ObjectivityIncarnate

Doesn’t “correct this behavior” very directly imply that the current behavior (in this case, taking your full lunch break) is incorrect and therefore in need of correction, though?

It’s one thing to suggest something, but calling it a “correction” changes things, I’d think.

Taxes in the US are overwhelmingly used for the military

“Overwhelmingly” is a bit of a ridiculous way to describe 13% of the budget, don’t you think?

and to enrich rich fucks

Cite a figure for this nebulous category, if you can.

not to help the poor.

Actually, welfare spending is barely less than military spending, at 11.8% of the budget.

By letting someone sit on them to “allow them to appreciate” is letting someone doing nothing accumulate the wealth gains of society that we all work for.

The same can be said of anyone who owns a house. There is nothing wrong with a thing you already own becoming more valuable to others.

Because those assets appreciate faster than inflation, they create inflation pressure as more asseted people have income to burn that doesn’t reflect actual economic movement. Decreasing the value of money that other people need to use to buy things to live.

This is a very confused couple of statements; most egregiously, you’re conflating asset price inflation with consumer price inflation, and only the latter has a direct effect on the working class.

The ultra-wealthy have a low ‘marginal propensity to consume’. If Jeff Bezos gains $10 billion on paper, he does not spend $10B on consumption goods; most gains remain invested. Appreciation alone does not automatically translate into CPI inflation, because unrealized gains are not income.

No one lives in a vacuum and letting people hoard assets has a negative impact on everyone else.

It’s objectively nonsensical to refer to the notion of purchasing something, and its market value increasing while you merely continue to own it, as “hoarding”. Not to mention, again, that net worth is a valuation, a price tag. It is not money. Stop acting like when the price of a stock goes up, that amount of cash money is magically vacuumed out of the wallets of the working class.

If everyone became a laborer with proper compensation, society would thrive.

People want to be able to own things (aka assets), though.

If everyone became an asset hoarder

Ownership isn’t hoarding.

society would break apart as there would be no one to operate the machinery of society.

Except this literally cannot ever happen because the demand created by the market is the whole reason those assets appreciate in value in the first place. It’s a self-correcting issue: if too many people try to just ‘own assets’, the demand will drop, and said assets’ value will start depreciating, incentivizing those people back in the other direction, to laboring.

…increasing the price of those assets, devaluing other ways of earning money

Asset appreciation is not income, stop equivocating the two.

reducing wealth inequality pushes us towards the first.

Not necessarily; it’s entirely possible for everyone to have identical wealth, and also all be poor. In fact, that was the default state of humanity for the vast majority of its history.

If you have wealth anywhere over say, $50 million, you hire an accountant to assess your business’s value.

‘Oh, our accountant says the valuation is just under the threshold for the new tax, what a coincidence!’

It is trivially easy to shift assets around in such a way that having a net worth threshold for a given tax is basically a guarantee that no one will pay it. Many countries have tried this already, and failed. Why repeat their mistakes, instead of learning from them?

We need to remember that people, and especially the ultra-wealthy, are not inert blocks of wood that don’t react to policy changes like these.

I’m calling bullshit on this. There are all sorts of taxes that fall heavily or solely on the wealthy.

Firstly, I said “only the wealthiest”, so don’t already start nudging those goalposts by “calling bullshit” and immediately tweaking it to “heavily or solely”. Secondly, if there are so many, name three.

The real value in a wealth tax is breaking up the money from individuals, the revenue is just a bonus.

And the mask comes off, revealing the true motivation. You’d happily waste the taxpayer money that is the poor’s lifeline in many cases, reducing overall tax revenue, because hurting the rich matters more to you than helping the poor.

money that’s now actually moving through the economy zombie wealth sitting in some rich fuck’s paws, doing nothing but contribute to inflation.

1. Net worth is a valuation, a price tag on something that’s already been transacted on, how could it possibly contribute to inflation? What nonsense.
2. The ultra-wealthy don’t have Scrooge McDuck vaults full of cash, their wealth consists of investments in businesses that run within the economy.

Switzerland’s wealth taxes, depending on area (there is no country-wide wealth tax) starts at the equivalent of ~$100,000 on average, putting it very squarely in the

‘dialed down’ to be just another ‘mundane’ tax that falls primarily into the lap of the middle class.

category I mentioned before. That is absolutely not a tax aimed exclusively at the ultra-wealthy.

This is basically urban legend at this point; “buy borrow die” is a tiny piece of the ultra-wealthy’s financial strategy, at least when it comes to the “borrow” part, which is what everyone’s focused on:

• In reality, the ultra wealthy do not borrow against a large fraction of their unsold gains. On average from 2004 to 2022, the top 1% of wealth-holders only borrowed 1-2% of their annual economic income.

• Borrowing while holding unrealized gains is, in fact, more of a middle-class activity than an ultra-wealthy one: Americans in the 50-90th percentiles borrowed 42% of their unrealized gains in 2022, compared to just 4% for the top 1% of wealth-holders.

• The primary tax avoidance strategy for the top 1% is not to borrow, but simply not to sell appreciated assets.

Not likely. First of all, the net worth numbers you see for these ultra-wealthy people are all educated guesses. To actually legally impose anything based on total net worth, you need to actually audit net worth and get a real figure. The resources it would take to do this are very unlikely to yield more tax revenue than they cost, especially because there is so much one can possess whose value is pretty much completely arbitrary (the high-end artwork, etc.).

It’s actually all-but-certain it’d be a net loss of tax revenue. There is a reason that every time such a policy targeting only the wealthiest is put into place (it’s been tried numerous times over the years in a bunch of European countries), it’s gotten rid of soon thereafter, or ‘dialed down’ to be just another ‘mundane’ tax that falls primarily into the lap of the middle class.

What an idiotic article (and website in general, looks Buzzfeed-tier). From its linked source:

Negative cerebrovascular effects can be expected by compressing jugular veins and carotids

No shit.

by a necktie.

Nobody is wearing a tie that tightly, and even if it is deliberately made that tight when you put it on, it’s not like a noose, it’ll loosen on its own almost immediately as you start moving around. There are no springs in a tie maintaining the tension.

It’s also important to keep in mind that a fallacious argument leading to a conclusion does not actually disprove the conclusion; identifying the fallacy just means that if the conclusion is correct, that argument is not the path to it. And if the fallacious argument is the only path to conclusion X, then there is simply no basis for presuming X to be correct at all.

red herring: might as well call it by its social media names: “ackshyually”, “whataboutism”, etc.

Well, “ackshyually” is actually (:P) rooted in mocking people who pedantically and pointlessly correct others, to the point of being more irritating than informative. The ‘Jimmy Neutron salt’ meme shows a pretty solid example of that kind of behavior:

Red herrings as a type of fallacy, on the other hand are about using something to support an argument that doesn’t actually have anything to do with it. The Wikipedia page itself gives a solid example of this:

For example, “I think we should make the academic requirements stricter for students. I recommend you support this because we are in a budget crisis, and we do not want our salaries affected.” The second sentence, though used to support the first sentence, does not address that topic.

You’re welcome!

Why miss the opportunity to say “bigly,”

Because the goal isn’t to sound stupid?

Dug a bit, and apparently this seat has literally never been held by a Republican; this is quite the misleading headline.

Her name is “Chasity”, by the way, not “Chastity”.

wanting to sound like an adult when making a genuine criticism is bootlicking

???

1. The fact that “mocking terms” is even in your ‘playbook’ to begin with, speaks volumes about you.
2. Acting like “y’all” is a component of some high-minded satire is genuinely hilarious. Who do you think you’re kidding?

You’re going to enjoy this, I think (ignore the titles of the videos, this is definitely what @maniacalmanicmania@aussie.zone was referring to, and the context makes the bit about WWW so much better:

https://youtu.be/Wo2KB1dEDdk
https://youtu.be/53hMYw8LX60

Each more pathetic than the last, it’s always a hallmark of an infantile mind not worth engaging with, in my experience.

Mature adults can talk about people they don’t like without this stupid playground nonsense.

Asinine ‘doodyhead’-tier ‘nicknames’ for people you don’t like are never appropriate, once you’ve reached a double-digit age. Grow up.

More or less the same way fried chicken ‘became the hallmark of cuisine’ for black Americans: it’s a stereotype, simple as that.

It’s not “sensitivity”, it’s simply pattern recognition. In the US, unseasoned/bland food has been a crack made at the expense of ‘white people’ specifically, for a very long time on the Internet.

I knew that second link was going to be Technology Connections, hah.