A one-time 5% wealth tax would bring Silicon Valley’s billionaires’ wealth back to where it was just 31 days ago, on September 7.
When it was “just” 178% higher than on January 1, 2023.
They’d rather let 3 million people lose their health insurance than let that happen.
Graph here: https://cabillionairetracker.org/
Rather than paying their fair share of taxes, Sergey Brin, Pether Thiel, and Patrick Collison prefer to spend tens of millions to manipulate the vote.
Stupefying levels of greed and lack of civil-mindedness.
$45 million in a week: California’s wealthy aren’t holding back to try to stop ‘billionaire tax’
All credits to Gabriel Zucman
Its way cheaper for them to buy the politicians, and these people will never miss an opportunity to optimize the number in their bank account. The system won’t change without some serious turbulence.
Even a 2% ANNUAL wealth tax would not take anything away from them, it would just make their wealth grow SLIGHTLY SLOWER.
In our next lives we should all strive to make sure THAT NO ONE HUMAN HOLDS THE WEALTH OF NATIONS.
I like an echo chamber dogpile as much as the next guy. But doesn’t prop40 also use language that can be taken advantage of? Like to expand this tax to other areas?
They freak out about this because their wealth is in holdings and isn’t liquid. They leverage debt and play these games to avoid paying their share the freeloading welfare queens that they are
This is probably more painful than “it’s just 5%.” And I love that for them
They freak out about this because their wealth is in holdings and isn’t liquid.
This is a legitimate problem. Forcing a primary shareholder to sell their shares devalues the shares of workers holding them in retirement accounts. Forcing them to liquidate their shares is not at all feasible.
Which is why this tax should never be payable in dollars. It should be paid directly in shares. It doesn’t have to be converted to cash first; the shares themselves go straight to the IRS.
The confiscated shares can be liquidated slowly over time. Every time 1000 shares are traded on the free market, the IRS gets to offer one of its taxed shares. The influence on the market price of the shares is minimized. If the shares become worthless, they just sit on the IRS books, collecting dust forever.
I’d only tax securities - investment holdings. Stocks, bonds, other fungible, intangible, financial assets. I want them spending their money on tangible products and personal services (as opposed to financial services) that are ultimately produced by workers. I want them pushing their money back into rotation, not setting up dollar farms to collect it from everything that moves.
But, if we want to go after general wealth, we can also do the same thing for deeded property or titled property. They don’t have to sell the land or the car/boat/plane; we just put a tax lien on it now, and collect later.
I like it, but I would prefer if the government kept the share of the companies, transitioning the companies into government run entities over time, thereby having the production be owned by the people.
Absolutely not: Trump, Trump, Bush, Bush, Bush, Reagan, Reagan, Ford, Nixon, Nixon.
We’ve seen what these bastards did to the postal service and everything else they’ve touched. We’re not putting every major industry in the country under the direct control of men like these. The idea of government-run commercial entities is simply a non-starter. That’s one of the few qualms I have about the IRS holding these shares for any length of time. I would strip control and voting rights from these taxed shares, restoring them only once they have been transferred to a market buyer.
I agree that ownership of production needs to be in the hands of the people, but that ownership needs to be directly in the hands of the people, not through a stake in a government that is, more often than not, overtly hostile and malicious to the interests of the people.
The tax would apply to ALL stocks, bonds, and other financial instruments. Natural US persons can exempt up to $10 million worth from their portfolio, but they will owe an equal proportion of every issue in their portfolio: They don’t get to pick and choose what issues they will keep and what they transfer to the IRS: The IRS gets the same percentage of everything.
The artificial persons owe the full tax: no exemptions. If you own $100 million in stocks, you can’t split it up among 10 companies. You can split it up among friends and family to avoid the tax, but they each control their own shares.
To the working class, securities remain a valuable asset. To the ultra-rich, a sufficiently-high tax converts these same securities into an expensive liability. With these conditions, an ownership stake in a worker’s company will become a significant component of their compensation. Ownership of production will be driven away from the ultra-wealthy and to the people.
It also sets a precedent - why not an annual 5% tax? why not 50%?
That’s why they’re afraid of it. It’s not just the liquidity, because 5% they can easily liquidate without affecting any of their hedged-leveraged debt coverage.
yeah, I think it’s more about power than money
Money is more about power than money once you’re over ten mil
totally
Yeah we should tax billionaires until they become “only” millonaires
I posted this comment on another topic but it’s relevant here too:
The sick part is that what is being asked is actually so inconsequential to the billionaires that not only will their line still go up, if we change nothing else but this, even wealth inequality itself will still keep going up, it will just go up at a slightly less supersonic speed. They don’t even care about the amount of money we’re asking for, they care about the precedent that if we can take this from them, what’s stopping us from taking everything from them.
That’s what they’re actually scared of. That’s why they resist this so hard. That’s why they don’t bend. They think that once the people slip out of their stranglehold they will get a taste of billionaire blood and they will like it.
And they might be right.
It’s not the money, it’s control of their companies. To pay the tax they have to sell stock which reduces control. They, rightly I think, also believe it’s a one time tax until the next time the tax gets passed. Maybe this a good thing but it should also be addressed by those pushing the wealth tax…
Would much rather make their worst nightmares come true. Anything less feels like leaving money on the table, ya know?
I noticed that in 2024, when Bernie was pushing the wealth tax, billionaires funneled a lot of money toward Trump. “Worst nightmares” is a double edged sword…
They’re gonna destroy our world, and we’re just going to tut-tut each other while they do it.
The tax rate on billionaires might be so important that it requires everyone’s attention every year until the problem is solved.
Financial obesity is neurotoxic, an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but trillionaires should be forced to transition into billionaires, and billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
I do not agree with the 2. sentence.
Why?
You don’t become a billionaire with a intact moral code. Those sort of people must feel the consequences of their wrong doings or it escalates always further.
Removing their wealth isn’t the end goal, I see it as a necessary first step that can inform further corrections should they be necessary.
Not wealth, public service, cleaning up their messes themselves and jail time.
They’re additive, not mutually exclusive.
I would rather have 1000 millionaires than 1 billionaire
Shareholder primacy is fundementally broken. We must tie ownership back to the direct stakeholder of each firm. Shareholders dont care about goods, services, or utilies; they only care about line go up.
What the heck is a stakeholder??
Vlad Dracula Tsepesh
Direct ownership of the means of production and not thru proxy like with controlling shares. In other words if you are not the direct owner you cant own the company.
It’s literally impossible to allow this to continue. Something will give.
We are far, far beyond the wealth inequality that spurned the French Revolution and yet, here we sit.
I’d attribute this to two main factors:
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The wealth inequality we’re dealing with has a higher ceiling (and higher floor) than the wealth inequality in pre-revolution France. We’re poor and hurting financially, but most of us are still able survive day-to-day without viscerally feeling the effects of our poverty.
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The internet keeps us apart. Pre-internet, people built communities, coalitions, and armies much more effectively because they weren’t so isolated in their homes, and so paralyzed by screens.
EDIT: the advent of suburbanism & carcentric infrastructure is another factor that keeps us more isolated than past populations have been. People used to live right alongside each other and their communities used to be walkable. The most disadvantaged among us (and therefore the most personally motivated to mobilize) are also the most limited by carcentric infrastructure.
They also had the advantage of surprise which you can’t really have with everything being tracked
True, it is much harder than it used to be to catch the oppressor class off guard.
But given how hard they work to discourage us from even nonviolently protesting, I suspect that they understand that once we truly collectively achieve class consciousness, it’s over for them.
And ruthless efficiency
Two people in my extended social network have died of curable health issues in the last 30 days.
I’m very sorry for your losses. I suspect that my own quality of life has been severely affected by undiagnosed curable health issues, and I’ll be genuinely surprised if I make it into old age.
Capitalism has murdered and continues to murder countless human lives.
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The French Revolution was not a peasant revolt, it was a movement of the upper-middle class. Nobody with money is interested in changing the government right now.
Newsom’s prepared to give his life defending the billionaires.
So we can hit them with 5% every month
Just hit all billionaires, worldwide, with 100% tax of all wealth over a billion dollars every year. A billion dollars is really an inconceivable amount of money for one person to have. Far more than one person could ever legitimately earn in a lifetime.
Letting them retain one billion dollars is probably far more charity than they deserve, but what can I say? I’m just a softie.
$30 million is generous and plenty to live on. Everything above that is capital that is only to be used to get even more.
Moreover even at $30 million, it’s difficult not to fall upwards. You can make really bad decisions, whether cruel, ignorant, reckless, or offensive to the public, and still turn a profit. It’s actually an argument against hiring upper management who are already well-to-do.
Like your card’s not getting declined for anything, ever. Why keep running up a high score when it makes many others suffer? It’s entirely unrelatable to me that anyone could be so fortunate and yet so callous.
Spreading that out would likely create more businesses, art, shows, and everything for them to try. They could spend a life time and not run out of new experiences as is, but they like staring at a chart that looks like it says they are winning.
They remember (or have schools that teach) the 90+% wealth tax back when accountants hadn’t hidden it all. You know, in the 1950s and before ‘boomer golden age’, which, along with strong unions, made the middle class happen. and what shall never again happen if the parasite class can help it.
That wasn’t a wealth tax though? That was an income tax and only on the top bracket. Very, very different things.
There’s a pretty straightforward solution to that, as well: tax unrealized capital gains as income the moment they’re used as collateral. If you can spend it, it’s income, you fucking cheaters.
Sure, simpler times back when accountants hadn’t hidden it all
And before the laws hadn’t been changed to make it so easy to hide it all
Billionaires should be illegal. That’s wages stolen from the workers.
I misread it as 31 years ago. But when I saw 31 days I was like… And of course they are opposed to it!
People who are cool with not having the maximum amount of money possible don’t end up billionaires
