maybe i am getting to old or to friendly to humans, but it's staggering to me how the priorities are for such things.
Instead we gave a small number of people all of this money for a moonshot in a state where they squabble over who’s allowed to use which bathroom and if I need an abortion I might die.
When a few people get really rich it kind of slips through the gaps, the broader system isn't impacted too much. When most people get a little rich they spend that money and prices go up. Said differently, wealth is all relative so when most people get a little more rich their comparative wealth didn't really change.
Redistribution of wealth is tricky and almost certainly runs into the same wall I mentioned in my last comment. When everyone competing with each other (financially) see a similar bump in income they didn't really change anything. Redistribution is more helpful when targeting the wealth gap and not very useful when considering how wealtht the majority of people "feel".
That said, I 100% agree people shouldn't be working their entire life on a rich person's boat. That's a much bigger, and more fundamental, problem though. That gets to the core of a debt-based society and the need for self reliance. The most effective way to get out from under someone else's boot (financially) is to work towards a spot where you aren't dependent on them or the job's income.
i don't agree that debt is the problem
Totally fair, by no means is that a settled issue. Debt is just my opinion of a likely root cause.
> there are lots of redistributions that are net beneficial even when you account for the incentive hit. marginal increases in the estate tax, for instance, almost certainly fall under this umbrella
That requires a lot more context to answer. The costs and benefits considered are important to lay out. Without that context I really can't say if it's a net benefit or not, I would assume that two average people would have a different list of factors they'd consider when saying whether its a net benefit or not.
Personally I don't see estate taxes as net beneficial. I don't agree with the principle that death is a taxable event, and I don't prefer the government to have in incentives to see people die (i.e. when someone with an estate dies the government makes money). Financially, to stick with just the numbers, I don't consider $66B in annual revenue worth the bureaucracy or legal complexity required to manage the estate tax program.
And the disincentive effects are much smaller than taxing the equivalent in directly earned income.