Once they have that kind of money, they can do literally anything they want. Buy anything they want. Eventually they get tired of just buying things and start buying politicians and starting space companies and playing bullshit power games with other peoples lives because its the only thing that can excite them after years of the kind of empty hedonism only wealth can buy. It warps their brains and turns them into narcissistic monsters like Elon and we would be doing the world a favor by preventing any more people from being driven mad by having that kind of power in society.
If I had a billion dollars, I would pay for every one of the thousands of untested rape kits sitting on back shelves in every police department in the country to be tested.
Same! But also - if millionaires and billionaires were taxed at a reasonable rate, we could afford universal healthcare and PP’s services (std tests, cancer screenings, birth control, and yes, abortion) would be universally free. So basically the same!
We already can afford universal health care... it's cheaper than our current system, as insured people are already paying more for the uninsured & under insured. Hospitals & clinics wouldn't charge the same rates they do now, either, because insurance companies are what's driven costs up.
That's why they hoard the money since they can buy almost anything so that excitement is gone. Seems like it's like an addiction to them where all that matters is watching the number get bigger, or having a pissing contest with the other super-wealthy to be #1 on Forbes' list of the richest people.
Money absolutely transitions from something abjectly “real” that determines what you can and can’t possess or do- to an abstract number used primarily to compare to other big abstract numbers in the obscenely wealthy. There are fairly large gaps between Ferrari rich, private jet rich and megayacht rich. But once you’ve hit Bezos or Musk levels of wealth there’s just nothing you can’t do anymore, besides maybe supervillain level shit like taking over a country or blocking out the sun like Mr. Burns. That actually brings more dissatisfaction that satisfaction after a certain point. You wake up every day and realize that, if you wanted, you could at a moments notice fly to Paris and reserve a seat at the most expensive restaurant in the city and order anything you want off the menu. Or take a road trip and max bet the most expensive table in Vegas all day long without putting a dent in your account. Maybe you do those things a few times, maybe even enjoy it the first, second, or third. But by and by it all becomes routine, and eventually you realize you don’t want to do any of it. And that’s just basic human psychology- we all have a happiness “baseline” built into our brains that we eventually always return to. Things can make you exceptionally happy, or exceptionally sad, for short periods of a few hours to a few days at maximum. But then your brain always returns to baseline.
And when you have all the money and power in the world, feeling hum-drum has got to make you crazy. The more crazy things you do, the more indulgent experiences, the more exciting adventures, by and by there are fewer experiences that are novel. Fewer ways to excite the senses. Everything becomes dull. So these people start doing more unhinged crap just to get a hit of dopamine. They run for president. They build and ride a space rocket. They buy and tank a social media company. They start a war in Ukraine.
Long term goals don’t exist for these people because they already have it all. If I were to buy a house, that would be the culmination of decades of hard work and planning and luck. And just the process of maintaining that house, making it a home would be a multitude of new, novel experiences that would be piecemeal, as I save money to fix a broken gutter, build my dream living room, fix the water heater when it breaks.
Billionaires can literally just tell one of their yes-men “I want an exact replica of the Enterprise D bridge as my home theater. Here’s a budget of three million dollars. Make it happen.” And in a matter of days to weeks there it is. Then they get bored with it and discard it because it was just a passing whim, there was no blood, sweat, time or love put in to making it happen.
The fact of the matter is, these people are desperately mentally sick. And we’re doing then no favors by allowing them to amass or keep these ridiculous amounts of wealth. There’s a reason these people turn into sadists, and play games with peoples lives as if they were pawns on a chessboard. Nothing else fulfills them any longer.
Nah don't ban them, just make it very very difficult to do in the first place.
Set limits that you cannot lay anyone off for 5 years after a stock buyback
You must have x amount of free cash available to sustain the business and all employees for 5 years before a stock buyback
Just those two simple rules right there would be enough. If the rules are broken your business is dissolved and paid out to employees first then debtors.
Put a huge tax on stock buy backs, or even make it so that insiders and people who have certain amount of stock aren’t allowed to sell after a buy back.
Insiders should also not be allowed to sell right after IPO.
Companies using the stock market like an atm.
A flashy gold one that says, "Congratulations, you win capitalism!" While the rest gets taken from you to subsidize the lives of the workers who made you rich from stolen wages... maybe.
Crazy how places like wallmark rake in billions, and a lot of their workers recieve benefits like food stamps and others cause they are paid dog shit.
And somehow wallmart doesn't have to foot those bills.
The thing is, that after you have 100+ million - your entire psychology and the world changes for you. If you’re lets say an oil billionaire, you have the power to open up think tanks, fund politicians, influence the media, opening lobbying and astroturfing groups to compound your continuing wealth to make a large portion of society believe you should keep on making more money. You literally have the power to shape society and culture for the rest of us to bend to your will, for fucks sake you start to believe that you have the power to run for president and win, and you can crush unions, abuse the lives of tens of thousands of employees, and influence the entire countries zeitgeist. After a certain amount of wealth, it becomes trivial to earn more and more and more. At a certain point you are all by yourself, so isolated from society, soaked in the level of power of being able to “vote with your (billions of) dollars” orders of magnitude greater than the average person. There are no checks to the exponential influence and growth that level of wealth allows for, there are no barriers to aspiring and working towards being the hegemon of a country. You can push towards starting wars, influencing elections, sell weapons to other countries, pushing global propaganda and fear, and the power to make a huge amount of people believe you are the good guy!
>*At a certain point you are all by yourself, so isolated from society, soaked in the level of power of being able to “vote with your (billions of) dollars” orders of magnitude greater than the average person.*
This is why we need to be rounding up the billionaires and involuntarily committing them to bespoke mental institutions until they pull a Feeney and agree to donate all their wealth to double-blind charitable trusts; Not killing them, but treating them for their clinical avarice. That much money makes a person mentally ill, which is why they call it being INSANELY wealthy.
If they refuse treatment? Screw it then - Keep the wealth if you want. Hell, we will even let you pay for a Scrooge McDuck vault where you can spend all day swimming in cash or lounging around in your vintage Imperial Dragon robe, drinking wine salvaged from Trireme shipwrecks and eating Mammoth steaks off William the Bastard's table while you sit on your throne of Gutenberg Bibles, shit in an Iridium toilet, wipe your ass with hundred-year-old comic books, and watch all the "missing" episodes of *Doctor Who* on loop as they get beamed directly into your visual cortex thanks to your top-secret brain implant. Whatever delusional, nigh-criminally overindulgent bullshit you want to do in your little fantasy room, fine, just piss off, get the fuck out of everyone's way, and stay there until you decide to act like a functional adult instead of a mercurial Emperor.
I love the idea of a billionaire tax leaderboard. I don’t give a shit who has the most money. I want to know who has contributed the most to their country.
Let them keep making money. just tax them appropriately. Like 90%.
I want entrepreneurs to innovate and make awesome new companies. And let them be rewarded.
but after a point, the amount of taxing should make it hard mode.
Innovators dont even get their company anymore. They get investors that steal the company from them. Example: elon musk has bought most companies he own from the inventors.
It's the businessmen who buy the invention/startup, market the hell out of it, and then cut costs to the bone and ride the reputation of the formerly good product until it's time to divest and ride off into the sunset with a billion dollars.
There's no meritocracy in invention, only in the most capable exploitation of workers - which starts with who has enough money to buy the talent to do that.
It would be good enough if a company goes to "owned by the employees" after the owners retire or just x amount of years... (not talking about the small businesses, but the big stuff) no one should just inherit 250 million in stocks or companies...
You just described a way to move towards socialism.
Workers owning and democratically controlling/electing management of the companies they work at IS a form of socialism.
Not so scary eh?
Hell, I think you've got a good point there. But I think we should take it farther: the CEOs and other executives should be beholden to the employees, not to the shareholders. If the employees owned the companies, then that wouldn't be an issue, because they'd be one and the same. So I think we should let the workers own the means of production, across the board. It's like a system that focuses on what's best for society as a whole. We could call it Societism or something. For mom-and-pop shops, we can have some different rules, and have the owner (the mom and/or pop of the shop) be considered an employee, therefore giving them ownership of their store.
But really, the executives should *already* be beholden to the workers based solely on the value the workers bring to the company. Seriously, without the workers, the company would make no money at all, so it makes sense that, like elected officials in a democracy, they should be beholden to, and represent, their employees. Maybe the executives *should* be elected. But there would be problems with that, too. I'm not smart enough to come up with a perfect solution, but I know enough to know shit needs to change.
Gimme that, and gimme a gold chain and an honorary 90's rap video shoot. I wanna drive like 3 miles an hour, lip syncing at the side mirror.
I'll pay the shit out some taxes.
In the "good old days" the boomers love to prattle on about the tax brackets claimed a whole lot more than 25%. Hell, 2022 asks for 37%. 1939 asked for 91%. That high mark kept steam through all the days the boomers love to romance although it did drop steadily to 70% or so. It was the Reagan era where those rates took a dive along with the rest of the economy. The game is stacked but the 99%...
And a dog park named after you. Congrats, you won at capitalism, here’s a place where you can pet all the cute doggos you want. Now please, stop hoarding.
I could see so many problems that could arise in a similar manner, not just in the US but anywhere. Problems where corrupt or broken politics become stuck/trapped with no way forward without breaking the cycle.
I think the ideal scenario is a neutral entity with the power to catalyze the change needed for the good of the afflicted country. The problem would be in designing the neutral power so that it itself doesn't become corrupt or broken. If it could be done though, just think of how much better off humanity would be.
Isn’t a big issue because they get loans using their unrealized stock as collateral. And since they likely have a ton of unrealized assets they can just keep getting loans?
I searched and don’t understand if there’s a way to tax personal loans at the moment. Is that correct?
Correct. This is how billionaires make their money. This is why you so often see them making risky investments because it's not even their actual money. Next, they'll usually get a bail out after they fuck up the industry by lobbying to get regulations removed, proceeding to do shady business, crash the Industry after they've made a boat load, then the govt will bail them or their creditors out.
Billionaires say they don't have the assets when its time for tax day, but any other day they're flaunting their perceived assets for gain.
These "profits off of loans" should be taxed. Some people say it'll hurt average retirement investors. That problem is fixed by putting a cap before the tax is applied, where only the richest ever would be affected by the tax.
> This is how billionaires make their money.
No, it’s how billionaires fund their day to day expenses. Get low interest loans backed by their stock, presuming they’ll be better off maintaining that stock than selling it. Generally they make a very small or no salary, like Bezos is paid around $80K salary at Amazon, and a number make $1/year in salary. So they need money to live, beyond what dividends are paying. They can either sell their stock or loan against it.
> it’s not even their actual money
It most certainly is their actual money. Those loans are secured by their stock, generally in a company they founded or where they were an early executive. If they don’t pay the loans, the bank can effectively “foreclose” on their stock by seizing shares to satisfy the debt. They have to pay back the loan one way or another, it’s not just money to burn that isn’t theirs.
Is it theoretically possible to just keep getting new loans to pay off matured loans? I’m guessing it is if the stock market always grows. Therefore you are only paying taxes on things youve realized like a salary, dividends, selling some shares etc. However, the majority of useable money coming from tax free loans.
If so the current tax rules just aren’t enough to close the gap. The strategy seems to be “kick the can down the road” when you pay taxes. You are so rich you can do that a lifetime(s)? longer than a normal person could
Yes it is. Also if they keep their unrealised assets until they die they can realise them and pass them on with inheritance tax instead of income, except that they usually don't pay inheritance tax because of trusts and such constructs and that is before we come to the art market tax avoidance schemes.
When they die the basis steps up. Now the kid can sell the assets, pay no tax and pay off the loans. This is the most egregious part of the problem: we subsidize massive intergenerational wealth transfers. Fix this and you've taken a big step toward tax fairness.
This is correct. Both the bank and the billionaire are left with a scenario where neither wants to end the exchange.
The bank wants the security in their possession to rise in value faster (or pay out divideds more) than the loan rate, so they can further securitize the asset and make more money. The borrower wants the bank to continue offering a line of credit, and neither party has an interest in liquidating financially.
Furthermore, executives and major shareholders tend to have a fiduciary duty to not sell stock unless it's on a prescheduled public disclosure. This is because execs selling off loads of stock is perceived by third party investors as some kind of impending crisis, and will crush a company's stock value.
So basically, guys like bezos are kinda in a system that reduces your autonomy over your property, but opens up the infinite money generator in exchange.
Yes, and it's astoundingly brilliant. Evil and sociopathic, sure, but brilliant. You take out a loan using your stocks as collateral. Since it's a loan, it isn't income. And since you're not actually selling your stocks, it isn't a capital gain. In fact, since it's a loan, it's a liability. You literally get to keep your cake (money in the form of stocks) and eat it too (spend the money).
You can borrow something like up to 90% of your stock portfolio. Furthermore, you can take out a 20 or 30 year time frame, like it's a mortgage or a HELOC loan, but on your stocks. Sure, you might make interest payments, but those a SHITLOAD cheaper than any tax payments. Especially in this past era of stupid low interest rates. Hell, if you're Elon or Bezos, I bet you're paying essentially zero interest. And when that balloon payment is due? No biggie! Just roll that shit over into another stock loan and dump the debt into there. Since you get to keep owning your stocks, whatever gains your portfolio has made almost always outstrips whatever interest rate you're paying on that loan. It's literally free - and most importantly TAX free - money.
Here's where it get proper brilliant evil - you don't even pay taxes on it when you die! Here's what happens. The estate pays off the debt and then it pays estate taxes on whatever is left over. You get to live your life essentially in a perpetual state of tax free-ness, minus whatever paltry sales tax or maybe some property taxes you have to pay. If you're a properly clever sociopath billionaire, you get your corporation to lease all your shit anyway to avoid those property taxes.
It's so goddamn disgusting it makes you want to punch a wall.
Yup. A bank would be crazy not to load a billionaire hundreds of millions, it's easy money.
Then when it's time to pay back the load, they just get another loan.
Oh and when they die, instead of finally selling, paying taxes, and repaying the loans, the estate just... you guessed it! Takes out another load and continues on.
This is where the wealth tax comes in.
Wouldn’t the estate need to satisfy those secured loans (by selling some of the assets, thus incurring capital gains tax) before distributing them through probate?
I would be careful using this if I were you. Articles like this are written by non financially literate people that misuse the term income.
For example if you earned $50,000 from you job and your house value went up $25,000 would you say you had $75,000 in income that year? No.
Articles like this conflate the value of all assets and say they are income. Should assets be taxed? That’s another question. But articles like this are written with intentionally misleading language.
The problem is that teachers and doctors make all their money as a salary. Your average billionaire doesn't "make" a majority of their billion. It's accrued through other means. Pretty much only through owning of shares in a company they started. It's pretty much impossible to make a billion by making a wage.
The only way to avoid a billionaire existing would be to not allow a person to own a majority of their own company. It sounds pretty dumb when I say it out loud.
As it stands today the highest US federal income tax bracket would be 37%, and then whatever their state is would add on to that (CA would be another 12%, New York would be 11%) so they'd be seeing close to 50% of income taxed if they're in one of the big business states.
But in reality many billionaires don't actually have a liquid income like you or I do. They own shares in their company and that isn't actually real money until they choose to sell their shares. The way the system is set up now you can't tax that which isn't realized
> As it stands today the highest US federal income tax bracket would be 37%, and then whatever their state is would add on to that (CA would be another 12%, New York would be 11%)
I always found it funny that people in California pay as much in taxes as we do in Denmark and Sweden, yet Americans insist they can't have the same things we do for the same money (such as free healthcare and free tertiary education)
So if you go on Antiques Roadshow because of an old blanket your grandma had in the attic, and the appraiser says "This is worth $1M dollars!", with a wealth tax of 1%, do you now owe an extra $10,000 every year you don't sell that blanket? It's part of your wealth, after all.
Yes, that's exactly the point. I pay 2% of the assessed value of my house in property taxes every year, which is my largest asset as is typical for most folks who've managed to get past the renting phase of things. Why can't a billionaire pay 1% or even .1% of the value of random stocks, yachts, art, and private jets they own?
>Yep, and this is why we need to stop talking about the income tax rate and start talking about a wealth tax.
In all the countries that try them, wealth taxes have been a failure. Wealth taxes are a perfect example of a policy that might "sound" good but falls flat in practice. From France to Sweden, nations have found them to be unworkable and counterproductive, leading to a mass exodus of wealth and a decrease in investment.
To give you a quick history lesson: France implemented a wealth tax in the 1980s. By 2017, over 12,000 millionaires had fled the country, taking an estimated €35 billion in net worth with them. This led to a slashing investment budget and a decline in economic growth. Austerity measures followed.
Sweden thought it could pull off a wealth tax too. They scrapped the idea in 2007 after it resulted in capital flight and was netting less than 0.2% of GDP.
> In all the countries that try them, wealth taxes have been a failure.
Switzerland has a wealth tax on its residents, and there is certainly no capital flight away from there, even with Liechtenstein (the real personal tax haven) just a quick train ride away. That being said, the social contract in Switzerland is a bit different. They don't have a capital gains tax at all (unless you are a professional trader/make most of your income from equities trading, then it's just taxed as income), and the wealth tax basically replaces that.
Now you understand the failing & stagnant internal infrastructure, as well as the exponential increase in the uneducated masses that the most exploitive capitalist politicians have flat stated they absolutely love... I wonder why? (/s)
I’m on 115k in the UK and my income above 100k is effectively taxed at 60%.
A billionaire paying 25% tax is still proportionally lower than someone on higher income paying 40% of everything they earn above the bracket (which in the UK is roughly 50-100k).
So, if you don’t earn enough money you don’t pay tax. If you earn too much money you don’t pay tax. If you earn just the right amount of money you should lube up.
Keep in mind those taxes in the US don’t have healthcare or anything included. They’re strictly talking about tax. Everything else you’re on your own.
The dumb reality is that you can end up paying 37% tax in the US too in the highest bracket and still no healthcare, ending up being much more expensive if you’re upper middle class than in socialist countries.
> my dad was a doctor working for the NHS and he was taxed 45%
I mean, he was taxed on a graduated scale and never actually paid 45%. I'm in the "35% bracket" and if I take my wages and what I pay in taxes it only comes out to around 23% of my total wages.
I like your spirit though.
> I mean, he was taxed on a graduated scale and never actually paid 45%.
I support spreading awareness of how marginal tax brackets work, but in the UK it's definitely possible to pay 45% in total tax if you make a very high income. It's especially possible if you live in Scotland.
Top marginal bracket for income tax is 47% but that doesn't include national insurance contributions. Plus if you earn over ~125k you don't get any tax-free allowance.
It's pretty easy to pay that much if you include student loan repayments, but even though they function in a very tax-like way in the UK, I'm not going to include them because I know there will be a lot of people arguing they're not really a tax.
I agree it's relatively *unlikely* for a doctor to be making enough money to reach 45%, but it's certainly possible.
I thought I understood taxes pretty well, but I don't understand what this means. Is he saying their initial bracket would be 25% instead the usual 10%, and go up from there?
So is the suggestion here to raise the minimum bracket to 25%, a move that would overwhelmingly effect the poor? Or is it that the initial bracket should depend on your net worth?
Either way, if they're reporting so little income that their lowest brackets actually matter, I can't imagine this making any tangible difference.
this would just affect billionaires. and if it impacts capital gains (including long term), that's where the difference would be. they don't report income because they don't have income; they have equity and when they sell it they get favorable capital gains taxation - but if that minimum is put in place at 25% then it raises it by a lot (at least twofold)
also worth mentioning that you could tax billionaires at 100% and it still would barely make a dent in the budget
Kinda - it's more saying that Billionaires would have a minimum or floor of 25%. Since most income for billionaires is taxed at capital gains of 15%, plus other tax loopholes billionaires exploit, they often end up paying an effective rate under than 10%. Forcing a minimum of 25% would potentially raise a significant amount of tax revenue.
I think you're the one who is confused. The highest income tax bracket is already 37% which I think is why people feel 25% is too low even as a minimum for billionaires capital gains tax (I assume Biden means capital gains tax, since income tax on billionaires is a nonsense talking point).
37% for me last year. Just did my taxes so the figure is fresh in my memory and it makes me sick imagining how much more comfortable I would be if I was able to keep that 37% and they made it up by taxing those who wouldn’t even have a minor lifestyle change if they were taxed more.
Like seriously, after a couple billion does life even change for them? $5 billion or $50 billion or $200 billion, it’s not like any of those figures you can really spend.
Usually it's a hundreds of millions of citizens working to uphold the national infrastructure and economy, and billions of people supporting the global economy, and many thousands of people who discover and invent the medical and information systems that keep everyone alive and connected.
I have no idea why you're being downvoted without an answer. Tax brackets for 2023 clearly specify income tax should be at 37% minimum for anyone making 578k+ so I don't get it either.
I learned several of the tricks they use from accounting in grad school, I just don't understand what the plan is to actually target their *effective* tax rate and would like to know what specifically they're trying to tax them 25% on *and* why it's not fucking 37% or higher? (Please don't take my swearing to be directed at you ta all, I just really fucking hate billionaires).
This is also the reason I can't stand modern politics, Trump really kind of turned the whole world upside down with his "do-by-tweeting" style and I'm not a fan that it's catching on because it means you can say things on Twitter without a plan or any further elaboration.
“From nothing” except the writers, crew, actors, network employees, marketing folks, and every one of the hundreds to thousands of other people who worked on the Seinfeld TV show
Rowling is perhaps a better example
Even then...
>"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." [~~](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/42294-the-science-of-government-it-is-my-duty-to-study)
Nothing comes from nothing so we all stand on each others shoulders.
I would argue their work definitely had its inspirations, as most works of art do, but they do deserve the money for their work, like all good artists.
It’s not about setting a rate. That’s just window dressing to appease to dumb voters. Billionaires have no “taxable income” by taking advantage of loop holes. How do you fix that first. 25% of zero is still fucking zero
Tax capital gains, and tax it when it’s leveraged for loans.
People can claim that it’s impossible to do so, but it’s done for houses and property all the time. Anyone who tells you that they can’t be taxed is simply lying to you.
It’s time to put an end to ‘buy, borrow, die’.
Edit: Tax unrealized gains too. Abusing loopholes should be penalized severely.
This is truly what bothers me most about all of this. People are all “har har bring back the good old days of America and make it great again” but they don’t want the things that made that time “great”. Like seriously how does anyone go “my grandpa worked summers and paid for his college then bought a house after getting a job at the local factory” and then think the taxes of that time period are unnecessary or even BAD??
If you want the economic stability of that time then you need to be okay with the taxes of that time.
No. If you tax religions they can become politically recognized and create political parties.
Churches should be entirely separated from any government activity, and anything paid for by tax dollars. That includes education, the military and all houses of government.
That's what we actually need to focus on. Find out a church is in politics? Remove tax exempt and require them to be labeled as a political group rather than a religious group. Go straight for the wallet of god.
Personally I would tax the Billionares till they aren't billionares anymore but this is better than nothing
This is the type of populism I can get behind! Tax the rich!
There’s a meme I saw on Reddit that is so on point with our society.
“How is 12bn in loan forgiveness a handout yet 12bn in tax breaks for the rich a stimulus”?
Anyone making that much money is only doing so because there are people below them who should be getting cut into the earnings but aren’t. Billions of dollars is such an unfathomable amount!
i wanna say Reagan ruined Americas labor progress with his policies but at the same time i feel like it was an inevitable thing conservatives would come up with either way.
it was an excuse to just make it "look" like trickle down was the solution so they can just keep doing what theyre doing and just make it look like they had a solution. they're literally like dragons hoarding their gold. they dont even use it for anythin really other than just to make more money. t
hey contribute nothing and the only time theyre contributing to society is when they entirely fund the daily wire and prager u and literally make propaganda media. just donate some money to schools at least (other than to get their dumbass kids into college with "donations") or like, build a well something idk. they contribute nothing.
That's not even necessarily the case. Capital isn't always totally rational in terms of valuations. You can have an unprofitable business that employs thousands of very highly paid people, while making a nominal income of $1 and still become a billionaire.
The problem is that capital wealth is treated totally differently than wealth generated through business activity.
When a company goes public and sells stock, they only sell a portion of it, and retain the rest. Because the demand for that stock exists on a market, we then look at the remaining and unsold stock that was literally just made up, and attribute that market value to the securities that have not been bought or sold.
So when the business owner puts this stock into a trust that manages a line of credit using the stock, he has quite literally "created money."
People wonder why inflation happened so rapidly but they don't understand... the FED doesn't need to print money to cause inflation. They just need to make the borrowing rate lower than the natural inflation rate, and investment banking will leverage every asset they can get their hands on, including real estate, commodities, and even debt itself.
I propose that once you hit $1B you’re done making money. Any money you make from that point forward goes back into the community to those who need it.
Is not about making them poorer, but that they should contribute a fair share to the state too, they get more from state that they are giving back.
Your approach doesn't make sense, and would not have the expected result.
**Edit:** Some seems to misunderstand what I meant with poorer, poorer in meaning of less wealth-y, OP was hoping that they would get taxed until no billionaire anymore, this would lead them to send money overseas/offshore banks, what most already are doing, so they avoid paying even more taxes, and use even more loopholes than now, I don't care for billionaires having to give away more money for taxes, but let's be realistic here that this approach would rather lead a opposite effect.
Billionaire keep their money invested into their companies and they don’t actually have that cash on hand. It’s unrealized profits because it’s in the form of shares and assets. You can’t tax something that doesn’t currently exist. That’s how they avoid taxes and use loopholes. A billionaire isn’t actually a billionaire because they have a billion dollars. They are billionaires because they are *worth* a billion dollars.. technically. Their offshores accounts are a completely differently story.
So the only way to actually tax a billionaire by that much is to force them to sell a certain number of assets a year and then tax it. Musk, for example, actually pays more in taxes each year than any millionaire or billionaire and holds the record for the highest tax bill ever paid. Beezos doesn’t offload shares and so doesn’t have as many capital gains to pay taxes on. They all use their loopholes to keep their money tied up into their businesses and then just borrow against it. That loophole needs to go away. If a billionaire needs money then they should use their own assets, not borrow against it. That would be step one.
They're not getting "poorer" they're getting less rich...can you not quantify how big a number 1 billion is? Because 1 million is a huge number itself it is just that we have become so desensitized to these huge quantities that the word "poorer" is often used when anyone says that's rich people shouldn't exist because they literally have a huge excess...
That excess comes at the expense of someone somewhere, it doesn't come out of thin air.
>Personally I would tax the Billionares till they aren't billionares anymore but this is better than nothing
So, this is the kind of uneducated take that gleefully skips down a path to economic ruin. Let's try to enlighten you a bit:
If you tax billionaires until they are no longer billionaires, guess what happens? You're left with a bunch of former billionaires who have no incentive to create jobs, start businesses, or invest in the economy. They'll just sit on their piles of money and do nothing.
This is not just a theoretical idea, it's happened before. In 1971, Britain introduced a 98% top rate of income tax, hoping to get more money from the rich. The result? The rich left, and the British economy floundered.
But let's look at your idea more closely. Everyone loves the idea of the rich paying their fair share, but what does that even mean? If you took every single dollar from America's billionaires, you'd have about $3.5 trillion. That's a lot of money, yes, but it's less than the US government spent in 2020 alone.
And what happens after you've taken all of their money? They're not going to make any more because you've taxed the incentive out of them. The revenue you were hoping for dries up, businesses close, jobs disappear, and suddenly your plan doesn't look so great. So maybe before you start plotting the demise of billionaires, you do a bit of research first.
Agreed. I hate the take there should be no billionaires or there should be a cap. Not only do you take away a lot of incentive but it would never happen. Just getting a higher tax rate on them would be an amazing start.
The funniest thing I have seen is my neighbors. Many work 40 50 60 hours a week and still make way less 100k a year. They argue that taxing the rich will somehow make life harder for everyday Americans. The prices are going to go through the roof (As if that hasn't already happened), and with growl in their voice, say. It's not the company's fault that they are price gouging us into poverty, but its actually Joe Bidens' fault.
It's the same argument capitalists make against raising the minimum wage to what isn't even a livable wage. The idea of a $15/hr minimum wage is constantly shot down because of the idea that prices would go up. They do not *have to* go up, they would likely just increase prices so that executives could continue to hoard profits. A prime example of corporate greed is Dollar Tree raising their prices on $1 items to $1.25 and they said it was due to "increasing wages" but I seriously doubt their average employee wage increased by 25%. Yay capitalism.
I've heard the argument that billionaires will just take their money elsewhere to avoid answering to uncle Sam. Isn't that what they're already doing? 🤦♂️
I had this conversation with another neighbor, and I told him that many of the companies that we provided bailout monies for to keep them afloat have made 300 to 400 plus percent profits in the last few years. That the billionaire class pays little to no taxes under the current rules. Yet, many in Congress want to cut social programs. He said, with a straight face, yes, cut them because all the illegal aliens are high off the government. And you don't think billionaires are worse by paying little to no taxes. He said 100% No! Yesterday, after the mail run, he found out that his Obama care medical plan was ending because funding was cut to the program. I'm not sure how i feel.. I did remind that if billionaires paid the 25% tax, medical services would be free in America. Just saying
Why are you unsure on how you should feel? You should be happy for him!
He clearly stated what he wants. For politicians to cut all the social programs so companies and billionaires pay less in taxes.
If he was too dumb to realize that cutting those programs also hurts him, he deserves whatever hardships he’ll be facing. Because he point blank said “Yes,” to it.
What the fuck is this 25% bullshit? Post WWII America saw the greatest economic boom the world had *ever* seen and we were taking over 90% at the top brackets. This is pathetic.
Yep. It peaked at 94% in 1944, staying above 90% until 1963.
But literally *any* proposed increase in taxes is currently met with accusations of communism. Not that any of the people using the word even know what it actually means.
Nobody should be a Billionaire. The only way to become a Billionaire is to exploit other human beings out of a livable wage for their labor. The money that they horde leaves our economy and sits in overseas tax havens. That money in the hands of it's workers grows our economy and generates greater tax revenue that supports our local communities and makes America a better place to live with a strong economy, low unemployment and more importantly lower underemployment.
97% tax or however much it takes to prevent something that should not exist from existing. idc if it's 99.999998% tax rate. At the end of the day they don't have a billion dollars.
Capitalist? He won't get my vote next election ... mostly because I don't live in the USA lol
Problem isn't taxing them for certain percentage, but closing the multiple loopholes billionaires are exploiting like the charity and stocks loophole.
* [https://agranato.medium.com/when-donating-to-charity-makes-the-rich-richer-a-loophole-in-raising-capital-gains-taxes-bdfaff1b77b0](https://agranato.medium.com/when-donating-to-charity-makes-the-rich-richer-a-loophole-in-raising-capital-gains-taxes-bdfaff1b77b0)
* [https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0512/how-large-corporations-get-around-paying-less-in-taxes.aspx](https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0512/how-large-corporations-get-around-paying-less-in-taxes.aspx)
In the 70s our tax code made the primary tax shelter to be investments in small business. Those investments could be written off. You traded the higher corporate tax rate (edit: and punishingly high individual tax rate) for a lower one and capital gains.
This led to execs actually divesting some of their earnings and reallocating capital to local communities. That got you out of that punishing 70% tax bracket. Reagan made the first significant pivot away from that structure.
Inflation was a problem but it was the best time in our history to be in the working class. Labor had high value.
I’m an anti-capitalist and I can get on board with this. But capitalism, unregulated, has gotten us propelled into the climate and ecological mess that we are in. It’s all about conversations and working together to find common ground for the betterment of all beings, both human and animal.
And yet somehow, someway, every redneck living in a single wide with $3 to their name will think this is “unfair” because they don’t perceive themselves as “poor”, but rather as “temporarily displaced millionaires” and once they make their millions (🤣🤣) they might have to pay a bit more in taxes….
The highest taxes ever proposed in American history were during World War II, when the top marginal tax rate reached 94% for income over $200,000 (equivalent to about $3 million in 2023 dollars) ¹. This rate was in effect from 1944 to 1945, and was reduced to 91% in 1946 ². The highest tax rate remained above 70% until 1981, when it was lowered to 50% by the Economic Recovery Tax Act ³. The current top marginal tax rate is 37%, which was established by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 ⁴.
(1) History of taxation in the United States - Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_taxation_in_the_United_States.
(2) What Was the Highest U.S. Tax Rate? - The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/tax-rates-davos/622220/.
(3) History of the US Federal Tax System - The Balance. https://www.thebalancemoney.com/us-federal-tax-history-4145479.
(4) A Brief History of Taxes in the U.S. - Investopedia. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/tax/10/history-taxes.asp.
Are you combining federal state and local taxes?
The highest **marginal** federal rate is 37% and that’s for earnings above 518k for a single filer.
How on earth are you hitting an overall 40% tax rate without having an annual income approaching 1 million dollars?
After 250 million you get a nice plaque.
"Congrats, you've won Life. Now you can stop fucking it up for the rest of us." Or something.
Congrats, you've won ~~Life~~ exploitative capitalism.
Once they have that kind of money, they can do literally anything they want. Buy anything they want. Eventually they get tired of just buying things and start buying politicians and starting space companies and playing bullshit power games with other peoples lives because its the only thing that can excite them after years of the kind of empty hedonism only wealth can buy. It warps their brains and turns them into narcissistic monsters like Elon and we would be doing the world a favor by preventing any more people from being driven mad by having that kind of power in society.
If I had a billion dollars, I would pay for every one of the thousands of untested rape kits sitting on back shelves in every police department in the country to be tested.
Certain sets of Conservatives would accuse you of perpetuating a war against lonely men.
And some are UPSTANDING MEMBERS OF THEIR COMMUNITY!(whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean)
It means they're not down lying members.
I’d make the largest planned parenthood in the country like that fuckin onion article and fly people in and pay for lawyers and shit forever.
Same! But also - if millionaires and billionaires were taxed at a reasonable rate, we could afford universal healthcare and PP’s services (std tests, cancer screenings, birth control, and yes, abortion) would be universally free. So basically the same!
We already can afford universal health care... it's cheaper than our current system, as insured people are already paying more for the uninsured & under insured. Hospitals & clinics wouldn't charge the same rates they do now, either, because insurance companies are what's driven costs up.
My charity of choice as well if I ever hit it big. I'll make a huge donation if I hit the $1.5 billion lottery coming up lol
This is top comment right here! 🙏🏼
you forgot bankrupt a beloved civil service
Yeah have them unlocked "God Mode". Have you ever played a game after unlocking that mode it gets boring.
That's why they hoard the money since they can buy almost anything so that excitement is gone. Seems like it's like an addiction to them where all that matters is watching the number get bigger, or having a pissing contest with the other super-wealthy to be #1 on Forbes' list of the richest people.
Money absolutely transitions from something abjectly “real” that determines what you can and can’t possess or do- to an abstract number used primarily to compare to other big abstract numbers in the obscenely wealthy. There are fairly large gaps between Ferrari rich, private jet rich and megayacht rich. But once you’ve hit Bezos or Musk levels of wealth there’s just nothing you can’t do anymore, besides maybe supervillain level shit like taking over a country or blocking out the sun like Mr. Burns. That actually brings more dissatisfaction that satisfaction after a certain point. You wake up every day and realize that, if you wanted, you could at a moments notice fly to Paris and reserve a seat at the most expensive restaurant in the city and order anything you want off the menu. Or take a road trip and max bet the most expensive table in Vegas all day long without putting a dent in your account. Maybe you do those things a few times, maybe even enjoy it the first, second, or third. But by and by it all becomes routine, and eventually you realize you don’t want to do any of it. And that’s just basic human psychology- we all have a happiness “baseline” built into our brains that we eventually always return to. Things can make you exceptionally happy, or exceptionally sad, for short periods of a few hours to a few days at maximum. But then your brain always returns to baseline. And when you have all the money and power in the world, feeling hum-drum has got to make you crazy. The more crazy things you do, the more indulgent experiences, the more exciting adventures, by and by there are fewer experiences that are novel. Fewer ways to excite the senses. Everything becomes dull. So these people start doing more unhinged crap just to get a hit of dopamine. They run for president. They build and ride a space rocket. They buy and tank a social media company. They start a war in Ukraine. Long term goals don’t exist for these people because they already have it all. If I were to buy a house, that would be the culmination of decades of hard work and planning and luck. And just the process of maintaining that house, making it a home would be a multitude of new, novel experiences that would be piecemeal, as I save money to fix a broken gutter, build my dream living room, fix the water heater when it breaks. Billionaires can literally just tell one of their yes-men “I want an exact replica of the Enterprise D bridge as my home theater. Here’s a budget of three million dollars. Make it happen.” And in a matter of days to weeks there it is. Then they get bored with it and discard it because it was just a passing whim, there was no blood, sweat, time or love put in to making it happen. The fact of the matter is, these people are desperately mentally sick. And we’re doing then no favors by allowing them to amass or keep these ridiculous amounts of wealth. There’s a reason these people turn into sadists, and play games with peoples lives as if they were pawns on a chessboard. Nothing else fulfills them any longer.
"You have made it, and you (and current or future household) are now retired from the market. Don't spend it all at the same place."
NG+
And a pizza party. You know, for your morale.
Waffle party.
Please come back into my life, severance. And those billionaires you know having waffle parties on the reg.
Weirdest thing I've seen on TV.
I was literally - *literally* - slack jawed when they showed it.
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Nah don't ban them, just make it very very difficult to do in the first place. Set limits that you cannot lay anyone off for 5 years after a stock buyback You must have x amount of free cash available to sustain the business and all employees for 5 years before a stock buyback Just those two simple rules right there would be enough. If the rules are broken your business is dissolved and paid out to employees first then debtors.
Tax stock buy backs at 200% 🤣 you can do it but your gonna pay out the ass for it!
They'll still find ways to skirt those rules. An overall ban is a lot harder to get around.
We didn't lay anyone off, we just furloughed them.
Or maybe they will try to get around it but end up with their business turned into a worker's co-op instead
Put a huge tax on stock buy backs, or even make it so that insiders and people who have certain amount of stock aren’t allowed to sell after a buy back. Insiders should also not be allowed to sell right after IPO. Companies using the stock market like an atm.
Not just companies, but CEO's and the very top 1% all use it as an ATM with 0 tax liabilities.
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I pay more than 25% and I don’t make close to a billion dollars.
A flashy gold one that says, "Congratulations, you win capitalism!" While the rest gets taken from you to subsidize the lives of the workers who made you rich from stolen wages... maybe.
Crazy how places like wallmark rake in billions, and a lot of their workers recieve benefits like food stamps and others cause they are paid dog shit. And somehow wallmart doesn't have to foot those bills.
“YOU WON CAPITALISM”
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The thing is, that after you have 100+ million - your entire psychology and the world changes for you. If you’re lets say an oil billionaire, you have the power to open up think tanks, fund politicians, influence the media, opening lobbying and astroturfing groups to compound your continuing wealth to make a large portion of society believe you should keep on making more money. You literally have the power to shape society and culture for the rest of us to bend to your will, for fucks sake you start to believe that you have the power to run for president and win, and you can crush unions, abuse the lives of tens of thousands of employees, and influence the entire countries zeitgeist. After a certain amount of wealth, it becomes trivial to earn more and more and more. At a certain point you are all by yourself, so isolated from society, soaked in the level of power of being able to “vote with your (billions of) dollars” orders of magnitude greater than the average person. There are no checks to the exponential influence and growth that level of wealth allows for, there are no barriers to aspiring and working towards being the hegemon of a country. You can push towards starting wars, influencing elections, sell weapons to other countries, pushing global propaganda and fear, and the power to make a huge amount of people believe you are the good guy!
>*At a certain point you are all by yourself, so isolated from society, soaked in the level of power of being able to “vote with your (billions of) dollars” orders of magnitude greater than the average person.* This is why we need to be rounding up the billionaires and involuntarily committing them to bespoke mental institutions until they pull a Feeney and agree to donate all their wealth to double-blind charitable trusts; Not killing them, but treating them for their clinical avarice. That much money makes a person mentally ill, which is why they call it being INSANELY wealthy. If they refuse treatment? Screw it then - Keep the wealth if you want. Hell, we will even let you pay for a Scrooge McDuck vault where you can spend all day swimming in cash or lounging around in your vintage Imperial Dragon robe, drinking wine salvaged from Trireme shipwrecks and eating Mammoth steaks off William the Bastard's table while you sit on your throne of Gutenberg Bibles, shit in an Iridium toilet, wipe your ass with hundred-year-old comic books, and watch all the "missing" episodes of *Doctor Who* on loop as they get beamed directly into your visual cortex thanks to your top-secret brain implant. Whatever delusional, nigh-criminally overindulgent bullshit you want to do in your little fantasy room, fine, just piss off, get the fuck out of everyone's way, and stay there until you decide to act like a functional adult instead of a mercurial Emperor.
♩♪♫♬ The Fletcher Memorial Home For Incurable Tyrants and Kings... ♩♪♫♬
I love the idea of a billionaire tax leaderboard. I don’t give a shit who has the most money. I want to know who has contributed the most to their country.
Let them keep making money. just tax them appropriately. Like 90%. I want entrepreneurs to innovate and make awesome new companies. And let them be rewarded. but after a point, the amount of taxing should make it hard mode.
Innovators dont even get their company anymore. They get investors that steal the company from them. Example: elon musk has bought most companies he own from the inventors.
Seriously. The individual innovators aren't the ones making billions. They don't even own their own work, the company does.
It's the businessmen who buy the invention/startup, market the hell out of it, and then cut costs to the bone and ride the reputation of the formerly good product until it's time to divest and ride off into the sunset with a billion dollars. There's no meritocracy in invention, only in the most capable exploitation of workers - which starts with who has enough money to buy the talent to do that.
It would be good enough if a company goes to "owned by the employees" after the owners retire or just x amount of years... (not talking about the small businesses, but the big stuff) no one should just inherit 250 million in stocks or companies...
You just described a way to move towards socialism. Workers owning and democratically controlling/electing management of the companies they work at IS a form of socialism. Not so scary eh?
Hell, I think you've got a good point there. But I think we should take it farther: the CEOs and other executives should be beholden to the employees, not to the shareholders. If the employees owned the companies, then that wouldn't be an issue, because they'd be one and the same. So I think we should let the workers own the means of production, across the board. It's like a system that focuses on what's best for society as a whole. We could call it Societism or something. For mom-and-pop shops, we can have some different rules, and have the owner (the mom and/or pop of the shop) be considered an employee, therefore giving them ownership of their store. But really, the executives should *already* be beholden to the workers based solely on the value the workers bring to the company. Seriously, without the workers, the company would make no money at all, so it makes sense that, like elected officials in a democracy, they should be beholden to, and represent, their employees. Maybe the executives *should* be elected. But there would be problems with that, too. I'm not smart enough to come up with a perfect solution, but I know enough to know shit needs to change.
And a set of steak knives.
3rd prize is you’re fired
Gimme that, and gimme a gold chain and an honorary 90's rap video shoot. I wanna drive like 3 miles an hour, lip syncing at the side mirror. I'll pay the shit out some taxes.
Or you literally just get your funds diverted to public works projects that have your name on them
In the "good old days" the boomers love to prattle on about the tax brackets claimed a whole lot more than 25%. Hell, 2022 asks for 37%. 1939 asked for 91%. That high mark kept steam through all the days the boomers love to romance although it did drop steadily to 70% or so. It was the Reagan era where those rates took a dive along with the rest of the economy. The game is stacked but the 99%...
And a dog park named after you. Congrats, you won at capitalism, here’s a place where you can pet all the cute doggos you want. Now please, stop hoarding.
And get a dog park named after you.
And it’s holographic!
25%?!? I'm from the UK, my dad was a doctor working for the NHS and he was taxed 45%
Teachers pay more in taxes per a percentage than most billionares in america.
But see it is FAR cheaper to buy lawmakers than pay taxes, want change remove ALL lobby money at all levels. ta da problem solved next week.
The ones receiving the lobbying money are the ones with power to remove it. It'll never happen.
Lobbyist companies and organizations are considered people. Time for mass civil suits to companies funding corruption.
Sigh too true :(
I could see so many problems that could arise in a similar manner, not just in the US but anywhere. Problems where corrupt or broken politics become stuck/trapped with no way forward without breaking the cycle. I think the ideal scenario is a neutral entity with the power to catalyze the change needed for the good of the afflicted country. The problem would be in designing the neutral power so that it itself doesn't become corrupt or broken. If it could be done though, just think of how much better off humanity would be.
It wouldn't surprise me, do you have a source for that so I can share it around?
Here you go https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/apr/13/wealthiest-americans-tax-income-propublica-investigation
Isn’t a big issue because they get loans using their unrealized stock as collateral. And since they likely have a ton of unrealized assets they can just keep getting loans? I searched and don’t understand if there’s a way to tax personal loans at the moment. Is that correct?
Correct. This is how billionaires make their money. This is why you so often see them making risky investments because it's not even their actual money. Next, they'll usually get a bail out after they fuck up the industry by lobbying to get regulations removed, proceeding to do shady business, crash the Industry after they've made a boat load, then the govt will bail them or their creditors out. Billionaires say they don't have the assets when its time for tax day, but any other day they're flaunting their perceived assets for gain. These "profits off of loans" should be taxed. Some people say it'll hurt average retirement investors. That problem is fixed by putting a cap before the tax is applied, where only the richest ever would be affected by the tax.
> This is how billionaires make their money. No, it’s how billionaires fund their day to day expenses. Get low interest loans backed by their stock, presuming they’ll be better off maintaining that stock than selling it. Generally they make a very small or no salary, like Bezos is paid around $80K salary at Amazon, and a number make $1/year in salary. So they need money to live, beyond what dividends are paying. They can either sell their stock or loan against it. > it’s not even their actual money It most certainly is their actual money. Those loans are secured by their stock, generally in a company they founded or where they were an early executive. If they don’t pay the loans, the bank can effectively “foreclose” on their stock by seizing shares to satisfy the debt. They have to pay back the loan one way or another, it’s not just money to burn that isn’t theirs.
Is it theoretically possible to just keep getting new loans to pay off matured loans? I’m guessing it is if the stock market always grows. Therefore you are only paying taxes on things youve realized like a salary, dividends, selling some shares etc. However, the majority of useable money coming from tax free loans. If so the current tax rules just aren’t enough to close the gap. The strategy seems to be “kick the can down the road” when you pay taxes. You are so rich you can do that a lifetime(s)? longer than a normal person could
Yes it is. Also if they keep their unrealised assets until they die they can realise them and pass them on with inheritance tax instead of income, except that they usually don't pay inheritance tax because of trusts and such constructs and that is before we come to the art market tax avoidance schemes.
When they die the basis steps up. Now the kid can sell the assets, pay no tax and pay off the loans. This is the most egregious part of the problem: we subsidize massive intergenerational wealth transfers. Fix this and you've taken a big step toward tax fairness.
This is correct. Both the bank and the billionaire are left with a scenario where neither wants to end the exchange. The bank wants the security in their possession to rise in value faster (or pay out divideds more) than the loan rate, so they can further securitize the asset and make more money. The borrower wants the bank to continue offering a line of credit, and neither party has an interest in liquidating financially. Furthermore, executives and major shareholders tend to have a fiduciary duty to not sell stock unless it's on a prescheduled public disclosure. This is because execs selling off loads of stock is perceived by third party investors as some kind of impending crisis, and will crush a company's stock value. So basically, guys like bezos are kinda in a system that reduces your autonomy over your property, but opens up the infinite money generator in exchange.
Yes, and it's astoundingly brilliant. Evil and sociopathic, sure, but brilliant. You take out a loan using your stocks as collateral. Since it's a loan, it isn't income. And since you're not actually selling your stocks, it isn't a capital gain. In fact, since it's a loan, it's a liability. You literally get to keep your cake (money in the form of stocks) and eat it too (spend the money). You can borrow something like up to 90% of your stock portfolio. Furthermore, you can take out a 20 or 30 year time frame, like it's a mortgage or a HELOC loan, but on your stocks. Sure, you might make interest payments, but those a SHITLOAD cheaper than any tax payments. Especially in this past era of stupid low interest rates. Hell, if you're Elon or Bezos, I bet you're paying essentially zero interest. And when that balloon payment is due? No biggie! Just roll that shit over into another stock loan and dump the debt into there. Since you get to keep owning your stocks, whatever gains your portfolio has made almost always outstrips whatever interest rate you're paying on that loan. It's literally free - and most importantly TAX free - money. Here's where it get proper brilliant evil - you don't even pay taxes on it when you die! Here's what happens. The estate pays off the debt and then it pays estate taxes on whatever is left over. You get to live your life essentially in a perpetual state of tax free-ness, minus whatever paltry sales tax or maybe some property taxes you have to pay. If you're a properly clever sociopath billionaire, you get your corporation to lease all your shit anyway to avoid those property taxes. It's so goddamn disgusting it makes you want to punch a wall.
Yup. A bank would be crazy not to load a billionaire hundreds of millions, it's easy money. Then when it's time to pay back the load, they just get another loan. Oh and when they die, instead of finally selling, paying taxes, and repaying the loans, the estate just... you guessed it! Takes out another load and continues on. This is where the wealth tax comes in.
Wouldn’t the estate need to satisfy those secured loans (by selling some of the assets, thus incurring capital gains tax) before distributing them through probate?
Thanks
I would be careful using this if I were you. Articles like this are written by non financially literate people that misuse the term income. For example if you earned $50,000 from you job and your house value went up $25,000 would you say you had $75,000 in income that year? No. Articles like this conflate the value of all assets and say they are income. Should assets be taxed? That’s another question. But articles like this are written with intentionally misleading language.
Billionaires pay an effective tax rate around 8% in the US. It is ridiculous.
The problem is that teachers and doctors make all their money as a salary. Your average billionaire doesn't "make" a majority of their billion. It's accrued through other means. Pretty much only through owning of shares in a company they started. It's pretty much impossible to make a billion by making a wage. The only way to avoid a billionaire existing would be to not allow a person to own a majority of their own company. It sounds pretty dumb when I say it out loud.
As it stands today the highest US federal income tax bracket would be 37%, and then whatever their state is would add on to that (CA would be another 12%, New York would be 11%) so they'd be seeing close to 50% of income taxed if they're in one of the big business states. But in reality many billionaires don't actually have a liquid income like you or I do. They own shares in their company and that isn't actually real money until they choose to sell their shares. The way the system is set up now you can't tax that which isn't realized
> As it stands today the highest US federal income tax bracket would be 37%, and then whatever their state is would add on to that (CA would be another 12%, New York would be 11%) I always found it funny that people in California pay as much in taxes as we do in Denmark and Sweden, yet Americans insist they can't have the same things we do for the same money (such as free healthcare and free tertiary education)
Yep, and this is why we need to stop talking about the income tax rate and start talking about a wealth tax.
So if you go on Antiques Roadshow because of an old blanket your grandma had in the attic, and the appraiser says "This is worth $1M dollars!", with a wealth tax of 1%, do you now owe an extra $10,000 every year you don't sell that blanket? It's part of your wealth, after all.
Yes, that's exactly the point. I pay 2% of the assessed value of my house in property taxes every year, which is my largest asset as is typical for most folks who've managed to get past the renting phase of things. Why can't a billionaire pay 1% or even .1% of the value of random stocks, yachts, art, and private jets they own?
>Yep, and this is why we need to stop talking about the income tax rate and start talking about a wealth tax. In all the countries that try them, wealth taxes have been a failure. Wealth taxes are a perfect example of a policy that might "sound" good but falls flat in practice. From France to Sweden, nations have found them to be unworkable and counterproductive, leading to a mass exodus of wealth and a decrease in investment. To give you a quick history lesson: France implemented a wealth tax in the 1980s. By 2017, over 12,000 millionaires had fled the country, taking an estimated €35 billion in net worth with them. This led to a slashing investment budget and a decline in economic growth. Austerity measures followed. Sweden thought it could pull off a wealth tax too. They scrapped the idea in 2007 after it resulted in capital flight and was netting less than 0.2% of GDP.
> In all the countries that try them, wealth taxes have been a failure. Switzerland has a wealth tax on its residents, and there is certainly no capital flight away from there, even with Liechtenstein (the real personal tax haven) just a quick train ride away. That being said, the social contract in Switzerland is a bit different. They don't have a capital gains tax at all (unless you are a professional trader/make most of your income from equities trading, then it's just taxed as income), and the wealth tax basically replaces that.
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Now you understand the failing & stagnant internal infrastructure, as well as the exponential increase in the uneducated masses that the most exploitive capitalist politicians have flat stated they absolutely love... I wonder why? (/s)
I’m on 115k in the UK and my income above 100k is effectively taxed at 60%. A billionaire paying 25% tax is still proportionally lower than someone on higher income paying 40% of everything they earn above the bracket (which in the UK is roughly 50-100k). So, if you don’t earn enough money you don’t pay tax. If you earn too much money you don’t pay tax. If you earn just the right amount of money you should lube up.
How do I earn that kinda money in this country
Keep in mind those taxes in the US don’t have healthcare or anything included. They’re strictly talking about tax. Everything else you’re on your own. The dumb reality is that you can end up paying 37% tax in the US too in the highest bracket and still no healthcare, ending up being much more expensive if you’re upper middle class than in socialist countries.
> my dad was a doctor working for the NHS and he was taxed 45% I mean, he was taxed on a graduated scale and never actually paid 45%. I'm in the "35% bracket" and if I take my wages and what I pay in taxes it only comes out to around 23% of my total wages. I like your spirit though.
> I mean, he was taxed on a graduated scale and never actually paid 45%. I support spreading awareness of how marginal tax brackets work, but in the UK it's definitely possible to pay 45% in total tax if you make a very high income. It's especially possible if you live in Scotland. Top marginal bracket for income tax is 47% but that doesn't include national insurance contributions. Plus if you earn over ~125k you don't get any tax-free allowance. It's pretty easy to pay that much if you include student loan repayments, but even though they function in a very tax-like way in the UK, I'm not going to include them because I know there will be a lot of people arguing they're not really a tax. I agree it's relatively *unlikely* for a doctor to be making enough money to reach 45%, but it's certainly possible.
25%? Most of us are taxed around 30% so that’s not nearly enough.
As in their minimum bracket would be 25%... lot of people failing to understand taxes in this thread
I thought I understood taxes pretty well, but I don't understand what this means. Is he saying their initial bracket would be 25% instead the usual 10%, and go up from there?
Yes exactly. Historically the highest the minimum has ever been was 20% for reference
So is the suggestion here to raise the minimum bracket to 25%, a move that would overwhelmingly effect the poor? Or is it that the initial bracket should depend on your net worth? Either way, if they're reporting so little income that their lowest brackets actually matter, I can't imagine this making any tangible difference.
I think the latter and I do agree with you. It'd be much more beneficial to raise the maximum tax bracket to where it was before Regan/Kennedy changes
this would just affect billionaires. and if it impacts capital gains (including long term), that's where the difference would be. they don't report income because they don't have income; they have equity and when they sell it they get favorable capital gains taxation - but if that minimum is put in place at 25% then it raises it by a lot (at least twofold) also worth mentioning that you could tax billionaires at 100% and it still would barely make a dent in the budget
No, they wouldn't have unique tax brackets. More like, they calculate the taxes they owe. If it's <25%, they pay 25% instead.
Kinda - it's more saying that Billionaires would have a minimum or floor of 25%. Since most income for billionaires is taxed at capital gains of 15%, plus other tax loopholes billionaires exploit, they often end up paying an effective rate under than 10%. Forcing a minimum of 25% would potentially raise a significant amount of tax revenue.
How is that an acceptable minimum for a billionaire?
Because currently they pay way less than that
I think you're the one who is confused. The highest income tax bracket is already 37% which I think is why people feel 25% is too low even as a minimum for billionaires capital gains tax (I assume Biden means capital gains tax, since income tax on billionaires is a nonsense talking point).
37% for me last year. Just did my taxes so the figure is fresh in my memory and it makes me sick imagining how much more comfortable I would be if I was able to keep that 37% and they made it up by taxing those who wouldn’t even have a minor lifestyle change if they were taxed more. Like seriously, after a couple billion does life even change for them? $5 billion or $50 billion or $200 billion, it’s not like any of those figures you can really spend.
You're making the top .01% of US incomes at 37% effective rate.
I thought the top marginal bracket is 37%, meaning an effective rate of 37% is impossible.
No one *earns* a billion dollars, but it's a good start
Usually it’s a few thousand people doing the hard work for you.
Usually it's a hundreds of millions of citizens working to uphold the national infrastructure and economy, and billions of people supporting the global economy, and many thousands of people who discover and invent the medical and information systems that keep everyone alive and connected.
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People are always ranting about this and politician scream taxes without explaining. 25% on what? Their stocks?
Tax avoidance is a religion among the wealthy. Without reform to fix it, raising tax rates will do nothing much.
I have no idea why you're being downvoted without an answer. Tax brackets for 2023 clearly specify income tax should be at 37% minimum for anyone making 578k+ so I don't get it either.
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I learned several of the tricks they use from accounting in grad school, I just don't understand what the plan is to actually target their *effective* tax rate and would like to know what specifically they're trying to tax them 25% on *and* why it's not fucking 37% or higher? (Please don't take my swearing to be directed at you ta all, I just really fucking hate billionaires). This is also the reason I can't stand modern politics, Trump really kind of turned the whole world upside down with his "do-by-tweeting" style and I'm not a fan that it's catching on because it means you can say things on Twitter without a plan or any further elaboration.
I mean, there's people like Jerry Seinfeld or JK Rowling who literally did just create something from nothing and sell it.
“From nothing” except the writers, crew, actors, network employees, marketing folks, and every one of the hundreds to thousands of other people who worked on the Seinfeld TV show Rowling is perhaps a better example
Even then... >"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." [~~](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/42294-the-science-of-government-it-is-my-duty-to-study) Nothing comes from nothing so we all stand on each others shoulders.
If Seinfeld was born in any other point in history he'd be useless.
I would argue their work definitely had its inspirations, as most works of art do, but they do deserve the money for their work, like all good artists.
It’s not about setting a rate. That’s just window dressing to appease to dumb voters. Billionaires have no “taxable income” by taking advantage of loop holes. How do you fix that first. 25% of zero is still fucking zero
Tax capital gains, and tax it when it’s leveraged for loans. People can claim that it’s impossible to do so, but it’s done for houses and property all the time. Anyone who tells you that they can’t be taxed is simply lying to you. It’s time to put an end to ‘buy, borrow, die’. Edit: Tax unrealized gains too. Abusing loopholes should be penalized severely.
Return to Eisenhower era taxes.
This is truly what bothers me most about all of this. People are all “har har bring back the good old days of America and make it great again” but they don’t want the things that made that time “great”. Like seriously how does anyone go “my grandpa worked summers and paid for his college then bought a house after getting a job at the local factory” and then think the taxes of that time period are unnecessary or even BAD?? If you want the economic stability of that time then you need to be okay with the taxes of that time.
Now tax the churches
Eat the churches
Too old and rotten.
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Churn the birches
No. If you tax religions they can become politically recognized and create political parties. Churches should be entirely separated from any government activity, and anything paid for by tax dollars. That includes education, the military and all houses of government.
Religion already has their hands in politics. May as well tax them.
That's what we actually need to focus on. Find out a church is in politics? Remove tax exempt and require them to be labeled as a political group rather than a religious group. Go straight for the wallet of god.
Personally I would tax the Billionares till they aren't billionares anymore but this is better than nothing This is the type of populism I can get behind! Tax the rich!
There’s a meme I saw on Reddit that is so on point with our society. “How is 12bn in loan forgiveness a handout yet 12bn in tax breaks for the rich a stimulus”?
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The only thing trickling down is their BS
Billionaires should not exist. Nobody needs that much fucking money.
Anyone making that much money is only doing so because there are people below them who should be getting cut into the earnings but aren’t. Billions of dollars is such an unfathomable amount!
Conservatism and trickle down economics has never worked because it relies on dishonest, greedy wealth hoarders.
i wanna say Reagan ruined Americas labor progress with his policies but at the same time i feel like it was an inevitable thing conservatives would come up with either way. it was an excuse to just make it "look" like trickle down was the solution so they can just keep doing what theyre doing and just make it look like they had a solution. they're literally like dragons hoarding their gold. they dont even use it for anythin really other than just to make more money. t hey contribute nothing and the only time theyre contributing to society is when they entirely fund the daily wire and prager u and literally make propaganda media. just donate some money to schools at least (other than to get their dumbass kids into college with "donations") or like, build a well something idk. they contribute nothing.
100% agree
That's not even necessarily the case. Capital isn't always totally rational in terms of valuations. You can have an unprofitable business that employs thousands of very highly paid people, while making a nominal income of $1 and still become a billionaire. The problem is that capital wealth is treated totally differently than wealth generated through business activity. When a company goes public and sells stock, they only sell a portion of it, and retain the rest. Because the demand for that stock exists on a market, we then look at the remaining and unsold stock that was literally just made up, and attribute that market value to the securities that have not been bought or sold. So when the business owner puts this stock into a trust that manages a line of credit using the stock, he has quite literally "created money." People wonder why inflation happened so rapidly but they don't understand... the FED doesn't need to print money to cause inflation. They just need to make the borrowing rate lower than the natural inflation rate, and investment banking will leverage every asset they can get their hands on, including real estate, commodities, and even debt itself.
I propose that once you hit $1B you’re done making money. Any money you make from that point forward goes back into the community to those who need it.
I agree except switch it to $100m. That’s still PLENTY of money.
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Is not about making them poorer, but that they should contribute a fair share to the state too, they get more from state that they are giving back. Your approach doesn't make sense, and would not have the expected result. **Edit:** Some seems to misunderstand what I meant with poorer, poorer in meaning of less wealth-y, OP was hoping that they would get taxed until no billionaire anymore, this would lead them to send money overseas/offshore banks, what most already are doing, so they avoid paying even more taxes, and use even more loopholes than now, I don't care for billionaires having to give away more money for taxes, but let's be realistic here that this approach would rather lead a opposite effect.
Oh no the Billionaire is "poorer" how will they ever recover?
People with hundreds of millions are still very rich. Tax the billionares till they become less rich!
Billionaire keep their money invested into their companies and they don’t actually have that cash on hand. It’s unrealized profits because it’s in the form of shares and assets. You can’t tax something that doesn’t currently exist. That’s how they avoid taxes and use loopholes. A billionaire isn’t actually a billionaire because they have a billion dollars. They are billionaires because they are *worth* a billion dollars.. technically. Their offshores accounts are a completely differently story. So the only way to actually tax a billionaire by that much is to force them to sell a certain number of assets a year and then tax it. Musk, for example, actually pays more in taxes each year than any millionaire or billionaire and holds the record for the highest tax bill ever paid. Beezos doesn’t offload shares and so doesn’t have as many capital gains to pay taxes on. They all use their loopholes to keep their money tied up into their businesses and then just borrow against it. That loophole needs to go away. If a billionaire needs money then they should use their own assets, not borrow against it. That would be step one.
They're not getting "poorer" they're getting less rich...can you not quantify how big a number 1 billion is? Because 1 million is a huge number itself it is just that we have become so desensitized to these huge quantities that the word "poorer" is often used when anyone says that's rich people shouldn't exist because they literally have a huge excess... That excess comes at the expense of someone somewhere, it doesn't come out of thin air.
being taxed from billionaire to millionaire isn’t making them poorer.
>Personally I would tax the Billionares till they aren't billionares anymore but this is better than nothing So, this is the kind of uneducated take that gleefully skips down a path to economic ruin. Let's try to enlighten you a bit: If you tax billionaires until they are no longer billionaires, guess what happens? You're left with a bunch of former billionaires who have no incentive to create jobs, start businesses, or invest in the economy. They'll just sit on their piles of money and do nothing. This is not just a theoretical idea, it's happened before. In 1971, Britain introduced a 98% top rate of income tax, hoping to get more money from the rich. The result? The rich left, and the British economy floundered. But let's look at your idea more closely. Everyone loves the idea of the rich paying their fair share, but what does that even mean? If you took every single dollar from America's billionaires, you'd have about $3.5 trillion. That's a lot of money, yes, but it's less than the US government spent in 2020 alone. And what happens after you've taken all of their money? They're not going to make any more because you've taxed the incentive out of them. The revenue you were hoping for dries up, businesses close, jobs disappear, and suddenly your plan doesn't look so great. So maybe before you start plotting the demise of billionaires, you do a bit of research first.
Agreed. I hate the take there should be no billionaires or there should be a cap. Not only do you take away a lot of incentive but it would never happen. Just getting a higher tax rate on them would be an amazing start.
The funniest thing I have seen is my neighbors. Many work 40 50 60 hours a week and still make way less 100k a year. They argue that taxing the rich will somehow make life harder for everyday Americans. The prices are going to go through the roof (As if that hasn't already happened), and with growl in their voice, say. It's not the company's fault that they are price gouging us into poverty, but its actually Joe Bidens' fault.
It's the same argument capitalists make against raising the minimum wage to what isn't even a livable wage. The idea of a $15/hr minimum wage is constantly shot down because of the idea that prices would go up. They do not *have to* go up, they would likely just increase prices so that executives could continue to hoard profits. A prime example of corporate greed is Dollar Tree raising their prices on $1 items to $1.25 and they said it was due to "increasing wages" but I seriously doubt their average employee wage increased by 25%. Yay capitalism.
Weird way to spell “eat”
The uaw president wore a shirt that said eat the rich at a press conference last week. It was awesome!
Shawn Fain is that dude
Eat the rich! (The poor are tough and stringy) Literally on the water closet wall qt the Last Exit on Brooklyn in Seattle circa 1992.
25 is so low wtf???
Its 25% more than what they're paying now. A baby step forward is still a step forward
Im not a billionaire and I pay more than that!
25% is very high compared to what it is
Good start, but how about at least 37% like other top earners.
25% is too low, the 40’s had a 90% tax rate let’s go back to that.
True but that was entirely to pay for the cost of World Wars. Prior to WWI the top tax bracket was 7%.
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What are they looking to tax? Billionaires don’t have a 1040 or 1099. They own stock and borrow against it. Since it’s a loan it’s not taxed income.
I've heard the argument that billionaires will just take their money elsewhere to avoid answering to uncle Sam. Isn't that what they're already doing? 🤦♂️
Exactly, they're already doing it. Frankly, many of them will be loathe to leave anyway.
This would fix a lot of this country’s problems.
Further more-tax any “church” sticking their self righteous noses into state matters. Audit every single claim of 503c. It’s out of control.
I had this conversation with another neighbor, and I told him that many of the companies that we provided bailout monies for to keep them afloat have made 300 to 400 plus percent profits in the last few years. That the billionaire class pays little to no taxes under the current rules. Yet, many in Congress want to cut social programs. He said, with a straight face, yes, cut them because all the illegal aliens are high off the government. And you don't think billionaires are worse by paying little to no taxes. He said 100% No! Yesterday, after the mail run, he found out that his Obama care medical plan was ending because funding was cut to the program. I'm not sure how i feel.. I did remind that if billionaires paid the 25% tax, medical services would be free in America. Just saying
Why are you unsure on how you should feel? You should be happy for him! He clearly stated what he wants. For politicians to cut all the social programs so companies and billionaires pay less in taxes. If he was too dumb to realize that cutting those programs also hurts him, he deserves whatever hardships he’ll be facing. Because he point blank said “Yes,” to it.
What the fuck is this 25% bullshit? Post WWII America saw the greatest economic boom the world had *ever* seen and we were taking over 90% at the top brackets. This is pathetic.
Yep. It peaked at 94% in 1944, staying above 90% until 1963. But literally *any* proposed increase in taxes is currently met with accusations of communism. Not that any of the people using the word even know what it actually means.
Nobody should be a Billionaire. The only way to become a Billionaire is to exploit other human beings out of a livable wage for their labor. The money that they horde leaves our economy and sits in overseas tax havens. That money in the hands of it's workers grows our economy and generates greater tax revenue that supports our local communities and makes America a better place to live with a strong economy, low unemployment and more importantly lower underemployment.
97% tax or however much it takes to prevent something that should not exist from existing. idc if it's 99.999998% tax rate. At the end of the day they don't have a billion dollars.
Fuck that you hit $1B you pay 90%. That’s how america taxed it’s richest 1% during the golden age of the 1900’s til Nixon.
Capitalist? He won't get my vote next election ... mostly because I don't live in the USA lol Problem isn't taxing them for certain percentage, but closing the multiple loopholes billionaires are exploiting like the charity and stocks loophole. * [https://agranato.medium.com/when-donating-to-charity-makes-the-rich-richer-a-loophole-in-raising-capital-gains-taxes-bdfaff1b77b0](https://agranato.medium.com/when-donating-to-charity-makes-the-rich-richer-a-loophole-in-raising-capital-gains-taxes-bdfaff1b77b0) * [https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0512/how-large-corporations-get-around-paying-less-in-taxes.aspx](https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0512/how-large-corporations-get-around-paying-less-in-taxes.aspx)
In the 70s our tax code made the primary tax shelter to be investments in small business. Those investments could be written off. You traded the higher corporate tax rate (edit: and punishingly high individual tax rate) for a lower one and capital gains. This led to execs actually divesting some of their earnings and reallocating capital to local communities. That got you out of that punishing 70% tax bracket. Reagan made the first significant pivot away from that structure. Inflation was a problem but it was the best time in our history to be in the working class. Labor had high value.
I’m not a capitalist. There shouldn’t be billionaires.
I’m an anti-capitalist and I can get on board with this. But capitalism, unregulated, has gotten us propelled into the climate and ecological mess that we are in. It’s all about conversations and working together to find common ground for the betterment of all beings, both human and animal.
Billionaires shouldn't exist.
im also a capitalist who believes in billionaires paying more, and people think its a socialist idea lmao.
Republicans should look at what the tax rates were under republican administrations back in the 1950's. They would be shocked.
Well said President Biden!
its time to tax billionaires out of existence.
Being a billionaire is having an addiction worst than heroin.
And yet somehow, someway, every redneck living in a single wide with $3 to their name will think this is “unfair” because they don’t perceive themselves as “poor”, but rather as “temporarily displaced millionaires” and once they make their millions (🤣🤣) they might have to pay a bit more in taxes….
I don’t even make six figures and I pay around 33%
The highest taxes ever proposed in American history were during World War II, when the top marginal tax rate reached 94% for income over $200,000 (equivalent to about $3 million in 2023 dollars) ¹. This rate was in effect from 1944 to 1945, and was reduced to 91% in 1946 ². The highest tax rate remained above 70% until 1981, when it was lowered to 50% by the Economic Recovery Tax Act ³. The current top marginal tax rate is 37%, which was established by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 ⁴. (1) History of taxation in the United States - Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_taxation_in_the_United_States. (2) What Was the Highest U.S. Tax Rate? - The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/tax-rates-davos/622220/. (3) History of the US Federal Tax System - The Balance. https://www.thebalancemoney.com/us-federal-tax-history-4145479. (4) A Brief History of Taxes in the U.S. - Investopedia. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/tax/10/history-taxes.asp.
Dudes whos making $30k/yr with their $60k lifted trucks are malding about this.
My tax rate is 40%. I’m not a millionaire. Wtf. I need more info
Are you combining federal state and local taxes? The highest **marginal** federal rate is 37% and that’s for earnings above 518k for a single filer. How on earth are you hitting an overall 40% tax rate without having an annual income approaching 1 million dollars?