I liked it overall. Carter’s characterization is very different from the books, but his book characterization is so weird that I completely understand why they changed it, even if I was annoyed.
(For those who haven’t read it: book Carter is a career soldier who claims to be so old that he can’t remember how many wars he’s fought in, despite having the appearance of a man in his thirties. He was living with a family in Virginia when the American Civil War broke out and jumped at the chance to get back into combat, which he seems to live for, and he doesn’t seem to care much about the reasons for fighting: it seems like he joined the Confederate army mostly because he happened to be there at the time, and if he had been living with a family of New Yorkers he would have been just as happy to fight for the Union. The backstory about a dead family is invented for the movie; in the book he went west mostly out of boredom due to the war being over, but being an unapologetic Confederate is obviously unacceptable today so they had to do something to make him sympathetic.
On arriving on Mars after having a vision when he catches sight of the planet, book Carter immediately decides to embrace every opportunity to fight, adventure, and generally behave like an action hero who isn’t afraid to wade through rivers of blood while the bodies of his enemies pile up around him. He and Kantos Kan are really kindred spirits, whereas in the movie the enthusiastic Kan basically has to drag him into the plot after he spends the first act or so trying to avoid any possible action.)
Also the book is very specific that most Martians don’t wear clothes, but that probably wouldn’t have gone over well either, lol.
i adore the books, which are from the early 20th century. hardly derivative when they inspired 20th century greats like Ray Bradbury and Carl Sagan :) i followed this movie for years leading up to it. they completely screwed the marketing. i was disappointed, to say the least. but it is magical to see such a loved work in film. maybe someday we’ll get a reboot.
I really need to find a GOOD printed copy of the original stories. I tried reading it years ago on a digital copy and the text recognition scan was so bad, I gave up.
Percentages don’t scale well into the billions, you will still need brackets.
A billionaire can give away 98% of their wealth and still comfortably be a multi millionare.
A full time cashier on the minimum wage can barely even survive on 100% of their wage. When it comes to living a healthy fulfilling life, If they contribute just 5% of their wage to tax they are sacrificing far more a billionaire paying 98% tax would be.
There is – the income bracket isn’t what all your money is taxed at. It’s a graduated scale. I’m going to make up numbers here just for an example.
I make $125,000. The first $5000 has no tax on it. The next $20000 are taxed at 5%. The next $25,000 are 10%. The next $30,000 is taxed at 15%. The next $30000 is taxed at 20%. And the last $15,000 are taxed at 35%.
So my total tax is 20000(0.05) + 25000(0.1) + 30000(0.15) + 30000(0.2) + 15000(0.35) = $19,250. My effective tax is 15.4%, even though I’m taxed higher than that on $45000 of my $125000.
It’s a piecewise function basically. And it works really well here because you start getting into very discretionary spending when it gets high, you’re not buying the essentials. You could have a bracket that has 75% tax on everything above a million for instance, and poorer people would be completely unaffected. This is why the myth of “if I get a raise I’ll be in a higher bracket and pay more in taxes” is incorrect.
Yeah so everyone is saying that the issue is that this system stops at the last bracket at 35%. If there was some continuous way to calculate the percentage, this pattern would be able to keep going.
When you say continuous, do you mean the tax rates? I assume so, because those are discrete numbers. You’re basically saying then what whatever the last bracket is, it needs to scale from 35% (in this example) to 100% at a certain income?
I don’t dislike the idea necessarily, but I think the problem with the wealthy not paying enough in taxes isn’t the highest rate, but what is taxed and how. Selling stock for instance is taxed at a lower rate than income, so we’d need to add a stipulation that if you make more than X, it’s taxed as if it’s normal income. (You’d have to make some exceptions for retiring people but that’s easy enough)
The Inflation Reduction Act had an idea that I think is worth pursuing, or at least calculating how it would go for the rich. Companies making a certain amount of profit in a tax year have to pay some % (maybe 20?) if that’ll be higher than their taxes calculated normally. It stops the loophole that lets corporations get away with paying no taxes. If we did that for rich people, I wonder how it would go. My gut instinct is that it would actually help a lot.
Edit: I just described Alternate Minimum Tax, which is a thing already. We’d just need to close loopholes around it by not letting anyone claim a deduction on it.
Probably not to 100% (because then the net income would go down) but yeah something like that. And yes you’re right, there are still many loopholes for rich people to avoid taxes so those issues should probably be fixed first. But to be fair I don’t know much about taxes or economics, it’s just an idea I had.
because then paupers would pay the same rate as billionaires. At the same time brackets make sure eveyone pays the same for the set amount. So even if more brackets were introduced billionaires would pay the same rate on their first 100k as millionaires. People of wealth only pay higher on the actualy high level. Whats crazy is we have several brackets that basically run through the 5 figure range and just into the 6 but none higher were 5 figures should just have one lowest rate.
It’s a percentage that nominally increases as wealth goes up.
Poor people need to spend a higher percentage of their income meeting basic needs, so having them pay the same percentage as the wealthy puts a higher burden on the poor.
In top of that, the wealthy are able to put a higher percentage of their income in things like investments, which are taxed at a lower rate (to encourage investing in the economy over hoarding wealth), so a flat rate tax would be effectively a regressive tax.
The problem is investments vs income. It’s not a super straightforward problem to solve. Having said that other countries have implemented a wealth tax, so it can be done
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