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fair share?
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this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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Lefty Memes
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Tax billionaires until there are no more billionaires
It's really insane that we legally treat the tenth billion dollars at the same level as a working persons house or car.
Everything is legally just "property".
No, fuck that.
The law should protect the first million of every citizen with ferver. (and when we tackle wealth inequality, most people will have this level of wealth at the end of their working life. The fact that most currently don't is due to inequality. )
Up until 100 million, it should be taxed at a reasonable level. Because at some level, it's fair that people prefer watching Taylor Swift instead of me sing on a stage.
Above that it should be taxed heavily.
And above a billion, it should be just confiscated. As in, oopsie, our system malfunctioned, you weren't supposed to end up with more wealth than what a thousand normal people would save up after a whole lifetime of work, so we are taking it back.
I actively try to cheat at every single-player game that I play. I still don't think I've accumulated a billion anything other than self-criticisms. Even that's questionable.
Idle-game users glance around nervously.
The problem is that this wealth is ownership in companies they made. If you start a company and it becomes too successful, Is it right that we really just forcefully take that ownership away from you? Who wants to start or keep a company in a country that takes away your company from you if it's too successful?
"I won't start a company because it may be worth over a billion one day and that would only leave me with hundreds of millions of dollars. That doesn't seem worthwhile," thought no one ever in your hypothetical.
No, it's more like
" why start a company when if it becomes too successful it will literally be taken away from me for being too successful". I don't believe we should be taking away businesses from business owners, do you?
I do. Fuck 'em. They already have 100 million dollars. They can go cry into that.
So your argument is "Fuck them because they have more than me". Is that about right? We can steal from them because they have more to steal?
They stole it from "me" first.
How did they do that exactly?
Come on, man, at least understand the concept of the reification of labour-power-at-work if you're going to debate the very concept of what it means to have capital.
The value of arbeitskraft is only extracted when the means of production are privately owned. Assets and liabilities have to cost less than the output for value to be generated, I'm saying that value should have an (extremely generous) upper bound as a compensation for the initial outlay of creating a private capital asset, after which additional value is returned either to the creators of the labour in the labour-power or the labour-power-at-work is deemed valuable to society and the value is returned in general there.
I don't know all the details of Marxism, basically because I think it's a flawed view and don't see the value in dedicating a lot of time to understanding the whole thing.
The problem is that, again, you are suggesting that company owners be forced to give up their ownership, in this case it seems like you are saying they should be forced to give it away to employees? That's where all the value we are talking about is, it's the value of stock, or ownership, that's worth billions.
Why should owners of anything be forced to give up that ownership? If they sell or give any ownership that should be their choice, not forced. This goes for anything from your car to your house to your company, ownership is ownership.
pro-capitalism, pro-socialism, pro-communism, pro-anarchism are all post-Marxist.
Just like things like "subconscious" or "trauma" or "unconscious thought" are post-Freudian.
You can be the most ardent unrestricted market Libertarian, you're still using Marxist terminology. We're not debating whether money exists, we're debating about how to use it.
For e.g., it's talking about whether you like strawberry or chocolate ice cream, not that milk doesn't exist.
Or maybe you're the successful owner and you reward the people that made you successful with a larger portion of that success?
Sure, give the owner that option, just don't steal ownership from them.
If you've gone public with the company yes, you've set up the situation where paying your due means giving up some control of the company. That was a you decision. But congratulations you're worth hundreds of millions. If you find yourself thinking that's not enough you're deeply broken and one of the most selfish people in human history, a true 0.01%er.
And again, this is a billion dollar baseline people are talking about. This is the same as people upset about the possibility of inheritance taxes because then they'd only get $10,000,000 tax free. No one is not starting a business because of that, which was your original argument.
It's one thing to willfully sell some company shares to investors, it's another to be forced to give up more shares just to pay taxes on wealth because of those shares.
This brings up an interesting point though, let's say it's a private company worth billions, where one person owns 100% of the shares, do you force them to sell also?
People may not start a business with the intent to be a billionaire, but if we say that if you make it that far we will just tax you so much you will be forced to sell away your ownership, who would keep their company here when they get close to that? I think it's telling that many of the most successful worldwide companies are US companies.
At some point you just have to give them a gold sticker, a "Congratulations! You won capitalism!" plaque, and leave something for the rest of humanity.
Yes, I'm sure if Jeff Bezos were worth 10 billion dollars less he would have just said forget it I'll flip burgers instead. I don't think you need to rip their company from them, you just need to tax them.
You are literally suggesting to rip the company away from them though. They are only worth billions because of that value, if you rant to tax them billions where do you think they are going to get that money? They only have one option, to sell their ownership in their own company. If that's not ripping their company away from them I don't know what is.
Are other people paying taxes described as "ripping" away their ownership in "x"? What a bizarre framing. Also, Bezos owns less than 10% of Amazon, so he's already given away ownership of the company. He has assets, and they should be taxed
How does Amazon exist? How do they continue to operate? They run on the Internet created by the US government, they deliver packages by flying through US airspace, and driving on roads paved by several levels of government. Their factories don't burn down because of municipal fire departments, and aren't burglarized because of municipal police departments. Why shouldn't they pay for those things, which they make much more use of than you or I?
True. But generally I think giant companies cause more systemic problems than they solve. So maybe we don't really need them.
After we die back to a manageable level from climate change we should try to remember that and prohibit it happening again.
We don't really need giant companies? Ok, sure... personally I like my high tech options these large companies offer, and their ability to offer lower prices thanks to the economics of scale. If you want to pay more for everything then feel free to go to small companies, personally I prefer to pay less for the same stuff from large companies.
Meanwhile the downsides are invasion of privacy, destruction of the environment, poor treatment of workers and on and on.
If the company becomes too successful, maybe there’s not just my effort that went into achieving that.
Somehow “you got paid, fuck off” is acceptable, but “you reaped the benefits, fuck off” is not.
All these people already sell the stock of their own companies to diversify their holdings or to buy a yacht, island or Twitter.
Selling stock on the market to pay the tax man is no different.
They still keep a billion dollars worth of stock, so its not like they end up poor.
And the government can "forcefully" take a third of a working mans income, which is way worse than taxing wealth. Go cry me a river.
They don't actually sell stock in a lot of cases, they keep it and take out loans against it. That can only go so far though, if you are like the rest of the crazy people here and suggest we just tax billionaires until they are no longer billionaires, then that won't work.
Why not take the income of these business owners? Just like we take the income of everyone else? Why special rules for taxing this specific group of people you don't like?
If they can take out loans to buys islands, Yachts and overpriced tweet companies, then let them take out loans to pay tax.
They only have five figure incomes thanks to the loopholes, so that isn't a fair level of taxation compared to their actual capital gains that they artificially keep as "unrealized" on paper. A trick unavailable to us mere mortals.
You're a tool.
It's clear you don't know how things work at all. You can't expect to tax someone billions every year and not have to sell the thing causing such a huge tax burden. This isn't an infinite money glitch, the loan thing can only go so far.
Also, unrealized gains are a real thing, stocks go up and down, and the change in value is unrealized until it's sold. If a stock goes up $100 that isn't $100 in my pocket, because tomorrow it could go down $200. If you want to tax these unrealized gains, then you should be paying out the unrealized losses as well. You would also be screwing up the middle class retirement funds, so thanks for that.
There are loopholes that can be closed, but won’t because the majority of American politicians are also rich assholes. I do think most of the ideas that get bandied out are dumb as sin, however.
It's actually taxes less if it's earned from investments
At a billion you get a small plaque that says 'yay you won capitalism', they name a park bench after you and you replay from scratch.