With wealth inequality and billionaire control over American society growing ever more obscene, it’s well past time to implement a maximum wage limit.
My limited understanding is that once you’re super wealthy your actual income doesn’t matter. They take loans against their wealth to pay for whatever they want.
We need to tax both capital gains at a rate higher than labor and tax loans as income if they use stock as collateral.
Yes but this is an article aimed at a casual audience of wage-laborers, who undestand wealth as the thing you get for a job.
And the details of the demand don’t really matter that much, because at this point it’s clear that even a milquetoast request like this will still prompt the US oligarchy to have the secret police fire on protesters. Imo if anything you want the demands to initially be as mild as possible, makes them look more unreasonable. Once people are onboard you can push for more important goals.
I think we need to decide, if unrealized gains are real gains. How you can loan using unrealized gains as collateral if from tax purposes it’s not real money.
If you can loan money using unrealized gains a collateral you should be taxed. I am not saying you tax unrealized gains, but taxing when get money “from” it.
But loan is considered a loss and you even get a tax break.
Also need to limit tax write-offs to really business needs, like rich people can get a huge car like a Mercedes G class on their business and write-off the cost for instance. The rich have a lot of loopholes. Incentives should be limited to people and companies making a X sum. If your company makes billions, I don’t think you need a tax incentive.
I propose we tax owning stock like property
It’s not wages that are the problem, it’s compounding multi-generational wealth. It’s very easy for rich people to make their income zero.
Amen. Minimum wage was a good start, but it’s become a mere virtue signal for labor rights. I have no reason to believe a maximum wage wouldn’t function similarly. Furthermore, nominal sums are pretty meaningless with currency anyway. Inflation makes them irrelevant pretty quickly. Progressive tax and social subsidy is what works, historically.
I worked for a guy that got paid $1 a year. The business paid for everything for him. Wage caps will not work.
What was his role?
CFO
worked for a guy
Probably some variation of owner/boss/CEO.
CFO his dad was CEO. I saw a 27000 Amex bill that we covered.
Can’t they both be a problem?
Well like I said, pretty much all of these mega rich people don’t have any income on paper, otherwise they would have to pay income tax. And rich people hate paying taxes.
multi generational wealth is the only way to have any fun though
That’s the whole problem.
if fun is a problem then I don’t want it fixed
Found the trust fund baby.
What we need is a wealth tax. If you don’t want wealth to be hoarded, then you tax it. The rich and their stooges online will parrot that “wealth taxes don’t work” precisely because it is the only tax that does work and that is why they oppose it.
Maximum wage laws don’t make sense because the ultra rich get their wealth from investments, not wages.
At some point, we decided that people who work and make $100K a year get taxed 50% more than people who make the same money from investment. Income is income. Get rid of capital gains special status.
And this loophole of borrowing money against stock value is income, and should be taxed as such. If we did this, everyone’s income taxes would be much lower, national debts would be in reduction.
But the Wall street dicks consider taxing on investments “getting taxed twice”, and hedge fund managers still pay NO income taxes, only CGT.
Nailed it.
What we need is a securities tax: a tax on every stock, bond, and other financial instruments in their portfolio. No need to liquidate it; the shares are simply transferred to the IRS annually. They’ll liquidate those shares slowly over time.
Natural persons are exempted on the first $10 million of their portfolio. No exemptions for artificial persons.
I’m in favour of maximum ratios of total compensation. Stock values, dividends, salary are all added together to get a total compensation value.
Start it at something like 50-1, then gradually lower it as the actual workforce is allowed to control an increased share of the company.
There is still incentive for growth; the growth is simply distributed more equitably.
A big misconception is that billionaires get rich from their salary.
Is it? This is the first I’m encountering that idea. I think most are aware it happens via gains in other ways.
Have you considered you may be in an echo chamber? Most Americans can barely operate on a 6th grade reading comprehension level. Source years of customer facing work as an American
constructed propaganda chamber/consent manufacture machine?
Sure I’m in probably a few. But I also think I’m old and decently read. And I haven’t encountered people that think billionaires got this money from salary.
You’d be surprised. My dad once complained about “the top 10%, the billionaires” and I had to I’ve inform him that based on wealth and income, he’s the top 10% just being middle class, and the billionaires basically don’t even show up as a percentage because there’s only like a thousand in the entire world. Most people do not understand how any of this works and do not have even a basic understanding of how any of these people got wealthy in the first place.
Now that doesn’t surprise me a bit. Many people struggle with curves and the intuition of growth systems.
The thing about most mega rich people is they don’t earn wages. So this wouldn’t affect them.
Came here to say this. They’re poor, see how much their salaries are? Just a million, which they reinvest into the company for another share of 1% of their 3 trillion dollar company… that they control, and fire 20k employees to get back 50 million in just a week for their share…
Semantics. We’ll change the wording to “assets controlled”.
Semantics. “Max income law”
Any income over $300,000 per year goes to the State to cover programs to eradicate poverty. Easy.
Ok so then once you hit $300k in income you should stop working? That sounds like a great way to have a shortage of working necessary skilled labor eg surgeons and lawyers who stop working after a few months every year.
My buddy is a spinal surgeon. He would stop working by May and his area would have no spinal surgeons for more than half the year under your suggestion.
If those people are actually taking home $300k/year after deducting things like business expenses and student loan payments, then they’re either way overpaid or they seriously need a vacation.
OR they have incredibly niche skills that are extremely hard to obtain and maintain.
The part that makes me think certain forms of leftism are really foolish is that they count on people not wanting to be compensated for the greater amount of harder work or risks they are willing to take on. People don’t work like that.
The risk to even get to that level was incredibly high as well. Medical school bills are no joke and you don’t know you’re going to become some top notch surgeon by the end, you might just wash out and be swimming in debt.
Education being risky is a feature of capitalism. A sane economic system would not require someone to go into debt to learn a valuable skill.
Maybe those skills shouldn’t be so incredibly niche, then. Almost like we should be encouraging people to develop them instead of locking them behind a paywall.
The overwhelming majority of people would not be capable due to their mental acuity and/or ability to engage in fine motor skills. Money isn’t as big of a factor in this case and having less informed and skilled spinal surgeons wouldn’t he a great thing.
The more intelligent choice is to not set such a low wage cap as it achieves nothing to begin with and addresses no problems.
That’s how you get a bunch of great Cuban surgeons
No, you don’t unless you live in a country whose medical technology is still decades behind the standards of the developed world. Your average Cuban doctor has no experience with the robotic surgery tools we have now.
that would kill lotteries
Why should I care? There’s no inherent reason lotteries deserve to exist. There are several reasons they shouldn’t exist.
gambling is fun
So find a different way to gamble. It’s not like there’s a shortage.
Lotteries are hardly gambling. You’re going to loose, statistically
Statistically, this applies to all other forms of gambling as well. The house almost always wins.
There are gambling where there is no house
Darn
They already play a shell game with wages, so they don’t pay income taxes. Most of the really rich and successful people have their incomes derived from capital gains and then use the talking point that it’s already money that was taxed through their business so it shouldn’t be taxed further.
TAX CAPITAL GAINS.
We do tax capital gains. It’s just at a lower rate than regular income and the first $50k or so is 0%. Some states tax capital gains as regular income.
They do a shell game by using their losses to offset their gains.
This would be something anyone could do but most people don’t have the ability to let stocks sit for over a year before taking the capitol loss strategically.
The system is built for the wealthy to have less risk.
Tax debt over say $1 million as income
We need monopoly busting, and inheritance tax, and general wealth redistribution. We need to stop monetizing basic needs and start paying fair wages. Income cap solves none of that. No way you can sell ‘income caps’ to the general public.
It’s simple, any income is income and taxed as income. this means loans, gains, etc. alll income.
Then everyone pays less income taxes. The current system puts the tax burden on the poorest people.
Yes simple flat tax rates are a dream for me. Imagine! Also with all the government monitoring we pay for… they can file our taxes for us. I’d love to get a fair itemized tax bill every year.
Monopoly busting, hell yes!! All the other ideas come from people who were unlucky enough to have nothing passed down to them.
I am sorry for your situation, but my father worked his ass off to leave me and my siblings something (it was meager compared to most I’m sure but it helped me out immensely when I needed a leg up), but blanket laws like this would have royally screwed me just because “well I didn’t inherit anything from my parents, so NOBODY ELSE SHOULD EITHER!!” mentality.
Like how much money are you talking about? Are you rich rich? or are you got enough daddy’s money to talk shit rich?
You’re broke to me if you’re worth less than 100 million I couldn’t care less about your family money
I think the 10-13 million dollar cap is plenty. It’s not about you it’s about the Walton kids controlling and passing down 100 Billion. It’s about Elon using his money to buy his way into the White House and steal from people…
If you gave your children $10 million and they couldn’t survive on it you fucking failed to raise your children. Anything more than that is burdensome. Passing off enough money so that your kids don’t have to struggle is one thing. Passing off enough money to buy yourself a political party by the time you’re 35 probably not a great idea.
Inheritance tax is what stops you having a noble class or owner class with a long line of inherited wealth.
A good inheritance tax would be tiered like income tax. Lower amounts would be untaxed with higher numbers being taxed at higher rates.
Maximum wage would be nice, but the inequality doesn’t happen with wages, it’s stock options, asset hoarding, and rent seeking. These people don’t pay taxes, or claim wages lol. Inheritance tax of 95% of 11Million that’s an idea! Need to strip the aristocracy of its belongings.
That wealth is also largely unrealized wealth on those stock options. I’m pretty against taxing unrealized gains, but for the love of god, we need to tax their leveraging of those unrealized gains which is how they benefit and wield it as a weapon, all while not paying any taxes on it. The tax rate should be HIGH (I’d be okay with the tax rate part being wealth based when they leverage it).
Yea it’s really a sticky situation. I’m also against taxing unrealized gains because it’s just hard to logic around. Taxing stock buy backs would help, taxing unrealized gains over 100M or whatever. Idk we need to tax away the aristocracy and the political power that comes with wealth accumulation. Would love to live in a world where a handful of people didn’t command the fates of billions
All incoming money and assets. Hell, tax all assets at 100% over 100M. Maybe even hard code a limit to the size of corporations, since they are people the same rules apply.
We need a cap per owner. When you have multiple owners, the cap sums between them. Owners share equal rights.
So take a megacorp, like Google. They would be essentially need to make every employee an owner plus hire thousands of new “owner employees” to maintain their profit margin. Those profits get divided equally among owners, and the owners decide the direction of the company.
This pattern is also future proof against AI.
I love it. Also the cap applies to all companies owned by a single individual, total not each.
Most billionaires don’t earn a wage at all. So they’re ahead of you on this. Most of their wealth comes from simply lying about what their shit is worth, and other rich people agreeing.
90% tax rate over 1million a year including capital gains. No cap on social security
Why the fuq someone needs 1 mil year? 500 is enough
Just trying to be reasonable
Everyone makes $1/hour.
But everything only costs $1.
1 hour of labor = any 1 thing.
Work three hours, buy house, sports car and superyacht.
Which everyone works to make because a single grain of rice is $1.
Why don’t you buy me? ;)
(Disclaimer: I am NOT worth $1)
Bro we’re gonna starve.
I predict we’re going to see our first trillionaire by the end of the decade. It’s beyond obscene. If you “earn” (lol) more than 5 million dollars a year, you should have that part taxed at 100%
Musk is currently trying to negotiate a pay package from Tesla, which, if approved would pay him roughly a trillion dollars over the next decade. It’s into the “not really comprehensible by humans” range.
Why the fuck does this ugly cunt need more money?? It’s just a small dick competition at this point.
- Tax income greater than 100x the minimum wage at 95%
- Tax standing wealth above 1000x annual minimum wage
The solutions aren’t complicated. What’s complicated is getting the solutions implemented when enough representatives are bought out by the wealthy.
Even simpler. If one’s wealth exceeds some function of GDP, the law no longer protects them.
As much as that appeals to some part of me deep down, those are the tactics being employed right now against vulnerable people in the US. If the law doesn’t protect everyone, it doesn’t protect anyone.
And honestly, I think the wealthy are more threatened by taxes than by having to hire their own protection.
I get that, but I don’t think they deserve the same protections as the vulnerable. The vulnerable cannot easily change their situation. The wealthy can. Beyond that, their cost to society is much much worse.
I don’t think they deserve it either. But when I advocate for due process and humane conditions for the worst people, it’s not for their sake–it’s for everyone else’s.
As soon as there is some class of people who are not protected by law or due process, it can easily be weaponized against the more vulnerable, even if that wasn’t the original intent.
For example, right now in the US, the government is denying due process to “illegal immigrants.” Doesn’t seem like a problem for anyone here legally, right? Except that without due process, what’s stopping them from throwing lawful residents into a van and hauling them away? They don’t get due process to prove their innocence. So anyone can now be defined as “illegal” and deported without any due process or recourse.
Lawfulness is for the vulnerable, even when applied to the less vulnerable.
I’m saying it isn’t a class of people that is not of their own volition. It could be looked at as similar to choosing the class of rapist or other criminal. By choosing to allow your wealth to exceed this point, society has deemed you to be in violation of the law; due process intact. You are therefore, no longer protected by the police, fire departments, emergency rooms, etc. It is one of the primary roles of society to determine what is acceptable and what is not.
I’m not sure what purpose revoking law has on anyone, including this group. In fact, the wealthy is often the group who advocates for privitization of these services, as they’re the only ones who can afford to pay for them out of pocket. Seems like an inconvenience at most.
If you want to make excessive wealth illegal, I’m all for that. But that’s not removing legal protections, it’s allowing the people to prosecute and reclaim wealth from those hoarding it, which seems more productive for what you’re trying to achieve.
If tomorrow’s wealth will exceed that cap, I’d like to see today’s priority be offload that money at all cost. That’s really all I’m suggesting with a partly tongue in cheek suggestion of making it scary to cross that line. But the point is simply to make a person approaching that line feel that getting rid of money with a quickness is integral to their wellbeing.
Why not just Most Dangerous Game the wealthiest individual at the end of each year if that’s your objective?
This is a much more difficult problem than you suggest. Taxing standing wealth of 1.8 million would limit so much of the upper middle class that actually drives economies.
Given how many people have their wealth invested in theor home, how do ypu propose to do this or is everyone constantly downgrading the home they are invested in?
Nothing in economics is ever “easy”.
1000x annual minimum wage is 14.5 million. That’s not the savings of the worker class (a conservative investment would provide enough return to live without working). And the point is that it’s tied to minimum wage. Want to be taxed less on your wealth? You gotta raise the minimum wage.
You’re right in saying it’s a bit more complicated than that–my two point suggestion is oversimplified–but my original point stands: the solutions are less complicated than getting rational legislation passed in a system where the checks and balances are bought out.
Ooof, how did I fuck up themath that badly? At 14+ million it’s different. That’s a lot of wealth compared to the average upper middle class family.
Is the way you judge what’s wealthy to look at your own situation and target something comfortably above that? There’s plenty of people who will surmise that your situation is comfortably better than theirs once that power is available to the public.
You don’t have to base it on your own situation, you can base it on cost of living or other objective values.
There’s a big difference between 1 million and 10 million. With a modest 5% return on investment, 1 million nets you $50,000 per year, which is enough to support a very modest lifestyle in some places (near poverty in others). 10 million with the same investment nets $500,000 per year, which is more than enough to retire to a very luxurious lifestyle and accumulate more wealth along the way.
And that’s still less than the 14.5 million I proposed, so that person would still not see any wealth tax.
No it’s based on a ton of actual hard statistics that focus on relative buying power vs what the state supplies. Many Europeans who make less than I do have a higher QoL than I do because their education and healthcare are subsidized/free.
It’s not that much different.
It’s wildly different.
$1 million invested at 5% is $50,000 annually. $10 million invested at 5% is $500,000 annually.
That’s the difference between the working and wealth classes.
It’s vastly different. A net worth of ten million plus isn’t just a case where you own a home and a retirement fund.
Real estate is a good example of the trickiest thing about “simple” wealth tax.
I bought a house, and 20 years later I have to pay more taxes because my neighbourhood is more desirable?
Okay, easy solution, you get one free house you need to reside in for x% of your time per year.
But say I bought a painting from a local artist, even a friend, and decades go by and they’ve gone on to become ultra famous. Do I now have to pay more tax because I possess something that has become valuable?
Obviously thats a very unlikely scenario, but you can see the principle issue.
For the numbers I suggested, I don’t think you’d realistically hit these types of cases.
1000x annual minimum wage is $14.5 million. Based on a quick search, the threshold for the top 1% of Americans with respect to net worth starts at $13.6 million in 2023. So over 98% of Americans would never see the impact of a wealth tax like this.
If minimum wage were brought up to a realistic level, say $20/hour (still low, but better than the current $7.25), that threshold jumps to $40 million. This would capture somewhere between the top 0.5% and 0.1%. This is excessive wealth.
In the case where your painting is suddenly worth $50 million, yes–you’d have to pay more tax. But I think that many dollars might be some reprieve from the pain of selling it.
Applying sensible economic policy to extreme wealth is easier than general economic policy.
I had a public policy professor who used to say wealth taxes frequently come with loopholes you can pilot a yacht through
Giving that money to poor people would drive the economy more.
Not necessarily, it is a lot more complex than that.
Honestly fuck these leeches, drop a zero from each.
