I mean you could even take the bottom number and leave them with the top number and they could still live in unimaginable luxury forever. Or just take the lot because fuck em lol.
The difference between someone with $1000 and a million dollars is the same between a millionaire and billionaire.
The proportional difference is the same, i.e. the same number of orders of magnitude separate them, but in absolute terms, someone with $10B is closer in wealth to your or I than to Bezos (which, to be clear, does not mean we shouldn’t take it, merely that the height Bezos is at is unfathomable)
Most of their billions is ownership in companies they grew into what they are today. It’s not like they have billions to spend, it’s that their ownership is worth billions according to the market.
They could go to any bank and leverage that asset for a loan for more than everyone who posts on this platform will make in their lifetimes no problem. That is a nonsense talking point
True, but that ownership gives them access to very low interest loans that they then use as spending money and don’t have to pay taxes on it
While that may be technically true, is running defense for these people who would happily see you and everone you care about die if it would make them another buck really something you want to be doing?
You all realize they don’t have that money laying around to pay the IRS right? They own companies, those companies are worth that much. To pay that you would have to liquidate those companies. So no more Amazon, Tesla, Space X, etc…
If only there were some way to change the ownership of assets without converting the asset into currency
Don’t be a bootlicker or bot or idiot.
When they sell their shares to buy twitter or pay the tax man, those companies still exist. It just means that other people get to buy those shares and that’s a good thing, because that way those companies get owned by the public.
Tesla and SpaceX still exist even after Elon overpaid by some $30B for his Twitter adventure.
I would be happy to take taxes in the form of ownership of the company
here the tax genius of Henry the 8th comes into play “pay me my money or else”
when noblemen didn’t pay william the conqueror the taxes he felt were due on time he would boil them. The principle being that if the rich face consequences for breaking the law they obey.
I highly recommend you to read the paper billionare argument. The market can stand the liquidation of most of those companies without making them go bankrupt, we don’t want them to stop existing, just to make them smaller and not a threat to democracy.
For the whole scale of wealth I also recommend going through wealth shown to scale
Can billionaires liquidate their assets? Yes, it is theoretically possible
The real question is, who is going to buy the assets?
Let’s say we have a billionaire that owns a billion dollar company.
Could that billionaire sell all their shares, get a billion dollars in cash, and then give it away. Yes, it is possible.
But that billion dollars in cash has to come from somewhere. Either the citizens have to come with a billion dollars in cash or the government.
If the citizens spend a billion to buy the shares, then the government takes the billion in cash from the billionaire, then the government gives a billion back to the citizens. You just basically printed an extra billion dollars for the economy, which causes inflation. Because the citizens now have two billion in stocks and cash, compared to just one billion in cash.
Our fiat money system has flaws, one day it is going to crash.
But Besos’ 100+ billion in Amazon stock is money tied up outside of the economy until he sells.
Forcing him to sell and introduce that money into the economy has repercussions.
No, they’d just need to liquidate their share in those companies. Those shares would then get bought up by other people or by pension funds.
All they’d need to liquidate is part of their ownership in said companies. Companies themselves will be ok, don’t you worry your bleeding heart.
That’s the thing people don’t get. The ultra wealthy are wealthy on paper.
On an average years. All of us make more than Elon in wages.
You’re making it sound like the wealthy are rich in technicality only. Maybe the majority of their assets aren’t liquid but they’re still damn wealthy more than “on paper.”
And singling out wages as the only source of income to prove Elon isn’t “actually” wealthy is disingenuous at best.
What did Elon get paid, excluding stock options at companies he works for?
I bet he still makes more than me.
Tax billionaires until there are no more billionaires
It’s really insane that we legally treat the tenth billion dollars at the same level as a working persons house or car.
Everything is legally just “property”.
No, fuck that.
The law should protect the first million of every citizen with ferver. (and when we tackle wealth inequality, most people will have this level of wealth at the end of their working life. The fact that most currently don’t is due to inequality. )
Up until 100 million, it should be taxed at a reasonable level. Because at some level, it’s fair that people prefer watching Taylor Swift instead of me sing on a stage.
Above that it should be taxed heavily.
And above a billion, it should be just confiscated. As in, oopsie, our system malfunctioned, you weren’t supposed to end up with more wealth than what a thousand normal people would save up after a whole lifetime of work, so we are taking it back.
you weren’t supposed to end up with more wealth than what a thousand normal people would save up after a while lifetime of work
I actively try to cheat at every single-player game that I play. I still don’t think I’ve accumulated a billion anything other than self-criticisms. Even that’s questionable.
The problem is that this wealth is ownership in companies they made. If you start a company and it becomes too successful, Is it right that we really just forcefully take that ownership away from you? Who wants to start or keep a company in a country that takes away your company from you if it’s too successful?
“I won’t start a company because it may be worth over a billion one day and that would only leave me with hundreds of millions of dollars. That doesn’t seem worthwhile,” thought no one ever in your hypothetical.
Yes, I’m sure if Jeff Bezos were worth 10 billion dollars less he would have just said forget it I’ll flip burgers instead. I don’t think you need to rip their company from them, you just need to tax them.
True. But generally I think giant companies cause more systemic problems than they solve. So maybe we don’t really need them.
After we die back to a manageable level from climate change we should try to remember that and prohibit it happening again.
If the company becomes too successful, maybe there’s not just my effort that went into achieving that.
Somehow “you got paid, fuck off” is acceptable, but “you reaped the benefits, fuck off” is not.
All these people already sell the stock of their own companies to diversify their holdings or to buy a yacht, island or Twitter.
Selling stock on the market to pay the tax man is no different.
They still keep a billion dollars worth of stock, so its not like they end up poor.
And the government can “forcefully” take a third of a working mans income, which is way worse than taxing wealth. Go cry me a river.
Do billionaires actually have billions in real money sitting around? I’ve always thought the billions were in stocks and couldn’t be taxed until they cashed it out and they could technically lose everything if the stock price falls. That’s really fucked up if true
Nobody keeps that amount of cash. Even below a million, most people have most of their wealth in either real estate (their own house) or financial securities (stocks, ETFs, bonds).
Yet, we all gotta pay property tax and capital gains.
The billionaires just have loopholes that they use to never realize gains with loan schemes and trust funds.
The billionaires just have loopholes that they use to never realize gains with loan schemes and trust funds. <
Isnt that then bigger problem than generally tax the rich?
Is there a difference?
Closing loopholes = taxing the rich
If the tax code lost all the loopholes, there probably would be no billionaires.
That is actually the case. Billionaires aren’t swimming in a room full of cash and they don’t some some secret mega vault that holds $100 billion. Most of these guys are founders of very successful corporations, and so they naturally have a larger than average share. Bezos has most of his wealth in Amazon stocks, Zuckerberg in Meta, Musk in Tesla and SpaceX, Gates in Microsoft, and so on. Their wealth goes up and down depending on how well the company they’re most tied to is doing. In the US and most other places, stocks aren’t taxed until they’re sold. Once a transaction happens, there will be a tax. Usually tax rates go up with profits and income, and there are deductions for losses (to a degree). It’s an okay system, the issue is that it isn’t being enforced. Our system is full of loopholes that these billionaires exploit to pay way less than they should. But billionaires not paying taxes are nothing compared to corporations not paying ANY taxes on billions in annual profits. That’s what we should go after.
Just spitballing here.
As you said, right now, you only pay taxes on profits at the time stocks are sold. Which means I could gather billions in “wealth” and never cash in, thus never pay a single dollar in taxes.
Suppose we would change how taxes are paid on stock profits. What if you had to pay taxes on yearly profits every year? This way, you can cash out at any time, because the tax is already paid. It would work just like regular income tax. Deductions and losses on the market would still apply.
The issue with this idea is that it doesn’t reflect how stocks work. Think about it like this: Owning a stock is like owning a block of gold. The value of the gold can go up or down. One year the value of your gold block could double and another year it could half. However, the actual value of your gold won’t be determined until you actually sell it. The tax your proposing isn’t a tax on wealth, but rather a tax on exchange rates. Besides if the stocks aren’t cashed then no harm is done. That money is being used and invested by the business.
I don’t think the issue is with the things we tax. We have good tax policy on that. The issue is that the system is flawed because corporations keep lobbying for new loopholes. If you want to see billionaires and corporations pay their faire share then we have to go after these loopholes. There should absolutely zero reason why individuals like you and me pay more in taxes than corporations like Salesforce, Nike, and FedEx. I’m not even talking about percentages here, we literally pay a larger monetary amount than they do. Actually some of these corporations get rebates for their profits. These are the type of things we should go after. We have to dig through the tax code, find every loophole, and hound our politicians to close them… And oh, not open new ones.
Something doesn’t add up for me, maybe I’m missing it.
The stock market (as I understand it) works on the premise that you buy some shares of the company. That money goes to the company, and they use it to improve their tools/processes/etc, in order to better compete with the rest of the market and turn a higher profit. This in turn makes your shares worth more, because the company is worth more.
You’re saying people can get taxed yearly on the growth of the shares - okay, understood. But here’s my question:
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If the market dips this year (or the company has a bad year) and the stock owner doesn’t sell the shares, they are now worth less. Will the government reimburse the tax at the end of the year?
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If yes - then we fix nothing, right? We even make it worse, because now we have to track everyone’s stock. That’ll generate a lot of meaningless work.
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If no, then we’re taxing every yearly gain no matter how small, but still asking stock owners to take a risk and continue to own that stock. Who would ever want to invest anymore, when potential gains are taxed before you even have a chance to withdraw them (not to mention where do you come up with the money to pay taxes if you don’t sell the stocks) but losses are not compensated, and you still hold all the risk? Every stock exchange would crash and burn, with nobody investing anymore, but even worse - selling all stock before that first year runs out and they’re taxed for it. All companies that are publicly traded would basically be worthless overnight. It’d lead to another great depression, no?
I’m really not very understanding of this field, but I can’t find another option here that would actually end well. Am I missing something?
If we’re just talking fantasies that we wish America would make reality, I would like to see it be way harder for the filthy rich to manipulate the stock market instead of rewarding them with day trading exemptions and tax breaks make them pay more to day trade as their trades are more volatile to the markets, make it way easier for the poor to enter into stock ownership of real street name stocks without having to have in depth knowledge of trading, and cherry-on-top ban short selling outright and require locates for all trades.
Sad day when “billionaires should pay taxes” is considered a far left position.
Billionaires should pay a wealth tax is considered a far left position. Billionaires should pay an income tax is a position supported by all except maybe some tea party folk.
The problem is that stocks aren’t income. Stocks don’t have a value until you sell them. How do you tax that? One day someone can be worth billions and the next nothing if the stocks they own drop in value or the company goes bankrupt. I don’t know the solution but it’s not as easy as most people make it out to be.
Take the inverse of that and you’re getting closer to what actually needs to happen.
What a loser, stalking all the lefty subs just to shit on people they disagree with in the laziest possible fashion. JFC find a hobby.
