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Just tax any income above $10,000,000 per year at 90%. There really isn’t a need for more than that.
Billionaires have very little taxable income. We need a wealth tax.
Billionaires don’t have taxable income because they’ve successfully lobbied for carve outs that exempt them from taxation.
That’s what makes a wealth tax impractical. How do you pass it through a Congress that’s been wholely co-opted by a billionaire friendly caucus?
Chuck Schumer, the senior senator from Wall Street, isn’t going to author a wealth tax. Kamala Harris, the former Senator from Silicon Valley isn’t going to sign it. And the SCOTUS majority that’s on the Harlan Crow payroll isn’t going to uphold it.
Also immediately redefine income more broadly. Tax law says it’s one narrow thing, but in reality a lot of money comes in. Let the law march reality.
All countries would need to adopt it because now they can just register their company and summer resort under various identities in [insert tax haven here].
Many also don’t truly “pay” for things. They leverage debt against their assets, essentially like a fancy credit card that says “I own MegaCorp, you know I’m good for it, just send the bills to this wealth management firm”.
So it’s not out of the realms of possibility to say that a billionaire is actually spending very little money, ever. What they have is essentially gifts from whoever manages their assets, and that company just skims whatever things “cost”.
IMO taxing wealth is what’s needed, but it needs to be framed in a way that makes a billionaire want to invest in their country through high taxes. Make it a privilege that is praised, and ostracise those business that excuse themselves from contributing.
1% tax on all registered securities, payable in shares of those securities. First $10,000,000 owned by a natural person is exempted.
All securities collected in tax are resold by IRS liquidators in small lots over time, constituting no more than 1% of total traded volume of each security.
That wouldn’t catch the people who are the real problem, billionaires, who report something like $1 per year in income.
When you have billions in shares, you can use that as collateral to borrow money from the bank, and then you just spend that money. That’s not “income” so it isn’t taxed.
What’s needed is a 90% tax on people reporting high incomes as a start. But, then you need to close loopholes. The carried interest loophole for a start, which would nail most of the hedge fund crowd. Then, tax unrealized gains when they’re in the tens of millions range. Then prevent billionaires from handing billions to their children tax free by preventing the “stepping up” of capital gains for their heirs.
If I have $250k in shares I can also use that as collateral for a mortgage to buy a house. It would be pretty odd and problematic to be taxed on that like it’s income when it’s not, despite me spending it on a house…because I need to pay it back.
I agree with the rest though. And definitely would love to see 90% for anyone reporting extremely high incomes.
Obviously, the kinds of unrealized gains that are a problem aren’t $250k that someone uses for collateral on a mortgage for a house they plan to live in. The problems are the millions or billions in unrealized gains that someone might use to get a $10 million loan from the bank that they then use to lobby the government to open up new loopholes in the tax code.
Taxing wealth and/or unrealized gains is tricky to do right, but not doing it at all is even trickier. If you let the ultra rich just keep getting richer, they’ll continue to use that wealth to control the political process to make themselves richer and more powerful. Obscene levels of wealth inequality and democracy can’t coexist.
Oddly enough, the same people that wouldn’t want a maximum wage also don’t want a minimum wage. Go figure!
Jello Biafra proposed this as a policy when he ran for mayor of SF in 1980 and has been humping this idea ever since. It wouldn’f fly legally but as someone else here noted, you can tax at 90% above a threshold and do it that way.
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I’ve often said we don’t need billionaires. That when one reaches that milestone anything above $999,999,999 should be taken as taxes from that person.
When I say this people often become defensive saying that the government shouldn’t be able to dictate how much wealth one person can accumulate. (It also happens that many of these people are prolife but that’s neither here nor there.) Often times comparing this action to communism which of course it isn’t.
The issue of course is that many people don’t understand what a billion of anything is. The human brain can’t comprehend such massive numbers. But nevertheless, there are people that are approaching the trillion dollar mark a number even further removed from a billion by several magnitudes.
Should there be billionaires. Probably not… What do you think?
Considering there’s no fully legal and definitely no moral way to get that kind of money, they should all be behinds bars. As for kids that inherit such wealth, shame on them for accepting blood money and doing literally nothing with it, besides make the world around them even worse.
if you exceed $999,999,999 it should reset, giving people a motivation to keep things well under the cap. like exceeding the high score registers in a game, let it roll over.
Show them the money visualizer website https://alteredqualia.com/xg/examples/money.html#s[orders_of_magnitude]
people often become defensive saying that the government shouldn’t be able to dictate how much wealth one person can accumulate
Of course it should. If we’re expecting to live in a democracy, then people need to have equal voices. If you’re a billionaire you have a megaphone, as Elon Musk has shown. Democracy can’t work if some people have far more power than others.
I think all the talk about billionaires is using a completely arbitrary number and subject to inflation. Wealth inequality is the big problem, it doesn’t matter what number on their bank account is.
The problem is that they have enough independence to just cross borders and easily pay for new citizenship if it suits them. It would have to be a world wide movement. It’s impossible, or at least would only be possible within some mythical completely self-sufficient country that could withstand their meddling.
My solution:
Your tax burden is your tax burden. If it’s 15% and you run off to a country where it’s 5% to avoid taxes, that’s fine. You can pay them 5%.
But you’re still on the hook for the remaining 10%.
If the 5% country tries to act as a tax haven and refuses to enforce the remaining 10%, they get a national embargo until they get in line.
Welcome to yet another world war I guess?
We’re due.
Isn’t that already how it works? Currently, US citizens still have to pay taxes when living outside the country unless they’re paying taxes to a specific set of other countries. Although consequences are on the individual who fails to pay and not their country of residence.
I’m not saying for US citizens and US companies. That’s how they avoid taxes - by registering in anther country.
Any person or company that does business in the US, even tangentially.
You’re based out of Panama? Cool. Pay them what they require, then pay the remaining X that a US company would own to either Panama, the US, or some other country you operate within.
Don’t grant them tax havens.
I have to repeat my response here, that is meaningless, when their taxable income is meaningless. How much did Trump pay in taxes again? The trick is to keep it tied up in an “investment” until they need it.
The US has exit taxes, as do many countries. If you try to renounce your US citizenship, you can be taxed based on the value of unsold assets.
I hate that the US is one of the few countries in the world that has citizenship-based taxation. It’s awful and stupid. But, in theory, it does mean that an American couldn’t just avoid taxes by moving to another country.
Those are meaningless, when their taxable income is meaningless.
But, if they tried to move to another country and renounce their US citizenship they’d have to pay an exit tax based on the entire value of their assets, including unrealized gains.
Also gameable.
Sure, everything is gameable if you’re a billionaire, but it would require clever lawyers and involve some risk.
The biggest problem is that part of the way they usually game is by trying to create and promote a legal minefield by promoting footnotes in the law.
Before you get to their armies of clever lawyers, you will be inundated with rights issues from Accidental Americans and senior expats who have not resided in the US for decades. Not even from taxes as most publications seem to claim but from the far steeper charges of failing to report “foreign bank accounts” of normal banks people have been living literally right beside of for normal day to day tasks, which have been mined with things like fines that are life shattering for anyone but billionaires.
It is designed so that any such solution will grind to an halt by fostering the prosecution of those least capable to defend themselves who are earning even well below what they would in the US. It is why the US renunciation rate is at record highs in the US, because the nation of immigrants have forgot what it is to be an immigrant.
So bringing it back to the point at hand, it isn’t just that they have clever lawyers, like Charles Rettig who was literally appointed by Trump to lead the IRS, it’s that they are able to hire and influence everyone involved in the process, not just on their side, to make sure they are the last to ever be affected.
I was thinking about this the other day, one of my favorite analogies is seconds.
A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. A trillion seconds is … 31,688 years.
The analogy already breaks down, because while most people could understand 12 days and a lot of adults can understand 31 years for having lived it (some even twice or more!), 31,688 years is completely incomprehensible again. How many human generations is that? All of recorded human history is only like 5,000 years. It’s utterly, mind-numbingly insane. No trillionaires, ever! No billionaires!!!
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/17/business/elon-musk-richest-person-trillionaire/index.html
This was published on September 17th of this year, after most of the nonsense of Twitter and utter things. He’s still on track, by 2027 no less. There’s no telling how directly and flagrantly he’ll benefit from a Trump win, either.
My favorite is “do you know the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire? About a billion dollars”
Like, being a millionaire is a pretty sweet spot to be in if you’re lucky enough. Not quite like a millionaire of decades ago but still good. But if you’re a billionaire, a million dollars is basically a rounding error.
Use milliseconds instead: a million milliseconds is 17 minutes, a billion milliseconds is 12 days, a trillion is 31 years.
I think the best way I’ve seen to illustrate it is the stories of immortals earning incredible amounts of money every day who still can’t reach the wealth of Elon Musk.
Like, you’re an immortal born during the ice age 80,000 years ago. You are somehow making $5000 per day (or its equivalent in gold for the 79,700 years before dollars are invented, and you save all of it. You’re not as rich as Elon Musk.
There really isn’t much difference in lifestyles between billionaires and people with 100 mil. No one needs that much money. Anyone who has made more than 100 million has done something truly heinous to do so. I feel we should set our sights at a much lower tax bracket to cut down any potential antisocial oligarchs.
What would be the point in amassing more wealth when its capped? At that wealth no matter what you do, its not gonna get less really if you invested into things. How does that solve any of the problems we have in society?
There wouldn’t be a point aside from maybe philanthropy. That these powerful Rich individuals will continue in Mass more wealth above the $1 billion cap specifically so others can benefit from it. I wouldn’t hold my breath for anything like that.
Of course there is a Maximum wage. According to my employers I am making it,.
In the mean time, decorate some pikes with billionaire noggins. The problem might fix itself if extreme wealth becomes a mortal liability.
Trickle-down economics works like a piñata - you gotta crack it open before anything starts to trickle.
Not even on the table whole inflationary spending is allowed. Maximum currency issuance first, then lets talk. Otherwise you just have a time bomb.
personally i absolutely support billionaires if you remove the actual issues like them being able to lobby and remove legal forms of tax evasion so that the country is benefitted more, especially when they are creative(ish) like elon and do stuff actually beneficial to humanity like space programs (may be wrong but i believe hearing news abt him making that and running it), and honestly it would be great if more billionaires focused on space exploration as well as the governments, its just the next step in mankind tbh
You dropped these bootstraps, bootlicker
Fuck off back to shitter Elon.
Billionaires mean that workers are exploited and underpaid somewhere in the chain. Support for billionaires means support for exploitation and resource extraction from actual workers (and the government initiatives and representatives they pay for).
Their money doesn’t come from nowhere, it comes from us. It comes from income taxes spent on subsidies, it comes from stock dividends paid for by mass layoffs, it comes from not having to pay a commensurate fine when hundreds of thousands of gallons of pollutants leak into the water we drink and fish in.
“Absolutely supporting billionaires” is a decidedly uninformed position.
In a very real sense the money doesn’t even exist. It’s the worth of their holdings… Which for some reason they can often borrow against… that adds the extra 2 or 3 zeros.
Yeah, that’s why I specifically mentioned dividends. A lot of executives are also paid bonuses on their salaries based on stock performance, so they can “double dip” in these cases too. This is on top of lobbying for deregulation.
Must be great to not have to worry about money and be able to simply fire other people if it ever becomes a concern; it just further goes to show that these people don’t actually add value to even their own companies.
I just want to start off by saying that your opinion is valid and it’s not even necessarily wrong. So don’t listen to anybody trying to disparage you on this.
If we are to allow billionaires to exist, they should take considerably more responsibility for the power that they wield and they of course should be taxed fairly in accordance to their income.
Also, lobbying should just be downright illegal. Which it is borderline is anyway.
Agreed except the part about lobbying. The EFF and ACLU are lobbying groups, and I don’t think you want to outlaw them. Heck, signing a petition is a form of lobbying.
Without discussing validity of the argument, which is pointless anyway, billionaires are in many ways similar to autocrats: they have a ton of unchecked, unelected power, near zero incentives to put this power to benefit everyone except for goodness of heart (but even then they are tied by laws obligating them to give profits to public companies), and every incentive to benefit themselves.
If they were taxed fairly it would be impossible to become a billionaire at this stage in our economy.
Scenario: you have 10 kids. Would you rather 1 kid thrive, 4 do alright, 4 struggling to find food, and one starving, or all 10 eat well?
The reason that kid is starving is directly tied to why the first one is thriving. It isn’t because there wasn’t enough food, it’s because the one thriving was taking the food from the rest, and throwing away a lot of it along the way, not caring at all about his siblings
Tax rates used to extend over 100% in the USA. The IRS lost the case. They were limited to all of the money earned, not more.
So there used to ba maximum wage.
If the minimum wage was a comfortable living wage — like it should be, in my and many other folks’ opinion — then it wouldn’t matter. One person’s excess isn’t a problem, unless it’s at the expense of someone else (which, you know, is kinda the case…).
A handful of people’s excess is exactly the problem.
Even if it’s not at the expense of someone else, too much wealth in the hands of one person is still harmful. It gives one person too much power over others, allows for people to buy their way out of legal trouble, buy politicians, etc.
because the people in the top end are paid via stocks and not actual hard currency.
Most of the super rich don’t make their Monday through wages.
well most of us super poor can’t even make an afternoon, much less an entire day. jfc the entitlement of these assholes
Most of the super rich don’t make their Monday through wages.
Certainly they must make their Tuesday through wages?
You’d think so, but they don’t even make their Wednesday through wages, let alone Tuesday.
The Hamster from The Hamster Dance 2.0 makes maximum wage
My favourite line from the song.
Is it because the people that we need to worry about don’t get paid massive wages? Instead they leverage their massive stock ownership as collateral for loans. And stock bonuses are not regulated or taxed in the same way as real wages.
I’d be fully supportive of a “maximum wealth” limit.
What we need to do is implement “prestige wealth”. Once you hit, say, 100m you get your assets sold in order to fund a UBI, but you get a nice pin that marks your achievement.
Every time you prestige, you get a new pin, but the color of the pin changes.
I’m totally cool with rewarding people for making a bunch of money and giving it back to the people. Hell, make each prestige cooler. You find 100 billion in taxes? We’ll build you a little statue. You fund 1 trillion dollars in taxes? You get to be on a coin or some shit. Really put these greedy fucks incessant need for attention to work.
A sort of “moneygrubbers anonymous”?
“You win! 🥳”
That still maintains an incentive to extract and hoard wealth. There should be none.
Absolutely, even at something like 100 * min wage. Still a hell of a lot less than what’s happening today.
How does that work though? Let’s say the maximum wealth limit is one billion dollars and you own $750M of stock in the company you founded. Your wealth could go above and below that $1B limit multiple times in a day as the stock price goes up and down. What happens then?
End of day holdings. Also if you’re worried about ownership, we can just revert companies to contract ownership.
I’ll preface this by saying the 1%'s stock holdings are pretty much the last thing I’m worried about protecting. But it could be as simple as requiring your wealth to be under the limit when you file your taxes. Let’s say it’s a billion dollars (I would argue it should be much lower). If you end the year with 11 billion dollars in wealth, you owe the government 10 billion dollars. There are controls we can put in place to prevent stock manipulation, similar to the ones we have now. Just actually enforced.
I think what we would see in response to that is people hiding their wealth offshore, through private companies, through family members, trust funds, non-profit foundations etc.
So the billionaire has 10 relatives and hires each of them at his company, giving them all stock options as a bonus, which come from his own personal accounts. Then when it comes to tax time he’s managed to limbo his way under the $1B bar.
Take all your wealth and use it to set up a bunch of non-profit organizations for preserving national parks or saving the rainforest or running homeless shelters. Then have those foundations hire your family members to the boards of directors and pay each one millions of dollars in salaries.
There are countless ways to do this. Not just for individuals but for companies. Apple is pretty infamous for its use of Ireland as a tax haven that allows it to avoid paying corporate (profit) taxes on all its sales in the EU.
The other issue I foresee with the maximum wealth limit is how much chaos it could cause for companies. Let’s say you found a furniture company and run it really well and hire tons of employees. Then over time it grows above the billion dollar limit, so in order to pay your taxes you sell off the company to private equity who proceed to liquidate all its assets and fire all the employees. Without the limit in place you may have been happy to keep running the company and maintaining a great workplace for all your employees but the giant tax bill forced your hand. In the end, the company is largely destroyed, everyone has lost their jobs, and you retire with your billion dollars in cash.
I think the above scenarios are problematic no matter what you set the limit to. It also doesn’t address the issue of private companies (not traded on the public stock exchange) which don’t have a nominal market value. Sure, they have a book value for all their hard assets, but that can be far lower than the true value of the company.
Think of something like Snapchat which went from maybe a dozen employees and a bunch of laptops to rejecting a $3 billion buyout offer from Mark Zuckerberg just 3 years later. Anyway, also how to deal with that? Let’s say you have a small company making calculator apps for iOS and Android. You earn $10,000 a year in profits from sales. Then some group of investors come together and offer you $10 billion for your company. Is your company now worth $10B just because of the offer? You’re not on the stock market. You barely make enough money to pay rent, yet come tax time you owe $9B.
You could say “well you rejected the offer so you don’t owe the government anything because you actually aren’t worth $10B.” But who decides what you’re worth? Snapchat rejected the $3B offer but most investors would’ve agreed they were worth it. But all they had was a few employees, some laptops and servers, and the app they made. They’re really not much different from the hypothetical calculator app company.
Wow, just running off into the wild blue yonder there. First of all, they already do all of that. A properly funded IRS would be able to go after them. There is only so much they can do.
Second who needs a 3 billion dollar payday? 10 million, just a hair shy of an entire order of magnitude less; is enough to fly first class, own a mansion, own the luxury cars, attend every major sporting league championship, vacation in Bora Bora resorts half the year, and just generally party your way through the entire rest of life.
Heck once you reach 1 million in stocks you can generally just stop working and live a normal life off the dividends alone.
You’re out here defending literal bond villain levels of money. A billion dollars could employ a 100 people at 100k and leave you 990 million dollars left. That’s enough money to actually have a private militia. (100k is the going rate for good guard contracts with combat experience)
Don’t mistake my argument for a defence of billionaires. I don’t care for them any more than anyone else here. I just want to make sure that any changes we make to the law actually work and accomplish their intended goal. Poorly-thought-out laws are worse than doing nothing: they can backfire.
To give an example, the government of Canada passed a law called the Online News Act. This law targeted Google and Facebook with a special tax, called a link tax, that would force them to pay every time they or one of their users linked to a Canadian news site. The money collected by these link taxes would then go to pay to support Canadian news agencies in general.
The law backfired. Google struck a deal with the largest Canadian newspapers to pay them a flat fee but Facebook went ahead and blocked every single link to a news site for all users in Canada. This left thousands of small, local, Canadian newspapers high and dry (they were getting most of their traffic from Facebook posts linking to them). A law intended to benefit Canadian news publishers ended up putting most of them out of business.
The point of my previous example is to show that if a company is privately held (not traded on the stock market) then how much it is actually worth is not clear or obvious at all. This makes imposition of the $1B maximum wealth limit extremely difficult to properly implement.
Or, if that’s your only concern, you make sure there’s a provision stating a company’s worth isn’t an issue unless someone is using it to fund their lifestyle.
Yeah, we can also make it fun. Once someone has amassed a certain quantity of wealth, make a big ceremony, where the guy is given a trophy that says “I won capitalism”. After that, every dollar he makes past the limit is taxed 100%
“I won capitalism”
Or we could think outside of the system we’ve been indoctrinated to believe is the only one that can “work” (by the very few people it does actually work for), and eliminate capitalism altogether so that there is no incentive to extract and hoard wealth in the first place, because those don’t serve society in any way shape or form.
No, let’s give them random privileges too. You get to drive in the HOV lane alone, you get a license made of metal, and you get to park in all handicap spaces except the closest to the entrance. And if you pay enough in taxes, you get an invite to the yearly pizza party with the president
They borrow against their stocks tax free. The system they have created is perverse and should be illegal.
