"A Cheap, Race-Neutral Way to Close the Racial Wealth Gap..
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Anonymous
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Anonymous
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Anonymous
The country owes a debt
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Anonymous
| $50,000 a year is not "cheap," especially in our current budget situation. We'd be saddling all of our kids, including black kids, with paying off the debt for generations. Even Clinton was only talking about $1,000 to $2,000 per kid. I have a feeling this wouldn't live up to peoples' expectations. |
Anonymous
Tax. The. Rich. |
Anonymous
PP here. I meant $50,000 per kid, not per year. Just correcting myself. But: you can impoverish Bill Gates and his ilk but you're still not going to raise enough funding for this. You're going to have to dip way down into the middle class. I used to work on Social Security and people were always saying, just eliminate the cap on how you only have to pay the FICA tax on your income up to $133,000 (that's the 2020 limit, aka taxable maximum), so that Bill Gates pays that 12.4% tax on all of his millions of dollars of annual income. And then don't pay him benefits because he doesn't need it. That was never enough to fix even Social Security; all the modeling showed that you'd still have to raise taxes on people with incomes down to about $60,000 to raise sufficient funding to make Social Security solvent. And Social Security only provides about $14,000 a year to the elderly (nowhere close to $50,000), even as we're assuming the additional FICA tax revenue from taxing Bill Gates would also be annual. People thought this was such an obvious fix, and so did I when I first heard it, but really careful modeling says otherwise. The one percent is actually less of a target than their individual massive wealth would lead us to think. I'm all for putting the estate tax thresholds back to where they used to be, at a million or so, FWIW. |
Anonymous
| Ok, tax their wealth too. I have half a million in assets before age 40, so I'm sure that would get taxed too. Let's do it. |
Anonymous
How are you going to do that? Are you going to make Charles Schwab, Fidelity, the TSP, and others report on how much people have in their investment accounts and 401(k)s? This will just encourage people to buy second homes on the Delaware Bay, or maybe in Portugal. Or, to spend their money on themselves in other ways before the government takes it away. |
Anonymous
+2 Bunch of racist jerks making stupid comments from their position of privilege |
Anonymous
There are definitely lots of racist jerks on DCUM. But, this doesn't seem super-doable from a budget or logistic perspective. What does seem do-able is an all-out effort to fix public schools by raising the property tax (which would hit people with higher-value houses). Subsidize home mortgages for low-income people and pay for it by lowering the cap on mortgage interest for homes over $500,000 or whatever (which would hit people with higher-value houses). And so on. |
Anonymous
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Anonymous
| Creating the racial wealth gap was not race-neutral so why should the solution be? American descendants of slaves are owed cash reparations from the US government. |
Anonymous
You can keep saying this. But there are theoretical issues (see the Reparations thread in the political forum) and economic issues (see above). |
Anonymous
The study quoted in the article estimated the cost at $80 billion. After the $700 billion bank bailout in 2008 and the recent $2 trillion stimulus package it seems cheap in comparison. |
Anonymous
+1 |