r/Green • u/Sauerkrautkid7 • Jul 31 '26

Why don’t we tax “rich” habits?

/r/stupidquestions/comments/1v804i9/why_dont_we_tax_rich_habits/
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86% Upvoted

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u/bumbletowne Jul 31 '26

  1. People have a right to privacy. You cannot ask what they are going to use water for. Case in point: forcing cattle to die of thirst because the farmer is having a bad year is horrifically unethical

  2. We already do this. It's called a luxury tax and carbon tax passed on to the consumer. In some cases you get tax credits or relief or even rate relief for sustainable usage (like USDA water rates for the US)

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u/rushmc1 Aug 01 '26

Because we're complicit.

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u/gsasquatch Jul 31 '26

More tax on jet fuel in general. Even a commercial jet has a poor passenger miles per gallon number vs. a train, depending on how full it is even vs. a car.

Might be like cigarettes, taxing the snot out of them to pay for the societal cost, and discourage use. Like now that plane tickets are 30% more expensive, it's beyond my threshold, and I'm not flying. Like when cigarettes got to a threshold, I stopped smoking.

I might not be so punitive as you, on like private school tuition, multiple cars etc. I'm looking at it more in terms of does the thing cost society more with its unintended consequences like fuel vs. global warming and having to build sea wall protections, increased insurance costs etc. An expensive school? That might be a societal benefit. A golf course? Yeah, maybe we should take into account the land use, the pollution, and the water use and add that into the greens fees.

Dividends should be taxed more than earned wages. You don't get dividends without a good society or someone else's hard work, it is a drain on society. But a person working, providing value to society for their efforts in some way, maybe shouldn't be taxed as much as someone leeching off of society with investment income.

Trouble is, people with money can buy the politicians to write the rules. Common folks like us, need to start seeing that if this is still a democracy, maybe our numbers matter more than their bank account numbers.

This is why I vote Green even if I'm not particularly as much an environmentalist as much as I am a socialist.
For me the environment is almost secondary, which is to say if we protect our common resources, share, and have a just society, I think the environment will be helped too so the two are complimentary and I think the Greens recognize that too.

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u/ens91 Aug 03 '26

Or just tax them on their net worth too, I think it's... Finland? Or a close by country that taxes them 1% of their total net worth yearly.

China prevented jack ma from having too much control of the media by forcing him to give up his stocks in media companies, and judging by how the rich control the west, I'm not sure it was a terrible idea. Is it an overstep of government control? Definitely. Is it good to let the rich control the media and influence lawmakers and leaders so they pay minimal tax? Definitely not.