I’m not arguing against progressive taxation, but rather that the guy with a million bucks either deserves to have his wealth taken on behalf of the other guy, or that he’s obligated to pay for that other guy.
Progressive taxation isn’t quite the same thing; it’s more about what level of taxation is onerous, rather than about what one deserves.
And that gets at the root of my discomfort; the idea that somehow people above a certain wealth level don’t “deserve” it. It’s not a question of worthiness or anything like that.
The problem is the disparity. Which is my point. And I don’t know how there cannot be a connection between the receptionist’s inability to afford a home (or whatever) with the doctor’s ability to afford one. They’re both operating in the same market.
Didn’t say anything about net worth, and didn’t say anything about taxing above and beyond existing progressive taxation. Take a breath, read what I wrote. Dismantle the strawman.
Sure it’s ‘collecting wealth.’ I might also be exhausting my wealth at the same time, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to use wealth as a synonym for money. I have dollars in my bank account. They, along with other assets, represent my wealth. Making an income adds to my wealth, and buying things subtracts from it.
Again, not trying to be argumentative, but this feels like a lot of knee-jerk defensiveness.
I did not say that a doctor should not make $300k a year.
I did not say anything about 5x the median net worth.
My point is simply that, while the $300k/yr doctor is not living in the same world as the $100-millionaire or billionaire, they also are not living in the same world as the $50k/yr wage earner. And it seems that any discussion about economic disparity will be reliably diverted into a discussion re-assuring the upper middle class that everyone knows they are just like the average folk, and we know they have expenses too, and everyone believes that they deserve every penny they have.
There’s a way to define it without even getting into specific numbers. My preference is to say that wealth starts when one is able to live a comfortable lifestyle of luxury without having to work and without worrying about running out of money.
Hopefully that’s a starting point for discussion and not where we start redistributing. That’s where me and my wife are. Unless some catastrophic worldwide economic crisis occurs, we’re set for life (we’re retired).
That means we can vacation, eat out when we want, etc. We ain’t buying any Picassos. This is the result of 40+ years of hard work and saving.
I accept that huge change is needed, and that we’ll have to pay our share. But how about we start at the Elon level and work our way down.
That’s not how the term “wealth”, as in “wealth tax”, is used in the context of these discussions. If you just mean that the doctor has five times higher income than the receptionist, just say that; no one could possibly take issue with such a statement.
Definitely. I can easily see the discussion sliding towards the position I see many of the Republicans I know in real life seem to believe that Democrats actually support. That is the position that wealth should be redistributed to the point where everyone has the same amount, which according to them is what “socialism” means. I think going anywhere even close to that is a terrible idea.
IMHO the focus should be on getting the 0.1% to contribute their fair share, not on trying to make the 10-25% “equal” to the 75-100%.
ETA: I also don’t mean to imply that everyone, in the moral sense, deserves all the wealth that they have. Some people do start with advantages that others don’t. But the solution to that is to try to provide everyone an equal opportunity to succeed, not some kind of guaranteed equal outcome, whatever that even means.
Theoretically selling those shares/property/etc dilutes their power and reallocates it to those investors who might do something better with it. Better than stock buybacks.
How so? Given my earlier comments, I’m playing devils advocate, but there are practical problems with this. Who is it that will be buying those shares? Not other billionaires, because they will be selling shares in their own companies to be paying their own wealth tax. Not hundred millionaires, because what incentive do they have to buy the stock? Best case scenario for them is that the stock goes up, they become billionaires, and then they have to sell that stock to pay their wealth tax, making it a wash at best.
My guess is that in the real world, what we would eventually end up with is communism in the old fashioned sense of the term, AKA the government buying that stock and owning those businesses.
IMHO the ideal solution is to create some kind of lever to “force” the oligarchs to run their businesses in a way that benefits society as a whole and their workers in particular rather than further enriching themselves. No, I don’t know what the best way to go about that is.
The “good” news is that you’d be gutting the financial sector (and through second order effects probably a lot of other sectors too), so a lot of valuation will simply evaporate before you need to worry about how to redistribute it! Hooray?
Either that, or what happened after Communism, where the officials gutting these companies and selling them for parts ensure that their well connected friends and family get most of the scraps.
“A million dollars is a nightmare. Can´t retire. Not worth it to work. Oh, yes. One will drive you un poco loco. Poorest rich person in America. The world´s tallest dwarf. The weakest strongman at the circus.”
– Paraphrased from Connor Roy’s conversation with Greg in HBO’s Succession
“I’m stuck picking up my own kid like an asshole.”
–Russ Hanneman, Silicon Valley
I remember telling a couple I was friends with about my new apartment in Manhattan when I moved there back in 2001. They were shocked by the rent and asked me how many rooms I lived in. It was a studio, so technically just the “one”.
Having a couple of million dollars working in NYC is comfortable…ish. But it pales in comparison when I look over the river and see these pencil thin towers of $40 million condos that no one actually lives in. Like it’s hard to compare notes to people who live outside of big expensive cities, because all the dimensions of cost and size and space are out of whack.
There’s also the matter than most people in that income bracket tend to earn their income from corporate jobs, which seem to be pretty unstable these days. So it’s like, yeah I’m doing well so long as some private equity firm doesn’t buy my company and lay everyone off.
The point of view of the 90% of households who earn less than $250k?
I think one of the problems is that we don’t really even think of people being “rich” unless they are in the top 0.1%
That is a perfectly rational and pragmatic choice and a pretty common one within my college classmates. And that’s the problem. Rather than creating incentives to solve actual problems, I feel like the corporate system only incentivizes the problem of “how to make rich people slightly richer”.
Think about universal Healthcare. What if your taxes went up by 5%, but you didn’t have to pay insurance premiums, or copays or coinsurance? What if you didn’t have to have your credit card to go to the doctor, and then get another bill later?
Targeting the ultra wealthy can be done without taxing them into poverty. Didn’t New York City create a 5th home tax or something? Something about of you own five private homes you get an extra tax? That’s not a business rental property, but these ultra wealthy people that own houses or luxury condos in multiple cities.
Couple that with legislation to break up the mega corporations and limit conglomerates and multi-industry corps or subsidiaries.
Disney can be a content creator, but not a distributor and platform and news corporation and marketing company.
Universal Healthcare just means extending healthcare options to everyone who needs them and is a moral imperative, but also wouldn’t really impact people who already have health insurance; are you talking about single payer healthcare?
The fact is that some of the higher cost of healthcare does stem from insurance companies, but it’s also true that very few European countries have a single payer system and yet they are able to get healthcare costs far below our own. Another major factor is the quality of care. Not necessarily quality in ways that matter to outcome, mind you; plenty of European countries are as good or better than us in those areas, other than cancer where the US is among the best in the world. But in terms of comfort? I believe that the last time I looked it up about 70% of US hospital beds were in their own room. That’s almost unheard of in Europe; that costs money. And that’s just one example (the risk of medical malpractice and the additional testing doctors order to avoid lawsuits is another example).
I don’t think anyone is objecting to taxing the ultra wealthy so that they pair their fair share. What I find objectionable are calls to end the existence of billionaires. I think that’s just silly.
Agreed, we should aggressively bust up monopolies. Amazon’s retail department and marketplace should not be one business.
You should take “billionaires” as a loose synecdoche that refers to an economic system that’s gone badly haywire in the direction of inequality.
Admittedly it’s somewhat delusional to suppose that liquidating the wealth of 1000 billionaires would be adequate to resolve all of society’s problems. Nor is it exactly right to suggest that “billionaire” is the bright line of wealth that’s excessive enough to justify confiscatory taxation. It’s more of a progression of the type that progressive income taxes are supposed to address, but aren’t adequate to do so, partly because tax brackets have been eroded, and partly because wealth isn’t income.
The broader point is that a person’s wealth ought to (very) roughly reflect what they contribute to society. Not what they inherited, nor their economic rents from being the first to build a railroad through a key mountain pass (keeping the analogy old-fasioned for simplicity). A person should get good compensation for that, but they shouldn’t be allowed to collect on it for perpetuity.
While it’s not all about billionaires, the existence of billionaires does suggest that the system is extremely broken. It shouldn’t be possible for an individual’s paper wealth to be millions of times larger than the majority of other Americans. While some humans’ contributions are more valuable than others, and some by an admittedly significant factor, nobody is THAT more valuable than anyone else.
The other big factor in addition to economic disparity is the power disparity. Elon Musk is now so powerful that not only is it impossible to keep him in check, his industries are also too big to fail without causing massive economic shockwaves. Likewise with some of the other tech titans. The economy simply shouldn’t be allowed to let any one person accumulate that much power.
So while billionaires are not in themselves the whole problem, the existence of billionaires is a symptom of our economic system needing some serious recalibration.
Not trying for a gotcha or to be difficult, but where is the line beyond wich income becomes wealth? If my net worth increases by $100 dollars, has my “wealth” not increased by $100, regardless of whether that increase came from investments increasing in value, interest paid to me from the bank, or income paid to me in exchange for labor?
Income and wealth are two different things. One is how much you make and one is how much you have. If you make a ton and spend a ton, you may not have any wealth. If you make much less but save well over your lifetime, you can accumulate a nestegg.
California is trying to do a wealth tax, taxing billionaires based on how much they have, not how much they make every year. Real estate tax is similar to a wealth tax, because it’s based on the value of the house (loosely), not how much it increases or decreases every year.
Income tax is based on how much you make that year.
The two are quite seperate and it’s weird how some people in this thread are conflating them.
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