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.
this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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I couldn't imagine spending $1 billion in my entire life, let alone 3-4.
Most of their billions is ownership in companies they grew into what they are today. It's not like they have billions to spend, it's that their ownership is worth billions according to the market.
True, but that ownership gives them access to very low interest loans that they then use as spending money and don't have to pay taxes on it
So what? We should take away that ownership because they can leverage it? Also the same people suggesting we tax wealth like this want to also close those "loopholes" of low interest loans on shares.
Yes.
Yes to taking away wealth or the way to leverage it?
Taking away (extreme) wealth. There's no reason one person should have that much. There's countless better ways to use that money/wealth than for one persons extravagant lifestyle. And even if they don't have an extravagant lifestyle, what are they gonna do with it? Doubt they will build infrastructure out of good will with it.
So take away ownership of a company just because it's too successful? That wealth is mostly in company ownership, so are you really suggesting we steal away legitimate ownership in successful companies?
Yes. Fuck Capitalism.
It's not stealing their legitimate ownership. They don't have legitimate ownership.
How is it not legitimate ownership?
The laws underpinning and protecting their ownership, as well as the institutions enforcing them, are historical holdovers and were never truly legitimised. They also largely go against justice, freedom and the pursuit of happines, which they largely champion as their goals.
At least you could think about it that way.
I'm not seeing how that makes any of it illegitimate. If you make something you own it, right? Why should a business be any different?
At the end of the day because the assumption that it shouldn't be any different for a business is flawed. And specifically because we live in a reality where this assumption is largely taken as truth and as a result laws get written by Musk Bezos Koch Gates ... and / or the companies they use to do their bidding. Which often enough have very bad outcomes, and are obviously bad laws, not only in hindsight.
While they are supposed to be written by the people for the people. Democratically. The Private company in this way wields authoritative Power over it's employees and with this power it often enough opposes or distorts the will of the people because the few owners get outsized control over the actions of many workers customers and so on. As such if there isn't a limit to private ownership of Capital/The means of production/Business there can never be anything more than a hollow democracy, a democracy where the word is used to describe itself but the spirit of the word can never be reached.
We are on lefty Memes here so a bunch of people likely want a less hollow and more true democracy in this sense. Which is why it should be different for a business or at large scale.
So basically what you are saying is the more successful a business is, the more of it we should steal away from the rightful owners?
Yes the ones that draw the largest benefit from a society should contribute the largest amount back. If there is infinite growth for some and infinite servitude for others the social contract is breaking, in this way it's much more reasonable to actually use taxation instead of just standing by while the society that all this wealth was extracted from takes violent revenge to their oppressors.
Without the rest of us billionaires couldn't exist to begin with, so if their wealth starts breaking our governments, our communities, our collective self determination, which they currently are doing, we naturally should remind them that they are nothing without the rest of us. And yeah the taxhammer is likely the more appropriate tool than the guillotine or the Molotov cocktail.
Their wealth presupposes a largely peaceful society, why should we let them break it. This is for example why GG Art 14 has
(1) Property and the right of inheritance shall be guaranteed. Their content and limits shall be defined by the laws. (2) Property entails obligations. Its use shall also serve the public good.
written back to back in the same paragraph, the obvious implication being uses of property that go against the public good may be curtailed by the law.
You all realize they don't have that money laying around to pay the IRS right? They own companies, those companies are worth that much. To pay that you would have to liquidate those companies. So no more Amazon, Tesla, Space X, etc...
I highly recommend you to read the paper billionare argument. The market can stand the liquidation of most of those companies without making them go bankrupt, we don't want them to stop existing, just to make them smaller and not a threat to democracy.
For the whole scale of wealth I also recommend going through wealth shown to scale
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?
The reason for a tax isn't to give the government money to spend, it already has the ability to spend infinite money for all intents and purposes. The taxation is there to destroy some part of that money to sort of balance the money supply after the fact.
This way of thinking about tax also makes very obvious that taxing income might make the least amount of sense and taxing wealt and transactions, probably is the more reasonable way to go.
The government in the us is obviously innefective but it's not going to get better by withholding it's spending money, in fact I'm fairly certain that for almost all government agencies in the US the requirements the law asks of them are largely impossible to hit on their current budget. Sure maybe the regulation could be easier and the oversight requirements less strict, but reducing the budget (except for military and police) wouldn't help any of the problems that exist when interfacing with these government agencies today, it'd just make them worse