maximum wage? maybe it works for ceos and such but most billionaires are way beyond their wages. lets start by employing preventative measurements that prevent billionaire charities to be used for money laundering or agenda pushing. then we continue by forcing strict regulations on tax havens. what else? we can also limit the number of estates a person can own and don’t allow companies to buy estates. finally, limit operational size of the media conglomerates and how much a single group can have influence on media. Support the hell out of small independent media operations. I know all very vague but very critical problems imo.
And tie it directly to the minimum wage…
You got work tomorrow morning at 8?
Earlier!
Damn ! Tax the Reeeeccchhh
I don’t mind working, I just want to be able to afford a reasonable life in exchange for… well, my life, basically.
Yea bruv. I feel ya
I have better idea: 100% tax
Better close tax loop holes while you’re at it.
Anything over a $500 million in asset value taxed at 100%.
Far above what anyone should own. And yet, you’ll get middle-class people defending the people with those riches, that they deserve to keep their billion dollars.
Yes, the world doesn't need billionaires And we can do it without guns No, we won't kill you and we won't lock you up On the contrary, you'll become millionaires!Knorkator - Die Welt braucht keine Milliardäre
They usually dont get paid much in wages. I think zuckerberg got paid $1/hr?
I think the word you’re looking for is “income” or “net worth”
Why on Earth would they use Taylor Swift as an example. Seriously?
Republicans hate her now so clearly she’s an extremist leftist /s
The Kremlin hates her now that she’s potentially opposing their candidate.
Taylor Swift, so hot right now.
Because there is an underlying tone in the wage equality movement that women shouldn’t have it.
Because Taylor Swift is a billionaire who is politically relevant. She often has been on the right side of things (but not always). Even if she was solely a source for good, that doesn’t justify the obscene wealth she has or her lifestyle
And the right doesn’t generally worship her the way other billionaires are worshipped because she’s woke or something? Whatever the reason, they’re more willing to criticize her
She’s also far more susceptible to public pressure than other billionaires as an artist
All together, she’s a good target to rally around.
Does she deserve to be wealthy? Sure. She actually worked to get where she is, and has done a lot of good.
But she’s a billionaire, and we need to discuss limiting all billionaires to reasonable amounts of extreme wealth.
It doesn’t matter where the conversation starts, we can’t really afford to be picky
As others have said, the problem isn’t wages, rich are rich because of returns, dividends and other stuff that, depending on the country or city, is tax exempt, precisely to avoid paying anything. A cynical asshole might even go so far as to say that it creates jobs for lawyers and accountants, which is technically true. It’s a win-win-lose for the rich-those ethically wrong workers-everyone else.
Unless the UN or really big blocks like the EU+BRICS start pressing every tax haven to stop pretending that they’re doing nothing wrong (which, let’s be honest, won’t happen, ever), the rich will just move around. They have that luxury, thanks to effectively infinite money.
they are rich because they own property other people depend own
How about we just execute the richest person every 3 months?
You can move to North Korea and enjoy life without rich people without killing anyone.
Make a threshold that if the relative wealth is equal between 100,000,000 million people no one is executed. That’s a hard cap right there.
Problem is the rich would start making death contracts. Scooping up some poor person to put them at the top with a contract saying if they go through with it they get certain privileges. The person would have to be too stupid to realize they can just distribute the wealth given to them and its win win win.
Also would hide their money off shore.
The process of determining who is most wealth would be problematic.
It would be difficult to have an accurate monthly system.
Not necessary. Just tax the fuck out of them.
Not sure why comments like this get so many upvotes. What kind of fantasy world are you living in where rich people pay taxes? There are entire industries formed around helping people to avoid paying as much tax as possible.
Even smaller farm businesses spend $5k in lawyer/accountant fees to save $7k in taxes through dividends. It doesn’t matter how small the return is at the end of the day, it’s essentially free money for the client at the end of it.
Upvoted for what we want, not what we think is likely to happen, I assume.
That’s the same thing. The default implementation for this is a tax bracket for the ultra-rich that uses 100% marginal tax rates.
I’d be satisfied with 90% for a top tax bracket.
Problem is that once you are wealthy enough you can move around the world. Similar to how Microsoft Ireland is somehow where most of Microsoft’s profits occur. I think there is a big role for international treaties here.
I’d be satisfied with 90% for a top tax bracket.
worked for Eisenhower.
Well count me in for 90% if we can get there, don’t want to let perfect be the enemy of good.
Wealth moving around isn’t that big of a problem really, people keep touting “wealth exodus” is a huge economic risk but rarely has that really outweighed whatever the benefits that caused it.
Fair enough, if the wealth isn’t benefiting anyone, than it’s exodus won’t hurt anyone.
And new, more contributing wealth will move in to take its place even if the old wealth moves
No, the problem is that most of the truly wealthy peoples’ wealth is not in the form of income. A high income tax bracket does nothing.
It needs to be a property tax, and it needs to be on everything they own, not just real-estate. Once that happens, it doesn’t need to be 90%, or anywhere near it.
There’s a reason why the PR-friendly rich people keep talking about wanting high income taxes, but no one’s talking about a total property tax.
A high income tax bracket does nothing.
This is nonsense. Wealthy people do tend to have high income, though of course most of it comes from invested wealth income and capital gains instead of wages. Taxing these is known to be effective.
I do think governments should explore taxing unrealized capital gains too, though.
yeah ireland restructured as a tax haven like the atlantic island nations a few years back; i have no idea how it’s going for them but it hasn’t worked out in any direction resembling autonomy for the rest of them
Specifically, tax the fuck out of the massive earnings they rake in from investments while claiming the have next to nothing on their taxes.
Stock buy backs should be quadruple taxed too. Or banned.
I’d like to know more about how this is supposed to work.
What is considered a wage? Is it net worth, increase in worth from one year to the next? Liquid capital?
Are benefits (insurance, child care, etc) counted towards this wage cap? What about company cars or housing? What about profit sharing through bonuses and / or stock grants?
Would loans be counted towards the wage cap? If not, can you borrow more than the wage cap?
What happens if you own a home or business that is worth more than the wage cap? Would you only be able to sell that commodity for the wage cap or would any excess of the wage cap be spread over multiple years?
Would inheritance or “gifts” be tallied towards the wage cap? Would donations to charitable organizations offset the wage cap?
Would companies be subject to these caps? What if a person incorporated, had all of their wealth and earnings go through that incorporation which they had sole discretion and control over the use of those funds?
What about foreign entities? Would people, companies, or even governments from other countries who exceed the maximum wage be allowed to buy / sell goods, direct / manage corporate interests, invest in land or stocks, or even reside in a country with a maximum wage? What authority or oversight would exist to even identify such a wage of a foreign entity? Or
Every single one of those questions represents a potential loophole that could be exploited to circumvent a “maximum wage” and I’m sure that somebody who has studied or worked in finance could think of others.
To be fair, there are a number of countries that already have a wealth tax. So it wouldn’t be some insurmountable concept.
Wealth that’s just sitting there is hard to assess and therefore easy to game. What’s the value of a piece of art? It’s far more practical to tax transactions and realized gains, when money changes hands.
There are less and less of them because taxing wealth doesn’t work.
That’s a theory I suppose. Another theory might be the wealthy influencing policies to have the tax removed. No idea if either are true.
One of the challenges is of course that the wealthy don’t get paid. They own and control assets that appreciate in value.
What if we ended private ownership of businesses. I don’t mean ending ownership of businesses, but that every business became publicly tradeable. No more private ownership of businesses.
I’m not actually advocating this (yet), just curious what people think would happen if we did this.
Enshittifcation would be mandatory via forced infinite growth to profit shareholders.
Instead, we can make the employees up to middle management and lower own a minimum of 60% shares of every company that way they’re not constantly getting fucked and they actually have a voice.
If employees own 60% then they should invest 60% of a company capital.
They are. With their time, whether that probationary or goes away if you do + some other obvious grey areas. This whole “business owners are taking all the risk so they have more money they can ever spend” nonsense is costing us, costing the government, and costing the environment. Shit has got to go.
Open your own business.
I wasn’t born with money stolen via exploitation. Not an option for me and 95% of the planet.
You don’t need much money to open a business. You just need to pay a small fee to register a company, anyone can manage that.
Does this small fee include cushion money for not turning a profit in years?
I would have 100% of voting shares be inalienably attached to all workers in the firm. Non-voting preferred stock can continue to be free floating property rights @canada
What if we ended private ownership of businesses. I don’t mean ending ownership of businesses, but that every business became publicly tradeable. No more private ownership of businesses
Not sure if that would really lead to any significant change. Most billionaires “own” publicly traded companies. In fact, most billionaires became billionaires when their companies initiated an IPO.
The problem is that rich people can use their stock as collateral for huge untaxable loans. What we need to do is figure out a way to classify and tax these loans without taxing things like mortgages.
The same as now
The people that own it privately will have controlling public shares. Can’t force them to sell at a given value and if you did they would just have a diverse portfolio that they swap between each other
I think finding a private company that brings people the levels we are talking about here are not an issue
Profit sharing works better, after x earned, everything is divided up between workers
Taxing profits is a good idea but they’ll figure out some creative accounting to avoid making them.
I think we just need to straight up take ownership of a portion their shares that increases based on how little tax they are paying.
imho I think this is the wrong way to go - there are some companies out there that continue to exist and thrive because they’re not jerked around by shareholders. Valve, being a great example.
tax the fuck out of every asset imho, but no private business? eehhhh extreme solution that doesn’t really fix the problems.
What if we ended private ownership of businesses. I don’t mean ending ownership of businesses, but that every business became publicly tradeable. No more private ownership of businesses.
There’s something to be said for mandatory stock awards to all employees (with no contractor sub-contractor loopholes) calculated to enforce a controlling interest among current staff.
Of course, arguably, I just described a union with more steps.
Edit: I think this won’t necessarily need to be mandatory, after current shareholders wise up that their current crop of CEO’s aren’t actually serving their interests.
But, if it works, there’s an argument to be made for making something mandatory to set a baseline expectation for human decency.
Which I suppose amounts to crowd-sourcing to staff things not currently handled by OSHA.
Taylor Swift is the new posterchild for billionaires, but honestly, she’s the least egregious example of a billionaire. She makes a fuck load of money because her concert tickets are like $1000 a pop. She’s known to give huge bonuses to her tour staff. If anyone is getting exploited, its her fans, but she’s literally just a performer. She’s hardly manipulating stock prices and doing pump and dump schemes and not paying her staff a livable wage.
Yeah, I don’t care for her music nor her lifestyle but at least she earned her money (or the first millions anyway).
The article had nothing to do with Taylor Swift though.
Taylor Swifts name shows up before the authors name when you click into the article. it’s not unfair to bring her up…
That has nothing to do WITH the article, though. The entire comment was on Taylor Swift, which the article had NOTHING to do with. Just her picture used. I am lost as to how it is relevant to the intention of the article, which was a GREAT read. This just derails the conversation to something that wasn’t even mentioned.
This shouldn’t be hard to logic through.
Ok so even though her name is the first name we see there in text on that page, we’re not allowed to talk about her in context to the article ?
“1000$ a pop”
I see what you did there.
don’t write her off. she’s just as bad and out of touch as the rest of them. on a cultural level, we have a billionaire who manipulates her audience by writing songs that market herself as a relatable, contemporary woman and positions herself as a model of feminism. she writes songs to portray her life as a women going through a tortured life as an artist in a sexist, broken system that made her a billionaire. she’s made many young, impressionable women feel that going through life as a woman is like Taylor Swift going through her eras when in reality, she’s a billionaire selling an image to perpetuate her wealth.
how is Taylor writing songs that perpetuate a fake lifestyle that contemporary women feel relatable to these days any different than Warren Buffett coming out and saying he still clips his own coupons. how dumb do they think we are? it’s insulting, really. she has had enough money to prove she’s a good person in the past, but now she has enough money to prove she’s absolutely a terrible person.
on another level, it’s just music. she can write whatever the fuck she wants, but I wish people would realize it’s stupid as hell to listen to a billionaire write songs complaining about love or being a tortured artist. it’s ridiculous.
Do… Do you think she started off a billionaire singer songwriter?
no, she started as a private equity money manager’s daughter
I think love for a billionaire just might be a little difficult and complicated. Probably would make for some interesting songs.
you dont need a max wage if you tax effectively. it would be 100% past a certain, massive amount.
Take a listen to the recent Grey Area podcast episode with Ingrid Robeyns. Her book is “Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth.” and they talk about this very subject.
That just sounds like a maximum wage but with more steps.
its actually a max wage with less steps. no need to have a max wage definition at all, just extend current tax practices.
Plus it actually could be used to do something* crazy, like help people or the environment.
- Autocorrect awesome sauce
If the U.S. managed to do it, they’d use it to build up the military.
That’s exactly how the article suggests setting the maximum.
“Wage” is rather poor wording then.
Wage is worthless wording. Most ultra rich don’t have wages - at least not relative to their change in worth. We need to change how taxes fundamentally work.
Anyone with two brain cells can understand that it’s a wordplay on “minimum wage” and the implementation of this isn’t really going to rely on the narrow definition of wages.
It seems unwise to rely on the uneducated masses to interpret things correctly. Perhaps clearer communication would be helpful.
That’s why there’s a whole text with explanations right below the headline
As you can see, lots of people don’t read those explanations.
Perhaps clearer communication would be beneficial.
There are more words???
How does that work when the super rich don’t pay any taxes to begin with? How do you tax wealth? How do you tax loans against shares?
Make it illegal to use shares as collateral for a loan. If a person can pay back a loan, they can buy back the shares after they sell them because they need money. Now people are paying capital gains taxes.
Ok but how are you supposed to do that when the most powerful and influential people in the world are the very people who rely on that method to maintain their power and influence?
in the united states, there were all kinds of ‘wealth’ taxes that prevented the loop holes. all that was systematically deleted over the last 60 years as conservatives decided ‘me want money, fuck society’
The top marginal tax rate in the US peaked in 1951 at 92% on income in excess of $400k (joint filing two income), the equivalent of about $4.7M in today’s money. That should come back.
Easy, make capital gains tax match income tax marginal rates.
But capital gains only execute when you sell.
all stock market trades should be taxed at 100% value. dont like it? dont
gamble‘invest’deleted by creator
…or just abolish the stock market (at least that’s how I read this).
At this point, abolishing the stock market would require a restart on the United States as an entity. The stock market is quite closely linked to the banking system. Closing the stock market would crash the US economy into oblivion.
And no doubt every other closely-tied economy, as well.
Right. So when they sell, they’ll get taxed. You can’t spend shares.
The problem is that’s basically what billionaires do, though. They take out loans with their shares as collateral. So on paper they have huge debt, but it’s minuscule compared to their wealth.
100% agree with all the people saying it’s not enough, but it could be a start, which potentially forces interesting changes at the company level even if it doesn’t do much with the economic system.
I would rather see no shareholder influence, but weakened shareholder influence and less incentive for CEOs and execs to be douchebags can still be meaningful (though perhaps not alone). Unfortunately, since people who want to lead others tend to be empathetically challenged, they still need explicit incentives for them not to just go through the same old exploitative and abusive patterns. Say this went through, the people who replace the spoiled CEOs who decide to leave would just end up being corrupt as well if some kind of positive reinforcement doesn’t also exist.
Reddit is shit-for-brains but one take that’s been living rent free is to have a law where you kill the richest person in the world. Won’t be long before people start scrambling to distribute their wealth so they’re not next on the chopping block 😄
Wouldn’t it be better to set a maximum wage/compensation for Congress/parliament? That way they couldn’t be bought. I don’t have as much a problem with people trying to become billionaires. I have a problem with an uneven playing field. Hell, by the time they get that rich, I’m not even on a playing field. Frankly I’m not even on the same planet.
