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‘I don’t think we should have billionaires’: mayor Zohran Mamdani in his own words
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2026
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simple solution, tax rate goes up by margins based on the standard deviation from the last year's income mean. for income more than one standard deviation above the mean, your tax rate for that margin is the percentile rank of your income compared to the last year's incomes. something like that would be fair. then mandate certain percentages be spent on education, welfare, etc. anything left over in the budget from the last year gets split evenly among all taxpayers.
That's actually a really simple and neat solution. My only worry is there's minor possibility that it could be abused, but not nearly as much as current systems are.
yeah, loans and hising income.overseas, stuff like that. guarantee 5% for the irs budget and regulate them to track down income tax schemes.
there would be some struggle, but things would level out after a couple of decades, and head towards real prosperity.
of course the idea is rough, you'd want narrow margins, and the ability shift it if there aren't enough high earners, and to apply the same scheme to corps too. all sorts of edges cases and fail points to consider.
Here's the problem: Zuckerberg and Bezos have an income of $1/year.
Of course, they also earn a tonne of shares, but you can't tax that until they cash out. Which they don't, because they don't have to - if they need cash, they take a loan, meaning they have negative income.
And if you start taxing unrealised gains, they'll think of yet another method of ignoring it, while you'd be killing all the middle-class people who've invested money in stock.
bezos takes a smallish salary, I don't care about that myth, or them, or unrealized gains. we need to rebalance the tax system. if unrealized gains are really such a loophole, then tax borrowing against it. This would hurt small borrowers too. so what?
the rich man loan problem is a red herring. if we ever rebalanced the system, there would also be political will to close loopholes. thus tax code can be directed at large borrowers or some other solution. your response is the "oh it is hopeless so don't consider it" crap brought up on reddit every time this subject comes up.