The Good Riddance Test

If you ever find yourself discussing tax with someone and you start to become concerned that they might be a retarded progressive, there is one infallible test that can be performed.

The Good Riddance Test.

Point out to them that taxing the rich only works up to a point in an open economy, because they have all sorts of ways in which they can avoid or evade those taxes once they get a bit tired of being endlessly gouged.

After all, all those lovely things which progressives call “rights” (accommodation, food, clothing, education, broadband etc) have to be paid for, and the highest 1% earners of our society have repeatedly shown they are unwilling to pay for more than about 30% of it – about where we are now.

If you demand much more than that, they start to invest abroad, or work abroad, or retire abroad – there are any number of “f*** this for a game of soldiers” type schemes for rich peeved people. And once they go abroad, their taxes go abroad with them. Forever.

So in pursuit of more taxes, we get less taxes.

And once you point this out to someone who has been claiming that taxing the rich will raise lots of extra cash for lovely benefits, they will go one way or the other.

Sensible people who were merely ignorant of reality will understand that this is not a very sensible solution – if they really care about more money for lovely things, and raising taxes on the rich will not only fail to achieve this but will usually cause them to move away, they say things like “Ah. Yes. That’s a bit of a problem. We don’t want the people who pay for 30% of our lovely things to move abroad and leave the rest of us to make up the losses”

But if they are a progressive retard, who doesn’t really care about poor people or efficient tax policy, but only about screwing rich people, they will pretty much always say “Good riddance”

It’s the Good Riddance Test, and it’s damn near infallible.