As oligarch fortunes soar: The case for expropriating the billionaires
As oligarch fortunes soar: The case for expropriating the billionaires
www.wsws.org
As oligarch fortunes soar: The case for expropriating the billionaires
60 comments
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Confiscate all personal wealth over 100million. Break up any company worth over 50billion. Take all institutions of public service out of private equity: utilities, house, prisons, retirement, schools, postal, healthcare and public land management. Reform the legal system to not give the wealthy any advantage. Do not allow elected representatives. Do not allow politicians to take private money for political campaigns. Allowing people and corporations to acquire this type of power has been humanity’s whole problem for thousands of years
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you should run for president
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Democrats would say this person is unelectable. After losing to Trump twice...
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Billionaires technically don't have much personal wealth. They leverage their illiquid assets as collateral to take out massive loans. Which they can later cover with taking out even bigger loans.
The liquid wealth of the wealthy is very low, technically in debt. This is another way they can avoid paying tax as they technically don't have much of anything, and the reason why 'declining to take a salary' is typically meaningless.
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That feels like an easy loophole to patch- Treat loans as income. Maybe tax it at some separate progressive rate so people using small loans as intended don't get fucked. But if Muskerberg has $100 million in loans taken out against his stock, taxing $90 million of that as income would make a difference. Especially if the top rate is like 90%.
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Buy borrow die
It does have a notable Achilles heel though, which is that the underlying portfolio has to keep appreciating in value.
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Get private equity out of hospitals and forbid them land ownership.
The current private equity hospital grift:
- Buy a non profit hospital and ruthlessly expand it, putting all other competition out of business.
- Become the hospital's own 3rd party billing center (same name)
- Become the hospitals own 3rd party collection service, a law firm.
- Collect millions per year from the government to pay off unpaid hospital bills.
- Collect those bills with the third party collections by any means, garnishment, denials of service. 6. 6. Get the local courts dependent upon the court fees involved.
- Collect legal fees on top of the actual medical bills, thus "triple dipping" and getting paid three times ... all for services that were mostly paid for by insurance already.
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Tax wealth, not work.
And churches.
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And money isn’t speech
Fuck Citizens United.
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But my tree fiddy has so much to say! /$
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Is that Michael Jackson in the picture to the left of pezoz?
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Zuck, Bezos Wife, Bezos, ???, Musk
Is ??? Pinchai of Google?
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Sure is.
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The billionaire fortunes pale in comparison to the trillions of dollars of unearned appreciation owned by regular home owners.
It's the unearned part that matters most, at least capital investment has some benefit to the economy. Real estate appreciation adds literally zero value to the economy.
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Yes, let's be mad at each other instead of the people creating the extractive markets
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You got me. My being in debt to a bank for rest of my life is worse than anything Bill Gates has ever done on Epstein's plane. I'm doubly guilty because I have kids, can you imagine how much unrealized wealth they represent?
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Today, on lists of things NOBODY said ITT
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Capital investment strips wealth out of the worker/consumer economy (where it is traded for goods and services, and becomes someone's paycheck) and transfers it to the securities market (where it is used to convert worker productivity into more capital)
Capital investment is only beneficial to the economy when the working class holds the capital.
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60 comments