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World’s billionaires should pay minimum 2% wealth tax, say G20 ministers
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2024
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If taxation were done properly there would be no billionaires. They are a symptom of a broken tax system.
So, I'm assuming you are in support of a 2% wealth tax?
Sorry if I sound paranoid, just checking. Tone is hard to convey in text.
2 percent for those who would dip below a billion.
Just make a billion dollars a hard limit. Once you achieve that wealth, you aren't allowed anymore. If it's because of stock values, then any shares after you hit a billion are distributed among employees (including "contract workers" who they pretend aren't employees).
If it's in cash money anything over a billion goes to the government.
If it's in real estate properties are seized and sold at auction according to the land use. For housing, it's only sold to individual people who will use the property as a sole homestead. For small offices it's sold to businesses with a single location.
If it's art it's donated to a museum in the art's place of origin.
So what I am hearing: buy shit in a different country than the one you are running, where you can't tax it. No investment and jobs for your economy.
Also, how do you determine the value of an ltd? Not all companies have shares and share price.
Private companies are valued all the time, typically it's by calculating a multiple of EBITDA, with some variations for particular industries
Twitter is a private company. Has been since Musk bought it and took it private.
And yet, we can still calculate that its value has fallen substantially since that happened.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/02/x-twitter-stock-falls-elon-musk
First of all, the article clearly states Fidelity owns shares, hence it is not fully private. Second of all, you are talking about the assessment of the company that holds the shares. Are you suggesting an honor system where everyone estimates their own wealth?
Private companies can still sell shares. They're just not publicly traded.
Ok, technically you are right although since Fidelity is publicly traded, it is a somewhat special case IMO. That is what I meant by it not being fully private. If it was owned ultimately by an individual, there would be no reason for such disclosure.
More importantly, this does not change my argument about it being a self reported value.
More like a symptom of a broken broad economic system. In all forms of capitalism, it is a given that much wealth accumulates in the few. It's a system where resources are distributed based on capital, and capital is a resource, and it's a system where those with more capital have more voting power both economy-wise and politics-wise. There is no such thing as a capitalist economy that has even wealth distribution long-term, it was quite plainly a system created for the sole purpose of keeping those with power in power – this isn't an exaggeration, the guys who basically created/popularized modern capitalism and are the basis for all the writings and philosophy of the "founders of capitalism" were post-french revolution aristocrats who wished to push a system where they could keep their power instead of having it taken while also not having their heads chopped off.
Even with the best taxation capitalism can offer, there is no solution to the capitalist problem. It's a system that requires there to be suffering underclasses and carefree upperclasses. It requires an immoral social hierarchy to exist. The systems that reduce the damage of this innately bad hierarchy while still maintaining it (welfare corporatism, for example) are incredibly unstable over the long-term and inevitably result in a populace that want to tear it down. The people who receive the most benefits from welfare & social safety in a capitalist society are often the ones that are the quickest to tear it down (them, and the elite) and guide us back to right-wing feudalism.
Billionaires might maybe go away if we "properly" tax, but there is only so much you can do to patch up a fundamentally broken system. The countries with the most wealth equality and highest wealth taxes also happen to be countries with a ton of megacorporations and/or billionaires... Switzerland, Scandinavian countries, Finland, Germany, Australia all have the highest wealth equality while all being on the top 15 for billionaires per capita excluding extremely small nations. Plus those countries have a tendency for alt-right movements to pop up, a few even more by proportion than the US...
TL;DR capitalism bad socialism good eat the rich