this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2026
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[–] TheDemonBuer@lemmy.world 9 points 2 days ago (4 children)

More and more I'm thinking we really need a wealth tax. Not because the government needs the money - the government literally makes their own money, they can create as much of it as they want - but because I think a cap on wealth is necessary for social cohesion. Plus, once people get over a certain level of wealth, the chances of it seriously negatively affecting them psychologically seem to go up considerably. Many, if not most, billionaires are just weird, creepy, disturbed wackos. I don't think it's good for them or for society.

I certainly wouldn't be opposed to capping individual wealth at $999 million. Another option might be to set the maximum at a percentage of GDP, maybe something like 0.01% of GDP. I think that would put the cap at just over $3 billion. That's still an astronomical amount of money, and there would still be billionaires but not the mega, stupid billionaires.

[–] Buffalox@lemmy.world 17 points 1 day ago (2 children)

a cap on wealth is necessary for social cohesion.

Billionaires are undermining democracy, which already is a huge problem and against the values of a country that wants to be democratic.
Yes most billionaires end up wackos, which makes it even worse that they have so much power.
IMO you can add an extra zero to the decimal places to make it 300 million. 1 billion is IMO already to much.
But I wouldn't make it a hard limit, just incrementally bigger tax percentage the higher you get.

[–] yoshemitzu@startrek.website 2 points 1 day ago

I wouldn't make it a hard limit, just incrementally bigger tax percentage the higher you get

That's a fun idea. Like yeah it's possible for you to become the first trillionaire, but you'll be getting taxed at 99.999%. It almost encourages innovation, in a way, because now billionaires have to figure out how to keep all that money despite incredible taxation. Only the people with truly novel, math-bending ways of generating value would be able to be that wealthy (or perhaps more likely, just people exploiting loopholes I haven't thought of...)

[–] TheDemonBuer@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

IMO you can add an extra zero to the decimal places to make it 300 million.

Sounds good to me.

[–] Olhonestjim@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

No, it has to be much lower than that. People need to feel like that kind of wealth is utterly unobtainable and shameful.

[–] grue@lemmy.world 9 points 1 day ago

More and more I'm thinking we really need a wealth tax. Not because the government needs the money - the government literally makes their own money, they can create as much of it as they want - but because I think a cap on wealth is necessary for social cohesion.

This is literally what the inheritance tax is for, so there's precedent.

Of course, they piss and moan about that too, but I don't give a shit and neither should anyone else.

[–] JustinTheGM@ttrpg.network 1 points 1 day ago

Even $1,000,000,001 is too much. I'd probably cap it somewhere closer to $10m, if we have to use money.