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This is like literally all I want to see from politicians currently.
The DNC chair has been saying he wants to run a presidential candidate like Mamdani since Mamdani won his primary...
He probably thought it long before then, but he won't weigh in on any primary.
Which is more than we've got from the DNC in about 50 years...
That means they are getting scared of us. Keep up the pressure.
He's been saying that stuff for well over a decade when he was Minnesota's state chair....
The voting meme era of the DNC learned their lesson, probably back in 2020 even tho Biden squeaked by. They just didn't have a chance between 2017 and 2025 to vote for a chair, 2021 Biden got to pick like every incoming Dem president.
Which makes it a much better thing, we're not fighting the party anymore.
They won't put a finger on the scale for or against the oligarchs, and that's all the people ever need, a fair fight. We just can't fuck up the primary and let a neoliberal win, because if they go on to win the general then they get to name party chair.
There's a lot at stake next primary, that's why so many people are pushing for people to not vote in it.
Mamdani is the first politician that makes me hopeful that the US might make progress into being FOR THE PEOPLE. Not FOR THE BILLIONAIRES
Alright everyone. To anyone checking in to this please we must push the open source community-run operating systems, social media, apps, and web apps for people to switch to. Tell them to get others on board too after they get comfy
Online and in-person we must keep switching people over!! The less people on those corpo ones the better!!
To make it easier tell people to use legacy social media and people social media until people social media has a big enough audience of people using them
Please do not scroll away we must all keep getting people to move. Many of us are but the more the better!!
Not sure why so many downvotes on an openspurce social media platform. Folks must really like the small nature of Lemmy currently. The world's digital town squares shouldn't be owned by anyone, but by everyone!
‘I don’t think we should have billionaires’
Half of America’s trailer-park residents pass out because he dared to attack our beloved billionaires. “But what about when we become billionaires!?!”
The reason we have had to deal with this over the centuries is half our population is authoritarian. The idea that someone can punch up as a violation of the laws of man.
Because of what seems to be uniquely an American ideology: they too could be a billionaire someday, so therefore an attack against billionaires is an attack against them.
It's not an accident, but intentionally taught propaganda to keep the masses from ever banding together and rising up. Imagine if they'd told all the peasants in 18th century France that someday, they might become royalty too!
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.
Even worse than that, with just $100 million in a risk-free CD making 3% APY, one receives $3 million per year from interest alone.
Nevermind how to spend a billion dollars in one lifetime, how do you spend three million dollars in one year?
Any wealth above $100 million should be taxed at the end of each fiscal year. Nobody could reasonably need more than that. Of course, it would be complicated by carving out exceptions for real assets. Anyone with that much money would just buy a new yacht every September to avoid it, but that should still be taxed as capital gains.
it enables them to singlehandedly influence politics to their personal liking by buying politicians and media institutions.
Most conservative americans seem to believe "freedom" includes permitting the wealthy to rig the game in their own favor. They don't seem to consider the ways in which that infringes on everyone else's freedom.
That's why "anarcho-captialism" and even "libertarian-capitalism" are both farces. There's no room for liberty under plutocracy. Only the financial oligarchs have any degree of freedom in those systems, which is no better or different than an aristocracy, just without the overt nepotism (the nepotism becomes covert instead, by mislabelling generational wealth as a "meritocracy").
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.
I agree, but too many people only measure the success of an economy by top-down metrics such as GDP, gross revenue, stock market growth, etc. They ignore factors such as cost of living, wage stagnation, median income, RIFs, and the job market in general, social mobility, cost of healthcare and education, etc., leading to such buffoonery as claiming "unemployment is good for the economy" and "deflation is bad for the economy."
And then they come back with stupid arguments like "econ 101, bro." Classical economic theories are a soft science at best, arguably even a pseudoscience, and yet finance bros treat it like it's a hard science. They cite them like scripture, or like laws of physics, but they're not nearly so immutable or infallible. Especially when they focus solely on supply-side and neoliberal economics, which were clearly developed with an agenda.
Even Adam Smith gets quoted out of context, while ignoring the fact that he was opposed to many of the ideas his work is often used to rationalize.
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.
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 have a secret hope that they use it to fly the fuck away from earth forever
99.9999% tax rate beyond $10 million total worth would be a great start.
You're even harsher than I am, I would put it at 100M, but I'm totally down to negotiate.
I would even go up to 1B.
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.
To be honest I think it's weird to have a system where you give people a bunch of wealth only to then have the state later take it away. Why does the system work such that they get all that wealth to begin with?
Yes the problem lies in how the wealth is accumulated, its extracted from someone. If they all worked super hard for it nobody would have a problem. But the reality is, all workers get a paycut so the equity owner can chill and see his money rise.
Originally it was just a really high tax rate at the highest bracket. This accounted for a monetary system that is essentially gamed. In the US the government reversed this under the theory of trickle down economics. This allowed a large group of people to greatly grow their investments and their wealth accordingly.
Inheritance tax is used to recoup some of these lost taxes but it is a poor way to do it. The correction should be at the beginning not the end. I agree with you.
Why does the system work such that they get all that wealth to begin with?
Because capitalism is the best way to distribute resources (to the top).
Execute anyone over $10 million net worth
So common-sense yet how many political leaders are brave enough to say it?
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.
