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‘I don’t think we should have billionaires’: mayor Zohran Mamdani in his own words
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2026
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You wouldn't get much from that. These people usually don't have much income. Most of the richest CEOs famously earn "1 dollar a year", and people applaud that as honourable or something. It's not, it's a method to not just lower their income tax, it gives them massive tax breaks.
Most of the "wealth" of these people is in company shares. If the company's value goes up, the shares' value goes up, and so the CEO's "wealth" goes up, even if they're not actually getting any cash from it.
When they need to buy something, they just go to a bank and get a super easy loan for any amount of money, that they can pay from interest on their shares. But they won't even pay the capital gains tax, because they were poor, they had negative money because of the loan, so they get extra tax breaks on top of tax breaks.
It's super hard to tax these parasites in a way that actually makes them give back any meaningful amounts of money to the public...
Nothing you say is untrue. That is why I said total worth. You would of course make sure the policy specifically includes stock as this total worth. They would be forced to cash out to keep it under the allowable amount.
Not saying this is possible in our current political climate, but it is definitely possible to tax the wealthy. You just have to create the policy and enforce it. Close all the loopholes, prevent things like trusts or shell corporations to hide wealth, and aggressively police unrealized gains.
You can't tax "total worth".
Imagine this - you have an average paying job, right? You have an apartment, a mortgage, you can afford to go out with friends, visit the cinema, etc. Nothing obscene, just a comfortable life.
Your relative dies and you suddenly find yourself owning an extra house. Your "total worth" has now shot up significantly, therefore your tax rate has gone up. You can no longer afford your mortgage.
See where the problem is?
And then you have things like the 401k in the US, which is your retirement fund, but the money is invested in the stock market.
Or even your own investments. Imagine you invested $10 000 in Nvidia in 2020. You forgot about the money, but suddenly you get a horrendous tax requirement, because you're wealthy - your $10 000 has turned into $134 600. It has absolutely no bearing on how much spending money you have, but somehow you now have to pay increased tax?
You, refusing to sell your extra house.
You did a logical oopsie there, mate.
If you sell the house, you now have a bunch of extra cash, meaning you now jump into the higher tax bracket anyway, but you ALSO have to pay the income tax on the house. You're still fucked.
You can certainly exempt things like a primary residence and allow grace periods to sell off inheritance to pay the taxes.
Taxing anything over $10 million of worth at an effective 100% puts a cap on your total worth. This is completely possible, but obviously would be extremely unpopular amongst all wealthy people.
Everyone would still pay other taxes, but I have a feeling that it would no longer be necessary considering how much money a policy like this thought exercise would generate.
I have a feeling there would still be a lot of ways for the rich to dodge the taxes, while regular people would somehow bear the brunt of it.
But, yeah, exempting anything below a couple million worth AND the primary residence might be a way out. Although, you'd probably need to define what a "residence" is, as well as put a cap on that, because otherwise those bastards would start building whole city-scale complexes and calling them their "primary residence".