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We need the 91% top-tier tax bracket.
We also need capital gains taxed at the same (or greater) rate as income tax.
We also need a 1-2% annual tax on registered securities, payable not in dollars, but in shares of the security. No more than 1% of total-traded volume will consist of liquidated shares. Up to $10 million worth of securities will be exempt from this tax, if held by a natural person.
We need the 91% top-tier tax bracket.
Why stop there? A 91% top-tier tax bracket got us here. Let's make it 100% this time for good measure.
Abandoning the 91% top tier rate is what got us in this mess. "Trickle Down" actually worked when there were consequences to not spending your excess earnings.
91%, 100%, 150%, 10,000%, doesn't matter: nobody paid it. The point of it was to get people to avoid it. What they had to do to avoid the top-tier tax rate is what drove the economy.
My point was to de facto criminalize billionaires. The law would state you are not allowed to own this much. Full stop. People would very quickly see obscene wealth much more critically if it was a crime.
Frankly, I'd say start with anyone being valued over $1B, including stocks, locked funds, properties and international assets etc. should have everything over that $1B taken away and divided for proper causes benefitting the populace.
On top of that they yearly pay a fair percentage of their assessed value as taxes. Also, no interest free loans for these people, nor drowning their possessions in loans to companies or whatnot. Stocks in companies are both directly taxed and under yearly taxation.
The US already taxes it's citizens abroad so yhe above shouldn't be too hard to implement.
But then what incentives would the creators of the soul-crushing-machines have to invent the next soul-crushing-machine???
Adding to that, why not have capital gains tax be progressive tax brackets too? That way you don't disencentivize poorer people investing and have high rates for wealthy people.
And 30% inheritance tax
Progressive inheritance tax capped at some reasonable value.
Inheritance tax doesn't even apply for the first $3M
Great. Make that the cap.
We also need capital gains taxed at the same (or greater) rate as income tax.
Can we amend that so the poors are a bit exempt? That could be useful to uplift people.
Income tax is already progressive, with "the poors" already exempt. Treating cap gains the same as income tax would exempt "the poors" in the same way.
Taxing cap gains at a lower rate than income is an insult to labor.
Income tax is already progressive
Lol. Clearly you aren't in the US, where income tax doesn't mean shit to the wealthy.
Billionaires are the worst in so many ways
Billionaires are leeches of the society. They shouldn’t exist.
Unlike leeches, the ecosystem won’t collapse if they go extinct. Billionaires are artificial leeches.
I'll bet they taste delicious slow roasted and with some Sweet Baby Ray's.
I would never consume a billionaire. just let them carbonize on the spit.
True, you don't want that evil somehow living on inside of you.
If only we could shoot them out of orbit, towards the sun.
Well, there is this one billionaire that has the technology for that...
I would like to point out that this is broadly worse than what Deus Ex (2001) predicted 2052 would be like.
Leo Gold:
Number One: In 1945, corporations paid 50% of federal taxes; now they pay about 5%. Number Two: In 1900, 90% of Americans were self employed; now it's about 2%... It's called consolidation; strengthen governments and corporations, weaken individuals. With taxes, this can be done imperceptibly over time."
Also, obligatory:
That's terror.
EDIT:
Oh right, here are the last gas prices from a post apocalyptic California that was utterly destroyed some time before 2052 (and I guess after 2027), by the San Andreas fault just completely cutting loose.
All of the horror. None of the augments.
Well, if you played the game back then, you could say that in a way, your vision was augmented.
The game also famously, but essentially accidentally, predicted 9/11, before it happened.
In 2052 world, its a minor lore note, an anecodote in some random datacube or email or something.
That Elon Musk for a long time, had JC as his Twitter avatar... shows you that he is basically the embodiment of the 'missing the point' meme, he thinks he's JC, when he is closer to a much, much lamer and cringey version of Bob Page, with a Zyme problem.
Taxes are deflationary, taking money out of the economy. Billionaires avoid taxes, part of how they push up inflation.
Billionaires constantly try to consolidate power, to push profits up, and hence prices. Billionaires and the wealth disparity they create, are both inflationary. Helping the rich get richer at the cost of everyone else.
Every country which runs and has the sovereign right to print its own currency (eg. Their currency isn't pegged to another) has enough money (as long as inflation hasn't gone hyper). Taxes aren't where money comes from. We spend first, and collect taxes as an after thought (which is why deficits are possible)... "We spent money we don't have" doesn't actually make sense, of course we had it to spend... We control the supply of money, we have an infinite amount (inflation is the constraint on spending, so why are we helping billionaires raise inflation?).
The only reason for taxes is to track spending so we can keep Neoliberal rating agencies like S&P and Moodies happy. It's just to please international Neoliberals, so we can say "profits are up"... When we should be measuring outcomes of government. Not how well government pleasured the wealthy and thus, pubished the poor.
...and most of these ratings agencies are from countries who have fucked their economies anyways. It's all a hypocritical facade to pay the rich. We're at french revolution levels of wealth disparity.
The real economics are those of helping citizens to be and do more. What we have now is a sham and should be replaced.
“Gee why was everything cheaper in the 50s, 60s, 70s? how could a family of 4 afford a single family home and two cars on a single income? Why was XYZ product of a higher quality? Why did worker productivity keep up with wages?”
There’s the obvious answer to this question “we taxed the rich so hard they couldn’t use their wealth to consolidate power and influence, and preventing them for redirecting resources from improving people’s standard of living to deranged self aggrandizing projects.”
And the dumbass mental gymnastics answers “Guberment regulation infringing on the free market, women have some rights now, LGBTQ people aren’t oppressed enough anymore, people don’t go to church enough, THE DEEP STATE!, and (((international finance))).” Funny how all those arguments have a bunch of well funded think tanks and unprofitable privately owned media organizations making arguments for them.
Nobody paid the 91% tax rate. Anyone who found themselves over the top tier chose to spend their excess money. If they were $10,000 into the top tier, they could elect to pay $9100 in taxes, or spend $10,000 on payroll and other deductible expenses. They could keep $900, or $10,000 worth of products and services purchased from the open market.
Nobody chose to keep the $900.
because the new deal didn't actually address the root problem of billionaires owning the means of production.
that's where the real power is, and why just taxing them isn't fixing the issue long term.
But taxes slow their accumulation of power.
And you're right. We need both.
it does, it also helps us within the confines of the capitalist system. what it doesn't do is solve the problem, they will always worm their way out of taxes or allowing us basic humanities.
So let's eat them?
Murder them?
Kill them?
Don’t eat shit, mulch the rich.
I agree with the anti-billionaire sentiment.
But the headline is written in a misleading way. I don’t know why we’re sharing a low quality substack with 2 likes when there are plenty of higher quality pieces that come to this conclusion.
“Study:” in the headline implies that they are repeating what a single study said. It’s the journalistic convention for using university press releases. In this case they are not doing that. But compiling a bunch of sources (none of which are academic as far as I can tell) and coming to their own conclusions. Nothing wrong with that. But it makes the title misleading.
Secondly in their own first couple paragraphs they show that the 0% while existing in some cases is not what usually happens. The truer “in practice” average is 3.4% or 8.2% depending on how you calculate.
So we can all agree that’s shocking and needs to be changed. But no point in making misleading headlines because it just makes us seem less serious when arguing about this to people who need to be convinced.
Agreed
I would like want to add to that that I want wealth caps. I don't care how lucky you are, nobody should own or control a lot of wealth, there isn't a single example of that not being drenched in abuse
After 10 million, any and all extra income over that should go 100% to taxes
It will honestly divide income, it will take away crazy amounts of power from the psychopaths, it will give governments the income to sustain free education, free healthcare, universal basic income even.
Give me 10 million dollar wealth caps world wide and it will solve the majority of world problems were facing now.
But all the money they donate to political campaigns totally doesn't influence policy.
This is a return to the 60s that I can get behind.
Ironically, this is how we really make America great again.
Fun fact: In 1966, the Beatles released "Taxman", protesting the 95% tax rate imposed by the Labour government. It was their first political song. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxman
I know that Lemmy is always on the side of poor, starving artists. So when you demand higher taxes, bear in mind that only one of the four Beatles lived long enough to become a billionaire.
When the King of Rock, Elvis Presley, died in 1977, he only had a wealth of $5 million. Today, poor Taylor Swift is only a billionaire, and we're all appalled how little she gets from streaming. Think about how terrible it would be, if all that money went to taxes.
Yet, Elvis Presley managed to have his jet, and a gaudy house, and as many peanut butter hamburgers as he wanted. Just like Swift (maybe minus the hamburgers). I wonder how she does it.
We dont need to tax the rich its time for disembowelment, eating, guillotine and corpse wagons.
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
I think it would take nothing less than a radical overhaul of society to fix this snowballing of power.
Having it so that individuals can only run a single company within a niche, and capping annual income to an absolute amount would be a very basic start. IMO, it would take even more to make such restrictions stick.
Corporations having wealth and asset caps based on their employee headcount & incomes, requiring that leaders have to be annually voted into their positions by their workers, having their income voted by said workers, and so on.
Our economics are made out of inherited junk and bubblegum. A clean sheet redesign is needed.
I really don't think it would take a radical overhaul. Personal income and wealth caps coupled to income and wealth floors would go a long way. Corporate caps would require a bit more complex calculations, but that's the cost of doing business with a liability shield.
If you mean a social overhaul is necessary to address the intrinsic tendency of capitalism towards accumulation and clustering of both capital and power (i.e., it necessarily bends towards authoritarianism, often fascism), then, yeah, I concur. We would need to do away with capitalism and the idea that the purpose of "wealth" is to increase wealth to the benefit of the initial holders of the wealth.
And everyone with no hope takes the easily available addictive drugs indirectly supplied by the same billionaires.
So do I understand correctly that the top income tax bracket is 0% today? Or is this just another shitty ragebait headline. Oligarchs shouldn’t exist, but almost none of their money comes from wages or capital gains anyways, so any polemics about income tax are mostly meaningless for this issue. Any type of wealth tax is fairly trivial to evade at that level.
The only thing that would work would be to enforce existing anti fraud laws to prevent oligarchs from gaining power in the first place, as well as convicting them for the white collar crimes they commit open daylight, and use fines as a way to get some of the absurd concentration of wealth out of the system.
Any type of wealth tax is fairly trivial to evade at that level.
Factually incorrect. Taxing a billionaire's wealth wouldn't be dissimilar from what we already do with property taxes. All it requires is an assessment and we already do that as a matter of policy in most states.
Secondly, none of this is meaningless. Billionaires are the single biggest problem for most of the human race, and they are the biggest drivers behind climate change. Holding them accountable is essential.
Turn the spigots back on!