There is no line; we are talking about anti-trust laws, bans on political donations, anti-corruption enforcement, conflict-of-interest standards, a standard where it is beyond the pale for politicians and bureaucrats to accept even a gifted fruit basket (also where they make it worth your while after you leave office), et cetera.
The concern from my end isn’t hobbling the Elon Musks or Peter Thiels of the world; it’s more along the lines of how do you actually do that without giving everyone who’s not middle class some kind of haircut as part of it.
A lot of the class warfare rhetoric from the left says “billionaires”, but actually seems to be a lot more inclusive than that, or at least what I hear is, which I think may end up being counterproductive. We want people to strive to be rich, and we want them to actually be able to be rich when someone accomplishes that.
I’m upper middle class. Raise my taxes! Go back to the Clinton-era tax code, including increased business tax rates. Also, get rid of the carried interest loophole, and increase the capital gains rates. That will go a long way.
People were striving to be rich back then. They were striving to be rich back in the 50s when marginal rates topped out at 90%.
No one needs a $billion to be rich. $100 million is plenty. So take it off the top from those at the top. No impact at all to those under the line. Sorry Elon, you’re going to have to live the rest of your life with just a $100 mill or so (or whatever we decide the line is). I don’t think this will have any significant impact on actual entrepeneurism – you can still get very, very rich… just not “destroy the world based on my whims” rich.
We definitely do not. No one [yes, I know about the exceptions that prove the rule] is going to get rich working as a doctor, or fireman, or professor. You want hundreds of billions, you had better move to Wall Street or get into some real cut-throat business.
Well, that’s precisely what it is.
There might be one or two people on the planet who are “billionaires” in the sense of “they just have a billion dollars to their name”. I think there’s some Indian billionaire who likes having a billion in his bank account, and I guess people who sell a major start-up briefly have a couple billions. But that situation doesn’t last; the overwhelming majority of billionaires are people who own companies that are valued in the billions, or who own multiple companies.
Which, for some people, is precisely the problem.
I disagree; I think there are problems, like the ability of billionaires to influence politics, whether through financial means of through controlling social media platforms. There are all kinds of regulations and rules I want to see implemented to limit what companies can and cannot do, for example. With social media companies, I think we need to either ban or at the very least make opt-in feeds and algorithms, and we need a lot more transparency about what is going on with those platforms.
I don’t have a problem with Zuckerberg owning Facebook, but I do think that what he does with it should be regulated, and considering the reach and influence of his platform, quite heavily.
I do have a problem with Elon owning Twitter, but not on principle; rather, I think he has taken specific actions that have crossed the line and that he should therefore be penalized.
Likewise, I don’t have a problem with Jeffrey Bezos getting astronomically rich through Amazon; I do have problems with specific anticompetitive practices that Amazon has taken, and as a result I think that Amazon should be broken up - at a minimum, the retail division should be split off from the marketplace, because the control of both gives Amazon an enormous competitive advantage over other retailers who want to use the marketplace, an advantage it has taken specific steps to abuse.
Before he became president, Woodrow Wilson argued in his book “The New Freedom” that big business and big finance had made traditional democracy impossible, that the common man needed interventionist government to stick up for him. This was an early championing of Progressivism, and it’s arguable just how much of an improvement Big Government was. When you hear arguments that corporations and billionaires are too powerful and need to be taken down a peg or three, the question has to be asked just who expects to replace them as the prime movers of society?
We don’t just need doctors and firefighters and professors; we also need online marketplaces that change the way we shop, we need online payment platforms that allow you to send money to anyone else instantly, and we need electric car companies. And we need the people who create those things. And I think it is totally fine for them to become monumentally wealthy if they create such a company.
What is NOT fine is for them to use the wealth and influence of their company to stifle competitors. We should be swift (far swifter than we are) and efficient (far more efficient than we are) at cutting down to size companies that engage in anti- competitive practices.
Ah, there’s the rub. And this is (possibly) the real problem with California’s proposed one-time Billionaire Wealth Tax. They don’t have their billions sitting in a mason jar buried in the back yard; it exists in their corporate ownership and stock holdings and real-estate holdings. To pay the tax, you have to sell stock (or property or…); putting a lot of extra supply into a market without increasing demand will lower prices lowering their overall net worth by more than the 5%.
Right now, Elon doesn’t live on a salary, he lives on taking loans out against his holdings, which he pays off with … loans from his holdings? Gains from his holdings? I don’t really know how these things work, but could that same procedure be used to pay the tax? Certainly, this helps expose the need to increase capital gains taxes and other financial dodges used by the wealthy.
A bigger problem with California’s proposed one-time Billionaire Wealth Tax is that the expected funds are earmarked for expenses that are NOT one-time, but ongoing programs. So when the one-time windfall is spent, then what? I have trouble believing any promise that begins with “just this once”.
Believe it or not, I agree with this. The problem I have is that in reality, the upper middle class contributes more than the billionaires. I’m fine contributing my share, as long as the wealthy do their part.
This isn’t really true. I know “borrow spend die” is a popular meme, but I haven’t seen any evidence that Elon Musk does this. He’s sold off large amounts of stocks and stock options and has paid billions of dollars in income taxes as a result.
That’s not to say that Musk is paying his fair share in taxes, but that particular claim isn’t actually true.
I don’t disagree with any part of this. It’s also a very far cry from “we must eliminate the very concept of a billionaire”.
If you agree that it’s very bad that Elon Musk has so much power, but you disagree with taxing him out of that power (i.e. taking enough of his wealth that he’s no longer capable of such influence), then how do you propose curbing that power?
With respect, and not saying that I even disagree with you, but when we live in communities where one person might earn in three years what their neighbor might spend thirty years earning, there is an almost unfathomable differential there that those who make that much (“medium six figures”) predictably dismiss as if it’s a meaningless difference.
I don’t know what’s “reasonable” or not, but the specialist making $300,000 a year is fundamentally living in a different world than the admin or receptionist in their office making $50k, $60k a year.
In discussions about wealth it is exhausting to constantly have to re-assure those who collect wealth at rates 5x or more than the median that they are in fact not wealthy.
You need that kind of money, for certain definitions of “need”. The problem is that the admin or receptionist needs to share with an apartment with 4 roommates, cannot put their kid through school, god forbid somebody get sick, and so forth.
Of course, plenty of people get by somehow, maybe you have two wage earners who together can afford to rent a tiny apartment.
And here we go. This is exactly the sort of thing that I’m cautioning against upthread.
5x the median net worth is right around a million dollars. That’s absurd to think that they need to be taxed above and beyond whatever already progressive taxation takes. It’s not that much money in any real sense. It’s the recommended retirement savings amount, FWIW, not Scrooge McDuck type money.
The problem isn’t that the person with a million dollars net worth has too much, it’s that the others don’t have enough. But that also doesn’t justify taking from the person with a million dollars to give it to anyone else. There are too many gotchas- what if that person making 30k was a dumbass who slacked in high school, does too many drugs, and can barely hold a job, while that millionaire is someone who did everything right, delayed gratification, saved money, etc…? Do they still deserve to have their money/wealth taken because the other guy has less? I’d say no.
Eh, I still say the person making $1M deserves to pay more taxes than the person making $30k, for reasons of simple arithmetic.
I mentioned this in another thread, but unless you’re getting really up there, you can’t really judge a person’s financial situation by their income. I have lived that experience, of being upper middle class by income and still not doing all that well.
And I have been poor. I started my adult life with next to nothing. So it’s not a perspective problem. Is my life easier than someone making less? Without question. But it’s not like my family’s every need goes fulfilled. I have a child with a disability, our medical expenses are insane, and we are just barely where we need to be for retirement. We bought a condo in part because we couldn’t afford a house. You also have to consider cost of living. And changes in the economy. And how much wealth you really need to have in times of job insecurity.
So while that person making $200k a year is probably okay, you don’t really know what they are contending with based on that single metric.
Their income isn’t the rate at which they “collect wealth”, that would be their income minus expenditures.
The doctor could be ‘collecting wealth’ at an infinitely higher rate if the receptionist can’t afford to save at all, or they could be collecting no wealth at all because they’re blowing it all away on gambling. Or the doctor could be raising a family of four as a single parent and barely making enough while the receptionist is a 20 year old living in a condo with roommates and saving most of their monthly income.