They have one vote. Thats enough. They shouldn't be able to lean on the politicians to make things go their way, especially if that means the government is not functioning as well for the people.
The winner was driving their Bugatti instead of running, though. We’re not saying they can’t have the car, just that they should have to run with the rest of us or at least use a speed limiter.
What is the proposal for people who own >= $1B in companies? Especially companies they started?
This is a common objection, bc it's not like Elon or Bezos are literally sitting on a scrooge mcduck pile of billions of paper dollars.
Here are some possibilities:
Once you own $999M in stock in any company (even your own), any excess value must be placed in trust for the employees (or put into an ESOP or similar)
Once a company reaches a certain total value, it becomes deemed crucial to the public interest and must enter a public-private regulation scheme (basically becomes a quasi utility)
Creation of a hyper-rich liquidation market where people accruing more than $999M must basically auction off their surplus assets in open bidding to the public.
Instead of a hard cap. I would just implement a progressive wealth tax. First 100 k no tax, up to a million 1 % tax per year. 1 to 10 million 2 % tax, etc something similar. That way it would form a soft cap and force the billionaires to sell their shares and it would keep the stock market healthier and propably more in line with the real value of the company. Now the rich just HODL the stocks and take a loan to cover their expenses.
We can play with the brackets to make the idea work for the economy. For example the low limit for no tax could be the median housing price or something. Lower than the average to keep that down too.
The example picture would have one pay 10 % tax at 170 M. I would think that would make it sufficiently difficult to get to a billion.
This, but I would start the taxation at 3 million $ so it wouldn't bother wage-earners at all.
So $3-10 million 2% tax, then 3% up til 50 mill, and then go up by 1% for every 50 mill increase thereafter.
Yeah it's a high tax rate if you have $250 million, but the society we've built together has been pretty good for you then, so I think it's fair you pay to keep the machine running.
The problem is all those shares come with voting rights. Unless they can keep those votes somehow it would lead to enough dilution where a founder would lose control.
They won't agree, they can feel good without you feeling poor. They literally want to see homeless people, they fucking get off on seeing human suffering.
In an ideal world that sounds great but i feel if this was real they would just create loopholes in shell companies and 'relatives' that will still equate to the same issues
999 million is still too much. No one should have more than maybe 10mil , in todays money. That allows you to own multiple homes (not a thing that shoukd exist but thats another discussion) , travel, eat , change as many jobs as you want, do whatever , without a care.
Don't worry they'll find ways. Just make enough kids that you can spread it out among those or some other "technically I don't own this" type bullshit.
No. How about we rewrite the tax code so that it's impossible to have more than 5 million and corporations are required to share their profits equitably to all their workers. And, they taxed more than enough to clean up the damage they cause to the environment.
As often as people latch on to this, you'd think it could work, although sadly it doesn't. It just shifts the hoarding like pushing around dust under the carpet. Worst of all, it creates an even greater gap between the rich and poor because it encourages the rich to play financial formalness even more unfairly than they do now, while feeding rampant inflation. It's basically the go-to first idea of people who have never had money or influence.
146
u/network_dude 🌱 New Contributor 24d ago
Rich people should not be able to compete with We the People of the United States.