Everytime I look at small problems or big global problems, if you follow the money trail, it all leads to some billionaire who is either working towards increasing their wealth or protecting their wealth from decreasing.
Everything from politics, climate change, workers rights, democratic government, technology, land rights, human rights can all be rendered down to people fighting another group of people who defend the rights of a billionaire to keep their wealth or to expand their control.
If humanity got rid of or outlawed the notion of any one individual owning far too much money than they could ever possibly spend in a lifetime, we could free up so much wealth and energy to do other things like save ourselves from climate change.
Where’s the line? Is it one billion? Aren’t we all trying to make more money and lose less money? Who decides what number equals ‘enough’? Does it depend on where you live? Size of your family? How/where you spend, save, donate? They say Dolly Parton could have been a billionaire but she’s donated so much that she only has $650 million. Should that be the goal - earn a billion and donate half? Is that better or worse than earning 100 million and donating half?
A billion dollars is so incomprehensibly more than anybody needs, no matter the size of their family, that there really is no reason to take these things into account. As for who decides what is enough, it’s the people allowed to vote.
As for the donation example, yes, that is worse, since for every billionaire that miraculously donates some of their wealth, there are loads who don’t. So better tax them all than hope that maybe a couple of them decide to be nice for once.
And a key point with donations: they go wherever the rich people want, not where society needs.
Where do taxes go? Do you trust the government to decide what society needs? I donate locally and i try to spend my money locally, but fucking Amazon comes along with a $2 wrench that delivers before 8am and i get sucked in.
And if they refuse to pay their “taxes” Then you, as the psychopath you are, are going to send men with guns to abduct them and throw them in a cage for an amount of time You determine and steal their life. Oh, and even if you don’t do that, you’ll just kill them right away with a gun. And their life will be over anyway.
Ah yes, the well known connection between “let’s have a very high tax bracket for billionaires” and “let’s literally go and murder rich people because I don’t like them lol”, you got me. Oh, and sanctioning criminal behavior with prison = psychopathy, got it.
Well, please elaborate then on exactly how you intend to make them obey you. It’s literally you are saying do this and they are saying no and so you either have to walk away or you have to use force against them to make them agree with your point of view.
Of course force may need to be used when people act criminally. In case of tax evasion, that may be seizing the amount owed and/or imprisonment in severe cases.
Say someone steals from a store and the owner demands it back, but the thief says “nu-uh”, what then? Is it morally permissible to use force to get your property back?
Of course force may need to be used when people act criminally. In case of tax evasion, that may be seizing the amount owed and/or imprisonment in severe cases.
Who is hurt by “tax evasion” If I choose not to pay my taxes, are you disabled or physically harmed in any way to where you cannot live your current lifestyle? I would argue the answer is no. If I do not pay my taxes, do you wake up in the middle of the night in mental anguish because of it? Again, I would argue the answer is no. So you think you have the right to demand that I give you money because you say so. And if I do not comply, you will throw me in a cage and/or kill me. Because apparently in order for me to live the longest I possibly can, I must obey you because you said so.
Say someone steals from a store and the owner demands it back, but the thief says “nu-uh”, what then? Is it morally permissible to use force to get your property back?
Absolutely. Because you harmed them. You took something that was theirs. They spent part of their life earning the money to purchase that thing to put in their store to resell to you to make your life more convenient.
You absolutly harm the whole society if you dont pay taxes… You use all the street and everything paid by taxes and then dont pay. Thats kind of harming.
1.000.000.000€ is if you get 1000€ every day for 3000 years.
Think about it.
Take out a calculator.
And than see, that I lied and its just 913.24€ every day for 3000 years.
Than think about WHO DA FUK needs money like this?
Mark has around 150 bio € so 150x3000= 450.000 years of 913.24€ EVERY FUKKING DAY.
A billion is so far past the line it’s not even a question. You cannot earn a billion. You cannot even earn a fraction of 1b.
https://youtu.be/8YUWDrLazCg - watch this, just the first few minutes then scrub along to the end.
As it turns you to can’t blame billionaires for everything. Also what would that even mean? Are just going to take away there money as soon as the hit the billion dollar mark? What does that mean for millionaires?
Also the billionaires would just make it look like they have 990 million dollars.
Are just going to take away there money as soon as the hit the billion dollar mark?
You want us to take something else from them?
Wealth disparity and concentration of power into a corrupt ruling class of plutocrats gets pretty toxic to human rights and democracy pretty quickly.
Listen to some behind the bastards episodes, look into people like the koch brothers, or Amazon’s union busting, or any of the large political scandals in the past 100 years (eg. Like the business plot) - and you’ll usually hear of some wealthy ahole involved funding some shitty attack on where ever.
I think billionaries are a symptom, not a cause, of the disease.
Some people are born in positions where they already have massive wealth and they grow up with connections to make it larger and larger. So that’s what they do.
But the real issue is the system that keeps everyone in debt for life. Many would like to stop working and enjoy their lives instead. They don’t need much. Just don’t want to work and get by with decent living standard.
That would be one of the ways to deal with excessive wealth … get rid of excessive inheritance. If you are billionaire … you get to leave two million dollars per child but nothing more.
Two million dollars to start any life would be more than enough for anyone.
But to inherit multi millions or even billions is a completely unfair advantage to everyone else. Imagine if you were a natural born psychopath or you just have an unnatural shortage of empathy for others and you inherit half a billion dollars … do you think that person would go on to do good things in the world?
I think the real problem is enforcement. Their children would see it as theft, and so if they said no, we’re not giving it up. Then in the end, you would have to send somebody with a gun or violence to “persuade” them to do so. And unless you’re some sort of psychopath, which is what most governments are, you are not willing to hurt people, so you can’t take it away from them.
In the scenario you describe, the billionaires get to engage in any degree of harm they want, hurt anyone they want, because only a “psychopath” can stop them.
In the scenario you describe, the real problem isn’t the billionaire. The real problem is your condescension of people for being willing to enforce a reasonable standard of behavior. The real problem is your declaration that stopping them is an act of psychopathy.
That degree of pacifism constitutes suicidal ideation.
I think humanity seems to have this need to centralize everything with just a few people. If billionaires are so bad, then people should not use the services that billionaires create and get rich off of and should decentralize, so things like Walmart should not exist and local grocery stores should exist. People should not use things like Amazon in favor of trading more peer to peer, but that’s less convenient.
Centralization is not the problem. Centralization is one of the keys to efficiency. Grocery stores are a centralized solution. Decentralization of the food supply would mean we each grow our own food in our back yards. (Even that is centralization… True decentralization, we would forage for food in the wild, rather than growing it in a dedicated place near our homes)
The problem comes not when we centralized, but when the store owner decided to take a share disproportionate to the value he provides. When the efficiency of his operation saves production costs, but those savings never reach back to workers or consumers.
The next problem comes when he acquires enough power in the marketplace that he can dictate terms without worrying about losing market share.
The solution is to dictate back to him a “level of futility.” A level at which any future gains are confiscated, so there is no benefit for squeezing workers and consumers any tighter. A confiscatory top-tier tax bracket was the solution to the Robber Barons of the industrial revolution. Abandoning that control has been an unmitigated disaster.
Yeah OP needs to spend more time with poor people. People are no better than billionaires on average, billionaires just get all the media attention.
Here’s a good visualization of the wealth the richest people on earth command vs pretty much everyone else: https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
I stopped when it got to the trillion comparison. Surely I can find a better use out of the next two weeks of my life.
Well, you do you, but the trillion comparison has many, many other comparisons, further info, and interesting possible real-world uses for that money in the scroll. It really is recommended.
Though admittedly it does take some time, like a long interactive video.
Also… That’s should say something for the issue of inequality, itself, lol
Hey thanks. That is IMPRESSIVE and deserves a post of its own, please do it
Good idea, will do tomorrow.
Poverty and starvation still exist because of billionaires
“Poverty exists not because we cannot feed the poor, but because we cannot satisfy the rich.”
While I don’t disagree with the sentiment, I do think a ban on resource hoarding would also require an overhaul of the capitalist system. Hoarding resources is exactly the point of our current system and banning it would most likely have hard to predict consequences.
Arguing that an alternative may be dangerous when the status quo is destroying our world is not a very good argument.
My point is that society should just simply create an upper ceiling of wealth for everyone. Everything still stays the same. We still have our capitalistic system, everyone is still capable and free to try to become as wealthy as they want to be, everyone is still allowed to manipulate the system and those around them to acquire as much wealth as they want in whatever way they please. The only thing that changes is that any one person’s wealth is just limited to … $100 million for example. Does any person require more than this in order to live a happy full and comfortable life? Any one that wants more than that is a pathological individual that is perfectly comfortable in taking away the wealth of those who have little to give.
It’s basically a system where we reward the worst individuals in our society to flourish and become even more powerful.
The alternative I present doesn’t look as dangerous as allowing a handful of questionable individuals to own everything and everyone on the planet.
I am not saying it is dangerous. My point is that taking a decision that is polar opposite of our financial system will come with consequences, many of them will not be simple to predict.
What happens after you accumulate 100 million? Are you allowed to work? Will you have to give up the interest your existing assets earn you? Do we tax everything the limit at 100%? How will we deal with the fact the some countries will attract people with lots to lose by not following the system?
These are of course just random thoughts, but I think most of us can come up with plenty of things that can jeopardize such a plan.
I don’t dismiss the idea, but I think a lot of safeguards need to be in place before such a plan could work.
One of the financial aspects it would deal with is … the idea of infinite growth and profits.
Limiting wealth would limit profits everywhere … which sounds bad for small groups of people and investors in any one sector. Everyone has the mentality of wanting to control one corner of the financial market and then make it grow exponentially without limits to an imaginary infinity … all of which is impossible.
By limiting individual wealth … wealth would then be allowed to spill over to more people. The wealth is still there but it is now in the hands of more people instead of a small group of people.
In our current system, we keep watching our financial markets grow every year with the expectation that they will keep rising forever while the amount of wealth everywhere is limited. In order to make it grow, debt has to be created and in order to pay for the debt, more debt is created and on and on to infinity.
The system I imagine puts limits on infinite growth, profit and wealth … the system that exists is only possible if a small group of people can continually achieve infinite wealth with limited resources.
What makes more sense.
And like I keep saying … removing billionaires won’t solve the world’s problems … but it would really make it a whole lot easier to deal with the world’s problems.
I think I see what you mean now. We both agree that wealth hoarding need to go, but I think I focus more on the problems it would cause and you just wanting to set a limit and deal with any issues as they arise. Is that a correct assumption?
I think we are imagining the problem, the solutions and the consequences in different ways.
You’re worried about the possibilities of what could be and imagine the problems it may cause.
I’m worried about what is happening now, what exists today and the problems it is causing in real time.
If we do nothing, then current problems persist and we avoid the uncertainty of alternatives. The only problem with that is that we will never realize what the alternatives could be … either a more manageable society with more distributed power … a repeat of the same system we live in today but with the power given to different actors … or a far worse situation than we live in today.
None of this is to imagine that it would create an instant utopia or dystopia … we are human and many of the social problems we have today will persist no matter what we create in the future.
So the final thought is … We either gamble on the certainty of inequality and power willingly given to those with the most wealth … or we take the chance on attempting to creating a new system.
Release the diamonds!!!
Release the movie Dogma on streaming services again!
Nuh-uh. Even if billionaires are banned I still wouldn’t have a girlfriend.
You know what, if they ban billionaires, Imma be your girlfriend
I’ve worked for a few small business tyrants that did horrible things as well. It’s more of a system issue. Billionaires do the most damage of any individuals, but I think it would be pretty similar if CEOs made small amounts of money (the corporations themselves often lobby for their interests), or if there were only small businesses (they’d probably just form national organizations to lobby for their shared interests).
I agree with the idea of compensating someone who worked at managing an organization … it takes work, talent, education and experience to do that and do it successfully.
What I don’t believe is in rewarding leaders who led their organization, business or corporation into ruin while punishing those who worked under them.
The current system rewards and encourages bad immoral behaviour and we wonder why the system is bad and immoral.
Its not the billionaires its that they are not paying back 50% to society.
I’m not sure that I agree. While I would support something like outlawing billionaires or at the very least, a tax bracket that claws back significant chunks of what they are draining from society, there are vast nuances to these issues beyond “the billionaires want it that way.” When you say “everything from … can all be rendered down”, I think it’s pretty important to recognize how much detail and nuance is lost in that rendering down.
Billionaires and the accumulation of wealth are just stand ins for the accumulation of power in a capitalistic society. When power is removed, it creates a vacuum. Who fills it? In the ideal, I know most of us would say “the people” but this is an insanely complex balancing beam to maintain without some group of assholes finding a new, non-capital way to extract and centralize that power.
None of this is to say that eliminating the notion of a billionaire is a bad idea. I’m with you all that the very idea of a billionaire is heinous and impossible without vast exploitation. I just do not think that issue being solved would be even close to some panacea for all of the world’s problems. There would just be twists in the existing problems and fun new ones.
I love this take, but sorry it goes against the hate billionaire circlejerk.
Exactly. Don’t hate the players, hate the game. We are too focused on finding a scape goat to see the inherit system is the problem.
I think theres enough bitterness and hate in my heart for both. I’ve got too many fucking scars I never needed to have, watched too many people die for no Fucking reason.
The player are the ones writing the rules of the game. They’re the ones bribing the refs.
Hate both, where it’s appropriate. Some of these players perpetuate the game that we all hate. Elon Musk is a player who has become part of the structure of the game, fighting regulations and damaging democracy for the sake of his own capitalistic endeavors. Someone mentioned below that Dolly Parton could be a billionaire. Not gonna hate on Dolly Parton who I assume did not come by her wealth through being an asshole, but more just being successful and our current “game” rewarding her with more than she would have in a better society. I would tax the absolute fuck out of her though.
you know what, give each one the chance for a nice life. dolly wants a recording studio and school and whatever at her ranch? wants to run a theme park? cool, I can’t imagine her community saying no.
fuckerberg wants to run a cringe mma gym under his apartment?maybe contribute a few lines to vlc or something every year (with extra review)? sure. no more than anyone should have.
shitty Jeff wants to be an aging beach himbo, maybe help people train at an outdoor gym? be my guest.
but they won’t. not until you already have a gun in their mouths, and at that point, its less effort to just kill them.
We’re looking at two extreme ends of the pole here. Zuck, Bezos, Musk are the shittiest public billionaires. There are also more secretive ones who are arguably even more destructive. These people have absolutely justified their own downfall, if it ever comes to pass. On the other side, Dolly doesn’t even technically count on this list because she has given enough away to not be a billionaire. Those are the easy cases where almost every reasonable person agrees on the “right” thing to do.
Now, we have to remember that there are people who exist at every little increment along that scale of giving back to general shittiness for the global population. Focusing on the billionaires themselves and their lifestyles or whatever is not the answer. We need to focus on making effective tax brackets, effective regulations on the avenues billionaires generally target for power (political institutions, media companies, etc), and effective spending of the increased income from those new taxes to help raise the lower class to a more equitable position. That’s a socdem perspective though, because I do not foresee capitalism collapsing in my lifetime and I like to be pragmatic.
doesn’t technically count
well I’m saying billionaires so we absolutely don’t catch any splash damage.
what are we even arguing about?
Not sure anybody is really arguing in this entire thread. Just discussion of edge cases and the gray areas on an interesting shower thought.
valid. parton is an edge case, an extreme outlier, or she would be if she counted. which she doesn’t.
so I feel like its a pretty good validation of the metric.
I don’t agree with that argument.
You’re right from the point of view that removing those with immense power from their billionaire wealth will be replaced by someone or another group. It’s our natural human condition to always want to be in control and there will always be those among us that will want more power and more control than others.
Removing the ability of any one person accumulating enormous amounts of wealth just levels the playing field. If those with a higher need to want more power don’t have the ability to control an entire sector, an entire region, an entire community or even an entire nation than others will have the ability to challenge them and regulate their power and control.
As it is now, when we allow individuals to gain enormous amounts of power, no one has the ability to challenge them. When those with enormous power decide to affect governments, industries, society or finance, there is very little any one can do to challenge them. Sure we can band together and take billionaires to court … but it comes down to how much money you have … the ability to challenge power means you need money and whoever has the most money has the most power. It isn’t a justice system that years everyone fairly, it’s a legal system that favors those with the most money.
Outlawing billionaires won’t create a utopia, it won’t remove our conflicts we have with each other. What it would do is level the playing field and distribute power among many other people who would all challenge one another as to what they can or can’t do. It would create a more democratic system where power would be spread to more people.
Once we create that distribution of power, we could then spend our energies solving the problems we have with each other and our world, rather than in spending all our time trying to defend finances.
As it is now, democratic power is impossible because power is only centered on those who have the most money.
I think you two are speaking about different steps in this hypothetical transition. You are talking about the long term goal, the other person was talking about the transition from now to the long term scenario. There is very real danger that the power vacuum left by the x-billionaires could be gobbled up by a small group of people. This cannot be dismissed even if we all agree on the end goal.
Secondary critique, set the wealth cap in relation to some other moving metric. I think a multiple of minimum wage would be great, give incentive for the wealthy to increase minimum wage to achieve a higher cap.
My argument would be that by eliminating the means of wealth being an avenue to power, it will merely shift to the government that is enforcing those rules. Those same shitty people will infiltrate that government and use it to inflate themselves while oppressing others. There was no utopian society prior to capitalism and fiat currency, and there won’t be one after.
To be clear, I’m not arguing that this is an impossible problem to solve. I just do not think eliminating the notion of a billionaire is the cure for all of your listed ills. I agree with you that it would absolutely have impacts on all of them, but we would still wake up to world hunger, climate change, etc.
Each of your listed issues is a complex, multi-faceted problem. We cannot boil down that nuance just so we can point to our favorite enemy, deserving as they might be. Fight them too, but don’t lose sight of the bigger picture.
It’s an alternative that has never been attempted in human history and yet everyone is afraid of the notion of ‘Limiting Wealth’.
I am not arguing from the point of view of utopian socialism or a redistribution of wealth … rather, I’m saying that everything in our capitalistic world more or less stays the same way. The only difference is that no one person is allowed to gain a certain level of wealth. Everyone is still free to be as ruthless and capitalistic as they please but their ambitions are given an upper ceiling … for example $100 million of total wealth. All excess wealth beyond that is taxed completely.
Isn’t $100 million for one individual more than enough? What is the sense in accumulating more than that other than a pathological desire to want to gather something that you don’t need. Even worse is the thought that as one accumulates more wealth than they can possibly require means that they have to siphon it from others around them. Uncontrolled, unlimited and runaway growth at all costs is medically known as a cancer. Billionaires are literally cancerous growths on civilization that are slowly killing the entire organism.
Creating a system of ‘Limited Wealth’ wouldn’t affect the majority of everyone … it would only affect a handful of individuals … yet it would benefit all of society.
Never been tried lol
Can you please point out where I said anything against almost anything you said here? Are you here to have a discussion about your shower thought or just grandstand your political opinion to a group that by large already shares it? Thank you for starting the thread, but not sure I’m going to reply to any additional messages because I’m not sure that you’re actually reading any of mine.
Let me know when you grow up
The thing keeping us from eliminating the billionaires isn’t the billionaires. It’s the ~40% of society that are convinced we have to have billionaires to survive. Those people always come up with unending lists of reasons why we just can’t survive without people of unimaginable wealth and power.
It’s not the billionaires. It’s the enablers.
So what we need is to get rid of Americans?
We are all working class. Do not be divided by imaginary boarders
The thing keeping us from eliminating the billionaires isn’t the billionaires. It’s the ~40% of society that are convinced we have to have billionaires to survive.
I call this set the “idiot army”, the activated dunces. It’s propaganda, this 40% is not inherently bad people, it’s guillible, low-education, low-information people that have been activated by malicious propaganda to promote the interests of the billionaire class.
The solution lies not in eliminating or dominating this group, it lies in de-activating them. The typical person in this group, if not being actively directed is too busy in their own world to destroy society.
The first step towards any sort of revolution (violent or not) or real change our world needs has to start by destroying all for-profit news. As long as for-profit news controlled by the billionaires exists, the idiot army cannot be deactivated, and any acts of heroism will be called acts of terrorism.
Edit: But how to destroy the news? Law, as long as we exist in a state, use the available tools. Focus on ranked choice voting, increasing voter turnout, and running for office to collaborate with others to make laws that prevent the news from being so toxic and so profitable. What kinds of laws? Just throwing out ideas
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Change the First amendment (bill of rights) so that it applies only to individuals. A news business or organization does not have the right to free speech or press.
- Make the news unprofitable and risky for a business
- This would probably have a ton of other beneficial effects as businesses could then lose the right to lie
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Any company that produces news content may not operate in another other industries, and may have no executives or board members currently in any other company or married or have children in other companies.
- Make it difficult for the bad people to be in charge of the news
Agreed. A good first step was taking Fox to court. While we work to change the Constitution, we need private citizens suing enough that it stops being profitable to lie.
It’s propaganda, this 40% is not inherently bad people, it’s guillible, low-education, low-information people
There are plenty of high education people who are gullible and easily manipulated. Hell man, every fanatical Trumper I know has at least a bachelor’s degree.
There are definitely smarter and more educated Trump supporters, but I don’t count them in this group, I feel like those people more consciously and intentionally feel like Trump will help them exploit and oppress others (e.g business types, police, etc).
Notice that I said highly educated, and not intelligent. Most of the people I know in this category aren’t people that I consider to be very intelligent. They just stuck with it long enough to graduate, and most of them had parents taking care of them while they were in school, which is one of the major hurdles to obtaining a college education.
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Great point and one I often circle back eventually when I have these discussions with my friends.
I’m starting to think that it is another one of ingrained human traits … we always want a world with protectors, leaders, figure heads … it’s like being children and wanting to be comforted by a parent, a mother or father.
Except it’s a twisted kind of need that we outgrew a long time ago because we are all becoming very capable, knowledgable and intelligent enough to exist on our own. Modern technology, the internet and mass communication is making us more aware of the world and each other and we are realizing that we don’t need figureheads any more.
We’re all made to think that we don’t, won’t or can’t possibly think like this. We’re made to believe that the world and humanity is one big dumb mob that would crumble without a leader.
I believe the opposite is true … it’s our supposed leaders, figureheads, strong men and billionaires that have all the incentive to keep the world as it is because it would mean they would lose most of their power and wealth … and with it their positions as leaders and figureheads.
The Emperors are strutting about the world completely naked … and we have to keep up the pretense that they are wearing the most beautiful fashions imaginable.
I’m starting to think that it is another one of ingrained human traits … we always want a world with protectors, leaders, figure heads … it’s like being children and wanting to be comforted by a parent, a mother or father.
A subset of humanity does, check out https://theauthoritarians.org/
If the billionaires can activate this subset in their interests, they can protect their positions.
That is one of many aspects, absolutely. The most liberal person I know has said and done many things to show me the way. But when asked about putting Trump on trial (He despises Trump) he says we should not because (basically) it would “look bad to children when they read about a US president being tried for crimes” in the history books.
I’m like, dude, if we don’t punish this MoFo, the next one is going to be writing the history books for us.
It sounds like you want less Billionaires in the world! Be the change you want to see!
I know a guy, who knows a guy, who knows a guy, who knows a guy, who knows a guy, who knows a guy who knows someone with a pistol that is both willing and able to bring about the change you seek.
This is exactly why I’m not a billionaire
It sounds like you want less Billionaires in the world! Be the change you want to see!
Enough with advocating for violence already, it gets so old, and it’s ruining Lemmy.
It also diminishes how other people see you, and the opinions you express, making them less likely to listen to your opinions.
The poster did not advocate for violence. You can zero out the billionaires class peacefully. We literally have the power. We just need to stop getting distracted.
The problem with your idea is that it’s not just about the amount of money, but the fact that some people will find ways to have more money, more power. As soon as you draw this line, you’ll have an new level of the richest people.
So in order to really make a difference you would need to spread wealth evenly and no one would be able to earn more than that. And the same goes for losing money of course. This way people will not have the incentives anymore, but i think this will eventually move to a new commodity , because it is just in our nature.
While I largely agree, I also note there will always be greedy outliers who will seek and find ways to skirt the system. We can minimize the ways, but humans are innovative AF, especially when told “you can’t.” I think it’s almost more motivating than “you can.”
Let’s say you get to pass a law in the USA that would make it illegal to have more than a billion dollars. How would you formulate this law and what would you expect to happen when it’s passed?
There wouldn’t be an immediate law to just have a roving gang of enforcers knock down a billionaire’s door and send them to jail … that is just wishful thinking.
Billionaire’s would still continue to exist except that anything beyond a certain level of wealth is just taxed either completely or near fully. It would remove the incentive for anyone to own or gain billions of dollars. And it wouldn’t occur immediately, it would take years, decades or even lifetimes to make a difference.
Anything over a net worth of 1 billion is taxed at 100%
And everything above 50 million is taxed 90%
And everything over $10 is taxed at 80%
You’d probably format it as a percentage of GDP per capita, as it’s about limiting wealth disparity (and thus protecting social mobility), distributing wealth growth nationally, and limiting the concentration of financial interest as it’s a threat to national and democratic security.
You’d probably want it accompanies by various studies that show that that large wealth disparities are detrimental to social mobility (aka the ability to “work your way up” in classes), and probably some political science papers on the ills of concentrations of wealth.
You’d probably want it to come into force along with laws that limit campaign contributions and big money donors in politics… get rid of that whole “political donations are protected as political speech” crap… and you’d probably want it as a wealth tax that pays into a sovereign wealth fund with rules on what it can be used for.
The better answer would be to just improve antitrust laws
All of the big name billionaires came from the tech industry
