Let’s make it 5 times minimum wage.

I think that there should be fixed levels of income from jobs, alongside universal benefits and a ceiling on wealth and assets. Personal wealth should have a hard cap, while businesses have their cap determined by employee head count. There can also be an UBI income lotto funded by companies, which allows them to increases their wealth cap - effectively allowing them to healthily grow as reliance on AI increases. People who had jobs displaced by AI get access to the income lotto first, followed by the disabled.

Education shouldn't just be free, it should be treated as job, paying people according to their grades. This encourages people to focus on their studies and a healthy work/life balance, instead of having to constantly juggling a meeting ends gig.

We have centuries of inherited rot from capitalistic practices, it would take a radical restructuring to make things fair. Similar to the Constitution and Magna Carta, where principles and rules are laid out to prevent absolute monarchy. Billionaires are the kings of our time, so we should have an economic ruleset designed from the outset to prevent their existence.

This, but make minimum wage equal to the maximium wage.

need it to cover all compensation but I agree. ben an jerrys had single digit multiples for the highest paid. don't see why we can't do 100.

So:

A loan of $1 m is given to Mr. Richbitch McDouchebag based on owning $1 m worth of stock.

Eventually that loan has to be paid off.

When McDouchebag sells off some stock to pay the loan, the amount paid presumably enters a bank account, either in their name or in the name of a numbered company they control, yes?

That's income. Apply tax to it before they pay off the loan. In Canada, the top marginal tax rate is 33%, so $330k minus the other marginal tax amounts for the lower brackets would be applied before this money can go to pay off a portion of that $1 million loaned.

It's either this, or we rip up the income tax act alongside finding a different revenue stream for the government.

I'm for whatever we can get on board with most people, because I am pretty sure most of us who aren't accountants hate filing income taxes.

If we instead got most of our money from other things that the government sold, then (a) big companies couldn't use the same accounting tricks to hide income, as we would no longer be taxing those precious profits of theirs (b) the rest of us wouldn't have to go through tax pain every April.

I realize that for some people, they get things like tax credits for a bunch of things like home renos, etc.

Perhaps under a no income tax system, the incentive to do these activities that reduced their income tax would have to be changed to something more tangible, like a guaranteed lower rate on utilities or something. I dunno.

I agree with the sentiment, but it's worth noting that the current excesses of CEO compensation through stock incentives are a response to a poorly implemented attempt to curb high CEO salaries.

We do need to reign in CEO compensation, but directly going after wages made the problem worse. I don't see the article addressing this, but a Clinton-era policy aimed to curb excessive CEO wages. IIRC the ratio of CEO pay to lowest paid worker within the same company was as bad as 30:1 at the time, but has since ballooned to hundreds: 1.

Maybe something as simple as capping stock incentives at N% of total compensation could work. But we'd need to make sure we're not just encouraging a new way to skirt around the legislation like last time.

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.

No chance anything that actually attacks inequality ever gets implemented through existing legislative channels.

Could the United States Follow This Lead?

😂

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.