For Billionaires+ only
You mean gift cards?
As people said you don’t want to completely stop savings but it would make sense for social benefits. Take snap. You could limit people to not keeping in excess of one months benefits in savings (the reason you might allow a month is so that they can do something special on a holiday or birhtday or such). So 2x times their benefit would be the maximum allowed holding. Now lets say you limit snap to things grown and processed in the US. Now it acts as an economic stimulus as well as a social safety net and you prevent the hoarding thing. You could convert all argricutural type aid to it and it would likely be better for the industry. Now note you stopped hoarding of the currency but that does not stop hoarding. Some folks if they see they have not used the full benefit will buy some treats like ice cream cake or something. Others however will buy canned goods or rice and beans and hoard that. Granted those folke like hoarded anyway. Similarly if money in general had an expiration date then rich people would buy more single family homes and warehoused and precious metals and such.
Whoa whoa whoa, you think people are saving their food stamps and not spending all of them every month? I’d love to actually see the data on that because I would be incredibly surprised. Because food stamps do not cover the monthly cost of food.
Sorry I often propose universal snap and forgot I had not put that in this particular comment.
Please note that Elon Musk doesn’t hoard money in the same way that Scrooge McDuck does
Man, I wish the world’s richest man was just a cheap skate instead of a corrupt sociopathic nazi fraud edgelord.
That’s pretty much always been an apt description of the World’s richest person.
Yes but he does hoard wealth and assets.
It does. It’s called inflation.
Modern millionaires don’t hoard cash, just like ancient millionaires didn’t hoard apples or wheat. Sure, millionaires always had something perishable, but most of the wealth was/is tied in things like land, buildings, companies, ships, cattle, slaves, stocks, bonds, loans etc.
Inflation has little impact on the wealthy. I should have said wealth or assets
It makes them invest their money which puts it to good use. That makes credit cheaper for everyone else.
Inequality is an issue, but that’s what taxes are for. You don’t solve inequality by breaking the economy.
Yeah that’s a good clarification. If land and old paintings had had an expiration date…
I mean the Mexican government makes it so that land can only be owned for 100 years.
And schools should have economics and personal finances as part of the curriculum.
Nobody is hoarding money. Uncle Scrooge is a bad caricature of a rich person - that’s not how any of it works.
And schools should have economics and personal finances as part of the curriculum.
the problem with this “common sense” approach is that it emphasizes and reinforces personal responsibility in a system that’s rigged to take advantage of every human foible.
I call this the “late-fee” fallacy. As in the idea that video store late fees are intended to encourage responsible behavior, not a revenue stream that the business relies on. Overdraft fees are another great example.
Financial responsibility would ruin the economy.
This has actually been tried. It’s called [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_currency](demurrage currency). Basically, every note decreases in value every week: in 1930s Austria, this was accomplished by requiring people to get regular stamps to keep their money good, but every stamp reduced the value of the note.
This encourages people to spend money instead of hoarding it, but the obvious downside is that it makes saving functionally impossible.
very cool thanks :)
That would disproportionately affect the poor since the money owned by the wealthy is overwhelmingly tied up in other assets, index funds etc
Your right I should have said wealth or assets
It already does, it’s called inflation.
Also are you talking about physical money, or bank accounts, or what…?
inflation has little effect on the wealthy. I should have said wealth or assets.
A wealth tax of just 1%/year is sufficient to prevent new billionaires from forming and slowly eliminating existing billionaires without having to bring out the choppy boys. Given current public anger, they would be wise to support such things.
How so? I support the idea of a wealth tax, but I would have expected the billionaires to be getting way above a 1% return on their assets.
Well, what do you think is going to happen to stock prices when billionaires are forced to liquidate over $200B in stocks and bonds a year just to cover their taxes? The only other option is dividends being issued and that would reduce the prices of the stocks as well.
It may bring down the overall numbers, but given the rate of passive growth would still be several times the wealth tax, I see no reason they would disappear or new ones would stop appearing.
Norway as an example has had their wealth tax for over a century. They still have one of the highest rates of billionaires per capita worldwide.
The passive growth for the last 70 years was largely due to governments buying stocks (to prepare for future budget deficits from a population swing) and the population flooding the market trying to get returns and effectively boosting market prices.
If you look over a longer history, you will see that stocks on average did barely better than inflation. And that on average stock prices were close to equal to 4x the annual dividend issued.
Most stocks today have no dividends. It is a game of greater fools.
Yes, only already rich should have an ability to use capital. Peons should be stripped of even theoretical possibility to get any capital-tier sum. Only gas and bread money.
I was thinking more of people having what they can use and not horad wealth and assets.
Do you mean cash, money, or wealth?
Sorry I should have said wealth or assets.
Absolutely not
Better solution: world wide wealth caps. WWWC, if you will
Just your normal tax brackets but with one extra one that says that nobody can be worth more than, say, 10 million dollars. Anything over that goes straight not taxes until you’re below again.
For companies, make it a billion dollars
This way, nobody can become extraordinary rich and or powerful
Nobody can pressure others or influence large groups with money because nobody can
Companies will require a huge amount of small shareholders so no one single shareholder can influence a single company
Governments will get a huge influx of money which they can use for a huge social network with free healthcare, free education, UBI (Universal Basic Income) and so on.
With that, no more poverty. Everyone can have a standard minimum living where they have a nice little home, all the food and healthcare and education they’d need, and if someone wants a little more, they can work a little more, but nobody can get over 10 mil.
It would eradicate poverty, and much of -or most- crime, as money is the incentive of much of the crime in the world
Governments can make world wide investment foundations that can fund independent press agencies with the single requirements that they always try to be as unbiased and honest as possible
Companies can’t have a networth over a billion dollars, so instead of 1-3 giant companies, we’ll have thousands, of not millions of smaller ones.
Companies will no longer have incentives to cheat and or fuck over customers or the environment because why would you of you reached the limit and you can’t earn more anyway? Focus can go to quality and safety again
I see a huge amount of pro’s here with … Well, I don’t even see cons
I know this requires that we implement this world wide, but that would be the only complication. The rules themselves are simple and basic. I know, there are a lot of details that willl emerge that need to be handled but anything is better than the oligarch shit we have now and this to me sounds like a Utopian society, really, or as close as we can get to them
