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I worked in a school with a pretty good amount of students whose families had probably not entered the country legally.
I had a student who would be out at the end of the day. Like, yeah, lots of kids are zonked out by the last hour, and the fake sleep to watch silent TikToks was ever popular.
But this girl was out. The bell would ring and I’d try to wake her up. Like starting with a “hey the bell just rang, time to go home.” Gently nudging her to get no response. This was routine.
She worked a full time job at night. She didn’t get to sleep. She worked at night, she went to high school during the day.
There have been times that I’ve had to work three jobs to survive as an adult, and I’ve worked my share of fifteen+ hour shifts with no OT because who needs labor laws?
But that girl had to work harder to survive than any billionaire I’ve met could even conceive of (and I fucked a billionaire for quite a while). She was a child. She should have been tired because she had stayed up all night playing video games or talking to her friends - she should not have been tired because she had to have a full time job to survive as a teenager in high school.
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We need to wipe them from existence.
Let every nation have a maximum wealth cap. 1000x the median national household income. Anything else is taxed at 100%. This cap in the US would be about $80 million today.
But if you're somehow in flagrant violation of this limit? If your wealth is the equivalent of over one billion 2025 dollars? Unless you quickly earn a multi-billion fortune and immediate give it away or spend it, having a net worth over $1 billion will be a felony. It will be a capital offense. Oh you're secretly billionaire, having hid your vast illegal fortune from the IRS? You are guilty of trying to amass a geopolitically-significant level of wealth. We're going to treat this as seriously as we would someone who attempts to build their own personal nuclear weapons. Really, you are guilty of a form of treason. Except instead of aiding a foreign nation, you were trying to become a threat to your nation yourself. And the traditional penalty for treason will be applied.
This is the world we could have. We could, if we wanted it badly enough, simply make being a billionaire a capital offense. Force them to give away or spend most everything they have. Either way, given or spent, wealth is distributed enough so that no individual can threaten the nation through their own personal wealth.
It is time we wiped billionaires off the face of the Earth. No individual should ever be allowed to become so wealthy that they become a threat to nation states.
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This really shows how little you actually understand about money. Let’s say this hypothetical played out. Where do you realistically think these taxes will end up? What do you think an economically monopolistic and highly supercharged government will get you? What will happen to the quality and ubiquity of goods and services available to you?
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Not op, and any Marxist feel free to step in, but 100% tax is technically communism. And I mean full final stage communism where money no longer exists. If income is taxed at 100%, then money no longer needs to exist since.. well you never really see it. The tax is spent on everything. You work if you can and everything that can be, is provided for you. Purely from an economic point of view. This is though an ideal and something that would need to be worked towards over long periods of time.
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You realize that a single grocery store with all of its stock is likely already worth more than 1000x median income? Who does the grocery have to be sold to to pay your 100% tax?
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It's sad that even the idea of a very high tax rate for even the top 0.1% is off the table. I really like the suggestion of capping net worth at $999 million and the government gets the rest.
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They shouldn't exist and people should stop glorifying them. This goes for the ceo of valve too.
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This goes for the ceo of valve too.
They gloat about overworking employees so they can remain short staffed
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They certainly do more ketamine though.
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Idk…they can afford a lot of viagra
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Being a billionaire is moral failing
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Can someone explain what the picture is from?
I know its megaman, but why?
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I will post this every time.
Billionaires have an unhealthy concentration of power, but they don't have a billion on their bank account. They own companies that are worth that much. They also aren't necessarily assholes.
Germany has many medium sized companies. They mostly treat their employees really well. Good pay, guaranteed jobs for their kids, etc. Many for sure are worth over a billion. And they are privately owned, so the owners are billionaires or close to it. So what is supposed to happen to those companies ownerships? Would it really be better if they are publicly owned?
I've come around to think that a wealth tax is necessary, but it's for sure complicated.
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I don't see how taxation changes the balance of power. Their power is not, as you said, the size of their bank account, but in their ownership of the company's assets. They also don't create the company's value with their work. The employees do.
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but they don’t have a billion on their bank account.
You may think having cash in your pockets is better because you are poor but having billions in companies and assets or owning the bank is better.
Germany has many medium sized companies. They mostly treat their employees really well.
Treating slaves slightly better does not make them free men.
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They also aren't necessarily assholes
Wrong buzzer noise
They've accumulated multiple orders of magnitude more money than anyone will ever need. That level of greed makes you an asshole by default
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wrong buzzer noise They don't have lots of "money", they have lot's of assets. In the US they can get loans at very favorable terms based on those assets. Which is how they avoid taxes. What the german rules for this are I don't know, but probably not the same.
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This assumes billionaires fell into money. Not true. The person with two jobs puts in more hours ongoing, but they either aren’t or don’t know how to actually work
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You have more in common with a begging homeless guy than a billionaire. Face it, there is a class divide and we need to do something about it.
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Alright man so you want me to satisfy your worldview and sit and point fingers with you at the billionaires for causing you to be where you are. Okay, cool! It’s their fault bro. They steal from you and keep you down.
Feel better? Now where are you?
You’re living a comforting lie if you allow yourself to keep repeating this dogma to yourself, and yet you are in no better of a place in the end.
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Yup, you are correct. Billionaires didn't fell into money, they stole money. From the poor.
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And how do you propose they stole it?
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How's that boot taste?
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surely that means you're a billionaire who knows how to actually work, then, right? since that's all it takes?
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Just get a better paying job is what you are saying? Or start a company, but remember that it needs to be a successful company?
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If someone wants to break the cycle and have a stab at a better life, then I do believe that yes, business and hard as hell work to make it happen is the cost. Most people would rather sit in comfort and point blame at some external figure for their misfortunes, yet they are in no better of a place in the end.
A better paying job can help certainly. And it can ease the pressure of being a lesser earner if treated responsibly. But in the end, working a job is still working for someone else and taking all your time to do so. Someone could run a business in a way that they create a full-time job for themselves and still end up here.
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How do you define work?
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There’s many facets, but some core tenets are to be highly focused, highly committed, and increasingly efficient in efforts to make a goal (in the right direction) happen.
The idea I’m thinking of explicitly here though is scaling this definition to hold increasing amounts of leverage over time. To put it simply, your continued highly focused, efficient, and effective work leads to a system where more work gets accomplished overall, and the time that you put in accomplishes much, much more.
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What billionaire didn't start out with a healthy infusion of cash? Sure, some turned millions into billions, but I don't know of any that didn't start with a line on several millions of investment available.
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• Oprah Winfrey • Howard Schultz • John Paul DeJoria • Ralph Lauren • Jan Koum • Shahid Khan • George Soros • Leonardo Del Vecchio
Now you know. You can look up their stories yourself. Now stop perpetuating the false dogma that somehow these people are special and unique and have something that you don’t. You can do it too, you just choose not to.
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