Their tax rate isn’t the real issue. The fact that they extract that much wealth out of the labor and production of others is the real problem.
No human being should have a billion dollars. The workers who got you to your level of privilege and status should be paid based on their worth.
A boss that pays fairly would never become a billionaire, and their workers would live good lives being paid the actual value of their labor. Increased demand from increased household discretionary income would create a boom on the supply side.
But it will never happen, because billionaires own everything and will always manufacture consent. Democracy will die to thunderous applause.
Us poors (the dumb ones, because education will be forever castrated) will clap for the billionaires and lay our thrift store hand-me-down jackets over the curb so they can cross a puddle in the street lest they get a drop of water on their 100k elephant skin boots. It’s coming to a head
If we tax them they won’t be incentivized to make more money, thus depriving the market of needed jobs. /s
Wouldn’t they need to employ more people to make the same amount of money?
Just like we never should have bailed out corporations we should not worry about taxing corporations or the rich. The void will be filled and more rich people will be made. That’s how the “free market” works. If you do not let companies die innovation slows and the economy rots. Rich people may not be motivated but some poor people will be.
That there are even billionaires, let alone multi-billionaires. It’s an immoral, unethical system that fundamentally exploited labor that allowed for this.
That productivity has gone up but wages have remained stagnant should boil everyone’s blood. All the wealth stolen and sent upwards into fewer and fewer hands. Legalized theft by way of capitalism.
Great article. Nice to see an economist doing such important work. I don’t really understand finances. I snipped the parts of the article that helped me understand the finding/headling. There’s a great chart in the article of taxation differences since the 1960s too - staggering! Plutocracy in action!
Published in The New York Times with the headline “It’s Time to Tax the Billionaires,” Zucman’s analysis notes that billionaires pay so little in taxes relative to their vast fortunes because they “live off their wealth”—mostly in the form of stock holdings—rather than wages and salaries.
Stock gains aren’t currently taxed in the U.S. until the underlying asset is sold, leaving billionaires like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Tesla CEO Elon Musk—a pair frequently competing to be the single richest man on the planet—with very little taxable income.
“But they can still make eye-popping purchases by borrowing against their assets,” Zucman noted. “Mr. Musk, for example, used his shares in Tesla as collateral to rustle up around $13 billion in tax-free loans to put toward his acquisition of Twitter.”
We can tax registered securities. Stock holdings. We can take 5% or 50% of all outstanding shares, each and every year, and transfer them to IRS liquidators to be resold in small lots over time.
We can exempt the first $10 million held by a natural person, (which exempts about 99.5% of the populace from the securities tax) and establish a progressive tax schedule that causes the tax rate to exceed average gains when holding more than $100 million worth of securities.
BREAKING NEWS: Republican voters still learning about the Trump Era Tax Reform 8 years later!
