4d ago

Rich tax.

Source.

175 comments

The US minimum wage hasn't changed in TEN YEARS?! You guys need to revolt, that is awful.
- To be fair, many states and cities have their own minimum wages higher than the federal minimum. I'll let you guess which states don't.
  
  The ones where the people are most afraid of communism and think minimum wage is socialism?
  
  50 states makes this game too difficult. Can we just guess colors instead?
  
  I live in a red state with an $11/hr minimum wage. We got that by amending the constitution, thereby overriding the legislature which was opposed to the increase. Unfortunately $11/hr is not even close to enough to live on here so apparently it's time to raise it via another constitutional amendment. Sigh
  
  Surprisingly, Florida has a higher minimum wage--nearly double that of the federal minimum, and will reach $15 in 2026. Of course, you can't survive on that working 40 hours a week.
  
  And most people in those states that don't have their own don't work for the federal minimum wage. My state has no minimum wage, and most "minimum wage" jobs start at something like $10-12.
- 10 years... how refreshingly optimistic...
  In 2007, Congress passed the increase to 7.25 to take effect in 2009. The minimum wage change 15 years ago was passed 17 years ago.
  
  I wonder how hoarders of wealth will be thought of in the distant future. If we survive, I hope they are seen as fools with misguided goals, and criminals for being vacuums of human potential.
  People should be contributing ideas, creativity and wisdom instead of worrying about their next meal.
- The US minimum wage hasn’t changed in TEN YEARS?!
  The vast majority of employers can't pay the minimum rate, because their employees wouldn't be able to do basic shit like travel to the jobsite or afford to eat. Wages have been rising (particularly post-COVID, after a few million Americans dropped out of the labor force for some mysterious reason) as demand eclipses supply.
  And a big reason AI has caught on as a techno-panacea is business analysts are looking at the median age and size of the labor force, the stark hostility to immigration, and the perpetually increasing need for technical work, then realizing this is going to put huge upward pressure on wages unless much of that workforce can be automated away.
  But market forces are happening even in absence of legislative action. Union activity is reemerging as a socio-economic force. Not everything rests on a federal majority manually raising the wage floor.
  
  You know, something always feels a little off with an underpantsweevil comment. I could never put my finger on it though, always seems so close to being factual but for some reason skewed. I think it's the declarative statements which turn out to be more of an opinion or editorial piece that's only backed up by other vague references much like a matt walsh or tim (can't remember his last name) might make.
  Wages have been rising...as demand eclipses supply.
  This is a weird general statement that reinforces that "supply & demand" is a worth-while endeavor that has worked out for everyone economically and socially. Of course wages have been rising.... it would be beyond a depression if the average salary went down for the past couple of years. The important caveats are completely missed though...
  While salaries are up, salary growth is down — the increase in average earnings is lower compared to the 7.3% rise between 2021 and 2022. The gender pay gap, while shrinking by 1% over the last 10 years, was only cut by 0.7% between 2022 and 2023. This means the average male makes $63,960, while their female counterparts make an average of $53,404
  The average white male earns $64,636, while the average Hispanic or Latino male makes $47,996 annually.
  With the annual inflation rate for 2023 at 3.4% for the year — up from 3.1% previously — salaries aren’t keeping up. A Smart Asset report based on MIT’s Living Wage data found that the average salary required to live comfortably in the U.S. is $68,499 after taxes.10 This is nearly $10,000 higher than what the average salary currently is. link
  AI..... are you talking about like a general AI or chatgpt? What right-wing or doomscrolling blog are you reading about AI from? All these companies trying to cram some type of "AI" into their program is a problem for sure, but it's just a fad which only the most useful implementations will stick around. If anything, the companies are spending more trying to make it work (which it doesn't).
  Amazon Fresh kills “Just Walk Out” shopping tech—it never really worked - "AI" checkout was actually powered by 1,000 human video reviewers in India.
  Here is an article by the Mckinsey Global Institute.
  One of the biggest questions of recent months is whether generative AI might wipe out jobs. Our research does not lead us to that conclusion, although we cannot definitively rule out job losses, at least in the short term. Technological advances often cause disruption, but historically, they eventually fuel economic and employment growth.
  This research does not predict aggregated future employment levels; instead, we model various drivers of labor demand to look at how the mix of jobs might change—and those results yield some gains and some losses.9 In fact, the occupational categories most exposed to generative AI could continue to add jobs through 2030 (Exhibit 4), although its adoption may slow their rate of growth. And even as automation takes hold, investment and structural drivers will support employment. The biggest impact for knowledge workers that we can state with certainty is that generative AI is likely to significantly change their mix of work activities.
  "But market forces are happening even in absence of legislative action. Union activity is reemerging as a socio-economic force. Not everything rests on a federal majority manually raising the wage floor."
  Interesting you've again promoted "market forces" (reminds me of trickle-down economics). Union activity has been beaten down by a war being waged for decades, proper legislation and officials protecting the rights of Unions are the only way they will continue to have a chance. The recent changes in the Biden administration shows that unions can stand a chance if the branches of government would actually support it.
  Wouldn't having a federal majority, manually raising the wage floor, protect future workers when the AI revolution comes? If the market determines the wage minimum, won't your points become moot when there is no more demand? I'm just still flabbergasted that you believe "employers can’t pay the minimum rate, because their employees wouldn’t be able to do basic shit like travel to the jobsite or afford to eat." I don't know what social circles you are in, but this isn't the reality most lower income people are facing.
- It's way beyond that, but the majority of the population has become weak and complicit. Either a general strike or full-on revolution is needed. I guess people will wait until everyone is suffering except the mega rich to be angry enough to break free from their day to day fantasy of blissful ignorance.
  
  Because eXcEptIoNAliSm and mEriToCrAcY, tHe aMerIcAn dReAm!!!1122
  It just goes to show how powerful the indoctrination really is.

Minimum wage shouldn’t ever be a specific amount, it should be a percentage tied to some other economic metric, so that as inflation or cost of living rises, wages increase with it as well. This BS of having to wait for out-of-touch millionaire Congress members to approve of minimum wage increases is ridiculous.
- Meanwhile, Congress has raised their own pay multiple times since they raised the minimum wage back in 2009.
  Actually, looking into it, it seems that they gave themselves an automatic annual pay raise back in the ethics reforms act of 1989! Fucking assholes.
  https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/97-615.html
  "The automatic annual adjustment for Members of Congress is determined by a formula using a component of the Employment Cost Index (ECI),......"
  ".....This adjustment formula was established by the Ethics Reform Act of 1989."
- In Europe we call this wage indexation, you should try it!
  
  Don't worry, we won't.
  
  Canadians and Europeans, hold on to this stuff. There are people trying to take away universal healthcare from Canada and Brexit happened. This shit can happen to anyone if you get complacent.
- How about we just make minimum wage a percentage of the highest income in the country? Take whoever made the most money in a given year, divide that by 52 weeks, and then divide that by 40 hours. Then divide whatever the result of that is by 1000. This should be very reasonable basis. It still allows for a huge wealth gap, but asserts that nobody should make over 1000 times more than anyone else. You still get rich and poor people, so this is in no way a leftist policy. It's a very moderate middle of the road one.
  Anyway, looking at 2023. Not even examining his true income and how much he blew doing who knows what, Elon Musk had $95.4 billion net gain in wealth that year. Divide that by 52 weeks, 40 hours, and 1000 - we should make minimum wage $45865.38 per hour. And if that's not reasonable or feasible, it just means he makes too much for the good of the economy.

Kamala Harris promises to tax the top 1%
Donald Trump promises to tax the bottom 50%
- Democrats already have the government right now and before that was trump and before that was 8 years of democrats again.
  So since 2012, democrats had the government for 8 years and republicans for 4 years.
  What makes this time special that they will finally tax the 1%?
  I still think that harris is better than trump a lot, but it kinda makes you think if these promises are just that, promises.
  
  Dems had a house majority for 2 years before losing it in 2022, and have had a tied senate for 4 years, although technically there has been more R than D for all four but Independents caucusing with the D tip them to 51:49 currently. But, to argue your point, there has been meaningful changes in the last 4 years with changes to how the FTC, SEC, and FCC operates with some of the largest fines ever given to companies like Facebook as well as increased IRS funding which led to a proportional increase in audits for the wealthiest Americans.
  And the Obama Era gave us a Medicaid Expansion, would have completely changed to a single payer system if not for Senate Republicans.
  
  Next step: specific campaign promises unkept by end of term become criminal fraud

Eat the Rich,
Eat the Rich,
Don't you know,
Life is a removed!
Eat the Rich,
Eat the Rich,
Out of the palace,
And into the ditch!

They have so much wealth it's hard to visualise how much they have.
- Eh, buying a president as your personal removed and jumping around on stage with him in an undersized t-shirt with your belly sticking out like a brain damaged orangatan is a pretty good visualization of how disgusting this much money is.
  
  buying a president as your personal removed
  Trump didn't buy Musk. They're ideological co-conspirators, eager for the day when they can each unleash the full force of the police state on their personal enemies. The fact that they both act like dim-witted children should warn the rest of us what too much money and too little social responsibility does to the human brain. Musk acts like a washed up 80s hack celebrity desperately flailing for attention because he's fucked in the skull, not because Trump pays him to behave that way.
- https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/?v=3
  
  Thanks for sharing this! I had not seen it in a while.
- Q: What's the the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars?
  A: About a billion dollars.

If you see these numbers and still think tax is the solution, you're not paying enough attention.
A system is what it does. Our system created this disparity, and will continue to allow it to grow as long as it exists. Any solutions within the acceptable limits said system has set out will never stop it, only placate the masses enough to stop us from tearing it down.
- You don't have to go that far back to find a time when the rich were heavily taxed and income disparity was much smaller. Keep going back and you can find other times when the disparity was greater and the rich were taxed less.
  The best outcome may require the system to be torn down, but it's clearly also possible to tax the rich significantly more even with the system already in place.
  
  Exactly. Post WWII the tax on the richest was 90%, it stayed there until the mid 60s when it was lowered to 70% and then in the early 80s Reagan and that congress lowered it to 50%, then briefly to even below 30%.
  It probably wouldn't have happened without the combined effect of the Great Depression rolling directly into WWII. With those two events, it was possible to raise taxes that high, and the rich actually (to a large extent) paid them.
  Even though the "Again" part of MAGA is very ill-defined, I think a lot of MAGA supporters would point to the post WWII era as a time that America was great. A greater shared prosperity was probably a significant reason why things felt so great then. Unions were strong, rich people were heavily taxed, and everyone was better off.
  
  Lmfao, looking back longingly at feudalism (with a stop over in the cold war era? Because that was such a prosperous time for so many in society /s) I'm guessing isn't making the point you think it is. You're literally arguing in favour of maintaining a disparity. The size of isn't the point, it's existence in the first place is.
  Maybe have a think with yourself about why you're so attached to the idea of there being a rich and ruling class at all, whose graces and willingness to pay back a tiny percentage of the money they extracted by exploitation society should depend on..
- Please explain what you're proposing. Are you saying to get rid of democracy or what?
  How about we tax the rich so there are no billionaires, take the corporations out of housing and rentals and fix our gerrymandering? These would go a long way to fix the problems.
  
  Can you please explain your line of thinking here? This person purpose more drastic measures than just taxing, and you jump on them being against democracy. How is democracy = some people being ultra rich?
  Like, for me, democracy means people decide how the society is ruled, so Im excited to hear how changing the system to get rid of disparity is the same as abolishing democracy
  
  It seems to me that they're hinting at abolishing capitalism.
  One way to do that would be to
  Mandate worker coop structure on all businesses
  Institute a 100% land value tax
  Taxing the rich doesn't really solve the root of the problem. Abolishing capitalism pre-distributes wealth so that people don't become billionaires in the first place. 100% land value tax encourages efficient use of land.
  @whitepeopletwitter

Eat*

You misspelled hang.
- Tax solves problems
  Violence solves result of problem
- People are super mad at the Chinese police for arresting Jack Ma, prosecuting him, and having the guy do community service work for a few years. But that's honestly way better than a guy that greedy and exploitative deserves.

Better yet, end all taxes on individuals. Instead, all taxes should be levied against corporations, and they should cover the entire bill for a functioning society... And society should democratically decide what that entails. Tax the corporations so much that their stock prices fall back to realistic numbers. Then we won't have any of these fake billionaires who's "wealth is tied up in stocks", but also they can get loans against them. It should be very easy to get "rich" by working yourself, it should be very hard to get rich "letting your money work for you"
- Maybe a hot take, but I actually think individual progressive taxes are great. Have a generous tax free threshold, but individual taxes stops excessive wealth hoarding and (in the case of inheritance tax) dynasties
  
  I agree, and on inheritance anything over like $1m should be taxed heavily. Anything over say $10m or so should be taxed at or near 100%.
  
  It's just an extra step... Everyone gets a paycheck from a corporation of some kind... Instead of hundreds of millions to deal with, the IRS could just focus on the companies
- Ok, so every American company becomes the subsidiary of a company registered in Bermuda or Ireland. They report no profits from their American subsidiaries, so they pay no taxes.
  Corporations don't have to "live" anywhere, so they don't have anything to lose by ceasing to exist in high tax areas and "moving" to low tax ones. It's why companies based in Kansas City switch back and forth from being Kansas-based or Missouri-based, whatever's convenient for their taxes.
  
  If they want to sell their shit in the US they have to allow us to audit them everywhere
- I am not a tax expert (IANATE?), but with all the tax havens and multi-national businesses would they not just relocate? I am very much interested in the simplification of the tax code such that the burden shifts back to those keen on wealth extraction. I just dunno what that looks like as code and in impementation.
  
  Sure, they can relocate. But you could structure the law so that you can't sell anything then. Apple is free to leave the US and not pay taxes, but then they are not allowed to sell anything in the US, have any offices in the US or hire anyone in the US. Of course such a law would never happen. But it's absolutely possible in theory.
  
  If they want to sell their shit in the US they have to let us audit them everywhere and tax accordingly

At this rate, we're going to have our first trillionaire by the end of the decade. How much is enough? How big does that pile of money need to be?

eat the rich, they taste like pork
- I doubt they taste that good, but I guess we would need to try to know for sure.
  
  I'm sure it depends on seasoning...

We should be way past taxing at this point.
- Eating them doesn't fix the problem that created them.
  
  Eating one of their children would probably be effective motivation.
  
  Taxing doesn't solve the problem either. Don't go around assuming everyone's a liberal who thinks that capitalism can be made to "work" by introducing taxes.

Nah. ...Well, don't get me wrong, the rich absolutely should be taxed, sure, but that's a different debate.
We don't have a nationally mandated minimum wage in Finland. Because the unions set their own minimum wages (which they adjust frequently to market conditions) and the unions also have actual legitimate power.
Maybe they should try this stuff in America too. It's fucking awesome.
- Americans have been convinced that is socialism and therefore the greatest evil.

If there's a minimum wage, there should also be a maximum wage, but I may be a communist, idk.
- The people in the meme aren't getting their wealth from their wages
  
  Which is why this policy usually goes by maximum income or income cap
- Imo, nothing about what you just said is communist in nature, as we are defining terms for a continued labor market.
- Maximum wage used to be a thing. It's how we got insurance tied to employment.

but all the alpha sigma dunno what males think they can be the next elon musk and start their own diddy thing.
- Probably not, TBH. It's probably about social order; they likely believe that there should be a specific order and set of rules in society, and that somehow billionaires 'deserve' what they have, and that it's 'right'. "The way it is is the way it should be." They likely also have regressive views about the position women should hold in society, LGBTQ+ rights, etc., for the same reasons. It's a fundamentally conservative thought process.

Why should the workers settle for only higher taxes and slightly more social programs, the workers deserve everything because without the workers there is nothing (furthermore without the capitalists there is everything).
- Because we do not fight under conditions of our choosing, we fight where we stand.
  Taxing the rich is a short-term solution, but it's one that we can do RIGHT NOW that would be a step in the right direction. You can't just quit capitalism cold-turkey without a bloody revolution. You have to take steps to transform society in a gradual manner.

Make them pay people more.

They got nation-states by the balls. They'll never let you tax them. At most there will be some concession made that just makes them look like they did something, how the ultra rich always do. Unfortunately liberal pacifism isn't nearly enough.

Obviously, those people worked for their money. All the teenagers with minimum wage did was have a job, like some sort of peasant.

The monkeys have too many bananas, we broke the system

And yet most forums will ban you even say the word "guillotine".

I guess y'all don't know what the point of capitalism is haha.
- Exploiting your fellow humans for personal gain...we know exactly what the point is

And by tax, we mean their actual wealth, not whatever pennies they give themselves each year as a "salary".

Would be good.

I am bad at math, but I would love someone to do the math and figure out how many thousands of dollars would have to be on the ground for it to be worth the time of Musk or Bezos or Zuckerberg to pick up.
I mean they'd actually get into a brawl over a penny, but that's a whole other issue.
- You'd need geniune "marginal" income data not wealth to calculate that accurately. Wealth is an illusory "value" it is inflated by asset pices that mean you can only sell it slowly without potentially reducing the price. This is far less true of widely accepted ( 'liquid') assets like cash.
  Their marginal value of +/-1 minute worked is probably actually very low, since most their income is "unearned". but ignore that for the sake of stupid calculation. assume they sacrifice an average amount to pick up this cash.
  You can start with say roughly +$270bn over 12 years being a bit less than $50k per minute. That +270 can cover inflation adjusting the 2012 start point to crrent prices, it's in the rounding.
  But even assuming they converted it all to liquid assets art once , and tank the asset price so that, instead of £50k/min the break-even might be $5k/min. very roughly i'm looking at $100 per second. That's your break even you have to get close to.
  After that it's a matter of practicality, face value per bill, ordering/stacking, spread/density, and wind. Assume no tools, vacuums, or scoops, just what can be gathered by one greedy c*nt by hand.
  If it's , say, a single $100 bill already at their feet, then it is probably worth it to them (or maybe handful of $100s if you prefer to think wealth = cash).
  A few $20s? probably; if they could gather 5x$20s per second and reach the break even rate - seems doable if the density is there. $10s or lower? I doubt it - unless the cash was neatly stacked or bundled.
  But, suppose they were put on to an effectively infinite but random mess of $1 bills; I dont think it's worth it to them. I don't think they could physically gather it fast enough. Plus at scale, they'd have overhead costs to store, transport, bundle , count it and then wait in line at the bank and other such indignities.
  If it was more like this: https://youtu.be/YEbs0RUyksI?t=363 then no chance.
  
  Damn, I didn't think it would require that much math! Thanks!

Axe the rich

Not the most fair comparison. Compare it to the richest people in 2012, as extreme wealth ebbs and flows with inflated "funny money" stocks.
- https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBLT01026
  Edit: also remember the unit on the left side is 1,000,000.
  So 10,000,000 is 10 trillion dollars.
  So that would show ~5 trillion dollars in net worth to 45+ trillion from 1990 to now.
  So they have made 900% increases over 35 years. Note inflation would have been 241% during those years.
  Instead of being rich for life and never needing money for anything, now they are rich for life and never need money for anything times 3.73.
  Instead of that money going to the people starving while working their ass off.
  
  This is a better comparison than the post itself, and we should also be putting the minimum wage on the graph to compare the gains.

Individual's wealth vs minimum wage is not a great comparison. It's showing accumulated wealth of an individual who will over time receive pay raises and build up their wealth.
Minimum wage is what it says the minimum. It's supposed to be entry level income at the time. It should be adjusted for inflation.
To make it more accurate, it should show income increase for ech of the billionaires, and compare it to an income of some median individuals.
- I tried do to just that, because i believed that it wouldn't paint a better picture for the billionaires, and I also dont like that people have downvoted your comment without providing explanation.
  Assuming Musk started working at 18yrs old, which would have been in 1989, 35 years ago. And assuming he started at 7.25 dollars an hour, and never got a raise, he would have accumulated roughly 527.800 dollars by now.
  40h * 52w * 7.25 usd = 15080 usd 15080 usd * 35y = 527 800 usd
  His net worth (according to meme) is a staggering 273 000 000 000 dollars. Obviously he had to have a pay rise to get there, lets calculate that rise, starting from 7.25 dollars an hour.
  273000000000 ÷ 527800 = 517241.37931034
  So his pay rise averaged over 35 years, would be an absurd 517240%, or 14778% per year. The yearly average pay rise is roughly 4-5%, its not even remotly close.
  All of this assumes that Elon started with 0 dollars to his name, he didn't. So in reality his hypothetical pay rise wouldve been a a bit lower. However the minimum wage wasn't 7.25 dollars in 1989, and I haven't accounted for inflation. Still the numbers would probably be similarly insane.
  Even in a somewhat more accurate form, I think the core statement of the meme still rings true.
  
  That's not how exponential growth works. The pay increase would be in the ballpark of 50% per year for that amount of gain in 35 years.
  And remember, wealth accumulates in passive investments, so even if you made $7.25/hr for 35 years, you'd have over $1m if you didn't spend any of it and it accumulated at over ~3% per year.

You could take all the money of all billionaires.. that would cover government expenses for about half a year. The state doesn't have a revenue problem, it has a spending problem.

These numbers are made up - specifically, they're made up by the stock market. If you actually think Elon Musk has $273 billion dollars, I have some Saudi shares in Twitter to sell you.
- Oh so he only has two billion? Well, we're basically equals then. I wonder how he takes his avocado toast....
  
  I'm not saying that Elon Musk deserves his wealth, I'm saying the premise of the meme is nonsense.
- Cool if their stock is worth that much they can get rid of it and make the company more public instead having so much power in the hands of the few

Opening a can of worms here, but I might have an opinion going against the grain. The minimum wage rate is not the problem, technically it should be $0.
The issue here is basically legislation, policies and government, that has been captured by these big corporations to be business friendly and antagonistic to the workers.
Make no mistake being friendly towards businesses should be important, basically the driver of the economy, why these three billionaires are not the root cause of your problem. Your root problem has been the corporate capture of your government, that has bled through your other pillars of democracy, your judicial and finally the big one, the people. Americans are, in my opinion, so addicted to fast news, so that everything should stir an emotional response. You have been polarised for political and vested interest gains. You have let yourselves down. By not uniting, by dividing yourselves, you the people have become weak, thus a united market will take advantage of you, distract you to non issues, while conquering your nation.
It can be changed but only if there is a cultural change, and the will of the people will guide that change.
- The poor do not have the ability to manipulate mass quantities of people, the rich do. Because they are rich and have the resources and connections to accomplish this. They buy politicians and manipulate to cause the conditions you describe. If they were not rich, they could not do that.
  Blaming the poor for being manipulated is bad faith. And victim blaming is not an effective rallying strategy.
- Hey I represent the Bad Take Society, and I wanted to recognize you for the absolute worst take I've seen today.
  You can't really believe this right? Surely you're trolling or being sarcastic or something? I can't imagine a person so utterly cucked by big business is even real.
- If regulation was bad for the poor and good for the rich the rich and large corporations wouldn't try so hard to get rid of regulation.
  
  They're not trying to get rid of regulation though; they're trying to make sure that the regulation is in their favor. That's what regulatory capture is. They're going to be fine with regulations that help cement their place in society.
- Peak liberalism.

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