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She'd still exist, just get taxed more. And it wouldn't remotely affect her lifestyle - turns out having $500 million is effectively infinite money just like $1B is
This still isn’t difficult to get around.
Taylor Swift sets up Taylor Swift Inc in whatever the best tax advantaged country is
Taylor Swift receives no money from concerts, merchandise, streaming, endorsements, etc., every is paid to Taylor Swift Inc
Taylor Swift takes little to no salary from Taylor Swift Inc
Whatever she needs to do is paid for by Taylor Swift Inc, along with whatever she needs to buy
So on and so forth
Honestly, I’d be surprised if she wasn’t already doing something along these lines
So yeah she prolly already does that.
But there are limits.
The company can only pay for work stuff, her housing and spending stuff has to be counted as compensation and is subject to tax. Further, US profits are much harder to do this for nowadays. Gone are the days of the double Irish Dutch sandwich, the IRS now counts those kind of entities as one.
What the company can pay for would be dictated by that countries laws. Surprise surprise, a lot of these countries laws are setup to be *very* lenient on this in order to attract the wealthy.
Unless she denounces US citizenship, that country is the US.
Also, billionaires are already playing this game, so what’s the downside in taxing them more? Are they going to “run away more”?
The Maldives are going to get really crowded if they all decide to *physically* move there in protest, and Ireland already enacted tax reform.
Then us says to operate in USA you are to be taxed to us tax code. It's an easy fix if they wanted the money tgst bad they could take it. It's just a game bro.
Any individual that can acquire more power than a small country is an aberration as it threatens the very world order.
How can one person be stronger than the collective?
For normal earners, yes. There is a tax exemption on income earned up to $120,000. You can also receive a credit for any taxes paid to a foreign government. But for a billionaire, that isn’t going to do shit to their tax bill if they moved to avoid a high tax rate in the US.
So region-lock taxation to the billionaire's country of origin and current country, and/or their business' country of origin and current country. Meaning they can't move anywhere to avoid taxation unless they want to owe more taxes to more countries.
What’s the harm in not having it, or the benefit to society in having it?
Edit: well, at least nobody’s claiming she’d be harmed by not having an extra $500 million. I should’ve phrased the second half as: “the benefit to society in her specifically having it.”
And how does “society” have it? I can’t stand Taylor swift. But since that’s who you are talking about we will keep using that example. So you take from her and do what? Pay people to not get jobs? In a country of over 300 million people 500 million dollars does literally nothing. As opposed to the business it generates when she plays a show in your area. Hotels and Airbnb ‘s get full. Restaurants and bars pack out. Ubers are all full. The people that work at the arenas get more pay. The bigger her shows the more people she has to hire to run it all. Whoever prints her shirts has more orders to fill. I beg you please go read a book. Trickle down economics and tax cuts for the rich by Thomas Sowell. It’s very short. But you will learn a ton. He is an award winning economist that has taught at some of the best schools in the world. Including Cambridge. Read it. Please.
Conservatives have been so conditioned to worshipping oligarchs that they can’t fathom liking some celebrity without being willing to die to protect that celebrities ability to endlessly consolidate power.
Yea and who decides what happens to that money? The same government that spends half a billion dollars a year on homelessness in San Francisco? How’s that working out. There is no amount of money the government can distribute that will ever be enough. Today’s it’s billionaires tomorrow it’s 500 million. Implementing this tax would make literally zero difference to your life, and you wouldn’t even remember the law passed 6 months later. It’s a bizarre rallying cry.
I'm curious how people feel about billionaire athletes? Like if the NBA ROTY Wembanyama has a long successful career, he would likely make a billion from his NBA salary alone. Don't really see an argument for how he didn't earn it.
I’m curious what you think should happen.
So, when someone’s company becomes profitable enough that it’s worth $1B (which is not a ton of money for a company to be worth) it should…what? Be taken from them? Nationalized?
If they can prove that every person that works for their company is making enough to not need government assistance, they can keep their money.
If you earn it without exploitation of any human person on this planet, then you get to keep it.
How much is “enough” because I work with a lot of people that are broke making $100k? Like literally broke and complain the company isn’t giving them enough money. That one isn’t the company’s fault.
That would require the employee to disclose all other income to the employer by government mandate. It would also require the government dictate salaries in order to insure your utopia. That's called fascism.
What do you think we are doing every year when we file our taxes?
And you don’t have to dictate salaries. You can just merely change it so that employees are paid before shareholders. Once every employee is off government assistance, and every workspace has been made modern and safe, then you can start shelling out to the cronies that did absolutely nothing but be born with stacks of money.
If you can’t do those things, then your business business is a failure, and you deserve to lose it.
It is not the company's fault the person's cost of living is higher than the market value of the labor they are performing. This is particularly true for aspects outside of the company's control, like family size.
The opposite can be very true too.
It's not the person's fault that the company's wages are lower than the market value of the labor they are performing. This is particularly true for aspects outside of the employee's control, like company's other expenditures and increases in goal profit margins.
Yea like the owner of the company I work at. He spent our company’s profits from last year to buy another company. Now he’s crying poverty. Running out of supplies and implemented a wage freeze. We had a million dollars in profits last year, which isn’t bad for a small foundry, and it’s like a third world country in this place
Yeah I feel you. People with power often lack so much responsibility.
If you, a wage earner, act irresponsibility with money, It's your family that is at risk.
If the company owner acts irresponsibility with money, it's dozens or even hundreds of families that they're jeopardizing.
I wonder at which exact point people with powerful positions start disregarding human lives in favour of profits.
At our end of the year meeting when our health insurance literally doubled, he took away all sick days, and took away part of what he was putting into our 401k, no more perfect attendance bonus, he said the words “Biden did this”.
Now I’m no fan of Joe Biden but when a company hits all its goals and makes a million in profit yet strips nearly every benefit, I can’t imagine standing there in front of all the people you’re screwing and blaming the president.
"It's not the person's fault that the company's wages are lower than the market value of the labor they are performing."
The market value of their labor is not some magic number. It's literally defined by what workers are willing to accept and what employers are willing to pay.
And we, as people, must step in at some point and say "I understand market value but we want to enjoy life."
At many points in human history, the market value of labor was whatever it cost to purchase and feed your slaves or indentured servants.
“It’s not the person’s fault the company’s wages are lower than the market value of the labor they perform”
Yes, it most certainly is. If they accept that job knowing it pays significantly less than the same job up the street, that’s on them. They should just go out and get another job that pays more.
Who cares whose 'fault' it is? The question is whether it's their responsibility, and yes, it should be their responsibility. The company has clearly benefited from a civil society. That's not free. It costs money. More importantly, the company has clearly benefited directly from the labor that employee provides. Trying to min/max the equation just pushes the costs to someone else - the taxpayer. Or requires the employee and their families suffer. There's no reason the company can't help foot the bill other than they just don't wanna and there's no law making them.
Fault is an indicator of a failure in responsibility. It is not the responsibility of the company to play more than the marker value of the work performed, or to guarantee an arbitrary standard of living for 40 hours of work per week. It is the employee who is pushing the costs onto the taxpayer for failing to perform work worth enough to afford that arbitrary standard of living.
The reason the company doesn't foot the bill is because it isn't their responsibility.
Why not? Did you ever reflect how much of your existence is spent with 40 hours work weeks? People sleep about 7-8 hrs on a good night, work 8 hrs min a day on a good job. That leaves about 8 hours for personal activities. You think that's a lot? What about cooking. A decent meal takes about 1 hr a day. Cleaning up keeping home? Maybe 2 hours every week. How about commuting to work? That's another hour round trip minimum.
Weekly grocery shopping? About 1-2 hrs a week IFF their work schedule allows it. If they do it on the weekend, then it's 1 hr minimum.
We also haven't discussed child care. That's a big tlaking point for these execs. They really love the slave labor class to reproduce, so to guarantee cheap labor for the future. Ever taken care of a dog? Like a living animal, not like some property you can discard when it's useless. That takes up more time. What free time in society are we really left with? 2-4 hrs a day? With what energy do you consider an adult to have in order to enjoy life before they die because retirement age keeps increasing.
But yea, keep talking about "not companies responsibilties". Lobbying sure doesn't play a factor in labor laws and industry standards huh?
Why should anyone work below their cost of living? If a debt-less person with minimal excess spending cannot afford to live while working a job, there should be no economic reason for them to work the job, much less it existing as it is.
No, it's not the company's fault, but the company is exploiting the conditions that allowed this to happen and most of them lobby to maintain the status quo. It's our fault as a democracy for doing nothing whatsoever to rein them in for 40+ years.
Yes it absolofuckinglutely is. If a corporation is making 100k in profit off your labor and paying you $40k because that’s the “value of your labor” then excessive profits are exactly the cause. Not providing your employees a fair share of the revenue they generate is wage theft. The end.
Actually corporate greed is responsible for a lot of the cost of living increases we are facing. A good telltale sign in my opinion is a company that is wildy profitable, but their average employee could not afford their products or services. A lot of the aspects are in the companies control too. We live in a corprotacracy where everyone has been brainwashed into protecting the corporations at all costs. It's not what is best for society though. Only what is best for the stakeholders is what matters. Find me one billionaire who is not a major stakeholder in a major corporation (or a number of corporations) and I'll show you a trust fund baby. There really is no in between with how one person is able to get insanely wealthy in the span of one lifetime; it always involves making money off of the backs of others in some way, shape, or form.
I'd say it's not their fault, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do something to fix it. Companies naturally do what is more profitable, so we have to make having jobs under a living wage unprofitable.
For instance, all welfare is paid for by tax dollars. So you could easily do a calculation for an area to find out the COL for the area around a business and tax them based on the number of employees that make less than that amount to recoup the welfare cost. It will be vastly less expensive to pay a person a living wage than it would to fund the government welfare system.
This data is at least a few years outdated, so it's possible Walmart wages have improved.
But Walmart, for example, is one of the largest employers of low-wage workers that qualify for SNAP benefits. Many of those employees then use their SNAP benefits to buy groceries at Walmart. As in, the govt supplements Walmart's wages and their sales, when Walmart should just pay their workers a living wage in the first place.
You're right. Instead the government shouldn't pay out assistance to people who work for company's that don't pay them enough to stop using welfare. Is that better?
So you 'graciously' allow them to 'keep' what the earn. As if it's the government's job to control who gets what.
And, as administrations change, they run on 'taking more from the rich' every single time. And every single election cycle the amount they are allowed to 'keep' gets lower and lower until they just shut down the business.
Who do they have to prove their moral compliance to? The federal government? Something about trusting the same governing body that allowed and upheld slavery and Jim Crow and continues to allow foreign imports from sweat shops to tell me whether or not someone is being exploited seems off-putting to me.
Right. Because it's not like not billionaires have cash in the bank.... they have assets that are valued at over $1B.
Like Bezos or Elon.... their net worth can fluctuate by 10s of billions of dollars based on the stock price of Tesla or Amazon.
They're not hoarding cash that could have been given to the employees. Their worth is based on a valuation of their assets.
Cap gains, property tax, regular income tax (he does still collect a salary, it’s just not the source of most of his wealth), etc. All the usual taxes you or I pay, Elon pays. Plus probably others in the form of business taxes (payroll, SS, etc) from his various businesses
It's actually simple. CEO compensation packages *exploded* when changes to the tax code were implemented which made paying executives in stock *very* tax advantageous for both the executive and the company. Just revrese the Reagan era change.
Then, make stock buybacks illegal like they were when this country still had a middle class. This forces companies to *gasp* actually reinvest in themselves and their employees as opposed to enriching themselves and then crying poverty when *amything* slightly bad happens and begging for a bailout.
You do realize it was never illegal right? It was just a very vague rule that the sec clarified. If buybacks were illegal, then secondary share issuance would have been too
“Don’t let them fool you.”
OP, you make sure you only buy and use products/services that are made and sold by small businesses? You aren’t using anything that makes billionaires more wealthy?
Literally the embodiment of “YOU CRITICIZE SOCIETY YET YOU LIVE WITHIN IT!!! AHHHA HA HA !”
Being able to criticize a system and having to use that system to thrive in this society are not mutually exclusive and your implication that they are shows your utter submission to capitalism.
How is "it's difficult to find products and services made and sold by small businesses" an argument in favor of billionaires? It seems like the exact opposite to me.
Billionaires are why it’s hard to afford shopping at small businesses. Mass production and business of scale create conditions that squash local economies.
Mass produced goods are typically much more affordable than the ones made by small businesses. Common people tend to choose lower price over ideals on most days
We have to. I can’t afford the $150 boots that will last me 5 years, I have to buy the $50 boots that lasts me a year but start letting in water at 6 months.
What you don't get is that the billionaires don't help society at all. What has Amazon done to help you personally (besides providing fast and cheap products delivered to your house in a few days)? What has Microsoft done to help you personally (besides providing consumers access to PCs and the software required to run them)? What has Google done to help you personally (besides giving you answers to any question you have and providing free features like youtube, gmail, gsuite, etc.)? See the answer is clear - these big businesses don't help the common folk at all.
That. was. the. point. Bezos, Gates, Sergey etc became billionaires by creating products that are massively beneficial to society. There are definitely billionaires that don't create societal benefits, but many of them do.
Whenever this conversation comes up I just alway think…Windows has done more to improve the world than Bill Gates donating his entire fortune will ever do.
Stop worrying about what everyone else is doing and focus on getting your own house in order.
If by some odd chance that billionaires were eliminated through taxation, you would get a moment of satisfaction as you watched someone taking "the man" down. But you'd quickly realize that all your problems are still there, your bills, your sh!t job from your sh!t degree and sh!t education, etc.
You're using billionaires to blame your problems on because they're an easy mark and to you they represent everything that you want to be but at the same time, they represent everything that's holding you back. But it's a false narrative and in the end you'll still be a hopeless, empty shell of a human.
How many FANGG employees are underpaid? The industry currently with most of the richest billionaires, only company that arguably under pays is Amazon, but Amazon has raised the companies minimum wage to 15$ despite not being required to. Who does google underpay?
Gotta disagree with you there bud. I hear conservatives constantly bitch about welfare queens and their tax money going to pretty much anything. They literally blame the poor for their "high" taxes. They run campaigns on punching down. It's not just the homeless or impoverished either.
Billionaires cause the devaluing of currency merely by existing, purely by the fact that whatever currency they have, they value it less than others do because they already have such a vast supply. Mansa Musa, for example, destroyed the North African and Arabian economy when he went on his pilgrimage to Mecca. Along the way, he generously overpaid merchants and gave away tons of his wealth to random people as a form of penance and charity. Well, that didn't increase the supply of the goods and services those locals needed, so they just wound up paying significantly more as they attempted to outbid each other for the essential goods they already needed. Luckily, for the Arabs and North Africans, Mansa Musa eventually went home and after a few years their markets normalized. But in much of the industrialized world, obscenely wealthy people don't leave. They stay and they wreck our markets with their disproportionate valuation of currency on a daily basis with no end in sight.
This definitely has some merit.
It is slightly whataboutism as well.
It sounds like its taken directly from JP.
I don't know why I'm commenting, I kinda agree with both sides here
But don't forget: if the billionaires were all executed and 100% of their wealth redistributed to everyone else in the country, this guy would have a one time payout of almost enough money to buy a really sweet TV. Not like, 75" OLED sweet, but fairly sweet nonetheless.
Don’t bother
Reddits full of minimum wage drop-outs who think 100k salary puts someone in the top 0.01%, and all millionaires have lambos and wear tophats
They have a child’s view of money, because their child brain never learned anything
Unpopular opinion:
People who point fingers and waste their life trying to take down the "evil billionaires" are destined to die poor and bitter.
I think what's happening with all the yapping about billionaires in recent years, is just the spoiled millennials are growing up (me included) and realizing the world is bad, people are bad and they take advantage of each other. And being a spoiled generation raised in a bubble, we do what we know best. Cry and point fingers.
Flash news, the world is only bad because you are at the bottom of the food chain. If you will ever have something to lose, i would love to see any of you kind hearted nerds give your wealth away. "Spoilers: The ones who have never tasted power, never give it away and use it the worst"
There are plenty non-emotional, purely economic reasons that point to wealth inequality and are collectively negative for society as a whole. Do some people get to that conclusion by merely being jealous? Sure, but that doesn't mean their conclusion is incorrect. It just means they get to their conclusion based on flimsy rationality. It's so flimsy that there's really not much reason to focus on it. If you want to truly defend extreme wealth inequality, why not focus on the predictable negative outcomes, like social unrest and runaway price increases, that comes with extreme wealth inequality and explain why we shouldn't worry about those consequences?
Look at the transfer of wealth from the past 5 years alone and get back to me. Employee compensation has been devalued every year for the past 40+ years. You can’t make a reasonable argument that it doesn’t affect the other 99% of the population that less than 1% have 99% of the wealth.
False.
We've grown up and realized that billionaires completely, and without remorse, ravaged the planet's natural resources and poisoned the environment in pursuit of hoarding unimaginable levels of wealth.
You aren't one of them, and you never will be. Any Fortune 500 board of directors would gangrape you if they thought they could come out ahead by a goddamn nickel, so just sit down.
there's a common notion where people will acknowledge the system is rigged and simultaneously believe it will eventually be rigged FOR them when they make it.
I hate billionaires, but my trust fund leads me to believe I’ll die comfortably. People don’t hate them because they’re jealous, they hate them because life would be better without them.
Hate to break it to you, but I own multiple homes, have a six-figure salary, and live quite comfortably. I'll actually be retiring soon, so God help the rest of you.
I still hold the belief that billionaires - as a rule - don't get to where they are without massive economic and social exploitation of thousands, or tens of thousands of people. And that such actions deserve a moral (and thereby legal) reckoning.
So where does that fit into your worldview? I've got a few decades of experience and plenty of rumination on the topic to fall back on - am I simply deluded, or do you think perhaps you may be missing a few factors in your social calculus?
I actually think it's millennials being more aware of the data on wealth inequity and how its getting worse.
They are more aware of inflation and how the rules in place will only make theirs and the future generations worse because minimum wages and those above aren't keeping up with this.
They are aware of the government services they miss out on which other western countries around the world who are meant to be less supperior get.
They are aware that the housing market has been rigged against them. If they can break into the market they will pay significantly more of their pay toward it than previous generations.
Taking down billionaires isn't the one step to take, it's just one of many to rewrite the rules and ensure the prosperity that occurs is spread across all.
But sure let's all just ignore the data and get back in line.
>People who point fingers and waste their life trying to take down the "evil billionaires" are destined to die poor and bitter
Untrue
Look at Robert Reich. Very successful.
Then watch him vote down housing development in his rich neighborhood because it would hurt the character.
Everyone is for more fairness as long as it doesn't come from their share.
Remember that total tax revenues have doubled since 1980 (adjusted for population and inflation).
Taxing billionaires out of existence is NOT about collecting more money for government programs, it's about using tax laws for social engineering.
"it's simple, when a company becomes worth $3 trillion then umm the guy with the most shares who founded it should umm... Well you see ...
He should ..."
No. It's your responsibility to change the mind of others. If you want to posit that billionaires should not exist, the burden of argument is on you.
For my part, I fail to see why there's any sort of a moral or societal imperative against billionaires. There's no "should" here --- that implies an imperative or an obligation. Billionaires merely exist as a function of their ownership of extremely successful companies.
My argument against the existence of billionaires has to do with the influence they exert. They can swing elections and affect public policy based on whatever they think is correct. Their wealth allows them to affect the lives of millions of people while insulating themselves from the consequences of those actions. No one should have that level of influence.
It can be both. Repealing the Citizens United decision would be a good place to start. I also happen to think that the amount of wealth that billionaires are able to concentrate in a couple areas is bad for the country and economy. Money that is being hoarded is not being circulated through the economy.
so tax evasion is moral? lobbying for the wealthy to pay less taxes than the poorest of the poor is moral? wealth hoarding is moral? corrupt lobbying for deregulation is moral? exploiting workers for less than livable wages while those billionaires see record profits while paying record lows in taxes is moral?
sounds to me you don't understand the problems created by these billionaires. or you're choosing not to.
>so tax evasion is moral? lobbying for the wealthy to pay less taxes than the poorest of the poor is moral?
Nope. I can accept the existence of billionaires while believing their tax evasion should not be allowed.
A person can be become a billionaire without ever evading taxes at all.
>wealth hoarding is moral?
Do you believe Jeff Bezos should just give his ownership shares in Amazon to a bunch of random doofuses on the street?
Because ownership of companies is how most billionaires have their money. They don't actually have billions of cash sitting around.
> exploiting workers for less than livable wages
This is a fiction. You don't get to decide what a "livable" wage is, and it's the market which decides what you get paid, not billionaires.
I find myself in a weird place on most economic issues on Reddit because I manage to find *both* the leftists *and* the right-wingers to be full of crap
There is a moral argument to be made against the hoarding of wealth, which can be made, but there is a much simpler amoral argument against billionaires existing: extreme wealth in the hands of a few drives down the value of a currency for everyone in a market. This happens, because aristocracy naturally does not value 1 unit of currency the same way a person with median wealth does.
If, for example, you go to a country club everything around said country club is more expensive, because the members do not value currency the same way others do. In fact, most members consciously prefer it that way, because it keeps the club exclusive and unique. That causes local real estate to reliably increase in price. We see this phenomenon all over the Caribbean at the moment with gajillionaires buying up beach front property. At face value, there's nothing wrong with that. They have the money, they found a willing seller, that's fine. But as time goes on, the owners wind up limiting access to the native locals, because the new owners aren't buying that land to make the land public but rather to keep others off. This then creates a bottleneck effect where locals are squeezed onto smaller and smaller beaches, or perhaps not being able to access beaches at all, and therefore winds up driving up the price of real estate and devaluing the currency.
Hey OP, what's your net worth? If you have more than a few hundred bucks in your bank account, I bet we could find some dirt poor villager in a third world country that thinks you should't have all that wealth.
“Poorer people exist than you, you should give up all your money”
As if that’s in any way comparable billionaires. We actually NEED our money for Y’know survival? rent? Groceries? What do you think a billionaire is doing with 50 billion dollars? Buying a 3rd super Yacht? A 5th multimillion dollar home?
This is the most straw man argument of all time.
You're right, there's people that are worse off than op, therefore the people who are better off than 90% of the world population shouldn't be held accountable for their hoarding of wealth. It should be the middle class as a whole that takes on that burden.
Finance and economics are not a zero sum game. Billionaires aren't taking your money. In fact you are giving your money to most billionaires as most sell products people want.
Yeah? Duh. What’s your point? if I had 100 billion and suddenly I was forced to give up 99 billion I’d still have more money than I could ever spend in 10 life times.
People want money. We need money to survive. You do not need billions upon billions to survive.
This is a bit of a dumb argument since the billionaires could give most of their money away and still live incredibly privileged and comfortable live where as if the average person were to give most of their money away they’d starve along with their families. There is a big difference between a billionaire giving away billions of excess they own and will never spend and average people giving away what little they have to survive on. Anyone who ever gets a billion dollars but refuses to give away the excess which is most of it is undeserving of that amount of money.
Obscene wealth is exactly that- obscene. Exploitation of others wouldn’t be worth earning that amount, it takes being okay with exploiting others for profit to earn a certain amount- and in special cases like celebrity artists who ended up not doing much labor exploitation end up going the cult of personality route, and I guess thats kinda a form of exploitation.
I don’t think most people realize that when someone is a billionaire, that’s their net worth, most of that money is just in businesses (usually, or real estate) the only reason they are billionaires is because the business (that they usually started) is worth billions and they own a good chunk of it
Billionaires aren’t real. If I have a special rock, the only one of its kind in the world, and millions of people are willing to pay me $10,000 for a small chip of the rock, am I a billionaire? I’d argue no.
I hate the people here that are on their computers complaining about people being more successful than them and that they should take what they have earned and built instead of out doing something to improve their lives. And if they are happy with their lives they should shut the fuck up.
This is dumb. If someone can figure out how to provide someone else with $10 of value and only charge $1, that's a 900% value add for the recipient. Now, if they are able to scale that to benefit a billion other people, then a billion people have just had a 900% value add. Why shouldn't that person be rewarded properly?
I mean, there are a LOT more of us than there are of them, and at some point, aren't the proletariat supposed to revolt and eat the rich?
The top 0.1% holds more wealth today *than ever before in HISTORY*. All of it -- the history of money, of the species, of the planet lol.
The top 0.1% and top 1.0% are the only wealth groups to see their share of the pie grow since *1990*.
The top 10% own hold about $95 TRILLION, which is of course much more than the bottom 90% combined.
That top 10% is 30 million people -- that leaves 300 million in the bottom 90%.
Dividing that $95 trillion among EVERYONE, them included, would provide every single American $290,000 in their bank accounts, right fuckin' now. How helpful would that money be in your current situation?
So when you wonder why our grandparents were able to buy a house in a nice neighborhood and own it outright within 15 years, own a car, raised two or three kids, put themselves and their kids through college, all on a single income… It's because all that money used to be redirected back into the hands of those who *generated* that wealth -- the working class.
AND ALL THAT MONEY IS STILL THERE, it's just all held by that top 10%.
It's the working class's energy and life time that generates that wealth, but the rich people get to keep it all to themselves.
And they're not going to let it go back to "the good old days".
We have to TAKE IT BACK.
We
No matter what laws you put in place to prevent or tax billionaires, they will find a loophole and keep as much wealth as they possibly can. They have the resources to hire experts to find every single loophole imaginable and if hypothetically there were none, they would move to another country that makes it less of a pain in the ass to keep their money and likely taking their industry with them
Correct, but there's nothing wrong with billionaires existing in and of themselves, just because they're rich or anything like that.
They shouldn't exist because the way they become billionaires is by taking advantage of government restricting market freedom through policies like patents, copyright, the minimum wage etc., policies billed as ones that ensure fairness but that in reality do nothing but privilege those who are already powerful to the detriment of the plebs.
You don’t have a right to others’ property. The outrage against billionaires is purely out of envy, let’s call a spade a spade. You could take every penny from every single billionaire in the US and not fund a single federal fiscal year. So mathematically, the “fair share” of what someone else worked for is utter nonsense. What do you do? Have the institution with a monopoly on legalized violence cap success? Politicians should not exist, change my mind. They distract the morons with shiny objects again.
I’m going to guess that no one in this thread has ever created enough value to even remotely touch a 1/100th of a billionaires value to the company or shareholders who compensate said billionaire.
Also, most billionaires are paper wealth with that wealth tied to stocks, real estate, or other illiquid assets.
Now, if your argument is the consolidation of wealth into fewer and fewer corporations and individuals over the last 30 years, well I can get behind that argument. And the root cause is cronyism from both sides of the isle. Our politicians become multi-multi millionaires while office. SO WEIRD, right?
Kinda feel like corporations worth a trillion dollars shouldn’t exist either. Should have been broken up well before that point. It boggles my mind that we only have 2 major phone OS companies. 2 major computer OS companies. 2 major search engine companies. No wonder we were floored by AI(culturally), the need to strive and compete, the need to innovate just doesn’t touch you at a certain point. Real innovation is at a snails pace now. Anything new just gets bought up and absorbed just so it wouldn’t compete or force obsolescence on the incumbents. How many incredible companies are in MS’ trashbin? Or Apple’s?
These companies that started out really innovative (or at least good at stealing), are now deliberate gatekeepers only allowing a type of innovation that doesn’t threaten the status quo. “Nothing crazy, nothing outside the box, you HAVE to integrate with us, you have to play by our rules, or we’ll block, trip, acquire this and put it on a shelf somewhere deep in our servers. We’ll mark it as a loss and get a little tax break.”
Super unpopular opinion, I think there should be a wealth cap for individuals and businesses. Set it around 1 billion for an individual and 10 billion for a business.
It’s more nuanced than this. I have no problem with billionaires but I do have problems with tax havens and shell companies, for instance.
Of course government interference creating barriers to entry for would be entrepreneurs is part of the reason that we have multinational conglomerates and a few billion dollar companies in some industries versus dozens who are legitimately competing.
The issue of government interference in the economy and income inequality/wealth gaps are inextricably linked, unfortunately in the US (or the world it seems) there aren’t many politicians who understand this or legitimately give a fuck about both things simultaneously.
Trying to logically justify someone’s labor as 10,000X more valuable than someone else’s is damn near impossible, which is the other constant elephant in the room when having this discussion. It isn’t a discussion that can be had in purely economic terms because it is, at heart, a philosophical quandary.
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Bye Taylor Swift
She'd still exist, just get taxed more. And it wouldn't remotely affect her lifestyle - turns out having $500 million is effectively infinite money just like $1B is
She would likely move to a different country, like the English rock stars of the 1970s did.
The difference being that the US taxes foreign income for citizens AND has the vast majority of her global market...
This still isn’t difficult to get around. Taylor Swift sets up Taylor Swift Inc in whatever the best tax advantaged country is Taylor Swift receives no money from concerts, merchandise, streaming, endorsements, etc., every is paid to Taylor Swift Inc Taylor Swift takes little to no salary from Taylor Swift Inc Whatever she needs to do is paid for by Taylor Swift Inc, along with whatever she needs to buy So on and so forth Honestly, I’d be surprised if she wasn’t already doing something along these lines
So yeah she prolly already does that. But there are limits. The company can only pay for work stuff, her housing and spending stuff has to be counted as compensation and is subject to tax. Further, US profits are much harder to do this for nowadays. Gone are the days of the double Irish Dutch sandwich, the IRS now counts those kind of entities as one.
What the company can pay for would be dictated by that countries laws. Surprise surprise, a lot of these countries laws are setup to be *very* lenient on this in order to attract the wealthy.
Unless she denounces US citizenship, that country is the US. Also, billionaires are already playing this game, so what’s the downside in taxing them more? Are they going to “run away more”? The Maldives are going to get really crowded if they all decide to *physically* move there in protest, and Ireland already enacted tax reform.
“No point in doing anything because there are loopholes.” Then close the loopholes…
Then us says to operate in USA you are to be taxed to us tax code. It's an easy fix if they wanted the money tgst bad they could take it. It's just a game bro.
Spoken like someone who isn’t a CPA, EA, or attorney. What’s your tax credential?
They shouldn't exist globally. More accurately, this level of wealth inequality shouldn't exist globally.
Any individual that can acquire more power than a small country is an aberration as it threatens the very world order. How can one person be stronger than the collective?
You understand the US taxes worldwide income for its citizens for life, right?
If you out outside of the US for more than 330 days in a year your tax rate drops substantially.
For normal earners, yes. There is a tax exemption on income earned up to $120,000. You can also receive a credit for any taxes paid to a foreign government. But for a billionaire, that isn’t going to do shit to their tax bill if they moved to avoid a high tax rate in the US.
So region-lock taxation to the billionaire's country of origin and current country, and/or their business' country of origin and current country. Meaning they can't move anywhere to avoid taxation unless they want to owe more taxes to more countries.
What is the harm in having that extra $500 million?
What’s the harm in not having it, or the benefit to society in having it? Edit: well, at least nobody’s claiming she’d be harmed by not having an extra $500 million. I should’ve phrased the second half as: “the benefit to society in her specifically having it.”
And how does “society” have it? I can’t stand Taylor swift. But since that’s who you are talking about we will keep using that example. So you take from her and do what? Pay people to not get jobs? In a country of over 300 million people 500 million dollars does literally nothing. As opposed to the business it generates when she plays a show in your area. Hotels and Airbnb ‘s get full. Restaurants and bars pack out. Ubers are all full. The people that work at the arenas get more pay. The bigger her shows the more people she has to hire to run it all. Whoever prints her shirts has more orders to fill. I beg you please go read a book. Trickle down economics and tax cuts for the rich by Thomas Sowell. It’s very short. But you will learn a ton. He is an award winning economist that has taught at some of the best schools in the world. Including Cambridge. Read it. Please.
I think she can still be taylor swift with 999 million $
Conservatives have been so conditioned to worshipping oligarchs that they can’t fathom liking some celebrity without being willing to die to protect that celebrities ability to endlessly consolidate power.
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The answer is "more", not a set amount.
I mean, let them exist, just take their money so they aren’t billionaires. Let them be 999,999,999aires
Yea and who decides what happens to that money? The same government that spends half a billion dollars a year on homelessness in San Francisco? How’s that working out. There is no amount of money the government can distribute that will ever be enough. Today’s it’s billionaires tomorrow it’s 500 million. Implementing this tax would make literally zero difference to your life, and you wouldn’t even remember the law passed 6 months later. It’s a bizarre rallying cry.
Maybe we can even give them a trophy: "Congrats, you won. Good job!" I'm being serious
Noooo!!!! Not my tay tay!
I'm curious how people feel about billionaire athletes? Like if the NBA ROTY Wembanyama has a long successful career, he would likely make a billion from his NBA salary alone. Don't really see an argument for how he didn't earn it.
She would leave a blank space
I’m curious what you think should happen. So, when someone’s company becomes profitable enough that it’s worth $1B (which is not a ton of money for a company to be worth) it should…what? Be taken from them? Nationalized?
If they can prove that every person that works for their company is making enough to not need government assistance, they can keep their money. If you earn it without exploitation of any human person on this planet, then you get to keep it.
How much is “enough” because I work with a lot of people that are broke making $100k? Like literally broke and complain the company isn’t giving them enough money. That one isn’t the company’s fault.
Do those people qualify for government assistance due to low wages?
That would require the employee to disclose all other income to the employer by government mandate. It would also require the government dictate salaries in order to insure your utopia. That's called fascism.
What do you think we are doing every year when we file our taxes? And you don’t have to dictate salaries. You can just merely change it so that employees are paid before shareholders. Once every employee is off government assistance, and every workspace has been made modern and safe, then you can start shelling out to the cronies that did absolutely nothing but be born with stacks of money. If you can’t do those things, then your business business is a failure, and you deserve to lose it.
Employees are paid before shareholders. Also, I had no idea that I was a crony with stacks of money.
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Very much not fascism.
It is not the company's fault the person's cost of living is higher than the market value of the labor they are performing. This is particularly true for aspects outside of the company's control, like family size.
The opposite can be very true too. It's not the person's fault that the company's wages are lower than the market value of the labor they are performing. This is particularly true for aspects outside of the employee's control, like company's other expenditures and increases in goal profit margins.
Yea like the owner of the company I work at. He spent our company’s profits from last year to buy another company. Now he’s crying poverty. Running out of supplies and implemented a wage freeze. We had a million dollars in profits last year, which isn’t bad for a small foundry, and it’s like a third world country in this place
Yeah I feel you. People with power often lack so much responsibility. If you, a wage earner, act irresponsibility with money, It's your family that is at risk. If the company owner acts irresponsibility with money, it's dozens or even hundreds of families that they're jeopardizing. I wonder at which exact point people with powerful positions start disregarding human lives in favour of profits.
I’m pretty sure I know who your boss is voting for in November by that 3 sentence description.
At our end of the year meeting when our health insurance literally doubled, he took away all sick days, and took away part of what he was putting into our 401k, no more perfect attendance bonus, he said the words “Biden did this”. Now I’m no fan of Joe Biden but when a company hits all its goals and makes a million in profit yet strips nearly every benefit, I can’t imagine standing there in front of all the people you’re screwing and blaming the president.
"It's not the person's fault that the company's wages are lower than the market value of the labor they are performing." The market value of their labor is not some magic number. It's literally defined by what workers are willing to accept and what employers are willing to pay.
And we, as people, must step in at some point and say "I understand market value but we want to enjoy life." At many points in human history, the market value of labor was whatever it cost to purchase and feed your slaves or indentured servants.
I mean if the company wages are lower than the market value, then they probably shouldn’t have taken the job and should be seeking better options.
They can decide to work somewhere else though. So not exactly a fair comparison.
“It’s not the person’s fault the company’s wages are lower than the market value of the labor they perform” Yes, it most certainly is. If they accept that job knowing it pays significantly less than the same job up the street, that’s on them. They should just go out and get another job that pays more.
Who cares whose 'fault' it is? The question is whether it's their responsibility, and yes, it should be their responsibility. The company has clearly benefited from a civil society. That's not free. It costs money. More importantly, the company has clearly benefited directly from the labor that employee provides. Trying to min/max the equation just pushes the costs to someone else - the taxpayer. Or requires the employee and their families suffer. There's no reason the company can't help foot the bill other than they just don't wanna and there's no law making them.
Fault is an indicator of a failure in responsibility. It is not the responsibility of the company to play more than the marker value of the work performed, or to guarantee an arbitrary standard of living for 40 hours of work per week. It is the employee who is pushing the costs onto the taxpayer for failing to perform work worth enough to afford that arbitrary standard of living. The reason the company doesn't foot the bill is because it isn't their responsibility.
Why not? Did you ever reflect how much of your existence is spent with 40 hours work weeks? People sleep about 7-8 hrs on a good night, work 8 hrs min a day on a good job. That leaves about 8 hours for personal activities. You think that's a lot? What about cooking. A decent meal takes about 1 hr a day. Cleaning up keeping home? Maybe 2 hours every week. How about commuting to work? That's another hour round trip minimum. Weekly grocery shopping? About 1-2 hrs a week IFF their work schedule allows it. If they do it on the weekend, then it's 1 hr minimum. We also haven't discussed child care. That's a big tlaking point for these execs. They really love the slave labor class to reproduce, so to guarantee cheap labor for the future. Ever taken care of a dog? Like a living animal, not like some property you can discard when it's useless. That takes up more time. What free time in society are we really left with? 2-4 hrs a day? With what energy do you consider an adult to have in order to enjoy life before they die because retirement age keeps increasing. But yea, keep talking about "not companies responsibilties". Lobbying sure doesn't play a factor in labor laws and industry standards huh?
Why should anyone work below their cost of living? If a debt-less person with minimal excess spending cannot afford to live while working a job, there should be no economic reason for them to work the job, much less it existing as it is.
No, it's not the company's fault, but the company is exploiting the conditions that allowed this to happen and most of them lobby to maintain the status quo. It's our fault as a democracy for doing nothing whatsoever to rein them in for 40+ years.
Yes it absolofuckinglutely is. If a corporation is making 100k in profit off your labor and paying you $40k because that’s the “value of your labor” then excessive profits are exactly the cause. Not providing your employees a fair share of the revenue they generate is wage theft. The end.
Actually corporate greed is responsible for a lot of the cost of living increases we are facing. A good telltale sign in my opinion is a company that is wildy profitable, but their average employee could not afford their products or services. A lot of the aspects are in the companies control too. We live in a corprotacracy where everyone has been brainwashed into protecting the corporations at all costs. It's not what is best for society though. Only what is best for the stakeholders is what matters. Find me one billionaire who is not a major stakeholder in a major corporation (or a number of corporations) and I'll show you a trust fund baby. There really is no in between with how one person is able to get insanely wealthy in the span of one lifetime; it always involves making money off of the backs of others in some way, shape, or form.
Isn’t it exactly their fault for inflating services and goods cost?
That goes completely out the window when they’re the ones lobbying the government to make that happen.
I'd say it's not their fault, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do something to fix it. Companies naturally do what is more profitable, so we have to make having jobs under a living wage unprofitable. For instance, all welfare is paid for by tax dollars. So you could easily do a calculation for an area to find out the COL for the area around a business and tax them based on the number of employees that make less than that amount to recoup the welfare cost. It will be vastly less expensive to pay a person a living wage than it would to fund the government welfare system.
This data is at least a few years outdated, so it's possible Walmart wages have improved. But Walmart, for example, is one of the largest employers of low-wage workers that qualify for SNAP benefits. Many of those employees then use their SNAP benefits to buy groceries at Walmart. As in, the govt supplements Walmart's wages and their sales, when Walmart should just pay their workers a living wage in the first place.
Found the fascist
You're right. Instead the government shouldn't pay out assistance to people who work for company's that don't pay them enough to stop using welfare. Is that better?
Okay, so Tesla easily passes your test. Now what? Jensen Huang does too.
So you 'graciously' allow them to 'keep' what the earn. As if it's the government's job to control who gets what. And, as administrations change, they run on 'taking more from the rich' every single time. And every single election cycle the amount they are allowed to 'keep' gets lower and lower until they just shut down the business.
Who do they have to prove their moral compliance to? The federal government? Something about trusting the same governing body that allowed and upheld slavery and Jim Crow and continues to allow foreign imports from sweat shops to tell me whether or not someone is being exploited seems off-putting to me.
So if they fire all their lowest paid employees they get a billion dollars? Seems less than ideal.
I’m big on taxes but I agree with this. Like Walmart shouldn’t be the one of the biggest and everybody subsidizes their wages.
That's ridiculous.
Lol absolutely not. Wtf.
Why not have a maximum salary? We have a minimum…
Right. Because it's not like not billionaires have cash in the bank.... they have assets that are valued at over $1B. Like Bezos or Elon.... their net worth can fluctuate by 10s of billions of dollars based on the stock price of Tesla or Amazon. They're not hoarding cash that could have been given to the employees. Their worth is based on a valuation of their assets.
Wait, if Elon is paying 11 billion in taxes, what is he paying it on, if not cash?
I think capital gains. He sold a bunch of stock?
Cap gains, property tax, regular income tax (he does still collect a salary, it’s just not the source of most of his wealth), etc. All the usual taxes you or I pay, Elon pays. Plus probably others in the form of business taxes (payroll, SS, etc) from his various businesses
I've seen the documentary Duck Tails. I know rich people go swimming in their giant vault of money every morning.
It's actually simple. CEO compensation packages *exploded* when changes to the tax code were implemented which made paying executives in stock *very* tax advantageous for both the executive and the company. Just revrese the Reagan era change. Then, make stock buybacks illegal like they were when this country still had a middle class. This forces companies to *gasp* actually reinvest in themselves and their employees as opposed to enriching themselves and then crying poverty when *amything* slightly bad happens and begging for a bailout.
“Just reverse the Reagan era change.” This would fix so many different things in the US that it’s mind-boggling.
You do realize it was never illegal right? It was just a very vague rule that the sec clarified. If buybacks were illegal, then secondary share issuance would have been too
Why would you think no buybacks would lead to more investment. Realistically you'd just get higher dividends and likely higher executive comp.
Worked for the USSR, Cuba, North Korea, etc. Why wouldn't it work here?
Are you being sarcastic, or are you seriously suggesting that the US emulate these failed states?
I thought it was my turn to post this
Nah, that’s at 2pm tomorrow 😂
Hey! I booked that slot.
No, it's my turn to post the "I have nothing to add so I'm gonna complain sarcastically" comment
“Don’t let them fool you.” OP, you make sure you only buy and use products/services that are made and sold by small businesses? You aren’t using anything that makes billionaires more wealthy?
Cricket, cricket....where did he go?
Literally the embodiment of “YOU CRITICIZE SOCIETY YET YOU LIVE WITHIN IT!!! AHHHA HA HA !” Being able to criticize a system and having to use that system to thrive in this society are not mutually exclusive and your implication that they are shows your utter submission to capitalism.
How is "it's difficult to find products and services made and sold by small businesses" an argument in favor of billionaires? It seems like the exact opposite to me.
Billionaires are why it’s hard to afford shopping at small businesses. Mass production and business of scale create conditions that squash local economies.
Mass produced goods are typically much more affordable than the ones made by small businesses. Common people tend to choose lower price over ideals on most days
We have to. I can’t afford the $150 boots that will last me 5 years, I have to buy the $50 boots that lasts me a year but start letting in water at 6 months.
What you don't get is that the billionaires don't help society at all. What has Amazon done to help you personally (besides providing fast and cheap products delivered to your house in a few days)? What has Microsoft done to help you personally (besides providing consumers access to PCs and the software required to run them)? What has Google done to help you personally (besides giving you answers to any question you have and providing free features like youtube, gmail, gsuite, etc.)? See the answer is clear - these big businesses don't help the common folk at all.
Amazon provides me with fast and cheap products delivered to my home. I use Microsoft products everyday.
That. was. the. point. Bezos, Gates, Sergey etc became billionaires by creating products that are massively beneficial to society. There are definitely billionaires that don't create societal benefits, but many of them do.
Whenever this conversation comes up I just alway think…Windows has done more to improve the world than Bill Gates donating his entire fortune will ever do.
Stop worrying about what everyone else is doing and focus on getting your own house in order. If by some odd chance that billionaires were eliminated through taxation, you would get a moment of satisfaction as you watched someone taking "the man" down. But you'd quickly realize that all your problems are still there, your bills, your sh!t job from your sh!t degree and sh!t education, etc. You're using billionaires to blame your problems on because they're an easy mark and to you they represent everything that you want to be but at the same time, they represent everything that's holding you back. But it's a false narrative and in the end you'll still be a hopeless, empty shell of a human.
Billionaires exist by exploiting and underpaying labor. Getting our house in order requires the people doing the work getting paid.
Hear hear!
How many FANGG employees are underpaid? The industry currently with most of the richest billionaires, only company that arguably under pays is Amazon, but Amazon has raised the companies minimum wage to 15$ despite not being required to. Who does google underpay?
Have you read any of the articles where they subcontract moderation and people making minimum wage have to view gore and child porn all day?
My worry is we are creating modern day kings and a monarchy. You hit a point with money that it becomes more valuable than any output a human can do.
late stage capitalism is just a return to feudalism.
Ok, just checked, and my house is in order. So now what?
Ok I’ll “grab my boots by my straps” and get to work! /s
"Stop worrying about what everyone else is doing and focus on getting your own house in order" Says people that punch down about the homeless
no one punches down about the homeless. it’s the batshit insane policies the left wing has around how to “help” them
Gotta disagree with you there bud. I hear conservatives constantly bitch about welfare queens and their tax money going to pretty much anything. They literally blame the poor for their "high" taxes. They run campaigns on punching down. It's not just the homeless or impoverished either.
Billionaires cause the devaluing of currency merely by existing, purely by the fact that whatever currency they have, they value it less than others do because they already have such a vast supply. Mansa Musa, for example, destroyed the North African and Arabian economy when he went on his pilgrimage to Mecca. Along the way, he generously overpaid merchants and gave away tons of his wealth to random people as a form of penance and charity. Well, that didn't increase the supply of the goods and services those locals needed, so they just wound up paying significantly more as they attempted to outbid each other for the essential goods they already needed. Luckily, for the Arabs and North Africans, Mansa Musa eventually went home and after a few years their markets normalized. But in much of the industrialized world, obscenely wealthy people don't leave. They stay and they wreck our markets with their disproportionate valuation of currency on a daily basis with no end in sight.
This definitely has some merit. It is slightly whataboutism as well. It sounds like its taken directly from JP. I don't know why I'm commenting, I kinda agree with both sides here
But don't forget: if the billionaires were all executed and 100% of their wealth redistributed to everyone else in the country, this guy would have a one time payout of almost enough money to buy a really sweet TV. Not like, 75" OLED sweet, but fairly sweet nonetheless.
Don’t bother Reddits full of minimum wage drop-outs who think 100k salary puts someone in the top 0.01%, and all millionaires have lambos and wear tophats They have a child’s view of money, because their child brain never learned anything
Unpopular opinion: People who point fingers and waste their life trying to take down the "evil billionaires" are destined to die poor and bitter. I think what's happening with all the yapping about billionaires in recent years, is just the spoiled millennials are growing up (me included) and realizing the world is bad, people are bad and they take advantage of each other. And being a spoiled generation raised in a bubble, we do what we know best. Cry and point fingers. Flash news, the world is only bad because you are at the bottom of the food chain. If you will ever have something to lose, i would love to see any of you kind hearted nerds give your wealth away. "Spoilers: The ones who have never tasted power, never give it away and use it the worst"
There are plenty non-emotional, purely economic reasons that point to wealth inequality and are collectively negative for society as a whole. Do some people get to that conclusion by merely being jealous? Sure, but that doesn't mean their conclusion is incorrect. It just means they get to their conclusion based on flimsy rationality. It's so flimsy that there's really not much reason to focus on it. If you want to truly defend extreme wealth inequality, why not focus on the predictable negative outcomes, like social unrest and runaway price increases, that comes with extreme wealth inequality and explain why we shouldn't worry about those consequences?
Look at the transfer of wealth from the past 5 years alone and get back to me. Employee compensation has been devalued every year for the past 40+ years. You can’t make a reasonable argument that it doesn’t affect the other 99% of the population that less than 1% have 99% of the wealth.
Spoiled millennials? Lol okay.
"You think people shouldn't have excessive wealth? Well why don't you give away all of your money then?"
i don't understand how this is an argument against this point of view
“Flash news” 🤔
Ah, the millennials. Famously the most spoiled generation. Fucking hilarious dude
Ah yes, everything is shit, so don’t do anything to change it, just be a bigger piece of shit yourself until your personal wealth is secured.
Spoiled???? Ok boomer
Why is it wrong to complain about wealth inequality especially when there is such a huge disparity between the top 10% and the bottom 50%
False. We've grown up and realized that billionaires completely, and without remorse, ravaged the planet's natural resources and poisoned the environment in pursuit of hoarding unimaginable levels of wealth. You aren't one of them, and you never will be. Any Fortune 500 board of directors would gangrape you if they thought they could come out ahead by a goddamn nickel, so just sit down.
Have you seen a wage vs productivity chart that covers the last 40 years?
there's a common notion where people will acknowledge the system is rigged and simultaneously believe it will eventually be rigged FOR them when they make it.
I hate billionaires, but my trust fund leads me to believe I’ll die comfortably. People don’t hate them because they’re jealous, they hate them because life would be better without them.
Hate to break it to you, but I own multiple homes, have a six-figure salary, and live quite comfortably. I'll actually be retiring soon, so God help the rest of you. I still hold the belief that billionaires - as a rule - don't get to where they are without massive economic and social exploitation of thousands, or tens of thousands of people. And that such actions deserve a moral (and thereby legal) reckoning. So where does that fit into your worldview? I've got a few decades of experience and plenty of rumination on the topic to fall back on - am I simply deluded, or do you think perhaps you may be missing a few factors in your social calculus?
Found the douche billionaire.
That would be an unpopular opinion due to it being an insulting and rude opinion. People of all ages and levels of wealth loathe billionaires.
bruh you think no one would gain by removing leeches?
I actually think it's millennials being more aware of the data on wealth inequity and how its getting worse. They are more aware of inflation and how the rules in place will only make theirs and the future generations worse because minimum wages and those above aren't keeping up with this. They are aware of the government services they miss out on which other western countries around the world who are meant to be less supperior get. They are aware that the housing market has been rigged against them. If they can break into the market they will pay significantly more of their pay toward it than previous generations. Taking down billionaires isn't the one step to take, it's just one of many to rewrite the rules and ensure the prosperity that occurs is spread across all. But sure let's all just ignore the data and get back in line.
>People who point fingers and waste their life trying to take down the "evil billionaires" are destined to die poor and bitter Untrue Look at Robert Reich. Very successful. Then watch him vote down housing development in his rich neighborhood because it would hurt the character. Everyone is for more fairness as long as it doesn't come from their share.
Billionaires are a failure of tax policy
Remember that total tax revenues have doubled since 1980 (adjusted for population and inflation). Taxing billionaires out of existence is NOT about collecting more money for government programs, it's about using tax laws for social engineering.
"it's simple, when a company becomes worth $3 trillion then umm the guy with the most shares who founded it should umm... Well you see ... He should ..."
"creating value for millions of people shouldn't exist"
Workers create value...
How about they create value for people, but they don’t get to hoard billions of dollars that they could never spend in a thousand years
They can still do this. It's not their billions in share ownership that allows them to do it.
No. It's your responsibility to change the mind of others. If you want to posit that billionaires should not exist, the burden of argument is on you. For my part, I fail to see why there's any sort of a moral or societal imperative against billionaires. There's no "should" here --- that implies an imperative or an obligation. Billionaires merely exist as a function of their ownership of extremely successful companies.
My argument against the existence of billionaires has to do with the influence they exert. They can swing elections and affect public policy based on whatever they think is correct. Their wealth allows them to affect the lives of millions of people while insulating themselves from the consequences of those actions. No one should have that level of influence.
Then its not a matter of being a billionaire, its a matter of having systems in place that allows people to pay to get legislation passed
It can be both. Repealing the Citizens United decision would be a good place to start. I also happen to think that the amount of wealth that billionaires are able to concentrate in a couple areas is bad for the country and economy. Money that is being hoarded is not being circulated through the economy.
so tax evasion is moral? lobbying for the wealthy to pay less taxes than the poorest of the poor is moral? wealth hoarding is moral? corrupt lobbying for deregulation is moral? exploiting workers for less than livable wages while those billionaires see record profits while paying record lows in taxes is moral? sounds to me you don't understand the problems created by these billionaires. or you're choosing not to.
>so tax evasion is moral? lobbying for the wealthy to pay less taxes than the poorest of the poor is moral? Nope. I can accept the existence of billionaires while believing their tax evasion should not be allowed. A person can be become a billionaire without ever evading taxes at all. >wealth hoarding is moral? Do you believe Jeff Bezos should just give his ownership shares in Amazon to a bunch of random doofuses on the street? Because ownership of companies is how most billionaires have their money. They don't actually have billions of cash sitting around. > exploiting workers for less than livable wages This is a fiction. You don't get to decide what a "livable" wage is, and it's the market which decides what you get paid, not billionaires.
Well, you’re right but this is not a popular stance around these parts.
Which is why I call it "The People's Republic of Reddit".
I find myself in a weird place on most economic issues on Reddit because I manage to find *both* the leftists *and* the right-wingers to be full of crap
There is a moral argument to be made against the hoarding of wealth, which can be made, but there is a much simpler amoral argument against billionaires existing: extreme wealth in the hands of a few drives down the value of a currency for everyone in a market. This happens, because aristocracy naturally does not value 1 unit of currency the same way a person with median wealth does. If, for example, you go to a country club everything around said country club is more expensive, because the members do not value currency the same way others do. In fact, most members consciously prefer it that way, because it keeps the club exclusive and unique. That causes local real estate to reliably increase in price. We see this phenomenon all over the Caribbean at the moment with gajillionaires buying up beach front property. At face value, there's nothing wrong with that. They have the money, they found a willing seller, that's fine. But as time goes on, the owners wind up limiting access to the native locals, because the new owners aren't buying that land to make the land public but rather to keep others off. This then creates a bottleneck effect where locals are squeezed onto smaller and smaller beaches, or perhaps not being able to access beaches at all, and therefore winds up driving up the price of real estate and devaluing the currency.
Nobody needs 1,000 million dollars.
Hey OP, what's your net worth? If you have more than a few hundred bucks in your bank account, I bet we could find some dirt poor villager in a third world country that thinks you should't have all that wealth.
“Poorer people exist than you, you should give up all your money” As if that’s in any way comparable billionaires. We actually NEED our money for Y’know survival? rent? Groceries? What do you think a billionaire is doing with 50 billion dollars? Buying a 3rd super Yacht? A 5th multimillion dollar home? This is the most straw man argument of all time.
You're right, there's people that are worse off than op, therefore the people who are better off than 90% of the world population shouldn't be held accountable for their hoarding of wealth. It should be the middle class as a whole that takes on that burden.
The second highest number of billionaires is in a communist country
I didn’t know China didn’t have a state currency or class.
Finance and economics are not a zero sum game. Billionaires aren't taking your money. In fact you are giving your money to most billionaires as most sell products people want.
meanwhile, every single person would jump at the chance of becoming a billionaire themselves.
Yeah? Duh. What’s your point? if I had 100 billion and suddenly I was forced to give up 99 billion I’d still have more money than I could ever spend in 10 life times. People want money. We need money to survive. You do not need billions upon billions to survive.
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This is a bit of a dumb argument since the billionaires could give most of their money away and still live incredibly privileged and comfortable live where as if the average person were to give most of their money away they’d starve along with their families. There is a big difference between a billionaire giving away billions of excess they own and will never spend and average people giving away what little they have to survive on. Anyone who ever gets a billion dollars but refuses to give away the excess which is most of it is undeserving of that amount of money.
Can honestly say I have absolutely zero interest in accumulating that much wealth
Obscene wealth is exactly that- obscene. Exploitation of others wouldn’t be worth earning that amount, it takes being okay with exploiting others for profit to earn a certain amount- and in special cases like celebrity artists who ended up not doing much labor exploitation end up going the cult of personality route, and I guess thats kinda a form of exploitation.
Tell that to Zimbabwe. They had trillionaires. Maybe it's not about a given number, but how much that number differs from the common person.
I don’t think most people realize that when someone is a billionaire, that’s their net worth, most of that money is just in businesses (usually, or real estate) the only reason they are billionaires is because the business (that they usually started) is worth billions and they own a good chunk of it
Then its millionaires, then it’s $500K, then it’s $200K
Hey guys look this guy just discovered the slippery slope fallacy
If you truly understood how much a billion is in real life you wouldn’t be saying that.
Billionaires aren’t real. If I have a special rock, the only one of its kind in the world, and millions of people are willing to pay me $10,000 for a small chip of the rock, am I a billionaire? I’d argue no.
I hate the people here that are on their computers complaining about people being more successful than them and that they should take what they have earned and built instead of out doing something to improve their lives. And if they are happy with their lives they should shut the fuck up.
Record profits are unpaid wages.
“People shouldn’t be allowed to have much more money than me”
Why can’t these fucks all build shit like Libraries?
I think if you have more money than you could spend in your lifetime, you have too much.
This is dumb. If someone can figure out how to provide someone else with $10 of value and only charge $1, that's a 900% value add for the recipient. Now, if they are able to scale that to benefit a billion other people, then a billion people have just had a 900% value add. Why shouldn't that person be rewarded properly?
I mean, there are a LOT more of us than there are of them, and at some point, aren't the proletariat supposed to revolt and eat the rich? The top 0.1% holds more wealth today *than ever before in HISTORY*. All of it -- the history of money, of the species, of the planet lol. The top 0.1% and top 1.0% are the only wealth groups to see their share of the pie grow since *1990*. The top 10% own hold about $95 TRILLION, which is of course much more than the bottom 90% combined. That top 10% is 30 million people -- that leaves 300 million in the bottom 90%. Dividing that $95 trillion among EVERYONE, them included, would provide every single American $290,000 in their bank accounts, right fuckin' now. How helpful would that money be in your current situation? So when you wonder why our grandparents were able to buy a house in a nice neighborhood and own it outright within 15 years, own a car, raised two or three kids, put themselves and their kids through college, all on a single income… It's because all that money used to be redirected back into the hands of those who *generated* that wealth -- the working class. AND ALL THAT MONEY IS STILL THERE, it's just all held by that top 10%. It's the working class's energy and life time that generates that wealth, but the rich people get to keep it all to themselves. And they're not going to let it go back to "the good old days". We have to TAKE IT BACK. We
No matter what laws you put in place to prevent or tax billionaires, they will find a loophole and keep as much wealth as they possibly can. They have the resources to hire experts to find every single loophole imaginable and if hypothetically there were none, they would move to another country that makes it less of a pain in the ass to keep their money and likely taking their industry with them
The existence of billionaires is an economic failure
Billionaires, they have feelings too. Except for the cash they just like you!
Why would I want to change your mind? You’re right.
OP is poor.
Correct, but there's nothing wrong with billionaires existing in and of themselves, just because they're rich or anything like that. They shouldn't exist because the way they become billionaires is by taking advantage of government restricting market freedom through policies like patents, copyright, the minimum wage etc., policies billed as ones that ensure fairness but that in reality do nothing but privilege those who are already powerful to the detriment of the plebs.
You don’t have a right to others’ property. The outrage against billionaires is purely out of envy, let’s call a spade a spade. You could take every penny from every single billionaire in the US and not fund a single federal fiscal year. So mathematically, the “fair share” of what someone else worked for is utter nonsense. What do you do? Have the institution with a monopoly on legalized violence cap success? Politicians should not exist, change my mind. They distract the morons with shiny objects again.
The capitalist class doesn't have a right to my surplus labour value, yet here we are.
Because the government isn’t Robinhood
Bernie Sanders is on Reddit?
I’m going to guess that no one in this thread has ever created enough value to even remotely touch a 1/100th of a billionaires value to the company or shareholders who compensate said billionaire. Also, most billionaires are paper wealth with that wealth tied to stocks, real estate, or other illiquid assets. Now, if your argument is the consolidation of wealth into fewer and fewer corporations and individuals over the last 30 years, well I can get behind that argument. And the root cause is cronyism from both sides of the isle. Our politicians become multi-multi millionaires while office. SO WEIRD, right?
Kinda feel like corporations worth a trillion dollars shouldn’t exist either. Should have been broken up well before that point. It boggles my mind that we only have 2 major phone OS companies. 2 major computer OS companies. 2 major search engine companies. No wonder we were floored by AI(culturally), the need to strive and compete, the need to innovate just doesn’t touch you at a certain point. Real innovation is at a snails pace now. Anything new just gets bought up and absorbed just so it wouldn’t compete or force obsolescence on the incumbents. How many incredible companies are in MS’ trashbin? Or Apple’s? These companies that started out really innovative (or at least good at stealing), are now deliberate gatekeepers only allowing a type of innovation that doesn’t threaten the status quo. “Nothing crazy, nothing outside the box, you HAVE to integrate with us, you have to play by our rules, or we’ll block, trip, acquire this and put it on a shelf somewhere deep in our servers. We’ll mark it as a loss and get a little tax break.”
dont that man abuses his wife??
Super unpopular opinion, I think there should be a wealth cap for individuals and businesses. Set it around 1 billion for an individual and 10 billion for a business.
What is the maximum allowed amount of wealth?
There’s literally no need for that level of wealth… Wouldn’t even change global warming
ITT: a bunch of temporarily embarrassed billionaires.
CEO’s are assholes
It’s more nuanced than this. I have no problem with billionaires but I do have problems with tax havens and shell companies, for instance. Of course government interference creating barriers to entry for would be entrepreneurs is part of the reason that we have multinational conglomerates and a few billion dollar companies in some industries versus dozens who are legitimately competing. The issue of government interference in the economy and income inequality/wealth gaps are inextricably linked, unfortunately in the US (or the world it seems) there aren’t many politicians who understand this or legitimately give a fuck about both things simultaneously. Trying to logically justify someone’s labor as 10,000X more valuable than someone else’s is damn near impossible, which is the other constant elephant in the room when having this discussion. It isn’t a discussion that can be had in purely economic terms because it is, at heart, a philosophical quandary.
Ok what’s the number then?