Budgets reflect values and our values right now or our tax system reflects our values. Our values are that sweat is less noble than money. And that is the money money makes gets taxed at a lower rate.
The idea of a working class is that you have people who are laboring but own nothing. And this comes out of the industrial revolution and the mass employment of people in things like factories. This is the this kind of idea of working class of working but not owning carries through the 19th century.
You don't have to choose between billionaires and universal healthcare. You can have a society with both. You know, these societies have high tax rates and produce incredible companies that go on to make billions of dollars and trillion dollar market caps and they have billionaires. The two are not mutually exclusive in America.
I think we're at an inflection point where the economic growth of the next 15 years could be larger than all prior economic growth combined. And if that's true, and I believe it is, the question of how that wealth gets distributed really matters.
The reality was that African Americans with money, African Americans exercising their own independence, especially financially, was a real threat, especially in the former Confederate South, where the Civil War was fought over the future of slavery in the nation.
Part of the punchline of the book is that black people can't purchase an escape from racism. We can't buy ourselves out of anti-blackness in the US. Moreover, black people know this.
I think we now need alternative minimum taxes of 60 or 70% on anything over a billion dollars for an individual because these individuals are under the impression that they are not subject to the standards of Western society, decency or any or the law.
If you do not want everything to be owned by a tiny elite, you have to aggressively tax extremely high levels of wealth. Because otherwise, if you're Jeff Bezos, what is he worth? $300 billion, right? Even if he makes 5% a year, he's making $15 billion a year, right? And it's just going to grow, right? It's going to grow unbelievably quickly.
Do you want everything to be owned by the tiny elite or not? If you do not want everything to be owned by a tiny elite, you have to aggressively tax extremely high levels of wealth.
The argument in favor of allowing everyday investors to own this stuff is that this stuff has made people really rich over long periods of time and so if you only let rich people own it, they're only going to get richer and the wealth gap explodes.
