Almost like the wealthy should be taxed 90% and healthcare should be free, and rent should be strictly regulated, and everyone should have a labor union.
this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2024
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How about this. If you make it to a net worth of $1 Billion, we get you a nice gold plaque that says, "Congratulations! You have won capitalism." Then, any income you earn after that is taxed at 100%.
Income and net worth are different concepts though. You can have a car and be too broke to buy gas.
I think you might be failing to envision just how much money a billion dollars is. If your net worth (Assets - Liabilities + Equity) = one billion dollars, you are among the wealthiest of the wealthiest people in the world.
Now, that probably isn't all just sitting in investments. I'll be very conservative and say half of it is. If you earned 4% annually on that $500M, which is a pretty decent average, you would gross $20 Million.
I don't know about you, but if I had $20 Million, I would never have to work another day for the rest of my life. You see where I'm going with this?
Wouldn’t the $20 Million be subject to the 100% income tax at that point, meaning the net worth billionaire wouldn’t be able to earn any income as it’s all taxed away?
Sure, but let's say they spent 20m. Then their net worth would be under a billion and the next couple of years of earnings would have a lower tax rate.
Even if they never were able to make money again, 20m goes into a billion 50 times. They could overspend for 50 years without making a cent on investments.
I'm sure they'd come up with fun new accounting loopholes though so their assets didn't appear to increase.
What incentive is there to keep working at a 90% tax burden?
They did in the 40s and 50s when wealth ttaxes were that high. 10% of a billion is still a 100 million.
Well if they stop working they make 0. 10% of any income is still more than zero, and this would likely be bracketed so high that there'd be at least a million or two in lower tax bands.
Edit: also strictly, the comment you replied to said "the wealthy" this could refer to a wealth tax rather than an income tax, where stopping working would just remove the income but not affect the tax burden at all—i.e. a pretty terrible idea if you want to remain wealthy
at first glance the thumb nail looked like the box from hellraiser and I thought damn that's bleak.
If you consider yourself broke and would like help, please make a post here. I and many others would love to help, but we need some information, such as:
- household income
- monthly expenses - broken down by category, like rent, utilities, groceries, restaurants, etc
- debts - amount owed by account, type of account, interest rate, minimum payment
- assets - value of car(s), cash, etc
- skills/education - in case we want to explore more ways to make money
A lot of people get discouraged and believe that they're screwed, but I firmly believe there's always a way to financial stability, it just takes a lot of work and humility.
That's very noble of you, but in our capitalist systems, those who provide the most needed and valuable services are often paid the least. You may feel that telling someone to get better educated and moving somewhere cheaper will solve their problem, but then someone else will fill their past role. Our most expensive cities will always need janitors, line cooks, laborers, shelf stockers and many other roles that will never pay much. We can't all be coders making 6 figures working remotely from bumbfuck nowhere. This doesn't even take into account disabled people who can't provide much or any value in the eyes of our system. You basically want to tell people to bootstrap, just in a gentler way.
I'm not sure why you got up on your soapbox to put someone down like that. They didn't say any of the things you said. Their comment isn't even edited, and yours is...
Because this is a forum where people share perspectives. If you don't want to hear them then don't read the comments.
Lol. You wrote a comment in reply to another comment. Usually replies are for responding to what the preceding comment said. Perspectives that follow the preceding perspectives.
If you want to say something about things that nobody has said, you can just make a new post.
The original post is that 50% of Americans consider themselves 'broke'.
@[email protected] a solution that would be considerate if 0.1% of working class Americans considered themselves broke.
@[email protected] offers an analysis why a 'pull yourself together' solution doesn't work when the issue starts hitting 50+% of a nation. That means there's something systemically going wrong and any suggested 'pull yourself by the bootstraps' solution is going to be met with more and more anger from a larger and larger crowd.