Billionaires aren't okay — for their mental health, time to drastically raise their taxes
From threatening cage matches to backing RFK Jr., billionaires prove too much money detaches a person from reality
From threatening cage matches to backing RFK Jr., billionaires prove too much money detaches a person from reality
Our billionaires are not okay. The most obvious example, of course, is Musk, who is having a midlife crisis so unhinged that it would be upsetting if he weren't such a terrible person. He purchased Twitter for $44 billion last year, out of nothing more than a fit of pique over the company's efforts to keep the social media app from being too overrun by Nazis. As the company swirls down the toilet under his watch, his public behavior gets ever more erratic. The threat from Threads, a Meta-owned competitor that launched earlier this month, caused Musk, age 52, to react with a level of immaturity that would be cause for alarm in a junior high school kid. He challenged Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to a "cage match." And then again to a "literal dick measuring contest." He keeps throwing schoolboy insults at Zuckerberg.
Kinda hilarious and sad at the same time.
And these are the kinds of people who become CEOs and Executives. They are not humanity's best, they are, quite honestly, humanity's worst.
The upsetting thing is how many millions of people look up to them and try to emulate them just because they're billionaires.
Doesn't matter what kind of absolutely disgusting, horrible human being the person in question is - "But he's a successful business man!!" is all it takes to convince many people that they should aspire to act in the exact same way.
Who thought giving trust fund kids a bunch of tax payer dollars was a good idea LOL
I worked for a trust fund kid. It started off great until I realized he had no understanding of how money worked. Despite him saying / thinking he cared about the bottom line and the well being of the company, he really only cared about his ego and if his (rich) family thought he was successful.
The only thing really bad about their outlook, is it's not true for everyone.
UBI is basically "trust funds for all"
If everyone had a guaranteed income that would cover living expenses, a bunch of people wouldn't be so hyper fixated on money
I worked for a guy who was given his family's company. When I told him my 4th birthday was approaching he tried to relate to me by asking if I was getting a boat over 40 ft because "a man's age should never be less than his age.". Because not only did he think I had a massive boat, he also thought I would buy a new one as I grew older.
This guy also refused to hire actual employees if he didn't have to. Everyone was "temp".
I have some friends in higher places than I.
One was doing the move from California to Vegas that a lot of people with money did a few years back.
I had asked him to explain, and he started with “ok, so say you make a million dollars a year…”
Sir, I have never seen that many zeroes in my bank account, fuck you mean?
Love him… but he’s a bit out of touch.
Yea, it’s all super dysfunctional.
Other trust fund kids
I heard trips to the titanic are great for them to release some pressure.
Maybe some based rocket engineer can switch out some metrics with some imperial next Bezo space flight.
In addition to taxation, make them share their wealth with all of their employees. Their working people deserve the money more than the government.
The workers should control the means of production. Imagine if every worker owned a stake in the company they worked for and got to vote on corporate decisions...
Exactly. The higher taxes should all go to healthcare, education and housing for working class people. And the leftovers should simply become dividends to provide additional support to the neediest. Oh and if people have issues with ‘welfare checks make people lazy’ or some other BS that’s repeatedly been proven to be nothing more than racist neoliberal propaganda then use the rest to fund something like the green new deal and all the jobs that will create. Or incubators for worker co-ops which are not only more fair and democratic in terms of allocation of wealth but make this kind of exploitative elite profiteering impossible.
Really glad to see this take. Nobody balks at the idea that 'hoarding' is a mental health issue when poor people do it. It's about time we recognize obscene wealth is bad for everyone in society, including the people who hold it.
It’s not as simple as raising taxes when they use creative accounting to live “at a loss” and pay for everything with loans while most of their holdings remain untaxable.
It's quite annoying that it is so plain to see how wealthy these people are, yet they're able to make themselves dirt poor on paper.
If only there was a way to force them to liquidate, rather than living on loans perpetually backed by their stock assets.
pay for everything with loans while most of their holdings remain untaxable.
Those loans are drying up...
But just because that exists doesn't mean we can't stop it.
Just write a law that cumulative loans over $x get charged a tax due when the loan is made. Have the bank treat it like "sales tax" and process it themselves before making the payment.
"Raise taxes" clearly also includes things like ending the 15% long term capital gains rate so they have to pay real income tax like the rest of us and fixing other things like that
It just means make them pay more by unspecified means
Absolutely correct, increase their taxes, close the legal loopholes.
Look no further than Hollywood studios for a primer in creative accounting, they’ve kept tens millions for themselves over decades.
Net worth tax
Yes, which is why a wealth tax needs to be implemented.
Really the best thing we can do is give in to their fantasies and convince people like Elon Musk that he can kill a tiger with his bare hands
There goes my hero, watch him as he goes.
Sure, but more to the point, we need to overhaul the entire socio-economic system. The neolibs experiment in deregulation and privatization and prioritizing profit growth has manifestly failed.
The stunningly stupid thing is that we basically have the tech to automate a huge amount of the labor required to produce all the stuff humans need and to at least try to do that sustainably, the problem is we don’t know how to organize a society that can run on much less human labor.
What keeps me up at night is the thought that one obvious way to reorganize around a much smaller human labor requirement is to have a much smaller population. Isn’t that the radical right end game here? Isn’t that why Very Rich People have gone full fascist?
Most of the words you just wrote are insurmountable to the average voter. But no. The Very Rich People don't want the population to decrease. They can dogwhistle to conservative voters about "demographic group x" and how they want them gone, but the ruling class needs infinite growth, and you can't have infinite growth (realistically at all) without a growing population.
Oh I think they (the tech-fascist oligarchs) accept that the current system has hit its growth limit, is played out. They are aware that the ecosystem interface with capitalism has been shredded to the extent that we are in multiple related crisis - all driven by the perpetual growth requirement of the system, and that the end result is a massive die-off anyway. They intend to accelerate that end while they can still control (or at least think they can still control) the transition to whatever the next phase of the system is.
What keeps me up at night is the thought that one obvious way to reorganize around a much smaller human labor requirement is to have a much smaller population. Isn’t that the radical right end game here? Isn’t that why Very Rich People have gone full fascist?
I've thought about this several times myself. Its like these mfers saw Kingsman and said, lets run with that idea. Wiping out mass swaths of the population would allow them to negate a small portion of human climate impact so they can keep on polluting and add another zero to their quarterly statement. I have no clue if this is something they think about, but one thing I do know is that these people are sick fucks and completely detached from reality.
I'm all for automation but what do the people who are unemployable do (other than not work, lol)? how do they pay for the goods and services they need?
we're nowhere near a post-scarcity society. who/what mechanism pays for and/or creates the resources used by those people that can't get their own resources because their purpose has been automated away?
Let us relieve them of their burdens.
We need cake! We need cake! We need cake! We need cake! We need cake!
is digital currency a burden?
For anyone wondering, 92% is the highest rate we had. Before Reagen, 70% was the highest bracket for 10 years. We need to get back to it.
https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/historical-highest-marginal-income-tax-rates
In a way I commend the likes of Musk for galvanizing people against billionaires and advancing social movements. He's so dislikable that it's productive.
People don't always grasp the amount of money a billionaire has. Let's put it in perspective:
A billionaire looks at $200,000 the same way a person with a $100,000 salary looks at $20 (for reference, a 1-millionaire looks at $200 the same).
It's also worth noting the power billionaires have relative to their country's size. Looking at Number of billionaires per million people. You could probably take this and weigh it further against the median per-capita GDP to see how much clout one billionaire has versus the population. For example, while India has a low # of billionaires / million people, the power the ~169 billionaires there have an overwhelming share of the total wealth of that nation.
What's funny to me is that many years ago Musk was viewed by a lot of the internet as this great engineering golden boy. Once cemented in the untouchable ranks of the gilded elite he opened his mouth more publically and fell flat on his face.
That's the power of branding and a good PR team, at least until Musk got high on his own supply and fired his PR team. His rise and fall is a bit similar to Purdue Pharma's Oxycontin marketing campaign; once the veneer of altruism was peeled off revealing an ant's nest of lies and greed destroying people's lives for profit, hype turned to horror.
A lot of his fans really thought he was some genius Tony Stark when in reality he just had loads of money to hire smart people to do the thinking for him. Something always rubbed me wrong with him even from the early days.
People don’t always grasp the amount of money a billionaire has
How much money do you think billionaires have?
Dunno about them, but my mental health would be improved if those parasites paid taxes.
Would have to be global though to not take their wealth out of the country.
I've been preaching this for years. That level of greed is disgusting and should really be dissected as a society to understand what makes someone like that. It's a huge personality disorder.
Here is a relevant video to this subject. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IP2EKTCngiM
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=IP2EKTCngiM
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
When Kanye West gets is the good one, something is wrong
Could you rephrase that? I don’t understand.
The article mentioned that Kanye West went down the same road as the other billionaires, but seems to have returned to reality after losing his brand deals and being boycotted by most people.
man there is a monty python sketch for this that I just can't find.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/IP2EKTCngiM
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Nothing new, it was the case in the past, it still is.
How would you realistically enforce this? They can just throw money to prevent this from happening. Or find other loopholes
realistically, there's no way to prevent it
that'd require overhauling the tax code - probably scrapping it entirely & drafting an entirely new code... and that's very unlikely
Fuck that. Taxation is theft.
Taxation is forecasting of weather and earthquakes, standard weights and measures, roads, timekeeping, consumer product safety standards... you know, all the things you depend on daily to just live your life.
I swear to God it's like trying to get a fish to see water. Lack of taxes and lack of government regulation hurts the working class and benefits corporations and the wealthy.
Yes. It's unfortunate that some minimum amount of taxation is a necessary evil we haven't been able to replace. It should still be minimized as much as possible.
Lol the person who thinks one person makes the world go around.
Then private property is theft as well.
It is. I get about 60% of my salary taken each month. Money I poured time in and I will never see it again.i get nothing from it except tired.
