“Won’t you please stop and think of the billionaires?”
“For just $5,479,452.05 a day, you can support a multibillionaire who needs you TODAY.”
🎶🎶 “We are the world… we are old white men… We are the ones that have yachts that need second yachts to land helicopters on… so you start giving us your change… If you don’t, we’ll fucking find a way to kill you.” 🎶🎶
Billionaires should not exist. Honestly, I’d expropriate them.
I don’t get the desire to violently dispose of billionaires; it’s a status defined by wealth, we just gotta take their money and they stop being billionaires. Problem solved, right?
Well there is the issue that to become a billionaire one must exploit and abuse tens, hundreds, thousands of people? Not to mention second order effects from their actions like bankrolling politicians that strip workers rights or safety standards for example, which impacts millions of people. Some people want to see some justice I suppose.
To the moon!
They must be good then.
Billionaires have a choice here:
A.) we tax them fairly.
or
B.) we kill them, eat them and tax their next of kin fairly.
Hey now, we can still do both
Guillotine as is tradition
The guillotine was mostly used after the revolution, to kill political opponents of the ruling party that took over. More of an animal farm type deal than a revolution.
This is the sort of pedantry that keeps me coming back to Lemmy.
The rule against advocating violence that removed this post kind of makes sense, from a CYA perspective, but also feels like it’s endorsing violence against everyone else.
Eh. I’m fine with my comment being removed. Fair call. But to also be fair, “eat the rich” is a sentiment as old as time.
“You’re trying to take away the incentives for people to work hard,” [Catsimatidis] said.
The working class is referred to as such for a reason.
He should stop pretending to be one of them.
Also, said billionaire should stop gaslighting everyone. Most people I know will try to find better work if their basic needs are fulfilled. Nobody except a billionaire wants hand outs.
Nobody except a billionaire wants hand outs.
…and gets them, usually on demand.
Let’s be real: who would work hard to make ONLY millions instead of billions? Most people would obviously rather stay poor.
If the billionaires are upset it’s a good sign you’re doing something right.
Exactly. Most policies are in billionaire’s favors, since they fund lobbying groups and super pacs. They mostly stay quiet about everything because they’re getting their way behind the scenes. If they’re complaining outright, it’s an absolute win for everyone else
Or, as is often the case with Biden, promising to do something right with the odds of actually going through with it being slim 🤷
Don’t break their bubble, it’s the only thing holding this thing together.
Yeah feels like every weekend he has promised to make Israel cease-fire by Monday since “Genociding with Biden” became a meme and somehow hes never been called out on that huge glaring lie, in fact I am often told to quiet if I bring it up.
Thoughts and prayers
Would it be illegal to start a like Jury Nullification Ad Campaign for murdering billionaires? Just like, if you’re on trial for running over a billionaire, we pledge to find you not guilty.
I don’t really understand why they’re upset, or how it will raise that much revenue. As the article points out, most billionaires don’t get their billions from income, they get it from investments. For instance, Jeff Bezos’ salary is like $80k, and then he gets other compensation that puts him at like $1.7M. if you put him in a much higher tax bracket, he shouldn’t even care - would hardly notice - because he’s worth $194B. To put that in perspective, if he earns just 5% a year in growth on that, it’s almost $10B. His compensation is like 0.02% of what he’s likely to make on investments, if that.
It’s also worth mentioning that most billionaires can’t really spend much of the billions. If Bezos tried to cash out much of his Amazon stock, the price would plummet and he’d be worth a lot less. What those guys do is take out loans with the stock as collateral and live off of that. Of course, Bezos himself is at a level of wealth where he can cash out a small percentage and it’s still enormous. I think last year he cashed out like $2B worth, which is a giant amount of money, but only 1% of his net worth.
Biden went over this. A 25% AMT, which doesn’t care what your type of revenue is, you’re paying at least 25%.
Wealth Tax. That is what we desperately need.
Maybe so, but Biden was just talking about the income tax rate.
The problem with a wealth tax is that it seems like it would be hard to do. If I buy a painting for $1M, do I get taxed on that amount regardless of its value even if it’s worth ten times that? Do I have to get it appraised? If so, just once or every year because the value can fluctuate? If I buy a rare classic car that’s rusted out, and I restore it, how is the value calculated? Now imagine I have a giant art collection and a giant car collection. It just doesn’t seem workable.
I’m sure all that stuff is insured. Not difficult to assess wealth. Don’t have a wealth tax kick in until over $30 million (whatever number). Seems imminently workable to me.
If you can afford a 1M$ painting, you can certainly afford to have it appraised once in a while.
Billionaires can suck my dick and fuck right off into the sun. This shit has GOT to fucking stop! 100% tax on anything over $200M, and I am being real generous with that.
Revoke “Citizen United vs FEC” would be step 1
And when was this? Looks like 2014? What happened to that bill? Who voted against it? Was it reintroduced when Dems took control again?
He has done it every year since 2013. We all have to contact our congressperson every year about it.
And what was the holdup in 2020-2022? Why is it not a news item every year? Everyone wants money out of politics, so what is keeping this from being a popular bill?
Well, it won’t. At some point, personal capital stops being a number and starts to equal influence. These people can form the public opinion as they wish and anybody stepping on their toes more than they allow will find themselves on the pointy end of a career ending smearing campaign.
For $10,000 a year, billionaires can pay me to give a shit.
Make that 10k/mo and I’ll think about it
Did you expect an addict to thank you when you take away their drug cold turkey? Billionairism is a mental disorder, like addiction, and it should be handled with the same care. The kind of care that only billionairs can afford in the US, I must add.
Biden claimed in his State of the Union address that the 25 percent minimum tax on the ultra-rich will raise $500 billion over 10 years. “Imagine what that could do for America,” he said.
I may be totally out of touch but does that seem kind of low to anyone else? I mean, that’s a lot of money in absolute terms but the government spent $6.3 trillion in FY 2023 alone. We should still do it obviously, but hopefully that number goes up a little.
I’m surprised it’s that high. The reason their effective rate goes down, is getting money by ways that are either special cases in the tax code or aren’t “income”. Until you fix those, wealthy people will still have the lowest tax rate.
…although apparently the tax rate for long term capital gains is already 20% for the wealthy. I didn’t know that
$500 billion is a sizable chunk of that $6.3 trillion, and it’s still only a 25% tax rate, and then only the “ultra-rich.”
If one considers something more reasonable, like a 70% tax of income over $100,000, then you’re talking about more substantial amounts to really start catching up to top economies.
500 billion over 10 years is not a sizeable chunk of a single year total.
They spend more than that a year on “defense”.
No, it sounds correct. Taxing billionaires’ income is fine, but the real money would come from actually taxing corporations more.
See, they only have income in certain circumstances, so the amount raised from an income tax would not be very high. You can raise corporate taxes by a little bit and get much more.
That way the income is taxed before it gets to anyone. It doesn’t matter if they have a billion dollars. Plus it encourages investment in the company (wages, new products, better quality, etc.) because business costs are tax write-offs.
This is ragebait content from democrats. 25 percent minimum income tax on anyone worth at least $100 million is still grossly unfair. 50 billion in a year is a pittance for the owning class. Removing loopholes and including expenditure as a factor is needed to fix income tax.
It’s a bit better than the 8% they currently pay. Some of them pay nothing. I think we should go back to the Eisenhower era 90% marginal rates, but baby steps, I guess?
This is the right approach.
