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We are so far past “taxing” them. They need to be stripped of their wealth completely, not lose some extra 5% on the next haul.
You can tax their existing wealth. For example an annual tax for the average wealth you held for the past year for people whose wealth exceeds a total 250 million in all assets
At this point we need to tax their wealth at a rate of like 90% or higher. Any laws that pass with the word “tax” in it is not going to go close to that number. We need to use harsher vocabulary and treat it as the crime it is imo.
Agreed. From ~1930 to the mid 60s, we were taxing almost everything over a certain amount (90+ %). In addition, corporate tax rates were significantly higher.
Besides the point really, we need a plutocrat tax/wealth tax, not income tax reform. It’s one of the few direct methods to redistribute the wealth theyve extracted from the 99% and decrease inequality.
Tax wealth, not workers!
This was actually the norm during the so-called “golden age of capitalism” in the US funnily enough. The higher margins of the wealthy were taxed upwards of 90% and what do you know, it led to prosperity.
The massive problem with that is that they’ll just move to a country that taxes them less.
The country wins by getting some of their money, the billionaire wins by keeping most of their money, everyone else from their original country gets fuckedThat is no problem at all! Get those motherfuckers out of the country if they are just going to suck it dry.
You see, that’s being said all the time as a counter-argument. But it has been proven to be untrue. First of all, there are exit taxes in most countries, the USA is pretty gung-ho on that for example. Also, the rich are also just people, that have families and friends. They won’t move just because they pay a bit more in taxes. People are lazy and like the environment they’re used to. Bonus if they have kids that don’t want to leave their friends behind. Lastly, where to move to? Many of the EU countries are the countries with the best living conditions world wide. Granted some of the criteria like accessibility and affordability don’t apply to the rich, but freedom of speech, general freedom, state of infrastructure, crime etc. mostly apply to them as well. And there are very few countries in the world that can match. Those that do are also expensive and or far away or have other issues.
Fair points.
That’s fine, let them extract the wealth of other countries until they learn their lesson. They don’t add value to society, that does not equate to a loss. It would be ridding ourselves of economic robbers.
That’s the same logic as saying “if we kick the snake oil grifter out of our town then he’ll just go to the next one!” Good, maybe they’ll kill him after they figure out he’s just a thief since we didn’t have the gumption.
Nah that’s not the same. Take lessons from history. Get the money back while you can.
I say kill them, especially the billionaires who are also chuds, then tax the surviving billionaires
It’s going to come to that sooner than we think.
Or nothing will change for the better because we engage in this childish and now apparently murderous nonsense online instead of doing anything practical.
Fantasizing about killing billionaires is cringe because it almost never leads to anything practical. Actions speak louder than words
I thought this years events would have done it, but people are still waiting
Close the “earn, loan, die” loophole to avoid taxes on unrealized gains. If you list an asset as collateral for a loan, then it is immediately taxable as if it were the same value.
Also, every year, we should redistribute 50% of the wealth of the richest person in the country. You get a ticker-tape parade, a nice statue, and the honor of knowing that you are helping millions of people without making any impact on your lavish lifestyle.
There are a lot more things we can do, but I feel like these would be two pretty easy starting places to curb the billionaire problem.
Oh, and we should also make it so that private equity and investors are paid LAST in a bankruptcy. Tired of good companies being bought ransacked, and folded so a billionaire can make a few mil from robbing employee pensions, shortchanging contractors and stiffing suppliers.
How about 95% on everything beyond 10 Million?
I’m for consumption
Elon musk would be in jail and broke by now if the SEC could do its job
But that would hurt the earnings of the mega wealthy, clearly can never be allowed to happen.
Idk we’ll see what happens when the rich people start eating themselves. I’m actually excited for this stage of capitalism.
May be something like Russia after the fall of communism or like Mexico with all its cartels and private armies?
I believe this to be the USA version of the fall of USSR. I think the Russian oligarchs were coaching our oligarchs.
Ah yes famously wealthy countries, the Soviet Union and Mexico, who went to hell when they stopped catering to the ultra-rich…
Actually, Russia has vast natural resources, but much of the wealth is concentrated in the hands of oligarchs. The post-communist period in Russia was marked by violent power struggles between oligarchs, often involving private militias or hired hitmen targeting rival businessmen. Perhaps it just wasn’t as visible in the US.
BTW, do not forget that most rich men in the US (Elon, Mark, Jeff) are rich on paper (stock market, company shares), while Russian millionaires have real physical control over resources or industries (eg Vladimir Potanin - rare earth elements, Vagit Alekperov - oil, Leonid Mikhelson - gas).
And there were more oligarchs in 1994 then there were in 2004 because they killed each other ❤️
The father of a classmate supposedly did business in Russia during the 1990s and, according to my classmate, witnessed an execution beneath a bridge somewhere in Moscow late in the evening. I don’t remember a name of the bridge, and I can’t verify whether the story was true. However, he was completely serious when telling it, and I do remember hearing media reports about organized crime killings and similar incidents in Russia during the chaotic post-Soviet years. So while I can’t confirm this particular story, it doesn’t sound impossible for that period.
Brother, the rich people in the USSR were literally throwing each other out of windows, and killing each other to consolidate wealth. Same with the Mexican cartels. They had to kill all the other oligarchs to become the real oligarchs. Please learn your history before you get sassy with random comments. You’re like a child walking into the middle of a movie.
Or the FBI (public emails where he begged Epstein to let him into the parties; also the election interference), or the FTC, or the EPA (Tesla plants piping battery waste into water supplies)…the list goes on
Which was the whole point of DOGE
Some clarification. Those billionnaires don’t have that much money. It’s the “valuation” of their assets, so it’s even more fictional than actual money. Which means they can practically set to anything with enough hype, and not pay any tax, but can convert some (only some) of that fictional money to real money by getting a bank loan against it, again, tax free.
What I’m saying is, we need to get those funny number back to ground truth. Melon wants SpaceX valued at 1.25 Tn or something. Let him pay taxes over those valuations and see how valuable they really are. After all, anyone with a 800bn company should be able to afford some taxes on them, right? So fucking tax them.
You can’t tax valuation
Tell that to the property taxes I pay on my house every year. They manage to define a value even though I’m not selling and it’s still an “unrealized gain”.
That’s right, homeowners pay on unrealized gains, but not Sociopathic Oligarchs. We should flip that.
That’s the thing about wealth taxes. People argue that they’re unworkable. The truth is that we already have wealth taxes. We just have the most useless style of wealth tax.
Instead of the ultra-wealthy paying the highest percentage in taxes, every home owner pays a similar rate. But, that means that the people who have most of their wealth tied up in their homes pay the highest effective rate. Even if it might be hard to come up with a perfect wealth tax, it would be extremely easy to come up with one that’s more progressive than property taxes.
If they can tax your house based on its current valuation, they can sure tax their stocks based on their current fucking valuations.
Excuse my French, they are not my native language.
Nor are English.
I pay increased taxes because my property goes up in value, even if I don’t sell. Same should apply to shares (to be fair there should also be tax credits when shares fall).
Personal loans against business assets should be taxed. The repayments can then be tax deductible so they are not double taxed. Without taxing these loans, it just creates a tax loophole where you avoid income tax.
As for company prices being inflated, to some extent, who cares? As long as they don’t get a bailuot when the bubble pops, it’s the investors issue.
We get tax deductions on interest paid on mortgages. They should not be getting tax deductions on their full repayment.
The tax deductions are meant to offset the tax on the loan. You don’t get your loans taxed as income so you don’t get full deduction on repayment. They wouldn’t pay less than you overall in my proposal.
Seems like this would be a good place to treat those stocks (and options) as real property and tax them accordingly. With a properly progressive rate on them, we could set the lower end such that normal retirement funds won’t be impacted, with the high end discouraging hording assets.
It doesn’t matter when they list their shitty money pits in the NASDAQ before volatility settles. They are going to screw people out of money any way possible.
This is important. More than glib stuff like the meme. When the billionaires talk about “paying their share,” it’s important that journalists and public repeatedly call out that BS. That’s how the average person is going to realize that it’s BS. Simple stuff like not being taxes on the value of their wealth (like average people are taxed on the value of, e.g., their home), and using the “unrealized gains” of those investments to back massive low-interest loans to buy/sell companies, politicians, etc. and fund their lives effectively tax free. It’s absolutely maddening.
This is all ignoring the single simple face that no 1 person should ever have the power over society that these parasites have.
I agree taxing fughazi is difficult. How about taxing the banks when they offer a loan for billionaires against their assets? Then they can pass that down as interest
I see what you’re saying about real money, but he could sell an extremely small portion of his assets, put them even in the shittiest money market, have all profits be available through a debit card, and still be a multi bajillionare. Dude has real money.
Also agree on the taxes. It will never happen. They might as well build an empire and set their entire species on fire. That’s the destruction this is causing.
Missed that scene of “Man from Earth”
What an excellent little film.
Never expect a bottle episode movie would be so good
Really? How? It’s like the main subplot!
Confiscate his wealth, and nationalize his companies. We paid for them, after all, they’re ours. They can be operated at the benefit of the citizens.
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Blood tax.
If the punishments of a universally applied system of law no longer apply to autocrats and oligarchs then neither should it’s protections.
we can’t say shit anymore on lemmy.world, it really is the alternative to reddit in every wrong way
We are beyond tax, burn the fuckers at the stake
But at 1% pa interest you’d surpass all of humanity combined, even at measly savings contributions
Compounded gains truely are the wonder of the financial world.
If you put $1 in the bank 2777 years ago, at 1% a year you’d have $1t now, handily beating musk. At 5% pa it would take a mere 567 years! Easy! A bit of sensible financial planning by your great-great-great-something grand parents would have seen you very comfortable now.
True, if you managed to find a bank that lasted that long, or a currency that lasted that long. Look at the history of both banks and currencies and you’ll see that the miracle compound interest is not easy to uphold.
Those are, indeed, issues, but they could be addressed with careful management. See my reply to a sibling comment, but basically, investing a couple of hours of wages back then, and carefully moving it from investment to investment over the millenia would do the trick.
But how much would 1$ of 751 BCE be worth in today’s money?
I was going to make a joke about the problem being finding a bank that would last that long, but you’ve got me thinking.
We obviously can’t use inflation to calculate values from that far back, as we don’t have the data, dollars didn’t exist, and the dollar isn’t tethered to an underlying asset anymore, so the best comparison is probably buying power.
A loaf of bread aparently averages $2.74 at the moment, but you could almost certainly make a loaf yourself for a dollar or less.
I’ve not had much luck finding the cost of bread in everyone’s favourite historical yardstick, Rome, in that era, the best I’ve found is the cost of grain in 200bce or so. Legionaries earned about 3as per day, which would buy enough grain to make 20 loaves, so 1 loaf would be an hour or two of work (assuming a legionary is employed 24 hours a day, the grain costs a bit more than a day’s salary, and I’m rounding a lot).
So basically, if your ancient roman ancestor had invested a couple of hours of their wages, and your familial line since then had all kept it growing at a very modest 1% pa, you’d be a trillionaire by now.
Another way of viewing it is that if Elon Musk spent $10k every day since the ice age, he would still not be out of money.
Elon Musk can spend 35 million every day and still get richer by around 5 million every day.
Everytime time this meme is posted someone makes a comment about how dumb it would be to just sit on that cash for the last 80,000 years instead of just taking advantage of compound interest.
Obviously you’d be extremely wealthy if you were immortal and could invest wisely over the last 80,000 years. That’s not really the point though.
The point is that billionaires have an obscene amount of money. An amount that most people can’t even imagine without going to an extreme example. They wouldn’t exist in a just society.
Dumbass should have invested.
Compound interest is your friend.
???
I fully agree with the pic you posted, but you sent it to the wrong commenter.
Should’ve shorted Big Ice.
Just after a few days it would be life changing money for me
It’s about 200,000 years saving 10k per day now. He’s rapidly approaching a trillion in net worth.
Seriously though, his actual worth is probably about tree fiddy on a good day
And yet Musk is still fucking miserable.
I highly doubt the USA will copy 1789 France.
No, it’ll likely be worse, if
Thankfully we don’t need to as we don’t have a autocratic government
you do
If you genuinely believe that you either don’t know what an autocratic government is or don’t understand the state of the American crisis.
Trump is the autocrat, and anyways revolutions have always happened even if its not an autocracy. Imagine all the countries that fought against colonialism
Okay I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about Trump’s power, and resultant classification.
How is it possible trump has full control of the entire government at his whim, if his power can be limited by the supreme court and the congress?
You gonna answer my question?
the congress and supreme court have been filled to the brim with trumpers, by trump
And yet still directly limit his actions both de jure and de facto
the nepal revolution, the government wasnt an autocracy
This is an international problem.
The more you tax them, the more will flee to countries willing to make concessions for them. But, taxation is preferable to seizing the assets; after seizure, you will lose a massive amount of business for obvious reasons, it will cost more than you seize.
I think that corporate control would be preferable. Shell companies and their machinations are at an absurd level today, see Panama and Pandora papers for more details.
How would you fix this without international solutions? What would those be? Can’t we make a deal?
Too bad we don’t have a diplomatic deal maker in office
If the USA taxes Amazon, do you think Amazon will stop doing business in the USA? Do you think Amazon will do less business in the USA? No, of course not, there’s a billion warehouses and distribution centers in the USA, it would be impossible to move.
If the USA taxes Jeff Bezos, do you think Jeff Bezos will go live in Panama? Do you think he will move to Africa? No, of course not, he has all his stuff in the USA that he cannot move, he would never leave.
As long as corporations/billionaires have their stuff in a country, that country can tax their stuff. It’s the other side of the coin Trump is having trouble with. Trump slaps a tarrif on everything to encourage manufactuing in the USA, but corpoations don’t have many manufacturing capabilities in the USA so the end result is lost jobs and raised prices for nothing. There’s no manufacturing stuff in the USA and it would take a decade to make the stuff if they started now.
At a certain level of wealth, all the money is tied up in assets that are difficult to move. Those assets are assessed and used to borrow money to avoid income tax. We can use those same assessments and implement a wealth tax.
The deal should be, “Y’all have had it too good for too long. Pay your fair share immediately and indefintely.”
So much of what they own is the resources of this land and the labour of the people living here. If they leave, then we get all of that back for ourselves.
Wealth flight is a myth, it is not real.
A good video that sums it up in a nice way: https://youtu.be/6DXZMXZCY0I
Even if it was real, roughly 0 billionaires are leaving the US because of tax issues. We can at least tax them until a few start leaving. It’s really a win-win scenario.
You can tax them by demanding the tax regardless of domicile, as a tax for selling their shit in your country.
We can fairly quickly degoogle EU.
As for small, micro, or even SMEs, atm even municipalities are competing & bowing instead of showing solidarity to others. Simple eg EU level laws are needed.
Yes, it’s an international problem.
How would you fix this without international solutions? What would those be? Can’t we make a deal?
Can’t be fixed locally unless you got an incorruptible government -> refuse to do any business with problematic individuals and their corporations. As long as no one holds a monopoly on something you need to survive, that’s viable.
This is an international problem.
They’re more you tax them, the more will flee to countries willing to make concessions for them
How would you fix this without international solutions? What would those be? Can’t we make a deal?
All the more reason then for a world government to control global taxation! I know, I know, Illuminati and all that jazz. But didn’t people have the concept of social contract to allowed to be ruled than live in anarchy? Does “The Leviathan” ring a bell to anyone? What are nation states on a global level if not anarchy?
People complain that the UN does nothing. But when it does act, people will also complain they interfere. Not against you but i want to say humans in genetal are really fucking stupid. We haven’t gotten past the ape brain that we have of tribal mentality, as well as only caring about out immediate environment.
If I have the power, I would make everyone travel to space and make them see the Earth from above, and make them realise that all the grievances and fighting we have, are infinitesimally small, insignificant and stupid seeing as how big the Earth and the cosmos are more than we can imagine. Most who viewed the Earth from space became more humanistic. It’s called the Overview effect. This puts into perspective what the phrase “look at the bigger picture” truly means.
Get them out of the country. What reason is there to let the removedry be sucked dry by billionaires that aren’t giving back?
No reason to let them own any assets or do any business in the cointry without taxing it accordingly.
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You got it, man
I was just wondering how tf that guy is still walking around in the most armed country on Earth. He must live in a bullet proof bubble.
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I’m heavily armed because it’s a hostile and unsafe environment.
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