little far. If you go to a fancy restaurant then you expect it to be "worth it." If it's not then I can see being kinda annoyed by it. If they add some extra fee for no reason then you're probably kinda pissed, right? If you buy a car and it's a lemon then you expect them to fix it.
It's a more extreme version of customer entitlement, which is fundamentally about not getting the deal you thought you were getting, which is based on expectations that may be out of wack. People don't stop feeling that way if they have money even though it really doesn't matter anymore.
And I think the answer is, okay, you can be someone else's customer.
Paying a lot of money for a restaurant meal enriches the owner… and nobody else. Workers at that restaurant still get paid a very very low wage and don’t get better working conditions as a result....
Paying a lot of money for a restaurant meal enriches the owner… and nobody else. Workers at that restaurant still get paid a very very low wage and don’t get better working conditions as a result.
Paying tax on your second or third home benefits the community: tax money will be used to pay for public programs and it will contribute to lowering the appeal of hoarding real estate in a city where affordable housing is scarce.
Sure, you could think about it that way, but I suspect it’s entirely disconnected from how people think about property taxes when they are complaining that their taxes are too high? They aren’t...
Sure, you could think about it that way, but I suspect it’s entirely disconnected from how people think about property taxes when they are complaining that their taxes are too high? They aren’t thinking about incentives or where the money goes just because that’s how you think about it.
It seems like this discussion lacks evidence about how people really think.
Your examples feel more like “I was scammed or mislead” which is about expectations, not value. If you paid a lot of money for a miserable experience at a restaurant, the issue is not that you had...
Your examples feel more like “I was scammed or mislead” which is about expectations, not value. If you paid a lot of money for a miserable experience at a restaurant, the issue is not that you had a miserable experience, or that you paid a lot of money, the issue is the expectation of one preventing the other. If you had a miserable restaurant experience but it was basically free, that wouldn’t be an issue, likewise if you paid a lot of money but had a fantastic and unforgettable meal, that also wouldn’t be an issue.
I think the same applies to the car analogy too.
I guess where I’m struggling to understand the frustration on a tax on owning multiple NY homes is where did the expectation (that it would be super cheap...?) come from when you’re buying in one of the most in demand cities in the world? In general I can see it as an immediate emotional response if it was unexpected, but I imagine the backlash if an existing tax was raised from 2% to 3% would be just as high as if it was raised from 92% to 93% so it feels like there’s no value in even turning these complaints into an article.
They had expectations about how much it would cost them. Now, there's an tax increase targeted specifically at them, so it will cost more. I don't think it's that hard to understand why some might...
They had expectations about how much it would cost them. Now, there's an tax increase targeted specifically at them, so it will cost more. I don't think it's that hard to understand why some might think that's unfair? NYC is changing the deal, and the politics around it are such that it seems punitive. (Of course, that's why a lot of other people like it.)
This really goes to show just how out touch these people are with reality, imagine having that much wealth and still crying that you are hard done by. Unbelievable.
This really goes to show just how out touch these people are with reality, imagine having that much wealth and still crying that you are hard done by. Unbelievable.
Especially in light of even "their" lawyers admitting What I think it's very interesting is that they're taking a policy issue personally in a way that it would never consider, say, mass layoffs...
Especially in light of even "their" lawyers admitting
Klein described his clients as “very angry”, but conceded the new tax was expected to be relatively minor compared to their overall net worth.
What I think it's very interesting is that they're taking a policy issue personally in a way that it would never consider, say, mass layoffs at their company. Or policy changes that negatively impact their customers but make them more money.
Probably the most significant common factor I’ve noticed in the very wealthy people I’ve interacted with is an absolutely unshakable sense of entitlement. It’s interesting, in some ways I even...
Exemplary
Probably the most significant common factor I’ve noticed in the very wealthy people I’ve interacted with is an absolutely unshakable sense of entitlement. It’s interesting, in some ways I even kinda see positives in it as an approach - it’s helped me unlearn a lot of mostly implicit things I was taught growing up about being deferential, not taking up space, not making demands, generally putting oneself second to people who have no reason to be allowed to put themselves first.
The frustrating part is that only about a third of them seem to be… honest about that approach, I guess is the best way to put it? I can have a principled disagreement with someone who’s just openly trying to maximise results for themselves and expecting everyone else to do the same in a kinda sportsmanlike way. “You’d do the same in my position” - well no, actually, I try to be better than that, but I believe you’d expect me to and I believe you’d take it as a fair loss if I did.
What I can’t stand is the people who’ve somehow managed to convince themselves that they actually and uniquely deserve special treatment to an extent that they deny it’s special treatment at all. Those are the fuckers who are genuinely pissed off about this but are still willing to axe 1,000 jobs without feeling bad about it, and those are the ones whose mindset I’ve never been able to really get.
Fairness means something else to people like that: fairness is like, Snow White kind of "fair", like beauty, to them. There's only themselves and a mirror, no other faces. It's not, if I had 0...
Fairness means something else to people like that: fairness is like, Snow White kind of "fair", like beauty, to them. There's only themselves and a mirror, no other faces. It's not, if I had 0 houses and this other person has two, is that fair. It's, I have two houses and I paid low taxes for both. A change where I pay even less means another diamond in my tiara so that makes it more fair, while a change where I pay more taxes means I still buy that new diamond but I can see a number on a piece of paper in my peripheral vision where my networth decreased by 0.00001% and that's NOT fair.
Just purely my assumptions here, for some of them I assume the behavior is inherited and much like other things people inherit, there are elements to what their parents understood that get lost as...
What I can’t stand is the people who’ve somehow managed to convince themselves that they actually and uniquely deserve special treatment to an extent that they deny it’s special treatment at all. Those are the fuckers who are genuinely pissed off about this but are still willing to axe 1,000 jobs without feeling bad about it, and those are the ones whose mindset I’ve never been able to really get.
Just purely my assumptions here, for some of them I assume the behavior is inherited and much like other things people inherit, there are elements to what their parents understood that get lost as those things get passed down to the children. In that behavior in particular the lost element is the awareness of what the mentality is behind that behavior and what is meant to be achieved with it.
The thing is that it doesn't actually suggest that they'll struggle in any way. Maybe I'm judging that wrong, but it feels like if you can afford multiple cars and parking and multiple apartments...
The thing is that it doesn't actually suggest that they'll struggle in any way. Maybe I'm judging that wrong, but it feels like if you can afford multiple cars and parking and multiple apartments in New York City, you're probably doing okay. The article seems to be people who just take it personally, not people who will struggle in any way because of the high cost of living and their particular lifestyle choices. One said he has to keep it because the kids/grandkids live nearby and he'll spend anything to live near them... (Seems to be more a "won't move out of NYC" than a "won't sell my second apartment" though?)
Feels very similar to the guy earlier this week who said that "eat the rich" was the equivalent of a slur.
When people are saying that they are struggling, they often mean they are having difficulty affording their lifestyle. Most people are entirely unaware of how wasteful their lives are because the...
When people are saying that they are struggling, they often mean they are having difficulty affording their lifestyle. Most people are entirely unaware of how wasteful their lives are because the current iteration of capitalism - and many of the ones before as well - strongly discourage reflection. Almost everyone can and should reduce their consumption in one way or another but it’s pretty taboo for anyone to point that out. Just think of how many people clap back when you see a forum post suggesting that people should drive less.
People who are moderately rich are socially adjacent to people who are obscenely rich, and as such they are more likely to compare themselves against them and find justifications and rationalizations for stupid expenses like a half dozen cars, second and third houses, and bi-annual or seasonal international leisure trips. They don’t think they are spending too much; they think they are socially required to. But it’s all a part of how capitalism continues to poison and consume society at large.
I understand all of this. My point is mostly that being in the class of "two NYC apartments" and the idea of more than one car + parking in the city (and we can presume any number of other...
I understand all of this. My point is mostly that being in the class of "two NYC apartments" and the idea of more than one car + parking in the city (and we can presume any number of other luxuries) strongly suggests a much higher level of wealth than owning a home and a vacation home in another area and cars some place that has much more room for parking. The example being used was Ken Griffen's 2nd apartment worth over $200 million. The properties impacted all seem would be worth at least $5 mil and aren't being rented out (like someone might if they needed the income.) The folks involved are estimated to be at the 95-99 percentile for wealth and that's for NYC.
The most that has happened is people pausing real estate deals until they know what the tax is and blustering about it. Maybe the folks pausing are the ones least financially well off, but maybe they're also doing it out of being traumatized like they were in Chicago.
If these increased taxes are in fact "a rounding error" for most of those impacted then we're not talking nearly so much about someone trying to keep up with the "Jones". We're firmly in the realm of C suite, multimilionaires and billionaires. Yeah maybe some of them are trying to keep up with Bezos, but this applies to less than 1/4 of these type of residences, so I think that's a reasonable set of folks to focus on.
It reads like they are existentially terrified of having their luxuries disrupted, without even the appearance of empathy for people who are existentially terrified of (or facing) their basic...
It reads like they are existentially terrified of having their luxuries disrupted, without even the appearance of empathy for people who are existentially terrified of (or facing) their basic survival being disrupted. It's shameful.
From my limited research this tax is one of the better ones proposed and implemented. It’s not these weird hard to enforce wealth taxes, it’s just straight up on a fairly easy to define extra...
From my limited research this tax is one of the better ones proposed and implemented. It’s not these weird hard to enforce wealth taxes, it’s just straight up on a fairly easy to define extra asset.
New York’s Democratic governor Kathy Hochul said the tax will affect 13,000 properties — about 0.4 per cent of the city’s more than 3.7mn housing units — and raise about $500mn annually.
They're hoarders, plain and simple, it's just that rather than hoard empty pizza boxes and newspapers and discarded tech, they hoard wealth and riches. It's the exact same mental illness, and we...
They're hoarders, plain and simple, it's just that rather than hoard empty pizza boxes and newspapers and discarded tech, they hoard wealth and riches. It's the exact same mental illness, and we should treat it as such. For their own good these things need to be removed from them, it's sapping them of their basic humanity and causing them to destroy the only home we all share because they're so frightened of losing their accumulations that they literally cannot think straight.
Let me pull out this old saw: if a monkey lived in a colony with other monkeys but kept all of the bananas to himself, and fought any monkey that tried to come get a banana from him, we wouldn't put him on the cover of magazines and laud him as the best and most clever of the monkeys, we'd ask what the fuck was wrong with that monkey.
This isn't hoarding in the mental health sense and you don't treat it by forcing people who hoard to have their items taken away, not if you have literally any other option (it's rarely for their...
This isn't hoarding in the mental health sense and you don't treat it by forcing people who hoard to have their items taken away, not if you have literally any other option (it's rarely for their own good at that point vs a societal safety issue). You have to do a lot of slow work to be effective and not result in returning to the behavior (after a ton of distress for them when they lose all their things.) This is at least based on the treatment planning I learned in school.
I don't disagree we need to handle it, but hoarders have much less control over their situation than rich people.
Well then I'm stumped. Because if it's not something beyond their immediate control as I assumed (as I believe is the case with hoarding), then I have no idea how to get through to them. I don't...
Well then I'm stumped. Because if it's not something beyond their immediate control as I assumed (as I believe is the case with hoarding), then I have no idea how to get through to them. I don't wish them any ill, but I want them to stop causing the harm that they are. Maybe I'm too naïve, expecting that the reason they don't examine their own actions and stop their behaviors is because they can't. Maybe they can and they rejected the notion, which is very sad.
Hoarding isn't a total lack of control but yes they have persistent difficulty getting rid of things, and it's causing them distress, generally with a very high level of anxiety if they consider...
Hoarding isn't a total lack of control but yes they have persistent difficulty getting rid of things, and it's causing them distress, generally with a very high level of anxiety if they consider throwing things away.
Rich people generally are not in distress due to their acquisition of wealth and there's not evidence that they couldn't stop acquiring it if they wanted to. At least none I'm familiar with.
They're just people making choices like all the rest of us. Most of us do shitty things or unhealthy things or negative things. It's nice to think we wouldn't ever make the same mistakes but we don't really know. The me of today is certain I'd never fuck people over like that. But I also recognize I am very often stressed about money to the point of treating medical supplies like health potions in a video game, keep a full stack or five at all times in the inventory. So maybe I'd be different.
It sounds to me like the money is the problem, and like maybe absurdly vast individual fortunes are not beneficial to society as a whole. I’m just spitballing here.
It sounds to me like the money is the problem, and like maybe absurdly vast individual fortunes are not beneficial to society as a whole. I’m just spitballing here.
From what I gather, NYC’s problem may be down to a few NIMBYs and property speculators, but places elsewhere have the problem that corporations are buying up housing and letting it sit empty for...
From what I gather, NYC’s problem may be down to a few NIMBYs and property speculators, but places elsewhere have the problem that corporations are buying up housing and letting it sit empty for the tax breaks, along with a few other issues like overvaluing the rent when they take out the loan to buy the property.
related: Mamdani Announces Balanced Budget Without Cuts https://prospect.org/2026/05/12/mamdani-announces-balanced-budget-without-cuts/ As a new New Yorker (and lifelong Jersey boy) I will proudly...
Like the old joke goes: Two Communists are talking, and boasting of their loyalism to the Party. The first friend asks: "Comrade, if you had two houses, would you give one of them to the Party?"...
Like the old joke goes:
Two Communists are talking, and boasting of their loyalism to the Party.
The first friend asks: "Comrade, if you had two houses, would you give one of them to the Party?"
The second friend replies, "Of course, Comrade!"
The first friend then asked, "If you had two cars, would you give one of them to me?"
"Of course, I should help the rest of society with my wealth!" replied the second friend.
Overjoyed, the first friend then asked, "If you had two chickens, would you give one of them to me?"
"No, comrade!" The second friend said.
The first friend becomes surprised and puzzled, and asks, "Why not, Comrade?"
"Well, I do have two chickens!" The second friend said.
It is always easy to decide on what to do with the things of others. And every populist politician proposes taxing the millonaries, until they become millonaries, then they start proposing taxing the billonaries.
I come from Argentina, a country where we tried dividing an ever-shrinking cake in different, more "just ways". Always the poverty increased, the freedoms became restricted, the foreign currency more desirable. Let's add a little government spending here and there. Let's print a little currency. Let's add a little more fiscal pressure. Repeat, and repeat, until everyone is equally poor.
I do not know what you guys were thinking when you elected Mr. Mamdani. What more evidence do you need? Everywhere it has been tried the "let's take things from people and give them to others at the discretion of the elected politician or unelected dictator du jour" has failed spectacularly.
Why must humanity insist on doing the superficially good thing ("giving more to others") instead of doing the correct, long term thing, which is "get out of the way of people, tax them as little as possible, and watch the country prosper"?
Because no politician will get credit for "keeping their nose out of people's business", that's why.
Sticking with the theme of Mamdani and the US for a second here, the most prosperous era in the United States is when wealth inequality was at its lowest and the tax burden distributed most...
Exemplary
Why must humanity insist on doing the superficially good thing ("giving more to others") instead of doing the correct, long term thing, which is "get out of the way of people, tax them as little as possible, and watch the country prosper"?
Sticking with the theme of Mamdani and the US for a second here, the most prosperous era in the United States is when wealth inequality was at its lowest and the tax burden distributed most heavily towards the top. The highest tax bracket at the time was 90%.
What happened is that people with wealth invested more in their local area and caused the region to flourish. Might as well spend it rather than give it to the tax man hey?
What you're proposing is the direction the US, and most of the western European world for that matter, is already going. Not taxing the rich is what we're doing and the consequences are rather stark in opposition to when you do tax the wealthy. Namely: increased inequality, massive wealth flight, reduced investment in local areas, higher tax burdens on lower incomes to make up for the lack of government revenue, etcetera etcetera. What we're not seeing is the country prosper.
Instead, the non-wealthy have the lowest consumer confidence ever, the highest levels of debt, and can't buy houses until they're 45 and up.
Humanity insists, because giving everyone chances works. Your plan isn't something novel, it has been tried. Frequently. And it always fails. Because the free market rich aren't in the business to make the country prosper, they're in the business to make themselves prosper. Without incentives like a high tax burden there is no reason for them to invest locally like they have done so historically.
.. and that's just keeping to the US. Taking it wider, whatever the place or time, a higher wealth inequality leads to an unstable country. Taxes can help alleviate this problem.
This isn't a terrible argument, but it's important to keep in mind when talking about the Post-WW2 economic boom that the United States exited the war as the only industrial economy that hadn't...
This isn't a terrible argument, but it's important to keep in mind when talking about the Post-WW2 economic boom that the United States exited the war as the only industrial economy that hadn't experienced mass destruction.
That's noteworthy when you are analyzing the results of our tax structure at the time. The US all but had a monopoly on industrial production for many goods in the late 40s and early 50s while Japan, Europe, and the USSR all rebuilt.
I don't think it's too difficult to find examples not the US but kept my post in the same realm since it started with Mamdani. The economic boom of post WW2 made it much easier for the entire...
I don't think it's too difficult to find examples not the US but kept my post in the same realm since it started with Mamdani.
The economic boom of post WW2 made it much easier for the entire country to thrive and you're absolutely right that it's important to keep that historical context in mind when discussing anything from the 50s.
Nevertheless, my post was less about the significant tax brackets and industrial base of the time and much more about wealth inequality, or lack thereof. Due to this calamitous event, jobs opened up, inheritances were paid out early, and housing was more available.
This follows a trend that doesn't make WW2 an outlier, but in line with other disasters. For example, wealth inequality dropped post WW1, but also shortly after the Black Death.
I am going to disclaim this next statement with a handwavey "I could be wrong about this" but these calamities often turn into a bit of a rebirth of prosperity when inequality is at its lowest when perhaps you'd expect a serious economic downturn, not unlike the Byzantines after their Justinian Plague/Black Death event, due to the loss of sometimes multiple generations.
Another small disclaimer that I feel isn't necessary on Tildes because of a bad faith interpretation, but because someone might mistake me typing "inequality" this much and equating my views with communism, that is not at all what I'm about. I think a certain level of income inequality isn't inherently a problem, I think wealth inequality to this extent in 2026 is.
Edit: dangit, I've turned another contemporary problem into a history post. This happens more frequently than I'd care to admit.
The comparison with ancient and medieval plagues is in interesting one, and I thing surprisingly relevant. Pre-industrial agricultural societies pretty much across the board wind up forming...
The comparison with ancient and medieval plagues is in interesting one, and I thing surprisingly relevant.
Pre-industrial agricultural societies pretty much across the board wind up forming societal structures where labor is heavily devalued relative to land and capital, because the local powerful people deliberately design them that way. A typical peasant family has not quite enough enough land to reliably feed themselves once taxes, disruptive weather conditions, and other attritive elements are accounted for, but they have enough labor available to work far more land given the opportunity. This surplus labor is normally spent in the fields owned by the local landowning "big men", for as little pay as these big men can get away with without things in the peasant community becoming so desperate that the surplus labor decide they'd rather attempt a violent uprising. All in all, peasants wind up working about as hard as they can sustain to keep themselves and their families alive, while the big men take everything else.
In situations where the local population is significantly reduced (such as a plague, or a brutal conquest and displacement of a local culture by a foreign invader) peasants are able to take control of land that had belonged to the deceased (both dead peasant families, and dead big men), and can use that formerly-surplus labor to work that land for themselves. This gives them significantly more short term power because they actually can feed their families without the meager earnings from working someone else's land. The local big men are still out there, with quite a bit of land, but that land is worthless if not worked. With a much smaller and less desperate labor pool to draw from, they need to pay much higher rates for workers, which gives them less surplus to spend on tools of extraction like armed soldiers. Total productivity wouldn't increase much overall (it might even go down slightly, because a peasant who has enough food to eat for the year and a surplus to trade for a few luxuries doesn't get a very good return from working even harder to get even more yields), but those peasants would find their individual lives much improved.
Over a few generations peasant populations increase to the capacity of the land, the local rulers slowly recover their wealth and military strength and are able to squeeze more and more out of this expanding peasant population until they are back at maximum sustainable extraction, and things return to normal.
The exact mechanics obviously do not map on neatly to modern society, but the general pattern of more resources coming available to the lower classes greatly reducing the wealth gap is definitely there. One could also note the relevance of an upper class extracting as much as possible from the lower classes, and spending that extracted surplus to maintain their power and continue extraction. It's breaking that feedback loop, not the precise mechanics of agrarian land and labor availability, which gives the lower classes power.
I already used up my exemplary for now but in case I don't remember to come back later when the cooldown is over, this is a really well-written comment.
I already used up my exemplary for now but in case I don't remember to come back later when the cooldown is over, this is a really well-written comment.
The sentiment is appreciated but no need, I feel plenty of others put more effort into their contributions. If anything the post was a hazy early morning diatribe rather than a well thought out...
The sentiment is appreciated but no need, I feel plenty of others put more effort into their contributions. If anything the post was a hazy early morning diatribe rather than a well thought out and put together response, although I do stand behind my message.
My post certainly lacks nuance but in all honesty that's also because the post I responded to was more of an emotionally charged than a substantiated one.
Not sure what kind of investment you mean, but I imagine investing locally would result in gentrification and higher property values. It doesn't seem like the cure for affordability, unless it's...
Not sure what kind of investment you mean, but I imagine investing locally would result in gentrification and higher property values. It doesn't seem like the cure for affordability, unless it's new construction? Investing in existing property (remodelling, etc) makes it more expensive.
Ironically, trickledown economics is probably one of the better descriptions for this phenomenon. Think of the current wealthy class. Their investments and connections are no longer locally bound....
Ironically, trickledown economics is probably one of the better descriptions for this phenomenon.
Think of the current wealthy class. Their investments and connections are no longer locally bound. Large scale international investment into corporations working at global scales, their "home" is wherever their private jet is taking them or whatever segregated hill or community they built their mansion on, and doing their best to skip out on taxes both personally and commercially.
The ramifications are clear: No connection with local communities to the point they'll threaten to leave said community if asked to pay into the collective and by investing at a multinational level you can skirt taxes too by creating corps in tax 'lenient' countries. Therefore, local communities see nothing of this generated wealth.
Previously, before large scale globalisation we'd frequently see the opposite. Wealthier people stayed in their local communities and became important figures. These folks would either pay taxes to the betterment of the collective, or decide to duck the taxes by investing locally. Why not look into supporting local business ventures? Construction too might be useful on the lands you own.
Money wasn't as quick to leave the community entirely and would circle around within the same area providing jobs and opportunities for the people, which increases consumer confidence, which boosts local store revenue, which in turn creates more options for entrepreneurs to open their own stores and the cycle continues.
Of course I'm painting a simplistic and idyllic picture, this didn't always happen but there is plenty of evidence it did.
I used to live in a place that was once built by a corporation to provide housing for their employees. They would provide cheap living spaces, creating construction jobs, gave breathing room to their employees and spend more time locally to spend money, which gave rise to local stores and restaurants, and so on.
Gentrification isn't too far off the mark but it's a bit of a dirty word because it implies it's purposefully done to price out lower classes when instead this happened in a "rising tide lifts all boats" kind of way. People usually want to improve the community they live in, and the wealthy used to too before they had the option to just take everything elsewhere and keep the community hostage by threatening to do so.
Boom/bust oil towns rapidly experience this phenomenon from both ends where local wealth booms the place until it dries up and is taken away only for the place to wither.
Long story short: Locally spent money remains local to the community which increases regional wealth. And that was frequently done by rich people trying to avoid paying the highest tax brackets and improve the place they also live in, but the crux is that this connection is no longer there to want to give back to the community. Nowadays that money is no longer regional but global.
Nowadays, people are advised to diversify their retirement investments by buying index funds that are national or even international. The big companies in these funds are also national or...
Nowadays, people are advised to diversify their retirement investments by buying index funds that are national or even international. The big companies in these funds are also national or international. They do have offices and factories in specific places, but the decisions about where to invest are made by professional managers. McDonalds is said to be largely a real estate company. Banks buy real estate to build local branches everywhere they think they can get people to open accounts with them. The current fad for large investors is that they’re desperate to build data centers in all sorts of places, which is a local investment of a sort, but not very popular these days.
Who else has local investments? Real estate developers and landlords and small businesses. Also farmers and the businesses that serve them. The owners of fruit orchards, car dealerships, construction companies, shopping plazas. People who own apartment buildings. Local developers.
Here’s a blog post about “local gentry.” I’m not seeing all that much of a point in it, but it seems to be roughly what you’re talking about?
It seems like local investors don’t get a whole lot of good press, and in large parts of the US, they tend to be conservative?
It seems like high real estate prices don’t happen without attracting lots of investment money, which suggests that urban California is absolutely awash in local investment.
Companies don’t build worker housing anymore because they don’t need to - it’s provided by other real estate developers.
One thing I often wondered about is why Google builds offices in big cities rather than somewhere suburban with cheap real estate. It seems like older companies like IBM used to do that. Maybe it’s because urban sprawl is no longer considered a good thing?
Note that I'm talking about the wealthy from times where "rich" didn't mean being worth more than the GDP of most countries. There are plenty of reasons for that ridiculous blowout that I won't...
Note that I'm talking about the wealthy from times where "rich" didn't mean being worth more than the GDP of most countries. There are plenty of reasons for that ridiculous blowout that I won't get into (Jack Welch being at least one or more of those reasons), this is generally about times where wealth inequality was already low before the globalisation of finances kicked in.
Your first paragraph sums up nicely how contemporary finance tends to be scatter shot rather than a local developing opportunities in their home town and staying there.
I'm not sure about the Google office thing, though I wouldn't be surprised if it was at least in part about the prestige of being prominent in high CoL areas.
Well, kudos for expressing a view which is likely to get quite a lot of push back around here. Would I be correct to assume you are libertarian/classical liberal? No shame in that, I was too for a...
Well, kudos for expressing a view which is likely to get quite a lot of push back around here.
Would I be correct to assume you are libertarian/classical liberal? No shame in that, I was too for a long time (which isn't implying I "grew out of it" or anything suggesting I know better than you, I really don't) and somewhat still am.
But Argentina's problem was mostly capital flight due to institutional instability, not welfare spending... and how do you explain the nordic countries as a counter point?
You could actually hate this more: Mamdani's tax is the politically easy option, it would be much more effective to reform local zoning law and let developers build high density housing (second home owners have a pretty negligible impact on property price, not enough of them). That would actually lower property prices and it's precisely what existing homeowners, including many "leftist", fight hardest against. Everyone supports affordability until it's their neighborhood at stake (this is still the 2 chicken joke).
But if you want politics to get out of the housing market so that it can work, you should be much more angry against Zoning than against Mamdani's tax!
Uh, there's plenty of it in New York City, and more being built all the time. Though, apparently not enough? Anyway, NYC is not at all typical for the US.
let developers build high density housing
Uh, there's plenty of it in New York City, and more being built all the time. Though, apparently not enough? Anyway, NYC is not at all typical for the US.
Thank you for your polite disagreement, it is much valued on this Internet. You are 100% correct in assuming I am a libertarian. Re: Argentina's Problem: Capital flight is a consequence of the...
Thank you for your polite disagreement, it is much valued on this Internet.
You are 100% correct in assuming I am a libertarian.
Re: Argentina's Problem: Capital flight is a consequence of the root issue: Chronic deficitary spending, either highly deficitary or ruinously deficitary. For over 120 years the "solution" has been to print more money (inflation) or ask for loans and default on them. Patch over patch over patch, and every administration adds more ministries, more public employees, more and more pork, and of course it ends up blowing up eventually.
Re: Nordic Countries - There are 2 models of societal organization that work well: Low taxes and minimal state services, high taxes and many public goods. The problem in Argentina is that you have insane taxes + inflation caused by deficitary spending and overprinting of currency (Look this up because it sounds like I am making stuff up, the fiscal pressure on businesses was 106% before Milei; i.e. if you had a shop you were evading taxes, period) with the public services of subsaharian Africa. Mr. Mamdani proposes to tax people who own two homes. The money then goes to the black hole of Mr. Mamdani's municipality and gets spent on what the politician decides, in the most inefficient manner possible, instead of being kept where it belongs, in the pockets of the people who made the money in the first place by serving society with better goods and services at a lower price.
I do agree that I went on a mini-rant; I can't help myself when I see the ever-growing State taking away liberty to spend what you earn on what you want.
I meant "Black hole" as in "Absorbs everything that goes in, unsatiable appetite", not as in "unknown what happens inside". Sorry for the confusion, not a native speaker. The politician spends and...
I meant "Black hole" as in "Absorbs everything that goes in, unsatiable appetite", not as in "unknown what happens inside". Sorry for the confusion, not a native speaker.
The politician spends and spends. Prosperity? Add public employees. Less prosperity? Increase taxes. No thought is ever given to reducing the ever increasing burden of the State's gigantic size on the taxpayer. I agree that the budget is "open", but it can be open and overinflated.
I'm not sure we're actually disagreeing on much policy. But I think 'less state' and 'better state' aren't the same argument, and libertarians often conflate them. Milei's Argentina cuts spending...
I'm not sure we're actually disagreeing on much policy.
But I think 'less state' and 'better state' aren't the same argument, and libertarians often conflate them.
Milei's Argentina cuts spending but also gutted university funding, destroying public goods that facilitate private enterprise.
We must choose which institutions are worth it.
Nordic country show us that high tax with high effective public spending can work. Low tax and barely any public service isn't such a good deal.
Basically, corruption is what we should fight against, everything else should fall into place in time if we can nail that long term.
Skepticism about the government certainly makes sense coming from someone in Argentina. How do people save money there in your experience? (Just curious.)
Skepticism about the government certainly makes sense coming from someone in Argentina.
How do people save money there in your experience? (Just curious.)
First of all, thankfully inflation is much lower now, we had a near hyperinflation in 2024. With that said, what you do with money depends on your sophistication level. In my personal case, I make...
First of all, thankfully inflation is much lower now, we had a near hyperinflation in 2024.
With that said, what you do with money depends on your sophistication level. In my personal case, I make my money outside the country as a freelancer and only bring in what I need to spend on daily necessities. For savings, crypto (Stable coins and staking, not speculation on poopcoins) and the S&P500 serve me well.
Older people usually hide 100 USD bills at home (There was a confiscation of USD deposits in 2001, so people either were personally screwed or had close family and friends who were screwed). Younger people have crypto, or USD in virtual wallets.
Many people overstock themselves in goods ("saving in cans"); a large pantry and large monthly or bimonthly purchases of everything you need are not uncommon. It is common to buy in bulk. A freezer full of meat is not a rarity.
Others buy construction materials that are durable ("saving in bricks"). The idea is to build a brick and concrete house that you can make money from in your retirement, and avoid the dilution of savings.
A minority "die of nominality" and will consider a car or motorcycle an investment, because they can sell it 5 years later for more pesos than they bought it for, but they do not bother comparing then vs now prices in the calculation. This has the unintended side effect of pushing used car and motorcycle prices through the roof. For reference, my 1998 Yamaha RX-100 is valued at about $1200 USD here; for the same price you can get a brand new 250cc in other countries.
Thanks! I've read before about a lot of these techniques. It's hard to tell from the outside if cryptocurrency is genuinely popular in Argentina or it it's just the crypto boosters talking it up.
Thanks! I've read before about a lot of these techniques. It's hard to tell from the outside if cryptocurrency is genuinely popular in Argentina or it it's just the crypto boosters talking it up.
I've never lived in any place where this is not the case. I have only ever lived in places where sewage, water, electricity, police, hospitals, education, roads, mail service, internet.......
Everywhere it has been tried the "let's take things from people and give them to others at the discretion of the elected politician or unelected dictator du jour" has failed spectacularly.
I've never lived in any place where this is not the case. I have only ever lived in places where sewage, water, electricity, police, hospitals, education, roads, mail service, internet.... everything have been paid for collectively, at the discretion of the will of the people (Canada, US) or an appointed government (British HK, HKSAR)
Are you of the opinion that taxation is a theft ? Taxation is a usage fee: you use two houses you pay for the roads and securities and utilities connected to those houses.
Hello! Maybe something is lost in translation as I am not a native speaker, forgive me if that is the case. I was not espousing an extreme view, such as an anarcho-capitalist one of no State and...
Hello! Maybe something is lost in translation as I am not a native speaker, forgive me if that is the case.
I was not espousing an extreme view, such as an anarcho-capitalist one of no State and no Tax. I am not of the opinion that taxation is theft; I do believe the social contract is "reasonable tax for services that the private sector is not able or willing to provide", such as some of the examples you mention (Except for internet, that's private here, but that's just a nitpick).
I was positing that there exists a slippery slope. For every new tax, there is a job created in the inefficient public sector, as a tax dollar will not be spent by the owner (See Thomas Sowell, who frequently argues that "spending other people's money"—specifically government spending—is inherently inefficient because individuals and bureaucrats lack the incentives to use funds as carefully as they would their own money). Keep adding taxes, limiting freedoms, and spending like there is no tomorrow, and then when tomorrow arrives you get the ills of a bloated State - chronic deficit, inflation, anemic growth or stanflation, elevated fiscal pressure, capital flight, etc -.
New taxes must be fought, because they are always "temporary" "for the rich" and they end up being "permanent" and "for everyone exceeding a very low bar". It is the nature of the politician to seek to spend money, because no politician will be reeelected on a "didn't overspend, did not add new taxes" platform. This taxation is just another cut on the death by thousand cuts that kills prosperity and economic freedom.
On the other hand, sometimes taxes transfer money to some other person, such as for pensions. Since they spend it on themselves, there's no particular reason to believe it will be less efficient....
On the other hand, sometimes taxes transfer money to some other person, such as for pensions. Since they spend it on themselves, there's no particular reason to believe it will be less efficient.
But I also like the unorthodox theory that the purpose of taxes is to reduce spending and prevent inflation. After all, a central government can print money and spend it. They don't actually need the money. But then total spending would be too much, so spending by the private sector must be reduced.
This doesn't apply for NYC since they aren't the central government.
Thank you for expanding on your thought, even if I am still firmly in the opposite opinion, that taxes must always be collected and re-adjusted, including new taxes and tax cuts, as always...
Thank you for expanding on your thought, even if I am still firmly in the opposite opinion, that taxes must always be collected and re-adjusted, including new taxes and tax cuts, as always necessary. If everyone fights every tax we end up with a society that no one has paid into running.
America is an excellent example, we have cut taxes for the rich, the country became prosperous but fewer individuals are prosperous, and the money is still moved overseas.
TIME TO EAT THIS MOTHERFUCKERS, what a bunch of useless twats. The tax rate was actually upwards of 94% on the top income earners back in the late 40's and 50's.
TIME TO EAT THIS MOTHERFUCKERS, what a bunch of useless twats. The tax rate was actually upwards of 94% on the top income earners back in the late 40's and 50's.
The language they're using is genuinely hilarious.
Yeah it like trickles down to them! Lower housing prices definitely won't benefit them in the long run and NYC will literally run out of people willing to eat there.
Absolutely destroying them with a tax on their second apartment.
He's acting like they suggested shooting his dog.
Literally separated from heaven by God
Yeah, real chief executives!
They can own two homes and pay the tax or sell their spare. This is absolutely ridiculous rhetoric by the oppressed wealthy class.
It’s not even that progressive. Many countries have this already. France for example: if you have more than one residence, you’re only exempt from property taxes on your main residence. Some struggle to find affordable housing while others tie up two or three properties, it’s really not unfair to tax that.
There's one executive they quote that's like "yeah everyone's fussing but this isn't the reason anyone leaves.".
Because it really isn't that much money if you can afford two homes in NYC. I think IL has this to some extent because I do have to indicate if I live in my owned property or not.
Yeah, I mean, if you can afford a second home in NYC, you're going to keep that home in NYC no matter what it costs. It's one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world. You don't own a second home there to save money.
Which is why all the whinging is ridiculous.
Not sure about that. Like other real estate, it could be treated as an investment, and some could decide to sell if they don't have many other ties.
Enough people might sell that prices go down a bit. One would expect a drop in asset prices when maintenance costs are higher. It's similar to how raising interest rates put a damper on the real estate market. But I don't think New York City needs to worry about that?
Does that mean people who own just one home don't pay property tax in France?
I've often wondered why we don't at least exempt the average house price from property tax. If you want something fancy, pay extra. But why penalize people who just want someplace normal to live in?
It used to be that everyone paid property tax. Now it’s only on your secondary residences.
There is still a local tax due by the registered owner that depends on surface and value of the house, but it’s only a part of the original tax.
The idea being that it would either make up for the prejudice or nudge people into not hoarding houses and depleting the housing stock.
I didn't even know what a pied-à-terres was. If you use a fancy french name for your expensive ass second home that costs more than most people's lifetime earnings, you're in fact, not a real person in my book.
EDIT Also, I had to edit this comment because how much the snippet that “I provide a lot of money to people who are blue-collar workers who work for me" annoys me.
These assholes don't "provide" anything. They pay as low of a market rate as they can in exchange for labor. It would be much more appropriate to say that the people who work for him provide a lot of labor to him.
In reality though, he's not providing anything. If he could get away with paying his workers nothing, he would. He's forced to pay them because that's what he needs to do to siphon an incredible amount of money from the City.
These people view themselves as demigods that have deigned to reward the mere mortals at their heels with resources out of the goodness of their hearts. In reality, they're not smarter, harder working, or more deserving of their wealth than anyone else. Simple matters of chance put them in a good position that they were able to compound. The more rich assholes internalized that fact, the better off we'd be.
The real people line was the one that really got me, like what’s even their intended implication there? We’re real people, who are suffering the ultimate inhumanity of… paying slightly more for an enormous luxury asset that’s still going to appreciate in value? Do they genuinely believe that no other person has ever had to pay a bit more for something than they’d want to before?
I propose anybody in this situation who complains about a tax like this that does not result in them paying 50% of their income toward housing be immediately stripped of this immense burden.
And that any tax that doesn't get them to that median percentage is too damn low.
If money is such a problem, you got so many problems, think I could solve them.
-Good Charlotte
It's even better though:
"A lot of these people who have pied-à-terres are real people.”
A lot....
But not all!?
Some are definitely owned by corporations, but corporations are ... People?
One article I read said Bloomberg established his primary residence in two different neighboring buildings with two different LLCs which, unless they connected the buildings I don't even know how that works.
But yeah I mean, it's telling that he's separating himself from the Griffen's of the world and their quarter billion dollar second homes.
First of all: I applaud extra tax on extra homes. That said
The general idea that people just spontaneously produce good outcomes left to themselves is trivially debunked by the lack of worker cooperatives competing in the market. If zero value was being provided outside the people at the extreme leaves of a company why does anyone work for them? I really don't get it. Nothing is stopping anyone from bandying together. I get that you are going are probably going to point at union busting at larger companies and other egregious anti competitive behaviour in certain markets from large multi-nationals, but there is still a ton of space all over the place for people to do their anarchist vegan co-op thing and control the means of production themselves. People in aggregate are shitty. They need to be bullied and cajoled to get anything done. The average person is simply not that interested in doing much of anything productive, and left to their own devices has no clue whatsoever how to fend for themselves or make anything at all. I realise that's probably a little too cynical a take for most, but that general baseline of incompetence is what allows such a belligerent capital class to exist. We can't opt-out because we collectively lack the skills and will to do it. Having worked at just about every level from mcdonalds, to supermarkets, to investment banking (software), startups, faang, and finally to being on the board of my own thing the most exhausting thing has never been the work, it's the endless stream of shitty selfish behaviour at every level. The communist man doesn't exist. He never has. He never will.
I am the first in my family to have an level of university education at all (dad orphan and mum from solidly working class background), I have paid off the entirety of my student loans myself, I have been working to pay for my education since I was 16, I have given 7 days a week / 365 days a year for 4 years straight to build something interesting and because I am white and male I am regularly told that apparently this was handed to me on a plate, and I don't provide "anything" and that by having the temerity to compensated more highly than the people that we employ I am stealing from them, that the company should be a cooperative. We have an options pool, we'll probably mint a few millionaires out of the early starters. Still I am told that it's not enough, I need to be more generous, as they go on holiday, enjoy dinners with their families etc, while I work.
I'm not saying anyone is a saint, but this idea that there is some morally superior working class being oppressed and abused by the immoral incompetent rich who achieve nothing of their own merit, and who provide nothing is simplistic, boring, and wrong.
Well, I'm not a communist or a socialist, so I mostly agree with you, but I'd add a lot of qualifiers onto that.
Firstly, the biggest predictor of whether someone becomes wealthy and part of the entrepreneurial leadership class we're talking about is whether their families are wealthy.
There's not some innate genetic marker that makes someone better at business that correlates to the people running businesses. It mostly comes down to how wealthy your parents are, which decides what kind of school you get to go to, what kinds of connections you have, how many risks you're able to take before you end up destitute and homeless and so on.
Almost every extremely successful friend I have also coincidentally have successful parents. I of course have personal experience with the inverse, people with wealthy parents that aren't successful, and also have met people who came from nothing and did the mythical bootstrap thing, but by and large, the people who are successful are successful due to pure happenstance of birth, and the data supports this as well. Rich people aren't somehow more deserving of being rich than anyone else. They just happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right set of skills and specific motivation to become rich. I can see this in myself, even. I'm pretty successful (not rich by any means, but I do pretty well). I just happened to be interested in computers at the exact right time before e-commerce completely exploded. I'm smart, but I'm not a genius. I'm not a particularly hard worker or well focused or eloquent, but I have been living and breathing computers and computer networking since I was 12 years old, so I have an innate understanding and feeling for how they behave. People treat me like an expert because of that, but that's not particularly because of any hard work or focused study that I forced myself to do. It's because of years of messing around with things I thought were interesting to mess around with.
If my family wasn't able to buy me a computer, or wasn't attentive enough or educated enough to be supportive of that hobby of mine as a kid, I probably wouldn't have continued it. If they weren't able to support me through multiple fuck ups in childhood, I wouldnt have been able to be where I am today. If I was born in the 1930s instead of now, I'd be fucked.
Secondly, the drive to become financially successful comes entirely from self interest. Yes, successful people employ others. Yes, they create businesses where none existed before, but they do this so that they can make a lot of money. It's not a favor for their workers. If they could make the same revenue but not pay anyone, they would.
Thirdly, the economy is mostly a zero sum game. The labor and resources put to work at a specific business are labor and resources that can't be used at other businesses. Just because someone employs other people doesn't mean they're doing something that benefits society.
Phillip morris employs a lot of people, uses up a lot of farmland, and lots of factory space to make products that kills millions of people a year.
Meta employs some of the most intelligent technically adept people in the world and has them spend all of their time creating technology that lets you have a puppy dog filter that tracks your face on Instagram, or better profiles you to put ads in front of your face.
So yes, Mark Zuckerberg employs a lot of people, but overall, I'd take a stab and say the world would be better off if all of those extremely talented people got paid slightly less money and spent all day working out how to cure dementia, or more efficient ways to combat poverty, or how to grow crops more efficiently.
The framing that the rich are somehow doing us all a favor by paying people for their labor is just a complete farce. They're paying people for their labor to benefit themselves, just like the people working for them are giving them their labor to benefit themselves. Neither is doing the other a favor. It's a purely transactional relationship.
General comments about generational wealth: I am very pro big inheritance tax, fwiw. It is also true that having access to better education, opportunities etc does grant the talent to run shit. Not having these things means that you can't. My comment isn't about what's fair it's simply a rail against the general sentiment that leadership / management across the board is contributing nothing, and is preventing the people from living their own unmolested lives and that everything would keep ticking along without intervention.
On computers / merit. People treat you like an expert because you are. You could have chosen to not engage with computers. You didn't absorb this by osmosis. You could have done anything else. You would be worse off.
[I also imagine that we probably have a lot more in common that not. I got my start on computers because my dad managed to convince his boss that he needed a 286 at home which he absolutely did not, and I needed to boot from dos to get quake to run, and so on].
On shitty companies: yes. Push back: the idea that if that capital swapped hands and went to the public sector it would somehow be immediately deployed usefully and efficiently is also straying into the realms of fantasy, because the same shit heels climbing to the top of the private sector also climb to the top of the public sector. I am currently watching the guardians of the NHS sign away all of our patient data to Palantir.
On the framing that the rich are doing us all a favour: agree. Companies employ people precisely because they believe the people that they employ produce more economic value than they are paying them. This wasn't the framing that I was going for. I agree that they're in it for themselves. What I am saying is that the relation is symbiotic. I disagree with idea that everyone could be be better off if they quit and did their own thing (which maybe you aren't actively arguing, but that seems to be the corollary of your original "they don't add anything" statement).
Thank you for the thoughtful response.
I spent a couple seconds on Google searching "difficulty setting up worker cooperative" and it turned up this reddit post, where a tech worker asked about what makes starting a cooperative difficult. Response:
^ that feels like it refutes the notion of a trivial debunk, at least? But may I ask if you've run into anything else concrete which could constitute a systemic disadvantage against co-ops that can't be traced back to investors wanting to exploit labour? For instance, in papasquat's example, the business owner takes out cheap loans then squeezes employees for profit. In the linked example, private equity cuts out the middleman and refuses to finance business owners that will not crush labourers for cash.
... also I read the rest of your comment, which I'll acknowledge, but not address if that's acceptable. Hopefully you'd agree that it's acceptable to mutually disagree on a topic.
I think the great beauty of tildes is people disagreeing and it being fine!
It is absolutely true that getting capital is harder if you go a different route. In the first instance though most funding comes from friends, fools, and family, followed by angels. None of these people need to be sophisticated investors, you don't need to give up control or voting rights to them, you just have to work harder at getting smaller cheques. If you want effectively two or three people to bankroll you then sure, they are going to want a big say, but that seems reasonable to me? I think there is a generally a lack of imagination when it comes to building businesses today. I will stick to tech because it's what I know, but I see criminally profligate spending all of the time, from people that could have taken small cheques, grown sustainably, and retained as a consequence significantly more control over their businesses. It generally seems that almost no one wants to start small. Well if you want to start big you either need to accept someone else's terms, or have a bunch of money yourself. See my other comment as to why I think co-ops don't actually work out in practice. Either the overhead of decision making will cause you get lapped by someone more nimble, or there is in fact some hierarchy, someone is calling the shots and the group is in denial.
Perhaps bully is too strong a word, but I think a lot of people default state of being is sitting on the couch absorbing entertainment. We all know it's "bad" and yet that is where the trendline seems to be inexorably heading. It would be nice to find some way to go back in time, but I don't know how we wouldn't end up in the same place. I enjoyed this article that was linked on lobste.rs.
I think it's always been hard. I think the hierarchy always exists and it is at its peak worst when it tries to pretend like it doesn't. If you break down trying to get things done into mostly a mathematical problem of forming consensus then basically every distributed system either gives up efficiency or basically elects a leader by consensus and the replicates its decisions to the rest of the group (see flexible paxos / raft / VSR for various protocols). Communication has a cost. You can also see those dynamics at play if you look at the mythical man month and ahmdal's law.
I think that's going a little far. If you go to a fancy restaurant then you expect it to be "worth it." If it's not then I can see being kinda annoyed by it. If they add some extra fee for no reason then you're probably kinda pissed, right? If you buy a car and it's a lemon then you expect them to fix it.
It's a more extreme version of customer entitlement, which is fundamentally about not getting the deal you thought you were getting, which is based on expectations that may be out of wack. People don't stop feeling that way if they have money even though it really doesn't matter anymore.
And I think the answer is, okay, you can be someone else's customer.
Paying a lot of money for a restaurant meal enriches the owner… and nobody else. Workers at that restaurant still get paid a very very low wage and don’t get better working conditions as a result.
Paying tax on your second or third home benefits the community: tax money will be used to pay for public programs and it will contribute to lowering the appeal of hoarding real estate in a city where affordable housing is scarce.
To me you’re comparing apples and oranges.
Sure, you could think about it that way, but I suspect it’s entirely disconnected from how people think about property taxes when they are complaining that their taxes are too high? They aren’t thinking about incentives or where the money goes just because that’s how you think about it.
It seems like this discussion lacks evidence about how people really think.
I was answering your restaurant analogy because I disagree with it.
Your examples feel more like “I was scammed or mislead” which is about expectations, not value. If you paid a lot of money for a miserable experience at a restaurant, the issue is not that you had a miserable experience, or that you paid a lot of money, the issue is the expectation of one preventing the other. If you had a miserable restaurant experience but it was basically free, that wouldn’t be an issue, likewise if you paid a lot of money but had a fantastic and unforgettable meal, that also wouldn’t be an issue.
I think the same applies to the car analogy too.
I guess where I’m struggling to understand the frustration on a tax on owning multiple NY homes is where did the expectation (that it would be super cheap...?) come from when you’re buying in one of the most in demand cities in the world? In general I can see it as an immediate emotional response if it was unexpected, but I imagine the backlash if an existing tax was raised from 2% to 3% would be just as high as if it was raised from 92% to 93% so it feels like there’s no value in even turning these complaints into an article.
They had expectations about how much it would cost them. Now, there's an tax increase targeted specifically at them, so it will cost more. I don't think it's that hard to understand why some might think that's unfair? NYC is changing the deal, and the politics around it are such that it seems punitive. (Of course, that's why a lot of other people like it.)
New buyers will know going in what it costs.
This really goes to show just how out touch these people are with reality, imagine having that much wealth and still crying that you are hard done by. Unbelievable.
Especially in light of even "their" lawyers admitting
What I think it's very interesting is that they're taking a policy issue personally in a way that it would never consider, say, mass layoffs at their company. Or policy changes that negatively impact their customers but make them more money.
Probably the most significant common factor I’ve noticed in the very wealthy people I’ve interacted with is an absolutely unshakable sense of entitlement. It’s interesting, in some ways I even kinda see positives in it as an approach - it’s helped me unlearn a lot of mostly implicit things I was taught growing up about being deferential, not taking up space, not making demands, generally putting oneself second to people who have no reason to be allowed to put themselves first.
The frustrating part is that only about a third of them seem to be… honest about that approach, I guess is the best way to put it? I can have a principled disagreement with someone who’s just openly trying to maximise results for themselves and expecting everyone else to do the same in a kinda sportsmanlike way. “You’d do the same in my position” - well no, actually, I try to be better than that, but I believe you’d expect me to and I believe you’d take it as a fair loss if I did.
What I can’t stand is the people who’ve somehow managed to convince themselves that they actually and uniquely deserve special treatment to an extent that they deny it’s special treatment at all. Those are the fuckers who are genuinely pissed off about this but are still willing to axe 1,000 jobs without feeling bad about it, and those are the ones whose mindset I’ve never been able to really get.
Fairness means something else to people like that: fairness is like, Snow White kind of "fair", like beauty, to them. There's only themselves and a mirror, no other faces. It's not, if I had 0 houses and this other person has two, is that fair. It's, I have two houses and I paid low taxes for both. A change where I pay even less means another diamond in my tiara so that makes it more fair, while a change where I pay more taxes means I still buy that new diamond but I can see a number on a piece of paper in my peripheral vision where my networth decreased by 0.00001% and that's NOT fair.
Just purely my assumptions here, for some of them I assume the behavior is inherited and much like other things people inherit, there are elements to what their parents understood that get lost as those things get passed down to the children. In that behavior in particular the lost element is the awareness of what the mentality is behind that behavior and what is meant to be achieved with it.
The thing is that it doesn't actually suggest that they'll struggle in any way. Maybe I'm judging that wrong, but it feels like if you can afford multiple cars and parking and multiple apartments in New York City, you're probably doing okay. The article seems to be people who just take it personally, not people who will struggle in any way because of the high cost of living and their particular lifestyle choices. One said he has to keep it because the kids/grandkids live nearby and he'll spend anything to live near them... (Seems to be more a "won't move out of NYC" than a "won't sell my second apartment" though?)
Feels very similar to the guy earlier this week who said that "eat the rich" was the equivalent of a slur.
When people are saying that they are struggling, they often mean they are having difficulty affording their lifestyle. Most people are entirely unaware of how wasteful their lives are because the current iteration of capitalism - and many of the ones before as well - strongly discourage reflection. Almost everyone can and should reduce their consumption in one way or another but it’s pretty taboo for anyone to point that out. Just think of how many people clap back when you see a forum post suggesting that people should drive less.
People who are moderately rich are socially adjacent to people who are obscenely rich, and as such they are more likely to compare themselves against them and find justifications and rationalizations for stupid expenses like a half dozen cars, second and third houses, and bi-annual or seasonal international leisure trips. They don’t think they are spending too much; they think they are socially required to. But it’s all a part of how capitalism continues to poison and consume society at large.
I understand all of this. My point is mostly that being in the class of "two NYC apartments" and the idea of more than one car + parking in the city (and we can presume any number of other luxuries) strongly suggests a much higher level of wealth than owning a home and a vacation home in another area and cars some place that has much more room for parking. The example being used was Ken Griffen's 2nd apartment worth over $200 million. The properties impacted all seem would be worth at least $5 mil and aren't being rented out (like someone might if they needed the income.) The folks involved are estimated to be at the 95-99 percentile for wealth and that's for NYC.
The most that has happened is people pausing real estate deals until they know what the tax is and blustering about it. Maybe the folks pausing are the ones least financially well off, but maybe they're also doing it out of being traumatized like they were in Chicago.
If these increased taxes are in fact "a rounding error" for most of those impacted then we're not talking nearly so much about someone trying to keep up with the "Jones". We're firmly in the realm of C suite, multimilionaires and billionaires. Yeah maybe some of them are trying to keep up with Bezos, but this applies to less than 1/4 of these type of residences, so I think that's a reasonable set of folks to focus on.
Additional info: (I'm not enough of an economist (at all) to analyze it but scanning it was fairly educational)
The Pied-à-Terre Tax and Its Potential Revenues - Office of the New York City Comptroller Mark Levine
It reads like they are existentially terrified of having their luxuries disrupted, without even the appearance of empathy for people who are existentially terrified of (or facing) their basic survival being disrupted. It's shameful.
From my limited research this tax is one of the better ones proposed and implemented. It’s not these weird hard to enforce wealth taxes, it’s just straight up on a fairly easy to define extra asset.
I wish more discussion was in this direction
They're hoarders, plain and simple, it's just that rather than hoard empty pizza boxes and newspapers and discarded tech, they hoard wealth and riches. It's the exact same mental illness, and we should treat it as such. For their own good these things need to be removed from them, it's sapping them of their basic humanity and causing them to destroy the only home we all share because they're so frightened of losing their accumulations that they literally cannot think straight.
Let me pull out this old saw: if a monkey lived in a colony with other monkeys but kept all of the bananas to himself, and fought any monkey that tried to come get a banana from him, we wouldn't put him on the cover of magazines and laud him as the best and most clever of the monkeys, we'd ask what the fuck was wrong with that monkey.
This isn't hoarding in the mental health sense and you don't treat it by forcing people who hoard to have their items taken away, not if you have literally any other option (it's rarely for their own good at that point vs a societal safety issue). You have to do a lot of slow work to be effective and not result in returning to the behavior (after a ton of distress for them when they lose all their things.) This is at least based on the treatment planning I learned in school.
I don't disagree we need to handle it, but hoarders have much less control over their situation than rich people.
Well then I'm stumped. Because if it's not something beyond their immediate control as I assumed (as I believe is the case with hoarding), then I have no idea how to get through to them. I don't wish them any ill, but I want them to stop causing the harm that they are. Maybe I'm too naïve, expecting that the reason they don't examine their own actions and stop their behaviors is because they can't. Maybe they can and they rejected the notion, which is very sad.
Hoarding isn't a total lack of control but yes they have persistent difficulty getting rid of things, and it's causing them distress, generally with a very high level of anxiety if they consider throwing things away.
Rich people generally are not in distress due to their acquisition of wealth and there's not evidence that they couldn't stop acquiring it if they wanted to. At least none I'm familiar with.
They're just people making choices like all the rest of us. Most of us do shitty things or unhealthy things or negative things. It's nice to think we wouldn't ever make the same mistakes but we don't really know. The me of today is certain I'd never fuck people over like that. But I also recognize I am very often stressed about money to the point of treating medical supplies like health potions in a video game, keep a full stack or five at all times in the inventory. So maybe I'd be different.
It sounds to me like the money is the problem, and like maybe absurdly vast individual fortunes are not beneficial to society as a whole. I’m just spitballing here.
Sure probably. I'm just here because I felt the need to correct mental health info.
From what I gather, NYC’s problem may be down to a few NIMBYs and property speculators, but places elsewhere have the problem that corporations are buying up housing and letting it sit empty for the tax breaks, along with a few other issues like overvaluing the rent when they take out the loan to buy the property.
related:
Mamdani Announces Balanced Budget Without Cuts
https://prospect.org/2026/05/12/mamdani-announces-balanced-budget-without-cuts/
As a new New Yorker (and lifelong Jersey boy) I will proudly still say fuck the rich :)
Like the old joke goes:
Two Communists are talking, and boasting of their loyalism to the Party.
The first friend asks: "Comrade, if you had two houses, would you give one of them to the Party?"
The second friend replies, "Of course, Comrade!"
The first friend then asked, "If you had two cars, would you give one of them to me?"
"Of course, I should help the rest of society with my wealth!" replied the second friend.
Overjoyed, the first friend then asked, "If you had two chickens, would you give one of them to me?"
"No, comrade!" The second friend said.
The first friend becomes surprised and puzzled, and asks, "Why not, Comrade?"
"Well, I do have two chickens!" The second friend said.
It is always easy to decide on what to do with the things of others. And every populist politician proposes taxing the millonaries, until they become millonaries, then they start proposing taxing the billonaries.
I come from Argentina, a country where we tried dividing an ever-shrinking cake in different, more "just ways". Always the poverty increased, the freedoms became restricted, the foreign currency more desirable. Let's add a little government spending here and there. Let's print a little currency. Let's add a little more fiscal pressure. Repeat, and repeat, until everyone is equally poor.
I do not know what you guys were thinking when you elected Mr. Mamdani. What more evidence do you need? Everywhere it has been tried the "let's take things from people and give them to others at the discretion of the elected politician or unelected dictator du jour" has failed spectacularly.
Why must humanity insist on doing the superficially good thing ("giving more to others") instead of doing the correct, long term thing, which is "get out of the way of people, tax them as little as possible, and watch the country prosper"?
Because no politician will get credit for "keeping their nose out of people's business", that's why.
Sticking with the theme of Mamdani and the US for a second here, the most prosperous era in the United States is when wealth inequality was at its lowest and the tax burden distributed most heavily towards the top. The highest tax bracket at the time was 90%.
What happened is that people with wealth invested more in their local area and caused the region to flourish. Might as well spend it rather than give it to the tax man hey?
What you're proposing is the direction the US, and most of the western European world for that matter, is already going. Not taxing the rich is what we're doing and the consequences are rather stark in opposition to when you do tax the wealthy. Namely: increased inequality, massive wealth flight, reduced investment in local areas, higher tax burdens on lower incomes to make up for the lack of government revenue, etcetera etcetera. What we're not seeing is the country prosper.
Instead, the non-wealthy have the lowest consumer confidence ever, the highest levels of debt, and can't buy houses until they're 45 and up.
Humanity insists, because giving everyone chances works. Your plan isn't something novel, it has been tried. Frequently. And it always fails. Because the free market rich aren't in the business to make the country prosper, they're in the business to make themselves prosper. Without incentives like a high tax burden there is no reason for them to invest locally like they have done so historically.
.. and that's just keeping to the US. Taking it wider, whatever the place or time, a higher wealth inequality leads to an unstable country. Taxes can help alleviate this problem.
This isn't a terrible argument, but it's important to keep in mind when talking about the Post-WW2 economic boom that the United States exited the war as the only industrial economy that hadn't experienced mass destruction.
That's noteworthy when you are analyzing the results of our tax structure at the time. The US all but had a monopoly on industrial production for many goods in the late 40s and early 50s while Japan, Europe, and the USSR all rebuilt.
I don't think it's too difficult to find examples not the US but kept my post in the same realm since it started with Mamdani.
The economic boom of post WW2 made it much easier for the entire country to thrive and you're absolutely right that it's important to keep that historical context in mind when discussing anything from the 50s.
Nevertheless, my post was less about the significant tax brackets and industrial base of the time and much more about wealth inequality, or lack thereof. Due to this calamitous event, jobs opened up, inheritances were paid out early, and housing was more available.
This follows a trend that doesn't make WW2 an outlier, but in line with other disasters. For example, wealth inequality dropped post WW1, but also shortly after the Black Death.
I am going to disclaim this next statement with a handwavey "I could be wrong about this" but these calamities often turn into a bit of a rebirth of prosperity when inequality is at its lowest when perhaps you'd expect a serious economic downturn, not unlike the Byzantines after their Justinian Plague/Black Death event, due to the loss of sometimes multiple generations.
Another small disclaimer that I feel isn't necessary on Tildes because of a bad faith interpretation, but because someone might mistake me typing "inequality" this much and equating my views with communism, that is not at all what I'm about. I think a certain level of income inequality isn't inherently a problem, I think wealth inequality to this extent in 2026 is.
Edit: dangit, I've turned another contemporary problem into a history post. This happens more frequently than I'd care to admit.
The comparison with ancient and medieval plagues is in interesting one, and I thing surprisingly relevant.
Pre-industrial agricultural societies pretty much across the board wind up forming societal structures where labor is heavily devalued relative to land and capital, because the local powerful people deliberately design them that way. A typical peasant family has not quite enough enough land to reliably feed themselves once taxes, disruptive weather conditions, and other attritive elements are accounted for, but they have enough labor available to work far more land given the opportunity. This surplus labor is normally spent in the fields owned by the local landowning "big men", for as little pay as these big men can get away with without things in the peasant community becoming so desperate that the surplus labor decide they'd rather attempt a violent uprising. All in all, peasants wind up working about as hard as they can sustain to keep themselves and their families alive, while the big men take everything else.
In situations where the local population is significantly reduced (such as a plague, or a brutal conquest and displacement of a local culture by a foreign invader) peasants are able to take control of land that had belonged to the deceased (both dead peasant families, and dead big men), and can use that formerly-surplus labor to work that land for themselves. This gives them significantly more short term power because they actually can feed their families without the meager earnings from working someone else's land. The local big men are still out there, with quite a bit of land, but that land is worthless if not worked. With a much smaller and less desperate labor pool to draw from, they need to pay much higher rates for workers, which gives them less surplus to spend on tools of extraction like armed soldiers. Total productivity wouldn't increase much overall (it might even go down slightly, because a peasant who has enough food to eat for the year and a surplus to trade for a few luxuries doesn't get a very good return from working even harder to get even more yields), but those peasants would find their individual lives much improved.
Over a few generations peasant populations increase to the capacity of the land, the local rulers slowly recover their wealth and military strength and are able to squeeze more and more out of this expanding peasant population until they are back at maximum sustainable extraction, and things return to normal.
The exact mechanics obviously do not map on neatly to modern society, but the general pattern of more resources coming available to the lower classes greatly reducing the wealth gap is definitely there. One could also note the relevance of an upper class extracting as much as possible from the lower classes, and spending that extracted surplus to maintain their power and continue extraction. It's breaking that feedback loop, not the precise mechanics of agrarian land and labor availability, which gives the lower classes power.
I already used up my exemplary for now but in case I don't remember to come back later when the cooldown is over, this is a really well-written comment.
The sentiment is appreciated but no need, I feel plenty of others put more effort into their contributions. If anything the post was a hazy early morning diatribe rather than a well thought out and put together response, although I do stand behind my message.
My post certainly lacks nuance but in all honesty that's also because the post I responded to was more of an emotionally charged than a substantiated one.
Your modesty is commendable, but I don't think a post has to be perfect to be worth marking Exemplary, and I think yours definitely fits the bill.
Not sure what kind of investment you mean, but I imagine investing locally would result in gentrification and higher property values. It doesn't seem like the cure for affordability, unless it's new construction? Investing in existing property (remodelling, etc) makes it more expensive.
Ironically, trickledown economics is probably one of the better descriptions for this phenomenon.
Think of the current wealthy class. Their investments and connections are no longer locally bound. Large scale international investment into corporations working at global scales, their "home" is wherever their private jet is taking them or whatever segregated hill or community they built their mansion on, and doing their best to skip out on taxes both personally and commercially.
The ramifications are clear: No connection with local communities to the point they'll threaten to leave said community if asked to pay into the collective and by investing at a multinational level you can skirt taxes too by creating corps in tax 'lenient' countries. Therefore, local communities see nothing of this generated wealth.
Previously, before large scale globalisation we'd frequently see the opposite. Wealthier people stayed in their local communities and became important figures. These folks would either pay taxes to the betterment of the collective, or decide to duck the taxes by investing locally. Why not look into supporting local business ventures? Construction too might be useful on the lands you own.
Money wasn't as quick to leave the community entirely and would circle around within the same area providing jobs and opportunities for the people, which increases consumer confidence, which boosts local store revenue, which in turn creates more options for entrepreneurs to open their own stores and the cycle continues.
Of course I'm painting a simplistic and idyllic picture, this didn't always happen but there is plenty of evidence it did.
I used to live in a place that was once built by a corporation to provide housing for their employees. They would provide cheap living spaces, creating construction jobs, gave breathing room to their employees and spend more time locally to spend money, which gave rise to local stores and restaurants, and so on.
Gentrification isn't too far off the mark but it's a bit of a dirty word because it implies it's purposefully done to price out lower classes when instead this happened in a "rising tide lifts all boats" kind of way. People usually want to improve the community they live in, and the wealthy used to too before they had the option to just take everything elsewhere and keep the community hostage by threatening to do so.
Boom/bust oil towns rapidly experience this phenomenon from both ends where local wealth booms the place until it dries up and is taken away only for the place to wither.
Long story short: Locally spent money remains local to the community which increases regional wealth. And that was frequently done by rich people trying to avoid paying the highest tax brackets and improve the place they also live in, but the crux is that this connection is no longer there to want to give back to the community. Nowadays that money is no longer regional but global.
Nowadays, people are advised to diversify their retirement investments by buying index funds that are national or even international. The big companies in these funds are also national or international. They do have offices and factories in specific places, but the decisions about where to invest are made by professional managers. McDonalds is said to be largely a real estate company. Banks buy real estate to build local branches everywhere they think they can get people to open accounts with them. The current fad for large investors is that they’re desperate to build data centers in all sorts of places, which is a local investment of a sort, but not very popular these days.
Who else has local investments? Real estate developers and landlords and small businesses. Also farmers and the businesses that serve them. The owners of fruit orchards, car dealerships, construction companies, shopping plazas. People who own apartment buildings. Local developers.
Here’s a blog post about “local gentry.” I’m not seeing all that much of a point in it, but it seems to be roughly what you’re talking about?
It seems like local investors don’t get a whole lot of good press, and in large parts of the US, they tend to be conservative?
It seems like high real estate prices don’t happen without attracting lots of investment money, which suggests that urban California is absolutely awash in local investment.
Companies don’t build worker housing anymore because they don’t need to - it’s provided by other real estate developers.
One thing I often wondered about is why Google builds offices in big cities rather than somewhere suburban with cheap real estate. It seems like older companies like IBM used to do that. Maybe it’s because urban sprawl is no longer considered a good thing?
Note that I'm talking about the wealthy from times where "rich" didn't mean being worth more than the GDP of most countries. There are plenty of reasons for that ridiculous blowout that I won't get into (Jack Welch being at least one or more of those reasons), this is generally about times where wealth inequality was already low before the globalisation of finances kicked in.
Your first paragraph sums up nicely how contemporary finance tends to be scatter shot rather than a local developing opportunities in their home town and staying there.
I'm not sure about the Google office thing, though I wouldn't be surprised if it was at least in part about the prestige of being prominent in high CoL areas.
Well, kudos for expressing a view which is likely to get quite a lot of push back around here.
Would I be correct to assume you are libertarian/classical liberal? No shame in that, I was too for a long time (which isn't implying I "grew out of it" or anything suggesting I know better than you, I really don't) and somewhat still am.
But Argentina's problem was mostly capital flight due to institutional instability, not welfare spending... and how do you explain the nordic countries as a counter point?
You could actually hate this more: Mamdani's tax is the politically easy option, it would be much more effective to reform local zoning law and let developers build high density housing (second home owners have a pretty negligible impact on property price, not enough of them). That would actually lower property prices and it's precisely what existing homeowners, including many "leftist", fight hardest against. Everyone supports affordability until it's their neighborhood at stake (this is still the 2 chicken joke).
But if you want politics to get out of the housing market so that it can work, you should be much more angry against Zoning than against Mamdani's tax!
Uh, there's plenty of it in New York City, and more being built all the time. Though, apparently not enough? Anyway, NYC is not at all typical for the US.
Thank you for your polite disagreement, it is much valued on this Internet.
You are 100% correct in assuming I am a libertarian.
Re: Argentina's Problem: Capital flight is a consequence of the root issue: Chronic deficitary spending, either highly deficitary or ruinously deficitary. For over 120 years the "solution" has been to print more money (inflation) or ask for loans and default on them. Patch over patch over patch, and every administration adds more ministries, more public employees, more and more pork, and of course it ends up blowing up eventually.
Re: Nordic Countries - There are 2 models of societal organization that work well: Low taxes and minimal state services, high taxes and many public goods. The problem in Argentina is that you have insane taxes + inflation caused by deficitary spending and overprinting of currency (Look this up because it sounds like I am making stuff up, the fiscal pressure on businesses was 106% before Milei; i.e. if you had a shop you were evading taxes, period) with the public services of subsaharian Africa. Mr. Mamdani proposes to tax people who own two homes. The money then goes to the black hole of Mr. Mamdani's municipality and gets spent on what the politician decides, in the most inefficient manner possible, instead of being kept where it belongs, in the pockets of the people who made the money in the first place by serving society with better goods and services at a lower price.
I do agree that I went on a mini-rant; I can't help myself when I see the ever-growing State taking away liberty to spend what you earn on what you want.
I meant "Black hole" as in "Absorbs everything that goes in, unsatiable appetite", not as in "unknown what happens inside". Sorry for the confusion, not a native speaker.
The politician spends and spends. Prosperity? Add public employees. Less prosperity? Increase taxes. No thought is ever given to reducing the ever increasing burden of the State's gigantic size on the taxpayer. I agree that the budget is "open", but it can be open and overinflated.
I'm not sure we're actually disagreeing on much policy.
But I think 'less state' and 'better state' aren't the same argument, and libertarians often conflate them.
Milei's Argentina cuts spending but also gutted university funding, destroying public goods that facilitate private enterprise.
We must choose which institutions are worth it.
Nordic country show us that high tax with high effective public spending can work. Low tax and barely any public service isn't such a good deal.
Basically, corruption is what we should fight against, everything else should fall into place in time if we can nail that long term.
Skepticism about the government certainly makes sense coming from someone in Argentina.
How do people save money there in your experience? (Just curious.)
First of all, thankfully inflation is much lower now, we had a near hyperinflation in 2024.
With that said, what you do with money depends on your sophistication level. In my personal case, I make my money outside the country as a freelancer and only bring in what I need to spend on daily necessities. For savings, crypto (Stable coins and staking, not speculation on poopcoins) and the S&P500 serve me well.
Older people usually hide 100 USD bills at home (There was a confiscation of USD deposits in 2001, so people either were personally screwed or had close family and friends who were screwed). Younger people have crypto, or USD in virtual wallets.
Many people overstock themselves in goods ("saving in cans"); a large pantry and large monthly or bimonthly purchases of everything you need are not uncommon. It is common to buy in bulk. A freezer full of meat is not a rarity.
Others buy construction materials that are durable ("saving in bricks"). The idea is to build a brick and concrete house that you can make money from in your retirement, and avoid the dilution of savings.
A minority "die of nominality" and will consider a car or motorcycle an investment, because they can sell it 5 years later for more pesos than they bought it for, but they do not bother comparing then vs now prices in the calculation. This has the unintended side effect of pushing used car and motorcycle prices through the roof. For reference, my 1998 Yamaha RX-100 is valued at about $1200 USD here; for the same price you can get a brand new 250cc in other countries.
Thanks! I've read before about a lot of these techniques. It's hard to tell from the outside if cryptocurrency is genuinely popular in Argentina or it it's just the crypto boosters talking it up.
I've never lived in any place where this is not the case. I have only ever lived in places where sewage, water, electricity, police, hospitals, education, roads, mail service, internet.... everything have been paid for collectively, at the discretion of the will of the people (Canada, US) or an appointed government (British HK, HKSAR)
Are you of the opinion that taxation is a theft ? Taxation is a usage fee: you use two houses you pay for the roads and securities and utilities connected to those houses.
Hello! Maybe something is lost in translation as I am not a native speaker, forgive me if that is the case.
I was not espousing an extreme view, such as an anarcho-capitalist one of no State and no Tax. I am not of the opinion that taxation is theft; I do believe the social contract is "reasonable tax for services that the private sector is not able or willing to provide", such as some of the examples you mention (Except for internet, that's private here, but that's just a nitpick).
I was positing that there exists a slippery slope. For every new tax, there is a job created in the inefficient public sector, as a tax dollar will not be spent by the owner (See Thomas Sowell, who frequently argues that "spending other people's money"—specifically government spending—is inherently inefficient because individuals and bureaucrats lack the incentives to use funds as carefully as they would their own money). Keep adding taxes, limiting freedoms, and spending like there is no tomorrow, and then when tomorrow arrives you get the ills of a bloated State - chronic deficit, inflation, anemic growth or stanflation, elevated fiscal pressure, capital flight, etc -.
New taxes must be fought, because they are always "temporary" "for the rich" and they end up being "permanent" and "for everyone exceeding a very low bar". It is the nature of the politician to seek to spend money, because no politician will be reeelected on a "didn't overspend, did not add new taxes" platform. This taxation is just another cut on the death by thousand cuts that kills prosperity and economic freedom.
On the other hand, sometimes taxes transfer money to some other person, such as for pensions. Since they spend it on themselves, there's no particular reason to believe it will be less efficient.
But I also like the unorthodox theory that the purpose of taxes is to reduce spending and prevent inflation. After all, a central government can print money and spend it. They don't actually need the money. But then total spending would be too much, so spending by the private sector must be reduced.
This doesn't apply for NYC since they aren't the central government.
Thank you for expanding on your thought, even if I am still firmly in the opposite opinion, that taxes must always be collected and re-adjusted, including new taxes and tax cuts, as always necessary. If everyone fights every tax we end up with a society that no one has paid into running.
America is an excellent example, we have cut taxes for the rich, the country became prosperous but fewer individuals are prosperous, and the money is still moved overseas.
the "wealth imbalance, it's shameful!" is probably what these engorged bon-bon-sucking layabouts meant to say, right?
TIME TO EAT THIS MOTHERFUCKERS, what a bunch of useless twats. The tax rate was actually upwards of 94% on the top income earners back in the late 40's and 50's.
Good.