Please go easy on the downvotes—the point here is to try to understand a perspective that many of you probably won’t share.
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- 5 hours
At “Billionaire” (or even hundreds of millions of dollars) levels of wealth the government should implement a different tax scale based on net worth. Simpler and harder to manipulate. An annual minimum tax bill of 1% of your net worth that cannot be reduced, offset, deferred or otherwise mitigated per billion annually to do buisness in the country, per country.
Just stop them rorting loopholes. I think people would probably hate billionaires a whole lot less if they just paid a FAIR amount of tax.
Edit: actually the math works pretty much all the way down. Everyone should have a minimum income tax bill every year of 1% of their net worth with the only exemption being your primary residence.
- HubertManne@piefed.socialEnglish7 hours
I would like progressive rules that make it very difficult the higher you get but theoretically allow people to dream of vast wealth. Sorta like a soft cap in an mmo. Im talking taxes here of course.
- SapereAude@anarchist.nexusEnglish15 hours
Rephrase of what I think you’re trying to ask: Should a society allow any person to accumulate wealth and power in the amount that today’s billionaires have?
There’s a huge amount of socioeconomic theory and history behind this apparently very simple question. In general, I think there’s a lot more benefit to all of us when advances do not flow entirely into the hands of a few people. Taxation has been the major form of wealth redistribution in the western world for a while now - since the Gilded Age robber-barons decided that helping society by building libraries, museums, and universities was preferable to having the government take 95% of money they made over a certain high amount.
The current system has been so perverted by that accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of a few that it’s become self-reinforcing, and is backed up by educational “reform” and propaganda from end to end. The result is that while the world may be continuing to get better overall, it’s either stalled, or is actively getting worse for many of us normal folks.
Without writing a novel, I think it would be a good idea to tie tax brackets to the poverty and average income levels, and then tax anything over like 100x the baseline amount at 99.98% or so. Also close all the tax loopholes like borrowing against assets being untaxed even if it’s the only source of income. Try to re-balance the system for all of us, and add as much buffer as possible to keep it from being re-fucked by those dragons hoarding all the gold.
12 hoursWell, I wasn’t so much getting at what you’re saying—which I completely agree with btw—but rather, I’m trying to understand what prevents people from realizing that the reason for their poor living conditions is the accumulation of capital in far too few hands.
The reason for my question: the global resurgence of fascism, which, in my opinion, is the direct consequence of the influence of billionaires, because they use this mindless ideology with all their might to pit people against one another and thus distract them from where the real problem lies.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that there are so many democracies where people view immigration as the most pressing problem. Absurdly, this is also the case in my home country, Germany, even though the German labor market needs far more foreign workers in a wide variety of sectors.
This is classic fascist ideology, which we unfortunately know all too well in this country. What’s frightening, however, is that the billionaires wield their influence so effectively that even the German masses no longer remember their inhuman faces and now still parrot whatever the algorithm—or rather, the will of the billionaires—presents to them.
It’s a tragedy, and my question in this post simply seeks to understand how this can be—how people fail to grasp that it is the powerful, and by no means the powerless, who should be despised.
- SapereAude@anarchist.nexusEnglish11 hours
There has been a concerted effort by fascists since at least 1965 to reduce education, buy up the entire media apparatus so it can be used for propaganda, break down government regulations so that they can aquire more power and wealth, create foundations and think-tanks that pump out quasi-scientific crap supporting fascism, dilute and distort scientific progress if it does not agree with them.
Studying history makes the efforts and trends clear. This isn’t people supporting fascism in a vacuum, it’s the result of society-wide manipulation of the entire world population, or at least, any part of it that votes. In that environment, I think it’s pretty remarkable that they’ve only managed to fuck up 35-40% of people at most. They’ve had to cheat political systems to make that minority act like a democratic majority.
- 15 hours
Count me in this bracket. A progressive income tax should prevent billionaires in the first place, and for less controllable things like an IPO a wealth tax will do the rest.
- neidu3@sh.itjust.worksEnglish15 hours
Billionaires in themselves aren’t the problem. The circumstances creating them are. And not taxing them appropriately even more so.
Aren’t the circumstances that give rise to them simply the fact that societies allow individuals to become so wealthy in the first place?
- neidu3@sh.itjust.worksEnglish15 hours
Yes, and that’s exactly what I’m getting at: One does not become a billionaire without exploiting a system that allows such exploitation to begin with. Nobody gets to where they are without any form of help; I’m fairly well off, and I am very aware of where I got help along the way. Becoming a billionaire is simply the result of taking any help offered to you without paying back your fair share, and that’s where the faults lie: The society that hands out government subsidies with no stipulation past a “trust me bro”.
Laws and policies need to be enacted that stifled an individuals economic growth past a certain point, effectively preventing people from becoming billionaires in the first place.
And who do you think has the greatest interest—and the resources—to set up the system you’re talking about in such a way that it essentially serves only the interests of billionaires?
I’d say the U.S. demonstrates quite impressively how this works.
To me, the saddest aspect of this nation’s decline is that the people who are paying the price have resigned themselves to their fate, since their ideology seems to make it appear inevitable to them.
- 15 hours
People who think billionaires should exist generally don’t believe in the common good as much as they believe in Big Strong Man IS Cool and Sexy. Or they don’t know how labor works
- 14 hours
There’s absolutely something to this, in that religions that enforce hierarchies are going to be more attractive to people who desire hierarchies (befitting from them or not). There’s no form in which you can be a billionaire without believing in hierarchy because it’s about as peak of human power as you can get
- 15 hours
If competent people were in charge, you’d benefit greatly from their taxes.
The problem, however, is that the world’s largest corporations pay virtually no taxes, which gives rise to the very serious problem the world is facing today.
- 15 hours
Absolutely, that’s why I said if competent people were in charge. Because then those would be paying taxes. The fact they don’t is laws being too weak, non-existent, or poorly enforced.
You still haven’t answered the question: Why should there be people who, as private individuals, have enough capital to finance entire countries?
We’re seeing the consequences of your approach today, and it’s this very approach that led us to this problem in the first place: The world isn’t run in the interest of the general public, but by unscrupulous billionaires who don’t give the general public a second thought.
Therefore, one can only conclude that your idea of some “Führer” who act justly leads to disaster.
I’m sorry, but if I have to put it this way, this is Nazi ideology.
What you might have in mind may be a technocracy, but even that would endow individual people with a level of power that, in my opinion, is hardly desirable.
China is largely organized this way, since most of its ministers are experts in their respective fields.
However, that doesn’t strike me as a society worth living in.
- 10 hours
We’re seeing the consequences of your approach today
We’re not, because countries don’t have competent people in charge. Except maybe New York, I’m not too familiar with the guy’s work, not being from the US myself and all, but I’ve only seen positive news in the right direction about him.
Just to clarify here, I interpreted your question philosophically, not related to a specific real world situation. So I answered with an ideal scenario. A “if x were to be the case then y” scenario. X isn’t the case, so y doesn’t apply. But y would apply in a world where x is the case.
My approach in fact has not come to pass, so we’re not seeing the consequences of it. We’re in need of a lot of politicial legwork to weaken the power of money first before billionaires can become a net benefit.
That said, some countries like mine do apply wealth taxes to the rich, and my (non-US) state had actually redistributed their surplus in tax income (almost certainly due to wealth tax, as the rich love this state for its low taxes iirc) to the people last year, by lowering the cost of healthcare this year iirc. So i think we are seeing some of what I’m talking about selectively. Though I do agree that selective cases aren’t nearly enough, and that the current situation doesn’t result in a net positive for having billionaires.
The world isn’t run in the interest of the general public, but by unscrupulous billionaires who don’t give the general public a second thought.
Yeah and that’s because the world isn’t run by competent people but by corrupt bastards who only care about money and getting reelected.
Also I think this is a very US centric opinion. I agree that my scenario doesn’t currently properly apply to any country I’m aware of, but money has vastly different power in different parts of the world. “The world” is a big term, and I really don’t think it applies globally. Money doesn’t buy you everything everywhere. Otherwise the US wouldn’t have been the only country (that mattered) to oppose the OECD deal. I know my country ended up implementing almost all of it, except for the part that would have had to be implemented by everyone to be effective. I assume at least a few others did as well. I doubt the money was in favor of implementing it, yet it still happened.
Therefore, one can only conclude that your idea of some “Führer” who act justly leads to disaster.
I think you’re kind of putting words in my mouth there. I know the specific term here is meant to be a form of figure of speech, not something I said, but I’m clearly not talking about having a benevolent dictator in charge. In fact, while I didn’t bring it up here, I do believe that having a single guy at the top of any branch of government is inherently problematic. Imo more countries should use the Swiss approach of having a council of equals from multiple parties as the head of state, not a single president or prime minister. it’s the only way to properly represent the people even at the highest level.
I might have to clarify here: To me, a politician’s job in a representative democracy is to represent their constituents and act in their interest. Not pocket money and act as a puppet to the highest payer. That’s how I differentiate between a competent and an incompetent politician. Hence the better the system enforces this, the better it is imo. As a little background for my opinion above on having more than one person in charge.
What you might have in mind may be a technocracy
No, what I have in mind is representative democracy with competent representatives. Simple as that. Not technocracies or other alternative forms of government.
- AskewLord@piefed.socialEnglish14 hours
competent people are in charge.
that’s why they pay very little tax.
- 12 hours
I think we have differing ideas of competency in a representative democracy.
- AskewLord@piefed.socialEnglish12 hours
money is speech, that’s the law of the land. more money = more representation.
always has been, always will be.
- 12 hours
But you can prevent that with laws and taking corruption serious.
A politician taking bribes from rich people is corruption and wouldn’t be allowed with competent people in charge.
Rich people influencing politics through ads and such can be outlawed by politicians taking election integrity serious.
Money buys representation because the elite in charge prefers corruption over doing their jobs as politicians. Not because it inherently does. There are actions that can be taken to prevent it, they’re just not being taken.
- AskewLord@piefed.socialEnglish12 hours
You assume those are necessarily wrong/bad things, you are working off some ideal, that doesn’t really exist.
Things have always been corrupt, it’s just a matter of degree and nakedness you find objectionable. I guess you’d prefer more of the backroom dealing of the early 20th USA century politics, and the massive lack of transparency therein.
- 11 hours
Corrupt politicians are incompetent politicians. That’s my point here.
Competent politicians wouldn’t be corrupt. They might not exist, but that doesn’t make this untrue.You’re right that what I’m describing is an ideal. But OP asked a philosophical question, not one about today’s realities, or at least that’s how I interpreted their question.
If politicians were competent, then they would redistribute the wealth from billonaires to social programs that would benefit the people.
That said, I disagree with you on this being unsolvable. Like I said, laws can go a long way. And not everywhere does money buy you everything.
There are countries with progressive wealth taxes on the rich, with the rate going higher the wealthier they are.
Many countries, including rich ones like Switzerland, were in favor of the OECD minimum corporate tax deal until the US withdrew, which would have unfairly impacted their economies and caused every company to pack up and leave. But at least in my country, can’t speak for others, it still got implemented except for one aspect which is postponed indefinitely.But based on the news I’ve been seeing, isn’t New York also taking great steps in this direction? So I don’t think it’s quite the impossibility for politicians to go against big money even in the US.
Money is powerful in the current world, but it’s not omnipotent. You can go against them, and you can create a world where it is powerless. You just need people willing to do so.
- 11 hours
A: they shouldn’t
Though I think the real issue with combating that is scale. These fuckers have the whole world available to them.
If their country raises their taxes to 99%, they just flee.
You can’t have one country implementing reforms while others sit idly be, because of that…so it’s really hard to make a reform, then lose X massive amount of investment from these soggy fucks that would pull out their investment money just out of spite, then somehow justify the move when business starts corroding in your country - in the short term of course…because in the long term I’m sure it’s beneficial.
But with how things are going nowadays I wouldn’t be surprised to see them fighting back too. I’d expect a fight on all fronts, from political, to economical, to societal, against any country that tries that sort of thing…
They’re such a fucking plague.
- 9 hours
well yea but it’s not gonna happen
Americans could always use violence against them because they’re armed to the teeth, but they don’t. The people don’t rebel unless they’re literally starving.
Because Americans are the most propagandized, passive people on the planet.
Until it comes to respecting gay or trans or liberals, then a small portion get insanely violent.
Its not that billionaires should or shouldn’t exist. Its the corrupt system that creates and protects them from citizens negatively impacted by their existence that needs to be addressed.
And who do you think has the greatest interest in this? Who do you think has the power to make it happen?
I don’t know where you’re located but if you paid any attention to the current US political system, neither of those questions would need to be asked.
In and of itself, it doesn’t matter at all which country someone lives in, as long as you’re aware of the answer to the question I asked.
The answer is simply: the billionaires—even if you think you can undermine that reality with a counter-question (in Europe, where I live, there are certainly billionaires as well).
However, if—knowing all this—you don’t come to the same conclusion, I can’t understand why not.
That’s what my original question was about, and so far no one in this thread has answered it: How does society as a whole benefit from the existence of billionaires?
I know my answer to that.
Do you know yours, since you say it wouldn’t make any difference whether they exist or not…
- 9 hours
Sweden has more billionaires per capita than USA.
Billionaires existing does not mean you can’t have a reasonable social welfare state. You’re wasting your time thinking taxing away billionaires will solve anything.
- BlameThePeacock@lemmy.caEnglish15 hours
Billionaires aren’t the problem. They aren’t good, but even eliminating them would not move the needle.
The only real fix for a significant portion of the current affordability problems is a sizeable Land Value tax. Henry George was mostly right, he wrote that shit out for us more than century ago, and we’re still ignoring him while we fuck everything up because we keep treating land as this giant pyramid scheme of investment.
But why wouldn’t it solve the problem if top tax rates were imposed that would make it impossible for such parasitic investment firms to emerge in the first place?
- BlameThePeacock@lemmy.caEnglish15 hours
Go run the math. If you were to tax away say everything people own that’s greater than $50 million dollars, and give it to everyone else, the total amount each person gets is something… but not as much as you would think. On the order of tens of thousands of dollars in the US for example. That would happen one time.
The most significant problem with housing costs isn’t that corporations can invest, it’s that ANYONE can invest. Investments require that an asset appreciate faster than inflation, and if that happens by definition it will always become increasingly more expensive than people can afford. Homes cannot be an investment for anyone, or they will always become too expensive.
In a lot of countries 10 000 dollars is the salary for about 5 000 days. Or in other words, far over 10 years. And you were talking about several tens of thousands, which means several decades of life when distributed among 300 million people, about a decade per person if distributed among a billion people.
- BlameThePeacock@lemmy.caEnglish14 hours
Those numbers are for US billionaires divided by US population. If you were to try to divide global wealth from billionaires vs global population it likely wouldn’t even be a thousand dollars.
Not everyone on this planet is poor. I don’t need that money. But maybe roughly 2 billion people do. And “not even a thousand dollars” is two years’ salary. In this case we’re talking about a quarter of the world’s population, so you “not even a thousand dollars” becomes “not even four thousand dollars”.
And that means: “Not even the salary for 8 years. Possibly only 5 years!”
I mean, the money is enough to completely eradicate poverty from this planet. That’s all that really matters.
- BlameThePeacock@lemmy.caEnglish10 hours
It’s not even close to enough to eradicate poverty from this planet. You vastly overestimate how much small amounts of money affect things. It may pull some of the ultra-poor out of poverty, but a single $2,000 payment wouldn’t manage to get anyone in the first world out of poverty, and there are plenty of people living in the first world.
Cost of living varies by country, you’re trying to suggest that redistribution would help people, and it would, but A) that’s not how any sort of tax would be redistributed and B) the amount of money relative to each country isn’t enough to solve any of the problems we’re seeing.
You seem to be trapped in the status quo, as if it were a law of nature. There are no self-regulating markets, as economists claim. What you’re presenting here as inevitable isn’t real. It’s simply an expression of an ideology that you mistake for reality.
There are people who live in houses, and there are also people who build them. There is simply no “real estate god” who is anything other than a human being.
You might think that’s naive, but if you think that way, aren’t you also saying that climate change is an unavoidable catastrophe? That puts you no longer in the camp of rationality, but in the realm of theology—namely, the inevitable Last Judgment, the end of the world, and all that nonsense.
What I’m getting at is this: The biggest lie that economics has ever come up with is that it’s science—it isn’t. Based on the theories it pursues, it’s at best a social science that has already been largely disproved.
- BlameThePeacock@lemmy.caEnglish14 hours
My proposal is to destroy the market completely with a land value tax. How does that have anything to do with being stuck in the status quo? It’s incredibly radical by the standards of the average person right now.
If something is an investment, by necessity it must increase in price faster than inflation. If you tax the ability for that to happen completely away, it’s no longer an investment vehicle. That’s not economics, it’s not science, it’s basic math.
This strikes me as similar to the ideas of Lizzy Magie, arguably one of the most absurdly exploited individuals with noble goals that history has to offer. She invented Monopoly to illustrate the absurdity of land ownership—today, Monopoly is the game that teaches children cutthroat capitalism.
Magie received a ridiculous low sum for her Monopoly patent, while others became millionaires off her idea (the Parker brothers, whose empire still exists today, benefited the most).
Edit: Please don’t get me wrong—I completely agree with you. I just don’t think it’s effective to focus solely on the one area where the world’s wealthy accumulate their wealth. This is simply a realistic view, since no billion-dollar company operates in just one sector (for example, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is involved in real estate deals worth billions, even though it is, at its core, a tech company). So what I’m trying to say is: Regulations targeting only the real estate market cannot possibly solve the problem.
- BlameThePeacock@lemmy.caEnglish10 hours
It’s because that game (or more specifically The Landlord Game which she made) was meant to teach on Henry George’s work (the guy that came up with the idea of Land Value taxes and explained why they were needed)
- 15 hours
I don’t care whether or not billionaires do or don’t exist. As long as the people that they hire get paid a living wage so that at some point, they can retire. I don’t care how much a billionaire has.
Yes, I completely agree with you. I just fear that reality shows that billionaires—who, after all, aren’t some kind of fantasy—simply don’t do that. Quite the opposite: With their power, which is equivalent to the capital of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people, they do everything in their power to make life for ordinary people worse and worse. We’re seeing this happen right now.
I simply cannot understand why people fail to recognize the reason for their increasingly dire situations.
I do understand that the reason is that the billionaires have so much capital that they control the media and can thus spread misinformation massively. That is precisely why fascism is so strong again—it is so attractive to billionaires because, with its ideology, it is designed to protect the “elites.” However, it’s not foreigners or any of the bogeymen this idiotic “doctrine” has to offer: the problem is those who spread this inhuman ideology—namely, the billionaires.
- Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafeEnglish15 hours
I’m not on board with casual murder, for one.
Really though, this is a simplistic question that can’t really be discussed well without major time. It’s not as simple as “allow billionaires to exist” - as even that framing is bad because it implies killing them as that’s the only way for someone to “not exist”.
You don’t have to kill them. You could simply take their money. Then they wouldn’t be billionaires. It’s not like the money belongs to them. It belongs to the government. They’re just holding on to it for a while.
- 14 hours
You could simply take their money.
Except this is far from a simple thing to do, since a vast majority of the wealth isn’t money.
For a more realistic option, I think that ending the practice of borrowing against stocks as a method of dodging taxes would go a long way towards getting billionaires to pay their share.
It kind of is simple. They have to sell stuff.
It’s up to them how to do that.Say we tax them at 15% of US assets after the first $1B. That’ll slowly widdle them down.
- 12 hours
So here’s a scenario:
You started a website, and this website became enormously popular. The company you started to run this website is now worth a couple billion dollars. You’re not an asshole, so you pay your employees generously and take an equal wage for yourself. You weren’t in a rush to grow, so you never took venture capital or became publicly traded.
As the sole owner of that company, you are technically worth a couple billion dollars, but your sellable assets are nowhere near that 15%. How is the law supposed to handle this situation without further making enshitification legally mandatory?
I can’t understand why you think of murder when it comes to the question of whether it makes sense for societies to allow people to become so rich that they rise above everyone else. In reasonably functioning states, this can be regulated by law.
You’re probably from the U.S., right?
- 15 hours
What if society takes away the billionaire’s money so that he ceases to be a billionaire. Does the billionaire still exist then?
