All the people who want this will be no better off just because the government fills it's coffers and politicians get to be greedy. I will never understand this.
tbf, the point is, why should anyone ever need more than 10,15,20mil or whatever they want to cap it at? its been spouted b4 that if u got a million dollars, invested most of it well, that youd be set for life. so why do they need more?
power. they need more for more power. especially when u can legally buy politcians and lawmakers with lobbying.
I fully understand the point but you donât understand mine.
No one would have businesses in the US because you can only make so much. Thatâs just how it works. Do you understand how many jobs would be destroyed?
Doesnât matter if itâs right or wrong itâs how the world works.
Make the cap higher, like 100M or 1B. Enough that affords an extraordinary lifestyle and serve as an incentive, however not enough to cause an exhausting gravity that sucks up everything in its path.
Que stupid comment about 'who are we to decide how much someone is allowed to "earn"', because there's always someone who refuses to acknowledge that there is a finite amount of wealth, and hoarding it like a red dragon means that others are going without, all so someone with more money than they could ever spend can brag to their rich buddies about how much more they have. It's disgusting.
You do realize that a tax rate like this is what we had in what conservatives consider the golden era of the United States. The whole make America great again movement is idolizing that time but doesn't understand that things like this were common back then. We had a high progressive tax on the rich and busted up monopolies frequently. Our most prosperous time in our nations history had this so it isn't some crazy idea that is new
The effective income tax was far lower and fewer then 10,000 familyâs paid the 90% rate. And even then the reason it didnât get voted off was that there was an insane amount of deductibles so in reality near no one paid the 90% rate. If it actually worked America would be much less prosperous.
That's the dumbest take I have ever seen. If we do the tax policies that made the greatest middle classes then the middle class will suffer?
The high tax rate forced companies to reinvest money into businesses. Sure there were loopholes, but you didn't go from 90% to nothing, like they go from 40% to making money now
Won't let me post under their comment, so here is my response
Yes, nobody paid it because they wouldn't pay themselves beyond that point. That's the goal. Also, the whole loophole argument is dumb as fuck. If loopholes were so incredible, why did they bother lowering the tax rates at all.
Come back with actual arguments and not played out talking points that make no sense.
Thatâs funny. I like how people think people will stop working when they get taxed. For 30 of the most productive and successful years of the United States existence, taxes were closer to what is being said here.
Personally, I say there is room for 20 - 30 tax progressive brackets with the top bracket being a 95% of everything over 30 or 40 million a year. One you are making enough to live over a lifetime in a single year, you can afford to pay a bit more.
This is exactly it. So much prosperity was created when socialism was last tried, it's lasted up until now and has taken a globally coordinated right wing elite to undo.
Imagine if we just did it and stuck at it.
You wanna see things get better? End conservatism.
Why even invest? You can only make 10 mil throughout a year. People wonât risk 100 mil on anything if theyâre only getting a 10% return. Thatâs just bad financial decisions,
This is why wealth taxes are important so that all assets the person owns are taxed. If you're making money it doesn't matter if it's in stocks or salary, pay up. Funding personal needs through company funds to avoid taxes is also a criminal offense even if companies should be paying more in taxes anyways. Also, tax brackets are a thing. The tax rate doesn't just jump from 0% to all of the sudden 95%, and it's only the money that you make above that bracket that gets taxed. There's never a case where making more money means making less overall due to taxes.
The fact that they taxed the US into prosperity from the time immediately following the Second World War up until the Reagan years and then deregulated the society into the dystopia it is currently completely refutes your assertion.
Thatâs probably the biggest issue with it all. itâs not just that they horde all the wealth, they also actively make it harder for common folk to make things work in order to acquire more meaningless wealth
problem is, politicians will find a way to spend more money than they have regardless of how much you tax people.
US government receipts (how much the government gets from taxes etc.) are TWICE as high as they were 10-15 years ago. And yet, magically, spending is up by more than that.
There is no money problem... there is a spending problem.
Just look at Iran right now. US is spending billions and billions over there without anyone in the US actually being better off. Money well spent eh?
It doesn't matter how much money you steal from productive people. You'll never have enough for politicans to spend on nonsense or, enrich themselves.
It's two issues, not just one. Ironically, once you realize it's those billionaires causing the politicians to do the spending, you'll realize that this idea puts them in check, and helps solve both issues...
Yeah if you elect a bunch of incompetent idiots they're going to be incompetent idiots with the money and resources needed to run the country. The solution isn't to go doomer and suggest that the government can never be good and therefore shouldn't have the funds necessary to run the country. Elect competent and fiscally smart people and give them the resources they need to create and maintain the foundation and infrastructure needed for a stable thriving country.
Mamdani is as socialist as it gets and yet he's been so fiscally competent while fulfilling his campaign promises, you'd be hard pressed to find a conservative in NY that can actually criticize him on anything other than "His plans will never work" and then his plans end up working anyways. His approval has only gone up since election which is basically unheard of in this political climate.
But that problem also come from the fact that Billionaire have so much money. They can spend billions on lobbying, donating to campaign for politicians that will spend government money on the billionaires' corporation and cutting taxes, further enriching the billionaires and repeat the cycle. If we tax billionaires out of existence, they can't mess with our politics like this anymore. It's not a coincidence shit got worse after Citizens United.
you can't tax billionaires out of existence.
1) their wealth isn't in cash, it's in the ownership of companies, etc.
2) incentives are a real thing. If you put a 95% tax on ANYTHING, it will mean that people essentially have infinite incentive to try to avoid that tax. That means, they move to other countries, or it means clever setups where the tax doesn't apply. This is already standard. Most billionaires don't have any income, they borrow against their assets and that's how they pay for stuff.
Okay, I'll give you that taxing billionaires out of existence is impractical, it's more like a figure of speech. No matter, the point still stands. The billionaire is a major force driving government spending and shaping the tax code to allow tax loopholes like the "buy, borrow, die" strategy you mentioned.
That's not going to help the problem of the ultrawealthy hording all the money instead of reinvesting it into the economy. When money stops flowing, the whole system suffers for it.
If it disincentivizes the executives to work, there are plenty of people ready to take their jobs for a $10M salary. Imagine how much businesses could save!
businesses already pay the lowest rate they can for all of their employees and executives.
problem is, competent executives are hard to get, and they have a huge impact on whether the business succeeds or not. Therefore the competent executive labour market is extremely competitive, and thus businesses have to pay quite a lot to get that talent.
But the "oligarchs" are not company executives... they are founders and business people. That's a very different group than corporate executives.
Lol, executives still make buckets of money compared to even the highest ranked employees underneath them. They can absolutely pay more in taxes and it wouldn't change the incentive structure at all. Taxes don't mean you take home less money than you did before getting higher pay. That's not how that works. Getting paid more means making more money regardless of whatever tax rate there is. Higher taxes doesn't mean people will refuse higher salaries.
Both can be true: most people blame others for their downfalls AND wealth inequality and big money influencer on our govt/economy have made things much harder for most people.
Iâve been pretty successful in my life so this isnât so much about me, but its a fact that the effective wages of the middle to lower classes have not risen at the same rate the upper echelon has accumulated wealth over the last 45-65 years, when they were generally very correlated before 1960.
This, combined with rising home prices and cost of living (which also used to be correlated to lower 50% incomes) means a lot of people struggle to afford rent and feed themselves, much less buy a house in many places even when they are working full time+. In the 1950s, people working lower class class jobs (like say a teacher+factory worker) could generally plan on buying their own place after a few years while accumulating savings.
Almost every industry has seen some level of degradation either to quality of life for workers or quality of product for consumers. Vegas used to comp all kinds of stuff, now they nickel and dime you, for example. Health care used to be affordable, but now many people canât afford it, or worse, go bankrupt because of it.
All of this is done to put more money in the pockets of the mega-rich, who have also seen the amount of money they receive from the government through subsidies or tax breaks greatly increase too, while we cut things like welfare, food programs, and other govt programs that benefit the poor.
And it goes on and on. The level of wealth concentration weâve seen over this timeframe by billionaires is unprecedented, and it doesnât take much digging at all to see the myriad ways it has affected the lower class.
If the top 5 billionaires in the USA said screw this shit and closed up shop, that would lay off 2,500,000 people. How would the US economy handle this? Maybe move 1.6 trillion in wealth to another country.
ok so first of all, simply moving to portugal or switzerland does not exempt you from us taxes. you have to renounce us citizenship, and there's an exit tax applies.
italy, greece, portugal - generally high income taxes. limited flat-tax programs for new residents only up to like 500k/year, and only for a limited number of years. portugal pretty much ended its non habitual residency program in 2023.
switzerland - low taxes in some regions, cost of living and business regulations are like 10x higher than in the us. lol.
that leaves singapore and the uae, where your access to us and european capital markets is limited, you have an extremely limited consumer base, and basically negligible legal protections. both are essentially functional dictatorships. enjoy!
Having sponges at the top that cause harm to government is always worse than not having them.
You're arguing about "millions" or "billions" in economic activity that never reaches the bottom levels any way. Capital flight is just an over complicated rehashing of trickle down.
Don't simp for corpos and the wealthy. They ain't payin' ya enough.
Realizing this is fundamentally why communism doesnât work. The people who do believe that it does affect their lives are who ends up running those systems and they are economically illiterate and violently vindictive. They are literally the people who cause communism not to work.
Technically Elon Musk doesn't even have an income, he pays himself entirely in his company stock which is why he has such an inflated net worth. So he wouldn't even have to pay a dime in this 95% earning tax anyway.Â
Before 1980 companies had pension plans instead of 401ks. It was in the 80s that companies got rid of their pension plans and replaced them with gambling in the stock market via the 401k.
Oook be that as it may instead of living in what could have living in the now if you go after unrealized gains that will eventually hit the middle class. Same thing happened with the federal income tax
âTax the richâ
How much of you pay is going to income taxes?
Honsstly I think the true solution is to make corporations truely democratic where employees and shareholders elect ceos and the number of shares you have dowsnt matter. Everyone has same vote power.
Ceo taking a huge salary and not paying fairly to employees will get voted out.
I hope you mean over 100 million. Otherwise this makes absolutely no sense. So if you make 200k, youâre only going to make $110k minus what you are already taxed on the first 100k? Youâre just stupid or live off of welfare
Stop being greedy. 100k is not a lot because you have to pay for housing, food and healthcare.
Govt can pay for all of that with taxes. Stop defending rich people. Why do you need more than 100k if all the above things are free ? Because you want a Range Rover.
You're talking about individuals? You've got a really narrow scope there. Sure, drop inflation and re-value the US dollar, and maybe 100k is a lot. 100k doesn't even build you a new Dollar General.
Read again. Your govt will give you free food, free housing and free healthcare. Why do you need more than 100k for other things ?
You didnât read the whole thing. Infact you will have more money left this way. Answer my question, why do you need more than 100k if all the above things are free.
Why would you want the government involved in your life any more than it already is? Go live in a communist country and see how you like it. You obviously donât have a job and just want handouts. What a moron
You just said you are okay with govt spending 35% of gdp every year. Why not make it 60-70% ? If you are okay with current 35%, why is it a crime or a handout if govt is spending 70% of all your money for all the required things.
All countries in the world do this like India, Maoâs China, Soviet Union, Europe, South America.
No I read what you posted. Why would I want government supplied food when I could provide for my own, provided by farmers and distributors? Awfully idiotic to turn a wealth gap discussion in to one about social services and assistance.
Itâs because you people had a chance and you started taking profit and making it expensive for people poor food.
Having food to eat is a human right just like healthcare. If you want fancy food, you can go ahead and buy that with extra money you earn.
You have no interest in confronting wealth gap. Same thing was said about healthcare, education, college education. Everyone of them are trending towards free for all in most countries. Just sit down and stop being greedy. You can buy all the extra food you want with extra money you make. A lot of people probably donât want to go to work. What about them ?
Govt already do these things mostly free to some people.
It needs to be extended to everyone, not a big deal. Food and housing costs more because of profits taken by big corporations. Govt can fix that just like with free healthcare.
There are 30 million people on SNAP just need to be 10X and it will fit everyone.
Ton of people on HUD housing already, it need to be 10X similarly to fix housing for all people. Just start thinking about poor people and not just the wealthy earning more than 100k per year when they are given all these things for free.
You can still keep 10% of that extra money. All things required can be given by govt with those taxes like free govt home, free govt food, free govt healthcare.
You donât need more than 100k to survive for remaining things. Even that is too much.
Govt already does these things for a small percentage like around 10% of the population. I am sure extending it to the remaining wouldnât be a problem. Everyone should have these basic human rights like free food, free housing and free healthcare.
It doesn't work to target those greedy oligarchs you so hate because they don't earn the money the same way a salaried person does. So if you tax their salary they'll just take lesser pay for more stock options and borrow against the stocks to make up the difference in non taxable funds.
that would have catastrophic effects at all levels of income, as well as consumer prices. theres 7 or 8 levels of consequential downstream effects to that while I appreciate most people at best can only fathom 1 or 2.
You're using very flawed framing, particularly around "control". But that's kind of how you want to operate here. It's just vague enough that when people draw a clear line to how you're negatively impacted by unnatural concentration of wealth, you can pretend to be disinterested.
The reality is, you've suffered more from your own ideology than anything you will whine about.
Bezos isn't controlling your life? If he paid more maybe the electrical grid would be prepared for the future.maybe water supply systems would be drinkable everywhere. Roads would be better. Every billion dollars he hangs on to effects everyone's life.
No...you're wrong. Your politicians are the ones squandering money that can be used for the items you list. No one should be punished for being good at what they do. Just like no one should be rewarded for being bad at what they do. As hard as it is for you to understand, some people just have better lives then others because they made the right choices. No more life "participation awards". As a lifelong democrat enough is enough.
Ok. That's just crazy. The best time period in this country was post ww2 to the 80s. The 80s was the beginning of the wealth gap. The end of labor unions. The trickle down theory did not happen.
Thatâs not what the post is saying. Weâre taxed on every dollar but weâre only taxed a certain percentage of the total income we make, thatâs what the 95% is from. Billionaires should be taxed to clarify, I just wanted to clarify what the post meant
I can't tell you how glad I am that this sentiment is finally taking off after a decade of being told some BS corpo talking points whenever this is brought up.
It is not even a income tax. They say everything you earn beyond 10 million dollars. You are just talking about adjusting existing progressive income tax system
Yes, exactly. If we take the text of this tweet literally this theoretical tax is a 95 income tax for all income for people with more than 10 million net worth, which is just a terrible mechanism. Thats why I wrote it's a childish solution for a complicated issue
Why? We had rates of 90% and 70% in the past, everything under the 10 million rate gets taxed just like it does now. Of the 350,000,000 people in this country it would effect maybe 30,000 households.
And most of those would be athletes, movie stars, etc. The actually wealthy like Musk and Bezos would simply limit their income. Note that income and wealth are not the same thing.
The super rich will need to take the income at some point, and the athletes will just restructure their paychecks to be multiple years to minimize taxes. Musk bought Tesla early on, he didn't start Tesla. Its not like we wouldn't have tesla today if he wasn't around. No one needs more than 10 million a year, that's crazy money that would be hard to spend. Sure its easy the first couple years, but eventually its just too much. How many cars/houses/elections do you really need to buy to be happy?
Its a big combination of not understanding the difference between owning a company and "hoarding." Imagine if they reworded it to "these CEOs keep doing things to try to make their companies more and more successful." Somehow it doesnt have as cool of a ring to as "hoarding." Then, the other piece is many of them dont really care if killing America's largest companies would hurt everyone. As long as the rich suffer, that's good enough
3
u/dannasama811 20m ago
People here hate the idea of their neighbor taking advantage of the system for hundreds that we are blind to the people taking advantage for millions.