the only way to make sure we don’t have trillionaires is to make sure that we don’t have billionaires.
‘I don’t think we should have billionaires’
Half of America’s trailer-park residents pass out because he dared to attack our beloved billionaires. “But what about when we become billionaires!?!”
The reason we have had to deal with this over the centuries is half our population is authoritarian. The idea that someone can punch up as a violation of the laws of man.
Because of what seems to be uniquely an American ideology: they too could be a billionaire someday, so therefore an attack against billionaires is an attack against them.
It’s not. On some level it’s in many, many people.
A while ago, Poland wanted to introduce extra property tax on the owners of three and more properties. The idea was to combat “investors”, and flippers. The Polish Internet lost its god damn mind.
Of course, a lot of the noise must’ve been sponsored, but regular people, people who can barely afford the mortgage rates for a single apartment started shouting against that property tax, as if they were at any risk of getting hit by it.
It’s not an accident, but intentionally taught propaganda to keep the masses from ever banding together and rising up. Imagine if they’d told all the peasants in 18th century France that someday, they might become royalty too!
This idiot should have a conversation with Dolla Bill
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.
Here’s the problem: Zuckerberg and Bezos have an income of $1/year.
Of course, they also earn a tonne of shares, but you can’t tax that until they cash out. Which they don’t, because they don’t have to - if they need cash, they take a loan, meaning they have negative income.
And if you start taxing unrealised gains, they’ll think of yet another method of ignoring it, while you’d be killing all the middle-class people who’ve invested money in stock.
bezos takes a smallish salary, I don’t care about that myth, or them, or unrealized gains. we need to rebalance the tax system. if unrealized gains are really such a loophole, then tax borrowing against it. This would hurt small borrowers too. so what?
the rich man loan problem is a red herring. if we ever rebalanced the system, there would also be political will to close loopholes. thus tax code can be directed at large borrowers or some other solution. your response is the “oh it is hopeless so don’t consider it” crap brought up on reddit every time this subject comes up.
bezos takes a smallish salary, I don’t care about that myth, or them, or unrealized gains. we need to rebalance the tax system
I agree, but you can’t “not care” about these things unless you want to bankrupt the working class.
your response is the “oh it is hopeless so don’t consider it” crap brought up on reddit every time this subject comes up.
I didn’t say “it’s hopeless”, I said it’s extremely difficult to do that without fucking over regular people.
And if it’s something that’s “brought up every time this subject comes up”, then you’d think there’s some merit to it, no?
your statement doesn’t follow from mine. bankrupt.the working class? they would be in the proposed tax margin.
you are just gibbering because taxes.
If you tried reading what I wrote, you’d see where it follows from your comment.
You’re just parroting the age old “tax the rich” without a second thought to the pitfalls and risks there.
even if you consider moving the goal posts to include capital gains, most working class, earning far below the mean, as median income in the us lags the mean significantly, most investments are tax deferred accounts covered under legislation already.
you’ve moved the goalposts to “taxing unrealized gains” by billionaires to evade the essential truth that tax margins are out of whack.
then you only continue to “discuss” that far off goalpost. you are a troll.
even if you consider moving the goal posts to include capital gains
How is including capital gains “moving goal posts”? What are you talking about?
you’ve moved the goalposts to “taxing unrealized gains” by billionaires to evade the essential truth that tax margins are out of whack.
WTF? I didn’t, the other guy did! Did you accidentally reply to the wrong comment? I’m so confused…
This is like literally all I want to see from politicians currently.
The DNC chair has been saying he wants to run a presidential candidate like Mamdani since Mamdani won his primary…
He probably thought it long before then, but he won’t weigh in on any primary.
Which is more than we’ve got from the DNC in about 50 years…
That means they are getting scared of us. Keep up the pressure.
He’s been saying that stuff for well over a decade when he was Minnesota’s state chair…
The voting meme era of the DNC learned their lesson, probably back in 2020 even tho Biden squeaked by. They just didn’t have a chance between 2017 and 2025 to vote for a chair, 2021 Biden got to pick like every incoming Dem president.
Which makes it a much better thing, we’re not fighting the party anymore.
They won’t put a finger on the scale for or against the oligarchs, and that’s all the people ever need, a fair fight. We just can’t fuck up the primary and let a neoliberal win, because if they go on to win the general then they get to name party chair.
There’s a lot at stake next primary, that’s why so many people are pushing for people to not vote in it.
a greed
99.9999% tax rate beyond $10 million total worth would be a great start.
To be honest I think it’s weird to have a system where you give people a bunch of wealth only to then have the state later take it away. Why does the system work such that they get all that wealth to begin with?
Originally it was just a really high tax rate at the highest bracket. This accounted for a monetary system that is essentially gamed. In the US the government reversed this under the theory of trickle down economics. This allowed a large group of people to greatly grow their investments and their wealth accordingly.
Inheritance tax is used to recoup some of these lost taxes but it is a poor way to do it. The correction should be at the beginning not the end. I agree with you.
Why does the system work such that they get all that wealth to begin with?
Because capitalism is the best way to distribute resources (to the top).
Yes the problem lies in how the wealth is accumulated, its extracted from someone. If they all worked super hard for it nobody would have a problem. But the reality is, all workers get a paycut so the equity owner can chill and see his money rise.
Execute anyone over $10 million net worth
You’re even harsher than I am, I would put it at 100M, but I’m totally down to negotiate.
I would even go up to 1B.
It really depends on what your goal is. If the goal is to dillute power and prevent corruption this would be the minimum I think. Anymore and it just frees up too much money that will inevitably be used to tip the scales in a typical representative democracy.
Honestly though it is really needs to be a solution everyone can agree to even if there are some winners and losers. Figuring out a way to allow people to accumulate without damaging society really is the goal and you could argue ultimately it is just a cultural issue and perhaps not a policy one.
I personally think in the US the greed culture has completely dominated and overshadowed everything else to a point that only money matters anymore. Classism it out of control and no one is around to say stop. We are reminiscent of a spoiled toddler that has never been told no.
The goal should be to address wealth inequality, which inevitably leads to oppression, as the wealthy have more power to write laws and entrench their wealth and power further. We either mitigate this legally / socially, or it will fix itself, and the fix will not be comfortable or gentle.
If someone has hundreds of billions of personal wealth then he has more individual wealth than the cumulative sum of the bottom perhaps 30 or 40% of the planet. This is 2 to 3B people. This is not defensible.
You wouldn’t get much from that. These people usually don’t have much income. Most of the richest CEOs famously earn “1 dollar a year”, and people applaud that as honourable or something. It’s not, it’s a method to not just lower their income tax, it gives them massive tax breaks.
Most of the “wealth” of these people is in company shares. If the company’s value goes up, the shares’ value goes up, and so the CEO’s “wealth” goes up, even if they’re not actually getting any cash from it.
When they need to buy something, they just go to a bank and get a super easy loan for any amount of money, that they can pay from interest on their shares. But they won’t even pay the capital gains tax, because they were poor, they had negative money because of the loan, so they get extra tax breaks on top of tax breaks.
It’s super hard to tax these parasites in a way that actually makes them give back any meaningful amounts of money to the public…
Nothing you say is untrue. That is why I said total worth. You would of course make sure the policy specifically includes stock as this total worth. They would be forced to cash out to keep it under the allowable amount.
Not saying this is possible in our current political climate, but it is definitely possible to tax the wealthy. You just have to create the policy and enforce it. Close all the loopholes, prevent things like trusts or shell corporations to hide wealth, and aggressively police unrealized gains.
You can’t tax “total worth”.
Imagine this - you have an average paying job, right? You have an apartment, a mortgage, you can afford to go out with friends, visit the cinema, etc. Nothing obscene, just a comfortable life.
Your relative dies and you suddenly find yourself owning an extra house. Your “total worth” has now shot up significantly, therefore your tax rate has gone up. You can no longer afford your mortgage.
See where the problem is?
And then you have things like the 401k in the US, which is your retirement fund, but the money is invested in the stock market.
Or even your own investments. Imagine you invested $10 000 in Nvidia in 2020. You forgot about the money, but suddenly you get a horrendous tax requirement, because you’re wealthy - your $10 000 has turned into $134 600. It has absolutely no bearing on how much spending money you have, but somehow you now have to pay increased tax?
See where the problem is?
You, refusing to sell your extra house.
You did a logical oopsie there, mate.
If you sell the house, you now have a bunch of extra cash, meaning you now jump into the higher tax bracket anyway, but you ALSO have to pay the income tax on the house. You’re still fucked.
You can certainly exempt things like a primary residence and allow grace periods to sell off inheritance to pay the taxes.
Taxing anything over $10 million of worth at an effective 100% puts a cap on your total worth. This is completely possible, but obviously would be extremely unpopular amongst all wealthy people.
Everyone would still pay other taxes, but I have a feeling that it would no longer be necessary considering how much money a policy like this thought exercise would generate.
I have a feeling there would still be a lot of ways for the rich to dodge the taxes, while regular people would somehow bear the brunt of it.
But, yeah, exempting anything below a couple million worth AND the primary residence might be a way out. Although, you’d probably need to define what a “residence” is, as well as put a cap on that, because otherwise those bastards would start building whole city-scale complexes and calling them their “primary residence”.
No, we should not.
agreed
Can the city raise billionaires taxes to a significant level?
Of course they can. Will they? Of course they won’t.
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.
