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I think there is a fundamental mistake here. This place often engages in utilitarian arguments but I don't think one should then conclude that taking utilitarian arguments seriously actually obliges one to utilitarianism. When taking an assertion by a utilitarian seriously it can but useful to engage with them on their own terms in order to show that even under their framework their doesn't hold merit. For instance if my primary reason for being pro-2A is the ward against tyranny but my interlocutor is attempting to make an argument that making all guns illegal would reduce suffering from interpersonal violence and I think it would not it may be worth my time to engage on this premise because if I win there it's a total victory for my side. More abstractly if policy X is thought to cause A and B and I find A very good and you find B very bad I can either convince you that A outweighs B, which will involve difficult value disputes or I can convince you that B is actually not a consequence on X in which case A obviously dominates. I think a lot of discussion on contentious topics in places like this are of this form, it keeps things in the 'is' rather than 'ought' territory, which is much firmer ground even if not the real bedrock of the disagreement.
I think a lot breaks down at this step. This is simply not how resources work. How much labor and natural resources actually go into that marginal yacht, even buying the shaky premise that marginal yachts are actually what the marginal ultra-wealthy dollar goes to rather than capital reinvestment. Money is an imperfect proxy for resources, one simply cannot transmute yacht materials into quality inner city housing. At best it can modestly reorganize where efforts are spent. You can throw all the money in the world at wringing water from a stone and end up with nothing to show for it.
I'm not really an opponent to welfare spending and quite a fan of things like very generous UBI if designed properly. But I can absolutely see that as things stand in the US where I'm most familiar drastically increasing welfare spending is much more likely to primarily go to lining the pockets of my ideological opponents, big government stooges spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per homeless person to not solve the problem, and until that's changed I have no confidence in any of this utilitarian argumentation until that is fixed. I think the trade you propose is a false one, we will tax the rich more but that tax will primarily be passed down to me as a customer of these rich people and the money taxed will ultimately have nearly no positive utility, and because the problems it attempts to solve will remain I'll see the demand for more taxes that I will ultimately bear will return again and again.
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