> A huge slice of our political landscape is people who still think trickle down economics works, tons of politicians are elected running on platforms for tax cuts. Reagan's politics live on and are largely responsible for how shit the world has become over the last 4 decades or so.

The problem here is the need to distinguish between two things that are complicated to distinguish.

There are a lot of regulations on the books with a decent cost/benefit ratio, and a lot with a poor cost/benefit ratio. Everyone benefits from removing the latter, but there are thousands of individual rules and you need someone who understands them to distinguish one type from the other. But these are often the exact people (lawyers, compliance bureaucrats) who benefit from the status quo and don't want wasteful inefficiencies to be removed because it pays their salary.

Meanwhile voters don't have the bandwidth to dive into the details, so in politics the candidates who want to do the right thing just say "we need fewer regulations" -- okay great, let's vote for that guy? But there is another class of candidate who is captured by corporations and says the same words but the regulations they want to get rid of are the ones with a high cost/benefit ratio, only the cost is on the corporation and the benefit is to the public.

You have to find a way to distinguish between them or you're screwed. Just saying "leave the inefficient rules in place and keep accumulating more of them forever" is still you're screwed, you have to actually solve that problem.

> Then close them.

That's what they did at the same time as they lowered the rate. Government revenues aren't any lower now than they were then -- they're higher.

> I don't care.

You don't care that it won't actually generate any long-term revenue? Then what is its purpose, just pure animosity?

> Yes, and I am suggesting the tax be based on net worth, not income.

Which is completely asinine because it creates all kinds of perverse incentives.

Major corporations would end up being controlled by foreign nationals instead of domestic ones because domestic owners would have to sell their shares to pay the tax. Anyone subject to the tax would have the incentive to take insanely wasteful high risk bets because high rates of return would be the only way to cover the tax without losing money year over year and losing everything to the tax over ten years isn't much worse than losing everything in a casino right away. Some assets would be harder to value than others and then trillions of dollars would shift into those assets away from others, which would be several different kinds of disastrous.

There are reasons we don't do it that way.

> frankly, I don't really give a shit about the economy either. We hear all about how great the economy is doing year over year, and me and my friends get more and more broke as it does. If the economy's doing great, it's not doing great for me or anyone I care about, and insofar as that's the case, why the fuck should I care if it continues to do great?

People say it's doing great because they have the incentive to find numbers that allow them to make themselves look good. They'll always say that when they're in charge. In fact there are some problems right now, but don't think for a second that adopting poorly considered policies couldn't make it a lot worse.