Ask Lemmy

I think anyone should only be allowed to own, say, $10 million in assets. Not just money in the bank, but items too. Need to prevent them from keeping $10 mil in pocket and buying art and jewelry and real estate worth a total of $6 billion.

Firstly, I think your focus on housing is too narrow to solve wealth inequality.

Second, if landlords are handed a $100 monthly tax bill they tend to increase their tenants rent by $100 a month.

Third, you ignore the effects this will have on new home construction, which will be SEVERE.

Fourth, and this is a minor thing, I think when discussing housing policy we should always be trying to disincentivize suburban sprawl snd incentivize density. Having more people own single family homes is not necessarily a great thing, maybe better than having corporations rent them out but not as good as having more dense walkable transit filled urban cores. I'd even go so far as to say that while having people own condos is best, having people rent apartments is still better (on a large scale) than having people own single family houses.

Order them to pay. Incarcerate them if they don't.

It works for poor people.

Mostly remove tax cuts of the last several decades. They mostly cut taxes on the highest owners: let’s not. Imagine if wealthy people had to pay at least the same tax rates as everyone else!

nothing will work, The wealthy will just raise prices of their products and services to cover any expenses, tax and etc. it is the consumers that will pay indirectly.

Unless there is a cap on how much wealth, property, income or salary anyone can have. People will probably find loopholes.

I think severe rent control would go a long way to solving the problem here in the UK.

Make it unprofitable to exploit the fundamental need for shelter. It would allow people to build up savings and have more disposable income, so they can compete properly in the market.

It would lift up the people at the bottom at the same time as curtailing those at the top = less inequality.

It's not like millionaires can take all the houses with them if decide to leave the country.

Income tax, capital gains tax, wealth tax, VAT on purchases over the median value increasing with price, property tax, inheritance tax, corporate taxes, etc

As a past tax accountant.

I don't believe a straight tax will get the job done. Taxation is too unpopular to be realistically effective, and will just have corners cut in very easy and direct ways. Mainly because the masses are too stupid to understand how taxes work. I have had countless times people ask me a tax question after knowing I work in tax, I'll answer their question, and the answer is the same thing every fucking time no matter if its a friend, coworker, family, etc. "No that is wrong, what I think is correct actually". It is infuriating.

I think there are three effective ways to tackle wealth inequality.

1. Give workers ownership along with their wage. The 'owners' will of course have a bigger cut than the workers, but the current hoarding of ownership is what I think the key issue is. Our idea of ownership is the root cause.

2. Lobbying/bribes. We all know why this is bad, but it happens. Until this is fixed wealth inequality will never be fixed.

3. Loans. It is so easy for the wealthy to receive a good deal on a loan. Only because they already have money and the loan is not necessary. We need to limit loans on people who already have one successful business. Why are we allowing people who have prospered receive more money without more scrutiny? That is the definition of greed. As long as their BS and IS look okay to a bank, they will get approved with little to no follow up.

4. Distributions. In the US, when filing as a S-corp, they will receive no income tax. This is because they are then required to have the owners be paid a 'fair' wage to themselves. Why? Because payroll taxes are more compared to income taxes in this scenario. Problems arise when owners will obviously abuse what is a 'fair' wage. Lets say an owner gives himself a 30k wage because that is what is 'fair'. There is nothing stopping him from withdrawing 100,000 in contributions a year, and distributions are tax free with literally no oversight. The only checks and balances for this is they might have a basis issue later in life, but honestly that is a pretty small fine for essentially having all the tax free income they want as long as their biz is doing good.

*This is based off my experience as tax accountant/consultant for small businesses with less than 20 employees 2 years ago. Tax laws have changed since then.

Obviously limit inheritence and gifts to family. Nobody should be inheriting a billion dollars.

A progressive wealth tax where at some amount of money your are taxed down to that amount. Billionaires shouldn't exist.

Practically that is impossible unless the rest of the world agrees, otherwise they will just hide their wealth overseas.

Hold a silent reverse auction. Whichever billionaires agree to the highest tax rate don't get eaten. The new billionaire tax rate is whatever the uneaten billionaires agreed to.

Edit: Also, roll 4d10+50 and add it as a secret bid. If it happens to be the highest bid, eat all of the billionaires. This roll is the "public option" to prevent the billionaires from colluding to cheat the system.

See how they did it in the 1950s. There's your blueprint.

Another discussion point that always comes up is "Jeff Bezos can't pay that tax rate, it's all tied up in shares of Amazon. He would have to sell huge portions of Amazon to keep up with the taxes."

And yes. That is the intent.

But I'm not upset if folks would rather just eat him than deal with the logistics of it.

Wealth Inequality on it's own, is a problem almost nobody but the middle, lower-middle and the poor will address. It has to start here. Nobody should amass the amount of money we see individuals possess. If someone understands how far a single million could stretch for someone (provided they're responsible that is), they would understand how pointless it'd be for someone to have even 10 million or 100 million or even a single billion.

And if anyone gave two shits about the seven deadly sins, the idea of accumulating more money should be a more frowned-upon thing. But instead, gaining more money equals to you being more powerful than most. That's not how things should ever be. There should be a cap of how much money you should realistically earn up to. We've already seen the damage and continuing to see the damage afflicted, by incredibly rich people. They're too dangerous to be wielding that much.

My personal thoughts are:

• Close carried interest loop holes
• Tax loans against unrealized gains on securities and physical property (excluding ones primary residence). You should not be able to take a billion dollar loan out to avoid capital gains taxes. I'm fine that this raises the basis for when the asset is sold. Well, someone do the math if there's a loophole this creates? But hopefully my intent is clear.
• Social security and Medicare tax applies to all income. Shares granted as part of compensation should also have social taxes payable on grant.
• Increase the tax brackets above the current max of 37% for income above $609k... Every 250kish above should increase by 2% until you reach 50% (about 2.5m)

That money should then be used for:

• Increasing social security payouts
• Expanding medicare access
• Increasing the limits for the tax brackets on the progressive scale for incomes below 250k

To boost the bottom:

• Stock buybacks are illegal except for the purposes of distributing stock to employees. This counts for executives but cannot exceed some multiple of their cash salary
• 20% of money flagged as dividend payments to shareholders should be distributed to employees as profit sharing into their retirement account. There needs to be rules around the max differential between the highest and lowest disbursement.