the only way to make sure we don’t have trillionaires is to make sure that we don’t have billionaires.
simple solution, tax rate goes up by margins based on the standard deviation from the last year’s income mean. for income more than one standard deviation above the mean, your tax rate for that margin is the percentile rank of your income compared to the last year’s incomes. something like that would be fair. then mandate certain percentages be spent on education, welfare, etc. anything left over in the budget from the last year gets split evenly among all taxpayers.
That’s actually a really simple and neat solution. My only worry is there’s minor possibility that it could be abused, but not nearly as much as current systems are.
yeah, loans and hising income.overseas, stuff like that. guarantee 5% for the irs budget and regulate them to track down income tax schemes.
there would be some struggle, but things would level out after a couple of decades, and head towards real prosperity.
of course the idea is rough, you’d want narrow margins, and the ability shift it if there aren’t enough high earners, and to apply the same scheme to corps too. all sorts of edges cases and fail points to consider.
a greed
99.9999% tax rate beyond $10 million total worth would be a great start.
No, we should not.
agreed
Can the city raise billionaires taxes to a significant level?
A person cannot earn a billion dollars on his labor, it’s impossible. The only way one becomes a billionaire is by stealing from the ones who did the hard work and enriching yourself off their labor. Billionaires are leeches, every single one is a disease on humanity. There are no good billionaires, they should all be shot and have their assets redistributed.
Billionaire math
Average USA billionaire has about $7b in wealth.
2026 * 365 = 739,490
$7,000,000,000 / 739,490 = $9,465.98
You would need to make $9k per day, for 2026 years, to catch up to the average billionaire wealth right now.
It’s estimated in 2026 that it would cost $37b to end world hunger until 2030.
Also note that Musk, Bezos, and other extreme billionaires are up to 100x of the average here ($700b for Musk). Who is making $900k per day?
This is not natural, it’s not rational, and it’s completely bullshit. You can come up with whatever distraction you want (“wealth & income aren’t the same”), but we should be taxing every dollar above $1b at 99% or higher.
30 years * 365 day = 10,950
$1,000,000,000 / 10,950 = $91,324.20
I could easily live off of $91k per DAY for 30 YEARS.
If you put these numbers against a human time scale we can understand, I don’t see the argument for this level of wealth, especially not as people go hungry, without clothes or food, and children die.
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Get rid of hunger and billionaires or we eat them.
I totally agree with the no billionaire concept - but I don’t even think that is the point of contention. I hate that we have been spinning on this for a decade. The real issue his HOW we do it from both a strategic and execution perspective
Do you implement changes slowly to minimize resistance? Do you do a lot at once to ensure changes don’t stall? Do we have an income tax? How do we tax non-liquid assets? What if those assets are held outside the US? And so on…
Most people don’t want billionaires. Let’s shift the discussion so that is the assumption we are starting with - and now we just have to implement.
For starters: Stop allowing people to borrow money against securities. Most wealthy people live and invest on borrowed cash which compounds their wealth. It’s a strategy that only works if you have a lot of money.
Changes in tax laws need to happen. People using the borrowing strategy above pay very little income tax. They often get tax breaks for the interest on the loans. Their real income is capital gains which gets taxed at near poverty levels. Someone making 40,000-85,000USD gets a marginal tax rate of 22%. Capitals gains tax is 15%.
I love it. This should be the discussion.
Amen to that
“In his own words,” the article title says, as if we should be shocked or upset by it.
