The US has a problem of representation. Specifically and especially since the Citizens United decision, corporate interests can easily flow money towards politicians to make them do just about anything they want. This exacerbated an existing problem with the corporate tax rate and has now brought it into laughably low territory.
That's all an oversimplification of course, but it's not that Americans haven't "figured it out". It is far more complicated than that.
Thank you. I'm getting quite tired of people posting the most fucking obvious takes about problems in the US, then going "why haven't americans fixed this? are they stupid?", when we have exceedingly small control over the actions of our shitass policy makers.
It's some real "everyone is dumb except for me" energy.
It was really bothering me that I was pronouncing this “YOO ESS-EEANNS” in my head every time I saw people using it. I just realized it can definitely also be “YOO-ZHIANS.” Which is obviously far superior.
I'm not sure I understand your point so if I'm off base let me know.
Firstly, inheriting $200k - $1M doesn't keep anyone poor. It doesn't even stop wealth from concentrating at a level that harms others and warps society - it just prevents that level of wealth from passing down to people who did nothing.
Secondly, if everyone was poor who would be controlling them? You have to keep most people poor and a much smaller group of people unassailably wealthy to control them. That's exactly the problem that high death taxes address.
So someone could spend all their life working hard contributing to their retirement accounts and saving money for their kids or whatever, only to lose everything above $1m when they die? That doesn't seem great.
MMT isn’t a tool for modeling all of inflation’s factors. It’s simply a description of how sovereign fiat money works. Some people mistakenly (or knowingly, for disparagement or promotion) attribute things to MMT that it just isn’t.
TBF taxes on billionaires would go under individual taxes. And corporate taxes are relatively easy to fudge because corporations aren't real except on paper.
It's a technical detail people might not have been aware of, and I've pointed it out. I'm going to disengage rather than defend a viewpoint I don't even necessarily hold.
Endless US debt is fine, provided there keeps being interest in the US dollar as a reserve currency. The US national debt is simply the difference between money printed and money collected. As long as the US dollar “disappears” into the global economy (which it does), inflation is kept under check.