SoTR Proposal: What if Tangle interviews a billionaire and a Tangle listener struggling financially?
I previously requested that Isaac bring on people with different viewpoints regarding the Epstein story, and I appreciated that he did that.
So for the billionaire discussion, what if Tangle brought on:
- a billionaire (maybe even a billionaire Tangle reader if one exists)
- a Tangle reader making below median income who is struggling to afford housing, food, or healthcare
Then people can hear both conversations and decide where their sympathies lie in terms of whether the system we’re living in is structured in a fair and just way.
And maybe that’s also how the conversations themselves could be framed. Not “are billionaires evil,” but whether a prosperous society is giving to and taking from people in a fair way.
If someone is struggling to afford housing, healthcare, or food for their kids, do we think that person is evil? Do we think they are taking more than their fair share from society? Or do we think they are just trying to get by in a system that is already hard for them? A lot of people are struggling right now. If we don’t think regular working people are evil or taking unfairly, then we should be willing to talk honestly about how the system treats them.
Regular working people often pay true tax rates around 20–30% when you include income and payroll taxes and compare taxes paid to what they actually earn. Meanwhile, according to ProPublica’s analysis of leaked IRS data, the 25 richest Americans paid a collective true tax rate of about 3.4% between 2014 and 2018. Warren Buffett’s was reportedly 0.1%, Jeff Bezos was under 1%, and Elon Musk was around 3%.
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-calculated-the-true-tax-rates-of-the-wealthiest
Extremely rich people can still exist. But should they legally pay a far lower true tax rate than regular working people? We can allow extreme wealth. We can let people keep enough that they couldn't spend it in a thousand lifetimes of pure luxury. Fine. The question is what happens beyond that, when wealth compounds so fast it couldn't be spent in a million lifetimes, and those additional gains are still taxed at a fraction of what a nurse or a teacher pays.
This isn't a radical idea. It's mostly about closing loopholes and making the system consistent. Kmele mentioned estate taxes, but the exemptions have expanded so much that most ultra-wealthy estates avoid them almost entirely. And during the communist hellscape known as the Ronald Reagan administration, top tax rates on the wealthy were dramatically higher than they are today.
Meanwhile, people are skipping medications and choosing between groceries and rent. So the smart question isn't the strawman are all billionaires evil? It's whether the system we've built actually reflects a fair bargain between what people contribute to society and what they take from it.
I think hearing from a billionaire and a struggling working person on this topic might really be in the spirit of Tangle.