Society does need to pay to improve itself. And contrary to these eternal hounds that dog us with endless fearmongering about a nation working to improve itself, we should be investing in ourselves, our people.
I will admit though: we should not assume we can simply tax the rich our way through this. It's not enough. Even raising the corporate income tax above it's pathetic effective levels won't do it!
Yet I'll take this moment to pitch: we should raise those taxes anyways. As Piketty says in Capital in the 21st Century, the point of very high taxes against the would be very rich is not to fund the state through these taxes. It's not for the tax-revenue stream. It's to make sure they do not accumulate enough wealth, money, power to distort and govern the democratic system itself. It's to restrain them from getting too powerful.
So, we still need to figure out where the money comes from. It's Cato so of course they are going to find the scariest numbers they possibly can. $20T/year for 10 years. Sounds like a lot. I suspect it's a pretty aggressively spendy version though. But yeah we probably should spend a bunch of trillion a year, being better, improving and caring for people. Making ourselves better. And we should tax the rich, because they have distorted and poisoned democracy, are spending billions a year getting whatever they want from democracy, at huge cost to the health welfare and well being of this nation, and they shouldn't have such free capital to burn to distort democracy (such as by giving so much money to Cato), to turn us against doing good things for ourselves.
Libertarian Koch "think" tank fears that money could be invested into the working class instead of Israel
Society does need to pay to improve itself. And contrary to these eternal hounds that dog us with endless fearmongering about a nation working to improve itself, we should be investing in ourselves, our people.
I will admit though: we should not assume we can simply tax the rich our way through this. It's not enough. Even raising the corporate income tax above it's pathetic effective levels won't do it!
Yet I'll take this moment to pitch: we should raise those taxes anyways. As Piketty says in Capital in the 21st Century, the point of very high taxes against the would be very rich is not to fund the state through these taxes. It's not for the tax-revenue stream. It's to make sure they do not accumulate enough wealth, money, power to distort and govern the democratic system itself. It's to restrain them from getting too powerful.
So, we still need to figure out where the money comes from. It's Cato so of course they are going to find the scariest numbers they possibly can. $20T/year for 10 years. Sounds like a lot. I suspect it's a pretty aggressively spendy version though. But yeah we probably should spend a bunch of trillion a year, being better, improving and caring for people. Making ourselves better. And we should tax the rich, because they have distorted and poisoned democracy, are spending billions a year getting whatever they want from democracy, at huge cost to the health welfare and well being of this nation, and they shouldn't have such free capital to burn to distort democracy (such as by giving so much money to Cato), to turn us against doing good things for ourselves.