We need a maximum wealth cap. I want to see a world where you are literally not allowed to have a net worth over a certain amount. I believe capitalism has its place, but unconstrained capitalism leads to innumerable social ills. You want to let people get rich enough to provide an incentive to get educated, work hard, start businesses, and innovate. But you do not want enough wealth that individuals or small groups of individuals can become a threat to society. We don't allow individuals to own nuclear weapons, regardless of how virtuous they may be. We decided long ago that private ownership of nuclear weapons is simply too much power in the hands of one individual.
Yet with enough wealth, an individual can create human misery equivalent to a nuclear weapon. For example, Elon Musk has a net worth of $400 billion. If he chose to, could spend his fortune on destroying the lives of 400,000 people. He could select his victims based on whatever criteria he chose. And he could spend $1 million per person simply hiring lawyers to make their lives Hell. Target them with frivolous lawsuits. Even if he never won a case, he could drive them into bankruptcy through legal fees alone. Or, he could pick a city of a million people and dedicate his fortune to just ruining that city. He could deliberately fund the campaigns of the worst candidates imaginable, and offer them enormous fortunes to deliberately destroy that city. Wealth is power, and power is wealth. They are equivalent and interchangeable. If you want to have a democracy, you cannot have unrestricted wealth.
I would set the wealth cap for any nation at 1000x the median household income of that nation, averaged over a certain number of years. In the US, that would be at this time about $80 million. That is a level of wealth even the most skilled and high-paid of lawyers or physicians, if they worked til the grave, lived like a pauper, and invested everything else, would still struggle to reach by the time of their death. The only way people reach that level of wealth is by leveraging the labor of others. And it is a level of wealth far, far above the level where increasing wealth continues to meaningfully increase happiness. That level of wealth is only useful to a person if that person seeks to manipulate and control other human beings.
We need a maximum wealth cap. Beyond a certain level of wealth, everything is taxed at 100%. I think 1000x the median household income is a good place to set that level. And I think that is extremely generous. I don't care what the former billionaires do with their extra income that would put them above this level. They could simply retire when they hit the cap. They could donate it to charity. They could give it all to their extended families. They could give it to their employees. They could hold grand parties in their home city every year that rivaled the excesses of ancient Rome. They could spend it all on giant yachts. Ultimately, I don't care. The core problem is the concentration of wealth and power in a small number of individuals. Any method of spreading out that wealth will avoid this problem. Even if they just give it all to their extended families, it would still be for the best. If Elon Musk wants to divvy up his fortune to his 5,000 closest family and friends, so be it. Even if every one of them was as much of a bastard as he was, at least they'll have conflicting interests, and few of them will want to see anyone appointed dictator.
We need a maximum wealth cap. Forget taxing incomes. Forget a wealth tax. We need to drive a dagger into the heart of the evil that haunts our society. The world does not need billionaires. We can have the benefits of efficiency and innovation that come with a free market without letting wealth concentrate to the point of farce. We can provide an incentive for people to work and discover without allowing individuals to become a threat to nation states. Even if you believe in the myth of visionary capitalist geniuses, we don't need billionaires. If Musk is already capped out on wealth, the board of SpaceX can still hire him as CEO. He can still enjoy the social status as influence of being the CEO of SpaceX, he just has to dispose of that wealth each year however he chooses.
1000x the median household income. No one should be able to have a fortune larger than this.
How about this: anything over said wealth cap is automatically used to fund education, health initiatives, as well as fight poverty and homelessness.
Also, politicians need a wealth cap; ie no stock trading while in office, or for 5 years after leaving office. Divest all ties to any business they have before taking office. They must also be prohibited from taking any job that has any relation to the government for at least 5 years after leaving office. All politicians must pay for their own health insurance.
How about this: anything over said wealth cap is automatically used to fund education, health initiatives, as well as fight poverty and homelessness.
Honestly, I agree with the top comment, and is already implied by the top comment with the 100% tax. If they want to cash it out (before that assessment, or when they're close to it) and burn it in a big pile instead of giving it to anybody in tax or charity, let them do it. It'll still have a positive effect through deflation.
All politicians must pay for their own health insurance.
lol, no. Everybody gets free health insurance. The end. That's the way to go on that.
When people hit 10mil, they should prestiege. Give them a fancy title or add-on to their name, take all their wealth and tell them to do it again to hit the next prestiege. Easy fix, gives the 1% the sense of pride and accomplishment they deserve.
They've bootstrapped once, they can do it again.
New Game Plus but in real life? 😆
Or, he could pick a city of a million people and dedicate his fortune to just ruining that city. He could deliberately fund the campaigns of the worst candidates imaginable, and offer them enormous fortunes to deliberately destroy that city.
Or, he could pick a country of a few hundred million people and dedicate his fortune to just ruining that country. He could deliberately fund the campaigns of the worst candidates imaginable, and offer them enormous fortunes to deliberately destroy that country...
I'd also add that companies/government offices should not be permitted to pay any employee more than 100x the annual income of their lowest paid employee. If the owners/executives want to further enrich themselves, they must first enrich those whose labor they profit from.
Include stock incentives in that as well. If executives are offered stock packages in lieu of part of their pay to try to get around this rule, require that proportional offers must also be made to all other employees based on level of income.
I’d also add that companies/government offices should not be permitted to pay any employee more than 100x the annual income of their lowest paid employee.
Sadly this wouldn't be difficult to loophole. Today's corporations would simply create nested contracting companies. As in, top execs would be one company where the lowest paid employee is a highly compensated Executive VP and the highest the CEO. The next step down being Senior VP that reports to that Executive VP would be the highest paid employee in a separate company that is contracted to the first company housing the high execs. Repeat until you get to the person that waters the flowers in the lobby.
Here's a visual to show the relationships between these companies and the contract linkage:
Jesus Christ we just need you lads to not let them lynch minorities. Start there
Lets have a guillotine tax : after 1000x the average wealth you are taxed 1% of the wealth above that threshold yearly to avoid meeting with…
That means a growing business owner sells 1-2% of his stock yearly but still grow his wealth if the business likely grow 10%. The government fund education and health and new people can vote on those stocks.
No. The point is not to raise revenue. Concentrated wealth is, in and of itself, as damaging to society as theft, murder, pandemics, and many other crimes and social ills. If you have a community where 100 people each have a wealth of $100k, and you drop in one person with a wealth of $100 billion, you have markedly decreased the quality of life of everyone in that city. You haven't taken a penny from them, but you have harmed their lives grievously. That billionaire can now buy up every property that comes up for sale. That billionaire can now dominate local politics. The resources of the entire city skew to meet the whims of that one person.
Billionaires are dangerous. You don't try to keep them around and use them as a cash cow. You eliminate them. You have a hard maximum wealth cap, and anything above it is taxed 100%. It's not about raising revenue. It's a matter of public health and safety. Billionaires are that dangerous.
Lets have a guillotine tax
Tax the top 10% of their body?
We need to just ripoff good videogame balance. Videogames are regulated better than actual governments!
Video games are definitely not regulated well. Literal slot machines are rated E for everyone. I don't even mean a system that behaves like it, one of the NBA games had a literal slot machine. Alongside all the rest of the gambling that's typically 18+ but is consistently rated E or 3+.
When you reach the cap, do you get a sticker that you can put on your laptop? Because I think would be nice.
That seems fair
Realize. It's only a cap on net worth. You can still make as much money as you want. You just have to spend to keep your net worth below the cap. So this would actually result in an era of extremely visible wealth and splendor. You either donate to all sorts of charities. Or you build a comically large and pretentious dwelling. Or you cut giant checks to your thousands of closest relatives. Or you throw giant extravagant parties for absurdly large numbers of people. Do what you want with it, but your net worth cannot exceed that number. And that makes it so your compounding wealth can never rise to geopolitically-significant levels. You can live in absolute resplendent luxury; you just can't get so wealthy that you threaten to take over the place.
But I suppose, if you want a sticker, that would be fine. Or, we could gamify this. Imagine if we just started publishing the top ten taxpayers each year. Their would literally be an official high score that oligarchs could aim for.
Money is pretty much potential human energy. Much like your nuclear bomb example, no one would accept living with a neighbor that has a literal army in their backyard. The government wouldn't nor would anyone living near them. Yet having that much wealth is having that much "human potential energy" that could power an army. As we can already see with what the billionaires do, they inspire the labor of huge masses of people on their behalf to wreak havock on society. They buy entire media ecosystems to manipulate. No one should have that much power, it's literally dangerous for all of us.
I think that making a whole new system would be the way: there are too many loopholes and inconsistencies with legacy economics and rules that are not fit for a UBIfied society.
The first thing is to write up a sort of Constitution, that lays out economic rights. After that, I think using an Universal Ranked Income would be key to having the best of socialism with a dash of highly controlled capitalism. That latter bit is used for guiding the pricing of goods and services, but socialism should define the income of people, plus their minimum and maximum wealth. Capitalism should be driven by the circumstances of the everyday person, not the other way around.
I am thinking there can be five or so central "Obligate" ranks, which determines the income of a person, but the default rank everyone has gives a number of benefits that they will always have access to. By ensuring the survival and wellbeing of everyone, the role of money itself transforms - it isn't for survival, but rather to upgrade a lifestyle. If money is optional, that means that workers can freely strike or protest.
Further, the problem of inflation can be addressed by making income brackets absolute. A waiter on the East Coast makes just as much as her male counterpart on the West Coast. Everyone within a job class gets the same income, no matter their personal skill or connections. Everyone can be subject to a $100,000 income cap from all combined sources, so it would be relatively easy to keep millionaires and the like from existing. By having everyone relatively equal in the economy, prices should naturally reflect reality.
I have a stupider solution. Let's get individual blue states to pass laws making it a serious felony for anyone with a net worth over 10,000x the median national income to set foot in state lines. It is literally a felony to have a net worth over a certain amount. Like, Elon Musk sets foot in California? Bam! Instant 20 year mandatory minimum prison sentence.
We'll get blue states to pass laws effectively banishing the billionaires from our lands, like cockroaches fleeing from the light!
Unless every country agrees with that we won’t see that happening.
Plus appraising privately owned companies is a pretty hard thing to do and it’s unrealistic to do every year.
Just have a progressively increasing tax system and make it so the system doesn’t allow you to take personal loans with stock as collateral. The entire US is so loan based and built so people consume as much as possible. Everybody who choses to use a creditcard when a normal bankcard could have worked is increasing this issue.
The thing with not every country agreeing can be solved by cutting the countries economy off of the other countries. For example if all of the eu would do this if you hava an eu company you can just function normally inside the eu but if you youre outside the eu you have to take a lot of steps to start doing business that assure that you dont ransack the eu. Idk if something likenl this works but this is the best i could come up with.
You cannot let them spend the excess. It must be taxed away. You must plug all borrowing loopholes as well as all holding company loopholes.
wealth caps can be abolished over the years not unlike worker protections and billionaire taxation has been for a while now. plus in the current climate i doubt you could achieve that without some real work. thats because despite stuff like this, they are still our kings.
the only solution is abolishing private ownership of our means of production. don't let our means of building life as we know it in the hands of a few in the first place. no one should accumulate all that power.
It's great that my taxes are going up so they can have even more.
The trick was seeing what was going on before trying to "teach the dems a lesson". Now all you can do is ride the train and wait for endless lawsuits to playout with disingenuous participants
Nixon was already impeached by now
Now all you can do is ride the train and wait for endless lawsuits to playout with disingenuous participants
There is a lot more you can do. Stop being defeatist. This kind of attitude got us into the train wreck that is 21st. Century US in the first place. And not accepting the oligarchy presenting you two flavors of oligarchy to vote between is part of what needs to be changed.
there's a lot more you can do
It's nice that you listed exactly zero things to do. Go tell Musker you don't accept him running all branches of government and having your info on his private servers, see how that works out for you. I'm not making excuses to do nothing (or being defeatist) or telling people not to participate in politics, but the US has a king atm
Ok I stopped being a defeatist, now what?
I fucking love the new defeatist approach. What makes you think you can do anything for the next 4 years that isn’t just stopping them?
Answer: class warfare
We've been in a class war for the past few decades. But at least one of the classes doesn't know/care that it's happening.
That's right. They've been killing us. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq7SGQzeCEw
There's like 10 people in the entire fucking world making more than 500 mil a year.
More like 700 in the US alone.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/retirement/how-many-billionaires-and-millionaires-live-in-the-u-s/
Curious if they tried blocking taxation on anyone BELOW a certain income level.
Honestly, I really don't understand why a populist left party doesn't pursue this.
No tax on income below $100K and no tax on wealth, property and inheritance below $1M.
Or choose some other figures.
It seems like it would be a slam dunk to get voter support.
There are several very similar issues that are all slam dunks, and the fact that they aren't pursued by the Democrat party is proof that they are part of the same capitalist gang as the GOP. There is no voter that would be against banning lobbyist bribery from corporations, but that is never a campaign point. The few progressive voices that we have still insist that they have to work from within the Democrat party and there is simply no way that they will ever gain any foothold that way. I insist that right now, when the Democrat party is the most powerless, is the time for progressives to break off into their own party while they are seated in Congress. The Democrat Party can join or die.
No tax on income below $100K and no tax on wealth, property and inheritance below $1M.
With UBI, it is possible to have a flat tax where corporate and lowest personal tax rates are the same. Without payroll taxes. That means that employment can be tax free as long as business doesn't get a tax deduction, though they still can if they lose money in a year.
There can be surtaxes on incomes above $100k, but they would appear to be very small, when personal income taxes are hidden this way.
That's been my thoughts as well.
Eliminate income tax on anyone making less than, say 500,000 per year. Then aggressively tax wealth and those making more.
Is this a MASSIVE shake up? Absolutely! Would it likely be a bit messy? Definitely!
But we are at a point where such fundamental change is necessary
I think there is a pretty easy hack to making tax cuts unappealing to billionaires: pass a law that says each tax payer receives the exact same amount back.
Pass a 4 trillion dollar tax cut that works out to $4000/tax payer? Congrats, billionaires. Enjoy your 4k.
Every republican voted no. See whats happening here?
UBI with extra steps. I like it
$4000 in the U.S. might be enough for a shitty car
edit, don't get stuck adjusting the points on that trash carb. just fucking walk.
Regressive tax cuts! I love it!
What's going on is that you have FAFO'd that you should never have compromised with the GOP like we fucking told you
If you told them not to compromise with the GOP and still voted for them anyway, then there’s not much FAFO here. Unless of course, you’re trying to say that the FO part of their FA is a result of your not voting for them in protest- which in this case, you then would have to admit your responsibility in helping to install trump in the white hose.
I'm dizzy with this circular logic here.
Dems need to behave and act like an opposition party. Organize local outreach and fund down ticket candidates. Who any of us voted for no longer matters.
Organize and resist. Moving forward is how you win. Gloating about the worst possible outcome at the end of the world doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
If we don't get off our asses there won't be another chance to vote. It's not 2000, Trump isn't Bush. Our systems are being dismantled. If that's not a call to unifying action I don't know what is.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t believe that the super rich actually have a high conventional income normally. Most of their wealth would be from investments and stock.
A neat trick with that is that they can take out loans against their stock to buy superyachts, governments, and other toys and that’s not only not income, the interest is tax deductible. Plus there are other tricks like S Corps to shield them. So, this isn’t as useful as it would suggest (not that we shouldn’t tax >100m at 99% or something just to make the point.)
You're not wrong.
But keep cutting their taxes and they can have more conventional income in addition to everything else.
It's called "Buy, Borrow, Die", and that's exactly what they do. They buy or inherit assets, hold them indefinitely, because they have no monetary value until sold, and take out loans using those assets as collateral. Then they just pay the interest on the loans, and then play with the money. Southern slave owners were doing a similar thing before Emancipation. The lax rules of Southern banking even allowed them to take out multiple loans on a single slave.
Party of the oligarchy, soon to be the one true party thanks to systemic failure of education in this country.
Damn it’s almost as if they’re debating in bad faith because they get money from their wealthy constituents
They probably want to avoid to tax themselves?
According to Wikipedia at least, there are no members of Congress who even have a net worth over $500 million: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_members_of_the_United_States_Congress_by_wealth let alone an annual income that high.
So I think it's that they're beholden to their donors, as usual.
It's not like they want to be taxed in the incoming years anyway, or their families, or their friends and donors. At this point it's the principle what they defend.
Does anyone have a link to the proposed amendment and the vote on it?
I believe this is regarding the proposed budget by the House Budget Committee.
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Thieves in the bank offices
