This is exactly why economic models broadly show that taxing capital assets makes workers worse off in the long run. An abundance of capital means that workers will be more productive on the margin, so their wage will be higher. This extends to the capital-income taxation involved in income taxes: pure labor taxes or consumption taxes are inherently more efficient. There are countervailing effects (taxing capital income works as an effective way of indirectly taxing the unearned value of resource-like assets, or of idiosyncratic skills that happen to correlate with holding more capital-like assets) but they can only roughly justify the current income tax arrangement, not some extra tax on assets.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
Oops!
You deride the weak justification for trickle down economics, then proceed to link wtfhappenedin1971.com, a site that tries to argue for the reintroduction of the gold standard through a gish-gallop of random charts?
I'm not perfectly aligned with gold bug politics. Their faith in the Kindleberger world is misplaced and their tax aversion can make them useful to my opponents, but at the same time they tend to take the Cantillon Pump and Balance of Payments mechanisms seriously while my traditional allies do not.
No, I don't mind borrowing their charts. Why? Do you have a better go-to link for The Wedge?
It's not. The (in)famous epi.org is flawed for all sorts of reasons, from excluding noproduction/supervisory workers (the highest compensated ones!), to excluding non-wage compensation (eg. benefits), to different deflators for compensation vs productivity. If you adjust for all of that, the chart is unremarkable.
https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economic-issues-watch/gr...
That incidentally, is the exact problem with the site. It presents a barrage of charts, without regard to relevance or rigor, and tries to persuade through sheer volume alone. Yet, if you scrutinize any of them, it quickly falls apart. That's probably why the site doesn't even bother justifying the charts, or even state the thesis, for that matter.
As for "gish gallop," right back atcha: those billionaire-funded think tanks firehose a lot of nonsense into the economic discourse (and curricula!)
300 years of thinking has established that copyright is the best way to sustain ongoing creation of knowledge and thought, yet the same crowd seem pretty fine gutting that 300 years of understanding because of their judgement that their desired use case for today outweighs the cost to society of lost future knowledge creation, so they seem plenty happy to ignore established thought when it benefits them.
However, if your goal is to increase stakeholdership, how would a policy that explicitly disincentivizes that behavior fix anything?
In any case, taxes do not go into a black hole, no matter how much the right likes to encourage this self-serving fiction. Taxes generally get spent down the economic ladder and move people up the economic ladder, increasing their marginal propensity to save. People must have money if you want them to save money.
Even more concretely: reversing the policies which dissolved the middle class might reasonably be expected to restore the middle class, or at least slow their demise.
But the point isn't to increase stakeholdership so much as to stop privileging stakeholders with very low effective tax bills relative to mere workers, which means that there's a lot less cause for concern about those workers not owning their means of production
To whom are the selling? The buyers would be only those that can make efficient enough returns to offset this tax due to their existing systemic advantages, like economies of scale or regulatory lobbying.
> But the point isn't to increase stakeholdership so much as to stop privileging stakeholders with very low effective tax bills relative to mere workers
At this point I think there is ample evidence that policy in this country does not move forward without the consent of these so-called privileged stakeholders. If you take that as a given, why would you support handing these people an economic machine gun to point at your future self?
Even assuming this is true, then what? Do you think the average joe is going to suddenly buy alphabet or meta stocks because bill ackman or ken griffin sold their shares to buy bigger yachts?