you dont need a max wage if you tax effectively. it would be 100% past a certain, massive amount.
That’s exactly how the article suggests setting the maximum.
“Wage” is rather poor wording then.
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.
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.
It seems unwise to rely on the uneducated masses to interpret things correctly. Perhaps clearer communication would be helpful.
That’s why there’s a whole text with explanations right below the headline
There are more words???
As you can see, lots of people don’t read those explanations.
Perhaps clearer communication would be beneficial.
How does that work when the super rich don’t pay any taxes to begin with? How do you tax wealth? How do you tax loans against shares?
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.
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Easy, make capital gains tax match income tax marginal rates.
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.
But capital gains only execute when you sell.
all stock market trades should be taxed at 100% value. dont like it? dont
gamble‘invest’…or just abolish the stock market (at least that’s how I read this).
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.
And no doubt every other closely-tied economy, as well.
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Right. So when they sell, they’ll get taxed. You can’t spend shares.
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.
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?
Execution? 🤷🏻♂️
You tax holdings.
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.
That just sounds like a maximum wage but with more steps.
its actually a max wage with fewer steps. no need to have a max wage definition at all, just extend current tax practices.
e. less to fewer, because details matter
Plus it actually could be used to do something* crazy, like help people or the environment.
- Autocorrect awesome sauce
If the U.S. managed to do it, they’d use it to build up the military.
Iirc DoD… Yeah, never passed an audit
thanks!
Not necessary. Just tax the fuck out of them.
Specifically, tax the fuck out of the massive earnings they rake in from investments while claiming the have next to nothing on their taxes.
Stock buy backs should be quadruple taxed too. Or banned.
That’s the same thing. The default implementation for this is a tax bracket for the ultra-rich that uses 100% marginal tax rates.
I’d be satisfied with 90% for a top tax bracket.
Problem is that once you are wealthy enough you can move around the world. Similar to how Microsoft Ireland is somehow where most of Microsoft’s profits occur. I think there is a big role for international treaties here.
No, the problem is that most of the truly wealthy peoples’ wealth is not in the form of income. A high income tax bracket does nothing.
It needs to be a property tax, and it needs to be on everything they own, not just real-estate. Once that happens, it doesn’t need to be 90%, or anywhere near it.
There’s a reason why the PR-friendly rich people keep talking about wanting high income taxes, but no one’s talking about a total property tax.
A high income tax bracket does nothing.
This is nonsense. Wealthy people do tend to have high income, though of course most of it comes from invested wealth income and capital gains instead of wages. Taxing these is known to be effective.
I do think governments should explore taxing unrealized capital gains too, though.
I do think governments should explore taxing unrealized capital gains too, though.
Oh, boy do they ever.
One big issue is that they can take out loans with stock as collateral. Yes, they eventually have to pay the loan back (and sell stock to do so, thus paying some capital gains), but they can still get around paying their fair share of captial gains (eg: sell the underperforming stocks to minimize capital gains, or just take out a new loan to repay the old one). While I can see the benefit of being able to use your stock as collateral for a loan, there needs to be changes to how capital gains are calculated in this case.
Another issue is that when they die, the inheritor of their stocks gets them with the cost basis reset (stepped-up basis). Let’s say I have stock that I purchased for $10/share. I die when the price is $100 and leave it to my sister, and she sells it when the price is $110. She only has to pay capital gains on $10/share, not $100/share. If you combine this with a cycle of taking out a loan to repay your previous loan until you die, this means that your estate can settle the final outstanding loan with virtually no capital gains tax at all, since the stepped-up basis for your stock goes into effect once it goes to probate (ie: before being distributed to creditors and beneficiaries).
I think the solution for the first issue is fairly straight-forward - make is so that you have to realize capital gains when using stocks and other securities as collateral. The second one would either be applying capital gains taxes before stepping up. Both of these seem fairly common sense fixes to the loopholes, so it’s safe to assume they won’t happen without a major political shift.
Well count me in for 90% if we can get there, don’t want to let perfect be the enemy of good.
Wealth moving around isn’t that big of a problem really, people keep touting “wealth exodus” is a huge economic risk but rarely has that really outweighed whatever the benefits that caused it.
Fair enough, if the wealth isn’t benefiting anyone, than it’s exodus won’t hurt anyone.
And new, more contributing wealth will move in to take its place even if the old wealth moves
yeah ireland restructured as a tax haven like the atlantic island nations a few years back; i have no idea how it’s going for them but it hasn’t worked out in any direction resembling autonomy for the rest of them
I’d be satisfied with 90% for a top tax bracket.
worked for Eisenhower.
Not sure why comments like this get so many upvotes. What kind of fantasy world are you living in where rich people pay taxes? There are entire industries formed around helping people to avoid paying as much tax as possible.
Upvoted for what we want, not what we think is likely to happen, I assume.
Even smaller farm businesses spend $5k in lawyer/accountant fees to save $7k in taxes through dividends. It doesn’t matter how small the return is at the end of the day, it’s essentially free money for the client at the end of it.
LoL yeah as if they won’t put loopholes in there like they did with taxes.
And hide all their money in offshore accounts. Does no one remember the Panama Papers?
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.
The same way they define and apply laws that determine, and maintain the poorest.
So without any media attention, when no one is paying attention?
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.
they are rich because they own property other people depend own
Wage is not the issue
One of the challenges is of course that the wealthy don’t get paid. They own and control assets that appreciate in value.
What if we ended private ownership of businesses. I don’t mean ending ownership of businesses, but that every business became publicly tradeable. No more private ownership of businesses.
I’m not actually advocating this (yet), just curious what people think would happen if we did this.
The same as now
The people that own it privately will have controlling public shares. Can’t force them to sell at a given value and if you did they would just have a diverse portfolio that they swap between each other
I think finding a private company that brings people the levels we are talking about here are not an issue
Profit sharing works better, after x earned, everything is divided up between workers
Taxing profits is a good idea but they’ll figure out some creative accounting to avoid making them.
I think we just need to straight up take ownership of a portion their shares that increases based on how little tax they are paying.
What i said is closer to what you are saying than it is to taxes
Enshittifcation would be mandatory via forced infinite growth to profit shareholders.
Instead, we can make the employees up to middle management and lower own a minimum of 60% shares of every company that way they’re not constantly getting fucked and they actually have a voice.
I would have 100% of voting shares be inalienably attached to all workers in the firm. Non-voting preferred stock can continue to be free floating property rights @canada
If employees own 60% then they should invest 60% of a company capital.
They are. With their time, whether that probationary or goes away if you do + some other obvious grey areas. This whole “business owners are taking all the risk so they have more money they can ever spend” nonsense is costing us, costing the government, and costing the environment. Shit has got to go.
Open your own business.
I wasn’t born with money stolen via exploitation. Not an option for me and 95% of the planet.
You don’t need much money to open a business. You just need to pay a small fee to register a company, anyone can manage that.
Does this small fee include cushion money for not turning a profit in years?
What if we ended private ownership of businesses. I don’t mean ending ownership of businesses, but that every business became publicly tradeable. No more private ownership of businesses
Not sure if that would really lead to any significant change. Most billionaires “own” publicly traded companies. In fact, most billionaires became billionaires when their companies initiated an IPO.
The problem is that rich people can use their stock as collateral for huge untaxable loans. What we need to do is figure out a way to classify and tax these loans without taxing things like mortgages.
imho I think this is the wrong way to go - there are some companies out there that continue to exist and thrive because they’re not jerked around by shareholders. Valve, being a great example.
tax the fuck out of every asset imho, but no private business? eehhhh extreme solution that doesn’t really fix the problems.
What if we ended private ownership of businesses. I don’t mean ending ownership of businesses, but that every business became publicly tradeable. No more private ownership of businesses.
There’s something to be said for mandatory stock awards to all employees (with no contractor sub-contractor loopholes) calculated to enforce a controlling interest among current staff.
Of course, arguably, I just described a union with more steps.
Edit: I think this won’t necessarily need to be mandatory, after current shareholders wise up that their current crop of CEO’s aren’t actually serving their interests.
But, if it works, there’s an argument to be made for making something mandatory to set a baseline expectation for human decency.
Which I suppose amounts to crowd-sourcing to staff things not currently handled by OSHA.
Probably better to limit ownership to directly interested parties, like workers and maybe customers
They usually dont get paid much in wages. I think zuckerberg got paid $1/hr?
I think the word you’re looking for is “income” or “net worth”
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.
That or they just don’t set their residency in Canada. Rich people can choose to move and reside anywhere they want
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.
And tie it directly to the minimum wage…
You got work tomorrow morning at 8?
Earlier!
Damn ! Tax the Reeeeccchhh
I don’t mind working, I just want to be able to afford a reasonable life in exchange for… well, my life, basically.
Yea bruv. I feel ya
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 $1000 a pop. She’s known to give huge bonuses to her tour staff. If anyone is getting exploited, its her fans, but she’s literally just a performer. She’s hardly manipulating stock prices and doing pump and dump schemes and not paying her staff a livable wage.
“1000$ a pop”
I see what you did there.
Yeah, I don’t care for her music nor her lifestyle but at least she earned her money (or the first millions anyway).
The article had nothing to do with Taylor Swift though.
Taylor Swifts name shows up before the authors name when you click into the article. it’s not unfair to bring her up…
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.
This shouldn’t be hard to logic through.
Ok so even though her name is the first name we see there in text on that page, we’re not allowed to talk about her in context to the article ?
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.
I think love for a billionaire just might be a little difficult and complicated. Probably would make for some interesting songs.
Do… Do you think she started off a billionaire singer songwriter?
no, she started as a private equity money manager’s daughter
This is going to get downvoted ):
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.
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?
It’s not fair to apply that defeatist outlook to one perspective and not the other. You can say that about your idea too, of lifting people out of poverty. How do we lift people out of poverty when the people writing legislation and funding elections have no concept of poor and no incentive to give a shit about the poor?
Here’s the thing, if we imagine for a moment that change can be brought on, then taking money out of billionaire pockets is inherently necessary to solve the issue of poverty. Poverty is not a problem of static amounts of money, it’s a problem of inequality. In the real world it looks like some people have a few dollars to their name while others have billions, but it’ll work exactly the same if some people have a few thousand dollars to their name while others have trillions.
Imo, if we don’t “level the playing field” at least a little bit, what’ll happen is that as we uplift people out of poverty in one way - e.x. giving them a home, feeding them, and educating them - it’ll just get more expensive to do everything else like eat out, go to movies, go on vacation, have internet, have a phone, have electricity and water. We as a society will have freed up some additional money by subsidizing education, housing, food but if left unchecked the wealthier among us will seize the opportunity to take that. And they will, because they have an incentive to. But if you take that extra money away - you can alleviate the incentive and make it not so appealing to try and take every last dollar. And yes, current income tax in most places does not account properly for how billionaires actually hold their money, but they could in this hypothetical scenario. I’m not gonna try and draft legislation here but it’s certainly possible, though it might cause all the billionaires to just leave.
Yea that all makes sense. I guess what I was trying to say was that taking the money out of the hands of the ultra wealthy seems less likely to actually happen than the smaller changes which are indeed happening slowly but surely, like greater access to clean water, food, shelter, education, the empowerment of women, etc. Generally speaking, those small changes are happening across the planet and I have hope that those changes will continue. A world with actual wealth equality just seems like a pipe dream, but on the other hand, things like indoor plumbing seem achievable globally.
You kind of lost me at ‘if we house, feed, and educate people than it will be more expensive to go to the movies or have internet’
The only hope we have of leveling the playing field is to focus on the achievable goals I mentioned. I don’t see why it is necessary to take from the rich to achieve these goals.
Don’t get me wrong, if it was at all possible to level the playing field by redistributing the wealth of the rich, that would be my first choice, I just don’t think that’s possible the way things are. I think it would be defeatist to think that that is the only way to lift people out of poverty.
Edit: one other point is that everyone benefits from less poverty, including the wealthy. The incentive is there for these changes to occur. Poor people don’t make very good consumers. Dealing with the effects of poverty is ironically a massive economic burden on society.
For the record, I don’t think focusing solely on taking money away from the richest people is the only way to lift people out of poverty, I think there are many factors that create poverty and that there being billionaires at all is a contributor to it due to the power they wield with it. Mind you, I don’t really include millionaires in the “wealthy” category here, I’m talking about billionaires - those with many orders of magnitude more wealth than somebody you’d just consider “rich”. I’m certainly not against feeding, housing, and educating people and contribute to efforts to do so locally. I was thinking more along the lines of hypothetically long term eradicating poverty, not how to realistically approach treating it today so that’s probably where our wires got crossed.
Yup, agreed completely.
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.
The author mentioned in this article was recently on The Grey Area podcast and the arguments and reasoning is pretty compelling. It’s also about the discussion and civic involvement and not a particular limit. But the reasoning behind a Limitarianism makes a lot of sense.
If person A makes 100million a year, that’s 1,000 times more than person B making 100k a year. Can you honestly say that person A is working 1k time harder, or is contributing 1k times more than the person B? Also remember that we’re not talking about the hordes of people working below person A who execute most of the work. We’re just talking about that one individual and their contributions.
Either way, the discussion about the subject is the important thing here. What do you want your society to look like in the future and for the next generation? Even if it’s not Limitarianism, starting the conversation and cival discourse to push society towards a better version of its current form is worth the effort.
Another way of thinking about it is the human potential it would open up and create.
Imagine limiting the wealth of the those with enormous fortunes and allowing those in the middle to become enormously wealthy, while at the same time allow those at the bottom to finally make it to a level where they no longer have to worry about surviving. It would be terrible for those with enormous wealth because they would lose control but it would great for those at the bottom who would achieve a way to take back control of their lives.
Imagine a world where those who never had the opportunity now have a chance to become doctors, engineers, scientists, professionals, creators, builders and inventors. Imagine a world filled with people who have the free time to just create things because they can instead of spending their lives just trying to get by. Most people in the world don’t want to become master and ruler of the universe … they just want to have a nice life, do something useful and enjoy their existence with others. It’s only a minority few who feel compelled to neurotically want to collect every bit of wealth everywhere and pathologically amass so much wealth, it would take a thousand lifetimes to actually use it, let alone enjoy it.
Imagine every poor inner city kid build up an education to become a professional at something and not worry about how they are going to make a living. Imagine a millions of poor kids in Indian and China doing something with their time in engineering, science or medicine. Imagine every poor kid in Africa building their countries and developing new ideas.
The world wouldn’t become a utopia … it would most likely still have all the problems we deal with today … but at the very least, we would have a world full of educated, capable people who would be able to handle it all. Right now, we’re just a horde of raging mindless apes that are worried about dying and will kill one another for a share of a few bananas.
Reminds me of the Kurzgesagt video “A Selfish case for Altruism”. If all those people were educated and working on making the world better, that would mean more people curing diseases that you personally could die from in the future. More people solving global warming and other future unknown global issues, that could harm you or you kids in the future. Etc…
Even from a self serving angle, it’s better to have more people in the world well fed, well educated, living well, and contributing to society.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Kurzgesagt video “A Selfish case for Altruism”
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How about we just execute the richest person every 3 months?
Make a threshold that if the relative wealth is equal between 100,000,000 million people no one is executed. That’s a hard cap right there.
Problem is the rich would start making death contracts. Scooping up some poor person to put them at the top with a contract saying if they go through with it they get certain privileges. The person would have to be too stupid to realize they can just distribute the wealth given to them and its win win win.
Also would hide their money off shore.
The process of determining who is most wealthy would be problematic.
It would be difficult to have an accurate monthly system.
You can move to North Korea and enjoy life without rich people without killing anyone.
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.
