Yeah but that's income, the billionaires don't do that any more (loopholes loopholes!)

Tax the compound wealth (too).

I'm talking wealth, not income. If your total net worth is $1.2 billion, this year you owe the IRS $200 billion.

The idea is that we make being that rich an extremely temporary condition. It's like trying to run up a downward moving escalator or run against a moving sidewalk.

In fact, I would tune the tax structure to harness some of the competitive impulses of the wealthy. People that rich view their net worth as a high score. They literally view it like a personal life score. It's just a video game to them. When your net worth goes from $10 to 20 billion, your lifestyle changes very little. Past a certain point, it's just about bragging rights.

So I would harness this impulse. I would tune the tax rates so that it actually would be possible for a handful of the absolutely most skilled business owners to maintain wealth slightly above a billion (or whatever inflation-adjusted level we set) for a limited period of time. Those owning the world's most profitable companies will be able to stay a bit over the threshold for the years their company is at its peak.

If you did this, you could actually harness the competitive instincts of the rich. Remember, it's all about getting a high score. But instead of competing for the largest fortune, they would compete for how long they're able to stay on the treadmill. Instead of size, they compete for time. A year or two would be a feat. A decade above the threshold would be a once-in-a-generation achievement. You would know these people by name. They would be famous. Staying above the wealth cap for any prolonged period would make you as famous as Musk or Bezos today. The rich would still get to compete with each other for bragging rights. They still compete for a high score. We just change what the score measures.

I don't want to eat the rich. I want to harness their greed. Imagine a donkey being lead by a carrot. Except the donkey is on a treadmill, and the treadmill is powering an electric generator. I want to turn every billionaire into that for the public treasury.

So we have to make sure that most of the world implements these taxes

Arent we already trying?

Tax havens should be ostracized.

Why should they care? They have more Money now. Of course not as much as they could have, but more than they Had previously.

In this specific case, there's no need for a communist revolution, just political will to change something, diplomacy and unwillingness to budge towards countries who don't want to play fair.

The people everywhere already try the diplomatic way, but breaking political will with capitalist media is part of the counter Offensive of the Bourgeoisie against the reformist struggle.

The need to Organize is equally important in reformist battles as in revolutionary Battles. Furthermore, the dependancy of the plan on global scale action means organization of scale unheard of in human History.

If you want to help Ukraine, feel free to go volunteer. There's plenty of conscripts there happy to change places with you.

Using them as a proxy to bleed Russia is not helping anyone except the US and weapons manufacturers.

They're working quite actively on that with things like Mercosur, the free trade agreements with India and Australia and strenghtening ties to Canada among other things.

Many were already in the works, but got boosted considerably when Trump got in for a 2nd time.

Yeah Russia under Putin has been interfering a lot, starting with climate change denial - but that is only possible because social media lets them. Without meaningful moderation to stem "agitprop" and hate speech and propaganda, there is no defense. Meanwhile spending more on the military industrial complex to build up this massive lobbying force that undermines democracy is the exact wrong reaction. We need to either demand the social media moderate and properly ban botnets and state agents, or ban them and create a European (moderated) alternative. You can't have for profit news or social media and expect democracy to work.

Obviously being Anti Russia doesn't change the historical fact that the CIA/NED funded and facilitated the protests and regime change in Ukraine and empowered Ukrainian Nazis to turn Ukraine Anti-Russia. And that Russia has legitimate security concerns about a Nato aligned, Nazi infested Ukraine. Which again, a military proxy adversary to Russia wasn't what we needed to fight Russia's interference. Putin/Russia does want to undermine and weaken Europe, and in that way they also profit from the destabilization the Ukraine war has caused. It's a similar dynamic to Bin Laden turning the US warmongering into overdrive and therefor ruining the US.

Pretending that military spending is about "protecting your freedoms" is jingoistic (and thus right wing) propaganda.

Also, a few corporations, billionaires, and hectomillionaires get richer every time military spending goes up. Taxing everyone to pay them is a reverse Robin Hood move not in accordance with left wing ideology.

The military spending is not protecting any freedoms

EU states spend tons of money on healthcare

the price is much higher taxation than US.

Fun fact: the US spends more tax money on healthcare than almost every EU member state and STILL it's so fucking expensive when it's free at point of service in most of Europe.

How is that possible, you might ask?

By most of those tax dollars going to insurance and pharmaceutical company profits, marketing, and lobbying to prevent a better system.

And now we have crazy ruskie try hard invading our neighbour and we're paying tons of money to stop him.

True, but guess what? The investment in that particular conflict already paid off so well that Russia is teetering on the brink of economic and military collapse, thus constituting a threat to anyone other than Ukraine and soon might not be even that.

And since Trump withdrawn support for Ukraine we have to pay even more to compensate

Nope. The war is as good as won already and the overwhelming success of the Ukrainian drone program means that they can pay for much more of it themselves now than in the beginning.

Tl;dr: there's no good reason to cut social services OR increase military spending in most EU member states

That's just not true. EU states spend tons of money on healthcare and other programs - the price is much higher taxation than US.

Funny, I (a very high earner) moved from the US to Spain.

My taxes went from roughly 42% to 45%. I also now get health care and education for my kids at a fraction of the price.

I don't get F-35s that crash in the rain as much, but I'm trying to somehow make due.

And now we have crazy ruskie try hard invading our neighbour

You ever think that maybe the US wasn't sad about that, and in fact wanted that proxy war? Because they said openly they liked it - see the recently departed Lindsey Graham.

The US might benefit from these nonsense games - they certainly profited from LNG sales after they blew up NordStream. But unlike them, we live next to Russia, so maybe it might be in our interest to live peacefully with them, instead of demanding their complete submission to NATO.

No amount of military equipment is worth shit if there's nobody to operate them. What kind of loyalty does it inspire when the state will just abandon people because they were unwilling to consider other ways of funding the military? This isn't America, Land of the Masochists.

Make poverty, and income and wealth inequality structurally impossible, then we can talk about reducing funding to social programs.

The "no-go zones" trope is a disgusting, racist conspiracy theory created by American right-wing xenophobes, and exported to their anti-immigrant counterparts across the pond. It is a product of the era immediately following the attacks on September 11, 2001.

The main claim is that there are specific areas within European cities which have been "taken over" by immigrants, usually Muslims, which have become "unsafe" for white or non-Muslim citizens to exist in, especially after dark. The more extreme claims state that "islamic extremists" have replaced the existing order with "sharia law".

This is racist, Islamophobic, and false.

In reality, racists and xenophobes simply do not like immigrants (especially the brown kind who talk funny and pray the wrong way) forming their own solidarity networks, running their own schools, and getting involved in their own local governments. They especially do not like them making time and space for their own forms of worship in their own communities, and will often claim that forced conversion is occurring in these areas, and that schools and governments have been "islamized".

Why wouldn't they. They haven't used any and even if we assume they can't finance the upkeep of their entire arsenal, you can be pretty sure they at least finance SOME of them, and idk about you, but with nuclear weapons, one is kinda enough to ruin my day.

It's insane Americans are even allowing him two more years. What happened to those guys, where did the spine go?