Assuming billionaires were going to get a special tax, how would you actually determine how much to tax them? Sure some would be straightforward like Musk where it’s entirely derived from a few companies with known ownership stakes, but what about all the others?
We don’t even know the names of most of the billionaires. With all the games they can play to hide money, now made even easier thanks to the changes Trump made in his first few months, how would you even figure out who and what amount to tax? They don’t have a normal salary or easily documented income like everyone else.
Set up a flat tax to close to 40%.
Can be paired with an automatic credit for around half of the poverty line.
Tax=(income × 0.40) - (poverty / 2)The poor people get a negative income tax, while the people who earn more pay more.
No capital gains or any other loophole.
outlaw wealth at 10x median, same way they have civil forfeiture for drug crimes in the US.
There are two loopholes to close:
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Capital gains taxes - income is income, not one guy pays 50% less tax than another based on how the money is defined. ie. plumber pays 45% taxes but if a guy invests in a plumbing shop, he only pays 30% or less. And for no good reason, hedge fund managers only pay CGT. Get rid of CGT and make lower income taxes.
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Borrowing money against stock values -this is a huge form of tax evasion.
3, heavily tax any money taken offshore.
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Listen the IRS has routinely made clear that every time it’s forensic accountants get to sink their teeth into a billionaires financials, the return on that effort is enormous. Don’t ask “how are going to tax billionaires,” first demand that they actually BE taxed.
We’ll figure it out later, man. Realistically, just have a team of specialists that focuses solely on the ultra-wealthy, and then let “unrealized gains” be taxed if they were ever used as collateral for a loan.
let “unrealized gains” be taxed if they were ever used as collateral for a loan.
This simply makes no sense as a concept. Collateral is something that you tell the one you’re borrowing from “you can have this if I fail to pay my loan back”. If the loan is repaid, literally nothing happens to the collateral, and it plays zero part in the actual transaction. There is zero non-arbitrary reason to tax an asset just because it was used as collateral.
Also, all home equity loans would fall under this definition, as well.
Like the French.
In several different ways. The trick is to attack the problem of excessive wealth accumulation by making the system feed more aggressively on accumulated wealth.
A wealth tax is important to prevent the excess accumulation of capital. Money is only really working if it’s in motion. Once it stops moving it stops adding value to the economy which is fine sometimes and in small amounts.
Tax disuse. Vacant real estate should be taxed extra. If they don’t want it taxed it should be actively used in a non-extractive way. This means low impact agriculture, preservation, or occupancy not mining, dumping or logging.
Tax non-resident ownership. You can own as many houses as you want but each additional one beyond your primary residence is going to incur a scaling tax penalty. Two probably would be manageable Three would be difficult once you get to four and five houses you’re going to find it extremely difficult to make any money. And the scaling tax penalty would apply to the most expensive one first.
If they’re extracting resources from it or doing heavy agriculture they should be paying a premium and not externalizing wastes. They could be taxed to ensure compliance and enforcement is adequate. They should also be taxed in advance to fund potential cleanup of any toxic or environmental hazards. The money can be held in escrow but it needs to not be held by the same people who have a financial incentive to cut corners.
See I don’t actually believe the problem is rich people or income inequality broadly it’s the runaway effect of the accumulation of wealth in the absence of any kind of functional theory about how money is supposed to actually work in the economy.
There are people that are going to just work like crazy people and they will in any fair system acquire more resources than most other people.
I think in a fair system the people who are likely to end up with more resources would look very different than the people who end up with more resources in our systems.
Something people don’t often understand about American dollars and American taxes is that the function of the government’s tax policy is not to pay its bills. Our government doesn’t need taxes to pay its bills. The function of the government collecting taxes is to delete money from the system.
They need to be deleting money from the places where there’s too much of it. Otherwise that money crowds out legitimate money that is the representative of economic value produced through labor. If labor has no voice, then the economy stops functioning.I wouldn’t tax rich in any special way.
I’d get rid of all income taxes, and tax the shit out of luxury good consumption
Bad idea. People will buy less.
Land value tax and unrealized capital gains tax.
At gunpoint.
Take all of it every year. They are claiming that they are smartest people on this planet so they figure something out.
Make assets not count towards wealth.
What’s that? Your wealth can’t be taxed because they’re not really money? Oh, I guess you’re not really rich then. No Forbes lists for you :(
Tax things they can’t move like land and only things they pay for like jets, yachts, art…
almost forgot… global corporation tax
there is no escape for weather hidden in companies and transferred around the world to avoid taxation
the current global corporation tax just the first step of destroying tax havens
I fall to see any argument for one person controlling even 8 digits, much less any more.
If you have even half a million of disposable money to spend, you shouldn’t be even close to be allowed a loan in any form. Being rich shouldn’t be a collateral for more money.
Given that it’s a common way they increase their worth, they should be barred from utilizing it.
Every dollar past 10 million should be gone right off the top, no exceptions.
Enacting it should either be completely secret, or enforced on everyone here now, regardless of where they move after this point.
That payday would fix a lot of immediate problems.
Bring obscenely rich should be meet with obscene “punishment”. At least they would call being cut down to size punishment.
I’d argue that stealing that much wealth and health care should be a capital crime. If I could bring them back so they could experience a capital punishment more than once, that would be justified IMO. That’s a harder sell to some, but there are no billionaires that should be allowed to live. Even the squeakiest clean (ethically speaking) one should be taxed and fined out of existence.
At least until the bottom 50% has as much as the top 50%
