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Elon musk would be in jail and broke by now if the SEC could do its job
Or the FBI (public emails where he begged Epstein to let him into the parties; also the election interference), or the FTC, or the EPA (Tesla plants piping battery waste into water supplies)…the list goes on
Which was the whole point of DOGE
Some clarification. Those billionnaires don’t have that much money. It’s the “valuation” of their assets, so it’s even more fictional than actual money. Which means they can practically set to anything with enough hype, and not pay any tax, but can convert some (only some) of that fictional money to real money by getting a bank loan against it, again, tax free.
What I’m saying is, we need to get those funny number back to ground truth. Melon wants SpaceX valued at 1.25 Tn or something. Let him pay taxes over those valuations and see how valuable they really are. After all, anyone with a 800bn company should be able to afford some taxes on them, right? So fucking tax them.
You can’t tax valuation
Tell that to the property taxes I pay on my house every year. They manage to define a value even though I’m not selling and it’s still an “unrealized gain”.
That’s right, homeowners pay on unrealized gains, but not Sociopathic Oligarchs. We should flip that.
That’s the thing about wealth taxes. People argue that they’re unworkable. The truth is that we already have wealth taxes. We just have the most useless style of wealth tax.
Instead of the ultra-wealthy paying the highest percentage in taxes, every home owner pays a similar rate. But, that means that the people who have most of their wealth tied up in their homes pay the highest effective rate. Even if it might be hard to come up with a perfect wealth tax, it would be extremely easy to come up with one that’s more progressive than property taxes.
“You can’t tax valuation”
Fine, the government gets 40% of your share options.
“You can’t tax valuation”
Yes you can. Capitalism just doesn’t want you.
If they are using the “unvested” assets for something, like getting a loan with them as collateral, then we should treat it as if they realized the gain.
If you use stock as collateral to get s $1mm loan, that should be treated as income.
If they then sell the stock and get taxed again… I don’t think I really care.
We tax valuation all the time! Property has a valuation and we levy taxes on how much it’s worth.
One time? Every year?
Just like Income tax. When they vest.
I think that doesn’t work well due to price fluctuations of the stocks and avoiding double taxing, but I don’t understand stock options and current tax laws enough to be confident about that.
avoiding double taxing
Who cares? Even double-taxing the billionaires is still the moderate compromise position, compared to the guillotine.
The guillotine is a dumbass fantasy that prevents people from having to think about real options while cosplaying on the internet.
Who cares? If the goal is the universal application of the law, that goal is not obtained when you use the law to apply to people you don’t like.
That’s the point. If you get paid $10 at 30% tax the government takes 3 of the dollars. If you get paid $10 and 10 options, the government takes 3 dollars and 3 shares (when they vest). Simple as that.
Deciding what to do with the shares as the government is a hairy problem though.
Ok, I see what you mean, but now you have government holding stocks with 0 idea if they should cash out or hold. Both cases could result in the government loosing out on tax money.
If government immediately sells, and you hold until the stocks are 10x the value, the governmwnt lost out on 90% of the money.
If government holds and you sell, the government stocks can become worthless (e.g. company goes bankrupt) and again lose out on tax money. Plus government needs money in the budget, not stocks.
This is why you usually tax the income when you sell the shares. The loophole is taking a loan against those shares, but if you ask me, the answer is to tax the loan money and make repayments tax deductible. The loan is basically getting the money from selling shares early, so it should be taxed when you get it.
Maybe the shares could go to a sovereign wealth fund with staff employed to try and maximize the value of the fund over the long term?
price fluctuations of the stocks
Average price over the last 30 days.
avoiding double taxing,
Submit a claim for repayment.
Average price over the last 30 days.
There are so many issues with this idk where to start. Maybe with: not all stock given as compensation are publicly traded yet. There may be no average price yet when they vest.
PS: Also, the original comment proposes taking 40% of the shares, not monetary equivalent which I originally misunderstood as well. So neither of our comments is really rellevant.
not all stock given as compensation are publicly traded yet. There may be no average price yet when they vest.
This doesn’t stop real estate being valued for tax purposes. Use the same approach - proxy valuations.
taking 40% of the shares
Yeah, that would just be nationalisation. After 5 years the government would own 90% of all businesses.
If they can tax your house based on its current valuation, they can sure tax their stocks based on their current fucking valuations.
Excuse my French, they are not my native language.
Nor are English.
I pay increased taxes because my property goes up in value, even if I don’t sell. Same should apply to shares (to be fair there should also be tax credits when shares fall).
Personal loans against business assets should be taxed. The repayments can then be tax deductible so they are not double taxed. Without taxing these loans, it just creates a tax loophole where you avoid income tax.
As for company prices being inflated, to some extent, who cares? As long as they don’t get a bailuot when the bubble pops, it’s the investors issue.
We get tax deductions on interest paid on mortgages. They should not be getting tax deductions on their full repayment.
The tax deductions are meant to offset the tax on the loan. You don’t get your loans taxed as income so you don’t get full deduction on repayment. They wouldn’t pay less than you overall in my proposal.
Seems like this would be a good place to treat those stocks (and options) as real property and tax them accordingly. With a properly progressive rate on them, we could set the lower end such that normal retirement funds won’t be impacted, with the high end discouraging hording assets.
This is important. More than glib stuff like the meme. When the billionaires talk about “paying their share,” it’s important that journalists and public repeatedly call out that BS. That’s how the average person is going to realize that it’s BS. Simple stuff like not being taxes on the value of their wealth (like average people are taxed on the value of, e.g., their home), and using the “unrealized gains” of those investments to back massive low-interest loans to buy/sell companies, politicians, etc. and fund their lives effectively tax free. It’s absolutely maddening.
This is all ignoring the single simple face that no 1 person should ever have the power over society that these parasites have.
I agree taxing fughazi is difficult. How about taxing the banks when they offer a loan for billionaires against their assets? Then they can pass that down as interest
Missed that scene of “Man from Earth”
What an excellent little film.
Never expect a bottle episode movie would be so good
Really? How? It’s like the main subplot!
Confiscate his wealth, and nationalize his companies. We paid for them, after all, they’re ours. They can be operated at the benefit of the citizens.
Removed by mod
Blood tax.
we can’t say shit anymore on lemmy.world, it really is the alternative to reddit in every wrong way
We are beyond tax, burn the fuckers at the stake
But at 1% pa interest you’d surpass all of humanity combined, even at measly savings contributions
Compounded gains truely are the wonder of the financial world.
If you put $1 in the bank 2777 years ago, at 1% a year you’d have $1t now, handily beating musk. At 5% pa it would take a mere 567 years! Easy! A bit of sensible financial planning by your great-great-great-something grand parents would have seen you very comfortable now.
But how much would 1$ of 751 BCE be worth in today’s money?
I was going to make a joke about the problem being finding a bank that would last that long, but you’ve got me thinking.
We obviously can’t use inflation to calculate values from that far back, as we don’t have the data, dollars didn’t exist, and the dollar isn’t tethered to an underlying asset anymore, so the best comparison is probably buying power.
A loaf of bread aparently averages $2.74 at the moment, but you could almost certainly make a loaf yourself for a dollar or less.
I’ve not had much luck finding the cost of bread in everyone’s favourite historical yardstick, Rome, in that era, the best I’ve found is the cost of grain in 200bce or so. Legionaries earned about 3as per day, which would buy enough grain to make 20 loaves, so 1 loaf would be an hour or two of work (assuming a legionary is employed 24 hours a day, the grain costs a bit more than a day’s salary, and I’m rounding a lot).
So basically, if your ancient roman ancestor had invested a couple of hours of their wages, and your familial line since then had all kept it growing at a very modest 1% pa, you’d be a trillionaire by now.
True, if you managed to find a bank that lasted that long, or a currency that lasted that long. Look at the history of both banks and currencies and you’ll see that the miracle compound interest is not easy to uphold.
Those are, indeed, issues, but they could be addressed with careful management. See my reply to a sibling comment, but basically, investing a couple of hours of wages back then, and carefully moving it from investment to investment over the millenia would do the trick.
Another way of viewing it is that if Elon Musk spent $10k every day since the ice age, he would still not be out of money.
Elon Musk can spend 35 million every day and still get richer by around 5 million every day.
Well, not really. He can’t actually spend that money. When he bought twitter, he had to take a bunch of sketchy loans and some of his stocks dropped because he had to sell a lot.
If he actually sells a bunch of his stocks, the price will dip and make the rest worth far less. So it’s not actually spendable money.
It’s more of a power measurement. If you have a billion you have influence over that many assets.
Also a problem with wealth tax. If you have to sell assets to pay it, that could have a bunch of weird effects. I think Denmark doesn’t actually tax your assets, they just increase your income tax if your wealth is above a certain level. But I’m not 100% on that.
Every fucking year hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Americans pay a tax on an illiquid asset: the property tax.
Don’t fucking tell me “oh it’s too difficult, there’s too many effects.” Tax. Them.
Progressive tax rate on long term and short term capital gains. 95 % upper limit for income tax. Kneecap their bullshit “buy, borrow, die” cycle.
Get back to the fucking WW2 tax levels, back when we had a middle class, and then we can maybe finally have a balanced budget, at least.
95% income is wild. But capital gains increase might not be a bad idea. Higher top brackets also probably a good idea. Taxing debt that you borrow against assets might be difficult because of mortgages. Technically I think the state gets taxes on that but only when they die. If there is a good proposal that works, I’d have no problem with it.
Just Wealth tax is not a good idea. The problem in my opinion is not that people get too rich, it’s that companies get too big. We need to break those monopolies up.
https://taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/historical-highest-marginal-income-tax-rates
95 is not that high For 20 years it was over 90
Now I know I hear people in the back “but it was world war time!” True. True.
How long have we been at war? Since Vietnam? How many fucking desert storms have we had? Cold war?
And not one person that has complained about the percentile has asked about what the top bracket would be.
Are you really going to argue that a 95% tax rate on every $1 over $1,000,000 is excessive or “wild”? Or does it actually represent the marginal utility of income?
Because the first 80k someone makes is waayyyyyyyyyyy more impactful than the next 80k. One makes sure you don’t die of starvation and exposure. The other is all pleasure.
I like your counterpoint about the wealth tax being more about monopolistic power. Hadn’t considered that angle. I do believe that the government must be larger than the entities it governs. If we ever want a smaller, more agile government, we need to shrink what it’s supposed to govern.
Here is why I argue for a wealth tax: Most things in life are not simply exponential. They’re logarithmic. At least for biology and natural systems. We need some corrective force that pushes back aggressively against wealth accumulation -regardless of source.
Well, we currently have death as a limiter. Proper inheritance taxes would cap everything to one lifetime.
What would happen to America and the USD if all of those people left the country and took their “wealth” with them?
They don’t leave. At least, not in the scary mass exodus they always try to imply.
So nothing?
With 95% income taxed and tax on illiquid assets, you’d see a mass exodus…
95 % upper limit for income tax.
Don’t argue against things I didn’t say.
You don’t see an exodus of homeowners for their property tax.
Why is that? Hmmm? Is it the case that rich people wanna be where money is? And nice services are? Where the culture is? Where the art is? Where their family is? Their friends? Their children’s life?
Show me a study that unequivocally shows that raising taxes leads to mass capital flight. I haven’t seen one yet. At best, its mixed.
They say this about minimum wage “you can’t raise it to $15 business will leave and go under!”
And every fucking time states or cities increase the minimum wage, that doesn’t happen.
Stop fucking carrying water for the rich
What would the host do without the parasites?
Everytime time this meme is posted someone makes a comment about how dumb it would be to just sit on that cash for the last 80,000 years instead of just taking advantage of compound interest.
Obviously you’d be extremely wealthy if you were immortal and could invest wisely over the last 80,000 years. That’s not really the point though.
The point is that billionaires have an obscene amount of money. An amount that most people can’t even imagine without going to an extreme example. They wouldn’t exist in a just society.
Just after a few days it would be life changing money for me
It’s about 200,000 years saving 10k per day now. He’s rapidly approaching a trillion in net worth.
Seriously though, his actual worth is probably about tree fiddy on a good day
And yet Musk is still fucking miserable.
Dumbass should have invested.
Compound interest is your friend.
I fully agree with the pic you posted, but you sent it to the wrong commenter.
???
Should’ve shorted Big Ice.
In case anyone wanted to know the number, it would be
$820,260,000$ 299,395,000,000 by 2026Edit: read the fucking thing wrong, it’s every day not every year mb
Not countung any interest accrued on that money. Even a low interest rate would cause any small investment to skyrocket over long periods.
I don’t believe they had banks in 80,000bc
Perhaps not, but somewhere between 80,000 BC and today, banks were invented, or so I’ve been told.
They didn’t have dollars in 80000bc either ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Even if we gave it a little bit let’s say 1% interest, which is what people get in savings usually, with the monthly 10,000$/m put in for 82,026 years: if we did our napkin math right that’s about $2,94698e15 ($2,946,980,000,000,000) which is ~22.67 times more money in the entire world lol
deleted by creator
You did not account for an inflation. How much todays $ is $1 from 80000y ago?
Bout tree fiddy.
Goddam it Loch Ness Monster, I ain’t giving you no tree fiddy!
Probably not as much as you’d think. The Gold Standard has not been repealed until 1971, which means inflation would only happen due to extraordinary events (like big wars). But the inflation since 1971 would still multiply your money eight-fold, which will put your saving of 82 millennia above Elon Musk’s net worth.
The returns on iron in that era would have been astronomical. But if you put all your money into a mastodon-powered ploughing business you could be belly up
You forgot that you could account for inflation yourself, IT’S TRUE
I highly doubt the USA will copy 1789 France.
No, it’ll likely be worse, if
Thankfully we don’t need to as we don’t have a autocratic government
you do
If you genuinely believe that you either don’t know what an autocratic government is or don’t understand the state of the American crisis.
Trump is the autocrat, and anyways revolutions have always happened even if its not an autocracy. Imagine all the countries that fought against colonialism
the nepal revolution, the government wasnt an autocracy
Okay I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about Trump’s power, and resultant classification.
How is it possible trump has full control of the entire government at his whim, if his power can be limited by the supreme court and the congress?
the congress and supreme court have been filled to the brim with trumpers, by trump
And yet still directly limit his actions both de jure and de facto
You gonna answer my question?
This is an international problem.
The more you tax them, the more will flee to countries willing to make concessions for them. But, taxation is preferable to seizing the assets; after seizure, you will lose a massive amount of business for obvious reasons, it will cost more than you seize.
I think that corporate control would be preferable. Shell companies and their machinations are at an absurd level today, see Panama and Pandora papers for more details.
How would you fix this without international solutions? What would those be? Can’t we make a deal?
Too bad we don’t have a diplomatic deal maker in office
If the USA taxes Amazon, do you think Amazon will stop doing business in the USA? Do you think Amazon will do less business in the USA? No, of course not, there’s a billion warehouses and distribution centers in the USA, it would be impossible to move.
If the USA taxes Jeff Bezos, do you think Jeff Bezos will go live in Panama? Do you think he will move to Africa? No, of course not, he has all his stuff in the USA that he cannot move, he would never leave.
As long as corporations/billionaires have their stuff in a country, that country can tax their stuff. It’s the other side of the coin Trump is having trouble with. Trump slaps a tarrif on everything to encourage manufactuing in the USA, but corpoations don’t have many manufacturing capabilities in the USA so the end result is lost jobs and raised prices for nothing. There’s no manufacturing stuff in the USA and it would take a decade to make the stuff if they started now.
At a certain level of wealth, all the money is tied up in assets that are difficult to move. Those assets are assessed and used to borrow money to avoid income tax. We can use those same assessments and implement a wealth tax.
The deal should be, “Y’all have had it too good for too long. Pay your fair share immediately and indefintely.”
Wealth flight is a myth, it is not real.
A good video that sums it up in a nice way: https://youtu.be/6DXZMXZCY0I
Even if it was real, roughly 0 billionaires are leaving the US because of tax issues. We can at least tax them until a few start leaving. It’s really a win-win scenario.
You can tax them by demanding the tax regardless of domicile, as a tax for selling their shit in your country.
We can fairly quickly degoogle EU.
As for small, micro, or even SMEs, atm even municipalities are competing & bowing instead of showing solidarity to others. Simple eg EU level laws are needed.
Yes, it’s an international problem.
How would you fix this without international solutions? What would those be? Can’t we make a deal?
Can’t be fixed locally unless you got an incorruptible government -> refuse to do any business with problematic individuals and their corporations. As long as no one holds a monopoly on something you need to survive, that’s viable.
Get them out of the country. What reason is there to let the removedry be sucked dry by billionaires that aren’t giving back?
No reason to let them own any assets or do any business in the cointry without taxing it accordingly.
This is an international problem.
They’re more you tax them, the more will flee to countries willing to make concessions for them
How would you fix this without international solutions? What would those be? Can’t we make a deal?
All the more reason then for a world government to control global taxation! I know, I know, Illuminati and all that jazz. But didn’t people have the concept of social contract to allowed to be ruled than live in anarchy? Does “The Leviathan” ring a bell to anyone? What are nation states on a global level if not anarchy?
People complain that the UN does nothing. But when it does act, people will also complain they interfere. Not against you but i want to say humans in genetal are really fucking stupid. We haven’t gotten past the ape brain that we have of tribal mentality, as well as only caring about out immediate environment.
If I have the power, I would make everyone travel to space and make them see the Earth from above, and make them realise that all the grievances and fighting we have, are infinitesimally small, insignificant and stupid seeing as how big the Earth and the cosmos are more than we can imagine. Most who viewed the Earth from space became more humanistic. It’s called the Overview effect. This puts into perspective what the phrase “look at the bigger picture” truly means.
