Europe

Once the left wanted higher taxes for everyone; Gen-Z socialists demand handouts funded by billionaires

Fucking crazy take. Billionaires have been paying far less than their share for decades. A regular person might pay 33% on their annual wealth gains while billionaire accounting and tax dodging leaves them near 0%.

People "demand handouts from billionaires" because 31.7% OF ALL WEALTH IN THE USA is tied up in the personal assets of 1% of the population. There is quite literally nowhere else to get the money.

Wow, how (expectedly) out of touch.

Gen-Z socialists are uninterested in letting the market rip and redistributing the proceeds.

Because they've seen how well that has worked for their peers and parents.

Unsurprisingly, their arguments are just a warmed over version of the same ones they published when they decried millenial socialism a few years back:

It is wrong to think that inequality must go on rising inexorably. American income inequality fell between 2005 and 2015, after adjusting for taxes and transfers. Median household income rose by 10% in real terms in the three years to 2017. A common refrain is that jobs are precarious. But in 2017 there were 97 traditional full-time employees for every 100 Americans aged 25-54, compared with only 89 in 2005. The biggest source of precariousness is not a lack of steady jobs but the economic risk of another downturn.

I'm not entirely sure the intervening years have done much to dispel worries amongst millennial socialists that jobs are precarious, despite the Economists' scolding.

Gen-Z socialists demand handouts funded by billionaires.

Billionaires and big corporations have been stealing their wealth by underpaying workers, enshitificating their products with ads, creating subscription based services with unreasonable price hikes for what should be a single purchase, corruption and financial fraud.

Nobody earns a billion dollars by working. The wealth they are hoarding was never theirs to take.

Just FYI, archive[.]ph links are banned on feddit, due to that site (and its other flavors like .today etc) using its visitors as a botnet for DDOS attacks.

That's them summing this version of socialism.

They then go on to argue it is dangerous because:

Rent controls would worsen housing shortages by crushing the incentive to build. The profit margins of big supermarket chains, demonised by Gen-Z socialists, are already wafer-thin after years of ruthless competition—a miracle of modern capitalism. Wealth taxes would become confiscatory and deter innovation. Do not assume that the failure of these policies, if implemented, would bring about an automatic course correction. Europe has struggled for decades to escape the low-growth funk left by its own over-regulation; the rise of statist “Peronists” in Argentina helps explain its century of relative decline.

Personally, I do find a lot of the modern progressive discourse about this to be pretty facile. When confronted with wealth flight, common answers tend to be "let 'em leave" (a mind bogglingly dumb take if these are the people you need to fund everything) to "well they won't leave" despite evidence to the contrary.

It's like these folks think they've stumbled onto an infinite money glitch and I've yet to see a serious discussion that weighs any cons or possible dangers. It's dumb when trump can't admit there might be costs or downsides to his ideas, the same is true of us.