With wealth inequality and billionaire control over American society growing ever more obscene, it’s well past time to implement a maximum wage limit.
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.
that would kill lotteries
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
Darn
Semantics. We’ll change the wording to “assets controlled”.
What we need is a wealth tax. If you don’t want wealth to be hoarded, then you tax it. The rich and their stooges online will parrot that “wealth taxes don’t work” precisely because it is the only tax that does work and that is why they oppose it.
- Tax income greater than 100x the minimum wage at 95%
- Tax standing wealth above 1000x annual minimum wage
The solutions aren’t complicated. What’s complicated is getting the solutions implemented when enough representatives are bought out by the wealthy.
This is a much more difficult problem than you suggest. Taxing standing wealth of 1.8 million would limit so much of the upper middle class that actually drives economies.
Given how many people have their wealth invested in theor home, how do ypu propose to do this or is everyone constantly downgrading the home they are invested in?
Nothing in economics is ever “easy”.
1000x annual minimum wage is 14.5 million. That’s not the savings of the worker class (a conservative investment would provide enough return to live without working). And the point is that it’s tied to minimum wage. Want to be taxed less on your wealth? You gotta raise the minimum wage.
You’re right in saying it’s a bit more complicated than that–my two point suggestion is oversimplified–but my original point stands: the solutions are less complicated than getting rational legislation passed in a system where the checks and balances are bought out.
Ooof, how did I fuck up themath that badly? At 14+ million it’s different. That’s a lot of wealth compared to the average upper middle class family.
Is the way you judge what’s wealthy to look at your own situation and target something comfortably above that? There’s plenty of people who will surmise that your situation is comfortably better than theirs once that power is available to the public.
No it’s based on a ton of actual hard statistics that focus on relative buying power vs what the state supplies. Many Europeans who make less than I do have a higher QoL than I do because their education and healthcare are subsidized/free.
You don’t have to base it on your own situation, you can base it on cost of living or other objective values.
There’s a big difference between 1 million and 10 million. With a modest 5% return on investment, 1 million nets you $50,000 per year, which is enough to support a very modest lifestyle in some places (near poverty in others). 10 million with the same investment nets $500,000 per year, which is more than enough to retire to a very luxurious lifestyle and accumulate more wealth along the way.
And that’s still less than the 14.5 million I proposed, so that person would still not see any wealth tax.
It’s not that much different.
It’s vastly different. A net worth of ten million plus isn’t just a case where you own a home and a retirement fund.
It’s wildly different.
$1 million invested at 5% is $50,000 annually. $10 million invested at 5% is $500,000 annually.
That’s the difference between the working and wealth classes.
Real estate is a good example of the trickiest thing about “simple” wealth tax.
I bought a house, and 20 years later I have to pay more taxes because my neighbourhood is more desirable?
Okay, easy solution, you get one free house you need to reside in for x% of your time per year.
But say I bought a painting from a local artist, even a friend, and decades go by and they’ve gone on to become ultra famous. Do I now have to pay more tax because I possess something that has become valuable?
Obviously thats a very unlikely scenario, but you can see the principle issue.
For the numbers I suggested, I don’t think you’d realistically hit these types of cases.
1000x annual minimum wage is $14.5 million. Based on a quick search, the threshold for the top 1% of Americans with respect to net worth starts at $13.6 million in 2023. So over 98% of Americans would never see the impact of a wealth tax like this.
If minimum wage were brought up to a realistic level, say $20/hour (still low, but better than the current $7.25), that threshold jumps to $40 million. This would capture somewhere between the top 0.5% and 0.1%. This is excessive wealth.
In the case where your painting is suddenly worth $50 million, yes–you’d have to pay more tax. But I think that many dollars might be some reprieve from the pain of selling it.
Applying sensible economic policy to extreme wealth is easier than general economic policy.
I had a public policy professor who used to say wealth taxes frequently come with loopholes you can pilot a yacht through
Giving that money to poor people would drive the economy more.
Not necessarily, it is a lot more complex than that.
Even simpler. If one’s wealth exceeds some function of GDP, the law no longer protects them.
As much as that appeals to some part of me deep down, those are the tactics being employed right now against vulnerable people in the US. If the law doesn’t protect everyone, it doesn’t protect anyone.
And honestly, I think the wealthy are more threatened by taxes than by having to hire their own protection.
I get that, but I don’t think they deserve the same protections as the vulnerable. The vulnerable cannot easily change their situation. The wealthy can. Beyond that, their cost to society is much much worse.
I don’t think they deserve it either. But when I advocate for due process and humane conditions for the worst people, it’s not for their sake–it’s for everyone else’s.
As soon as there is some class of people who are not protected by law or due process, it can easily be weaponized against the more vulnerable, even if that wasn’t the original intent.
For example, right now in the US, the government is denying due process to “illegal immigrants.” Doesn’t seem like a problem for anyone here legally, right? Except that without due process, what’s stopping them from throwing lawful residents into a van and hauling them away? They don’t get due process to prove their innocence. So anyone can now be defined as “illegal” and deported without any due process or recourse.
Lawfulness is for the vulnerable, even when applied to the less vulnerable.
I’m saying it isn’t a class of people that is not of their own volition. It could be looked at as similar to choosing the class of rapist or other criminal. By choosing to allow your wealth to exceed this point, society has deemed you to be in violation of the law; due process intact. You are therefore, no longer protected by the police, fire departments, emergency rooms, etc. It is one of the primary roles of society to determine what is acceptable and what is not.
I’m not sure what purpose revoking law has on anyone, including this group. In fact, the wealthy is often the group who advocates for privitization of these services, as they’re the only ones who can afford to pay for them out of pocket. Seems like an inconvenience at most.
If you want to make excessive wealth illegal, I’m all for that. But that’s not removing legal protections, it’s allowing the people to prosecute and reclaim wealth from those hoarding it, which seems more productive for what you’re trying to achieve.
If tomorrow’s wealth will exceed that cap, I’d like to see today’s priority be offload that money at all cost. That’s really all I’m suggesting with a partly tongue in cheek suggestion of making it scary to cross that line. But the point is simply to make a person approaching that line feel that getting rid of money with a quickness is integral to their wellbeing.
Why not just Most Dangerous Game the wealthiest individual at the end of each year if that’s your objective?
Maximum wage laws don’t make sense because the ultra rich get their wealth from investments, not wages.
At some point, we decided that people who work and make $100K a year get taxed 50% more than people who make the same money from investment. Income is income. Get rid of capital gains special status.
And this loophole of borrowing money against stock value is income, and should be taxed as such. If we did this, everyone’s income taxes would be much lower, national debts would be in reduction.
But the Wall street dicks consider taxing on investments “getting taxed twice”, and hedge fund managers still pay NO income taxes, only CGT.
I’m in favour of maximum ratios of total compensation. Stock values, dividends, salary are all added together to get a total compensation value.
Start it at something like 50-1, then gradually lower it as the actual workforce is allowed to control an increased share of the company.
There is still incentive for growth; the growth is simply distributed more equitably.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
They already play a shell game with wages, so they don’t pay income taxes. Most of the really rich and successful people have their incomes derived from capital gains and then use the talking point that it’s already money that was taxed through their business so it shouldn’t be taxed further.
TAX CAPITAL GAINS.
We do tax capital gains. It’s just at a lower rate than regular income and the first $50k or so is 0%. Some states tax capital gains as regular income.
They do a shell game by using their losses to offset their gains.
This would be something anyone could do but most people don’t have the ability to let stocks sit for over a year before taking the capitol loss strategically.
The system is built for the wealthy to have less risk.
Tax debt over say $1 million as income
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
How about a 99.9% corporate tax rate and then nationalize the corporations later on?
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”
