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‘I don’t think we should have billionaires’: mayor Zohran Mamdani in his own words (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 1 week ago by Yawweee877h444@lemmy.world to c/politics@lemmy.world

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[-] DaddleDew@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

You can't even spend a billion dollars with the most ridiculous luxury items you can think of. Spending that much in a lifetime for things you would even remotely appreciate would feel like work.

The only difference having billions of dollars makes instead of only a few millions in a rich person's life is that it enables them to singlehandedly influence politics to their personal liking by buying politicians and media institutions. Which is something nobody should be allowed to do to begin with.

Meanwhile had that billion dollars been distributed to the worker class through fair wages or even to the consumers through fair prices it would have contributed to the economy and the well-being of everyone. Having to tax it to avoid seeing that money sit in some asshole's offshore bank account is a failure of the system to properly distribute wealth when it is generated to begin with and even that isn't being done right now.

[-] red_tomato@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago

The difference between 1 million and 1 billion is about 1 billion.

[-] floofloof@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 week ago

And the prediction is that we'll have a few trillionaires soon. The difference between 1 billion and 1 trillion is about 1 trillion.

[-] vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 week ago

Personally I'm hoping we see a couple multi trillionares. Rapidly followed by their assets depreciating into worthlessness and the USD becoming worth less than monopoly money.

[-] wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 week ago

Even worse than that, with just $100 million in a risk-free CD making 3% APY, one receives $3 million per year from interest alone.

Nevermind how to spend a billion dollars in one lifetime, how do you spend three million dollars in one year?

Any wealth above $100 million should be taxed at the end of each fiscal year. Nobody could reasonably need more than that. Of course, it would be complicated by carving out exceptions for real assets. Anyone with that much money would just buy a new yacht every September to avoid it, but that should still be taxed as capital gains.

it enables them to singlehandedly influence politics to their personal liking by buying politicians and media institutions.

Most conservative americans seem to believe "freedom" includes permitting the wealthy to rig the game in their own favor. They don't seem to consider the ways in which that infringes on everyone else's freedom.

That's why "anarcho-captialism" and even "libertarian-capitalism" are both farces. There's no room for liberty under plutocracy. Only the financial oligarchs have any degree of freedom in those systems, which is no better or different than an aristocracy, just without the overt nepotism (the nepotism becomes covert instead, by mislabelling generational wealth as a "meritocracy").

Meanwhile had that billion dollars been distributed to the worker class through fair wages or even to the consumers through fair prices it would have contributed to the economy and the well-being of everyone.

I agree, but too many people only measure the success of an economy by top-down metrics such as GDP, gross revenue, stock market growth, etc. They ignore factors such as cost of living, wage stagnation, median income, RIFs, and the job market in general, social mobility, cost of healthcare and education, etc., leading to such buffoonery as claiming "unemployment is good for the economy" and "deflation is bad for the economy."

And then they come back with stupid arguments like "econ 101, bro." Classical economic theories are a soft science at best, arguably even a pseudoscience, and yet finance bros treat it like it's a hard science. They cite them like scripture, or like laws of physics, but they're not nearly so immutable or infallible. Especially when they focus solely on supply-side and neoliberal economics, which were clearly developed with an agenda.

Even Adam Smith gets quoted out of context, while ignoring the fact that he was opposed to many of the ideas his work is often used to rationalize.

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[-] angband@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago

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.

[-] Baggie@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 week ago

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.

[-] angband@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

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.

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[-] Kn1ghtDigital@lemmy.zip 9 points 1 week ago

Maybe a single person shouldn't have enough wealth to rival a country? It's almost like that gives them more power than the government that is supposed to keep them in check.

[-] RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago

Individuals having the ability to operate private space programs is insane.

[-] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I also can't think of a more insane pick than to let that individual be Elon Musk. Really shows how billionaires fail their way to the top.

At the end of the day I think billionaires owning space companies undermines the pursuit of humans going into space and studying space in general as it is difficult enough to justify to the average person normally that space exploration is important but when you have the people leading the pursuit of it hoarding enough wealth to lift an astounding amount of people out of poverty, then the association of those people with space exploration threatens to make space exploration a target of populist austerity sentiment unfairly because by its very nature it is a loud thing that draws lots of attention.

[-] RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

There aren’t any good billionaires. They get rich leeching off everyone else’s work, suppressing wages and compensation, and avoiding taxes on their insane wealth. On top of that, a seemingly normal person is likely to become a complete PoS when they no longer have to face any consequences for being a PoS because of their wealth.

[-] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

The way I see it, billionaires are best understood as an autonomous cancerous process of money hoarding money, the human being who is the billionaire at the center of it hardly has any agency, just raw and pure complicity in the growth of the cancer enveloping them in a replacement of their human identity with an approximation of one constructed from financial abstractions.

Billionaires think they are making more and more important choices as they get richer but what really is occurring is they are becoming less and less a relevant part of the money they hoard in terms of what actions that entity of money takes and why it does so.

To be a proud billionaire is to be a proud insect host for the paratisoid wasp that is wealth hoarding. It is a strange and disturbing ideology from the perspective of an insect to take pride in being the vessel for a process that will most certainly annihilate you from within.

[-] HurricaneLiz@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

I like the way you write, good style 💜

[-] CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

They become very much like that kid in Twilight Zone's It's a Good Life

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[-] chiliedogg@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

I work for a small city that's an enclave for the super-rich. Literally every household is multi-millionaires (I don't live there, of course).

When we butt heads with a resident, it's a challenge because most of our residents have a larger budget and pool of resources than the city. My favorite example was when a resident tried to build a retaining wall in a drainage easement for a new home that would result in a street behind them flooding any time it rained. When we told them no, they tried to buy the Engineering firm we hired to review their development.

[-] Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

[-] Smeagol666@crazypeople.online 6 points 1 week ago

I like the sentiment, but I hate white type on a light grey background. I'm half blind from a lifetime of jerking off, take it easy on an old incel.

[-] Doomsider@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago

99.9999% tax rate beyond $10 million total worth would be a great start.

[-] bunchberry@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

To be honest I think it's weird to have a system where you give people a bunch of wealth only to then have the state later take it away. Why does the system work such that they get all that wealth to begin with?

[-] Doomsider@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Originally it was just a really high tax rate at the highest bracket. This accounted for a monetary system that is essentially gamed. In the US the government reversed this under the theory of trickle down economics. This allowed a large group of people to greatly grow their investments and their wealth accordingly.

Inheritance tax is used to recoup some of these lost taxes but it is a poor way to do it. The correction should be at the beginning not the end. I agree with you.

[-] Mangoholic@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago

Yes the problem lies in how the wealth is accumulated, its extracted from someone. If they all worked super hard for it nobody would have a problem. But the reality is, all workers get a paycut so the equity owner can chill and see his money rise.

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[-] TwinTitans@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago

No, we should not.

[-] Tigeroovy@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 week ago

This is like literally all I want to see from politicians currently.

[-] givesomefucks@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

The DNC chair has been saying he wants to run a presidential candidate like Mamdani since Mamdani won his primary...

He probably thought it long before then, but he won't weigh in on any primary.

Which is more than we've got from the DNC in about 50 years...

[-] BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 2 points 1 week ago

That means they are getting scared of us. Keep up the pressure.

[-] givesomefucks@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

He's been saying that stuff for well over a decade when he was Minnesota's state chair....

The voting meme era of the DNC learned their lesson, probably back in 2020 even tho Biden squeaked by. They just didn't have a chance between 2017 and 2025 to vote for a chair, 2021 Biden got to pick like every incoming Dem president.

Which makes it a much better thing, we're not fighting the party anymore.

They won't put a finger on the scale for or against the oligarchs, and that's all the people ever need, a fair fight. We just can't fuck up the primary and let a neoliberal win, because if they go on to win the general then they get to name party chair.

There's a lot at stake next primary, that's why so many people are pushing for people to not vote in it.

[-] buzz86us@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago

Mamdani is the first politician that makes me hopeful that the US might make progress into being FOR THE PEOPLE. Not FOR THE BILLIONAIRES

[-] Lushed_Lungfish@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 week ago

Can the city raise billionaires taxes to a significant level?

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[-] Batmorous@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

Alright everyone. To anyone checking in to this please we must push the open source community-run operating systems, social media, apps, and web apps for people to switch to. Tell them to get others on board too after they get comfy

Online and in-person we must keep switching people over!! The less people on those corpo ones the better!!

To make it easier tell people to use legacy social media and people social media until people social media has a big enough audience of people using them

Please do not scroll away we must all keep getting people to move. Many of us are but the more the better!!

[-] elfin8er@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

Not sure why so many downvotes on an openspurce social media platform. Folks must really like the small nature of Lemmy currently. The world's digital town squares shouldn't be owned by anyone, but by everyone!

[-] Fandangalo@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Billionaire math

Average USA billionaire has about $7b in wealth.

2026 * 365 ‎ = 739,490

$7,000,000,000 / 739,490‎ = $9,465.98

You would need to make $9k per day, for 2026 years, to catch up to the average billionaire wealth right now.

It’s estimated in 2026 that it would cost $37b to end world hunger until 2030.

Also note that Musk, Bezos, and other extreme billionaires are up to 100x of the average here ($700b for Musk). Who is making $900k per day?

This is not natural, it’s not rational, and it’s completely bullshit. You can come up with whatever distraction you want (“wealth & income aren’t the same”), but we should be taxing every dollar above $1b at 99% or higher.

30 years * 365 day = 10,950

$1,000,000,000 / 10,950 ‎ = $91,324.20

I could easily live off of $91k per DAY for 30 YEARS.

If you put these numbers against a human time scale we can understand, I don’t see the argument for this level of wealth, especially not as people go hungry, without clothes or food, and children die.

[-] teddyt@feddit.org 2 points 1 week ago

A bit of context, because $9k per day sounds "not too bad" to some. It means you have a yearly income 3.4 million a year, for 37 generations of working people.

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[-] But_my_mom_says_im_cool@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

A person cannot earn a billion dollars on his labor, it’s impossible. The only way one becomes a billionaire is by stealing from the ones who did the hard work and enriching yourself off their labor. Billionaires are leeches, every single one is a disease on humanity. There are no good billionaires, they should all be shot and have their assets redistributed.

[-] TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

the only way to make sure we don't have trillionaires is to make sure that we don't have billionaires.

[-] LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 week ago

So common-sense yet how many political leaders are brave enough to say it?

[-] Yawweee877h444@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

We need more politicians talking like this often and publicly, then actually working to make it reality.

[-] grue@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

"In his own words," the article title says, as if we should be shocked or upset by it.

[-] realitista@lemmus.org 1 points 1 week ago

How is this even a controversial opinion? They'll find a way to fuck him over for sure.

[-] desmosthenes@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

agreed

[-] sturger@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

‘I don’t think we should have billionaires’

Half of America’s trailer-park residents pass out because he dared to attack our beloved billionaires. “But what about when we become billionaires!?!”

The reason we have had to deal with this over the centuries is half our population is authoritarian. The idea that someone can punch up as a violation of the laws of man.

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this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2026

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