you dont need a max wage if you tax effectively. it would be 100% past a certain, massive amount.
That’s exactly how the article suggests setting the maximum.
“Wage” is rather poor wording then.
Wage is worthless wording. Most ultra rich don’t have wages - at least not relative to their change in worth. We need to change how taxes fundamentally work.
Anyone with two brain cells can understand that it’s a wordplay on “minimum wage” and the implementation of this isn’t really going to rely on the narrow definition of wages.
It seems unwise to rely on the uneducated masses to interpret things correctly. Perhaps clearer communication would be helpful.
That’s why there’s a whole text with explanations right below the headline
There are more words???
As you can see, lots of people don’t read those explanations.
Perhaps clearer communication would be beneficial.
How does that work when the super rich don’t pay any taxes to begin with? How do you tax wealth? How do you tax loans against shares?
in the united states, there were all kinds of ‘wealth’ taxes that prevented the loop holes. all that was systematically deleted over the last 60 years as conservatives decided ‘me want money, fuck society’
The top marginal tax rate in the US peaked in 1951 at 92% on income in excess of $400k (joint filing two income), the equivalent of about $4.7M in today’s money. That should come back.
Easy, make capital gains tax match income tax marginal rates.
But capital gains only execute when you sell.
all stock market trades should be taxed at 100% value. dont like it? dont
gamble‘invest’…or just abolish the stock market (at least that’s how I read this).
At this point, abolishing the stock market would require a restart on the United States as an entity. The stock market is quite closely linked to the banking system. Closing the stock market would crash the US economy into oblivion.
And no doubt every other closely-tied economy, as well.
Do they get a tax refund when they take a loss as well?
Right. So when they sell, they’ll get taxed. You can’t spend shares.
The problem is that’s basically what billionaires do, though. They take out loans with their shares as collateral. So on paper they have huge debt, but it’s minuscule compared to their wealth.
Take a listen to the recent Grey Area podcast episode with Ingrid Robeyns. Her book is “Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth.” and they talk about this very subject.
That just sounds like a maximum wage but with more steps.
its actually a max wage with less steps. no need to have a max wage definition at all, just extend current tax practices.
Plus it actually could be used to do something* crazy, like help people or the environment.
- Autocorrect awesome sauce
If the U.S. managed to do it, they’d use it to build up the military.
Iirc DoD… Yeah, never passed an audit
Not necessary. Just tax the fuck out of them.
Specifically, tax the fuck out of the massive earnings they rake in from investments while claiming the have next to nothing on their taxes.
Stock buy backs should be quadruple taxed too. Or banned.
That’s the same thing. The default implementation for this is a tax bracket for the ultra-rich that uses 100% marginal tax rates.
I’d be satisfied with 90% for a top tax bracket.
Problem is that once you are wealthy enough you can move around the world. Similar to how Microsoft Ireland is somehow where most of Microsoft’s profits occur. I think there is a big role for international treaties here.
No, the problem is that most of the truly wealthy peoples’ wealth is not in the form of income. A high income tax bracket does nothing.
It needs to be a property tax, and it needs to be on everything they own, not just real-estate. Once that happens, it doesn’t need to be 90%, or anywhere near it.
There’s a reason why the PR-friendly rich people keep talking about wanting high income taxes, but no one’s talking about a total property tax.
A high income tax bracket does nothing.
This is nonsense. Wealthy people do tend to have high income, though of course most of it comes from invested wealth income and capital gains instead of wages. Taxing these is known to be effective.
I do think governments should explore taxing unrealized capital gains too, though.
Well count me in for 90% if we can get there, don’t want to let perfect be the enemy of good.
Wealth moving around isn’t that big of a problem really, people keep touting “wealth exodus” is a huge economic risk but rarely has that really outweighed whatever the benefits that caused it.
Fair enough, if the wealth isn’t benefiting anyone, than it’s exodus won’t hurt anyone.
And new, more contributing wealth will move in to take its place even if the old wealth moves
yeah ireland restructured as a tax haven like the atlantic island nations a few years back; i have no idea how it’s going for them but it hasn’t worked out in any direction resembling autonomy for the rest of them
I’d be satisfied with 90% for a top tax bracket.
worked for Eisenhower.
Not sure why comments like this get so many upvotes. What kind of fantasy world are you living in where rich people pay taxes? There are entire industries formed around helping people to avoid paying as much tax as possible.
Upvoted for what we want, not what we think is likely to happen, I assume.
Even smaller farm businesses spend $5k in lawyer/accountant fees to save $7k in taxes through dividends. It doesn’t matter how small the return is at the end of the day, it’s essentially free money for the client at the end of it.
LoL yeah as if they won’t put loopholes in there like they did with taxes.
And hide all their money in offshore accounts. Does no one remember the Panama Papers?
Wage is not the issue
One of the challenges is of course that the wealthy don’t get paid. They own and control assets that appreciate in value.
What if we ended private ownership of businesses. I don’t mean ending ownership of businesses, but that every business became publicly tradeable. No more private ownership of businesses.
I’m not actually advocating this (yet), just curious what people think would happen if we did this.
The same as now
The people that own it privately will have controlling public shares. Can’t force them to sell at a given value and if you did they would just have a diverse portfolio that they swap between each other
I think finding a private company that brings people the levels we are talking about here are not an issue
Profit sharing works better, after x earned, everything is divided up between workers
Taxing profits is a good idea but they’ll figure out some creative accounting to avoid making them.
I think we just need to straight up take ownership of a portion their shares that increases based on how little tax they are paying.
Enshittifcation would be mandatory via forced infinite growth to profit shareholders.
Instead, we can make the employees up to middle management and lower own a minimum of 60% shares of every company that way they’re not constantly getting fucked and they actually have a voice.
I would have 100% of voting shares be inalienably attached to all workers in the firm. Non-voting preferred stock can continue to be free floating property rights @canada
If employees own 60% then they should invest 60% of a company capital.
They are. With their time, whether that probationary or goes away if you do + some other obvious grey areas. This whole “business owners are taking all the risk so they have more money they can ever spend” nonsense is costing us, costing the government, and costing the environment. Shit has got to go.
Open your own business.
I wasn’t born with money stolen via exploitation. Not an option for me and 95% of the planet.
You don’t need much money to open a business. You just need to pay a small fee to register a company, anyone can manage that.
Does this small fee include cushion money for not turning a profit in years?
imho I think this is the wrong way to go - there are some companies out there that continue to exist and thrive because they’re not jerked around by shareholders. Valve, being a great example.
tax the fuck out of every asset imho, but no private business? eehhhh extreme solution that doesn’t really fix the problems.
What if we ended private ownership of businesses. I don’t mean ending ownership of businesses, but that every business became publicly tradeable. No more private ownership of businesses
Not sure if that would really lead to any significant change. Most billionaires “own” publicly traded companies. In fact, most billionaires became billionaires when their companies initiated an IPO.
The problem is that rich people can use their stock as collateral for huge untaxable loans. What we need to do is figure out a way to classify and tax these loans without taxing things like mortgages.
What if we ended private ownership of businesses. I don’t mean ending ownership of businesses, but that every business became publicly tradeable. No more private ownership of businesses.
There’s something to be said for mandatory stock awards to all employees (with no contractor sub-contractor loopholes) calculated to enforce a controlling interest among current staff.
Of course, arguably, I just described a union with more steps.
Edit: I think this won’t necessarily need to be mandatory, after current shareholders wise up that their current crop of CEO’s aren’t actually serving their interests.
But, if it works, there’s an argument to be made for making something mandatory to set a baseline expectation for human decency.
Which I suppose amounts to crowd-sourcing to staff things not currently handled by OSHA.
Probably better to limit ownership to directly interested parties, like workers and maybe customers
As others have said, the problem isn’t wages, rich are rich because of returns, dividends and other stuff that, depending on the country or city, is tax exempt, precisely to avoid paying anything. A cynical asshole might even go so far as to say that it creates jobs for lawyers and accountants, which is technically true. It’s a win-win-lose for the rich-those ethically wrong workers-everyone else.
Unless the UN or really big blocks like the EU+BRICS start pressing every tax haven to stop pretending that they’re doing nothing wrong (which, let’s be honest, won’t happen, ever), the rich will just move around. They have that luxury, thanks to effectively infinite money.
they are rich because they own property other people depend own
They usually dont get paid much in wages. I think zuckerberg got paid $1/hr?
I think the word you’re looking for is “income” or “net worth”
Setting a maximum wage for them wouldn’t do a damn thing. They’ll just use the wealth they already have to hoover up more through things like insider trading or flat out stealing company money.
Adding a maximum wage for the rich would be like trying to drain the ocean using a toy bucket.
In an ideal world anyone making more than, let’s say for an example, $1 million in a year would pay 100% tax on anything more.
No one needs more than $1,000,000 a year for anything. No one works hard enough to actually deserve that. It’s just pure luck and/or screwing over other people to get more than that.
Unfortunately if one country implements that, all the rich people leave and go live somewhere else that doesn’t tax that much.
On paper they don’t make anything a year and pay less tax than you or I. The only way that’s going to change is a massive world-wide effort to crack down on tax havens and to start taxing their assets fully.
The author in the article talks about how most of the wealth is either coming from capital gains and/or inheritance. They know wage isn’t the thing to cap, the article is likely just trying to maximize clicks. The subject is still worth exploring and the author is very well informed.
That or they just don’t set their residency in Canada. Rich people can choose to move and reside anywhere they want
The only greener pastures for the rich would be moving to their southern neighbor since it’s probably the safest place for the rich currently. Not many options if they don’t wanna be screwed.
Let’s put aside the fact that the super rich don’t have a wage. How the fuck are you going to make and apply laws against the people who have the most power in the system you’re supporting?
Let’s just say if they have too much, we just put them in a big stew and eat them.
The author mentioned in this article was recently on The Grey Area podcast and the arguments and reasoning is pretty compelling. It’s also about the discussion and civic involvement and not a particular limit. But the reasoning behind a Limitarianism makes a lot of sense.
If person A makes 100million a year, that’s 1,000 times more than person B making 100k a year. Can you honestly say that person A is working 1k time harder, or is contributing 1k times more than the person B? Also remember that we’re not talking about the hordes of people working below person A who execute most of the work. We’re just talking about that one individual and their contributions.
Either way, the discussion about the subject is the important thing here. What do you want your society to look like in the future and for the next generation? Even if it’s not Limitarianism, starting the conversation and cival discourse to push society towards a better version of its current form is worth the effort.
Another way of thinking about it is the human potential it would open up and create.
Imagine limiting the wealth of the those with enormous fortunes and allowing those in the middle to become enormously wealthy, while at the same time allow those at the bottom to finally make it to a level where they no longer have to worry about surviving. It would be terrible for those with enormous wealth because they would lose control but it would great for those at the bottom who would achieve a way to take back control of their lives.
Imagine a world where those who never had the opportunity now have a chance to become doctors, engineers, scientists, professionals, creators, builders and inventors. Imagine a world filled with people who have the free time to just create things because they can instead of spending their lives just trying to get by. Most people in the world don’t want to become master and ruler of the universe … they just want to have a nice life, do something useful and enjoy their existence with others. It’s only a minority few who feel compelled to neurotically want to collect every bit of wealth everywhere and pathologically amass so much wealth, it would take a thousand lifetimes to actually use it, let alone enjoy it.
Imagine every poor inner city kid build up an education to become a professional at something and not worry about how they are going to make a living. Imagine a millions of poor kids in Indian and China doing something with their time in engineering, science or medicine. Imagine every poor kid in Africa building their countries and developing new ideas.
The world wouldn’t become a utopia … it would most likely still have all the problems we deal with today … but at the very least, we would have a world full of educated, capable people who would be able to handle it all. Right now, we’re just a horde of raging mindless apes that are worried about dying and will kill one another for a share of a few bananas.
Reminds me of the Kurzgesagt video “A Selfish case for Altruism”. If all those people were educated and working on making the world better, that would mean more people curing diseases that you personally could die from in the future. More people solving global warming and other future unknown global issues, that could harm you or you kids in the future. Etc…
Even from a self serving angle, it’s better to have more people in the world well fed, well educated, living well, and contributing to society.
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Kurzgesagt video “A Selfish case for Altruism”
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How about we just execute the richest person every 3 months?
Make a threshold that if the relative wealth is equal between 100,000,000 million people no one is executed. That’s a hard cap right there.
Problem is the rich would start making death contracts. Scooping up some poor person to put them at the top with a contract saying if they go through with it they get certain privileges. The person would have to be too stupid to realize they can just distribute the wealth given to them and its win win win.
Also would hide their money off shore.
The process of determining who is most wealthy would be problematic.
It would be difficult to have an accurate monthly system.
You can move to North Korea and enjoy life without rich people without killing anyone.
I’d like to know more about how this is supposed to work.
What is considered a wage? Is it net worth, increase in worth from one year to the next? Liquid capital?
Are benefits (insurance, child care, etc) counted towards this wage cap? What about company cars or housing? What about profit sharing through bonuses and / or stock grants?
Would loans be counted towards the wage cap? If not, can you borrow more than the wage cap?
What happens if you own a home or business that is worth more than the wage cap? Would you only be able to sell that commodity for the wage cap or would any excess of the wage cap be spread over multiple years?
Would inheritance or “gifts” be tallied towards the wage cap? Would donations to charitable organizations offset the wage cap?
Would companies be subject to these caps? What if a person incorporated, had all of their wealth and earnings go through that incorporation which they had sole discretion and control over the use of those funds?
What about foreign entities? Would people, companies, or even governments from other countries who exceed the maximum wage be allowed to buy / sell goods, direct / manage corporate interests, invest in land or stocks, or even reside in a country with a maximum wage? What authority or oversight would exist to even identify such a wage of a foreign entity? Or
Every single one of those questions represents a potential loophole that could be exploited to circumvent a “maximum wage” and I’m sure that somebody who has studied or worked in finance could think of others.
To be fair, there are a number of countries that already have a wealth tax. So it wouldn’t be some insurmountable concept.
Wealth that’s just sitting there is hard to assess and therefore easy to game. What’s the value of a piece of art? It’s far more practical to tax transactions and realized gains, when money changes hands.
There are less and less of them because taxing wealth doesn’t work.
Why on Earth would they use Taylor Swift as an example. Seriously?
Taylor Swift, so hot right now.
Because there is an underlying tone in the wage equality movement that women shouldn’t have it.
Republicans hate her now so clearly she’s an extremist leftist /s
The Kremlin hates her now that she’s potentially opposing their candidate.
Because Taylor Swift is a billionaire who is politically relevant. She often has been on the right side of things (but not always). Even if she was solely a source for good, that doesn’t justify the obscene wealth she has or her lifestyle
And the right doesn’t generally worship her the way other billionaires are worshipped because she’s woke or something? Whatever the reason, they’re more willing to criticize her
She’s also far more susceptible to public pressure than other billionaires as an artist
All together, she’s a good target to rally around.
Does she deserve to be wealthy? Sure. She actually worked to get where she is, and has done a lot of good.
But she’s a billionaire, and we need to discuss limiting all billionaires to reasonable amounts of extreme wealth.
It doesn’t matter where the conversation starts, we can’t really afford to be picky
And tie it directly to the minimum wage…
You got work tomorrow morning at 8?
I have better idea: 100% tax
Anything over a $500 million in asset value taxed at 100%.
Far above what anyone should own. And yet, you’ll get middle-class people defending the people with those riches, that they deserve to keep their billion dollars.
