Switzerland had a vote on this in 2013. Max would be 12x the min. The motion lost thanks to corporate propaganda.
But there is the shining example in the Basque region of Spain... in Mondragón, the highest and lowest paid workers in Mondragón, for example, remains about six to one.
Could the United States Follow This Lead?
😂
No chance anything that actually attacks inequality ever gets implemented through existing legislative channels.
I mean I'm still thinking of you have more money than you and all your currently alive descendants could possibly spend in their lives, you shouldn't be able to receive any money for anything at all.
And once you cap out how much you are able to spend personally, anything you get at that point should already be at least halved, if not stricter.
No idea about specific numbers, but I like this as a starter.
There shouldn't be any billionaires at ALL. And very few multi millionaires. And by "multi", I mean I'm the double digit millions. That should be the extreme high end. Nobody needs that much, even with today's prices.
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.
A big misconception is that billionaires get rich from their salary.
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.
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.
Cash addiction just needs codified. We already know a wad of cash lights up the brain like a bump of cocaine.
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.
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.
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.
Wealth cap
Yeah this is the only way
Billionaires get cash by taking debt out against their giant stock positons. Not wages.
Coupled to a highly progressive tax, a wealth floor, and UBI, and we got something really cooking!
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.
Idk if you know this but governments are composed of a lot of people. We can fix multiple issues with multiple solutions. Right now the top 0.01% have absolutely too much money. The top 0.1% also don't get taxed enough. The top 1% also don't get taxed enough. The top 10% likely could handle more taxing as well depending on what country we're talking about.
The reality is there are hundreds of problems modern governments need to solve, most of which require revenue, so getting more revenue from the people who own a ton and people who make a ton is good.
I don't understand why we have to pick one solution when we definitely can handle talking about (especially casually on the Internet) multiple solutions, those solutions are good, and we agree on the ranking of importance (wealth tax first, anything that goes after the top 1%, and then income taxes, anything that goes after the top 10%). Like, I don't think it's that hard.
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.
I'm literally agreeing with that statement. The ultra wealthy make all their money from their wealthy. Yes. Can we all agree that that's what's happening? Yes? Good.
Now ALSO can we agree it's sane for someone to suggest taxing ultra high income earners? Like in 2012, just reading off the wiki here, the median cash compensation for a US CEO was 5.3 million. That's cash. That's about as much money as I want the limit to be on anyone in the world in terms of wealth and these fuckers are getting paid that a year. Can we agree we should tax cash incomes over oh idk 1 million dollars at something like 90%?
Like guys come on, this isn't hard. Don't just knee jerk react to the topic, read what is being written. Yes, tax wealth. That's the most important thing every government can do. Yes, I'm saying that because I know wealth begets wealth and it cascades, the wealthy are wealthy because of their wealth (no shit). ALSO, yes we should tax ultra-high income earners. If you get paid enough money to retire in two years of normal full time work you should be taxed accordingly (with something like Germany's tax law that let's you spread it out over X years so if it was a one time thing you get taxed normally but if it's an every year salary it gets taxed correctly).
We desperately need to get rid of billionaires and follow that up with millionaires
I think "millionaires" is probably a bit too broad depending on exactly how you define it. A million dollars doesn't go nearly as far as it used to.
Most insanely wealthy people don't necessarily have millions or billions of dollars sitting around in cash or in their bank accounts, that worth includes things like investments and real estate.
So going by that most people who own a house are probably around halfway to being a millionaire just due to that, add in a retirement account and some savings and odds are theres probably a lot more "millionaires" walking around than you'd think.
I have a relative who retired a few years ago, he worked as a bricklayer his entire life, and don't get me wrong, that's a solid job, and he was very good at it, so he made good money, but he wasn't his own boss, or anyone else's for that matter, wasn't actively playing the stock market or anything, just a guy who worked his whole life, lived within his means, saved money, put it into safe retirement accounts and such, etc.
He retired with about 1.5 million. I'm not totally clear if that includes the value of his house or not, if it does that would still put him at around 1 million in savings and investrents, and if it doesn't you can bump him up to around 2 if we measure him like we do the really wealthy people.
And there's a good chance that medical bills and such will eat up a good amount of that from him in the coming years..
How about a 99.9% corporate tax rate and then nationalize the corporations later on?
These cunts will spin it like, 'Society will break down if we pay more than 20 an hour. Don't you like cheeseburgers? Don't you like groceries?
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