5% is dirt cheap compared to the taxes they’ve avoided for many DECADES.
5% is less than the passive income that amount of wealth makes that year!
Cheaper than what they deserve.
Why don’t they just fuck off? You won capitalism. You have get away with murder money. Just go and fuck off already, why do you have to make the rest of us miserable?
Because they want more. Why? They’re mentally ill.
What’s crazy is that he’s only spending less than 1% of what the tax would cost him.
If he spent $10b and managed to save himself a $13b tax bill, he’d still save $3b.
I suspect he’s actually spending much more than $100m. He has probably hired expensive attorneys, expensive accountants, expensive PR firms, etc. We have to hope he hasn’t hired private detectives, hackers, hit men, etc.
Shit like this makes me think the Billionaires are afraid of wealth tax because much of their wealth isn’t real. They can materialize 0.05% to fight legislation, but if they tried to liquidate a significant portion of their stocks or whatever that’d decrease the value of the rest of their fortune, not to mention somebody needs to buy what they sold.
They need other people to think what they own is valuable; and they do that by owning it, as rich people are reputable in many people’s eyes. If they sell the feedback cycle inverts
I’m sure that’s part of it. Selling enough stock to meet a 5% wealth tax would sometimes mean that selling those stocks would really drop the value of those shares, and therefore drop their on-paper wealth.
But, the simpler explanation is they don’t wanna.
I don’t want a one-time, 5% wealth tax. I want a recurring wealth tax. At 0.5%, such a tax outpaces the one time 5% in ten years.
I would settle for one time 5%… but it’s just so short-sighted. 5% in one sudden movement is actually a big ask… and are we actually going to be able to pull that off more than once?
A recurring wealth tax 1) is better in the long-term, 2) is less disruptive to the stock market (which we should care about, as long as this is the sustem we have) 3) makes for a more predictable economic environment, so people with money might actually still want to live in CA.
Wealth tax should be progressive. It is dangerous to let so much accumulate.
Even something ridiculously “extreme”, such as 99% wealth tax over a trillion, every year. 90% over a billion, every year. 5% over 10 million, every year. 0. 1% over a million. Would make perfect sense to me. There would be zero change to their quality of life. They just wouldn’t be able to buy influence at scale that can subvert democracy. And that tax would be more than sufficient to lift everyone out of poverty, or effect so many positive changes in the world.
A progressive wealth tax has benefits as well. I just think there’s value in pointing out the impact that such a small percentage has. Implementing even a fraction of a percentage would make a serious impact; we don’t need to go whole hog right here, right now.
My ideal starting point for a progressive wealth tax would max out at 2%, because that’s within a standard deviation of annual S&P growth.
I understand the perspective that the extreme wealth taxes wouldn’t change the quality of life of the ultra-rich… but do you know what the long term impact on the economy would be?
I don’t. And I study this kind of thing. This is not the kind of system that responds well to massive, overnight changes. Most Americans get their food by buying it… if we fuck up, and the economy irretrievably crumbles without a backup, people will starve.
As desperate as people may be for radical change, it is worth it to make these proposals in a responsible way, and ensure that we’re not doing more harm than good.
I promote taxing total compensation (the stock options) and putting in minimum limits on taxes for to wealthy. I have also heard people discussing ideas for having the top billionaires have forced sales of a percentage of their stock and putting possession taxes in place for land hoarding.
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but trillionaires should be forced to transition into billionaires, and billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
Yeah any billionares above maybe 5 billion (let them stay billionares as a treat) should be monetarily euthanised or actually euthanised and their possesions distributed to the populace.
The whole point is to avoid paying. It’s a special little club these fuckers belong to and they sit around with brandy and a monocle laughing maniacally about how they got away with not paying taxes.
They’ll spend more money on avoiding paying taxes then actually paying the taxes which in and of itself is… Evil.
END BILLIONAIRES WITH GUILOTENES
or however you spell it
Millionaires and other parasites are so disgusting. He doesn’t care about losing the money, he just doesn’t want to be told what to do with it (told to give some of it back to the country).
Billionaires should be illegal. Tax the fuck outta these assholes.
He’d like this better than my simplified alternate tax rate of 1 head.
Great choice of pic. Google Glasshole.
Bullshit. Democracies are more vulnerable to outside influence than most other governments. Billionaires love democracy. Especially small democracies like Canada where it is so cheap and easy to capture regulatory offices.
PS: fuck off sanitation
