POG Politics Thread Version 3

"for they not know what they do"

Ohio, Ohio

OH

Filthy, I found your new country!

You now sound like a regressive conservative.

51st state!!!

Canada are some cheating bastards, we have massive Curling drama

I saw video, the athlete appeared to illegally boop the curling stone after the hogline.

Rules update: the stone must be delivered by the handle only, no booping regardless of hogline.

why should millionaires who can afford to leave their money lying around other people's accounts have to pay for the security that enables them to afford leaving money lying around in other people's accounts?

that doesn't sound like peasants carrying palanquins to me

what's even the point of hoarding wealth at that point??

like, how does that incentive me to fund a class of professionals whose entire role is to drive up inflation for the sake of compounding wealth disparity???

get it together, Netherlands! must be all the safe prostitution, rehabilitative criminal justice, and fully funded education they have.

how can they be this bad at exploiting their poor????

I detect a bit of sarcasm.

Because that money and those businesses will just leave. New businesses will start elsewhere.

I thought you were all about deporting people on welfare and now you're scared that the biggest welfare queens would leave?

Not sure if this was sarcastic, but a sales tax on all purchases is actually regressive. The less wealthy you are the greater percentage of your income and wealth you spend. Meaning if all we had was a sales tax poor people would be disadvantaged

Billionaires would leave? Don’t tempt me with a good time

Mark, ask Grok whether wealth tax historically results in mass emigration by wealth holders.

or think through the economic logic a bit more

you live and thrive in a society which has propelled you to vast material comfort

you are connected, established, wired

then you're told that you will have to start paying out a chunk of your passive income to better your country

you say, "nope, I'll start over somewhere else as an outsider, leaving behind my friends and family"?

the demand for your efforts that made you rich doesn't go away after you leave, you just give someone else (your rivals) a grab at it

and you did it all to avoid, not losing anything, just making a little less

it does not make sense.

also it's not all unrealized gains:

"Real estate and shares in qualifying startups will follow different rules. For those assets, the government adopted a capital gains approach, meaning that tax on the appreciation of value is charged only when the asset is sold or otherwise disposed of."

https://www.imidaily.com/europe/dutch-lawmakers-approve-a-36-tax-on-unrealized-crypto-stock-and-bond-gains/

IMI Daily

Dutch Lawmakers Approve a 36% Tax on Unrealized Crypto, Stock, and Bond Gains - IMI Daily

"The bill also includes an unlimited loss carry-forward provision, allowing investors who suffer a downturn to offset those losses against future gains, and a €1,800 tax-free return threshold that exempts small savers."

hopefully the real estate exception is just for primary residences, or that could get really bad over there!

It's the rich that pay most of the taxes. If some of them leave rip revenues.

Werewolves don't even pretend to be villagers anymore, they just look at you like this

I think you should try thinking a little more directly about the problem rather than viewing it through the lens of only the currently existing economic rule set.

Unlike pre-historical society and animals, human labor is able to produce far more than a human consumes thanks to technological development.

Aggregated over a whole society, we produce far far more as a society than said society consumes. The question of economics is what to do with that surplus labor.

Under feudalism that surplus labor was given to kings and lords based on their heritage. Under our current system it’s given to billionaires (and others less rich) because they own the means of production.

But if you have a country with a ten million people and a few billionaires leave, the capacity to produce surplus labor hasn’t been affected at all. All that has happened is that a more equitable distribution of that surplus labor is possible.

here's what Grok tells me:

"Recent analyses of French tax changes (including the supertax and later reforms) show very low emigration rates among top earners (e.g., ~0.2% annual departure for the top 1%), with even large tax hikes triggering only modest additional outflows (0.02–0.23% extra per percentage point increase)."

"Many rigorous studies, particularly on U.S. "millionaire taxes" (e.g., in New Jersey, California, and others), conclude that while some tax-motivated migration occurs—especially among retirees, those with investment income, or the ultra-wealthy—it is typically marginal"

we're in post-game. the wolves won.

Trying to imagine a bunch of serfs slaving away, producing just enough food for their family to barely survive with the rest going to an absurdly wealthy lord. Then when the serf suggests that they get just a little bit more of the food they produce the lord threatens to leave and go somewhere else.

That would be cause for celebration. The serfs would throw a party!