Reddit is shit-for-brains but one take that’s been living rent free is to have a law where you kill the richest person in the world. Won’t be long before people start scrambling to distribute their wealth so they’re not next on the chopping block 😄
Taylor Swift is the new posterchild for billionaires, but honestly, she’s the least egregious example of a billionaire. She makes a fuck load of money because her concert tickets are like $1000 a pop. She’s known to give huge bonuses to her tour staff. If anyone is getting exploited, its her fans, but she’s literally just a performer. She’s hardly manipulating stock prices and doing pump and dump schemes and not paying her staff a livable wage.
That has nothing to do WITH the article, though. The entire comment was on Taylor Swift, which the article had NOTHING to do with. Just her picture used. I am lost as to how it is relevant to the intention of the article, which was a GREAT read. This just derails the conversation to something that wasn’t even mentioned.
don’t write her off. she’s just as bad and out of touch as the rest of them. on a cultural level, we have a billionaire who manipulates her audience by writing songs that market herself as a relatable, contemporary woman and positions herself as a model of feminism. she writes songs to portray her life as a women going through a tortured life as an artist in a sexist, broken system that made her a billionaire. she’s made many young, impressionable women feel that going through life as a woman is like Taylor Swift going through her eras when in reality, she’s a billionaire selling an image to perpetuate her wealth.
how is Taylor writing songs that perpetuate a fake lifestyle that contemporary women feel relatable to these days any different than Warren Buffett coming out and saying he still clips his own coupons. how dumb do they think we are? it’s insulting, really. she has had enough money to prove she’s a good person in the past, but now she has enough money to prove she’s absolutely a terrible person.
on another level, it’s just music. she can write whatever the fuck she wants, but I wish people would realize it’s stupid as hell to listen to a billionaire write songs complaining about love or being a tortured artist. it’s ridiculous.
100% agree with all the people saying it’s not enough, but it could be a start, which potentially forces interesting changes at the company level even if it doesn’t do much with the economic system.
I would rather see no shareholder influence, but weakened shareholder influence and less incentive for CEOs and execs to be douchebags can still be meaningful (though perhaps not alone). Unfortunately, since people who want to lead others tend to be empathetically challenged, they still need explicit incentives for them not to just go through the same old exploitative and abusive patterns. Say this went through, the people who replace the spoiled CEOs who decide to leave would just end up being corrupt as well if some kind of positive reinforcement doesn’t also exist.
Wouldn’t it be better to set a maximum wage/compensation for Congress/parliament? That way they couldn’t be bought. I don’t have as much a problem with people trying to become billionaires. I have a problem with an uneven playing field. Hell, by the time they get that rich, I’m not even on a playing field. Frankly I’m not even on the same planet.
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 after 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?
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’
The 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.
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.
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.
Wage 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.
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.
Take 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.
maximum wage? maybe it works for ceos and such but most billionaires are way beyond their wages. lets start by employing preventative measurements that prevent billionaire charities to be used for money laundering or agenda pushing. then we continue by forcing strict regulations on tax havens. what else? we can also limit the number of estates a person can own and don’t allow companies to buy estates. finally, limit operational size of the media conglomerates and how much a single group can have influence on media. Support the hell out of small independent media operations. I know all very vague but very critical problems imo.
Let’s put aside the fact that the super rich don’t have a wage. How the fuck are you going to make and apply laws against the people who have the most power in the system you’re supporting?
Let’s just say if they have too much, we just put them in a big stew and eat them.
Setting a maximum wage for them wouldn’t do a damn thing. They’ll just use the wealth they already have to hoover up more through things like insider trading or flat out stealing company money.
Adding a maximum wage for the rich would be like trying to drain the ocean using a toy bucket.
In an ideal world anyone making more than, let’s say for an example, $1 million in a year would pay 100% tax on anything more.
No one needs more than $1,000,000 a year for anything. No one works hard enough to actually deserve that. It’s just pure luck and/or screwing over other people to get more than that.
Unfortunately if one country implements that, all the rich people leave and go live somewhere else that doesn’t tax that much.
On paper they don’t make anything a year and pay less tax than you or I. The only way that’s going to change is a massive world-wide effort to crack down on tax havens and to start taxing their assets fully.
The author in the article talks about how most of the wealth is either coming from capital gains and/or inheritance. They know wage isn’t the thing to cap, the article is likely just trying to maximize clicks. The subject is still worth exploring and the author is very well informed.
The only greener pastures for the rich would be moving to their southern neighbor since it’s probably the safest place for the rich currently. Not many options if they don’t wanna be screwed.
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.
Either way, the discussion about the subject is the important thing here. What do you want your society to look like in the future and for the next generation? Even if it’s not Limitarianism, starting the conversation and cival discourse to push society towards a better version of its current form is worth the effort.
Another 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.
Because 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.
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Reddit is shit-for-brains but one take that’s been living rent free is to have a law where you kill the richest person in the world. Won’t be long before people start scrambling to distribute their wealth so they’re not next on the chopping block 😄
lol imagine being so poor that you earn a wage
Wage is not the issue
Taylor Swift is the new posterchild for billionaires, but honestly, she’s the least egregious example of a billionaire. She makes a fuck load of money because her concert tickets are like $1000 a pop. She’s known to give huge bonuses to her tour staff. If anyone is getting exploited, its her fans, but she’s literally just a performer. She’s hardly manipulating stock prices and doing pump and dump schemes and not paying her staff a livable wage.
“1000$ a pop”
I see what you did there.
The article had nothing to do with Taylor Swift though.
Taylor Swifts name shows up before the authors name when you click into the article. it’s not unfair to bring her up…
That has nothing to do WITH the article, though. The entire comment was on Taylor Swift, which the article had NOTHING to do with. Just her picture used. I am lost as to how it is relevant to the intention of the article, which was a GREAT read. This just derails the conversation to something that wasn’t even mentioned.
This shouldn’t be hard to logic through.
Ok so even though her name is the first name we see there in text on that page, we’re not allowed to talk about her in context to the article ?
Yeah, I don’t care for her music nor her lifestyle but at least she earned her money (or the first millions anyway).
don’t write her off. she’s just as bad and out of touch as the rest of them. on a cultural level, we have a billionaire who manipulates her audience by writing songs that market herself as a relatable, contemporary woman and positions herself as a model of feminism. she writes songs to portray her life as a women going through a tortured life as an artist in a sexist, broken system that made her a billionaire. she’s made many young, impressionable women feel that going through life as a woman is like Taylor Swift going through her eras when in reality, she’s a billionaire selling an image to perpetuate her wealth.
how is Taylor writing songs that perpetuate a fake lifestyle that contemporary women feel relatable to these days any different than Warren Buffett coming out and saying he still clips his own coupons. how dumb do they think we are? it’s insulting, really. she has had enough money to prove she’s a good person in the past, but now she has enough money to prove she’s absolutely a terrible person.
on another level, it’s just music. she can write whatever the fuck she wants, but I wish people would realize it’s stupid as hell to listen to a billionaire write songs complaining about love or being a tortured artist. it’s ridiculous.
I think love for a billionaire just might be a little difficult and complicated. Probably would make for some interesting songs.
Do… Do you think she started off a billionaire singer songwriter?
no, she started as a private equity money manager’s daughter
100% agree with all the people saying it’s not enough, but it could be a start, which potentially forces interesting changes at the company level even if it doesn’t do much with the economic system.
I would rather see no shareholder influence, but weakened shareholder influence and less incentive for CEOs and execs to be douchebags can still be meaningful (though perhaps not alone). Unfortunately, since people who want to lead others tend to be empathetically challenged, they still need explicit incentives for them not to just go through the same old exploitative and abusive patterns. Say this went through, the people who replace the spoiled CEOs who decide to leave would just end up being corrupt as well if some kind of positive reinforcement doesn’t also exist.
Wouldn’t it be better to set a maximum wage/compensation for Congress/parliament? That way they couldn’t be bought. I don’t have as much a problem with people trying to become billionaires. I have a problem with an uneven playing field. Hell, by the time they get that rich, I’m not even on a playing field. Frankly I’m not even on the same planet.
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?
And tie it directly to the minimum wage…
You got work tomorrow morning at 8?
Earlier!
Damn ! Tax the Reeeeccchhh
I don’t mind working, I just want to be able to afford a reasonable life in exchange for… well, my life, basically.
Yea bruv. I feel ya
you dont need a max wage if you tax effectively. it would be 100% past a certain, massive amount.
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?
You tax holdings.
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 after 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? 🤷🏻♂️
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’
The 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.
deleted by creator
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 least that’s how I read this).
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.
Do 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.
That’s exactly how the article suggests setting the maximum.
“Wage” is rather poor wording then.
Wage 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.
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
There are more words???
As you can see, lots of people don’t read those explanations.
Perhaps clearer communication would be beneficial.
That just sounds like a maximum wage but with more steps.
its actually a max wage with fewer steps. no need to have a max wage definition at all, just extend current tax practices.
e. less to fewer, because details matter
https://64.media.tumblr.com/220f8957ce7813f034a335d5fc3fc4d0/tumblr_no6d84XUfZ1trty0oo4_400.gif
thanks!
Plus it actually could be used to do something* crazy, like help people or the environment.
If the U.S. managed to do it, they’d use it to build up the military.
Iirc DoD… Yeah, never passed an audit
Take 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.
maximum wage? maybe it works for ceos and such but most billionaires are way beyond their wages. lets start by employing preventative measurements that prevent billionaire charities to be used for money laundering or agenda pushing. then we continue by forcing strict regulations on tax havens. what else? we can also limit the number of estates a person can own and don’t allow companies to buy estates. finally, limit operational size of the media conglomerates and how much a single group can have influence on media. Support the hell out of small independent media operations. I know all very vague but very critical problems imo.
Let’s put aside the fact that the super rich don’t have a wage. How the fuck are you going to make and apply laws against the people who have the most power in the system you’re supporting?
Let’s just say if they have too much, we just put them in a big stew and eat them.
The same way they define and apply laws that determine, and maintain the poorest.
So without any media attention, when no one is paying attention?
Setting a maximum wage for them wouldn’t do a damn thing. They’ll just use the wealth they already have to hoover up more through things like insider trading or flat out stealing company money.
Adding a maximum wage for the rich would be like trying to drain the ocean using a toy bucket.
In an ideal world anyone making more than, let’s say for an example, $1 million in a year would pay 100% tax on anything more.
No one needs more than $1,000,000 a year for anything. No one works hard enough to actually deserve that. It’s just pure luck and/or screwing over other people to get more than that.
Unfortunately if one country implements that, all the rich people leave and go live somewhere else that doesn’t tax that much.
On paper they don’t make anything a year and pay less tax than you or I. The only way that’s going to change is a massive world-wide effort to crack down on tax havens and to start taxing their assets fully.
The author in the article talks about how most of the wealth is either coming from capital gains and/or inheritance. They know wage isn’t the thing to cap, the article is likely just trying to maximize clicks. The subject is still worth exploring and the author is very well informed.
That or they just don’t set their residency in Canada. Rich people can choose to move and reside anywhere they want
The only greener pastures for the rich would be moving to their southern neighbor since it’s probably the safest place for the rich currently. Not many options if they don’t wanna be screwed.
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.
Either way, the discussion about the subject is the important thing here. What do you want your society to look like in the future and for the next generation? Even if it’s not Limitarianism, starting the conversation and cival discourse to push society towards a better version of its current form is worth the effort.
Another 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.
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Kurzgesagt video “A Selfish case for Altruism”
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They 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 /s
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.
Because 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.