Let’s Set a Maximum Wage for the Rich | The Tyee
According to ‘Limitarianism,’ no one deserves to be a billionaire. Not even Taylor Swift.
you dont need a max wage if you tax effectively. it would be 100% past a certain, massive amount.
How does that work when the super rich don’t pay any taxes to begin with? How do you tax wealth? How do you tax loans against shares?
You tax holdings.
Take a listen to the recent Grey Area podcast episode with Ingrid Robeyns. Her book is "Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth." and they talk about this very subject.
Not necessary. Just tax the fuck out of them.
Specifically, tax the fuck out of the massive earnings they rake in from investments while claiming the have next to nothing on their taxes.
Stock buy backs should be quadruple taxed too. Or banned.
That's the same thing. The default implementation for this is a tax bracket for the ultra-rich that uses 100% marginal tax rates.
Not sure why comments like this get so many upvotes. What kind of fantasy world are you living in where rich people pay taxes? There are entire industries formed around helping people to avoid paying as much tax as possible.
Upvoted for what we want, not what we think is likely to happen, I assume.
Even smaller farm businesses spend $5k in lawyer/accountant fees to save $7k in taxes through dividends. It doesn't matter how small the return is at the end of the day, it's essentially free money for the client at the end of it.
LoL yeah as if they won't put loopholes in there like they did with taxes.
And hide all their money in offshore accounts. Does no one remember the Panama Papers?
Let’s put aside the fact that the super rich don’t have a wage. How the fuck are you going to make and apply laws against the people who have the most power in the system you’re supporting?
Let’s just say if they have too much, we just put them in a big stew and eat them.
The same way they define and apply laws that determine, and maintain the poorest.
So without any media attention, when no one is paying attention?
As others have said, the problem isn't wages, rich are rich because of returns, dividends and other stuff that, depending on the country or city, is tax exempt, precisely to avoid paying anything. A cynical asshole might even go so far as to say that it creates jobs for lawyers and accountants, which is technically true. It's a win-win-lose for the rich-those ethically wrong workers-everyone else.
Unless the UN or really big blocks like the EU+BRICS start pressing every tax haven to stop pretending that they're doing nothing wrong (which, let's be honest, won't happen, ever), the rich will just move around. They have that luxury, thanks to effectively infinite money.
they are rich because they own property other people depend own
Wage is not the issue
One of the challenges is of course that the wealthy don't get paid. They own and control assets that appreciate in value.
What if we ended private ownership of businesses. I don't mean ending ownership of businesses, but that every business became publicly tradeable. No more private ownership of businesses.
I'm not actually advocating this (yet), just curious what people think would happen if we did this.
The same as now
The people that own it privately will have controlling public shares. Can’t force them to sell at a given value and if you did they would just have a diverse portfolio that they swap between each other
I think finding a private company that brings people the levels we are talking about here are not an issue
Profit sharing works better, after x earned, everything is divided up between workers
Enshittifcation would be mandatory via forced infinite growth to profit shareholders.
Instead, we can make the employees up to middle management and lower own a minimum of 60% shares of every company that way they're not constantly getting fucked and they actually have a voice.
I would have 100% of voting shares be inalienably attached to all workers in the firm. Non-voting preferred stock can continue to be free floating property rights @canada
What if we ended private ownership of businesses. I don't mean ending ownership of businesses, but that every business became publicly tradeable. No more private ownership of businesses
Not sure if that would really lead to any significant change. Most billionaires "own" publicly traded companies. In fact, most billionaires became billionaires when their companies initiated an IPO.
The problem is that rich people can use their stock as collateral for huge untaxable loans. What we need to do is figure out a way to classify and tax these loans without taxing things like mortgages.
imho I think this is the wrong way to go - there are some companies out there that continue to exist and thrive because they're not jerked around by shareholders. Valve, being a great example.
tax the fuck out of every asset imho, but no private business? eehhhh extreme solution that doesn't really fix the problems.
Probably better to limit ownership to directly interested parties, like workers and maybe customers
What if we ended private ownership of businesses. I don't mean ending ownership of businesses, but that every business became publicly tradeable. No more private ownership of businesses.
There's something to be said for mandatory stock awards to all employees (with no contractor sub-contractor loopholes) calculated to enforce a controlling interest among current staff.
Of course, arguably, I just described a union with more steps.
Edit: I think this won't necessarily need to be mandatory, after current shareholders wise up that their current crop of CEO's aren't actually serving their interests.
But, if it works, there's an argument to be made for making something mandatory to set a baseline expectation for human decency.
Which I suppose amounts to crowd-sourcing to staff things not currently handled by OSHA.
They usually dont get paid much in wages. I think zuckerberg got paid $1/hr?
I think the word you're looking for is "income" or "net worth"
Setting a maximum wage for them wouldn't do a damn thing. They'll just use the wealth they already have to hoover up more through things like insider trading or flat out stealing company money.
Adding a maximum wage for the rich would be like trying to drain the ocean using a toy bucket.
In an ideal world anyone making more than, let's say for an example, $1 million in a year would pay 100% tax on anything more.
No one needs more than $1,000,000 a year for anything. No one works hard enough to actually deserve that. It's just pure luck and/or screwing over other people to get more than that.
Unfortunately if one country implements that, all the rich people leave and go live somewhere else that doesn't tax that much.
On paper they don't make anything a year and pay less tax than you or I. The only way that's going to change is a massive world-wide effort to crack down on tax havens and to start taxing their assets fully.
The author in the article talks about how most of the wealth is either coming from capital gains and/or inheritance. They know wage isn't the thing to cap, the article is likely just trying to maximize clicks. The subject is still worth exploring and the author is very well informed.
That or they just don't set their residency in Canada. Rich people can choose to move and reside anywhere they want
The only greener pastures for the rich would be moving to their southern neighbor since it's probably the safest place for the rich currently. Not many options if they don't wanna be screwed.
Taylor Swift is the new posterchild for billionaires, but honestly, she's the least egregious example of a billionaire. She makes a fuck load of money because her concert tickets are like $1000 a pop. She's known to give huge bonuses to her tour staff. If anyone is getting exploited, its her fans, but she's literally just a performer. She's hardly manipulating stock prices and doing pump and dump schemes and not paying her staff a livable wage.
"1000$ a pop"
I see what you did there.
Yeah, I don't care for her music nor her lifestyle but at least she earned her money (or the first millions anyway).
don't write her off. she's just as bad and out of touch as the rest of them. on a cultural level, we have a billionaire who manipulates her audience by writing songs that market herself as a relatable, contemporary woman and positions herself as a model of feminism. she writes songs to portray her life as a women going through a tortured life as an artist in a sexist, broken system that made her a billionaire. she's made many young, impressionable women feel that going through life as a woman is like Taylor Swift going through her eras when in reality, she's a billionaire selling an image to perpetuate her wealth.
how is Taylor writing songs that perpetuate a fake lifestyle that contemporary women feel relatable to these days any different than Warren Buffett coming out and saying he still clips his own coupons. how dumb do they think we are? it's insulting, really. she has had enough money to prove she's a good person in the past, but now she has enough money to prove she's absolutely a terrible person.
on another level, it's just music. she can write whatever the fuck she wants, but I wish people would realize it's stupid as hell to listen to a billionaire write songs complaining about love or being a tortured artist. it's ridiculous.
This is going to get downvoted ):
Preventing people from becoming rich is not what we should be focused on. A maximum wage is a good headline but doesn’t make any sense at all (read other comments on this post).
We should be focused on eliminating poverty and building up the middle class.
I hate the reality of super rich people existing in a world where millions starve to death or don’t have access to clean drinking water, but rather than focus on eliminating the ultra wealthy (which just won’t happen), we should be pushing to lift people out of poverty, which might happen if push comes to shove.
You know... it might be just a little bit easier (/s) to take people out of poverty if the trillions didn't go to pockets of ultra rich and the companies.
In a limited capital economy (and we are in such an economy despite capitalists thinking we're not) every dollar that ends up in a pocket of ultra rich is a dollar that cannot be spent on food and housing by regular people.
Every single dollar in companies and ultra rich pockets comes from regular people's work. Thus, if someone despite working lives in poverty then they are actively being exploited by the ultra rich. Jeff Bezos and Amazon workers living on food stamps is a great example.
We simply can't take everyone out of poverty if we don't distribute the money even slightly more fairly.
We should return very high taxes for the rich, use the proceeds to expand the middle class. We had that in the past, assholes got rid of it with bullshit economics.
I really which it were that simple… they elect the politicians, they write the legislation, and even if somehow they were taxed at 95% they would still pay $0, like they do now ): it’s really hard not to feel apathetic when it comes to late stage capitalism. That invisible hand has got us by the balls.
The author mentioned in this article was recently on The Grey Area podcast and the arguments and reasoning is pretty compelling. It's also about the discussion and civic involvement and not a particular limit. But the reasoning behind a Limitarianism makes a lot of sense.
If person A makes 100million a year, that's 1,000 times more than person B making 100k a year. Can you honestly say that person A is working 1k time harder, or is contributing 1k times more than the person B? Also remember that we're not talking about the hordes of people working below person A who execute most of the work. We're just talking about that one individual and their contributions.
Either way, the discussion about the subject is the important thing here. What do you want your society to look like in the future and for the next generation? Even if it's not Limitarianism, starting the conversation and cival discourse to push society towards a better version of its current form is worth the effort.
Another way of thinking about it is the human potential it would open up and create.
Imagine limiting the wealth of the those with enormous fortunes and allowing those in the middle to become enormously wealthy, while at the same time allow those at the bottom to finally make it to a level where they no longer have to worry about surviving. It would be terrible for those with enormous wealth because they would lose control but it would great for those at the bottom who would achieve a way to take back control of their lives.
Imagine a world where those who never had the opportunity now have a chance to become doctors, engineers, scientists, professionals, creators, builders and inventors. Imagine a world filled with people who have the free time to just create things because they can instead of spending their lives just trying to get by. Most people in the world don't want to become master and ruler of the universe ... they just want to have a nice life, do something useful and enjoy their existence with others. It's only a minority few who feel compelled to neurotically want to collect every bit of wealth everywhere and pathologically amass so much wealth, it would take a thousand lifetimes to actually use it, let alone enjoy it.
Imagine every poor inner city kid build up an education to become a professional at something and not worry about how they are going to make a living. Imagine a millions of poor kids in Indian and China doing something with their time in engineering, science or medicine. Imagine every poor kid in Africa building their countries and developing new ideas.
The world wouldn't become a utopia ... it would most likely still have all the problems we deal with today ... but at the very least, we would have a world full of educated, capable people who would be able to handle it all. Right now, we're just a horde of raging mindless apes that are worried about dying and will kill one another for a share of a few bananas.
Reminds me of the Kurzgesagt video "A Selfish case for Altruism". If all those people were educated and working on making the world better, that would mean more people curing diseases that you personally could die from in the future. More people solving global warming and other future unknown global issues, that could harm you or you kids in the future. Etc...
Even from a self serving angle, it's better to have more people in the world well fed, well educated, living well, and contributing to society.
maximum wage? maybe it works for ceos and such but most billionaires are way beyond their wages. lets start by employing preventative measurements that prevent billionaire charities to be used for money laundering or agenda pushing. then we continue by forcing strict regulations on tax havens. what else? we can also limit the number of estates a person can own and don't allow companies to buy estates. finally, limit operational size of the media conglomerates and how much a single group can have influence on media. Support the hell out of small independent media operations. I know all very vague but very critical problems imo.
How about we just execute the richest person every 3 months?
Make a threshold that if the relative wealth is equal between 100,000,000 million people no one is executed. That's a hard cap right there.
Problem is the rich would start making death contracts. Scooping up some poor person to put them at the top with a contract saying if they go through with it they get certain privileges. The person would have to be too stupid to realize they can just distribute the wealth given to them and its win win win.
Also would hide their money off shore.
The process of determining who is most wealthy would be problematic.
It would be difficult to have an accurate monthly system.
You can move to North Korea and enjoy life without rich people without killing anyone.
100% agree with all the people saying it's not enough, but it could be a start, which potentially forces interesting changes at the company level even if it doesn't do much with the economic system.
I would rather see no shareholder influence, but weakened shareholder influence and less incentive for CEOs and execs to be douchebags can still be meaningful (though perhaps not alone). Unfortunately, since people who want to lead others tend to be empathetically challenged, they still need explicit incentives for them not to just go through the same old exploitative and abusive patterns. Say this went through, the people who replace the spoiled CEOs who decide to leave would just end up being corrupt as well if some kind of positive reinforcement doesn't also exist.
Why on Earth would they use Taylor Swift as an example. Seriously?
Taylor Swift, so hot right now.
Because there is an underlying tone in the wage equality movement that women shouldn't have it.
Republicans hate her now so clearly she's an extremist leftist /s
The Kremlin hates her now that she's potentially opposing their candidate.
Because Taylor Swift is a billionaire who is politically relevant. She often has been on the right side of things (but not always). Even if she was solely a source for good, that doesn't justify the obscene wealth she has or her lifestyle
And the right doesn't generally worship her the way other billionaires are worshipped because she's woke or something? Whatever the reason, they're more willing to criticize her
She's also far more susceptible to public pressure than other billionaires as an artist
All together, she's a good target to rally around.
Does she deserve to be wealthy? Sure. She actually worked to get where she is, and has done a lot of good.
But she's a billionaire, and we need to discuss limiting all billionaires to reasonable amounts of extreme wealth.
It doesn't matter where the conversation starts, we can't really afford to be picky
I do think the argument of a maximum value to contribution is more difficult to make with an artist as the example. Especially one as prevalent as Taylor Swift.
Art is intended to illicit emotions from people. Music in particular continues to illicit those emotions from years after it is released.
Are we then saying that the value of people feeling joy has a cap?
I don't necessarily disagree with capping the income of an artist. I'm just pointing to the danger of using them as an example.
100% tax over 100 million or something?
I'd like to know more about how this is supposed to work.
What is considered a wage? Is it net worth, increase in worth from one year to the next? Liquid capital?
Are benefits (insurance, child care, etc) counted towards this wage cap? What about company cars or housing? What about profit sharing through bonuses and / or stock grants?
Would loans be counted towards the wage cap? If not, can you borrow more than the wage cap?
What happens if you own a home or business that is worth more than the wage cap? Would you only be able to sell that commodity for the wage cap or would any excess of the wage cap be spread over multiple years?
Would inheritance or "gifts" be tallied towards the wage cap? Would donations to charitable organizations offset the wage cap?
Would companies be subject to these caps? What if a person incorporated, had all of their wealth and earnings go through that incorporation which they had sole discretion and control over the use of those funds?
What about foreign entities? Would people, companies, or even governments from other countries who exceed the maximum wage be allowed to buy / sell goods, direct / manage corporate interests, invest in land or stocks, or even reside in a country with a maximum wage? What authority or oversight would exist to even identify such a wage of a foreign entity? Or
Every single one of those questions represents a potential loophole that could be exploited to circumvent a "maximum wage" and I'm sure that somebody who has studied or worked in finance could think of others.
To be fair, there are a number of countries that already have a wealth tax. So it wouldn't be some insurmountable concept.
I have better idea: 100% tax
Anything over a $500 million in asset value taxed at 100%.
Far above what anyone should own. And yet, you'll get middle-class people defending the people with those riches, that they deserve to keep their billion dollars.
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Yes, the world doesn't need billionaires
And we can do it without guns
No, we won't kill you and we won't lock you up
On the contrary, you'll become millionaires!
Knorkator - Die Welt braucht keine Milliardäre
Better close tax loop holes while you're at it.
Reddit is shit-for-brains but one take that's been living rent free is to have a law where you kill the richest person in the world. Won't be long before people start scrambling to distribute their wealth so they're not next on the chopping block 😄
lol imagine being so poor that you earn a wage
Wouldn't it be better to set a maximum wage/compensation for Congress/parliament? That way they couldn't be bought. I don't have as much a problem with people trying to become billionaires. I have a problem with an uneven playing field. Hell, by the time they get that rich, I'm not even on a playing field. Frankly I'm not even on the same planet.