grteLet’s Set a Maximum Wage for the Rich | The Tyee
LoL yeah as if they won’t put loopholes in there like they did with taxes.
And hide all their money in offshore accounts. Does no one remember the Panama Papers?
originaluciferyou dont need a max wage if you tax effectively. it would be 100% past a certain, massive amount.
That’s exactly how the article suggests setting the maximum.
“Wage” is rather poor wording then.
Yes, but anyone with two brain cells can understand that it’s a wordplay on “minimum wage” and the implementation of this isn’t really going to rely on the narrow definition of wages.
It seems unwise to rely on the uneducated masses to interpret things correctly. Perhaps clearer communication would be helpful.
That’s why there’s a whole text with explanations right below the headline
This is fine🔥🐶☕🔥There are more words???
As you can see, lots of people don’t read those explanations.
Perhaps clearer communication would be beneficial.
OverzeetopWage is worthless wording. Most ultra rich don’t have wages - at least not relative to their change in worth. We need to change how taxes fundamentally work.
That just sounds like a maximum wage but with more steps.
its actually a max wage with less steps. no need to have a max wage definition at all, just extend current tax practices.
Plus it actually could be used to do something* crazy, like help people or the environment.
- Autocorrect awesome sauce
If the U.S. managed to do it, they’d use it to build up the military.
Iirc DoD... Yeah, never passed an audit
How does that work when the super rich don’t pay any taxes to begin with? How do you tax wealth? How do you tax loans against shares?
in the united states, there were all kinds of 'wealth' taxes that prevented the loop holes. all that was systematically deleted over the last 60 years as conservatives decided 'me want money, fuck society'
Sir_Osis_of_LiverThe top marginal tax rate in the US peaked in 1951 at 92% on income in excess of $400k (joint filing two income), the equivalent of about $4.7M in today's money. That should come back.
whotookkarlThat or a general property tax to prioritize incredibly wealthy people to prevent grotesque capitalism mutants like billionaires instead of income tax which the working class primarily earns by. We’ve had them before under similar conditions before the income tax along with anti trust suits to break up monopolies.
Easy, make capital gains tax match income tax marginal rates.
But capital gains only execute when you sell.
all stock market trades should be taxed at 100% value. dont like it? dont gamble 'invest'
…or just abolish the stock market.
At this point, abolishing the stock market would require a restart on the United States as an entity. The stock market is quite closely linked to the banking system. Closing the stock market would crash the US economy into oblivion.
And no doubt every other closely-tied economy, as well.
helenslunchDo they get a tax refund when they take a loss as well?
Right. So when they sell, they’ll get taxed. You can’t spend shares.
The problem is that’s basically what billionaires do, though. They take out loans with their shares as collateral. So on paper they have huge debt, but it’s minuscule compared to their wealth.
And watch the few remaining small businesses who are operating on a shoestring budget and are the only ones actually paying capital gains get eaten up by the large corporations who offshore their gains. Small businesses who have debt aren’t able to write off principal debt payments so on the books they make money that they pay tax on, but in reality they just gave that money back to the bank to pay off ‘business assets’ which aren’t worth shit when the business isn’t making money. So they make just enough money to pay the bank, then are hit with taxes for the money they paid the bank, and they float by in the red until the inevitable bankruptcy. If they are a franchise, corporate then comes in and sells the business to the next sucker who is willing to gamble on the false hope of the franchise model. Big corporate sells the business to a new ‘owner’ every 5 or 10 years, and the banks get another government backed SBA loan with no risk.
We are in the latter days of capitalism, increasing capital gains won’t work when the big guys already don’t pay shit.
Make it illegal to use shares as collateral for a loan. If a person can pay back a loan, they can buy back the shares when they sell them because they need money. Now people are paying capital gains taxes.
Ok but how are you supposed to do that when the most powerful and influential people in the world are the very people who rely on that method to maintain their power and influence?
Execution? 🤷🏻♂️
You tax holdings.
slowbyrneTake a listen to the recent Grey Area podcast episode with Ingrid Robeyns. Her book is “Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth.” and they talk about this very subject.
The author mentioned in this article was recently on The Grey Area podcast and the arguments and reasoning is pretty compelling. It’s also about the discussion and civic involvement and not a particular limit. But the reasoning behind a Limitarianism makes a lot of sense.
If person A makes 100million a year, that’s 1,000 times more than person B making 100k a year. Can you honestly say that person A is working 1k time harder, or is contributing 1k times more than the person B? Also remember that we’re not talking about the hordes of people working below person A who execute most of the work. We’re just talking about that one individual and their contributions.
IninewCrowAnother way of thinking about it is the human potential it would open up and create.
Imagine limiting the wealth of the those with enormous fortunes and allowing those in the middle to become enormously wealthy, while at the same time allow those at the bottom to finally make it to a level where they no longer have to worry about surviving. It would be terrible for those with enormous wealth because they would lose control but it would great for those at the bottom who would achieve a way to take back control of their lives.
Imagine a world where those who never had the opportunity now have a chance to become doctors, engineers, scientists, professionals, creators, builders and inventors. Imagine a world filled with people who have the free time to just create things because they can instead of spending their lives just trying to get by. Most people in the world don’t want to become master and ruler of the universe … they just want to have a nice life, do something useful and enjoy their existence with others. It’s only a minority few who feel compelled to neurotically want to collect every bit of wealth everywhere and pathologically amass so much wealth, it would take a thousand lifetimes to actually use it, let alone enjoy it.
Imagine every poor inner city kid build up an education to become a professional at something and not worry about how they are going to make a living. Imagine a millions of poor kids in Indian and China doing something with their time in engineering, science or medicine. Imagine every poor kid in Africa building their countries and developing new ideas.
The world wouldn’t become a utopia … it would most likely still have all the problems we deal with today … but at the very least, we would have a world full of educated, capable people who would be able to handle it all. Right now, we’re just a horde of raging mindless apes that are worried about dying and will kill one another for a share of a few bananas.
Reminds me of the Kurzgesagt video “A Selfish case for Altruism”. If all those people were educated and working on making the world better, that would mean more people curing diseases that you personally could die from in the future. More people solving global warming and other future unknown global issues, that could harm you or you kids in the future. Etc…
Even from a self serving angle, it’s better to have more people in the world well fed, well educated, living well, and contributing to society.
A Selfish Argument for Making the World a Better Place – Egoistic Altruism
delirious_owlThey usually dont get paid much in wages. I think zuckerberg got paid $1/hr?
I think the word you’re looking for is “income” or “net worth”
Why on Earth would they use Taylor Swift as an example. Seriously?
Republicans hate her now so clearly she’s an extremist leftist
The Kremlin hates her now that she’s potentially opposing their candidate.
Taylor Swift, so hot right now.
Because there is an underlying tone in the wage equality movement that women shouldn’t have it.
theneverfoxBecause Taylor Swift is a billionaire who is politically relevant. She often has been on the right side of things (but not always). Even if she was solely a source for good, that doesn’t justify the obscene wealth she has or her lifestyle
And the right doesn’t generally worship her the way other billionaires are worshipped because she’s woke or something? Whatever the reason, they’re more willing to criticize her
She’s also far more susceptible to public pressure than other billionaires as an artist
All together, she’s a good target to rally around.
Does she deserve to be wealthy? Sure. She actually worked to get where she is, and has done a lot of good.
But she’s a billionaire, and we need to discuss limiting all billionaires to reasonable amounts of extreme wealth.
It doesn’t matter where the conversation starts, we can’t really afford to be picky
I do think the argument of a maximum value to contribution is more difficult to make with an artist as the example. Especially one as prevalent as Taylor Swift.
Art is intended to illicit emotions from people. Music in particular continues to illicit those emotions from years after it is released.
Are we then saying that the value of people feeling joy has a cap?
I don’t necessarily disagree with capping the income of an artist. I’m just pointing to the danger of using them as an example.
How about we just execute the richest person every 3 months?
Make a threshold that if the relative wealth is equal between 100,000,000 million people no one is executed. That’s a hard cap right there.
You can move to North Korea and enjoy life without rich people without killing anyone.
EndOfLineI’d like to know more about how this is supposed to work.
What is considered a wage? Is it net worth, increase in worth from one year to the next? Liquid capital?
Are benefits (insurance, child care, etc) counted towards this wage cap? What about company cars or housing? What about profit sharing through bonuses and / or stock grants?
Would loans be counted towards the wage cap? If not, can you borrow more than the wage cap?
What happens if you own a home or business that is worth more than the wage cap? Would you only be able to sell that commodity for the wage cap or would any excess of the wage cap be spread over multiple years?
Would inheritance or “gifts” be tallied towards the wage cap? Would donations to charitable organizations offset the wage cap?
Would companies be subject to these caps? What if a person incorporated, had all of their wealth and earnings go through that incorporation which they had sole discretion and control over the use of those funds?
What about foreign entities? Would people, companies, or even governments from other countries who exceed the maximum wage be allowed to buy / sell goods, direct / manage corporate interests, invest in land or stocks, or even reside in a country with a maximum wage? What authority or oversight would exist to even identify such a wage of a foreign entity? Or
Every single one of those questions represents a potential loophole that could be exploited to circumvent a “maximum wage” and I’m sure that somebody who has studied or worked in finance could think of others.
To be fair, there are a number of countries that already have a wealth tax. So I’m not for pretending that it’s some insurmountable concept.
Wealth that’s just sitting there is hard to assess and therefore easy to game. What’s the value of a piece of art? It’s far more practical to tax transactions and realized gains, when money changes hands.
There are less and less of them because taxing wealth doesn’t work.
That’s a theory I suppose. Another theory might be the wealthy influencing policies to have the tax removed. No idea if either are true.
One of the challenges is of course that the wealthy don’t get paid. They own and control assets that appreciate in value.
What if we ended private ownership of businesses. I don’t mean ending ownership of businesses, but that every business became publicly tradeable. No more private ownership of businesses.
I’m not actually advocating this (yet), just curious what people think would happen if we did this.
Enshittifcation would be mandatory via forced infinite growth to profit shareholders.
Instead, we can make the employees up to middle management and lower own a minimum of 60% shares of every company that way they’re not constantly getting fucked and they actually have a voice.
If employees own 60% then they should invest 60% of a company capital.
They are. With their time, whether that probationary or goes away if you do + some other obvious grey areas. This whole “business owners are taking all the risk so they have more money they can ever spend” nonsense is costing us, costing the government, and costing the environment. Shit has got to go.