At this point, abolishing the stock market would require a restart on the United States as an entity. The stock market is quite closely linked to the banking system. Closing the stock market would crash the US economy into oblivion.
The problem is that’s basically what billionaires do, though. They take out loans with their shares as collateral. So on paper they have huge debt, but it’s minuscule compared to their wealth.
And watch the few remaining small businesses who are operating on a shoestring budget and are the only ones actually paying capital gains get eaten up by the large corporations who offshore their gains. Small businesses who have debt aren’t able to write off principal debt payments so on the books they make money that they pay tax on, but in reality they just gave that money back to the bank to pay off ‘business assets’ which aren’t worth shit when the business isn’t making money. So they make just enough money to pay the bank, then are hit with taxes for the money they paid the bank, and they float by in the red until the inevitable bankruptcy. If they are a franchise, corporate then comes in and sells the business to the next sucker who is willing to gamble on the false hope of the franchise model. Big corporate sells the business to a new ‘owner’ every 5 or 10 years, and the banks get another government backed SBA loan with no risk.
We are in the latter days of capitalism, increasing capital gains won’t work when the big guys already don’t pay shit.
in the united states, there were all kinds of 'wealth' taxes that prevented the loop holes. all that was systematically deleted over the last 60 years as conservatives decided 'me want money, fuck society'
The top marginal tax rate in the US peaked in 1951 at 92% on income in excess of $400k (joint filing two income), the equivalent of about $4.7M in today's money. That should come back.
Make it illegal to use shares as collateral for a loan. If a person can pay back a loan, they can buy back the shares after they sell them because they need money. Now people are paying capital gains taxes.
Ok but how are you supposed to do that when the most powerful and influential people in the world are the very people who rely on that method to maintain their power and influence?
Anyone with two brain cells can understand that it’s a wordplay on “minimum wage” and the implementation of this isn’t really going to rely on the narrow definition of wages.
Wage is worthless wording. Most ultra rich don’t have wages - at least not relative to their change in worth. We need to change how taxes fundamentally work.
Take a listen to the recent Grey Area podcast episode with Ingrid Robeyns. Her book is “Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth.” and they talk about this very subject.
Reddit is shit-for-brains but one take that’s been living rent free is to have a law where you kill the richest person in the world. Won’t be long before people start scrambling to distribute their wealth so they’re not next on the chopping block 😄
Wouldn’t it be better to set a maximum wage/compensation for Congress/parliament? That way they couldn’t be bought. I don’t have as much a problem with people trying to become billionaires. I have a problem with an uneven playing field. Hell, by the time they get that rich, I’m not even on a playing field. Frankly I’m not even on the same planet.
Preventing people from becoming rich is not what we should be focused on. A maximum wage is a good headline but doesn’t make any sense at all (read other comments on this post).
We should be focused on eliminating poverty and building up the middle class.
I hate the reality of super rich people existing in a world where millions starve to death or don’t have access to clean drinking water, but rather than focus on eliminating the ultra wealthy (which just won’t happen), we should be pushing to lift people out of poverty, which might happen if push comes to shove.
We should return very high taxes for the rich, use the proceeds to expand the middle class. We had that in the past, assholes got rid of it with bullshit economics.
I really which it were that simple… they elect the politicians, they write the legislation, and even if somehow they were taxed at 95% they would still pay $0, like they do now ): it’s really hard not to feel apathetic when it comes to late stage capitalism. That invisible hand has got us by the balls.
You know… it might be just a little bit easier (/s) to take people out of poverty if the trillions didn’t go to pockets of ultra rich and the companies.
In a limited capital economy (and we are in such an economy despite capitalists thinking we’re not) every dollar that ends up in a pocket of ultra rich is a dollar that cannot be spent on food and housing by regular people.
Every single dollar in companies and ultra rich pockets comes from regular people’s work. Thus, if someone despite working lives in poverty then they are actively being exploited by the ultra rich. Jeff Bezos and Amazon workers living on food stamps is a great example.
We simply can’t take everyone out of poverty if we don’t distribute the money even slightly more fairly.
Fair enough, but how do we take the money from the rich people if they are the people writing legislation and funding elections? Does it really matter what percent we declare that they are taxed when they pay precisely 0 percent at the end of the day?
maximum wage? maybe it works for ceos and such but most billionaires are way beyond their wages. lets start by employing preventative measurements that prevent billionaire charities to be used for money laundering or agenda pushing. then we continue by forcing strict regulations on tax havens. what else? we can also limit the number of estates a person can own and don’t allow companies to buy estates. finally, limit operational size of the media conglomerates and how much a single group can have influence on media. Support the hell out of small independent media operations. I know all very vague but very critical problems imo.
100% agree with all the people saying it’s not enough, but it could be a start, which potentially forces interesting changes at the company level even if it doesn’t do much with the economic system.
I would rather see no shareholder influence, but weakened shareholder influence and less incentive for CEOs and execs to be douchebags can still be meaningful (though perhaps not alone). Unfortunately, since people who want to lead others tend to be empathetically challenged, they still need explicit incentives for them not to just go through the same old exploitative and abusive patterns. Say this went through, the people who replace the spoiled CEOs who decide to leave would just end up being corrupt as well if some kind of positive reinforcement doesn’t also exist.
Taylor Swift is the new posterchild for billionaires, but honestly, she’s the least egregious example of a billionaire. She makes a fuck load of money because her concert tickets are like $1000 a pop. She’s known to give huge bonuses to her tour staff. If anyone is getting exploited, its her fans, but she’s literally just a performer. She’s hardly manipulating stock prices and doing pump and dump schemes and not paying her staff a livable wage.
That has nothing to do WITH the article, though. The entire comment was on Taylor Swift, which the article had NOTHING to do with. Just her picture used. I am lost as to how it is relevant to the intention of the article, which was a GREAT read. This just derails the conversation to something that wasn’t even mentioned.
don’t write her off. she’s just as bad and out of touch as the rest of them. on a cultural level, we have a billionaire who manipulates her audience by writing songs that market herself as a relatable, contemporary woman and positions herself as a model of feminism. she writes songs to portray her life as a women going through a tortured life as an artist in a sexist, broken system that made her a billionaire. she’s made many young, impressionable women feel that going through life as a woman is like Taylor Swift going through her eras when in reality, she’s a billionaire selling an image to perpetuate her wealth.
how is Taylor writing songs that perpetuate a fake lifestyle that contemporary women feel relatable to these days any different than Warren Buffett coming out and saying he still clips his own coupons. how dumb do they think we are? it’s insulting, really. she has had enough money to prove she’s a good person in the past, but now she has enough money to prove she’s absolutely a terrible person.
on another level, it’s just music. she can write whatever the fuck she wants, but I wish people would realize it’s stupid as hell to listen to a billionaire write songs complaining about love or being a tortured artist. it’s ridiculous.
Anything over a $500 million in asset value taxed at 100%.
Far above what anyone should own. And yet, you’ll get middle-class people defending the people with those riches, that they deserve to keep their billion dollars.
<span style="color:#323232;">Yes, the world doesn't need billionaires
</span><span style="color:#323232;">And we can do it without guns
</span><span style="color:#323232;">No, we won't kill you and we won't lock you up
</span><span style="color:#323232;">On the contrary, you'll become millionaires!
</span>
Let’s put aside the fact that the super rich don’t have a wage. How the fuck are you going to make and apply laws against the people who have the most power in the system you’re supporting?
Let’s just say if they have too much, we just put them in a big stew and eat them.
As others have said, the problem isn’t wages, rich are rich because of returns, dividends and other stuff that, depending on the country or city, is tax exempt, precisely to avoid paying anything. A cynical asshole might even go so far as to say that it creates jobs for lawyers and accountants, which is technically true. It’s a win-win-lose for the rich-those ethically wrong workers-everyone else.
Unless the UN or really big blocks like the EU+BRICS start pressing every tax haven to stop pretending that they’re doing nothing wrong (which, let’s be honest, won’t happen, ever), the rich will just move around. They have that luxury, thanks to effectively infinite money.
Setting a maximum wage for them wouldn’t do a damn thing. They’ll just use the wealth they already have to hoover up more through things like insider trading or flat out stealing company money.
Adding a maximum wage for the rich would be like trying to drain the ocean using a toy bucket.
In an ideal world anyone making more than, let’s say for an example, $1 million in a year would pay 100% tax on anything more.
No one needs more than $1,000,000 a year for anything. No one works hard enough to actually deserve that. It’s just pure luck and/or screwing over other people to get more than that.
Unfortunately if one country implements that, all the rich people leave and go live somewhere else that doesn’t tax that much.
On paper they don’t make anything a year and pay less tax than you or I. The only way that’s going to change is a massive world-wide effort to crack down on tax havens and to start taxing their assets fully.
The author in the article talks about how most of the wealth is either coming from capital gains and/or inheritance. They know wage isn’t the thing to cap, the article is likely just trying to maximize clicks. The subject is still worth exploring and the author is very well informed.
The only greener pastures for the rich would be moving to their southern neighbor since it’s probably the safest place for the rich currently. Not many options if they don’t wanna be screwed.
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