this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2026
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politics

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[–] DaddleDew@lemmy.world 196 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (9 children)

You can't even spend a billion dollars with the most ridiculous luxury items you can think of. Spending that much in a lifetime for things you would even remotely appreciate would feel like work.

The only difference having billions of dollars makes instead of only a few millions in a rich person's life is that it enables them to singlehandedly influence politics to their personal liking by buying politicians and media institutions. Which is something nobody should be allowed to do to begin with.

Meanwhile had that billion dollars been distributed to the worker class through fair wages or even to the consumers through fair prices it would have contributed to the economy and the well-being of everyone. Having to tax it to avoid seeing that money sit in some asshole's offshore bank account is a failure of the system to properly distribute wealth when it is generated to begin with and even that isn't being done right now.

[–] red_tomato@lemmy.world 101 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The difference between 1 million and 1 billion is about 1 billion.

[–] floofloof@lemmy.ca 64 points 1 week ago (1 children)

And the prediction is that we'll have a few trillionaires soon. The difference between 1 billion and 1 trillion is about 1 trillion.

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[–] Kn1ghtDigital@lemmy.zip 138 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Maybe a single person shouldn't have enough wealth to rival a country? It's almost like that gives them more power than the government that is supposed to keep them in check.

[–] RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 84 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Individuals having the ability to operate private space programs is insane.

[–] UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 1 points 6 days ago

I have a secret hope that they use it to fly the fuck away from earth forever

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 32 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

I also can't think of a more insane pick than to let that individual be Elon Musk. Really shows how billionaires fail their way to the top.

At the end of the day I think billionaires owning space companies undermines the pursuit of humans going into space and studying space in general as it is difficult enough to justify to the average person normally that space exploration is important but when you have the people leading the pursuit of it hoarding enough wealth to lift an astounding amount of people out of poverty, then the association of those people with space exploration threatens to make space exploration a target of populist austerity sentiment unfairly because by its very nature it is a loud thing that draws lots of attention.

[–] FosterMolasses@leminal.space 2 points 6 days ago

This is true, and very many self-proclaimed leftists already argue against it as such. "How dare you fund NASA when poverty has not yet been eradicated by a utopian society!!"

We'd still be living in mudhuts with outhouses if it were up to these people.

[–] RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 35 points 1 week ago (7 children)

There aren’t any good billionaires. They get rich leeching off everyone else’s work, suppressing wages and compensation, and avoiding taxes on their insane wealth. On top of that, a seemingly normal person is likely to become a complete PoS when they no longer have to face any consequences for being a PoS because of their wealth.

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 27 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

The way I see it, billionaires are best understood as an autonomous cancerous process of money hoarding money, the human being who is the billionaire at the center of it hardly has any agency, just raw and pure complicity in the growth of the cancer enveloping them in a replacement of their human identity with an approximation of one constructed from financial abstractions.

Billionaires think they are making more and more important choices as they get richer but what really is occurring is they are becoming less and less a relevant part of the money they hoard in terms of what actions that entity of money takes and why it does so.

To be a proud billionaire is to be a proud insect host for the paratisoid wasp that is wealth hoarding. It is a strange and disturbing ideology from the perspective of an insect to take pride in being the vessel for a process that will most certainly annihilate you from within.

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[–] chiliedogg@lemmy.world 14 points 1 week ago

I work for a small city that's an enclave for the super-rich. Literally every household is multi-millionaires (I don't live there, of course).

When we butt heads with a resident, it's a challenge because most of our residents have a larger budget and pool of resources than the city. My favorite example was when a resident tried to build a retaining wall in a drainage easement for a new home that would result in a street behind them flooding any time it rained. When we told them no, they tried to buy the Engineering firm we hired to review their development.

[–] LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 84 points 1 week ago (2 children)

So common-sense yet how many political leaders are brave enough to say it?

[–] Yawweee877h444@lemmy.world 50 points 1 week ago (1 children)

We need more politicians talking like this often and publicly, then actually working to make it reality.

[–] realitista@lemmus.org 21 points 1 week ago

They will find a way to fuck him, I'm certain of it. That's why we don't have more- they get rid of them via smear campaigns, primarying someone else, etc. It's a miracle anyone like him or Sanders ever gets elected with all the headwinds they have against them.

[–] danc4498@lemmy.world 17 points 1 week ago

They’re more likely to defend the billionaires.

[–] Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 65 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)
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[–] Tigeroovy@lemmy.ca 53 points 1 week ago (1 children)

This is like literally all I want to see from politicians currently.

[–] givesomefucks@lemmy.world 12 points 1 week ago (2 children)

The DNC chair has been saying he wants to run a presidential candidate like Mamdani since Mamdani won his primary...

He probably thought it long before then, but he won't weigh in on any primary.

Which is more than we've got from the DNC in about 50 years...

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A person cannot earn a billion dollars on his labor, it’s impossible. The only way one becomes a billionaire is by stealing from the ones who did the hard work and enriching yourself off their labor. Billionaires are leeches, every single one is a disease on humanity. There are no good billionaires, they should all be shot and have their assets redistributed.

[–] Fandangalo@lemmy.world 47 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Billionaire math

Average USA billionaire has about $7b in wealth. 

2026 * 365 ‎ = 739,490

$7,000,000,000 / 739,490‎ = $9,465.98

You would need to make $9k per day, for 2026 years, to catch up to the average billionaire wealth right now. 

It’s estimated in 2026 that it would cost $37b to end world hunger until 2030. 

Also note that Musk, Bezos, and other extreme billionaires are up to 100x of the average here ($700b for Musk). Who is making $900k per day? 

This is not natural, it’s not rational, and it’s completely bullshit. You can come up with whatever distraction you want (“wealth & income aren’t the same”), but we should be taxing every dollar above $1b at 99% or higher. 

30 years * 365 day = 10,950

$1,000,000,000 / 10,950 ‎ = $91,324.20

I could easily live off of $91k per DAY for 30 YEARS. 

If you put these numbers against a human time scale we can understand, I don’t see the argument for this level of wealth, especially not as people go hungry, without clothes or food, and children die.

[–] teddyt@feddit.org 28 points 1 week ago (1 children)

A bit of context, because $9k per day sounds "not too bad" to some. It means you have a yearly income 3.4 million a year, for 37 generations of working people.

[–] Fandangalo@lemmy.world 16 points 1 week ago

Fuck yeah, math homie. Thank you.

[–] TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com 40 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

the only way to make sure we don't have trillionaires is to make sure that we don't have billionaires.

[–] sturger@sh.itjust.works 27 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

‘I don’t think we should have billionaires’

Half of America’s trailer-park residents pass out because he dared to attack our beloved billionaires. “But what about when we become billionaires!?!”

The reason we have had to deal with this over the centuries is half our population is authoritarian. The idea that someone can punch up as a violation of the laws of man.

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[–] Doomsider@lemmy.world 25 points 1 week ago (15 children)

99.9999% tax rate beyond $10 million total worth would be a great start.

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[–] grue@lemmy.world 25 points 1 week ago

"In his own words," the article title says, as if we should be shocked or upset by it.

[–] angband@lemmy.world 21 points 1 week ago (9 children)

simple solution, tax rate goes up by margins based on the standard deviation from the last year's income mean. for income more than one standard deviation above the mean, your tax rate for that margin is the percentile rank of your income compared to the last year's incomes. something like that would be fair. then mandate certain percentages be spent on education, welfare, etc. anything left over in the budget from the last year gets split evenly among all taxpayers.

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[–] AnchoriteMagus@lemmy.world 20 points 1 week ago

He's absolutely right. Hoarding wealth is a mental illness, we just turn a blind eye to people who have it because what they're addicted to is what society runs on.

[–] realitista@lemmus.org 19 points 1 week ago (1 children)

How is this even a controversial opinion? They'll find a way to fuck him over for sure.

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[–] RaoulDuke85@piefed.social 18 points 1 week ago

Get rid of hunger and billionaires or we eat them.

[–] TwinTitans@lemmy.world 16 points 1 week ago

No, we should not.

[–] Lushed_Lungfish@lemmy.ca 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Can the city raise billionaires taxes to a significant level?

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