fair share?

Most of their billions is ownership in companies they grew into what they are today. It's not like they have billions to spend, it's that their ownership is worth billions according to the market.

no more Amazon, Tesla, Space X, etc...

Oh no! Anyway, so how can we make this happen, like, yesterday?

Don't be a bootlicker or bot or idiot.

When they sell their shares to buy twitter or pay the tax man, those companies still exist. It just means that other people get to buy those shares and that's a good thing, because that way those companies get owned by the public.

Tesla and SpaceX still exist even after Elon overpaid by some $30B for his Twitter adventure.

Brings a tear to my eye, I tells ya

You don't have to liquidate. Giving governments around the world more of a direct say in these international companies would be good.

Don't threaten me with a good time

I would be happy to take taxes in the form of ownership of the company

here the tax genius of Henry the 8th comes into play "pay me my money or else"

when noblemen didn't pay william the conqueror the taxes he felt were due on time he would boil them. The principle being that if the rich face consequences for breaking the law they obey.

Well they are public companies bar space x so. Just redistribute those shares.

I highly recommend you to read the paper billionare argument. The market can stand the liquidation of most of those companies without making them go bankrupt, we don't want them to stop existing, just to make them smaller and not a threat to democracy.

For the whole scale of wealth I also recommend going through wealth shown to scale

No, they'd just need to liquidate their share in those companies. Those shares would then get bought up by other people or by pension funds.

All they’d need to liquidate is part of their ownership in said companies. Companies themselves will be ok, don’t you worry your bleeding heart.

That’s the thing people don’t get. The ultra wealthy are wealthy on paper.

On an average years. All of us make more than Elon in wages.

you weren't supposed to end up with more wealth than what a thousand normal people would save up after a while lifetime of work

I actively try to cheat at every single-player game that I play. I still don't think I've accumulated a billion anything other than self-criticisms. Even that's questionable.

I'm cool with numbers past a billion being asymptotically possible. Let the money-addicts keep chasing N+1 dollars, if each +1 puts ten times more money into public funding.

It's actually taxes less if it's earned from investments

At a billion you get a small plaque that says 'yay you won capitalism', they name a park bench after you and you replay from scratch.

The problem is that this wealth is ownership in companies they made. If you start a company and it becomes too successful, Is it right that we really just forcefully take that ownership away from you? Who wants to start or keep a company in a country that takes away your company from you if it's too successful?

The billionaires just have loopholes that they use to never realize gains with loan schemes and trust funds. <

Isnt that then bigger problem than generally tax the rich?

Just spitballing here.

As you said, right now, you only pay taxes on profits at the time stocks are sold. Which means I could gather billions in "wealth" and never cash in, thus never pay a single dollar in taxes.

Suppose we would change how taxes are paid on stock profits. What if you had to pay taxes on yearly profits every year? This way, you can cash out at any time, because the tax is already paid. It would work just like regular income tax. Deductions and losses on the market would still apply.

How do they have cash on hand to do stuff then?

That!... That's literally what I meant!!

What a loser, stalking all the lefty subs just to shit on people they disagree with in the laziest possible fashion. JFC find a hobby.

Tbh you would have to create a really good anti trust taskforce full of people that lost everything to these humongous companies, people whose stores got undercut and etc.

I say this because the only way Colombia fought against Escobar's control of the police was by having a task force full of people whose family or friends had died to the cartel.

This said, yhe defenetly, not one entity that has that much power should be there without being voted in. How would you feel if the gov owned the internet, cuz that doesn't sound good to me. Soo yhe between voting for whomever controls most of the internet or having better anti trust laws and regulating forces idk

Not with a wealth tax. I'd say just break up the companies and share prices will adjust to reflect.

I don't agree with that. I'm personally completely fine with millionaires or perhaps even 100 millions. Like there should be a social safety net at the bottom there should be a social safety limit at the top even if it is very high and more wealth than anyone could reasonably need. Because beyond that point it's not they are just getting more wealthy. Everyone else is getting poorer for it.

God the insanity of that wealth is hard to fathom.

Nobody needs $100m, which is itself a totally insignificant amount compared to $1b… and we’re talking people with hundreds of billions :/

They don't. No one can explain how a wealth tax work because it doesn't work.

rich person talk: it's not a tax problem, it's a spending problem.

No it's not, money spent in the economy is money going around. rather than hoarded offshore.

The rich saying their tax rate should be higher only advocate for higher income tax rates, which they are already avoiding for the most part. It's just another PR stunt.

Who cares

I kinda pulled the exact multipliers out of my butt, however! I've spreadsheeted this shit out and there's a way to do it such that 60% of Americans wind up with a tax break while putting some serious screws to obscene wealth in the highest brackets. I even added an additional multiplier for every multiple of twenty times the average of the lowest quintile's wages someone's income rises above. Twenty because that's the predicted "ideal" wage ratio between an organization's lowest and highest compensated members.

So you have the top bracket rate, and then after the first multiple is passed, that gets taxed at the nominal rate times the multiplier, and so on and so forth past each new multiple.

I imagine a realistic implementation would involve a system of progressive brackets and minimums/deductibles, modeled after the way income tax is. Ideally, things are modeled such that the tax is only full percents among those absurdly high brackets that can afford them

Constitutionality is another matter though, and yeah it seems like it would be awful hard to get that through the current court

too low

I’m not being apathetic, just pragmatic. If you want to bring about positive change you need a better solution than something that has failed and will continue to do so.

Calm down their soldier. Massive jump from taxation reform to full blown death squads. This ain’t 1939.

So are most of these billionaires. The dude is right, giving more money to the US government just means inflating Washington’s war chest.

The US government is sovereign, it can very much either take ownership of the stock, or estimate its value and construct a loan that the company owners needs to pay back because they owe this tax. Or probably 100s of more clever solutions as well.

It can definitely decide to tax wealth if it wanted to, it could also break up large companies to at least spread the wealth of these institutions wider. It mostly just doesn't "want" to.

This argument is so unnecessary defeatist pretending the most militarised and police ridden country in the world has no power to enforce laws it could write.

Opposite to that notion I think if the US had any interest in fairness in taxation, especially on a more global scale, it could easily get all the common tax havens/financial secrecy jurisdictions, to fold to essentially whatever demands if has. But again it seems like the US government strangely doesn't really want that either.

Which is still the central issue the US government is more captured by the billionaire class than a lot of people like to think they are, and it's never just the dem or just the reps, it's large portions of both parties that are essentially captured in this way, or just fall into it because preserving the status quo is easy.

True, but that would mean to tax billionaires by taking money from their lenders?

Elon would have triggered a taxable event using his wealth to buy Twitter.

And now Twitter is down to $4b. Because wealth is not money.

No, I said what I meant. Wealth is not money. Even if we try to express wealth in a monetary value, it's not money. And there's nothing to tax.

That sounds like a sales tax, no? Which would be regressive unless you charged sales tax on purchase of debt / equity. Doesn't matter if it's only a sales tax on yachts or whatever because they would have to buy like every single yacht to come close to comparing with their spending on further means of production as expressed by ownership / debt.

Edit: Honestly, I'm not sure if it would stop being regressive even if there was sales tax on buying stock or whatever. Mostly going off vibes with that one.

I hate the stock market as much as the next guy. Glorified gambling.

But, the stock market is tied directly to the economy

What do you think most people's retirement accounts are tied to?

According to a quick Google, 61% of adults in US own stock. Which means more than half the population has an interest in the stock market not crashing.

Yes the 1% probably owns the majority of stocks. Quick Google says 54% of all stocks.

US Dollar is a fiat currency. It's only backed by the faith of the people behind it.

It can absolutely crash and while the 1% will suffer, we will all suffer at least a little bit.

I completely agree. At this point, I really just don't understand the Republican party. I'm somebody that has always considered myself to be on the side of smaller government and conservative in general but this Republican party does not represent me.

…yeah when you think about how the US government spends money, a one-time injection of 15 bil is nothing. Hell, the combined lifetime wealth of ALL billionaires wouldn’t reach the ANNUAL budget of the US military.

You do understand that the government budget is 4 trillion per year, right? Do the math! What's wrong with you?

I'll do you one better. Even if you take ALL their money, that's less than 6 months budget. You steal it from them, spend it in a few months, and you're back where you started in no time. It doesn't fix anything or change anything, but introduces tremendous problems (like inflation).

And besides that and completely ignoring all these direct problems, these assets are not even liquid (Surprise surprise, Jeff Bezos doesn't store $5B in his safe). So, in order to cash them out, you're gonna have to sell them on the open markets, crash the stock markets, crash real estate markets, etc, which will lead to much higher unemployment, and pension funds will be destroyed (just like in 2008), and millions will go bankrupt. And all this even ignores that the net worth you're assigning to them ignores slippage, so it's much less than 1.8 Trillion when sold on the open market, ignoring automated bots that will sell even more to protect their hedge funds.

Yes, let's do all that destruction in the economy just for 6 months worth of spending. Great plan!

Like I always say: A bunch of ignorant, uneducated, stupid and entitled teenagers who don't know anything about the economy want to decide how the economy works. Go read a book, and stop telling us how to run the world before you learn how the world works. Go learn, and your realistic suggestions are welcome. We all want a better world.