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‘I don’t think we should have billionaires’: mayor Zohran Mamdani in his own words
(www.theguardian.com)
Can the city raise billionaires taxes to a significant level?
this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2026
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politics
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simple solution, tax rate goes up by margins based on the standard deviation from the last year's income mean. for income more than one standard deviation above the mean, your tax rate for that margin is the percentile rank of your income compared to the last year's incomes. something like that would be fair. then mandate certain percentages be spent on education, welfare, etc. anything left over in the budget from the last year gets split evenly among all taxpayers.
That's actually a really simple and neat solution. My only worry is there's minor possibility that it could be abused, but not nearly as much as current systems are.
yeah, loans and hising income.overseas, stuff like that. guarantee 5% for the irs budget and regulate them to track down income tax schemes.
there would be some struggle, but things would level out after a couple of decades, and head towards real prosperity.
of course the idea is rough, you'd want narrow margins, and the ability shift it if there aren't enough high earners, and to apply the same scheme to corps too. all sorts of edges cases and fail points to consider.
a greed
Maybe a single person shouldn't have enough wealth to rival a country? It's almost like that gives them more power than the government that is supposed to keep them in check.
Individuals having the ability to operate private space programs is insane.
I also can't think of a more insane pick than to let that individual be Elon Musk. Really shows how billionaires fail their way to the top.
At the end of the day I think billionaires owning space companies undermines the pursuit of humans going into space and studying space in general as it is difficult enough to justify to the average person normally that space exploration is important but when you have the people leading the pursuit of it hoarding enough wealth to lift an astounding amount of people out of poverty, then the association of those people with space exploration threatens to make space exploration a target of populist austerity sentiment unfairly because by its very nature it is a loud thing that draws lots of attention.
There aren’t any good billionaires. They get rich leeching off everyone else’s work, suppressing wages and compensation, and avoiding taxes on their insane wealth. On top of that, a seemingly normal person is likely to become a complete PoS when they no longer have to face any consequences for being a PoS because of their wealth.
not saying shes a good one and i am not a fan, but i dont think taylor swift did that did she?
The way I see it, billionaires are best understood as an autonomous cancerous process of money hoarding money, the human being who is the billionaire at the center of it hardly has any agency, just raw and pure complicity in the growth of the cancer enveloping them in a replacement of their human identity with an approximation of one constructed from financial abstractions.
Billionaires think they are making more and more important choices as they get richer but what really is occurring is they are becoming less and less a relevant part of the money they hoard in terms of what actions that entity of money takes and why it does so.
To be a proud billionaire is to be a proud insect host for the paratisoid wasp that is wealth hoarding. It is a strange and disturbing ideology from the perspective of an insect to take pride in being the vessel for a process that will most certainly annihilate you from within.
They become very much like that kid in Twilight Zone's It's a Good Life
You can't even spend a billion dollars with the most ridiculous luxury items you can think of. Spending that much in a lifetime for things you would even remotely appreciate would feel like work.
The only difference having billions of dollars makes instead of only a few millions in a rich person's life is that it enables them to singlehandedly influence politics to their personal liking by buying politicians and media institutions. Which is something nobody should be allowed to do to begin with.
Meanwhile had that billion dollars been distributed to the worker class through fair wages or even to the consumers through fair prices it would have contributed to the economy and the well-being of everyone. Having to tax it to avoid seeing that money sit in some asshole's offshore bank account is a failure of the system to properly distribute wealth when it is generated to begin with and even that isn't being done right now.
The difference between 1 million and 1 billion is about 1 billion.
And the prediction is that we'll have a few trillionaires soon. The difference between 1 billion and 1 trillion is about 1 trillion.
Personally I'm hoping we see a couple multi trillionares. Rapidly followed by their assets depreciating into worthlessness and the USD becoming worth less than monopoly money.
A billion dollars buys you power. That kind of money gets you a seat at the table.
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So common-sense yet how many political leaders are brave enough to say it?
We need more politicians talking like this often and publicly, then actually working to make it reality.
They will find a way to fuck him, I'm certain of it. That's why we don't have more- they get rid of them via smear campaigns, primarying someone else, etc. It's a miracle anyone like him or Sanders ever gets elected with all the headwinds they have against them.
They’re more likely to defend the billionaires.
Billionaire math
Average USA billionaire has about $7b in wealth.
2026 * 365 = 739,490
$7,000,000,000 / 739,490 = $9,465.98
You would need to make $9k per day, for 2026 years, to catch up to the average billionaire wealth right now.
It’s estimated in 2026 that it would cost $37b to end world hunger until 2030.
Also note that Musk, Bezos, and other extreme billionaires are up to 100x of the average here ($700b for Musk). Who is making $900k per day?
This is not natural, it’s not rational, and it’s completely bullshit. You can come up with whatever distraction you want (“wealth & income aren’t the same”), but we should be taxing every dollar above $1b at 99% or higher.
30 years * 365 day = 10,950
$1,000,000,000 / 10,950 = $91,324.20
I could easily live off of $91k per DAY for 30 YEARS.
If you put these numbers against a human time scale we can understand, I don’t see the argument for this level of wealth, especially not as people go hungry, without clothes or food, and children die.
A bit of context, because $9k per day sounds "not too bad" to some. It means you have a yearly income 3.4 million a year, for 37 generations of working people.
Fuck yeah, math homie. Thank you.
A person cannot earn a billion dollars on his labor, it’s impossible. The only way one becomes a billionaire is by stealing from the ones who did the hard work and enriching yourself off their labor. Billionaires are leeches, every single one is a disease on humanity. There are no good billionaires, they should all be shot and have their assets redistributed.
the only way to make sure we don't have trillionaires is to make sure that we don't have billionaires.
"In his own words," the article title says, as if we should be shocked or upset by it.
How is this even a controversial opinion? They'll find a way to fuck him over for sure.
A better question is why does this opinion still matter? He already won the election, it isn't news unless his stance changes to something new which it hasn't.
He's absolutely right. Hoarding wealth is a mental illness, we just turn a blind eye to people who have it because what they're addicted to is what society runs on.
Get rid of hunger and billionaires or we eat them.
I totally agree with the no billionaire concept - but I don't even think that is the point of contention. I hate that we have been spinning on this for a decade. The real issue his HOW we do it from both a strategic and execution perspective
Do you implement changes slowly to minimize resistance? Do you do a lot at once to ensure changes don't stall? Do we have an income tax? How do we tax non-liquid assets? What if those assets are held outside the US? And so on...
Most people don't want billionaires. Let's shift the discussion so that is the assumption we are starting with - and now we just have to implement.
For starters: Stop allowing people to borrow money against securities. Most wealthy people live and invest on borrowed cash which compounds their wealth. It’s a strategy that only works if you have a lot of money.
Changes in tax laws need to happen. People using the borrowing strategy above pay very little income tax. They often get tax breaks for the interest on the loans. Their real income is capital gains which gets taxed at near poverty levels. Someone making 40,000-85,000USD gets a marginal tax rate of 22%. Capitals gains tax is 15%.
I love it. This should be the discussion.
agreed
Amen to that
If I ever win a lottery where I get more than a billion in one fell swoop, I'll give everything above a billion away...maybe have a presser stating agreement with the notion that billionaires should not be a thing.
If I ever win a lottery over $100M I'll giveaway everything above $100M away....
If I ever win a lottery over $10M I'll give away everything above $10M....
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