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Of course we can tax billionaires by Cory Doctorow
Billionaires are pretty confident that they can't be taxed – not just that they shouldn't be taxed, but rather, that it is technically impossible to tax the ultra-rich. They're not shy about explaining why, either – and neither is their army of lickspittles.
If it's impossible to tax billionaires, then anyone who demands that we tax billionaires is being childish. If taxing billionaires is impossible, then being mad that we're not taxing billionaires is like being mad at gravity.
Boy is this old trick getting old. It was already pretty thin when Margaret Thatcher rolled it out, insisting that "there is no alternative" to her program of letting the rich get richer and the poor go hungry. Dressing up a demand ("stop trying to think of alternatives"
as a scientific truth ("there is no alternative" sets up a world where your opponents are Doing Ideology, while you're doing science.
Billionaires basically don't pay tax – that's a big part of how they got to be billionaires:
https://www.propublica.org/series/the-secret-irs-files
By cheating on their taxes, they get to keep – and invest – more money than less-rich people (who get to keep more money than regular people and poor people, obvs). They get so much money that they can "invest" it in corrupting the political process, for example, by flushing vast sums of dark money into elections to unseat politicians who care about finance crime and replace them with crytpo-friendly lawmakers who'll turn a blind eye to billionaires' scams:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/14/silicon-valley-the-new-lobbying-monster
If it's impossible to tax billionaires, then anyone who demands that we tax billionaires is being childish. If taxing billionaires is impossible, then being mad that we're not taxing billionaires is like being mad at gravity.
Boy is this old trick getting old. It was already pretty thin when Margaret Thatcher rolled it out, insisting that "there is no alternative" to her program of letting the rich get richer and the poor go hungry. Dressing up a demand ("stop trying to think of alternatives"
as a scientific truth ("there is no alternative" sets up a world where your opponents are Doing Ideology, while you're doing science.
Billionaires basically don't pay tax – that's a big part of how they got to be billionaires:
https://www.propublica.org/series/the-secret-irs-files
By cheating on their taxes, they get to keep – and invest – more money than less-rich people (who get to keep more money than regular people and poor people, obvs). They get so much money that they can "invest" it in corrupting the political process, for example, by flushing vast sums of dark money into elections to unseat politicians who care about finance crime and replace them with crytpo-friendly lawmakers who'll turn a blind eye to billionaires' scams:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/14/silicon-valley-the-new-lobbying-monster
https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/15/piketty-pilled/#tax-justice