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I mean you could even take the bottom number and leave them with the top number and they could still live in unimaginable luxury forever. Or just take the lot because fuck em lol.
I couldn’t imagine spending $1 billion in my entire life, let alone 3-4.
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A million seconds is about 12 days. A billion seconds is about 32 years.
The proportional difference is the same, i.e. the same number of orders of magnitude separate them, but in absolute terms, someone with $10B is closer in wealth to your or I than to Bezos (which, to be clear, does not mean we shouldn’t take it, merely that the height Bezos is at is unfathomable)
Most of their billions is ownership in companies they grew into what they are today. It’s not like they have billions to spend, it’s that their ownership is worth billions according to the market.
They could go to any bank and leverage that asset for a loan for more than everyone who posts on this platform will make in their lifetimes no problem. That is a nonsense talking point
What’s your point? So because they can leverage their ownership of their own company we need to take away that ownership?
Yes, if you can control more wealth than a mid size city earns in ten lifetimes, you should not be allowed to do that
I don’t think the stock market should be determining if we take away companies from their owners, no matter how much it’s worth. Why does having more wealth than a certain size city matter? Especially if your company has more employees and customers than even a large city?
Especially if your company has more employees and customers than even a large city?
Why do those employees get the bare minimum? Why are the working majority excluded from ownership and decision-making in the companies they run?
True, but that ownership gives them access to very low interest loans that they then use as spending money and don’t have to pay taxes on it
So what? We should take away that ownership because they can leverage it? Also the same people suggesting we tax wealth like this want to also close those “loopholes” of low interest loans on shares.
Yes.
Yes to taking away wealth or the way to leverage it?
Taking away (extreme) wealth. There’s no reason one person should have that much. There’s countless better ways to use that money/wealth than for one persons extravagant lifestyle. And even if they don’t have an extravagant lifestyle, what are they gonna do with it? Doubt they will build infrastructure out of good will with it.
If they are self-made millionaires/billionaires as they claim, take everything they have/own and tell them to start the quest again, no glitches, DLC, or saved progress.
You all realize they don’t have that money laying around to pay the IRS right? They own companies, those companies are worth that much. To pay that you would have to liquidate those companies. So no more Amazon, Tesla, Space X, etc…
no more Amazon, Tesla, Space X, etc…
Oh no! Anyway, so how can we make this happen, like, yesterday?
I highly recommend you to read the paper billionare argument. The market can stand the liquidation of most of those companies without making them go bankrupt, we don’t want them to stop existing, just to make them smaller and not a threat to democracy.
For the whole scale of wealth I also recommend going through wealth shown to scale
Don’t be a bootlicker or bot or idiot.
When they sell their shares to buy twitter or pay the tax man, those companies still exist. It just means that other people get to buy those shares and that’s a good thing, because that way those companies get owned by the public.
Tesla and SpaceX still exist even after Elon overpaid by some $30B for his Twitter adventure.
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Tax billionaires until there are no more billionaires
It’s really insane that we legally treat the tenth billion dollars at the same level as a working persons house or car.
Everything is legally just “property”.
No, fuck that.
The law should protect the first million of every citizen with ferver. (and when we tackle wealth inequality, most people will have this level of wealth at the end of their working life. The fact that most currently don’t is due to inequality. )
Up until 100 million, it should be taxed at a reasonable level. Because at some level, it’s fair that people prefer watching Taylor Swift instead of me sing on a stage.
Above that it should be taxed heavily.
And above a billion, it should be just confiscated. As in, oopsie, our system malfunctioned, you weren’t supposed to end up with more wealth than what a thousand normal people would save up after a whole lifetime of work, so we are taking it back.
At a billion you get a small plaque that says ‘yay you won capitalism’, they name a park bench after you and you replay from scratch.
Wealth taxes are stupid. That said, nobody needs multiple hundreds of billions of dollars.
The solution is to have regulations and laws in place that prevent them getting this large in the first place. The fact that Amazon and Google own 90% of the internet is absolutely fucked.
I agree, no one should be able to hold such an obscene amount of wealth. Right now they do, though. How do you propose this be remedied?
Fuck the billionaires, tax them all by 100% of their income beyond 1 billion.
None of these guys has income anywhere near a billion in yearly income. They have stock and other assets that are worth billions but it is not income per se. If anything they go to extreme lengths to minimize their income.
is there anyway to classify new/gained assets and tax that?
Ate they not taxed when they are bought and sold?
See? that’s another thing. Why is some income not considered income?
People who actually have to work ALWAYS have to pay taxes, but the parasites that gamble in the stock market get to keep all that money they won, and if they lose they get a bailout from the taxpayers.
There are billionaires out there that have become so narcissistic that they just say it outright. “I’m going to privatize the profits and socialize the losses”
Sad day when “billionaires should pay taxes” is considered a far left position.
Billionaires should pay a wealth tax is considered a far left position. Billionaires should pay an income tax is a position supported by all except maybe some tea party folk.
Here’s the basic idea of what I’d think is fair
You have a basic rate for income below the 20th percentile of all incomes
Multiply that by 1.5 for income between that and the 40th percentile
Multiply that by 1.25 for income between that and the 60th percentile
Multiply that by 1.125 for income between that and the 80th percentile
Multiply that by 1.0625 for income between that and the 95th percentile
Multiply that by 1.03125 for income between that and the 99th percentile
Multiply that by 1.015625 for all income above the 99th percentile, with the additional caveat that people who top this bracket even once cannot hold public office, donate to political campaigns, or hire lobbyists and lobbying firms for ten years following them topping out.
Imagine something similar for taxes on units of housing owned, dividends earned, and so on and so forth.
The idea being that the highest rate can’t be adjusted without significantly reducing the tax burden of the poorest, basically erasing the only way conservatives have been able to balance the books whenever they try that shit.
As of this point every wealth tax that has been implemented ends up getting abandoned because if how inefficient they are. It’s like rent control, it sounds great on paper bu historically never works out like it was planned.
Forcing Bezos to liquidate $6b of Amazon would have an effect on the economy.
Plus, you don’t think they would really pay that tax, do you? There’s always a loophole.
Wealth taxes actually work, that’s why the rich attack them so vehemently.
I think you’re wrong on both points. I’ve heard plenty of rich people say they believe their tax rate should be higher including some of the ones on that list. You’re also wrong when you say it works. It works for who? If you don’t attack the spending problem it’s just more money to be wasted. Let’s face it the political system is outstanding and finding some need to spend every cent they can possibly get their hands on. It won’t matter if they spend it on your priorities or someone else’s they will always find the need to spend it. In our current inflation based economy they don’t even need to spend what they take in it’s easier to just print more and that’s exactly what they’re doing.
rich person talk: it’s not a tax problem, it’s a spending problem.
No it’s not, money spent in the economy is money going around. rather than hoarded offshore.
Do billionaires actually have billions in real money sitting around? I’ve always thought the billions were in stocks and couldn’t be taxed until they cashed it out and they could technically lose everything if the stock price falls. That’s really fucked up if true
Nobody keeps that amount of cash. Even below a million, most people have most of their wealth in either real estate (their own house) or financial securities (stocks, ETFs, bonds).
Yet, we all gotta pay property tax and capital gains.
The billionaires just have loopholes that they use to never realize gains with loan schemes and trust funds.
Only $4.6 Billion for Musk? I’m sure he’d appreciate that, since he paid $11Billion in 2021.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/10/investing/elon-musk-tesla-zero-tax-bill/index.html
Wealth tax should absolutely be a priority. In my state, MA, we voted in a “millionaires tax”. One thing it will cover is state wide free school lunch.
Billionaires shouldn’t exist. Their fair share is more like 95%.
As a temporarily embarrassed billionaire myself, I have reservations about this
Wealth is not money. There’s nothing to tax.
This is a very true statement.
Stocks won’t get taxed unless they get actioned on. That is where the majority of their preceeded wealth is.
The US government is sovereign, it can very much either take ownership of the stock, or estimate its value and construct a loan that the company owners needs to pay back because they owe this tax. Or probably 100s of more clever solutions as well.
It can definitely decide to tax wealth if it wanted to, it could also break up large companies to at least spread the wealth of these institutions wider. It mostly just doesn’t “want” to.
This argument is so unnecessary defeatist pretending the most militarised and police ridden country in the world has no power to enforce laws it could write.
Opposite to that notion I think if the US had any interest in fairness in taxation, especially on a more global scale, it could easily get all the common tax havens/financial secrecy jurisdictions, to fold to essentially whatever demands if has. But again it seems like the US government strangely doesn’t really want that either.
Which is still the central issue the US government is more captured by the billionaire class than a lot of people like to think they are, and it’s never just the dem or just the reps, it’s large portions of both parties that are essentially captured in this way, or just fall into it because preserving the status quo is easy.
It’s also real money, otherwise Musk couldn’t have bought Twitter for $44 billion. He sure didn’t have that amount on his bank account but he still bought it all the same, thus giving him a substantial soft power through information.
And now Twitter is down to $4b. Because wealth is not money.
How would this be implemented? I don’t think the market would appreciate if all billionaires were suddenly forced to sell off billions worth of their shares. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to fight back against these tyrants, but not if it crashes the economy and makes the lives of workers worse.
Say it with me: The stock market is not the economy.
I hate the stock market as much as the next guy. Glorified gambling.
But, the stock market is tied directly to the economy
What do you think most people’s retirement accounts are tied to?
According to a quick Google, 61% of adults in US own stock. Which means more than half the population has an interest in the stock market not crashing.
Yes the 1% probably owns the majority of stocks. Quick Google says 54% of all stocks.
US Dollar is a fiat currency. It’s only backed by the faith of the people behind it.
It can absolutely crash and while the 1% will suffer, we will all suffer at least a little bit.
The stock prices wouldn’t be affected except in the short term. The fundamentals of the companies wouldn’t change and so the price would recover quickly. Any dip is due to a temporary imbalance of buyers and sellers.
These stock sales would likely be spread over longer durations so as not to crash the price which would also be bad for the billionaires because they would have to sell more stock to cover the tax.
