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.
Billionaires simply cannot exist without their money coming from the exploitation of the “lower classes”
But they won’t drive you to become homeless and stop paying you.
Over many generations
I’ve never liked how the pyramid is arranged, as if the ones on top are living the ‘right’ way, or are ‘better’ somehow.
It should be the other way around, with 8 billion people hanging to a ledge, trying to improve the state of the world, while roughly 6.5k are throwing a tantrum, desperately clinging to the ankles of the masses, threatening to drag everything into the void if they can’t get their way.
I mean you just made another metaphor but it’s more weird and doesn’t work
Think about it. Many of them have enough money to end world hunger, build affordable housing, give healthcare to a poor country, etc. But they choose not to. All evil is an active choice.
They mostly just choose to go to Epstein island it seems
Itt:
- reposses the wealth
- homelessness is on the homeless
Both are equally wrong. Homelessness has a great many causes and some people would struggle even with a home due to disorder that had them become homeless. It isn’t just a money issue.
The way Denmark and Sweden tackle the problem very successfully shows that combating homelessness is largely an issue of the right social policies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Finland And it actually saves money too
100% tax for money after $500 Million. Also, tax corporations the full salary of the worker that is replaced by AI/automation/robotics to fund universal basic income.
Start a little earlier, personal income above 10 million gets a 90% tax without loopholes, and no tax until the cost of living (At least until the government sorts out universal basic needs.)
I like the latter parts.
Many are homeless because of their choices or habits.
Shut the fuck up
The best way a billionaire could spend their money is to lobby politicians to tax the rich.
taylor isnt one of the good ones, she just had good pr, up until she started partying with magat influencer.
I’m a bit torn on the topic of entertainer billionaires and millionaires. Is it our opinion that they should just retire as soon as they hit 2 or 3 million, and end all contracts with royalties? It’s not really their fault, at that point, that they keep making money.
Likewise with people who bought stock shares before a big merger or bought crypto a decade ago which made their wealth more than decuple in value. They certainly didn’t start at the same low as the majority of people, but that’s also not really their fault.
Let’s say that there can be some, that it’s possible to be, a good billionaire but let’s all agree we should be taxing the fuck out of them.
Also, it’s always Taylor Swift.
I feel like this is seeing in action the thinking that led to the cultural revolution. “Sure, he’s just a chemistry teacher. But he’s one of the evil ones. He’s in the bad group. Into the labor camp!”
Fixing the awful problems with our society requires changing a lot of things, among them taxes and the power of the wealthy to distort government and public opinion. Demonizing Taylor Swift relentlessly will do fuck all.
Is it our opinion that they should just retire as soon as they hit 2 or 3 million, and end all contracts with royalties
Nope. They are in fact able to spend money to help those that need it, so you can pack away your ridiculous strawman.
It’s not really their fault, at that point, that they keep making money.
It’s their fault if they hoard vast riches rather than meaningfully contribute to the betterment of the people, though.
Let’s say that there can be some, that it’s possible to be, a good billionaire
ABSOLUTELY not. You don’t accidentally become a billionaire in a day. Yes become a billionaire by hoarding ridiculous amounts of money long past the point where you have enough for everything you could ever need.
That’s a lot of words to say “I didn’t understand the meme”
It’s your interpretation that the meme is intended to be sarcastic or ironic?
You don’t become a billionaire by hard work. You exploited a lot of people, you fucked over a lot of people. If they were a billionaire but literally everyone that worked for them was a multi-millionare I’d shut up. If I made $100,000 (of current USD) for 2,000 years… I wouldn’t have made a billion dollars.
Is it our opinion that they should just retire as soon as they hit 2 or 3 million, and end all contracts with royalties? It’s not really their fault, at that point, that they keep making money.
They don’t become billionaires off of royalties. Taylor Swift is selling tickets to her shows for hundreds or thousands of dollars. She could be paying her staff more, and charging her customers less, but she chooses not to, because she is greedy.
Ticketmaster actually takes the most from sales to her shows, but yes she specifically could be making better use of her money, such as not renting a super-yacht and not flying everywhere on a private plane.
whatabout Livenation/Ticketmaster
Lmao, you cited prices of tickets but the actual cause for those prices is somehow whataboutism?
I’ve seen this viewpoint a lot lately, and while I absolutely agree that tickets to her shows are expensive, when my wife bought tickets to the Eras Tour she was able to get them on the primary market for about $300 each for very good seats. The secondary scalping market was selling the same seats for between $2,000-$4,000 depending on the show, and people were buying them at that price. From a supply and demand perspective, Taylor Swift was absolutely selling those tickets below their true market value.
As for paying her crew more, she also paid out $197 million in bonuses to her crew across the tour. That’s about 10% of tour revenue in bonuses. Not profits, revenue. I’ve been tangentially involved in the entertainment industry since college and have multiple friends directly involved, and I’ve never heard of any other performer giving that much in bonuses to their crew.
Additionally, she donated to food pantries in every city she performed in. While the amounts she donated to each food pantry have not been released, people have worked out that it was likely at least $20k/pantry, based on the number of meals the pantries said they would be able to provide with it. That’s at least $1 million across all the cities, which is obviously not enough, but is far more than most other entertainers do.
I know she gets a lot of flack because she’s so visible in our culture, but in terms of how bad billionaires are, she’s significantly better than a lot of others who fly under the radar. There are over 3,000 billionaires today, according to Forbes, and I’m pretty certain most of them made their money through much worse methods than singing songs and selling overpriced merch to fans. 😛
in terms of how bad billionaires are, she’s significantly better than a lot of others
“He was a very gentle rapist”
“He was a very gentle rapist”
That’s not exactly a good-faith argument. You said she should pay her staff more and charge less for tickets. I provided a counterpoint to that.
Going back to the original question that you were asked, should she have retired when she started to approach $1 billion in net worth?
I will point out that the ownership rights to her music, which she purchased with the money she made from The Eras Tour and now owns completely, is probably worth close to $1 billion in valuation alone. Even if her entire liquid net worth was taxed from her, she’d be a billionaire on paper just by virtue of her music catalog & the value of her name.
Tax is the answer
I don’t think it’s that unwarranted to calculate that there’s a certain amount of money that you could realistically spend in a lifetime, and anything after that might as well be passed on to taxes and other charities/community initiatives to help everyone else.
It’s probably not something us common folk think about, but I’m certain that these people have thought about it at least once before, and their decision to keep the money for themselves is what makes them evil. There are no good billionaires because to reach that level you need to have made that decision long ago; the “good billionaires” are still millionaires.
That’s exactly the point I think anyone reasonable would make.
It’s not necessarily how they got the money, it’s that they keep it. If I won the lottery, and got a multi-billion dollar payout, I could wire most of that money to a DAF, tell it to distribute the money to 200 different charities I like, and it could be done within the week.
Keeping that much money is a choice. Continuing to spend it all on lavish expenses while the poor suffer is a personal choice, not one they’re forced to bear the consequences of due to their fame.
You know who is a good billionaire? Steve Wozniak.
Because he got his, more than he could ever need, and then he decided to stop. Since then he’s lived on his ranch and participated in tech outreach ever since
You could self publish and live in luxury at $100 million. You could keep making music, hell you could do it in complete creative freedom
Why would you want to become an avatar of wealth?
Power. At some point money stops being what it is to most people and becomes leverage to do things. The truly wealthy don’t have to worry about having the ability to buy things, they shift to being able to influence and control stuff. Now, that can certainly be used for good, so there’s the difference between the perceived good and bad billionaire.
Now that’s a totally different argument, but it’s bullshit
Being a billionaire means you cease to be a person. Your personal finances are a corporation that does nothing but take
Point to a good billionaire. I’ll point you to a PR firm and probably pictures at Epstein’s Island with half naked children
There are no good billionaires. That’s both prescrive and descriptive, it’s just not a real thing for a whole host of reasons
Mostly agreed, but if Woz had gone billionaire, he’d have more to give. I wouldn’t pursue such a life myself though.
You literally can’t be a billionaire and give it away. You’d start giving long before that if you ever would part with more than slivers of your dragon hoard
Well technically even if they buy a ranch and self publish all their own works with their own studios then their assets are still more welath than most people will ever earn.
The only way to truly get rid of wealth is to give it to somebody else.
So? The world isn’t fair. I don’t begrudge people who have more than me, frankly I’m way more disturbed that anyone has less than me
It’s fine to be rich. Especially if you actually earned it through your own efforts
It’s not fine to hoard so much it destroys the fucking world, and that’s what it means to be a billionaire
I begrudge people sitting on billions of dollars while others starve.
Yeah, and those people are destroying the world
If someone has ten million? Good for them. A hundred? Pushing it, but not so much that their mere existence means others must starve
A billion? No, fuck off, your sheer hoard kills people systematically
No one needs more than 5 million dollars. That’s enough for a comfortable life without laboring every again.
If they make a shit load of money doing concerts, that money needs to keep moving. Tax it so it can go into schools and infrastructure and such. They don’t need a mega yacht. People are starving and suffering from problems money would solve.
Wrong.
This always gets downvotes, so I’ll tell this Indian proverb again. Short version:
Rich guy feels for the beggars. Decides to travel the country and give every one he sees a Rupee. After 20-years of this philanthropy, he is now a beggar himself.
Sound noble? The rich man didn’t improve anyone’s life, only wasted his fortune.
When you acquire that sort of money, by hook or by crook, the only sane way to disburse it is through trusts, scholarships, endowments. Drop a million in the stock market, now you have a never-ending scholarship to give away. Rinse and repeat. The robber barons of old did this and built great things. Apparently they’re too selfish now days. 🤷🏻♂️
Also consider, when you’re filthy rich, you have criminals and other scum banging on your door nonstop. You literally have to hire someone to filter the noise. Bezo’s ex seems to have the idea. She seems to be doing solid charity work.
Lemmy: “Fuck her! She should splat it out all at once!”
Return to the proverb in the second paragraph.
And yes, taxation would solve most of these issues. But isn’t politics all about arguing who gets what money for what purposes? We’ve had rich people since the dawn of time, don’t see them magically going away. At least there’s a sane avenue for them doing good works. Dropping it all at once is a childish notion of how charitable wealth works.
Even if he saw literally everyone in India, that’s nowhere near a billion dollars. Money has severe diminishing marginal utility so he did in fact make a huge net improvement. A single rupee for a billion people is a very big deal indeed, but the human brain just rounds one rupee down to zero and a billion people down to a thousand.
Whoever told you that story is taking advantage of your difficulty with very small numbers and very large numbers.
That’s not an
Indian proverb
it’s just some random parable peddled online during the early 90s. Don’t talk shit.
lol. your solution is to invest in the system that creates that poverty so you can feel better when you “help” a handful of people while running the lives of everyone.
yhea, the solution isn’t for a rich person to fix things. it’s for the rich person who created that system and maintains it with violence to lose his head.
