Is it because the people that we need to worry about don't get paid massive wages? Instead they leverage their massive stock ownership as collateral for loans. And stock bonuses are not regulated or taxed in the same way as real wages.
I'd be fully supportive of a "maximum wealth" limit.
What we need to do is implement "prestige wealth". Once you hit, say, 100m you get your assets sold in order to fund a UBI, but you get a nice pin that marks your achievement.
Every time you prestige, you get a new pin, but the color of the pin changes.
"You win! 🥳"
A sort of "moneygrubbers anonymous"?
I'm totally cool with rewarding people for making a bunch of money and giving it back to the people. Hell, make each prestige cooler. You find 100 billion in taxes? We'll build you a little statue. You fund 1 trillion dollars in taxes? You get to be on a coin or some shit. Really put these greedy fucks incessant need for attention to work.
Yeah, we can also make it fun. Once someone has amassed a certain quantity of wealth, make a big ceremony, where the guy is given a trophy that says "I won capitalism". After that, every dollar he makes past the limit is taxed 100%
Because making 400k/yr by sitting on a pile of assets and living a low-cost life in a paid-off small-town cottage is not the same as making 400k/yr as a debt-saddled surgeon renting in a high-cost city center, so targeting income instead of wealth gets us farther from a fairer economy.
Next question.
Next question, why did you immediately go to 400k? Why not 1 million? If you make a million dollars then you've made half the average lifetime earnings of a worker. Double question, if we capped earnings at 400k, would school lenders not take that into account?
I think a maximum yearly income, including any money you could conceivably spend for personal use, would be a wonderful idea. It would certainly put a damper on being a billionaire if you know you could never actually get more than about a hundred million dollars in your life. Just literally running the score up at that point.
Ok sure, but if you frame the conversation to mean the limit would be set at $400k/year then you're missing the point. We're talking billionaires not single digit millionaires. Despite how those numbers sound to the average person there's several orders of magnitude between them.
i couldnt read the article (paywall) but is that applicable when billionaires often get paid significantly less than $400k/yr?
I don't mean to argue against your point but they became billionaires somehow. There are people who are becoming billionaires today and their wealth accumulation could be limited. It seems like more than one solution is needed. I don't think billionaires are good for society... They have too much power, political power
Lets put that maximum at $10M/month (or year). Now your counter argument doesn't work any more.
The people who make that kind of money don't make it through wages but other compensation.
I think we should be setting these max/min wages as relative values, not absolute values. Otherwise we have to pass laws every time the min wage needs to be adjusted. And we'll end up with stagnation.
For example, a person's wage can only be X% higher than the lowest wage of someone a step below them in hierarchy. Including contractors and suppliers so they can't skirt or find loopholes.
There still might be some haywire incentives that require more thought, but it should hopefully encourage labor to be valued at an appropriate proportion of value. Either everyone makes good money, or nobody does.
Should also probably deincentivize layoffs, stock buybacks, etc. at the cost of shareholder earnings / value.
I've often said we don't need billionaires. That when one reaches that milestone anything above $999,999,999 should be taken as taxes from that person.
When I say this people often become defensive saying that the government shouldn't be able to dictate how much wealth one person can accumulate. (It also happens that many of these people are prolife but that's neither here nor there.) Often times comparing this action to communism which of course it isn't.
The issue of course is that many people don't understand what a billion of anything is. The human brain can't comprehend such massive numbers. But nevertheless, there are people that are approaching the trillion dollar mark a number even further removed from a billion by several magnitudes.
Should there be billionaires. Probably not... What do you think?
I was thinking about this the other day, one of my favorite analogies is seconds.
A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. A trillion seconds is ............ 31,688 years.
The analogy already breaks down, because while most people could understand 12 days and a lot of adults can understand 31 years for having lived it (some even twice or more!), 31,688 years is completely incomprehensible again. How many human generations is that? All of recorded human history is only like 5,000 years. It's utterly, mind-numbingly insane. No trillionaires, ever! No billionaires!!!
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/17/business/elon-musk-richest-person-trillionaire/index.html
This was published on September 17th of this year, after most of the nonsense of Twitter and utter things. He's still on track, by 2027 no less. There's no telling how directly and flagrantly he'll benefit from a Trump win, either.
My favorite is "do you know the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire? About a billion dollars"
Like, being a millionaire is a pretty sweet spot to be in if you're lucky enough. Not quite like a millionaire of decades ago but still good. But if you're a billionaire, a million dollars is basically a rounding error.
I think all the talk about billionaires is using a completely arbitrary number and subject to inflation. Wealth inequality is the big problem, it doesn't matter what number on their bank account is.
The problem is that they have enough independence to just cross borders and easily pay for new citizenship if it suits them. It would have to be a world wide movement. It's impossible, or at least would only be possible within some mythical completely self-sufficient country that could withstand their meddling.
My solution:
Your tax burden is your tax burden. If it's 15% and you run off to a country where it's 5% to avoid taxes, that's fine. You can pay them 5%.
But you're still on the hook for the remaining 10%.
If the 5% country tries to act as a tax haven and refuses to enforce the remaining 10%, they get a national embargo until they get in line.
Just tax any income above $10,000,000 per year at 90%. There really isn’t a need for more than that.
Billionaires have very little taxable income. We need a wealth tax.
Billionaires don't have taxable income because they've successfully lobbied for carve outs that exempt them from taxation.
That's what makes a wealth tax impractical. How do you pass it through a Congress that's been wholely co-opted by a billionaire friendly caucus?
Chuck Schumer, the senior senator from Wall Street, isn't going to author a wealth tax. Kamala Harris, the former Senator from Silicon Valley isn't going to sign it. And the SCOTUS majority that's on the Harlan Crow payroll isn't going to uphold it.
That wouldn't catch the people who are the real problem, billionaires, who report something like $1 per year in income.
When you have billions in shares, you can use that as collateral to borrow money from the bank, and then you just spend that money. That's not "income" so it isn't taxed.
What's needed is a 90% tax on people reporting high incomes as a start. But, then you need to close loopholes. The carried interest loophole for a start, which would nail most of the hedge fund crowd. Then, tax unrealized gains when they're in the tens of millions range. Then prevent billionaires from handing billions to their children tax free by preventing the "stepping up" of capital gains for their heirs.
Oddly enough, the same people that wouldn’t want a maximum wage also don’t want a minimum wage. Go figure!
Of course there is a Maximum wage. According to my employers I am making it,.
If the minimum wage was a comfortable living wage
like it should be, in my and many other folks' opinion
then it wouldn't matter. One person's excess isn't a problem, unless it's at the expense of someone else (which, you know, is kinda the case...).
Even if it’s not at the expense of someone else, too much wealth in the hands of one person is still harmful. It gives one person too much power over others, allows for people to buy their way out of legal trouble, buy politicians, etc.
A handful of people’s excess is exactly the problem.
because the people in the top end are paid via stocks and not actual hard currency.
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Maximum wage only makes sense as a percentage of other people in the company. Ie. The maximum allowed is 10x more than the minimum wage paid in the company
Anything else means the money would just go to shareholders
And obviously, a minimum wage permitted too by amount
C-suite compensation is already largely handled by share offers - which get further pumped/paid for by share buyback schemes.
This would just further exacerbate it, unless we first re-ban buybacks.
Honestly, we should just ban them regardless.
Tax rates used to extend over 100% in the USA. The IRS lost the case. They were limited to all of the money earned, not more.
So there used to ba maximum wage.
In the mean time, decorate some pikes with billionaire noggins. The problem might fix itself if extreme wealth becomes a mortal liability.
Trickle-down economics works like a piñata - you gotta crack it open before anything starts to trickle.
Jello Biafra proposed this as a policy when he ran for mayor of SF in 1980 and has been humping this idea ever since. It wouldn'f fly legally but as someone else here noted, you can tax at 90% above a threshold and do it that way.
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