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This is like literally all I want to see from politicians currently.
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...
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.
The difference between 1 million and 1 billion is about 1 billion.
And the prediction is that we'll have a few trillionaires soon. The difference between 1 billion and 1 trillion is about 1 trillion.
Even worse than that, with just $100 million in a risk-free CD making 3% APY, one receives $3 million per year from interest alone.
Nevermind how to spend a billion dollars in one lifetime, how do you spend three million dollars in one year?
Any wealth above $100 million should be taxed at the end of each fiscal year. Nobody could reasonably need more than that. Of course, it would be complicated by carving out exceptions for real assets. Anyone with that much money would just buy a new yacht every September to avoid it, but that should still be taxed as capital gains.
it enables them to singlehandedly influence politics to their personal liking by buying politicians and media institutions.
Most conservative americans seem to believe "freedom" includes permitting the wealthy to rig the game in their own favor. They don't seem to consider the ways in which that infringes on everyone else's freedom.
That's why "anarcho-captialism" and even "libertarian-capitalism" are both farces. There's no room for liberty under plutocracy. Only the financial oligarchs have any degree of freedom in those systems, which is no better or different than an aristocracy, just without the overt nepotism (the nepotism becomes covert instead, by mislabelling generational wealth as a "meritocracy").
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.
I agree, but too many people only measure the success of an economy by top-down metrics such as GDP, gross revenue, stock market growth, etc. They ignore factors such as cost of living, wage stagnation, median income, RIFs, and the job market in general, social mobility, cost of healthcare and education, etc., leading to such buffoonery as claiming "unemployment is good for the economy" and "deflation is bad for the economy."
And then they come back with stupid arguments like "econ 101, bro." Classical economic theories are a soft science at best, arguably even a pseudoscience, and yet finance bros treat it like it's a hard science. They cite them like scripture, or like laws of physics, but they're not nearly so immutable or infallible. Especially when they focus solely on supply-side and neoliberal economics, which were clearly developed with an agenda.
Even Adam Smith gets quoted out of context, while ignoring the fact that he was opposed to many of the ideas his work is often used to rationalize.
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.
Individuals having the ability to operate private space programs is insane.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
‘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.
Because of what seems to be uniquely an American ideology: they too could be a billionaire someday, so therefore an attack against billionaires is an attack against them.
It's not. On some level it's in many, many people.
A while ago, Poland wanted to introduce extra property tax on the owners of three and more properties. The idea was to combat "investors", and flippers. The Polish Internet lost its god damn mind.
Of course, a lot of the noise must've been sponsored, but regular people, people who can barely afford the mortgage rates for a single apartment started shouting against that property tax, as if they were at any risk of getting hit by it.
I like the sentiment, but I hate white type on a light grey background. I'm half blind from a lifetime of jerking off, take it easy on an old incel.
Mamdani is the first politician that makes me hopeful that the US might make progress into being FOR THE PEOPLE. Not FOR THE BILLIONAIRES
So common-sense yet how many political leaders are brave enough to say it?
We need more politicians talking like this often and publicly, then actually working to make it reality.
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.
Alright everyone. To anyone checking in to this please we must push the open source community-run operating systems, social media, apps, and web apps for people to switch to. Tell them to get others on board too after they get comfy
Online and in-person we must keep switching people over!! The less people on those corpo ones the better!!
To make it easier tell people to use legacy social media and people social media until people social media has a big enough audience of people using them
Please do not scroll away we must all keep getting people to move. Many of us are but the more the better!!
Not sure why so many downvotes on an openspurce social media platform. Folks must really like the small nature of Lemmy currently. The world's digital town squares shouldn't be owned by anyone, but by everyone!
99.9999% tax rate beyond $10 million total worth would be a great start.
You're even harsher than I am, I would put it at 100M, but I'm totally down to negotiate.
I would even go up to 1B.
You wouldn't get much from that. These people usually don't have much income. Most of the richest CEOs famously earn "1 dollar a year", and people applaud that as honourable or something. It's not, it's a method to not just lower their income tax, it gives them massive tax breaks.
Most of the "wealth" of these people is in company shares. If the company's value goes up, the shares' value goes up, and so the CEO's "wealth" goes up, even if they're not actually getting any cash from it.
When they need to buy something, they just go to a bank and get a super easy loan for any amount of money, that they can pay from interest on their shares. But they won't even pay the capital gains tax, because they were poor, they had negative money because of the loan, so they get extra tax breaks on top of tax breaks.
It's super hard to tax these parasites in a way that actually makes them give back any meaningful amounts of money to the public...
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.
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.
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.
the only way to make sure we don't have trillionaires is to make sure that we don't have billionaires.
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.
No, we should not.
"In his own words," the article title says, as if we should be shocked or upset by it.
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.
How is this even a controversial opinion? They'll find a way to fuck him over for sure.