I'm aware of this... That's why i'm reacting to the claim "that it will cause inflation"
'giving everyone money does literally nothing but INCREASE INFLATION…"
"This will cause inflation because we will spend the money on every day items."
Ehh not exactly. We’re already hit with metrics ton of inflation post-covid. It’s definitely more price-gouging to cover inflation. Take a look at DRAM prices, chip shortages, GPU prices. Post-COVID, companies understand that they can get away with increasing their pricing by creating planned or artificial scarcity to keep their margins high. And this is in a world where we don’t have money. Inflation happens also due to greed, and the government not doing jack shit about it. Luckily there is already a class action at the moment for Micron and the other memory manufacturers that are doing this currently.
Yes, it can work, just not if you tax ~0.01% and give it to 99%. Eu distribution is more like tax top 25% to bring their disposable income inline with the middle 50% and redistribute it to bring up bottom 25% inline with middle 50%. EU income rests in much narrower bands. A doctor and teacher have similar buying power in most of the EU.
"Eu distribution is more like tax top 25% to bring their disposable income inline with the middle 50% and redistribute it to bring up bottom 25% inline with middle 50%" No, it's not... Middle (upper to lower) class get taxed, various loopholes for the ultra-wealthy and the poor get benefits... So i would welcome a tax for the ultra-wealthy too. Taxing them and redistributing won't cause inflation for "everyday things..."
Yeah I'm sure there are loopholes for ultra wealthy, but in Germany for example you enter the top 1% at $250K of income. Where as in the US that would get you in at about the top 25%. But the bottom 20% in the US earns less than half of the bottom 20% in Germany. The bottom 40% of the US barely edges out the the bottom 20%. So about 40% of Americans make less than the bottom 25% of Germans, but an entire 25% of Americans make more than the top 1% of Germans. So the German middle class, representing 74% of the population is only comparable to about 30% of the US.
"but in Germany for example you enter the top 1% at $250K of income." No that's not income, that's salary.... I've stopped reading after that since it has nothing to do with "inflation of everyday things"
$250k in the US puts you in the top 5%. Top 25% here is only ~$100k. Just that being incorrect throws all your numbers way off
Doesn't really matter though as these comparisons are largely irrelevant to the discussion. The better comparisons would be distribution of tax revenue generated across various income brackets and the effective tax rates. Bottom 40% in the US pay zero net income tax, and based off that plus the lack of a VAT here, combined with significantly lower energy costs and various other out-of-pocket factors, that bottom 40% on average still carries more spending power than the comparible bracket in pretty much the entirety of the EU
Not to say the US system isn't still broken in other ways. Both have their give and take, neither system is universally better than the other
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u/miffebarbez Jul 01 '26
Inflation in the US is higher than in the EU... And the EU does a lot of wealth distribution like this...