I like the use of the Monopoly man here. The creator of Monopoly was promoting Land Value Taxation, which has no deadweight loss and doesn't distort prices whatsoever.
this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2025
180 points (98.9% liked)
Progressive Politics
3484 readers
451 users here now
Welcome to Progressive Politics! A place for news updates and political discussion from a left perspective. Conservatives and centrists are welcome just try and keep it civil :)
(Sidebar still a work in progress post recommendations if you have them such as reading lists)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
And this would be an issue... because?
If you can't tax them on it anyway, why even have them around? They're a giant drain on the system.
That's alright, billionaires don't have to be here to pay back what they've stolen from society.
Correct. Ownership is just a name on a piece of paper anyway, whether that means ownership of money, or of businesses, or of assets, or of intellectual property. We need to start taxing them not just as people but also start taxing their products and services and brands and businesses and all the other things they own. This is why the US got so mad at Canada for trying to tax digital media services like Netflix. Politics and governments won't allow it, which means we first need to change our governments and our politics.
If we do succeed at trying to get them to pay us back, they will inevitably try to get around that too, by hiding their sneaky schemes to dodge our attempts to make them pay their way, but they'll start by punishing anyone who tries that by withdrawing services entirely. But they can't keep that up forever, especially if more and more countries start doing it, because we're the source of their money. And it makes things so much harder for them, and it's more work and the one thing they hate doing is work. We will always have to keep chasing them in a game of whack-a-mole, but this is a game of whack-a-mole that is not just fun but also very rewarding. And it's so much better to be chasing them rather than having them chasing us. We want them running scared from the angry mob, like they should be. Grab your torches and pitchforks and let's go make some billionaires scared.
Which confirms their parasitic nature.
If they stay, they take up more resources, block off resources for others and generally provide no benefit while also contributing nothing substantial to taxes that benefit everyone.
If they leave, their harms are reduced and society still has to cope without their taxes which were never being paid anyway.
If they stay, there are no benefits but more harms.
If they leave, there are no benefits but at least there are no more harms.
We don't need billionaires.
"If you remove the tapeworm, you won't have a tapeworm anymore"
The world's governments: .... but what would we do without tapeworms?
OK, I'm convinced. Put it back in!
A global government would solve a lot of problems, maybe even less than it caused?
Good
Please do
Good. Let them go exploit and impoverish a different country and leave mine the fuck alone.
that's like saying if we prosecute pedophiles, they will run away.
good
One idea might be to tax based on where the money is earned rather than by where the taxpayers live. If you move from Country A, but still make money from a business which operates in Country A, invest in Country A's stock market, and keep your money in Country A banks, you will be subject to Country A's taxes. But by all means, feel free to abandon your real estate holdings in Country A and move to Shittistan if that's more your drift.
This is how it works for regular income earning folks but yet the billionaires skate around those laws because it's an "investment" or whatever.
No, it is not.
Suppose I am a billionaire intent on paying as little in tax as possible. I own or control a huge company (or some other investments) whose profits I want to benefit from. Under current US tax laws, I could purchase a citizenship of a country with lenient tax laws, move there, and then renounce my American citizenship. All the shares of American companies I would sell to an American holding company, which I register in Delaware (which has very low corporate tax). That holding company would then be owned in full by a company which I register in a tax haven country like the Cayman Islands. I have the American company give ownership of things like the company's intellectual property to the holding company, which it leases back to the original company. When the original company makes profit, the holding company then charges the original company for use of intellectual property, equal to the amount of profit I want to take. This money then flows to the Cayman Islands company, free of tax as it is a business expense. The Cayman Islands company then pays this money to me as salary or as dividends, on which I pay an extremely low tax rate as a legal citizen of the tax haven country.
Under a system where the ultimate beneficial owner of money earned in the US is subject to tax, all this holding company nonsense would be meaningless because it would actually not evade any tax liability at all. This could be enforced by taxing the flow of money leaving the US (e.g. funds transferred from the American company to the Caymanian company would be taxed as if the Caymanian company were myself).
Dude, if you're even a lowly traveling consultant in the United States and you stay in one area (i.e., state) making money for a period of time (I want to say 30 days, perhaps continuous), you have to pay taxes in that locality.
My point was that billionaires skate around these rules for all of the reasons you are stating and then some. They should be subject to them just like everyone else is.
I guess we are in agreement then
I think we are all in agreement, because this is a very reasonable position. The only people who are not in agreement with this reasonable position are the governments who refuse to change the tax laws and insist it is too dangerous, too hard or too complicated, because lawmakers actually work for and are funded by the billionaires and not us. There is nothing hard or complicated about this. Dangerous, maybe, but I am tired of being threatened by these people who want us to think there are dangers. Where there is a will, there is a way. The government has absolutely no will to do this, though.
💯
To a certain extent, I'm sure. You can't say you would double your rent just because you like it here.
I already did! I moved to California instead of undesirable places with <50% its CoL/taxes. And rent/taxes are a much bigger percentage of my income than they are for the rich!
If billionaires leave and don't own the rental, then rent won't be increased to help them amass more wealth.