• @[email protected]
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    837 months ago

    I got into it with someone I worked with [who made exactly as much as me.] Asked what would someone buy with $5 billion that they couldn’t get with $1 billion. He couldn’t come up with something, but was still going to defend someone else’s right to have it.

      • @[email protected]
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        107 months ago

        At the expense of giving 100,000 people a $1000,000 raise, which would massively stimulate the economy.

        • Ann Archy
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          67 months ago

          And those 100,000 people being the country’s industrial elite, the raise being tax breaks for those people, and the country being USA.

          You could run on a over the counter GOP ticket.

              • Ann Archy
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                37 months ago

                Yeah the conservative fine print is really becoming their front page material fast.

                It’s like, they don’t have to cover it up anymore, decades of political brainwashing has gotten enough people on board with the original psychosis for them to just flaunt it.

                • @[email protected]
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                  67 months ago

                  Abortion access is really hurting them on that front.

                  It’s all well and good to obsess over and villanise minorities like trans people that have no meaningful effect on conservative lives, but you start attaching a life-long responsibility to another human for an accident, and people aren’t going to like it.

          • @[email protected]
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            17 months ago

            If you give a billionaire money, they basically throw it on the pile.

            If you give the average American money - particularly the 57% that can’t afford a $1k emergency, they’ll spend it. That spending funds jobs, profits, and is re-spent again and again until it winds up siphoned off as shareholder profits and eventually added to the pile.

            • @[email protected]
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              07 months ago

              Yeah but if you flood the economy with money by giving everyone a million dollars then you’ll have hyper inflation and the money will become effectively worthless and nobody will be better off.

              This is one of the ways billionaires can control countries. They have so much money they can literally affect the value of those countries currency by buying and selling vast quantities of it.

              • @[email protected]
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                17 months ago

                Except we’re not talking about the printing money - we’re talking about the wealthy leeching off the labour of others while pulling money out of circulation, acting as a predatory handbrake on the economy to the tune of a billion dollars vs putting that money in the hands of the workers that created the value, who will also spend it in a more economically stimulative manner.

                Everyone would be better off other than a very small few, who are functionally disconnected from the society they leech off in any case.

                • @[email protected]
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                  17 months ago

                  If you’re going to just dump the money back into the system then you may as well be printing it. Money really isn’t the issue here, it’s the availability of resources. Money won’t fix shit if the goods aren’t available.

                  If the wealthy own everything what good do you think giving the poor a bunch of inherently worthless bunch of paper notes will do?

    • @[email protected]
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      47 months ago

      The only issue I can think of is that when people reach that billion, they’ll just close up shop cause why continue if your revenue is limited to your spending habits. I’d want the answer to that question to be “out of the goodness of my heart” or “to help people” but I sadly don’t think a lot of them would do so

      • @[email protected]
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        47 months ago

        Your commnet reminds be about a story I heard. A American guy graduated college and then volunteered to go out and do good in the world. After a year he checked in with some of his fellow grads and saw how much they were making. He did some calculations and decided that he should come back to the USA and get a job. He got a great job with a big salary, and by living frugally he was able to donate enough to support five aide workers.

        • @[email protected]
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          37 months ago

          That should be more common, especially among “Christians”. But people rarely act altruistically. That’s what makes it nice when they do.

          Donate to Doctors Without Borders (or something similar) people. Charities have volunteers coming out their ears.

  • @[email protected]
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    457 months ago

    When you can’t have an engaging conversation about anything related to the wealthy because everyone has Stockholm Syndrome.

    • Ann Archy
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      257 months ago

      “Why are you poor? You clearly belong with us rich folk. Hop on, there’s always room for one more, innit!”

  • NutWrench
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    187 months ago

    “We have this fantasy that our interests and the interests of the super rich are the same. Like somehow the rich will eventually get SO full that they’ll explode. And the candy will rain down on the rest of us. Like they’re some kind of pinata of benevolence. But here’s the thing about a pinata: it doesn’t open on its own. You have to beat it with a Stick.”

  • @AMillionNames
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    7 months ago

    The billionaires only need to brainwash the extraordinarily gullible in our society, and we are surrounded by them. The US even has an entire political party catering to them. The breaking point of democracy is generalized stupidity.

  • JokeDeity
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    37 months ago

    I love how every meme about being a poor person includes a figure that’s far more than I make in a year. 😅

  • @can
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    17 months ago

    deleted by creator

  • MxM111
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    7 months ago

    That is contradictory. If there are no billionaires you cannot tax them. Obviously the 35K guy reacts to that.

    • @can
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      617 months ago

      I still call the guy with 900 mil “ultra wealthy”.

      • MxM111
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        7 months ago

        Obviously not for 35K guy. :)

        Edit: asker chatGPT about it:

        The most well-known lists that rank the wealth of individuals are Forbes’ various lists, including the Forbes 400 for the United States and the Forbes World’s Billionaires list for international rankings. As of 2023, to be included on the Forbes 400 list, which ranks the wealthiest individuals in the United States, a person needed to have a net worth of at least $2.9 billion

        My point is that we often forget how rich the rich are. Human brain just is not good operating with billions.

        • Jo Miran
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          307 months ago

          During the Occupy Wall Street days a group of guys started yelling at my wife and I, calling us 1%'ers because we were having dinner at a “nice” restaurant (~$200 for ap, entree, dessert, drinks, and tip). I realized how clueless most people are about what truly rich means.

          I’m wealthy, not gonna lie, but I’ve also had two serious health scares, one being cancer. All it takes is one prolonged bout with cancer to fully wipe the proceeds from our 25 year career in tech. That’s not rich, that’s called wealthy enough to be able to take a breath from under this boot were under.

          Ten years ago, a dear friend, a genius, and highly regarded in his field (not tech) had a house in an affluent neighborhood, a BMW, nice clothes, nice watch, kids taking dance and music lessons, etc. The full blown suburban Bliss lifestyle. One nervous breakdown led to job loss, to divorce, to mental health issues, to drug use (though mostly weed), to now living with his elderly mom in a run down trailer in the bayou. That slide to ruin took less than the ten years but I rounded up. Now look at Elon. A hundred kids, baby mommas everywhere, some suing him, his mental breakdown led to blowing 44BILLION on a dying platform, and none of it even makes a dent.

          • @[email protected]
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            247 months ago

            Your second paragraph could be fixed by the US not having the worst Healthcare system on the entire planet.

          • @[email protected]
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            127 months ago

            Its insanity, he could quite literally burn his fortune and I don’t think the flames would consume it fast enough to burn it all. Our systems become nonsensical when individuals control this much. Most people are financing everything, one mistep and they’re done for, yet these goliaths are meandering around, shitting the bed, and it doesn’t even register in their conciousness. Fucking insane.

    • Queen HawlSera
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      377 months ago

      I feel like you don’t understand how much a billion dollars is. Look the mice don’t get fed by giving all of their cheese to the owner of the house in order to feed on the crumbs. This is just the dumbest shit I’ve ever seen, and it’s time to admit that trickle down does not work, will not work, and has never worked.

      • @[email protected]
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        7 months ago

        it’s time to admit that trickle down does not work, will not work, and has never worked, and was always a scam to begin with.

        FTFY.

      • @[email protected]
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        117 months ago

        Thank you for the horrible image you painted in my mind with mice giving their cheese to the owner of the house

      • @[email protected]
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        107 months ago

        it’s time to admit that trickle down does not work, will not work, and has never worked.

        Well, we just haven’t done it hard enough! That’s why we have to eliminate all of the “entitlement” programs that are starving those poor billionaires. Then the wealth will really flow!

        • Ann Archy
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          7 months ago

          That is not taking it far enough for the scheme to work. You need a proper theocracy with billionaires made into a pantheon of gods wielding absolute power. Then they will solve the worlds problems.

          But the common people who did not inherit their wealth are too self destructive for their own good and for it to happen.

          Billionaires love us, they want to love us, and here we are, us pitiful dregs, not letting them, out of a sense of entitlement.

          RIP

      • Stern
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        27 months ago

        It was a sad day in the Stern house when I found out trickle down was once called horse and sparrow (“If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.”), but got hit with the ol’ bowdlerization beam to be more palettable to the masses.

  • Shake747
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    -977 months ago

    If they did tax the wealthy heavily, they’d probably leave the country, and pull their money and resources with them.

    I’m sure another nation would be more than willing to house billionaires/ultra millionaires and their assets, and your country would lose a lot of money/cash flow/jobs

    It’s a hard challenge to solve in a world wide setting.

    • snooggums
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      657 months ago

      While that is a load of horseshit, it doesn’t matter.

      Either they leave and cost the country less to prop up their businesses through tax exemptions so someone else can fill the void, or they don’t leave and pay their taxes. Society wins either way.

      • Shake747
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        -117 months ago

        That’d be awesome if it were always the case, but it doesn’t appear to be - below are a couple articles about raising taxes in nations and what happened when they did:

        https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/26/698057356/if-a-wealth-tax-is-such-a-good-idea-why-did-europe-kill-theirs

        https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/10/super-rich-abandoning-norway-at-record-rate-as-wealth-tax-rises-slightly

        Hopefully we can figure something out though, there is too much wealth being horded by only a few at this point. That always seems to be what happens in every modern system we’ve made on a large scale. Communism or Capitalism, the wealth/power eventually ends up in the hands of a only a few people

        • snooggums
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          57 months ago

          So, that is one specific way to tax the wealthy and isn’t even one that I am thinking of.

          The biggest loopholes to close are:

          1. Caps on things like medicare that are a percentage of income with a cap. Just remove the cap and make it a percentage of any amount of income.
          2. Raise the taxes on capital gains to align with income tax instead of being a tax break and apply percentage of income taxes like medicare to them. Income is income, and unless capital gains is taxed higher than regular income it should just be income because it is treated like income.
          3. Lower the caps on tax breaks for things like home interest. Currently the rich can buy multiple homes at interest rates lower than the rest of the population and then they get both income from selling it later and it makes them money just by being able to buy whatever. Tax that process more when the house is worth an excessive amount.
          4. When they get a loan against stocks and other assets it should be taxed as income if it is above a certain threshold, say the median household income. So if the median household income is 100k in some area, then them getting a cash loan should be taxed for every dollar over 100k as income. This closes the loop where they don’t need ‘income’ from jobs because they get assets that appreciate instead and avoid income tax while never paying taxes on those assets until they sell them.
          5. Don’t let them lower their taxes because they ‘lost money’ in one year. Regular people don’t get to do that, don’t let them either.

          There is even more that goes into the process of them getting massively rich while avoiding taxes by business and asset appreciation that doesn’t count as income, which appreciates faster when they are underpaying their staff. The whole problem is how fast having money lets you get more money without paying taxes.

          And don’t get me started on tax exemptions for businesses that are never a net benefit for the community they are in. That is a whole race to the bottom.

    • @[email protected]
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      417 months ago

      Good riddance

      Having the wealthy here hasnt really helped us they lobby for laws that hurt the common person and benifit them and they dont pay their fair share in taxes.

      They can’t take all their resources with them.

      As for jobs most of the resources that create those jobs would still be here why coulden’t they just change ownership?

    • BeautifulMind ♾️
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      5 months ago

      If they did tax the wealthy heavily, they’d probably leave the country, and pull their money and resources with them.

      We did tax the wealthy heavily- in the period between FDR and Reagan. From the 40s to the 80s the top marginal income tax rate was between 70 and 94%. And do you know what the ultra-rich did? They prospered along with everybody else, they stayed put in the USA, and they seethed about other people prospering and their loss of power and influence.

      You know what else they did? They spent money to corrupt politics, to pack the judiciary, to legalize bribery and money in politics, to build international legal frameworks to prevent countries from regulating or taxing their billionaires. They stood up propaganda organs to subvert democracy, they paid politicians to betray the voters and strip away their labor protections, and here we are today deep into the garters of another gilded age.

    • @[email protected]
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      287 months ago

      They didn’t leave when the top tax rate was something like 90% back in FDRs day so why would they leave if it’s 40, 50, even 60%? I seriously doubt we’d EVER go that high as the ones that would be affected control our government, but still.

    • @[email protected]
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      227 months ago

      So you’re telling me that we’ve been able to get Musk, Bezos, Thiel, and the rest of the god-tier narcissists to GTFO this whole time?!

      It’d be even funnier to clawback their dinero after they go to Panama or wherever they fuck off to.

    • @[email protected]
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      217 months ago

      If they did tax the wealthy heavily, they’d probably leave the country, and pull their money and resources with them.

      Good. Billionaires take many times more wealth from society than they put into it. That’s how they became obscenely rich to begin with.

    • @[email protected]
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      197 months ago

      Why are you against asking billionaires to contribute back? They get many services from our country, and Uncle Sam expects their duty as well.

    • @[email protected]
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      7 months ago

      they’d probably leave the country, and pull their money and resources with them.

      No rich people live in New York City, Chicago, San Fransisco, or LA, because the taxes are so high.

      Please don’t Google “cities where the highest net worth people live”.

      I’m sure another nation would be more than willing to house billionaires/ultra millionaires and their assets

      But would Elon Musk want to move to the slums of Mumbai or the desert wastes of Sudan just to save on taxes? Why don’t all the billionaires live in Jackson Hole, Wyoming or Nashville, Tennessee or Dallas, Texas?

      • @[email protected]
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        17 months ago

        Dallas has a whole lot due to the energy and telecom sectors. The city itself is pretty blue, but sometimes out in the suburbs like Rockwall a full on Alex Jones emerges. It’s pretty much the same for every city in Texas.

        • @[email protected]
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          27 months ago

          Dallas has a whole lot due to the energy and telecom sectors.

          Absolutely. What’s more, they have an enormous influence over who gets to run for office and how much positive press they receive. And yet the taxes in Dallas are still some of the highest in the state. Almost as though taxes pay for the public utilities that make Dallas a major energy/telecom hub, and the exceptionally wealthy consider this tax money an investment rather than a loss or a theft.

          It’s pretty much the same for every city in Texas.

          The dirty truth about Texas suburbs is that they’ll have shockingly high taxes and fees for the purpose of building up local infrastructure. Houston Chronicle did an article a few months back about how the Texas tax system raised more per-capita than California, thanks in large part to the property tax base that has seen housing prices skyrocket over the last decade.

          The big difference between these red and blue states isn’t how much money is raised but where it is spent.

    • @[email protected]
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      137 months ago

      Ahh yes, we’re all very familiar with the tale of the time the Billionaire came to town and gave everyone money, jobs, and a golden toilet.

      • Ann Archy
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        07 months ago

        The sky scraper is technically owned by a hive collective of financial AI instruments based out of Kiribati anyway, nothing would change for the elite.

    • @ZzyzxRoad
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      87 months ago

      It’s weird how no one remembers the paradise papers and all that. Most of their wealth is already off shore and none of it is taxed. There’s no such thing as “trickle down.” They are not good for the economy even if they did invest in it in any way other than proverbially setting their money on fire. Meanwhile, most of the property being bought and sold in the US now is owned by the wealthiest people from other countries, not US billionaires.

    • Stern
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      47 months ago

      If a mega rich dude pulls out, someone else who is okay with making great rather then ungodly money is going to step in to take their place. Richie Rich can’t take his factories and land with him, and its rather unlikely his workers would be willing or able to move elsewhere, especially to leave the country, and even moreso depending on the country, so enjoy the brain drain.