You can torture me as much as you like, I won’t talk.
That’s a good idea, I like that.
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.
Most of the “tax the rich” proposals are not even socialist, they are social democratic, still capitalist, meaning some billionaires would still exist. Not sure why they are so mad about, they couldn’t even possibly spend it all.
Not sure why they are so mad about, they couldn’t even possibly spend it all.
Because they’re addicted to money and addiction isn’t logical.
They won’t give in any easier than any random crackhead would hand over their last rock to you.
Unless you make sure to tighten loopholes, people can put their net worth in other legal entities like trusts, leave the country, or both.
Tighten the tax code first, then tax the rich. No point in those weirdos (ppl and companies) moving to Dubai or Switzerland or Ireland
That’s actually totally unnecessary for several reasons. The first of which is that super rich people don’t care where they live because they’re super rich and they can afford it. This is in comparison to middle class and poor people that actually do need to move if they can’t afford housing.
Also, and this is not very complicated, is the fact that businesses and companies are located in certain places and can’t easily move. The richest man in the world could move to Russia if he really wanted, but his companies won’t go with him. And he would be throwing away a lot of his current and future wealth. Or consider people who own real estate. What are they going to do? Sell all of their real estate that reduced prices and then move abroad? Sure they can do that but it would actually help the general public.
Of course we should also tighten the tax code but we don’t need to worry about the exact timing for the very basic reasons I’ve mentioned above.
It is also not true. Billionaires would still be billionaires even if they paid taxes.
They’re so unbelievably wealthy that they could pay for some of the US’s services on their own, and it’d only make a tiny dent in their pockets.
Here’s an incredible visualization that puts it in perspective.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250827001825/https://dbkrupp.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
$240.7 billion (wealth of Elon Musk)
And now he has over twice that.
That’s calculated value, it’s not taxed until sold so the book value of the shareholder will be the purchase price. It’s hard to tax stocks owned especially if they’re private and the price per share is not known until sold. In theory if you base it on the last sale price you could sell one share at 1 cent and then the whole business will be worth very little.
If you tax revenue it breaks business models that are mostly distribution. If you tax profit they do some accounting magic to have zero profit like Amazon which leaves very little. Capital gains tax means money will be less efficiently allocated and dividend tax makes businesses just do share buybacks.
I think land value tax is a great start and taxing the businesses net assets would also help in this case. Of course billionaires shouldn’t exist but it’s hard to wipe them out with taxes.
The US gdp is what, 3 trillion dollars per year? The population is around 300 million. And yet, there are billionaires. So for that to be in any way fair, there should be around 1000 people in the US.
Im basically asleep so im oretty sure my math is fucked, but the point is close enough
so your math is slightly off. with 3 trillion in GDP ($USD3,000,000,000,000) with 300 million people (300,000,000people) yields around 10 thousand $/person ($USD3,000,0
00,000,000/300,000,000people or $USD30,000/3people or $USD10,000/person) in economic activity generated, assuming it is spread equally. my estimate is sizeable larger. pulling actual figures: in 2023 US GDP was $27.36 trillion and population 334.9 million. If we were to round to estimate, i’d say $USD30 trillion and 300 million people). that estimation makes the math more like $USD100,000/person ($USD250,000/household). Actual numbers math comes out around $USD81,700/person ($USD204,300/household). since the median household income is (last period we had both measures is 2023, hence the choice of the year) $USD83,730 and per capita personal income is $USD57,937 (average household size was 2.5 people, so a per capita personal income of 57,937 would either yield a household income of $USD144,842.50/household {going the other way, $USD83,730/household/(2.5people/household) = $USD33,492/person} or exclude a lot of people for “reasons” it’s been way too long since i looked into economic demography i can only invent said reasons. but massive income inequality and theft could definitely skew things.)
Oh, but I want them to pay so much takes that they are down to $999 million at most.
$100,000,000. There’s literally nothing you could buy, that you should be able to buy as a private citizen, that costs that much.
“If you arrest pedophiles, there won’t be pedophiles anymore.”
Did someone say that seriously? Who knows, but if I take a screenshot of the imagined dialogue, it will feel real and that’s what’s important.
But people really argue this. The argument usually goes, “if you tax billionaires in a sufficiently rigorous way, then they will leave the country and their money will go elsewhere.”
Which ignores the fact that 1) They already attempt to pay zero taxes, 2) There is no point in having billionaires here if we can’t tax them properly and, 3) Billions of dollars can only be amassed on the back of rampant exploitation: billionaires shouldn’t exist in the first place.
I’m sorry but this sounds like someone just making up a strawman to fire back a snarky quip. I have literally never heard the top comment and interact with a lot of right wing people/commentary
In France, one of the arguments is that they will leave the country (if we nationalize what they left behind, good ridance) so depending on why there would be no more billionaires, it could be true in a sense.
Truth is, they would not flee this much
I suppose whether people leave also depends on a countries quality of life. From what I understand there’s the general consensus that people who can afford it and those who can make a living in another country, are the first to leave when there’s eg conflict/war/apocalypse. I’m not sure how much this affects billionaires or business owners, but assume it has at least a little effect.
Never heard of Ayn Rand then, I take it?
“If you give everyone healthcare then people will be able to get treatment”
Yeah we get that. Please like and subscribe.
I mean it’s kinda a foundational argument for free market capitalism. It may not be that exact wording, but it’s usually somewhere in the ball park of “if people aren’t rewarded for their work then they won’t work hard to be successful”. Usually it’s a response deployed against people questioning extravagant wealth or someone suggesting a higher tax.
