We Desperately Need Maximum Wage Laws
With wealth inequality and billionaire control over American society growing ever more obscene, it’s well past time to implement a maximum wage limit.
With wealth inequality and billionaire control over American society growing ever more obscene, it’s well past time to implement a maximum wage limit.
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.
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.
Is it? This is the first I’m encountering that idea. I think most are aware it happens via gains in other ways.
You'd be surprised. My dad once complained about "the top 10%, the billionaires" and I had to I've inform him that based on wealth and income, he's the top 10% just being middle class, and the billionaires basically don't even show up as a percentage because there's only like a thousand in the entire world. Most people do not understand how any of this works and do not have even a basic understanding of how any of these people got wealthy in the first place.
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.
Ok so then once you hit $300k in income you should stop working? That sounds like a great way to have a shortage of working necessary skilled labor eg surgeons and lawyers who stop working after a few months every year.
My buddy is a spinal surgeon. He would stop working by May and his area would have no spinal surgeons for more than half the year under your suggestion.
Semantics. We'll change the wording to "assets controlled".
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.
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.
Nailed it.
What we need is a securities tax: a tax on every stock, bond, and other financial instruments in their portfolio. No need to liquidate it; the shares are simply transferred to the IRS annually. They'll liquidate those shares slowly over time.
Natural persons are exempted on the first $10 million of their portfolio. No exemptions for artificial persons.
I'm in favour of maximum ratios of total compensation. Stock values, dividends, salary are all added together to get a total compensation value.
Start it at something like 50-1, then gradually lower it as the actual workforce is allowed to control an increased share of the company.
There is still incentive for growth; the growth is simply distributed more equitably.
The solutions aren't complicated. What's complicated is getting the solutions implemented when enough representatives are bought out by the wealthy.
Even simpler. If one’s wealth exceeds some function of GDP, the law no longer protects them.
As much as that appeals to some part of me deep down, those are the tactics being employed right now against vulnerable people in the US. If the law doesn't protect everyone, it doesn't protect anyone.
And honestly, I think the wealthy are more threatened by taxes than by having to hire their own protection.
Why not just Most Dangerous Game the wealthiest individual at the end of each year if that’s your objective?
This is a much more difficult problem than you suggest. Taxing standing wealth of 1.8 million would limit so much of the upper middle class that actually drives economies.
Given how many people have their wealth invested in theor home, how do ypu propose to do this or is everyone constantly downgrading the home they are invested in?
Nothing in economics is ever "easy".
1000x annual minimum wage is 14.5 million. That's not the savings of the worker class (a conservative investment would provide enough return to live without working). And the point is that it's tied to minimum wage. Want to be taxed less on your wealth? You gotta raise the minimum wage.
You're right in saying it's a bit more complicated than that--my two point suggestion is oversimplified--but my original point stands: the solutions are less complicated than getting rational legislation passed in a system where the checks and balances are bought out.
Real estate is a good example of the trickiest thing about "simple" wealth tax.
I bought a house, and 20 years later I have to pay more taxes because my neighbourhood is more desirable?
Okay, easy solution, you get one free house you need to reside in for x% of your time per year.
But say I bought a painting from a local artist, even a friend, and decades go by and they've gone on to become ultra famous. Do I now have to pay more tax because I possess something that has become valuable?
Obviously thats a very unlikely scenario, but you can see the principle issue.
Honestly fuck these leeches, drop a zero from each.
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.
Well, cats are better than money, so if you went around petting every cat you could find, I wouldn’t really think much of it. In fact, I’d be pretty goddamn jealous that you could spend every waking minute in search of another beautiful pussy to snuggle with.
Cash addiction just needs codified. We already know a wad of cash lights up the brain like a bump of cocaine.
people with mental illnesses are better than those without
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.
It's simple, any income is income and taxed as income. this means loans, gains, etc. alll income.
Then everyone pays less income taxes. The current system puts the tax burden on the poorest people.
Yes simple flat tax rates are a dream for me. Imagine! Also with all the government monitoring we pay for… they can file our taxes for us. I’d love to get a fair itemized tax bill every year.
Monopoly busting, hell yes!! All the other ideas come from people who were unlucky enough to have nothing passed down to them.
I am sorry for your situation, but my father worked his ass off to leave me and my siblings something (it was meager compared to most I'm sure but it helped me out immensely when I needed a leg up), but blanket laws like this would have royally screwed me just because "well I didn't inherit anything from my parents, so NOBODY ELSE SHOULD EITHER!!" mentality.
Inheritance tax is what stops you having a noble class or owner class with a long line of inherited wealth.
A good inheritance tax would be tiered like income tax. Lower amounts would be untaxed with higher numbers being taxed at higher rates.
Like how much money are you talking about? Are you rich rich? or are you got enough daddy’s money to talk shit rich?
You’re broke to me if you’re worth less than 100 million I couldn’t care less about your family money
I think the 10-13 million dollar cap is plenty. It’s not about you it’s about the Walton kids controlling and passing down 100 Billion. It’s about Elon using his money to buy his way into the White House and steal from people..
If you gave your children $10 million and they couldn’t survive on it you fucking failed to raise your children. Anything more than that is burdensome. Passing off enough money so that your kids don’t have to struggle is one thing. Passing off enough money to buy yourself a political party by the time you’re 35 probably not a great idea.
Most billionaires don't earn a wage at all. So they're ahead of you on this. Most of their wealth comes from simply lying about what their shit is worth, and other rich people agreeing.
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
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.
I love it. Also the cap applies to all companies owned by a single individual, total not each.
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.
That wealth is also largely unrealized wealth on those stock options. I'm pretty against taxing unrealized gains, but for the love of god, we need to tax their leveraging of those unrealized gains which is how they benefit and wield it as a weapon, all while not paying any taxes on it. The tax rate should be HIGH (I'd be okay with the tax rate part being wealth based when they leverage it).
Yea it’s really a sticky situation. I’m also against taxing unrealized gains because it’s just hard to logic around. Taxing stock buy backs would help, taxing unrealized gains over 100M or whatever. Idk we need to tax away the aristocracy and the political power that comes with wealth accumulation. Would love to live in a world where a handful of people didn’t command the fates of billions
Wealth cap
Yeah this is the only way
Billionaires get cash by taking debt out against their giant stock positons. Not wages.
They can have a wage but I think it should be legally capped at 10 times the lowest paid person in the company
Coupled to a highly progressive tax, a wealth floor, and UBI, and we got something really cooking!
As someone once suggested a while ago, we just cap wealth at $999 million. Every dollar above that goes to building schools and hospitals. When you reach this point, you get a plaque that says "I won capitalism" and we name a dog park after you.
I also believe in the 999 rule! When I was a kid, I would play Zelda games and in those games the maximum number of rupees you can have is often 999. You can’t collect any more than that. Sure, you can try to put it in your pocket but it just disappears into the void. In that game, as in life, I never really needed to have any more than 999 at one time. Very rarely would I go out and spend all of my rupees.
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.
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.
We do tax capital gains. It's just at a lower rate than regular income and the first $50k or so is 0%. Some states tax capital gains as regular income.
They do a shell game by using their losses to offset their gains.
This would be something anyone could do but most people don't have the ability to let stocks sit for over a year before taking the capitol loss strategically.
The system is built for the wealthy to have less risk.
Tax debt over say $1 million as income
90% tax rate over 1million a year including capital gains. No cap on social security
Why the fuq someone needs 1 mil year? 500 is enough
Just trying to be reasonable
How about a 99.9% corporate tax rate and then nationalize the corporations later on?
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.
Or tax funds borrowed at ultra-low rates against unrealized capital gains as collateral. If you can spend it, it's income.
That makes no sense. Then what happens when the market crashes, tax rebates?
Just eliminate this loop hole of borrowing against stock values tax free. It just encourages hording and increasing wealth with no taxation.
Nah, change income and networth tax brackets. More brackets, over a wider range
The lowest incomes pay no tax at all. The higher you get, the more you pay. Once you reach 1 million per year, income taxes go to 100%.
Same for networth taxes. Let's say that the max networth should be 20 million
Again, those that have nothing, pay nothing Those that have a little, pay a little Once you reach 20 million, anything over that goes automatically 100% to tax
Nobody van get richer than that level, ever... The numbers are quickly made up but with more details added, I think that system would be awesome. We can keep everything the exact same, we only change this.
Nobody will be much richer than the rest, or much poorer than the rest
Governments will have huge tax incomes that it can use for the social net that protects everyone. Use it to find free healthcare, free education, free housing, universal income, you name it.
Tie those numbers to minimum wage or UBI values. If the rich want more, they gotta let others have more too.
Oh sure. The numbers are made up, of course and a lot of details would have to be added, but in basics, i think that idea would work
I put together a concept that I called "Universal Ranked Income". Everyone gets benefits like generic food, basic shelter, healthcare, utilities, and so forth for free. Money is used to buy luxuries such as bigger houses or fancier clothes, and jobs are classified into ranks. Each rank grants an absolute income per year while someone holds a job. Without a job, a citizen gets $10,000 per year by default. Someone with the highest ranked job, such as an Astronaut at Rank 5, gets $100,000. After taxes, it is about $8,500 and $60,000 income respectively. The lowest rank job (2), such as a waiter, gets $40k, $30k after their own taxes. Someone with the best job gets x2 income than a waitress.
There are also hard caps on annual income, savings, and assets of $100,000 for each category. By making incomes very fixed, we make it easier to detect when someone's wealth is too large, making it easier to investigate them and to confiscate their outsized wealth. We might also be preventing inflation, since incomes are fixed numbers - the economy has to react to the wealth bands, rather than the income reacting to the economy.
That seems rather over complicated and would cause a lot of other issues. Your entire economy now has to deal with everyone basicsally having more or less the same income, while vendors get very limited in how they can differentiate with prices. Inflation will still exist,how will you fix that with these fixed incomes?
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.
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?
Everyone makes $1/hour.
But everything only costs $1.
1 hour of labor = any 1 thing.
Work three hours, buy house, sports car and superyacht.
Which everyone works to make because a single grain of rice is $1.
Why don't you buy me? ;)
(Disclaimer: I am NOT worth $1)
Bro we're gonna starve.
They’ll use those laws on regular folk while they ignore them or use loopholes
"It’s maximum wage. I don’t receive any wage, I receive a dividend"
"It’s maximum wage. I don’t receive any wage, I receive rent"
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..
I'd agree with you on tossing billionaires and two - three figure millionaires, but on the low end millionaires is a very wide net that could also include folks with property, retirees and small business owners. I'm not trying to sound out of touch or shill for the owning class here, because there definitely is a point where personal wealth gets excessive, but "common people" with over a million in assets isn't all that unheard of.
We desperately need to teach leftists academic economics. Yall have your heart in the right place but none of you have the slightest clue what the fallout of your policy suggestions are.
"Getting rid" of millionaires is ludicrous. There are people who are millionaires because a stock does well for a bit. There are people who had a million for a few days because they held Dogecoin when Elon manipulated that price. Millionaire is a much lower bar than you think.
I made about 60k when I started working as a dev. At the rate I saved back then, I'd be well in millionaire territory within about 10 years had I not left it for grad school.
You are framing this in a capitalist world. Getting rid of billionaires would also get rid of the stock market, they hold about 93% of stocks. The stock market is them buying a portion of working class wages and calling them dividends. If everyone's material needs are met the accumulation of wealth isnt a driving force for 'success'
What you meant to say is we need a wealth tax.
Maximum profit laws.
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%"
Yes. If congress really had their shit together, they could implement something at the IRS where each really wealthy person is audited and taxed on their personal GDP. Auditors could present their findings of wealth and a committee could tax the value at an appropriate level.
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.
We need maximum wealth, maximum power and maximum influence laws, enforcement and strict punishments for corruption.
Money is simply the ability to command labor-power. Money is an abstraction for what is in actuality class society, Financial reform around money and taxes cannot change the nature of class society. They are obfuscations designed to distract you.
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.
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.
If we broke up all their massive companies, they could not get such compensation. But they decided not to use the antitrust laws that already exist or say no to literally any merger.
This might be even more important.
I agree with the sentiment, but it's worth noting that the current excesses of CEO compensation through stock incentives
Securities tax, payable in shares of the security. 1% of all registered securities are transferred directly to the IRS each and every year. Natural persons can request an exemption for up to $10 million worth. No exemption for corporate or other artificial "persons".
IRS liquidators will auction the taxed shares over time, such that sale of taxed shares are never more than 1% of total traded volume.
"It's not that I must always have a lot. I must always have more than everyone else. Forever. And everyone else must show their enthusiasm about me having the most."
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!
So:
A loan of $1 m is given to Mr. Richremoved 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.
Let’s make it 5 times minimum wage.
That's like $70k a year as a cap. There are jobs that are critical to the function of society but are remarkably dangerous or require unique skills that many cannot obtain. Suggesting there shouldn't be greater compensation than what a truck driver makes means no one will be willing to do these necessary yet hazardous jobs. Why would anyone weld underwater if there are other jobs that will pay just as well that aren't like.y to kill you!
Okay, how about 15 times minimum wage.
Also, CEOs do not have specialized skills and their work pushing pencils can hardly be considered dangerous.
All of the 23 underwater welders can earn the maximum wage. CEOs must prove that their job is dangerous and that nobody has their skill set to earn as much as those welders.
minimum wage is $7 an hour somewhere???
I completely agree with the concept of taxing income above a certain limit entirely. I think that only solves a portion of the problem, with the majority of the problem being solved by well implemented wealth taxes. Every dollar of wealth over something like 50 million USD should be taxed at 100%. No one should ever become a hundred millionaire again, let alone a billionaire.
50 million is too damn high.
I mean I completely agree, but this is Lemmy not a bill proposal. I'm picking a number everyone should be able to agree with because that limits the number of dumb comments I get.
If I was writing a bill I'd probably hard limit it to 20 million with it being soft limited starting at 6 million.
They will just circumvent those. What we need is to stop celebrating the anti-social accumulation of too much wealth and work to revert that.
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.
The problem of this is always the same. Contractors. Is your janitor holding the wage of your CEO down? Easy fix, you are the CEO. Fire the janitor and hire a cleaning company. Since the employees of the cleaning company are not your employees, their wages are no longer relevant.
At some point, the CEO can just have its own company of 1 employee (himself) which owns 100% of the stakes of the real company, and he can also be CEO of the real company. The real company would just pay massive amounts to the CEO company for "IP" or "consulting".
This policy can be implemented voluntarily by companies, but I don't think a government can make a law to implement this policy without obvious loopholes.
If you had a minimum wage and defined maximum wage in terms of that, you'd bypass this issue.
The "creating shell companies to get around laws" and "outsource to contractors to get around employee protections" points are still problems of course. I suspect the most realistic way of dealing with it is making it unprofitable.
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.
This, but make minimum wage equal to the maximium 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.
No incentive to ever perform better at work would be amazing
Burger flipper: "I get paid better for having done excellent work?!"
Manager: "Here is your bonus." passes a pink slip
Burger flipper: 😩
THAT is our reality. Employers tend to toss out veteran employees onto their ass, just for daring to ask for raises that can't keep up with the economy. We got people who have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet, through no fault of their own.
Employers shouldn't set the worth and requirements of jobs, else they will abuse people by making bullshit demands.
I agree with this but sadly in a multi national world the ultra wealthy will simply flee to some tax haven country as primary residency.
@desmosthenes @technocrit why does that matter if they're not contributing anyway. But also https://taxjustice.net/press/millionaire-exodus-did-not-occur-study-reveals/
Good.
Okay. So, just keep bending over. Got it.
/s
This is an empty "threat" they promote. They want you to believe they are somehow valuable to society, when really, they are just leeches who contribute nothing. Let them flee, the entire world is getting tired of their shit.
na just think of other solutions on top of this. not saying to not set the maximum - but perhaps a multinational solution is needed, or set the standards on the banks themselves, or on repatriation of their income when they’re trying to spend (ie a sales tax for rich) or a carbon tax, or withdrawal of government grants/contracts for their companies (i’m sure there’s other besides aws and azure out there) for some ideas - so on