by wwweston | 2026-03-13 22:12:07+00:00
> And 60x the population.

OK, let's assume that oil is the only relevant resource, and population is the other relevant factor, and there's no efficiencies of scale or exceptional American ingenuity that can be discovered. 30x the resources combined with 60 times the population would mean we should be able to provide at least half the floor that Norway does, right?

Does that mean if we discover another resource the US has, or efficiencies of scale, or an exceptionally ingenious solution, we can revise that number up?

What if we'd behaved differently in the past when our oil to population ratio was similar to Norway's (or better)? And when's the 2nd best time to start?

Or is this more of a shrug we're nothing compared to those fortunate Scandinavians and that's why we just can't have nice things that they have no matter how nice it would be to have those things, stiff upper lip chaps, greatest country in the world situation?

> And defends the world with defense expenditures.

This is the "I have to wash my hair that night" of excuses -- plausibly true at some level yet studiedly ignoring such a wide latitude of optionality involved that it's clearly covering a refusal.

> Once that door is open, there will be no end to it.

Slippery slope fallacy. Tax rates move, but not monotonically.

For average US households effective income tax rates are more or less flat for the last generation or three. For high eaners? To say that the trend is downward doesn't cover it, it's a dramatic drop compared to midcentury era rates.

Wealth taxes in the countries that have them don't seem to demand an ever larger share.

If your strongest example is washington state a capital gains tax rate change within the same order of magnitude (that's still well below average effective income tax rates) you don't have much of a case.

Lots of unevisceratedly wealthy people live in states where the highest income tax bracket has rates over 10%. I'm sure the people with over a million a year in income will remain prosperous.

> If your estate is $1 billion, your estate tax will be:

Also you'll be dead and as such won't have continued control over any of your previous assets. Hence the earlier comment to the effect that one may as well complain to God about having to loosen ones grasp on them at death as rail against rendering unto caeser.

The natural "tax rate" on assets at death is 100%. Any smaller number than that is an affordance from the cooperation of society.

> said many times that billionaires should not exist

Perhaps he's right and it's hard to draw a solid straight line between that scale of personal profit and input. Perhaps he's wrong.

Still, as discussed, the most extreme concrete policy that Sanders has proposed is a wealth tax of 5%, and we've discussed why the dynamics of that are not existential threats to the wealth of anyone, much less worthy of the term "evisceration."

No one is proposing taking all the money from even the billionares. Most likely outcome of a 5% tax rate is stabilization.

> it won't raise the general standard of living.

And yet other societies have managed to produce better general standards of living (and higher rates of entrepreneurial success) via various policies including some different tax rates.

> You will also never have companies like SpaceX.

Companies exist to broadly source capital to bring to bear on an enterprise. So it stands to reason that companies like Space X will exist whether the capital comes from a wide pool of investors whose upside is limited somewhere below hyperwealth, or a contribution from a narrower set of investors with a higher concentration, at least as long as there's a credible upside.