He’s absolutely right. Billionaires should not exist.
Wealth concentration is bad for everyone but the wealthy. https://inequality.org/facts/
IDK even they don’t seem happy. Elon seems fucking miserable. I mean, I don’t feel bad for them, but knowing that literally everyone thinks the world would be a better place without you can’t feel great.
And one of the reasons why there’s so much more wealth inequality now is what conservatives have done to the tax code. Take a loot at this chart on the highest tax bracket over time.
Nobody asked me, but I agree with him.
Do you think we should have billionaires?
Now he can add “Endorsed by PoopSpiderman” on his campaign website.
Not a common endorsement.
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Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund manager who has backed President Donald Trump in the past, on Thursday pledged to use his money to bankroll a challenger to Mamdani in the general election.
Case in point.
And how did he get those billions? How many peoples necks did he have to step on to climb his way up. It’s not so much what you do with your billions, it’s how you got them that makes you evil. The only exception to this is probably Bezos ex wife, maybe.
“Employees are the rungs on the ladder of success. Don’t hesitate to step on them.” -Rule of acquisition #211
Grand Nagus Rom: “We invented elevators for a reason.”
She was working for a hedge fund when she met him and they were married for 26 years. She may have given away $19 billion of her fortune, but her net worth is still $36 billion, the same as the original divorce settlement.
lol. I don’t think she is as innocent as you make it seem 😂
Hence the maybe at the end. I always use qualifiers MOST of the time so I can weasel out of any statement I make.
So you just make sweeping nonsense statements, maybe.
This might induce me to donate to Mamdani’s campaign. I live in fucking Illinois btw.
I absolutely am
I live nowhere near NYC and I donated.
Tbf, that’s one of the better states on workers rights issues.
Honestly, even if you think billionaires should exist, it’s still the most logical action for Mamdani to oppose them as billionaires will do everything to stop him.
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They should have one of these next to each city-owned grocery store.
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BBQ?
Wholly agreed. There are no ethical billionaires. Fight me.
Nope! What you said is perfectly acceptable in polite society and in fact I agree. We should hang out sometime maybe.
guillotine and chill?
Jesus said it best
It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.
No.
ethics should mean infants are innocent until they perform actions, yet if the infants parents were billionaires and died the infant would be a billionaire without performing any action.
Imagine life was a game. You lived for 2025 years. You worked 260 days / year. You made the median US salary.
You would need to relive that process 3,145 times to match an Oligarch.
That amount of wealth is unethical while humanity suffers. No one can really fathom “1b dollars.”
Oooooh! He said the thing!
Damnit Zohran… I can only get sooo hard…
Good thing he’s pro-universal healthcare, I’ll need to get this hardon medically drained.
He’s, ahem, straining the limits of my turgidity.
At this rate im gonna have to see my doctor.
Mamdani added in his response: “I have already had to start to get used to, get used to the fact that the president will talk about how I look, how I sound, where I’m from, who I am, ultimately, because he wants to distract from what I’m fighting for, and I’m fighting for the very working people that he ran a campaign to empower, that he has since then betrayed.”
Goddamn, this reads like a response that came from a real socialist playbook. Don’t take the bait on the culture war bullshit, say it’s distraction from helping workers. Wow.
His messaging is laser fucking focused
This needs to become the mainstream opinion. Billionaires and ultra wealthy shouldn’t exist. There is no trickling down or any of that stolen wealth coming back into the hands of average people.
Greed needs to be treated as an addiction just like alcoholism or gambling.
The rich can do it without civil or criminal consequence?
As in it’s a mental illness.
Imagine if billionaires paid their fair share of taxes. Municipalities would fight to get them to live in their area
They will just live in other countries if being a billionaire is illegal.
It doesn’t matter where they live. If the US exerts pressure on whatever country the money is in they can and would get that money back. They’re somehow able to freeze the accounts of Russian oligarchs so they’s no reason to believe they couldn’t do it with Bezo as well.
That’s the neat thing, they won’t. It’s pretty easy to apply a high tax on moving away. In fact the USA of all places do just that.
Also, what do rich people possess? Assets. Physical assets. A big part of that is real estate, owned privately or by companies they own. There’s no taking that with you. They can sell their assets and try to take the money with them, but that means the society they leave gets it’s assets back.
That’s fine, billionaires do not add to an economy, they drain it. So if they leave it will remove a useless burden on the economy and whatever country is dumb enough to take them in can deal with them instead. Meanwhile, if they are pulling money from our country we can find ways to tax it and prevent them from draining our resources (and yes, money is a resource like any other).
Lol, no. This is a strawman argument. Billionaires will absolutely not give up their precious connections and real estate to live on a private island or move away. Even if 50% would do that (lmao never) the tax would still be a huge benefit. Even without the money, not having these greedsacks meddling with local politics and laws would be a dream.
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Hopefully the corrupt ones go to China or Vietnam because they’re not afraid to give corrupt billionaires the death penalty.
As long as they stop siphoning money from us, I’m fine with that
They can live where ever they want. The assets are here and we can tax them here.
Here in the UK 78% of people support a 2% wealth tax on net assets worth more than £10 million yet our spineless neoliberal government is more focused on cutting disability benefits and bombing starving children.
Can’t they just get around a tax like that by borrowing cash (for their lifestyle) and using their assets as collateral?
Wealth includes assets. If you can borrow against it, it can be taxed.
In fact, taxing the assets makes borrowing against them even more expensive.
Wealth includes assets. If you can borrow against it, it can be taxed.
I’m actually against a wealth tax, but think one of the only ways that taking their unrealized assets can work is if we do as you suggest.
If you own stock in something, taxing unrealized gains isn’t good. it’s not like were going to pay them for unrealized losses.
But we MUST stop them from being able to actualize those unrealized gains without taxing them like when they use their unrealized assets as collateral. It’s like a loophole for the ultra wealthy where they can just borrow against their assets for their entire life without paying taxes on it.
And really… who cares if this way might be more expensive to do, they’re rich as fuck, and can pay for it as part of that tax. Also assets can be very nebulous and hard to know what they actually have. But when you see that new house, new yacht, donation to a SPAC or whatever, the IRS can come knocking and be like how’d you pay for that.
It will lead to more dark money. It’s very hard to accurately measure a persons net worth when their financials aren’t just a house and an IRA like the average person. Especially if they don’t want you to see it. You’ll never be able to implement that tax in a consistent way.
Yes, that’s the current situation, thanks for pointing that out. I don’t think people understand how much tax evasion they do, for instance as of 2016 there was £36 TRILLION in offshore tax havens, UK GDP is £25 trillion for comparison. Murder in the first degree can get you prison for life, but letting countless people die from poverty related issues at home while getting rich off of starving and killing kids overseas makes you a billionaire. Why do we accept that?
law is inherently flawed and easily manipulated by clever sociopaths. chaotic good FTW. let there be guillotines and morally sound citizens and nothing more.
Laws are written to be manipulated, that’s why European culture uses laws and words as weapons, for European culture loves words to be twisted. This is why the “truth” always changes in the European mind, look no further than their use of “treaties” or “truces” or their fad-politics. Whether it’s far-right capitalism or left-wing socialism, I fail to see the difference when they both rely on “production at all costs” at the expense of our natural world and turning our habitable environments into gravel pits and uranium mines all in the name of “productivity.” The global south, or “third world”, and natural peoples will all be capitalist workerbees or socialist proletarian under the European death-cult of “productivity” as they call it; I call it a culture of suicide with a medieval religious devotion to their faith except now it’s shifted to science, technology, and money - just another example of how the truth always changes. They’re incapable of any real thought, incapable of simply appreciating the magic of nature to admire a lake or mountain or people in being, and most of all they cannot listen unless the world around them is despiritualized into mechanical models and dead symbols written on dead leaves.
To me I don’t see the shift towards left-wing, even the death of capitalism, to be revolutionary. It may be yet another revolution for the European mind, but to the rest of the world it’s merely a continuation. In order for humanity to live in harmony with nature, European culture must die.
Thing is, that ability to evade that is intentionally built in. It has to be. We have KYC laws here and anything over 10K is tracked.
The fact that the ultrawealthy are able to manipulate money in ways so that it’s not tracked and/or not taxed has to be by design.
Huh, curious, I could swear we Germans (and most other countries I’m sure) used to do just that until a glorious neoliberal government came along and abolished the tax.
That’s why accountants and auditors exist.
If you’re suggesting that it shouldn’t be done because its too hard – it’s not. That’s just a dumb excuse.
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You know what? I don’t want it peaceful. They’ve stomped on people there entire lives, forced others to rely on social programs, dig through trash, and work to the bone.
I want a comeuppance, I want blood, and I want it to be that of every fucking billionaires’ head rolling off the guillotine
And you’ll have it. They have enough money to pay an army and you bet they will use that to stop you from taking their wealth. Understand that they have rationalized their immense wealth to the point where they trully believe they deserve it. You can see it sometimes in how they consider themselves hard working geniuses, or decide God somewhat chose them to be ridiculously rich.
Yes, they will resort to violence (but not themselves, of course). But they won’t need to get their hands too dirty.
They’ll fund campaigns, they’ll own law enforcements and will wield it against the people, meanwhile they’ll buy propaganda to convince as many people as they can it’s all for the best. That’s easy to predict because they already do exactly that.
Violent repression of demonstrations, violence and intimidation against activists and journalists. Owning of all the mainstream medias and a large share of the less mainstream ones. All of that is slowly normalized.
Agree. They had a choice. They shunned taxes and played at fake philanthropy. They have now dropped that and started playing like they are god. They are fragile mortals that need a reminder of revolution, I would like to see it done the French way but any way should do.
You have to ask yourself: Is fulfilling that desire for retribution worth the lives of the millions of vulnerable people who would be killed due to lack of medical treatment, potable water, food, etc?
???
You mean the ones who are already sick and dying from those exact things, caused by the greed of the aforementioned?
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But could this really be done? As far as I’ve understood, billionaires typically don’t have a billion liquidized and ready for spending. Rather, their value is distributed in ownership of several companies. How would the 100% taxes on ownership in companies be applied?
Don’t get me wrong, I would love to see it work, but I feel like it’s a lot more complicated than stated. And if a good way of applying those taxes would be introduced, I’m sure the billionaires would either find new ways to make the money untouchable or personally move to a country with looser tax laws.
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That’s what conservatives always claim. Most of them won’t move and even if they do, good riddance. Simply tax their wealth beforehand.
My experience is from Norway where the taxes on the rich is balancing on a line. A lot of rich Norwegians have already moved to Switzerland to avoid annual taxes on their wealth. I would expect to see something similar if USA introduced reasonable taxes, unfortunately.
Than they have to sell their stock or property to either not be above the threshold or to liquidate it. It’s not untouchable.
or, here me out, they intentionally tank their assets value just before its value gets measured
.
Voila, no more billionaires
… in the country with the tax. They’ll just live somewhere else.
People have to stop believing that wealthy people will leave instantly once they begin getting taxed. This is just a lie.
They are wealthy because of their assets and connections. They have houses, appartements, offices and factories. They have a network of influencer in the country they live in, in the city they live in ! They have a big family, kids. It’s actually harder for these people to move out than you and I.
The money is already escaping. They use any loopholes (fiscal optimization they call it) to pay much lower tax than anyone else proportionally.
They won’t leave ! Let the tax begin ! The loopholes have to be eliminated so that they cannot convert their wealth to escape tax artificially.
Let them, they don’t generate anything.
I’m getting downvoted like i i care they’d leave, just that it’s not gonna bring tax revenue.
They are not doing it even today. If they are businessmen, they are not going to leave their businesses just because they are being taxed.
Fine by me, they weren’t paying taxes anyway.
Ok great.
Even the billionaires would be better off without billinaires. It their relative ranking was the same they would still have more money than they could spend but it would now come with clean air, water, land, better infrastructure, a healthier world, happier people to interact with.
That’s what capitalism is supposed to do. fReE lAbOuR
What do the billionaires buy that pollutes nature that much?
The pollution comes from millions of cars, chemicals for products like clothing and intense agriculture so that everybody can eat some form of meat.
Billionaires allow us to feel helpless while we could agree with our neighbors to reduce the ecological footprint of society to a minimum.
The pollution comes from millions of cars, an industry forced on the people through decades of lobbying and bribery to eliminate the possibility of free public transportation, so that they could become richer. The pollution comes from products for clothing that are made cheaply as possible - at the cost of the environment - and extreme amounts of ad campaigns that purposefully change contemporary fashion ideals in order to keep fast turnaround on product and maximize profit so that they can become richer. Agriculture is corrupted by the rich so that it gets government subsidies in addition to maximizing profits by basing crop choice on profitability instead of sustainability, disregarding native species and planting unfathomably large fields of monocultures, squeezing the farmers themselves and funneling all the money to agri-business execs, i.e. they can become richer. Then they run ad campaigns saying ‘everyone needs to do their part to save the environment!’ which is clearly bullshit when the system itself is made to maximize profit, and not to maximize caring for the earth. Polluting the earth is profitable, and the profits flow ever upward.
So we wait until billionaires change?
Private jets, for one.
Also yachts.
Im not saying that. Its the wealth inequality that stunts society. People don’t have the resources to make decisions based on whats best and have to deal with what they can afford. Lack of infrastructure and regulators results in more pollution.
People don’t have the resources to make decisions based on whats best
People have still more than many others on the world. Illegal immigrants have less, and they have to pay off their traffickers.
This mindset is a prison. The people have the power, they are just sure that they don’t have it. A beautiful display of mind control.
I would argue the trap is in the other way. Your reply reminds me a lot of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6vjaimSK4E . You may think you know how good the average american has it but you may not understand stand the unique challenges of various americans in many different situations. Wealth disparity is the trap and the only way toward freedom is a society were it is not so extreme.
and the only way toward freedom is a society were it is not so extreme.
That is not a way. Who should create the society?
OP argued that there are no resources left. Well, then that’s the way till the robots make humans unnecessary.
If people want to get out, they have to do something. Don’t work harder, consume smarter. Not the poorest have to start but those who make two vacations per year. Spend that money wisely and grow from there.
Thanks for the song.
we should create such a society with taxation and regularion. resources are finite but we have them left and I agree we have to use them wisely. I often point out that we would get in excess of a barrels worth of oil for every one spent in the heyday of the oil age but now we just get a few but wind/solar/etc lets us recoup way more energy per barrel again.
we should create such a society
The problem is that nobody knows how.
Yes! Let’s stop this modern day slavery.
I’m not against people having money, but to have a thousand times more than most people can make in their entire lifetime is just taking it too far. There should be a cap after which you pay 90% tax or something
Check the progressive taxation we had in the US after WW2 when, barring the racism/sexism/otherisms, the US actually thrived and single income families could manage being middle class, and owning a nice home. Reagan fucked us, but if it hadn’t been him it would have been another terrible regressive.
All these conservative lapdogs continue to fuck us all with their single issue voting and sticking it to the libs.
I’m pretty judgy right now so imo anybody voting for GOP candidates in the US is either gullible, brainwashed, semi/fully mentally deficient, or is so racist or scared of other people’s peepees that they will vote against their own best interests.
Problem is billionaires don’t make “income” and it’s quite difficult to even know what they own, let alone how to tax something like unrealized gains on stock holdings that they are using as leverage to get loans
At some point, somebody convinced people that unrealized gains were not actually income because you don’t know for sure that you’d make that money, and I think that was a bad idea. Maybe unrealized gains aren’t 1:1 the same thing as income, but the calculations of an income equivalent aren’t going to be complicated.
Somehow property taxes are okay, though, even though we haven’t realized the gains!
This exactly. At some threshold of worth, you should get taxed an amount based on your worth that will be big enough to force you to realize some gains in order to pay it.
The issue with realizing the gains is that you have to relinquish control of your company bit by bit. However, you could have the company (which you likely control) give out dividends, or you could use the stock as collateral for a loan. Or just pay yourself a bigger salary.
This is a good question: is it okay for you as a person to control a company that has grown that large? Maybe nudging people to give up control of entities that large is a good side effect.
Give up control to whom? Some megacorp with infinite money would just buy a majority stake (often referred to as a hostile takeover) and wind up owning everything to an even larger extent than today.
Try being rich you fucking idiot
It’s a joke y’all, damn. Just pull up on your boots or whatever it is these rich people did to turn on the money
Fucking peasant, has even tried buying some money?
Lol this guy gets it
If only there was an entire federal agency whose sole job would be to track them down and tax them.
You can have a person be full-time managing the billionaire’s case, still a very strong net win.
And even if hypothetically the cost of tracking their wealth outpaced the income generated by the tax, it’s still a societal positive by reducing inequality, which is the root of most problems.
you don’t tax the income. you tax luxury expenditure.
if they commission a yacht, they pay 200% tax on that. if they charter a jet, they pay 500% tax on that spend. if they retain a jet, they pay 800% tax on all its expenses from hangar parking to servicing to everything else.
the tax on any car above a guideline value should increase 1% for every 1% increase in value of the car. say, you pay 1% tax for a 1000 dollar car, 50% for a 1500 dollar car, 100% for a 2000 dollar car, 300% for a 4000 dollar car and so on. and not just on the sticker price, but on every service attached to that vehicle (insurance, maintenance, etc.) for its life.
similarly for luxury hotels, clothing, jewellery, watches, golf and ski resorts, and marriages in venice.
Yeah, cuz people obviously don’t store wealth in bank accounts or investment properties and/or shell corporations… That’s why the Caymans are famous for their shellfish and local hospitality, and Bezos’ ex-wife didn’t end up getting much cash in their divorce.
It’s also fortunate that these idiots haven’t figured out that they could probably have a (few) companies that hold things (excuse my rough terminology for this concept I just now came up with) maybe even purchase them too - like jets, cars, maybe yachts even - and not have to pay any of those taxes!
Man, i hope word doesn’t get out about this!
My favorite tax policy hack for that last part is for the government to require a billionaire to formally declare the value of each of their assets (for purposes of calculating taxes)… with the stipulation that the government can choose to buy such an asset from the billionaire at the declared value at any time.
Gets to market rate real quick.
I’m not against people having money
It’s been an archaic and backwards system for managing collective wealth for over a century.
We’re living in an era of unprecedented surpluses. But we’re still gatekeeping the most rudimentary essentials of daily life behind a paywall.
I am absolutely against people having money. All money causes is grief, anxiety, and depravation.
thousand times
Oh buddy that’s peanuts
the average person could probably earn $100,000,000 if they invested their money well and used all opportunities to make more. lawyers median annual wage is $145,760 which gets fairly close within 80 years of 4% interest.
the average person could probably earn $100,000,000 if they invested their money well and used all opportunities to make more.
Is this counting like, if I invested instead of using that money for rent and food??
yes, just grow your own on your farm your ancestors left you
Why not just have a cap? 90% still means that they can further accumulate wealth, and taxes means they will try to dodge them.
They used to dodge 90% taxes by reinvesting in their workers and their company’s reputation. That way the company would last a hundred years and continue to pay out your family for generations, and all you’ve gotta do is hire people to keep it running.
Fuck that, 99.99% and they’d still have more than we could earn in a lifetime, fuck that and fuck them.
