With wealth inequality and billionaire control over American society growing ever more obscene, it’s well past time to implement a maximum wage limit.
Most billionaires don’t earn a wage at all. So they’re ahead of you on this. Most of their wealth comes from simply lying about what their shit is worth, and other rich people agreeing.
They’ll use those laws on regular folk while they ignore them or use loopholes
“It’s maximum wage. I don’t receive any wage, I receive a dividend”
“It’s maximum wage. I don’t receive any wage, I receive rent”
No chance anything that actually attacks inequality ever gets implemented through existing legislative channels.
This is a stupid idea. The ultra wealthy make a tiny portion of their income through wages- that’s kind of the entire point and problem of capitalism. It is ownership of capital that drives the income of the ultra wealthy. Jeff Bezos’s salary from Amazon is only $80,000 per year, and he is one of the richest people on Earth. Maximum wage laws only hurt workers, while not impacting the ultra wealthy at all. When you see the giant compensation packages of CEO, very little of that is actually in wages. It’s in stock in the company, and other non-cash benefits. Even if you restrict this practice, that wouldn’t have done anything to prevent the wealthiest people on Earth from getting where they are since they are all founders or descendants of founders. I can’t think of a single billionaire who got there from wages or any kind of compensation working for someone else- it’s all ownership of capital.
I don’t think you’re helping the cause. A perfect solution is not the goal, and a good idea that fails to address the targeted problem is still a good idea.
You can at the same time think:
- people shouldn’t be allowed to have a salary of 1 million
- that the ultra rich aren’t ultra rich because of their salary
- believe that we should tax ultra-high income individuals highly
- believe that we should tax ultra-wealthy individuals highly
Don’t be a bad progressive by discouraging progress. “Tax wealth not work” is a great slogan to unify the working class. We should also probably tax ultra-high income individuals as well.
The issue is that this is literally not a problem. It’s like deciding that the best course of action when you’re starving in the woods is to hunt and eat Bigfoot instead of foraging for food. It’s a waste of time and resources at best, and a distraction from real solutions at worse. Nobody in the history of the world has become ultra wealthy through high salary.
Idk if you know this but governments are composed of a lot of people. We can fix multiple issues with multiple solutions. Right now the top 0.01% have absolutely too much money. The top 0.1% also don’t get taxed enough. The top 1% also don’t get taxed enough. The top 10% likely could handle more taxing as well depending on what country we’re talking about.
The reality is there are hundreds of problems modern governments need to solve, most of which require revenue, so getting more revenue from the people who own a ton and people who make a ton is good.
I don’t understand why we have to pick one solution when we definitely can handle talking about (especially casually on the Internet) multiple solutions, those solutions are good, and we agree on the ranking of importance (wealth tax first, anything that goes after the top 1%, and then income taxes, anything that goes after the top 10%). Like, I don’t think it’s that hard.
*aside from pro-sports competitors.
He is right though. Those rich guys won’t have an income at all, they just live on loans., get driven around in cars owned by the company, live in houses owned by the company etc, etc etc.
I’m literally agreeing with that statement. The ultra wealthy make all their money from their wealthy. Yes. Can we all agree that that’s what’s happening? Yes? Good.
Now ALSO can we agree it’s sane for someone to suggest taxing ultra high income earners? Like in 2012, just reading off the wiki here, the median cash compensation for a US CEO was 5.3 million. That’s cash. That’s about as much money as I want the limit to be on anyone in the world in terms of wealth and these fuckers are getting paid that a year. Can we agree we should tax cash incomes over oh idk 1 million dollars at something like 90%?
Like guys come on, this isn’t hard. Don’t just knee jerk react to the topic, read what is being written. Yes, tax wealth. That’s the most important thing every government can do. Yes, I’m saying that because I know wealth begets wealth and it cascades, the wealthy are wealthy because of their wealth (no shit). ALSO, yes we should tax ultra-high income earners. If you get paid enough money to retire in two years of normal full time work you should be taxed accordingly (with something like Germany’s tax law that let’s you spread it out over X years so if it was a one time thing you get taxed normally but if it’s an every year salary it gets taxed correctly).
The ultra rich own assets. Their wealth does not come from monopoly money from a paycheck. So you can’t tax them unless you go after unrealized gains.
You absolutely can tax assets. Idk what your point is here, are you anti-taxing the rich? Or are you hyper fixating on the fact that I’m also pro-taxing ultra high income earners more? I don’t get your comment.
I’m against taxing unrealized investment gains.
Okay, cool, that’s not the question. Are you for taxing the ultra wealthy based on their wealth or against? Are you saying you’re against this specific form of wealth tax and because you believe that’s the only form of wealth tax you’re against the whole concept? What’s your fundamental position and point, because I’m not proposing a bill here, I’m taking to strangers on the Internet.
I completely agree with the concept of taxing income above a certain limit entirely. I think that only solves a portion of the problem, with the majority of the problem being solved by well implemented wealth taxes. Every dollar of wealth over something like 50 million USD should be taxed at 100%. No one should ever become a hundred millionaire again, let alone a billionaire.
50 million is too damn high.
I mean I completely agree, but this is Lemmy not a bill proposal. I’m picking a number everyone should be able to agree with because that limits the number of dumb comments I get.
If I was writing a bill I’d probably hard limit it to 20 million with it being soft limited starting at 6 million.
need it to cover all compensation but I agree. ben an jerrys had single digit multiples for the highest paid. don’t see why we can’t do 100.
90% tax rate over 1million a year including capital gains. No cap on social security
Why the fuq someone needs 1 mil year? 500 is enough
Just trying to be reasonable
The thing about most mega rich people is they don’t earn wages. So this wouldn’t affect them.
Came here to say this. They’re poor, see how much their salaries are? Just a million, which they reinvest into the company for another share of 1% of their 3 trillion dollar company… that they control, and fire 20k employees to get back 50 million in just a week for their share…
Semantics. “Max income law”
Any income over $300,000 per year goes to the State to cover programs to eradicate poverty. Easy.
Ok so then once you hit $300k in income you should stop working? That sounds like a great way to have a shortage of working necessary skilled labor eg surgeons and lawyers who stop working after a few months every year.
My buddy is a spinal surgeon. He would stop working by May and his area would have no spinal surgeons for more than half the year under your suggestion.
That’s how you get a bunch of great Cuban surgeons
No, you don’t unless you live in a country whose medical technology is still decades behind the standards of the developed world. Your average Cuban doctor has no experience with the robotic surgery tools we have now.
If those people are actually taking home $300k/year after deducting things like business expenses and student loan payments, then they’re either way overpaid or they seriously need a vacation.
OR they have incredibly niche skills that are extremely hard to obtain and maintain.
The part that makes me think certain forms of leftism are really foolish is that they count on people not wanting to be compensated for the greater amount of harder work or risks they are willing to take on. People don’t work like that.
The risk to even get to that level was incredibly high as well. Medical school bills are no joke and you don’t know you’re going to become some top notch surgeon by the end, you might just wash out and be swimming in debt.
Education being risky is a feature of capitalism. A sane economic system would not require someone to go into debt to learn a valuable skill.
Maybe those skills shouldn’t be so incredibly niche, then. Almost like we should be encouraging people to develop them instead of locking them behind a paywall.
The overwhelming majority of people would not be capable due to their mental acuity and/or ability to engage in fine motor skills. Money isn’t as big of a factor in this case and having less informed and skilled spinal surgeons wouldn’t he a great thing.
The more intelligent choice is to not set such a low wage cap as it achieves nothing to begin with and addresses no problems.
that would kill lotteries
Darn
Why should I care? There’s no inherent reason lotteries deserve to exist. There are several reasons they shouldn’t exist.
gambling is fun
Lotteries are hardly gambling. You’re going to loose, statistically
Statistically, this applies to all other forms of gambling as well. The house almost always wins.
There are gambling where there is no house
So find a different way to gamble. It’s not like there’s a shortage.
Semantics. We’ll change the wording to “assets controlled”.
I agree with the sentiment, but it’s worth noting that the current excesses of CEO compensation through stock incentives are a response to a poorly implemented attempt to curb high CEO salaries.
We do need to reign in CEO compensation, but directly going after wages made the problem worse. I don’t see the article addressing this, but a Clinton-era policy aimed to curb excessive CEO wages. IIRC the ratio of CEO pay to lowest paid worker within the same company was as bad as 30:1 at the time, but has since ballooned to hundreds: 1.
Maybe something as simple as capping stock incentives at N% of total compensation could work. But we’d need to make sure we’re not just encouraging a new way to skirt around the legislation like last time.
I agree with the sentiment, but it’s worth noting that the current excesses of CEO compensation through stock incentives
Securities tax, payable in shares of the security. 1% of all registered securities are transferred directly to the IRS each and every year. Natural persons can request an exemption for up to $10 million worth. No exemption for corporate or other artificial “persons”.
IRS liquidators will auction the taxed shares over time, such that sale of taxed shares are never more than 1% of total traded volume.
If we broke up all their massive companies, they could not get such compensation. But they decided not to use the antitrust laws that already exist or say no to literally any merger.
This might be even more important.
We need monopoly busting, and inheritance tax, and general wealth redistribution. We need to stop monetizing basic needs and start paying fair wages. Income cap solves none of that. No way you can sell ‘income caps’ to the general public.
Monopoly busting, hell yes!! All the other ideas come from people who were unlucky enough to have nothing passed down to them.
I am sorry for your situation, but my father worked his ass off to leave me and my siblings something (it was meager compared to most I’m sure but it helped me out immensely when I needed a leg up), but blanket laws like this would have royally screwed me just because “well I didn’t inherit anything from my parents, so NOBODY ELSE SHOULD EITHER!!” mentality.
I think the 10-13 million dollar cap is plenty. It’s not about you it’s about the Walton kids controlling and passing down 100 Billion. It’s about Elon using his money to buy his way into the White House and steal from people…
If you gave your children $10 million and they couldn’t survive on it you fucking failed to raise your children. Anything more than that is burdensome. Passing off enough money so that your kids don’t have to struggle is one thing. Passing off enough money to buy yourself a political party by the time you’re 35 probably not a great idea.
Like how much money are you talking about? Are you rich rich? or are you got enough daddy’s money to talk shit rich?
You’re broke to me if you’re worth less than 100 million I couldn’t care less about your family money
Inheritance tax is what stops you having a noble class or owner class with a long line of inherited wealth.
A good inheritance tax would be tiered like income tax. Lower amounts would be untaxed with higher numbers being taxed at higher rates.
It’s simple, any income is income and taxed as income. this means loans, gains, etc. alll income.
Then everyone pays less income taxes. The current system puts the tax burden on the poorest people.
Yes simple flat tax rates are a dream for me. Imagine! Also with all the government monitoring we pay for… they can file our taxes for us. I’d love to get a fair itemized tax bill every year.
Maximum wage would be nice, but the inequality doesn’t happen with wages, it’s stock options, asset hoarding, and rent seeking. These people don’t pay taxes, or claim wages lol. Inheritance tax of 95% of 11Million that’s an idea! Need to strip the aristocracy of its belongings.
That wealth is also largely unrealized wealth on those stock options. I’m pretty against taxing unrealized gains, but for the love of god, we need to tax their leveraging of those unrealized gains which is how they benefit and wield it as a weapon, all while not paying any taxes on it. The tax rate should be HIGH (I’d be okay with the tax rate part being wealth based when they leverage it).
Yea it’s really a sticky situation. I’m also against taxing unrealized gains because it’s just hard to logic around. Taxing stock buy backs would help, taxing unrealized gains over 100M or whatever. Idk we need to tax away the aristocracy and the political power that comes with wealth accumulation. Would love to live in a world where a handful of people didn’t command the fates of billions
We desperately need to get rid of billionaires and follow that up with millionaires
I think “millionaires” is probably a bit too broad depending on exactly how you define it. A million dollars doesn’t go nearly as far as it used to.
Most insanely wealthy people don’t necessarily have millions or billions of dollars sitting around in cash or in their bank accounts, that worth includes things like investments and real estate.
So going by that most people who own a house are probably around halfway to being a millionaire just due to that, add in a retirement account and some savings and odds are theres probably a lot more “millionaires” walking around than you’d think.
I have a relative who retired a few years ago, he worked as a bricklayer his entire life, and don’t get me wrong, that’s a solid job, and he was very good at it, so he made good money, but he wasn’t his own boss, or anyone else’s for that matter, wasn’t actively playing the stock market or anything, just a guy who worked his whole life, lived within his means, saved money, put it into safe retirement accounts and such, etc.
He retired with about 1.5 million. I’m not totally clear if that includes the value of his house or not, if it does that would still put him at around 1 million in savings and investrents, and if it doesn’t you can bump him up to around 2 if we measure him like we do the really wealthy people.
And there’s a good chance that medical bills and such will eat up a good amount of that from him in the coming years…
We desperately need to teach leftists academic economics. Yall have your heart in the right place but none of you have the slightest clue what the fallout of your policy suggestions are.
“Getting rid” of millionaires is ludicrous. There are people who are millionaires because a stock does well for a bit. There are people who had a million for a few days because they held Dogecoin when Elon manipulated that price. Millionaire is a much lower bar than you think.
the vast majority of lawyers, doctors, and farmer owners have a net worth above a million even
Exactly, I graduated college at the right time for many of my friends to he worth 10+ million on paper entirely in the form of stock in their employer. One of my buddies had $16 million in AskJeeves that he couldn’t sell as an employee. By the time he could sell that was $64k. Not everyone who is a millionaire is actually a millionaire.
I made about 60k when I started working as a dev. At the rate I saved back then, I’d be well in millionaire territory within about 10 years had I not left it for grad school.
There are people who are millionaires because a stock does well for a bit.
These largely aren’t working class people.
You would be wrong about that.
The top 10% of the wealthiest own 93% of all stocks with the 1% owning 54%
Those statistics are for volume of ownership and aren’t relevant to a discussion about wealth. I can own a handful of highly priced shares and be worth 1+ million while not holding a ton of shares.
Your highly priced shares are highly priced because of the volume held by the 10%
That makes no sense.
You are framing this in a capitalist world. Getting rid of billionaires would also get rid of the stock market, they hold about 93% of stocks. The stock market is them buying a portion of working class wages and calling them dividends. If everyone’s material needs are met the accumulation of wealth isnt a driving force for ‘success’
Getting rid of stocks and billionaires would have a massive fallout hence why we need to teach leftists actual academic economics as this shift would be colossal and havea ton of externalities.
My limited understanding is that once you’re super wealthy your actual income doesn’t matter. They take loans against their wealth to pay for whatever they want.
We need to tax both capital gains at a rate higher than labor and tax loans as income if they use stock as collateral.
I think we need to decide, if unrealized gains are real gains. How you can loan using unrealized gains as collateral if from tax purposes it’s not real money.
If you can loan money using unrealized gains a collateral you should be taxed. I am not saying you tax unrealized gains, but taxing when get money “from” it.
But loan is considered a loss and you even get a tax break.
Also need to limit tax write-offs to really business needs, like rich people can get a huge car like a Mercedes G class on their business and write-off the cost for instance. The rich have a lot of loopholes. Incentives should be limited to people and companies making a X sum. If your company makes billions, I don’t think you need a tax incentive.
I propose we tax owning stock like property
Yes but this is an article aimed at a casual audience of wage-laborers, who undestand wealth as the thing you get for a job.
And the details of the demand don’t really matter that much, because at this point it’s clear that even a milquetoast request like this will still prompt the US oligarchy to have the secret police fire on protesters. Imo if anything you want the demands to initially be as mild as possible, makes them look more unreasonable. Once people are onboard you can push for more important goals.
I agree with this but sadly in a multi national world the ultra wealthy will simply flee to some tax haven country as primary residency.
@desmosthenes @technocrit why does that matter if they’re not contributing anyway. But also https://taxjustice.net/press/millionaire-exodus-did-not-occur-study-reveals/
because they buy things - especially luxury items, create more companies, hire people, in theory… who knows anymore
@desmosthenes a lot of it is more likely to go into the Cayman Islands or investing in media they can control or buying politicians. Give $1b to one man or $20 each to 50 million people - bet you more money makes it into your local economy the second way.
this is what I was alluding towards. but have to crawl back that initial 1b in the first place… but agreed, normal folk actually pay taxes
@desmosthenes they also buy food and drink from your local town, rather than designer limited editions from Paris.
@desmosthenes but to go back to the first point - if they want to have a company in the US they will do it whether or not they’re resident. Can’t very easily employ thousands of Cayman Islanders in your billion dollar business. A Way would be found. But by structuring the business in such a way as to avoid whatever restrictions there are, there would at least be a small reduction in their cut. And a small reduction in billions is not insignificant. Plus… One fewer tax haven reduces options.
Okay. So, just keep bending over. Got it.
/s
This is an empty “threat” they promote. They want you to believe they are somehow valuable to society, when really, they are just leeches who contribute nothing. Let them flee, the entire world is getting tired of their shit.
na just think of other solutions on top of this. not saying to not set the maximum - but perhaps a multinational solution is needed, or set the standards on the banks themselves, or on repatriation of their income when they’re trying to spend (ie a sales tax for rich) or a carbon tax, or withdrawal of government grants/contracts for their companies (i’m sure there’s other besides aws and azure out there) for some ideas - so on
Senator Warren’s wealth tax confronted this with a 50% exit tax on all funds relocated within 25 years of the plan’s adoption (IIRC).
see that’s a good solution
I preferred it to Sander’s plan as his exit tax sunset after 4 years as I recall. Many younger tech guys can plan on being alive in 4 years but far fewer will be able to count on 25 years.
Good.
These cunts will spin it like, 'Society will break down if we pay more than 20 an hour. Don’t you like cheeseburgers? Don’t you like groceries?
