Gosh, they have statistics! By a man. A man from Goldman!
"I was quoted by a man from Goldman's in the mansion house, that in Hong Kong it cost them $70 to onboard a client. In the UK, it now costs them $10,000 to onboard a client just because of the regulation."
In the US about twenty years ago, there was a minor movement for a flat sales tax that would replace all other taxes. I lived in Georgia at the time, which was the epicenter of support for the idea. Proponents got themselves stuck in a metaphoric tarpit when they wouldn't accept that most people's way of calculating sales tax was different than what they promoted. At least in the US, if there's a 7% sales tax, it means if you buy something for a dollar, you pay seven cents in tax. Their flat sales tax would have been 30% using this method, but they wanted to promote it as being only 23% since $0.30 is 23% of $1.30.
I'm sure there were other reasons why it failed, but for the people I knew who supported it, claiming it to be a 23% sales tax instead of a 30% sales tax was a hill they were willing to let the whole thing die on (and it did die). Lots of people who casually supported it at first when they heard 23%, lost interest when it was clarified what that really meant. The difference between 23% and 30% isn't all that great but if you're going to overhaul the tax system, trust in those who are doing it is needed.
Laughing aloud at the thought of the average paycheck to paycheck consumerist blowing a gasket when they see a $24k tax bill for their $80k pickup truck.
Every time someone shares something it has to be new, otherwise it's not worthy of your attention? Couldn't you at least provide some constructive criticism why the argument falls short in your mind, instead of the sharing the first knee-jerky reaction that popped up in your head that just touches the surface?
> Couldn't you at least provide some constructive criticism why the argument falls short in your mind […]
For the flat tax, which is tax cut for the rich:
> This paper uses data from 18 OECD countries over the last five decades to estimate the causal effect of major tax cuts for the rich on income inequality, economic growth, and unemployment. First, we use a new encompassing measure of taxes on the rich to identify instances of major reduction in tax progressivity. Then, we look at the causal effect of these episodes on economic outcomes by applying a nonparametric generalization of the difference-in-differences indicator that implements Mahalanobis matching in panel data analysis. We find that major reforms reducing taxes on the rich lead to higher income inequality as measured by the top 1% share of pre-tax national income. The effect remains stable in the medium term. In contrast, such reforms do not have any significant effect on economic growth and unemployment.
The quality of discourse on HN has been nearing the bottom of the barrel (read: mostly indistinguishable from Reddit) since the pandemic. It’s very rare these days to see citations or even arguments that explain personal reasoning. Just like Reddit and Facebook, commenters mostly write what they think or feel as if it were unyielding fact, and the most common denominator (read: boring, derivative, often oversimplified assumptions) rise to the top via the voting system.
> The quality of discourse on HN has been nearing the bottom of the barrel (read: mostly indistinguishable from Reddit) since the pandemic
That's very much not true, and it's also a tale as old as HN at this point. Since I started commenting on HN in 2010 sometime, the quality had stayed more or less the same, and hasn't drastically dropped in quality like Reddit has done as it grew. Also, the amount of comments that complain that HN is turning into Reddit seems to have stayed at the same level of frequency too, fwiw.
The constructive criticism is that this has been the economic policy of the US for the last 40 years.
It's been a disaster that's lead to wealth consolidation not seen since the gilded age while bringing back old terrible concepts (such as company towns [1]). It's wrecked the middle class.
The fact is, tax isn't what gets in the way of company growth and innovation. It shockingly is actually the opposite. When you have buybacks, low taxes, and easy mergers and acquisitions, it encourages companies to behave in manners not good for the company but good for the owners of the company. That means sending money to stock buybacks, buying out competition, suppressing wages, and cutting corners which overall kill quality. That's because the name of the game is capturing as much money as possible.
High tax and strong corporate regulations like we had in the 50s, 60s, and 70s changes the perspective of companies. If you give a company owner the choice to spend a dollar in taxes or spend it on employee benefits, they'll spend it on employee benefits. But leave a loophole for how they can circuitously capture that dollar for themselves and they'll do that every time.
The tax cut and deregulation era of Reagan, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden has been a trainwreck that has lead us right up to the problems we have today. Nothing is affordable and the unrestrained capitalism has made it more expensive than ever just to live with everything getting worse year over year.
This guy pretends like the economic policy he's proposing isn't what we've been running and that's why it's so laughable dumb.
