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It's the same issue as the race/IQ debate. You have people who are 130Iq on this site arguing that the US going from 100IQ to 95IQ is a CATASTROPHE. But what about the gap between 100 and 130? And for racism - ok, blacks are some number of points less. But - ">130IQ people" are 30 points higher than the average american. Isn't that a much more important bit?
Yeah, but the solution is for the 130IQ people to have more children, or do eugenics, in either case. The difference between 100 and 95 is swamped by 100 - 130.
this is not that stark. A lot of poorer people still vote R, esp if white. Also ... don't the democrats want higher taxes on the rich, and the republicans want lower taxes on the rich? I don't have a preference on the issue, but have never understood the 'take from the middle class' argument.
Can you name a specific way that'll happen?
The rich is an exponentially different category. If you take the upper 10%, the first 9.9% are PMC and business owners with very transparent income streams. When the government raises taxes on the rich, it targets these people first and foremost. Orthoxerox the FAANG programmer and orthoxerox the owner of a copy center chain both have to do something for a living, which makes them middle class.
Taxing the "idle rich" is much harder. They have enough money to pay other people to take care of their money. These well-paid and highly qualified people spend their days thinking about minimizing the tax burden of their customers, coming up with complex and tailor-made solutions. To counteract them, you would have to fill the IRS with equally well-paid and highly qualified people, and this just doesn't scale.
You hire one such guy for $500K, he spends a year targeting Mr Moneybags, spends another $500K on court fees and gets ten million back in taxes. That's a great rate of return, isn't it? Hire a hundred of them, and they will collect a billion tax dollars every year!
There's 130 million households in the US. The top 10.0% (or 13 000 000) can be forced to pay $10K more in taxes. Bam, 130 billion tax dollars earned.
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To be fair, if there were a country with an average IQ of 130, for them it would be a catastrophe to be reduced to an average of 100. It's possible that, for a fixed percentage of 130 IQ people a country might have (assuming it's a low percentage), having a population average of 100 is still going to get you a significantly better standard of living than a population average of 95, even if the gap between 100 and 130 is much larger.
I'm not arguing that intelligence doesn't matter, it does, I'm explicitly arguing that the difference that matters is the 130/160 vs 100, as opposed to native 100 vs migrant 95. It just sounds like a reductio ad absurdum
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Realistically, the US will fund future spending programs, no matter how large, through debt and not taxation. This has all sorts of negative externalities but none of them are what you're describing.
You want to see the worst case future of the US under a scenario of demographic semi-replacement(because no one expects the natives to pack up and move to australia like SA whites)? Argentina, not South Africa. Inflation is the killer, not tax burden or hostility driven outmigration(Hispanics think getting to live next to white people is the awesomest thing ever). And that's still bad, but talented and demographically majority Argentines aren't exactly excluded from in country opportunities the way SA whites or high caste Indians are. If anything, a scenario like that strongly encourages native talent to go to work in country in high-reward jobs because it strengthens the economy and raises tax revenues without having to raise rates(which the US is unlikely to do).
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