If the billionaires are upset it’s a good sign you’re doing something right.
Exactly. Most policies are in billionaire's favors, since they fund lobbying groups and super pacs. They mostly stay quiet about everything because they’re getting their way behind the scenes. If they’re complaining outright, it’s an absolute win for everyone else
Or, as is often the case with Biden, promising to do something right with the odds of actually going through with it being slim 🤷
Don’t break their bubble, it’s the only thing holding this thing together.
Yeah feels like every weekend he has promised to make Israel cease-fire by Monday since “Genociding with Biden” became a meme and somehow hes never been called out on that huge glaring lie, in fact I am often told to quiet if I bring it up.
Crying billionaires are a sign of society healing.
A healthy society has zero billionaires.
Let’s go further with these taxes.
Don't like it? Fuck you. Your greed is unconscionable and your hoarding of wealth is amoral and disgusting. In conclusion, fuck you.
Yeah, but what if they find the right commercials to throw at us during election time?
It's nuts for them to rail against this because when Biden said 25% minimum, I was like, "that's it‽"
I get taxed at 25% already and I'm making $125k.
25% is nowhere near enough. Anyone making over 400k individually should be taxed closer to 50%.
there should be a 100% tax for anyone who has a billion dollars or more.
That level of wealth is not compatible with existing in a society.
I think the biggest problem isn’t the tax rate, but the fact that the billionaire class can circumvent the tax system entirely.
Own billions of dollars in stock, don’t ever sell any, don’t pay any taxes on that growth. Maybe some dividends get taxed or something.
Need pocket money though. Take out a loan for $100 million using a little bit of your stock as collateral. You don’t get taxed on taking out debt.
People don't realize that billionaires don't have their billions sitting in a bank account somewhere like you or I might have our own life savings tucked away in a savings account. That would be foolish of them, obviously, the FDIC won't insure them past a certain point, so a bank failure could cause them to lose everything.
Every single billionaire is only a billionaire "on paper". It's the sum total of all their assets, both liquid and non-liquid (like stocks, but also properties, etc.). They leverage their assets as collateral for a loan, and then use that loan to buy the stuff they want or just use it to make more investments. They leverage debt in a way that we can't even begin to fathom.
It's mad, but I can see the conundrum. How do you tax assets that aren't worth anything until sold? Can you compel them to sell their assets to settle a tax bill? How do you go after rich folk who use loans to circumvent generating income through the sale of their assets without also harming regular people who need to take out loans to buy things like cars and houses?
Rich people have gotten too good at playing the system and we seriously need to look at how we can fix things before it's too late. Right now, the wealthy have unprecedented control over the government, but it's still not an oligarchy yet. There's still time, though. Someone out there has to have a solution.
How do you tax assets that aren’t worth anything until sold?
I have to pay property taxes on my home and car each year. These are assets that I'm not selling, yet I'm still being taxed on their value. It's amazing that they've figured out a way to do it for the working class but not for the ruling class.
I agree with what you're saying but I'm curious. You have to pay taxes on the value of your car? Do car registration fees scale with car value in your area?
I live in an area with car taxes, and they are separate from vehicle registration fees.
Do car registration fees scale with car value in your area?
Kinda... it's based on the age of the car and the original MSRP, so it isn't exactly based on the car's actual value, but an estimate of what the value might be.
Easy, tax net worth. Tax the value of all assets owned by an individual, trust, or corporation only in excess of some large number. Perhaps exceeding 5x the median net worth.
And only then might a corporation get tax incentives based on the number of people they employ. Because let's be fair here, office buildings are really expensive and we don't want to disincentivize company growth and job creation.
Just appropriate the assets for the people. Imagine what would happen if all that income came in to your government instead of a single asshole.
What really pisses me off is liberals yelling "TAX THE RICH!!" and when you propose a wealth tax they start screaming about how unsold stocks aren't wealth and isnt money but wait someone who has lots of stock is the richest man in the world....
Here's a radical idea: seize stocks and redistribute them among the citizenry. Eveyone is a stockholder! Now, who are the wealthiest?
Edit: and there it is right below me
I think the biggest problem isn’t the tax rate, but the fact that the billionaire class can circumvent the tax system entirely
That's only possible because they're allowed to buy influence in the system to make it allow for that.
In reality, the other threats (they'll take their wealth to other countries and leave us poor) are bluffing; most of their wealth isn't portable.
Also in reality, most of the policies they demand (and get) aren't democratically popular, they're only viable because they spend so much collective money on propaganda and think tanks to get people thinking the money will trickle down or that without them as 'job creators' all will be spoiled or lost.
It's bullshit, and it only works because we let it work. Apparently we need to move in hundred-year cycles between letting the titans of industry squeeze everyone dry before we remember to assert public power to prevent that
Taxing the rich is great and all, but it still doesn't solve the issue of gov spending being completely and utterly shit. We spend more on healthcare per individual than any other nation on the planet. We don't even need to tax the rich right now and we could have single payer. The idea that taxing the rich is needed to pay for services and safety nets is silly. We're the wealthiest nation on the planet, we can already afford all of the things our citizens need, we just have a gov who doesn't know how to properly spend the money it already has.
Oh, its you again.
Showing up yet again to reply to imaginary comments instead of the topic at hand.
Way to contribute just like last time...
Such a boomer reply.
Lol yes because someone else has a different take than you on your dumbass comment must be a boomer ok kid
You mean like the price caps on medication so Medicare can save the government money? Or like the increase in IRS funding so they can focus on the previously "too difficult" task of navigating the web of interactions the wealthy use to avoid paying the taxes they already owe?
They're trying that too, but it's not just about taking money from the ultra rich just for our healthcare, it's like others have stated: it's about fairness to all. 25% of a billion doesn't mean the same to them as ~25% of ~60k means to us. Yeah it's a much larger dollar amount, but they aren't nearly as affected as we are from what we currently pay and we still do it and are ok with it.
I'm talking about using the money we already have for medical care, we don't have to increase taxes on anyone, we're already able to provide healthcare for everyone. Trying to tax the rich is a whole other deal.
Raising tax revenue and funding some variation of single payer health care or socialised medicine are not mutually exclusive.
Huh, in Australia you would be taxed 37 percent and anything over $180k is 45%
So I'm sure closer to 50% coulr come down
The US has a similar graduated system (32% for incomes over $192k for single fillers, plus whatever your state income tax is), but billionaires have access to a lot of loopholes that prevent their wealth from being counted that way.
Agreed, but I guess you've got to start somewhere.
Where I'm at it's like anything over 95k is close to 50%. 25? Must be nice.
It is in most places outside the US. But it is still the same problem: regardless how high the official rate is, there are way to many loopholes to avoid paying them. It does not help if the tax rate is 80, 90, or even 99% if they get around paying it altogether.
400k is rich in some areas but certainly not everywhere, that's way too sharp of a curve. Someone making 400k is already taxed at 35% federally plus whatever state and local so probably close to 50. The real issue is that after 500k the rates don't change where it should be increasing logarithmically. But really after a certain point there are way too many things that the rich do to reduce their tax burden that just aren't available to everyone else, that 100k or 400k person is in reality paying a much higher percentage than someone making a million a year much less billionaires.
Why did you copy and paste this exact comment from someone else elsewhere in this thread...?
What? I didn't
Hmm, I don't see it anymore. There was another post from another user that was word for word the same as yours, but slightly newer. My apologies, my client must have bugged out.
Billionaires can suck my dick and fuck right off into the sun. This shit has GOT to fucking stop! 100% tax on anything over $200M, and I am being real generous with that.
Revoke "Citizen United vs FEC" would be step 1
Well, it won't. At some point, personal capital stops being a number and starts to equal influence. These people can form the public opinion as they wish and anybody stepping on their toes more than they allow will find themselves on the pointy end of a career ending smearing campaign.
“I don’t agree with the idea of just singling out people because of how much they have or don’t have,”
That's literally how income tax works, you ignorant slut.
The ones being singled out are poor people and the middle class. The rich get preferential rates, deductions that only apply to them, the ability to have armies of accountants and lawyers to limit their liability, and are far less likely to be audited.
It SHOULD be that all income within different brackets should be taxed the same. The rich only pay more because they have more. We all should be taxed 50% on income over $500,000, it’s just that most of us don’t have any income over that.
I wonder if he feels the same about healthcare, housing, food, and clean water. Regardless of how much shit he has, he can live in the same apartment with the same public water and food deserts and a doctor that isn't on his personal staff.
You have to leave incentives for people who are the ones who are going to create the jobs for all those people trying to climb the ladder.
Oh my god, FUCK OFF
b-b-but, nobody will want to do good work if they don't have the extremely weak opportunity to enrich themselves by taking advantage of other's labor!!!
Granted, I only skimmed the tweet articles, but I didn't see any names shared between them.
It's almost like one subset of billionaires say one thing and that another subset said another thing.
Biden claimed in his State of the Union address that the 25 percent minimum tax on the ultra-rich will raise $500 billion over 10 years. “Imagine what that could do for America,” he said.
Maybe I'm not good at comprehending numbers at this scale but does this seem kind of low to anyone else? I mean, that's a lot of money in absolute terms but the government spent $6.3 trillion in FY 2023 alone.
We should still do it obviously. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good and all that.
No, it sounds correct. Taxing billionaires' income is fine, but the real money would come from actually taxing corporations more.
See, they only have income in certain circumstances, so the amount raised from an income tax would not be very high. You can raise corporate taxes by a little bit and get much more.
That way the income is taxed before it gets to anyone. It doesn't matter if they have a billion dollars. Plus it encourages investment in the company (wages, new products, better quality, etc.) because business costs are tax write-offs.
I’m surprised it’s that high. The reason their effective rate goes down, is getting money by ways that are either special cases in the tax code or aren’t “income”. Until you fix those, wealthy people will still have the lowest tax rate.
…although apparently the tax rate for long term capital gains is already 20% for the wealthy. I didn’t know that
$500 billion is a sizable chunk of that $6.3 trillion, and it's still only a 25% tax rate, and then only the "ultra-rich."
If one considers something more reasonable, like a 70% tax of income over $100,000, then you're talking about more substantial amounts to really start catching up to top economies.
500 billion over 10 years is not a sizeable chunk of a single year total.
They spend more than that a year on "defense".
Boohoo
Thoughts and prayers
Billionaires should not exist. Honestly, I'd expropriate them.
I don't get the desire to violently dispose of billionaires; it's a status defined by wealth, we just gotta take their money and they stop being billionaires. Problem solved, right?
Apparently it's not just Billionaires who hate this, but also Russian trolls pretending to be leftists. Who would have guessed the two would be allied?!
???
Did you expect an addict to thank you when you take away their drug cold turkey? Billionairism is a mental disorder, like addiction, and it should be handled with the same care. The kind of care that only billionairs can afford in the US, I must add.
For $10,000 a year, billionaires can pay me to give a shit.
Support yachts are the finest way to improve your yachting experience. Not only you will be able to increase the number of guest & crew accommodations, but also the amount of water toys & tenders that are within your fleet. Upgrapding the mothership to obtain the same results usually comes at a much heftier cost than a support vessel. In addition, the support yacht will be able to resupply the mothership while at anchor and make sure that you never run out of food, wines and all the supplies you may ever need.
lol. A fucking support yacht. Holy shit.
Obviously you only temporarily need a support yacht. Any day now you'll have your mega yacht with helipad, smaller yacht garage, swimming pool, etc.
Good. Rage until you hurt yourself you undeveloped children.
please don't hurt the children.
Wah wah wah just get into your fkn submarine, we double-checked the bulkhead for you 🫡
😭🤌🎻🎶🎵
I don't really understand why they're upset, or how it will raise that much revenue. As the article points out, most billionaires don't get their billions from income, they get it from investments. For instance, Jeff Bezos' salary is like $80k, and then he gets other compensation that puts him at like $1.7M. if you put him in a much higher tax bracket, he shouldn't even care - would hardly notice - because he's worth $194B. To put that in perspective, if he earns just 5% a year in growth on that, it's almost $10B. His compensation is like 0.02% of what he's likely to make on investments, if that.
It's also worth mentioning that most billionaires can't really spend much of the billions. If Bezos tried to cash out much of his Amazon stock, the price would plummet and he'd be worth a lot less. What those guys do is take out loans with the stock as collateral and live off of that. Of course, Bezos himself is at a level of wealth where he can cash out a small percentage and it's still enormous. I think last year he cashed out like $2B worth, which is a giant amount of money, but only 1% of his net worth.
Wealth Tax. That is what we desperately need.
Maybe so, but Biden was just talking about the income tax rate.
The problem with a wealth tax is that it seems like it would be hard to do. If I buy a painting for $1M, do I get taxed on that amount regardless of its value even if it's worth ten times that? Do I have to get it appraised? If so, just once or every year because the value can fluctuate? If I buy a rare classic car that's rusted out, and I restore it, how is the value calculated? Now imagine I have a giant art collection and a giant car collection. It just doesn't seem workable.
I'm sure all that stuff is insured. Not difficult to assess wealth. Don't have a wealth tax kick in until over $30 million (whatever number). Seems imminently workable to me.
If you can afford a 1M$ painting, you can certainly afford to have it appraised once in a while.
Biden went over this. A 25% AMT, which doesn't care what your type of revenue is, you're paying at least 25%.
"Won't you please stop and think of the billionaires?"
"For just $5,479,452.05 a day, you can support a multibillionaire who needs you TODAY."
🎶🎶 "We are the world... we are old white men... We are the ones that have yachts that need second yachts to land helicopters on... so you start giving us your change... If you don't, we'll fucking find a way to kill you." 🎶🎶
Well they got rich taking advantage of the poor. That’s the only way you become a billionaire. I feel nothing towards them.
why do i suddenly have the impression this tax aint coming to pass?
Because Democrats are neoliberal conservatives who don't care about the average person. The only reason Democrats are so obviously preferable to Republicans is that Republicans are fucking insane.
Billionaires: "I DO think we should be taxed more."
puts money into lobbying against tax increases
Billionaires: You want to prey upon the rest of us unilaterally? That fine. Just stay on your little island, announce it as a sovereign nation, pay to defend it, and good luck! That's what happens when you contribute nothing to society yourself...
Considering the billionaires also own the contracts for manufacturing every piece of military equipment we have... That would get interesting.
United States government takes control of those manufacturing facilities?
Oh, so it's about the vague promises he made in a speech, not actual policy? Excuse me if I don't rush to celebrate how marvelously progressive he's being just yet 🥱
They (billionaires) should not exist, full stop. If they were actually taxed the way we used to in this country, we wouldn't have these security threats.
Good, fuck em
They must be good then.
Let them eat cake!
Let them eat shit!
What there should be is an assests controled cap, no person should have control over more than 1 billion in assets.
Billionaire tears taste like a fine Châteauneuf-du-Pape.
Biden was cooking with this one. It should be even higher that wealth is stolen.
In my dreams, we have a flat tax of 30% over all income beyond 40k per year.
And wouldn’t it be neat if, on the tax return form, there was question:
Where would you like your tax dollars to go:
• education
• military
• foreign aid
• welfare programs
• don’t care, equally distributed
30? Lol, nah man, 50 when it gets to more than 1mil a year.
How about 100% tax on all income, but everything is free in reasonable amounts. 😉
Isn't communism the devil or some dumb shit like that? We gotta protect our corporate overlords man, we wouldn't want to live in a dictatorship where a very rich few control the world! /s
To some degree taxes need to be tied to cost of living. Someone making $70k in rural Texas vs NYC is going to have a very different cost of living and quality of life.
Flat tax is nice in theory, but it's horribly regressive. 30% would be a nice reduction in taxes for anyone making $230k + or so, while a dramatic increase for anyone under 90k
The trick is what to tax when the ultra wealthy base most of their worth on stock.
This only would help if they would actually pay taxes at all.
With no due respect to these whiny fucking billionaires, good and go fuck yourselves for being petulant children.
A few verses the masses. They can suck it up, pull themselves up by their bootstraps, etc.
“My kids, who are 10, 12 and 14, you could tell them, ‘You know what, when you retire you’re gonna get money at 70, not 65.’” he said. “Do you think they’re gonna care?”
It's the first step in a wealth tax. In the future a government "wealth assessor" will inventory everything you own or invest in, make an arbitrary determination of how much its "worth", and then set your taxes. Like property tax but a million times more complex and arbitrary.
Where are you seeing this?
Within the depths of their feverish swampland they call a brain.
Literally the first paragraph of OPs article: "The plan would impose a 25 percent minimum income tax on anyone worth at least $100 million." I.e. if your asset size is less than a certain threshold it won't affect you. So it will require audits of asset size to accurately tax.
They're just proposals, guys. They're not going anywhere. Biden's a Democrat, remember?
It's so weird how electing a single Democrat doesn't get us everything we want.
It's weird how he says shit he knows he can't accomplish and centrists expect everyone to treat that as an accomplishment.
I'm wondering if your downvotes are from people thinking you're saying Republicans would do better. It's so strange these days, you're not allowed to criticize Biden or Democrats because if you do, you must want the fascists to win. Why is it so difficult to see that two things can be true. One, that this election is literally a vote on if you think democracy should continue as a way of gov't. Two, the dems could do better. Everyone can always do better.
My downvotes are from people who expect everyone to treat campaign promises as accomplishments.
If the billionaires are upset it’s a good sign you’re doing something right.
Exactly. Most policies are in billionaire's favors, since they fund lobbying groups and super pacs. They mostly stay quiet about everything because they’re getting their way behind the scenes. If they’re complaining outright, it’s an absolute win for everyone else
Or, as is often the case with Biden, promising to do something right with the odds of actually going through with it being slim 🤷
Don’t break their bubble, it’s the only thing holding this thing together.
Yeah feels like every weekend he has promised to make Israel cease-fire by Monday since “Genociding with Biden” became a meme and somehow hes never been called out on that huge glaring lie, in fact I am often told to quiet if I bring it up.
Crying billionaires are a sign of society healing.
A healthy society has zero billionaires.
Let’s go further with these taxes.
Don't like it? Fuck you. Your greed is unconscionable and your hoarding of wealth is amoral and disgusting. In conclusion, fuck you.
Yeah, but what if they find the right commercials to throw at us during election time?
It's nuts for them to rail against this because when Biden said 25% minimum, I was like, "that's it‽"
I get taxed at 25% already and I'm making $125k.
25% is nowhere near enough. Anyone making over 400k individually should be taxed closer to 50%.
there should be a 100% tax for anyone who has a billion dollars or more.
That level of wealth is not compatible with existing in a society.
I think the biggest problem isn’t the tax rate, but the fact that the billionaire class can circumvent the tax system entirely.
Own billions of dollars in stock, don’t ever sell any, don’t pay any taxes on that growth. Maybe some dividends get taxed or something.
Need pocket money though. Take out a loan for $100 million using a little bit of your stock as collateral. You don’t get taxed on taking out debt.
People don't realize that billionaires don't have their billions sitting in a bank account somewhere like you or I might have our own life savings tucked away in a savings account. That would be foolish of them, obviously, the FDIC won't insure them past a certain point, so a bank failure could cause them to lose everything.
Every single billionaire is only a billionaire "on paper". It's the sum total of all their assets, both liquid and non-liquid (like stocks, but also properties, etc.). They leverage their assets as collateral for a loan, and then use that loan to buy the stuff they want or just use it to make more investments. They leverage debt in a way that we can't even begin to fathom.
It's mad, but I can see the conundrum. How do you tax assets that aren't worth anything until sold? Can you compel them to sell their assets to settle a tax bill? How do you go after rich folk who use loans to circumvent generating income through the sale of their assets without also harming regular people who need to take out loans to buy things like cars and houses?
Rich people have gotten too good at playing the system and we seriously need to look at how we can fix things before it's too late. Right now, the wealthy have unprecedented control over the government, but it's still not an oligarchy yet. There's still time, though. Someone out there has to have a solution.
I have to pay property taxes on my home and car each year. These are assets that I'm not selling, yet I'm still being taxed on their value. It's amazing that they've figured out a way to do it for the working class but not for the ruling class.
I agree with what you're saying but I'm curious. You have to pay taxes on the value of your car? Do car registration fees scale with car value in your area?
I live in an area with car taxes, and they are separate from vehicle registration fees.
Kinda... it's based on the age of the car and the original MSRP, so it isn't exactly based on the car's actual value, but an estimate of what the value might be.
https://www.in.gov/bmv/fees-taxes/vehicle-registration-fees-and-taxes/excise-tax-information/#Passenger_Vehicle_Excise_Tax_Fees
Easy, tax net worth. Tax the value of all assets owned by an individual, trust, or corporation only in excess of some large number. Perhaps exceeding 5x the median net worth.
And only then might a corporation get tax incentives based on the number of people they employ. Because let's be fair here, office buildings are really expensive and we don't want to disincentivize company growth and job creation.
Just appropriate the assets for the people. Imagine what would happen if all that income came in to your government instead of a single asshole.
What really pisses me off is liberals yelling "TAX THE RICH!!" and when you propose a wealth tax they start screaming about how unsold stocks aren't wealth and isnt money but wait someone who has lots of stock is the richest man in the world....
Here's a radical idea: seize stocks and redistribute them among the citizenry. Eveyone is a stockholder! Now, who are the wealthiest?
Edit: and there it is right below me
That's only possible because they're allowed to buy influence in the system to make it allow for that. In reality, the other threats (they'll take their wealth to other countries and leave us poor) are bluffing; most of their wealth isn't portable. Also in reality, most of the policies they demand (and get) aren't democratically popular, they're only viable because they spend so much collective money on propaganda and think tanks to get people thinking the money will trickle down or that without them as 'job creators' all will be spoiled or lost.
It's bullshit, and it only works because we let it work. Apparently we need to move in hundred-year cycles between letting the titans of industry squeeze everyone dry before we remember to assert public power to prevent that
Taxing the rich is great and all, but it still doesn't solve the issue of gov spending being completely and utterly shit. We spend more on healthcare per individual than any other nation on the planet. We don't even need to tax the rich right now and we could have single payer. The idea that taxing the rich is needed to pay for services and safety nets is silly. We're the wealthiest nation on the planet, we can already afford all of the things our citizens need, we just have a gov who doesn't know how to properly spend the money it already has.
Oh, its you again.
Showing up yet again to reply to imaginary comments instead of the topic at hand.
Way to contribute just like last time...
Such a boomer reply.
Lol yes because someone else has a different take than you on your dumbass comment must be a boomer ok kid
You mean like the price caps on medication so Medicare can save the government money? Or like the increase in IRS funding so they can focus on the previously "too difficult" task of navigating the web of interactions the wealthy use to avoid paying the taxes they already owe?
They're trying that too, but it's not just about taking money from the ultra rich just for our healthcare, it's like others have stated: it's about fairness to all. 25% of a billion doesn't mean the same to them as ~25% of ~60k means to us. Yeah it's a much larger dollar amount, but they aren't nearly as affected as we are from what we currently pay and we still do it and are ok with it.
I'm talking about using the money we already have for medical care, we don't have to increase taxes on anyone, we're already able to provide healthcare for everyone. Trying to tax the rich is a whole other deal.
Raising tax revenue and funding some variation of single payer health care or socialised medicine are not mutually exclusive.
Cool, where did I say they were?
Huh, in Australia you would be taxed 37 percent and anything over $180k is 45%
So I'm sure closer to 50% coulr come down
The US has a similar graduated system (32% for incomes over $192k for single fillers, plus whatever your state income tax is), but billionaires have access to a lot of loopholes that prevent their wealth from being counted that way.
Agreed, but I guess you've got to start somewhere.
Where I'm at it's like anything over 95k is close to 50%. 25? Must be nice.
It is in most places outside the US. But it is still the same problem: regardless how high the official rate is, there are way to many loopholes to avoid paying them. It does not help if the tax rate is 80, 90, or even 99% if they get around paying it altogether.
400k is rich in some areas but certainly not everywhere, that's way too sharp of a curve. Someone making 400k is already taxed at 35% federally plus whatever state and local so probably close to 50. The real issue is that after 500k the rates don't change where it should be increasing logarithmically. But really after a certain point there are way too many things that the rich do to reduce their tax burden that just aren't available to everyone else, that 100k or 400k person is in reality paying a much higher percentage than someone making a million a year much less billionaires.
Why did you copy and paste this exact comment from someone else elsewhere in this thread...?
What? I didn't
Hmm, I don't see it anymore. There was another post from another user that was word for word the same as yours, but slightly newer. My apologies, my client must have bugged out.
Lemmy is a little wonky, no biggie :)
Billionaires can suck my dick and fuck right off into the sun. This shit has GOT to fucking stop! 100% tax on anything over $200M, and I am being real generous with that.
Revoke "Citizen United vs FEC" would be step 1
Well, it won't. At some point, personal capital stops being a number and starts to equal influence. These people can form the public opinion as they wish and anybody stepping on their toes more than they allow will find themselves on the pointy end of a career ending smearing campaign.
“I don’t agree with the idea of just singling out people because of how much they have or don’t have,”
That's literally how income tax works, you ignorant slut.
The ones being singled out are poor people and the middle class. The rich get preferential rates, deductions that only apply to them, the ability to have armies of accountants and lawyers to limit their liability, and are far less likely to be audited.
It SHOULD be that all income within different brackets should be taxed the same. The rich only pay more because they have more. We all should be taxed 50% on income over $500,000, it’s just that most of us don’t have any income over that.
I wonder if he feels the same about healthcare, housing, food, and clean water. Regardless of how much shit he has, he can live in the same apartment with the same public water and food deserts and a doctor that isn't on his personal staff.
Oh my god, FUCK OFF
b-b-but, nobody will want to do good work if they don't have the extremely weak opportunity to enrich themselves by taking advantage of other's labor!!!
Billionaires: you should tax us more
Also billionaires: nooooo.... Not more taxes!
Maybe not the same billionaires?
Granted, I only skimmed the tweet articles, but I didn't see any names shared between them.
It's almost like one subset of billionaires say one thing and that another subset said another thing.
Maybe I'm not good at comprehending numbers at this scale but does this seem kind of low to anyone else? I mean, that's a lot of money in absolute terms but the government spent $6.3 trillion in FY 2023 alone.
We should still do it obviously. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good and all that.
No, it sounds correct. Taxing billionaires' income is fine, but the real money would come from actually taxing corporations more.
See, they only have income in certain circumstances, so the amount raised from an income tax would not be very high. You can raise corporate taxes by a little bit and get much more.
That way the income is taxed before it gets to anyone. It doesn't matter if they have a billion dollars. Plus it encourages investment in the company (wages, new products, better quality, etc.) because business costs are tax write-offs.
I’m surprised it’s that high. The reason their effective rate goes down, is getting money by ways that are either special cases in the tax code or aren’t “income”. Until you fix those, wealthy people will still have the lowest tax rate.
…although apparently the tax rate for long term capital gains is already 20% for the wealthy. I didn’t know that
$500 billion is a sizable chunk of that $6.3 trillion, and it's still only a 25% tax rate, and then only the "ultra-rich."
If one considers something more reasonable, like a 70% tax of income over $100,000, then you're talking about more substantial amounts to really start catching up to top economies.
500 billion over 10 years is not a sizeable chunk of a single year total.
They spend more than that a year on "defense".
Boohoo
Thoughts and prayers
Billionaires should not exist. Honestly, I'd expropriate them.
I don't get the desire to violently dispose of billionaires; it's a status defined by wealth, we just gotta take their money and they stop being billionaires. Problem solved, right?
To the moon!
To the sun
Apparently it's not just Billionaires who hate this, but also Russian trolls pretending to be leftists. Who would have guessed the two would be allied?!
???
Did you expect an addict to thank you when you take away their drug cold turkey? Billionairism is a mental disorder, like addiction, and it should be handled with the same care. The kind of care that only billionairs can afford in the US, I must add.
For $10,000 a year, billionaires can pay me to give a shit.
Why would you take away these creations from them??? /s
https://www.twwyachts.com/yachts-for-sale/support/
lol. A fucking support yacht. Holy shit.
Obviously you only temporarily need a support yacht. Any day now you'll have your mega yacht with helipad, smaller yacht garage, swimming pool, etc.
Good. Rage until you hurt yourself you undeveloped children.
please don't hurt the children.
Wah wah wah just get into your fkn submarine, we double-checked the bulkhead for you 🫡
😭🤌🎻🎶🎵
I don't really understand why they're upset, or how it will raise that much revenue. As the article points out, most billionaires don't get their billions from income, they get it from investments. For instance, Jeff Bezos' salary is like $80k, and then he gets other compensation that puts him at like $1.7M. if you put him in a much higher tax bracket, he shouldn't even care - would hardly notice - because he's worth $194B. To put that in perspective, if he earns just 5% a year in growth on that, it's almost $10B. His compensation is like 0.02% of what he's likely to make on investments, if that.
It's also worth mentioning that most billionaires can't really spend much of the billions. If Bezos tried to cash out much of his Amazon stock, the price would plummet and he'd be worth a lot less. What those guys do is take out loans with the stock as collateral and live off of that. Of course, Bezos himself is at a level of wealth where he can cash out a small percentage and it's still enormous. I think last year he cashed out like $2B worth, which is a giant amount of money, but only 1% of his net worth.
Wealth Tax. That is what we desperately need.
Maybe so, but Biden was just talking about the income tax rate.
The problem with a wealth tax is that it seems like it would be hard to do. If I buy a painting for $1M, do I get taxed on that amount regardless of its value even if it's worth ten times that? Do I have to get it appraised? If so, just once or every year because the value can fluctuate? If I buy a rare classic car that's rusted out, and I restore it, how is the value calculated? Now imagine I have a giant art collection and a giant car collection. It just doesn't seem workable.
I'm sure all that stuff is insured. Not difficult to assess wealth. Don't have a wealth tax kick in until over $30 million (whatever number). Seems imminently workable to me.
If you can afford a 1M$ painting, you can certainly afford to have it appraised once in a while.
Biden went over this. A 25% AMT, which doesn't care what your type of revenue is, you're paying at least 25%.
"Won't you please stop and think of the billionaires?"
"For just $5,479,452.05 a day, you can support a multibillionaire who needs you TODAY."
🎶🎶 "We are the world... we are old white men... We are the ones that have yachts that need second yachts to land helicopters on... so you start giving us your change... If you don't, we'll fucking find a way to kill you." 🎶🎶
Well they got rich taking advantage of the poor. That’s the only way you become a billionaire. I feel nothing towards them.
why do i suddenly have the impression this tax aint coming to pass?
Because Democrats are neoliberal conservatives who don't care about the average person. The only reason Democrats are so obviously preferable to Republicans is that Republicans are fucking insane.
Billionaires: "I DO think we should be taxed more."
puts money into lobbying against tax increases
Billionaires: You want to prey upon the rest of us unilaterally? That fine. Just stay on your little island, announce it as a sovereign nation, pay to defend it, and good luck! That's what happens when you contribute nothing to society yourself...
Considering the billionaires also own the contracts for manufacturing every piece of military equipment we have... That would get interesting.
United States government takes control of those manufacturing facilities?
Good. Fuck em.
Billionaires: Cry more. Yours is the machine we rage against.
Oh, so it's about the vague promises he made in a speech, not actual policy? Excuse me if I don't rush to celebrate how marvelously progressive he's being just yet 🥱
Archive link for those that don’t have access.
This is never getting implemented and is just theatre for the masses.
The same billionaires who frequently say “we’re not actually taxed enough”?
Probably not the same billionaires.
They (billionaires) should not exist, full stop. If they were actually taxed the way we used to in this country, we wouldn't have these security threats.
Good, fuck em
They must be good then.
Let them eat cake!
Let them eat shit!
What there should be is an assests controled cap, no person should have control over more than 1 billion in assets.
Billionaire tears taste like a fine Châteauneuf-du-Pape.
Biden was cooking with this one. It should be even higher that wealth is stolen.
In my dreams, we have a flat tax of 30% over all income beyond 40k per year.
And wouldn’t it be neat if, on the tax return form, there was question:
Where would you like your tax dollars to go: • education • military • foreign aid • welfare programs • don’t care, equally distributed
30? Lol, nah man, 50 when it gets to more than 1mil a year.
How about 100% tax on all income, but everything is free in reasonable amounts. 😉
Isn't communism the devil or some dumb shit like that? We gotta protect our corporate overlords man, we wouldn't want to live in a dictatorship where a very rich few control the world! /s
To some degree taxes need to be tied to cost of living. Someone making $70k in rural Texas vs NYC is going to have a very different cost of living and quality of life.
Flat tax is nice in theory, but it's horribly regressive. 30% would be a nice reduction in taxes for anyone making $230k + or so, while a dramatic increase for anyone under 90k
The trick is what to tax when the ultra wealthy base most of their worth on stock.
This only would help if they would actually pay taxes at all.
With no due respect to these whiny fucking billionaires, good and go fuck yourselves for being petulant children.
A few verses the masses. They can suck it up, pull themselves up by their bootstraps, etc.
It's the first step in a wealth tax. In the future a government "wealth assessor" will inventory everything you own or invest in, make an arbitrary determination of how much its "worth", and then set your taxes. Like property tax but a million times more complex and arbitrary.
Where are you seeing this?
Within the depths of their feverish swampland they call a brain.
Literally the first paragraph of OPs article: "The plan would impose a 25 percent minimum income tax on anyone worth at least $100 million." I.e. if your asset size is less than a certain threshold it won't affect you. So it will require audits of asset size to accurately tax.
They're just proposals, guys. They're not going anywhere. Biden's a Democrat, remember?
It's so weird how electing a single Democrat doesn't get us everything we want.
It's weird how he says shit he knows he can't accomplish and centrists expect everyone to treat that as an accomplishment.
I'm wondering if your downvotes are from people thinking you're saying Republicans would do better. It's so strange these days, you're not allowed to criticize Biden or Democrats because if you do, you must want the fascists to win. Why is it so difficult to see that two things can be true. One, that this election is literally a vote on if you think democracy should continue as a way of gov't. Two, the dems could do better. Everyone can always do better.
My downvotes are from people who expect everyone to treat campaign promises as accomplishments.