My limited understanding is that once you're super wealthy your actual income doesn't matter. They take loans against their wealth to pay for whatever they want.
We need to tax both capital gains at a rate higher than labor and tax loans as income if they use stock as collateral.
Yes but this is an article aimed at a casual audience of wage-laborers, who undestand wealth as the thing you get for a job.
And the details of the demand don't really matter that much, because at this point it's clear that even a milquetoast request like this will still prompt the US oligarchy to have the secret police fire on protesters. Imo if anything you want the demands to initially be as mild as possible, makes them look more unreasonable. Once people are onboard you can push for more important goals.
I think we need to decide, if unrealized gains are real gains. How you can loan using unrealized gains as collateral if from tax purposes it’s not real money.
If you can loan money using unrealized gains a collateral you should be taxed. I am not saying you tax unrealized gains, but taxing when get money “from” it.
But loan is considered a loss and you even get a tax break.
Also need to limit tax write-offs to really business needs, like rich people can get a huge car like a Mercedes G class on their business and write-off the cost for instance. The rich have a lot of loopholes. Incentives should be limited to people and companies making a X sum. If your company makes billions, I don’t think you need a tax incentive.
I propose we tax owning stock like property
It's not wages that are the problem, it's compounding multi-generational wealth. It's very easy for rich people to make their income zero.
Amen. Minimum wage was a good start, but it's become a mere virtue signal for labor rights. I have no reason to believe a maximum wage wouldn't function similarly. Furthermore, nominal sums are pretty meaningless with currency anyway. Inflation makes them irrelevant pretty quickly. Progressive tax and social subsidy is what works, historically.
I worked for a guy that got paid $1 a year. The business paid for everything for him. Wage caps will not work.
Can't they both be a problem?
Well like I said, pretty much all of these mega rich people don't have any income on paper, otherwise they would have to pay income tax. And rich people hate paying taxes.
What we need is a wealth tax. If you don't want wealth to be hoarded, then you tax it. The rich and their stooges online will parrot that "wealth taxes don't work" precisely because it is the only tax that does work and that is why they oppose it.
A big misconception is that billionaires get rich from their salary.
Maximum wage laws don't make sense because the ultra rich get their wealth from investments, not wages.
At some point, we decided that people who work and make $100K a year get taxed 50% more than people who make the same money from investment. Income is income. Get rid of capital gains special status.
And this loophole of borrowing money against stock value is income, and should be taxed as such. If we did this, everyone's income taxes would be much lower, national debts would be in reduction.
But the Wall street dicks consider taxing on investments "getting taxed twice", and hedge fund managers still pay NO income taxes, only CGT.
The thing about most mega rich people is they don't earn wages. So this wouldn't affect them.
Came here to say this. They're poor, see how much their salaries are? Just a million, which they reinvest into the company for another share of 1% of their 3 trillion dollar company... that they control, and fire 20k employees to get back 50 million in just a week for their share...
Semantics. "Max income law"
Any income over $300,000 per year goes to the State to cover programs to eradicate poverty. Easy.
We need monopoly busting, and inheritance tax, and general wealth redistribution. We need to stop monetizing basic needs and start paying fair wages. Income cap solves none of that. No way you can sell ‘income caps’ to the general public.
They already play a shell game with wages, so they don't pay income taxes. Most of the really rich and successful people have their incomes derived from capital gains and then use the talking point that it's already money that was taxed through their business so it shouldn't be taxed further.
TAX CAPITAL GAINS.
All incoming money and assets. Hell, tax all assets at 100% over 100M. Maybe even hard code a limit to the size of corporations, since they are people the same rules apply.
We need a cap per owner. When you have multiple owners, the cap sums between them. Owners share equal rights.
So take a megacorp, like Google. They would be essentially need to make every employee an owner plus hire thousands of new "owner employees" to maintain their profit margin. Those profits get divided equally among owners, and the owners decide the direction of the company.
This pattern is also future proof against AI.
Maximum wage would be nice, but the inequality doesn’t happen with wages, it’s stock options, asset hoarding, and rent seeking. These people don’t pay taxes, or claim wages lol. Inheritance tax of 95% of 11Million that’s an idea! Need to strip the aristocracy of its belongings.
The solutions aren't complicated. What's complicated is getting the solutions implemented when enough representatives are bought out by the wealthy.
I agree with the post who said that it should be categorised as a mental illness. If I had 100 cats people would look at me funny, if I was going around the state grabbing every cat I could get my hands on they would have me locked up.
Yes, this. It also explains why they can't ever seem to stop even though they already are filthy rich. It was never healthy to begin with.
90% tax rate over 1million a year including capital gains. No cap on social security
I predict we're going to see our first trillionaire by the end of the decade. It's beyond obscene. If you "earn" (lol) more than 5 million dollars a year, you should have that part taxed at 100%
Musk is currently trying to negotiate a pay package from Tesla, which, if approved would pay him roughly a trillion dollars over the next decade. It's into the "not really comprehensible by humans" range.
Why the fuck does this ugly cunt need more money?? It's just a small dick competition at this point.
Maximum profit laws.
This is a stupid idea. The ultra wealthy make a tiny portion of their income through wages- that's kind of the entire point and problem of capitalism. It is ownership of capital that drives the income of the ultra wealthy. Jeff Bezos's salary from Amazon is only $80,000 per year, and he is one of the richest people on Earth. Maximum wage laws only hurt workers, while not impacting the ultra wealthy at all. When you see the giant compensation packages of CEO, very little of that is actually in wages. It's in stock in the company, and other non-cash benefits. Even if you restrict this practice, that wouldn't have done anything to prevent the wealthiest people on Earth from getting where they are since they are all founders or descendants of founders. I can't think of a single billionaire who got there from wages or any kind of compensation working for someone else- it's all ownership of capital.
I don't think you're helping the cause. A perfect solution is not the goal, and a good idea that fails to address the targeted problem is still a good idea.
You can at the same time think:
Don't be a bad progressive by discouraging progress. "Tax wealth not work" is a great slogan to unify the working class. We should also probably tax ultra-high income individuals as well.
The issue is that this is literally not a problem. It's like deciding that the best course of action when you're starving in the woods is to hunt and eat Bigfoot instead of foraging for food. It's a waste of time and resources at best, and a distraction from real solutions at worse. Nobody in the history of the world has become ultra wealthy through high salary.
He is right though. Those rich guys won't have an income at all, they just live on loans., get driven around in cars owned by the company, live in houses owned by the company etc, etc etc.
What you meant to say is we need a wealth tax.
Also capital gains tax should be based on total net worth. So if fElon sells some stock, his capital gains tax is based on his obscene net worth.
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
That won't solve the borrow, die, repeat. It's a great idea and should definitely have been implemented yesterday to modify the incentives of middle management but we REALLY need to start taxing people on a "personal GDP" after a certain level.
Space Kare pays proportionally 1\10 of the taxes I pay without having a "wage".
"Oh, you want to buy twitter for 50b, here's your M&A property tax of 25%"
This article is TERRORISM (according to Trump's Republican Administration!)! If you would like to NOT be Terrorists please SHOOT UP A CHURCH IN A MAGA HAT instead!
We desperately need to get rid of billionaires and follow that up with millionaires
"It's not that I must always have a lot. I mist always have more than everyone else. Forever. And everyone else must show their enthusiasm about me having the most."
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