• Random Dent@lemmy.ml
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    2 years ago

    I mean you could even take the bottom number and leave them with the top number and they could still live in unimaginable luxury forever. Or just take the lot because fuck em lol.

    • xenspidey@lemmy.zip
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      2 years ago

      You all realize they don’t have that money laying around to pay the IRS right? They own companies, those companies are worth that much. To pay that you would have to liquidate those companies. So no more Amazon, Tesla, Space X, etc…

    • alvvayson@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      It’s really insane that we legally treat the tenth billion dollars at the same level as a working persons house or car.

      Everything is legally just “property”.

      No, fuck that.

      The law should protect the first million of every citizen with ferver. (and when we tackle wealth inequality, most people will have this level of wealth at the end of their working life. The fact that most currently don’t is due to inequality. )

      Up until 100 million, it should be taxed at a reasonable level. Because at some level, it’s fair that people prefer watching Taylor Swift instead of me sing on a stage.

      Above that it should be taxed heavily.

      And above a billion, it should be just confiscated. As in, oopsie, our system malfunctioned, you weren’t supposed to end up with more wealth than what a thousand normal people would save up after a whole lifetime of work, so we are taking it back.

      • Taleya@aussie.zone
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        1 year ago

        At a billion you get a small plaque that says ‘yay you won capitalism’, they name a park bench after you and you replay from scratch.

  • gosling@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    Do billionaires actually have billions in real money sitting around? I’ve always thought the billions were in stocks and couldn’t be taxed until they cashed it out and they could technically lose everything if the stock price falls. That’s really fucked up if true

    • alvvayson@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      Nobody keeps that amount of cash. Even below a million, most people have most of their wealth in either real estate (their own house) or financial securities (stocks, ETFs, bonds).

      Yet, we all gotta pay property tax and capital gains.

      The billionaires just have loopholes that they use to never realize gains with loan schemes and trust funds.

  • Stumblinbear@pawb.social
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    2 years ago

    Wealth taxes are stupid. That said, nobody needs multiple hundreds of billions of dollars.

    The solution is to have regulations and laws in place that prevent them getting this large in the first place. The fact that Amazon and Google own 90% of the internet is absolutely fucked.

  • Decompose@programming.dev
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    2 years ago

    Regardless of how hard it’s to do this, you’ll get what out of this… 15B? That’s nothing… the government spends that in less than a day. Maybe cut government spending in half first. None of this is sustainable.

    https://www.usdebtclock.org/