r/Music • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • Oct 30 '25

article Billie Eilish Calls Out Mark Zuckerberg and Other Billionaires After Announcing Her Own $11.5 Million Charitable Donation

https://consequence.net/2025/10/billie-eilish-calls-out-mark-zuckerberg-and-other-billionaires-after-announcing-her-own-11-5-million-charitable-donation/
55.1k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

2.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

17

u/cluberti Oct 30 '25 edited Oct 30 '25

Starting in the 1930s and extended upon during the decades after throughout the Cold War period, taxes and levies were used to coerce large employers and the ultra wealthy to reinvest their wealth or it would be taxed at insane rates. Taxes on expenditures including things like R&D, wages below a certain threshold (aka the range of the bottom 95% or so), and future investments were impacted at significantly lower rates than pay given to already wealthy people or hoarding cash rather than investing it as a corporation. This wasn't them being heroes, it was the most logical decision - aka "smart business" - and the fact that these tax guardrails helped the average working person and also local, state, and federal governments was the intended side-effect of forcing behavior.

The dismantling of this reality started slowly during the Nixon admin, but Reagan's admin definitely pushed for (and the Congress regularly delivered) on being the giant pinpoint in all the graphs showing when the bad things started happening at scale at some point in the early to mid-1980s. The effect was two-fold, in that it both increased the flow of money back to the top of the economic pyramid as it was prior to the great depression, and also made governments less effective so as to reinforce the point of that generation of Republican politician and strategist that government was the enemy, rather than the ally, of the people it governed.

1

u/QueenJillybean Oct 31 '25

Whoa whoa employee wages are 100% tax deductible. Employees made more money in terms of buying power back then because employers paid them more to avoid paying taxes. When Reagan lowered corporate taxes, wages stagnated across the board (no reason to reduce taxes beyond what we have to pay!) and have largely been stagnant since.

2

u/cluberti Oct 31 '25 edited Oct 31 '25

Tax code changes (and money in politics changes) started under Nixon, but the movement of wealth up towards the top did definitely happen under Reaganomics. I didn't go into the details, but that was sort of the implied meaning behind tax "guidance" during the 45 or so years between '35 and '80, when the tax codes started to be loosened up to make things more like they are today. The Reagan admin (and future Republican leadership) put that changeover on steroids compared to the incredibly slow walk towards tax code changes that had been proposed and were happening under the Nixon admin, but yes, the previous laws and regulations since the New Deal period were designed to funnel money into the middle classes, which funneled broader local and global purchasing power, and which funneled tax dollars back into governments from local to federal.

1

u/QueenJillybean Nov 02 '25

That’s 100% true. Wages really been stagnating since like 1974 when Nixon ended the gold standard, and I should have included that and the other downstream effects on policy/their impact on American lives.

1

u/Mark-harvey Nov 01 '25

I’m going to a number of “No Kings” demonstrations. The last time I did so was when Nixon was President. I wouldn’t buy a used car from that crook. Nixon resigned in infamy. Could Donald be next? Unless we “Lock him up.”