Let's go to our caller from the four one nine area code.
Who's calling today from four one nine?
Well, David, is this me?
Yes, it is.
Hello, I've called them before, I am from a rural Ohio, and so my question is, how do
you argue for a tap for no tax cuts for the rich Republicans?
Because I've tried this in the past and it hasn't worked.
So the argument in the past has been, well, you see, if you tax them and the businesses
are going to go away and they made all that money legally, they did it because they just
worked harder than everybody else, which isn't true.
So I tried arguing with them about it, saying how this tax.
If you tax them, you could put it towards infrastructure, Medicare and overall improving
the quality of life for your country.
And they just straight up refuse it.
So my question for you is, how do you argue?
Well, one of the things you have to do is you have to really separate the arguments,
because even right there, you gave me two different arguments and you kind of blended
them together and you said, I'm having a hard time arguing against this.
The first one was that if you tax, you're going to hurt the businesses or Teiko, they'll
stop doing it, they'll stop working.
Or sometimes it extends to they'll move to another country or whatever the case may be
or disincentive guys work or whatever.
That's one argument.
Then you went on to trying to justify the reason we have taxes as necessary to pay for
things and to have roads and public schools and whatever else.
So one is really important.
It's impossible to go through every counterpoint, point and counterpoint here with you.
But one thing you really want to do is you want to separate out the different arguments
and make them really justify it.
So to pick one, there's this idea that if the tax goes too high, they'll they'll just
stop their business.
It's a disincentive to keep working because too much of their money will be going to taxes.
OK, we can we can deal with that.
There's a lot of scholarship on that.
And we can start to talk about.
Well, the devil is in the details.
What should the top marginal tax rate be?
What we have generally found is that the tax, the top marginal tax rate at which the government
maximizes revenue is around 70 percent.
Now, that doesn't mean you get taxed 70 percent on all your income.
That might mean, like once you get to 10 million a year in income, you start paying 70 percent
or something like that.
And all of the scholarship on it suggests that that does not create a disincentive to
work and that the truth is, if it started to create one at that point, maybe it wouldn't
be altogether a bad thing.
So that's just an example of how you've got to separate these arguments and not allow
what gets difficult is you'll have three or four different arguments that are sort of
related but not really thrown at you.
And then you're in the position of having to pick them apart and respond to each of
them all together.
Don't allow that.
Take control of the narrative and go point by point.
And obviously it takes time to do it.
So you've got to have some patients.
Yes.
Because I think the main problem is trying to argue this with Republicans, like my friends,
for example.
I mean, they respect my opinion.
They listen to me.
It's just their parents have grown them up in a way that they already have their heart
set beliefs.
Yes.
And nothing will change their mind.
Right.
Just learn to accept this fact.
Yep.
So what you have to do in those cases is recognizing that is important.
You're not going to change their minds by beating them over the head.
Get them to justify their beliefs deeply with a sort of Socratic method of questioning.
And one place on taxes you can start is, okay, listen, do you want to get.
Get the crazies out of the conversation by saying our tax is legal and should we have
some taxes?
OK.
That's the first place.
If someone says taxes are theft or slavery and are illegal or the tax rate should be
zero, I wouldn't even waste my time with those people.
That's not just.
It's go do something else.
Go read a book.
You're going to have some some better thing you can focus on once they concede.
OK.
Yeah.
Let me place in my heart.
I realized I tried changing the topic to something else.
I forgot what it was.
Yeah.
They started.
They started coming after me saying how I am I am against billionaires and how just
because they worked.
So it's harder than I do that I shouldn't be Gelson, which I'm not jealous.
They made their money through illegal ways.
Money laundering.
Sounds like the Trump campaign.
One hundred seventy dollars of money launder.
Oh, you know what?
I'm so now I'm starting to see why maybe these conversations aren't going so well.
I'm I you're you're sort of all over the place because now you're on to talking about individual
billionaires who are accused of luck.
But that's a very different conversation from taxation and what the tax rate would be.
So what I would I would really do is don't.
Don't go all over the place with arguments about money laundering and should build it.
You've really got to narrow the conversation, find two or three really good arguments and
come prepared because I can.
I can see you're probably getting flustered and going, I want to play them.
I wasn't I didn't I didn't bring that up, OK?
I was still sitting on the main taxes.
How, you know, taxes pay for everything.
You need taxes like advisers to certain things, death and taxes.
Well, but they would argue that the taxes shouldn't be certain.
So this is where I went starting soon.
And so I would start I would start with the example I gave to you are tax.
OK.
It sounds like I may be on speaker and are starting to echo.
You've got a lot going on there and a lot to contend with.
But I would really first focus in on do they concede that we need some taxes and that taxes
are legal and then you can work from there in the gray area and narrow the focus on to
what what the tax rates should be?
All right, my friend, I appreciate the phone call.
Sounds like you've got a real that's a real matzo ball hanging out there in terms of some
of these some of these arguments you're in.
And I very much wish you the best.
All right.
That does it for me today as far as phone calls are concerned.
I will take more calls again in the future.
Not today, not today, but in the future.
And as always, I feel terribly that I wasn't able to get to everybody who called in The
David Pakman Show David Pakman dot.com.