You can’t even spend a billion dollars with the most ridiculous luxury items you can think of. Spending that much in a lifetime for things you would even remotely appreciate would feel like work.
The only difference having billions of dollars makes instead of only a few millions in a rich person’s life is that it enables them to singlehandedly influence politics to their personal liking by buying politicians and media institutions. Which is something nobody should be allowed to do to begin with.
Meanwhile had that billion dollars been distributed to the worker class through fair wages or even to the consumers through fair prices it would have contributed to the economy and the well-being of everyone. Having to tax it to avoid seeing that money sit in some asshole’s offshore bank account is a failure of the system to properly distribute wealth when it is generated to begin with and even that isn’t being done right now.
The difference between 1 million and 1 billion is about 1 billion.
And the prediction is that we’ll have a few trillionaires soon. The difference between 1 billion and 1 trillion is about 1 trillion.
Personally I’m hoping we see a couple multi trillionares. Rapidly followed by their assets depreciating into worthlessness and the USD becoming worth less than monopoly money.
A billion dollars buys you power. That kind of money gets you a seat at the table.
So common-sense yet how many political leaders are brave enough to say it?
We need more politicians talking like this often and publicly, then actually working to make it reality.
They’re more likely to defend the billionaires.
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.
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…
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.
A bit of context, because $9k per day sounds “not too bad” to some. It means you have a yearly income 3.4 million a year, for 37 generations of working people.
Fuck yeah, math homie. Thank you.
‘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.
99.9999% tax rate beyond $10 million total worth would be a great start.
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.
Execute anyone over $10 million net worth
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?
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.
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).
“In his own words,” the article title says, as if we should be shocked or upset by it.
He’s absolutely right. Hoarding wealth is a mental illness, we just turn a blind eye to people who have it because what they’re addicted to is what society runs on.
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.
Alright everyone. To anyone checking in to this please we must push the open source community-run operating systems, social media, apps, and web apps for people to switch to. Tell them to get others on board too after they get comfy
Online and in-person we must keep switching people over!! The less people on those corpo ones the better!!
To make it easier tell people to use legacy social media and people social media until people social media has a big enough audience of people using them
Please do not scroll away we must all keep getting people to move. Many of us are but the more the better!!
Not sure why so many downvotes on an openspurce social media platform. Folks must really like the small nature of Lemmy currently. The world’s digital town squares shouldn’t be owned by anyone, but by everyone!
No, we should not.
Get rid of hunger and billionaires or we eat them.
Can the city raise billionaires taxes to a significant level?
Of course they can. Will they? Of course they won’t.
