So, when I said debate, I meant like a debate under the debate tab. That said, I'll respond, though some of this might be covered in the earlier post I made.
First off, I'm not necessarily dead set against welfare people voting, but I think a person's vote should be in some manner related to amount they pay in taxes. I understand that giving rich people more representation under the current structure would make them too powerful. However, higher taxation of the rich (in the numeral amount) is taxation without good representation. I will give you a demonstration of my point. Suppose I make a million dollars and pay $300,000 dollars in taxes and my neighbor makes $50,000 and pays $15,000 in taxes. Why should someone that pays 5% of amount that I pay in taxes have an equal say in the distribution/use of those funds in government?
Now, I wouldn't be in support of taxation with proportional representation in congress, but I think the people that pay the most in taxes ought to have their own house in congress to consent any increases in taxation or allocations of funds.
What kind of taxes count? Payroll taxes are deducted from workers' income. Moreover, payroll taxes are regressive, meaning that low and medium income workers lose a higher percentage of their paycheck to payroll taxes vis-à-vis their wealthier counterparts. These wealthy counterparts, especially business owners, can only contribute so much to government coffers because they conscript the lower class to work for them at minimum pay. Workers, then, not only contribute to corporate tax revenue, they also keep the economy running, fund research and development through corporate profits they generate, and provide conveniences that most people in the world could not even dream of (our gig economy and service sector is massive and caters to most people's needs).
An even more important problem is distinguishing the individual tax contributions of the rich and the poor. If my theater, fast food restaurant, or whatnot, made $4 billion USD (and paid, I don't know, $200 thousand USD in taxes), but I employ 300 workers at minimum wage, how do we know how much is produced by me, the single CEO, and the 300 workers that I employ? There is no clear-cut division between what workers contribute and what I, the CEO, contributed. I might be a decent CEO, but the combined efforts of my 300 workers who sold product, served customers, etc., certainly have as much, if not more claim to that $200 thousand dollars in tax revenue than do I (and, for that matter, the $4 billion dollars too). I cannot pay shareholders from these profits if my workers don't do their jobs, so even capital-gains income is born out of wage-labor, and hence, is produced in part by the laboring class. The contributions made by low-income workers is ultimately invisible and often claimed by their employers. Yet, if someone has a 9-5 job, they can be relatively certain that they are contributing to company profits, personal profits (especially shareholders if the company is public), and often charities (fast-food restaurants, especially McDonalds and Taco Bell, often ask people to round up to donate to charity) simply by working. Company profits are taxed. Corporate gains (dividends) are taxed (with some exceptions). The products that indigent people buy are also taxed (and this is another tax that the poor bear the brunt of).
Thus, creating your new "house" will be all but impossible unless you track the exact tax contributions of every person in society, both indirectly and directly.
Your grouping an entire sector of society and not fairly. Some rich people are crooked and others are honest. I don't think we should penalize all rich people for the actions of others when they're not complicit in these actions. The idea that the rich are "supposedly" the oppressor class or that the needs of many outweigh the needs of the few are bad arguments for mostly diminishing the consent/representation of the rich. They should be able to decide to which ends their money in government is most usefully applied.
The issue you brought up is bigger and more complicated. It begs the question of "how do we end conspiring and collusion between corrupt politicians and businesses leaders?" I think then you should consider "what would make it harder or less likely for them to collude together?" Giving the rich a little veto and approval power on allocation and taxation in their respective house, I don't think will make things any worse. Its the politicians that can be bought and stay in office forever which is the problem that needs to be solved.
First, I made no normative claim. I don't recall calling all rich people oppressors or even implying they were corrupt because they lobbied. Their leverage in the political arena simply outweighs that of the ordinary citizen. For every year since 2008, corporations constituted over 85% of annual lobbying expenditures (1). Billionaires make up nearly 10% of federal campaign contributions despite being an infinitesimal substratum of the US population (2). Corporations that donate are rewarded with trillions of dollars in government funding (in fact, from 2007-2012, the government spent more on subsidies than social security) (3). I could go on, but I'll spare you. If you are interested, I would recommend reading the works of Page, Gilens, Hayes, and Bartels. Their work is not uncontested, though their empirical findings (especially the one that, when those in the 90th and 10th percentile of income have opposing policy preferences, the rich get what they want, are mostly supported by empirical data) (4) (5).
It need not be the majority of rich people that contribute to campaigns or lobby for this effect to manifest, nor do these contributions need to be corrupt. The quid-pro-quo relationship between congress and companies is not illegal. It is facilitated by law. Yet, those profits did not manifest out of the ether. They were not earned solely by the board of trustees or the CEO. Company income is generated by those at the foot of the pedestal: the average worker.
As for your solution of giving the rich more influence by offering them a house, I might point out that there is a chamber that caters specifically to the rich: the Senate (5). Second, why are we paying off the rich with political influence so they stop being corrupt? Appeasement only emboldens people and makes them demand more from us.
First off, Do you think people that don't pay any taxes at all should be able to vote? Representation in the U.S. had always been based loosely on principle that taxes are based on consent and the representation of the people who are taxed. Firefighters, police and charity workers are subjectively important to society, but should they have the same representation as a person that pays double amount of taxes? I'm sure other individuals (the same income) wouldn't like it if these people paid lower taxes than everybody else because they were deemed subjectively more valuable to society.
For the first part of your question: yes. Voting is the sine qua non of modern democracy (unless we return to sortition like the Greeks). Removing someone's suffrage is tantamount to stripping them of citizenship (or at least, it's damn close). Falling under US jurisprudence and concomitantly being denied suffrage removes from people their political agency and allow others to decide what the law should be for them. If democracy supposes "autonomy" as its principal concept, what you would institute is "heteronomy," a form of internal colonization where the poor are disenfranchised wage-laborers without the capacity to change political leadership. I am against oligarchy, hence, I am against non-universal and unequal suffrage. However, most people pay taxes to begin with. And, even if they don't, if they work, they contribute by increasing the pot from which corporate and capital gains tax revenue is drawn.
Also, representation in the US was based on property qualifications, race, but not personal income tax. In fact, personal income taxes were not constitutional until the early 20th century. How do I know this? The 16th amendment authorized personal income taxes and was passed shortly after the Civil War (6). Hamilton believed imposts should fund governmental institutions more than anything.
Up til the late 19th century, noncitizen Europeans could vote in the US, too (actually, the naturalization law said "free white persons") (7 p. 14-15). If we are basing our model of representation on the past, then I would imagine we would extend voting rights to noncitizens, although that is anathema in current discourse (at the national level, anyway).
I'll clear something up now. Firefighters, teachers, certain utility workers, and garbage collectors make under the median wage, generally. It is not that I think their tax burden should be less, it naturally is less; they all in a different tax bracket. Yet, society depends on them to fix powerlines, collect garbage, etc. If we must couch all contributions to society in economic terms, imagine a start-up tech firm, or even a major one like Apple, trying to make money when their factories are experiencing brownouts. What economic damage would result from destroyed powerlines? What economic damage would result from having no firefighters? What diseases would spread if there were no garbage collectors, and would it not hurt the economy too? What would happen to the future workforce if teachers didn't teach students basic math and reading skills?
Lastly, I don't think a lot of workers making McDonald's sandwiches are ultimately worthy of deciding an arbitrary tax rate on a group of people that pay it. If the workers pay taxes, then they should enjoy the privilege's of the government services that everyone consented would be shared by all. However, this doesn't mean they should have a say in matter about the taxes that another group commits to the government.
I think the wealthy would actually consent to many taxes that they thought were vital. More importantly though, they wouldn't consent to taxes that they deemed unnecessary or harmful to business.
I find this much less unfair than rich people arbitrarily setting budgets for city firefighters, welfare, and other programs they do not have any stake in and do not use. Under your system, the rich would hold arbitrary influence over a large swathe of the population that now cannot exercise political agency. You don't make the relationship any more fair, you just reverse it.
But, again, the poor do contribute tax dollars, indirectly or otherwise. Their production generates revenue and dividends. Many in the service sector avert economic damage to society that would come out of our tax dollars. This is "invisible" contributions, but they are still there.
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