The reason people put these high limits is they think it will never concern them. But the reality is we should just tax net worth over a million at 100%; or maybe forbid wealth altogether. Or at least we should discuss that, instead of billion limits that may only affect a few people -- people who will never be part of the discussion in the first place.
– roughly after Phil Zimmerman
Thanks, I don‘t like that future.
Don‘t get me wrong, I‘m all for progressive and _way_ higher taxes, but this extreme would do the opposite of what you want.
So regardless of what you consider the right answer to the question (it's pretty tough to support without major caveats in my opinion), they are not at all the same and it actually comes across as an subtle attempt to reduce any potential support by muddying the waters, regardless of what you were actually trying to do.
I'm not saying a hard cap on wealth is the best way to achieve this or that achieving any form of control of private power that doesn't turn authoritarian is possible, but in general, I'm against using these types of "you can't make the thing we do regulated, because then only criminals will do it" argument. Beer, recreational weed and medical services tightly regulated and we don't see massive crime rings build on top of them. If we regulate wealth to such a degree that most people feel like it's fair, it'll be difficult to establish proper crime syndicates around it - the question of how to keep a state that can do this effectively from being authoritarian is a much better question to raise
Day to day citizens won’t care and would probably get behind it because its easy to point at bad billionaires who only did bad stuff because they had billions to do those things with. And tax revenue would help their lives so great … tax the rich … easy sell.
The millionaires are basically just upper middle class these days, they might think differently but it’s not hard to construct arguments based on their real life and use things they care about to get them to agree.
The multimillionaires are the toughest sell, but i think it’s probably doable. They aren’t yet detached from reality, they have causes they care about they can’t single handily bankroll. they haven’t gotten rich enough the tenth generation of their families may never need to work, they can be reasoned with.
The hundred million plus will probably on average hate the idea as they are probably in general looking at the continuation of their net worth growth and considering themselves as likely be eventually billionaires themselves… on average. Some will be on board, maybe even a significant percentage but I think the majority wont. The thing is about critical mass. With even a modest percentage of these people and all the rest…
With that aggregate group you can use democracy to make things happen even with the billionaires trying to buy the system. There are rich people on board to pay for counter media propaganda and the voting class do matter to their elected representatives as those people worry about getting votes next time.
A wealth tax at say a hundred million is so much harder to sell than at a billion.
And that’s all before you’d get into how it was structured. It would be almost impossible for the world to stop billionaires hoarding wealth in some foxhole full of gold and diamonds and valuable art and so on… but even just capping personal wealth at a billion and forcing the rest of their wealth into trusts and companies would likely be a net good as the army of money managers and businessmen would spread that money further around the economy than a single billionaire ever could.
In coastal cities, sure. Beyond that, most people understand the cost of a Prohibition-style war on private wealth.
But don't you think it's a little too easy to select the number so that there are so few people impacted that their opinion on the matter won't count either way? And so that you personal won't be impacted either?
This isn’t about who’s allowed to marry or what religious beliefs you can have… it’s should you be entitled to make more money in interest than the average citizen can earn in their entire lifetime. At some point surely you think there’s enough money and they don’t need more? Perhaps you think it should be ten or a hundred billion?
For me I think it’s a billion in today’s money (roughly, since money is obviously fluctuating) and I say that even though I grew up with the hustle and grind startup mentality as my ideal and dreaming of striking it rich with a startup and becoming a billionaire based on some crazy smart idea and tons of hard work… I’ve wizened with age and I think a billion is more than enough. 20 year old me might not have but 20 year old me was also burning out my mind overworking myself trying to find a way to make myself rich… to be honest 20 year old me was an idiot for not seeing how the system of global finance works and thinking a tech startup was the path to riches. Should have gone for fame and smart financial management of the short term fame related income followed by careful fostering of a lifestyle brand focused on licensing out the perceived reputation.
For example, many (most? all?) farms are worth more than a million, who should own these?
If one wants to start a new venture that requires more than $1e6 to start (say a new factory), how would funding work?
Don't expect a cogent, sensible answer to that question.
It’s leg work, forensic accountants and laws that demand accountability. If the government thinks your cheating your taxes people are tasked to investigate… if the government suspects your cheating the 100% billionaire tax they would assign people to the task and investigate.
I don’t know why people pretend this has to be special… like billionaires are supervillains with unbelievable power to conceal their globe spanning networks and operations.
I meant how would ownership of companies work? If a company is worth 100 billion ($1e11), does that mean you need 100 000 people who together own that company (and nothing else)? If it has a good month and becomes worth more, you need to find more people?
Capping wealth at a billion has a couple of icky practicalities, but I can definitely understand why you would want to do this. There are less than a thousand billionaires in the USA right now, if we can radically improve wealth equality by affecting that many people it seems like a good trade, and those people are still filthy rich at the end of the process.
But if you cap it at a million, I start to see things that require millionaires. Starting large companies and family owned farms are two of them. I'm genuinely curious what alternatives to millionaires we have there.
Are you (or bambax) arguing for straight up communism, where everything is owned "communally" or by the state?
If it worked with strait income it wouldn’t be too hard but at the level of wealth we’re talking about most of the money isn’t income it’s just capital… a big pile of capital assets of value they have control over which they can leverage small portions off to take loans against for cash to do whatever they want at an interest rate lower than the rate of growth in the value of their capital assets… because they’re never a risky loan applicant and the whole system tilts towards them almost as if money had some weird form of financial gravity.
So while I’m no super genius economist and political wizard with all the answers to how it can be done, I just think it’s important we recognise that there’s a point where these people have so much money the system is broken for them and if we believe in the equality of all people, that all people are born equal, we should be trying to change the system in a way to rectify the problems their wealth causes.
There would be years of arguing all the details about trusts and percentages and inheritance and family control and super PACs and even if it’s constitutionally allowed since there’s precedent that money is speech and this could be argued to be an unreasonable restriction on the sort of speech (money) a person can have (not more than a billion dollars worth)… it’s a massively complicated question I’m just saying I think we can agree it’s well and truly kicked in by the time you have a billion dollars and maybe we can all get together and work out a way we agree on that stops people getting more power and money for free due to capital interest rate returns each day than many of us will ever have in a lifetime.
All people should have equal opportunity, free from prejudice, sexism, etc. But all people are not born equal.
Equality in rights, does not mean people are identical.
Where I live, taxes become crazy high if single, and with imcome over 100k. So I just work less.
And I get paid well, for I am exceptionally good at what I do. This means that by taking more of my money, simply because I choose to excel, the government has taken part of my labour, right off the market.
The skills they so very much desire, are diminished.
People blather on about billionaires, and how the wealth should be redistributed. I've done the math. Take all that wealth, and in 1 year it is gone, forever, never to return, and it barely makes a dent in anything.
Communism just doesn't work, because it removes that drive, that zen to compete, that desire to build from people.
It just smacks of jealousy to me.
As a reference point, a retirement account funded with $1,000,000, designed to support a $50,000 annual spend (inflation-adjusted), only has a 75% chance of lasting 30 years before the money runs out. (per default parameters on https://cfiresim.com)
A more realistic concern would be that if you set a 100% wealth tax for all wealth exceeding a million dollars, rich people would just structure their wealth so they don't exceed that cap. In most cases that wealth is primarily in companies (i.e. profiting off other people's labor). So if want to place a ceiling cap on "how much money you can have" (figuratively, let's not pretend this is ever about cash on hand) we'd also need better transparency for corporate ownership.
Personally I think a 100% wealth tax as a "maximum amount of money an individual can have" is a red herring and while wealth taxes are certainly a way to skim some of that surplus value siphoned off by people who own companies (speaking as a company owner myself to be clear), it's just a band aid for the underlying problem.
In my opinion the only logical solution is to abolish individual ownership of companies, effectively requiring all corporations to operate as cooperatives. This isn't an "easy answer" as there are clearly a lot of nuances to what the laws would need to specify in order to make this happen, and it's clearly in stark opposition to how company ownership works in most places today, but it's the only way to fix the problem of excessive wealth accumulation, if we view it as a real problem.
I suspect that the answer does not lie in an absolute number but more in a 99th or even 95th percentile sort of way.