Assuming billionaires were going to get a special tax, how would you actually determine how much to tax them? Sure some would be straightforward like Musk where it’s entirely derived from a few companies with known ownership stakes, but what about all the others?
We don’t even know the names of most of the billionaires. With all the games they can play to hide money, now made even easier thanks to the changes Trump made in his first few months, how would you even figure out who and what amount to tax? They don’t have a normal salary or easily documented income like everyone else.
You must log in or # to comment.
If somebody owns shares of $company_A, they have to pay 1% of the shares annually, which become public property. This way, the means of production (company shares) slowly become public property over time.
Wealth caps
Worldwide wealth caps
Start at 100 million…after a decade, lower that to 10 million
Anything, income, gift, whatever, over that goes 100% to taxes
Nobody had the right or need to be worth over 10 million dollars
Wealth caps are also an extremely simple solution, a very simple rule to add to the current system to fix so maby issues.
Governments will get so much more Income that they can immediately do free healthcare, free education, etc.
Nobody will have a huge amount of money, and as such, a huge amount of power anymore which will lower the chance of wars. With that we can significantly lower expenses to killing materials and instead focus on life
We can solve poverty, which, in addition to free mental health care, will also solve most crimes (yeah, crimes of passion will remain)
We can finally spend a huge amount of resources on climate change and fixing the environment around us!
We can make government funded non profit investment foundations for infrastructure projects, for independent journalism, etc so that we have great independent news and great infrastructure
A simple rule with so many great consequences…
But it would would require the rich allowing us to implement that simple rule. World wide. So it won’t ever happen
Sounds good in theory. But it is inoperative in a capitalist society. Here’s a thought exercise:
Management might have a salary of $5 million but stock worth 1 billion. Maybe you expect they divest their stock? Okay, who buys? Who has control of the company? Does it become a societal asset? Can’t have a company run by a million-person committee.
Your wealth cap works where someone has liquidity over 100million. I suggest that few do as it’s not a tax-advantaged strategy.
Nah, just 10M wealth caps…
Management is free to give you a 100M bonus! If your current worth is 1M, 91M of that bonus will go to taxes and you receive 9M and after that, all goes to taxes.
If you have shares, and the value of those shares goes up? You’ll have to pay the taxes over that, sell some shares, and pay money to taxes. And yeah, companies would simply need boat loads of small shareholders.
And no, 100M is already way too much. If you need investment for bigger things, maybe think independent, government funded investment companies that could be a thing?
In several different ways. The trick is to attack the problem of excessive wealth accumulation by making the system feed more aggressively on accumulated wealth.
A wealth tax is important to prevent the excess accumulation of capital. Money is only really working if it’s in motion. Once it stops moving it stops adding value to the economy which is fine sometimes and in small amounts.
Tax disuse. Vacant real estate should be taxed extra. If they don’t want it taxed it should be actively used in a non-extractive way. This means low impact agriculture, preservation, or occupancy not mining, dumping or logging.
Tax non-resident ownership. You can own as many houses as you want but each additional one beyond your primary residence is going to incur a scaling tax penalty. Two probably would be manageable Three would be difficult once you get to four and five houses you’re going to find it extremely difficult to make any money. And the scaling tax penalty would apply to the most expensive one first.
If they’re extracting resources from it or doing heavy agriculture they should be paying a premium and not externalizing wastes. They could be taxed to ensure compliance and enforcement is adequate. They should also be taxed in advance to fund potential cleanup of any toxic or environmental hazards. The money can be held in escrow but it needs to not be held by the same people who have a financial incentive to cut corners.
See I don’t actually believe the problem is rich people or income inequality broadly it’s the runaway effect of the accumulation of wealth in the absence of any kind of functional theory about how money is supposed to actually work in the economy.
There are people that are going to just work like crazy people and they will in any fair system acquire more resources than most other people.
I think in a fair system the people who are likely to end up with more resources would look very different than the people who end up with more resources in our systems.
Something people don’t often understand about American dollars and American taxes is that the function of the government’s tax policy is not to pay its bills. Our government doesn’t need taxes to pay its bills. The function of the government collecting taxes is to delete money from the system.
They need to be deleting money from the places where there’s too much of it. Otherwise that money crowds out legitimate money that is the representative of economic value produced through labor. If labor has no voice, then the economy stops functioning.In my opinion, you’d establish a number that is the max amount anyone would need in a region per year, let’s say 1 million. For one million you could finance a place to live, a car, food for you and your family, hobbies and maybe a trip or two. Then multiply that by three. Just to shut down the ones who’d argue. Three times what ever the amount of money anyone would need is an obscene amount of money per year. Everything else goes to 1) the state to regulate the quality and cost of the community, and 2) entities that generate value and has jobs
There’s just an upper limit on what any one person can own.
Ten houses, one private airplane, one yacht, and $100 million worth of ‘stuff.’
No more than 1% of any company.
That’s just off the top of my head for discussion. Feel free to jiggle with the numbers.
With a large bladed machine.
Listen the IRS has routinely made clear that every time it’s forensic accountants get to sink their teeth into a billionaires financials, the return on that effort is enormous. Don’t ask “how are going to tax billionaires,” first demand that they actually BE taxed.
We’ll figure it out later, man. Realistically, just have a team of specialists that focuses solely on the ultra-wealthy, and then let “unrealized gains” be taxed if they were ever used as collateral for a loan.
let “unrealized gains” be taxed if they were ever used as collateral for a loan.
This simply makes no sense as a concept. Collateral is something that you tell the one you’re borrowing from “you can have this if I fail to pay my loan back”. If the loan is repaid, literally nothing happens to the collateral, and it plays zero part in the actual transaction. There is zero non-arbitrary reason to tax an asset just because it was used as collateral.
Also, all home equity loans would fall under this definition, as well.
The problem lies in the top 1% using their shares of a company as their personal bank account. They can use these shares as collateral for a loan, bypassing all income tax. If accountant can figure out how a billionaire can avoid paying taxes on the entirety of their massive yearly income, then others can figure out how to tax it properly. If you’re income is more than 70% this weird untaxable thing, then congrats, we gon’ tax it now.
The problem lies in the top 1% using their shares of a company as their personal bank account.
There is no problem in someone using their own assets for their own benefit.
They can use these shares as collateral for a loan, bypassing all income tax.
There’s no income tax to “bypass”, because a loan isn’t income. You have to pay it back. Do you consider it “bypassing all income tax” when a homeowner takes out a Home Equity Loan too?
you just really love the taste of boots, huh?
how dare you suggest we tax billionaires! Don’t you know they’re better than the rest of us? You can’t tax them because that’s not fair to the god-like status I have bestowed upon them! their money is special and shouldn’t be touched, they ripped off their workers and dodged taxes fair and square!
I dryly state of couple of plain facts, along with an analogy to clarify why using your own assets as collateral for a loan doesn’t make sense to be interpreted as ‘bypassing income tax’
You accuse me of being a bootlicker and put a ton of words in my mouth, assuming all sorts of nonsense about my values/positions because you apparently can’t handle the actual words you were presented with, and need a straw man to focus on instead
Why pretend you have any interest in genuine discourse when you act like this? It’s extremely obvious you have no desire to actually communicate. Go write a blog somewhere with the comments disabled if you can’t handle contradiction.
The biggest loophole they use is taking out loans and using stock as collateral. Stock is supposed to be unrealized so if it is used as part of ANY transaction it should instantly become taxable.
I’ve heard this before but don’t understand how it works… Eventually they’ll need to pay it off, no? So they sell stocks to pay the loan?
yeah, but by the time you have to pay it back your stock has accrued more value, so you just take out another loan. as long as the assets you possess are plentiful you can just keep borrowing against them.
this is also why the rich want super low interest rates, because they get the most leverage from them and they want asset values to skyrocket. the scheme doesn’t work if your assets are stagnant or decrease in value.
But collateral isn’t used as part of a transaction unless the loan is defaulted on.
Attainder.
You have a special division of the IRS whose job is to identify the top few hundred wealthiest individuals and then tax them. These people wouldn’t have to self report like the rest of us.
Two prongs. One, tax loans against stock options and publicly traded shares. Two tax foreign investment dividends that constitute more than 10% of the total value of a publicly traded company. Step one makes them live off of dividends and realized assets. They can’t live off other loans of other people’s money and just keep hording assets, two pins them down and keeps them from trying to take their money and run to a tax haven.
They will eventually find a way around those, and you will have to adjust the tax code to accomodate, but that’s going to be true regardless. It’s a bit like digital hygene and cyber security. An endless arms race between states trying to build more effective risk management tools and people trying to exploit and the system and thus the people living within the system.
