I mean you could even take the bottom number and leave them with the top number and they could still live in unimaginable luxury forever. Or just take the lot because fuck em lol.
Do billionaires actually have billions in real money sitting around? I've always thought the billions were in stocks and couldn't be taxed until they cashed it out and they could technically lose everything if the stock price falls. That's really fucked up if true
Wealth taxes are stupid. That said, nobody needs multiple hundreds of billions of dollars.
The solution is to have regulations and laws in place that prevent them getting this large in the first place. The fact that Amazon and Google own 90% of the internet is absolutely fucked.
I always use seconds as an allegory to dollars when I explain to people the difference between thousand, million and billion (I did the number crunching in my head and rushed it, so if I made any errors lemme know).
1000 seconds = 17 minutes
100,000 seconds = 27 hours
1 million seconds = 11 days
1 billion seconds = 31.70 years
148 billion seconds (Bezos' net worth) = 4693 years
Wealth tax should absolutely be a priority. In my state, MA, we voted in a "millionaires tax". One thing it will cover is state wide free school lunch.
Counterpoint: But they don't wanna pay taxes! They don't wannaaaaaaaaaaa.... why are you being so mean to the precious billionaires?
So there are irreconcilable issues on this issue and Congress is currently too busy trying to impeach Biden because his son had dick pics on his laptop.
You have a basic rate for income below the 20th percentile of all incomes
Multiply that by 1.5 for income between that and the 40th percentile
Multiply that by 1.25 for income between that and the 60th percentile
Multiply that by 1.125 for income between that and the 80th percentile
Multiply that by 1.0625 for income between that and the 95th percentile
Multiply that by 1.03125 for income between that and the 99th percentile
Multiply that by 1.015625 for all income above the 99th percentile, with the additional caveat that people who top this bracket even once cannot hold public office, donate to political campaigns, or hire lobbyists and lobbying firms for ten years following them topping out.
Imagine something similar for taxes on units of housing owned, dividends earned, and so on and so forth.
The idea being that the highest rate can't be adjusted without significantly reducing the tax burden of the poorest, basically erasing the only way conservatives have been able to balance the books whenever they try that shit.
As of this point every wealth tax that has been implemented ends up getting abandoned because if how inefficient they are. It's like rent control, it sounds great on paper bu historically never works out like it was planned.
The problem is, unless them getting taxed more results in you getting taxed less, it almost doesn't matter. It seems like any extra money the government ever gets just ends up going to more war.
Even if the wealth tax will get passed, it'll cost much less than a billion dollars to hire a big and expensive team of lawyers and accountants that can find several ways to bypass it.
How would this be implemented? I don't think the market would appreciate if all billionaires were suddenly forced to sell off billions worth of their shares. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to fight back against these tyrants, but not if it crashes the economy and makes the lives of workers worse.
I may be dumb here, but how a real version of this tax would work? This example is basically pocket change and they'd pay cash (numbers on a computer} through some form of credit (against equity, etc}.
But if the tax left them with 1 million remaining for example, I assume that it'd basically be impossible to pay without changing the underlying ownership / means of production, no? The boring liquidity thing people say would actually apply because there wouldn't be enough cash (even as computer numbers) to pay the tax. So the gov would have to "print" the money for it. And then the rich would get a loan from the fed to pay the tax,(?) which seems circuitous, but also it seems circuitous even if they got a loan from a normal bank. The super-rich would essentially then just be constantly building this really large debt that would exceed the total amount of money. Because no underlying ownership or production would change, it would basically be the same as now, right? literally just numbers on a computer? Taking debt forever with unlimited credit to pay the people who gave you the money?
I'm sorta falling into a weird spot where:
Taxes seem to not really be about funding government in the sense that the gov controls the money supply (unless that's not true actually?), so, uh, are taxes a very dull game that everyone has to play? Is this what people are talking about when they say "providing base demand for the currency"?
All of these numbers seem much larger than they need to be...? In that you could only really buy 'investments' with them. Mostly being further means of production or scams. I get that there are markets for really expensive things (yachts come to mind), but honestly comparatively those don't really seem expensive. Is there some other use for money that I'm too poor to understand?
Money does seem kinda fake as well tbh.
So am I being uncharitable and there is a way for a tax to actually un-rich billionaires? Would they have to sell shares/debt to the state eventually building state ownership? It all seems a bit difficult and roundabout, but maybe that's just my lack of understanding. Also please don't respond with something from an econ class.
I agree we should have a more progressive tax. The problem is fair is a relative term. When is fair fair enough? The fact is the underlying problem is overspending and no amount of "fair" increases to the tax rate is going to solve that problem.
Regardless of how hard it's to do this, you'll get what out of this... 15B? That's nothing... the government spends that in less than a day. Maybe cut government spending in half first. None of this is sustainable.
Why is it assumed that if the government has more money, then things will be better?
The government is filled with inefficiency that will just be made worse by throwing more money at the issue. Americans are not getting value out of their taxes.
Americans have record low confidence in congress and many officials in government (Supreme Court). Why would we give them more money when they, congress in particular, is responsible for setting the budget?