politics

Our billionaires are not okay. The most obvious example, of course, is Musk, who is having a midlife crisis so unhinged that it would be upsetting if he weren't such a terrible person. He purchased Twitter for $44 billion last year, out of nothing more than a fit of pique over the company's efforts to keep the social media app from being too overrun by Nazis. As the company swirls down the toilet under his watch, his public behavior gets ever more erratic. The threat from Threads, a Meta-owned competitor that launched earlier this month, caused Musk, age 52, to react with a level of immaturity that would be cause for alarm in a junior high school kid. He challenged Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to a "cage match." And then again to a "literal dick measuring contest." He keeps throwing schoolboy insults at Zuckerberg.

Kinda hilarious and sad at the same time.

Who thought giving trust fund kids a bunch of tax payer dollars was a good idea LOL

I heard trips to the titanic are great for them to release some pressure.

In addition to taxation, make them share their wealth with all of their employees. Their working people deserve the money more than the government.

Really glad to see this take. Nobody balks at the idea that 'hoarding' is a mental health issue when poor people do it. It's about time we recognize obscene wealth is bad for everyone in society, including the people who hold it.

It’s not as simple as raising taxes when they use creative accounting to live “at a loss” and pay for everything with loans while most of their holdings remain untaxable.

Really the best thing we can do is give in to their fantasies and convince people like Elon Musk that he can kill a tiger with his bare hands

Sure, but more to the point, we need to overhaul the entire socio-economic system. The neolibs experiment in deregulation and privatization and prioritizing profit growth has manifestly failed.

The stunningly stupid thing is that we basically have the tech to automate a huge amount of the labor required to produce all the stuff humans need and to at least try to do that sustainably, the problem is we don’t know how to organize a society that can run on much less human labor.

What keeps me up at night is the thought that one obvious way to reorganize around a much smaller human labor requirement is to have a much smaller population. Isn’t that the radical right end game here? Isn’t that why Very Rich People have gone full fascist?

Let us relieve them of their burdens.

For anyone wondering, 92% is the highest rate we had. Before Reagen, 70% was the highest bracket for 10 years. We need to get back to it.

https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/historical-highest-marginal-income-tax-rates

In a way I commend the likes of Musk for galvanizing people against billionaires and advancing social movements. He's so dislikable that it's productive.

People don't always grasp the amount of money a billionaire has. Let's put it in perspective:

A billionaire looks at $200,000 the same way a person with a $100,000 salary looks at $20 (for reference, a 1-millionaire looks at $200 the same).

It's also worth noting the power billionaires have relative to their country's size. Looking at Number of billionaires per million people. You could probably take this and weigh it further against the median per-capita GDP to see how much clout one billionaire has versus the population. For example, while India has a low # of billionaires / million people, the power the ~169 billionaires there have an overwhelming share of the total wealth of that nation.

Dunno about them, but my mental health would be improved if those parasites paid taxes.

I've been preaching this for years. That level of greed is disgusting and should really be dissected as a society to understand what makes someone like that. It's a huge personality disorder.

Here is a relevant video to this subject. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IP2EKTCngiM