Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
Congresses and presidents give tax breaks for the wealthy and give the wealthy regulatory protection at the expense of everyone else because congress members and presidents are the wealthy. They are protecting themselves and people like them, screwing over everyone else.
https://www.capitalisnt.com/episodes/why-congress-protects-car-dealers-more-than-elon-musk-ft-eric-zwick
When the government makes applying for welfare hard, they mostly just waste a lot of people’s time and make it so people who qualify for benefits do not get them because the application is too burdensome. Such qualifications don’t boost employment, they just make poor people suffer more.
It’s easier to get subsidies that mostly go to those with higher incomes.
When you make qualifying for benefits difficult, you make it harder to track fraud. The biggest fraudsters are organized actors that know how to get around complex requirements. More fraud is doctors and wealthy people cheating on payments and tax subsidies, than poor people cheating to get food or healthcare.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oZd7wpZuAc
The US loses 100 billion dollars a year due to corporate tax avoidance where corporations pretend like their profits came from low tax areas like the small island country of Malta. This is about equal to the budget of the food stamps program. It’s about equal to how much Medicaid spends on children’s healthcare. The Biden administration was trying to alleviate this, but Trump ended attempts to do so.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9vcKFX2V2I
Other than the free 1k for those children born in the right window, Trump accounts will mostly help those who already have money.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1nyY8e4Zj0
Trump’s tax cuts that mostly benefit the wealthy do not sunset. His financial benefits for the middle class and below do sunset. If he really thought these programs were good and were helping people, he and the Republican Congress that passed them would have made them permanent, instead, he made them temporary to use as an election issue.
Trump Accounts mostly benefit those wealthy enough to take advantage of them as tax deductions (ways to avoid paying taxes, making the deficit, debt, and inflation worse).
Anytime the government does something through tax deductions instead of checks, it’s a sign that it will mostly benefit the wealthy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poeAc1jUvzk&t=682s
Why Is It So Hard To Tax Billionaires?
There are a hell of a lot of games and loopholes. And, Congress won’t do shit about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E308lijSQv0
We’ve got to be able to have fair, reasonable ways to tax the super wealthy without demonizing them.
The wealthy pay a lot, however, due to how incredibly much they have, and inequality, they still don’t pay their fair share. The goal of taxation is to pay for government in the least harmful way possible, not to liquidate the rich. Fair taxation and reasonable welfare policy is good. Class warfare is evil. A society that taxes in order to end billionaires, or that uses rhetoric that endangers the wealthy, will be a violent and repressive society–either because the masses will turn authoritarian and violent, or because the wealthy will out of fear.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gu5wTYUaPs8
Jeff Bezos pays himself an 82k salary even though he is the head of a massive company, Amazon, but he is fabulously wealthy through his stock, which he can use to take out loans tax free. So, he lives a tremendously wealthy lifestyle while paying very little taxes. This is legal. The estate tax is supposed to make up for this, but it is riddled with loopholes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mX5U5DNUfBc
The Roman Empire fell partially because super-rich land holders selfishly avoided taxes, weakening the empire from within.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ke7n-OV33Q
“The Trump administration signaled a plan Friday to revoke a two-year-old tax rule designed to crack down on an arcane but highly lucrative tax avoidance tactic used by some of the largest and most complicated businesses.
If enacted, the Trump administration’s proposal would mean that large business partnerships no longer need to tell the IRS when they shift assets from one corporate entity to another. Those transactions, called “basis shifting,” have allowed businesses to dodge tens of billions of dollars in taxes, the Treasury Department alleged in the past, by illegally depreciating the same asset over and over again.
…
the IRS workforce has shrunk drastically under Trump. In the first months of his term, more than a quarter of the agency took buyout offers or otherwise left their jobs.”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-moves-undo-tax-rule-204632497.html