From the technological Olympus of Silicon Valley to the urban canyons of Wall Street, a narrow club of vastly wealthy plutocrats sits on a ballooning share of the nation’s resources. One percent of Americans at the apex of the economy are hoarding over 31% of the nation’s total wealth, a cool $55tn in net worth.
Getting them to share with the rest of society, to fund redistribution or pay for public goods, is proving pretty much impossible. Their ability to move resources around, hide profit across jurisdictions, and minimize income to hoard wealth until they die appears to put them beyond the reach of taxation.
One recent research paper found that the country’s richest 384 oligarchs paid only 24% of their economic income in 2025, compared with 30% for the average taxpayer. And not all of them are getting top notch tax advice. Reporting by ProPublica revealed that some of the richest Americans – like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Michael Bloomberg – live largely tax free.
The survival of humanity depends on us removing billionaires from the picture entirely and not having capitalism.
Scientific socialism is the only sustainable way forward.
Financial obesity is neurotoxic, an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but trillionaires should be forced to transition into billionaires, and billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
Yeah, “taxing.”
The ultimate tax.
Not just taxing them, but taxing them until they are no longer billionaires. No one person needs that much money and it is morally wrong to hoard that much money while others are without homes, starving, or worse.
I’m accused regularly of being a crazy person, but my personal opinion is that after $500M/year, 100% tax rate. Locked. No exceptions, no loopholes, no offshore, no technicalities.
Id cut it even earlier. 50 million. You get 3 multi-million dollar properties, a yacht, and thats it.
I don’t think you’re crazy. Not even extreme. You’re like slightly left of a reasonable centrist in my book. The past 10 years of politics have too many people across the political spectrum wearing orange-shaded glasses, IYKWIM.
orange-shaded glasses
I was with you until orange-shaded glasses, so I guess Idk. /shrug
Trump. It’s because of Trump and the MAGA-fication of American politics.
Maybe fake-tan stained glasses?
As of early October, 260 billionaires lived in the state, according to the Forbes billionaires’ list, amassing nearly $2.5tn in wealth. Based on these numbers, the 5% tax would raise some $110bn
If a one time 5% tax on 260 people would raise $110,000,000,000 that alone should be enough to show you how fucked up our system is.
I would even go a step further than “get them to pay their own fair share.”
When we talk about taxing billionaires, as we are in California right now, they always say the same thing: we will just leave.
Well, maybe that’s a good thing. Billionaires flock to the US because they know they can do business with a free hand here and keep all the profits. And we see the results: capture of the state, exploitation of the workers, pollution of the media.
Maybe it would be good for the US if it were no longer seen as the billionaires business paradise and they fucked off somewhwre else to try their luck?
Go further. Start guillotining them.
You said the word of the (every) day!
Good riddance. I can’t think of the last time a billionaire did any good besides build a new worthless toy or find a way to exploit consumers and the government.
Not like we’ll collapse anyway. Most of their money is spent on overseas labor and goods because they want to hoard all they can.
Here’s how it works: They pay no taxes because they own the government. So we pay taxes and give them our money.
Then they take our money and and use it to fund their terrible ideas that usually just fucking crash and burn and tank the entire fucking economy. So then they need more money. So you continue to pay more money, and they take your money. Now they have more money.
But we can’t ask them to contribute money to fund public services let alone their own harebrained schemes because “Something something… Milton Friedman… Blah, blah, blah Hayek and the road to Serfdom, and the CIA is busy defending our freedom, yada, yada, yada.”
To be fair, it’s not only the economy anymore. They’re literally ready to burn the planet and kill us all to get more money.
How the fuck are they gonna get more money if they kill us all?
Unless it’s just gonna be circular financing from now on, with the rich snowballing their monopoly money back and forth.
Their net worths are already made up anyway. It’s all merely speculative. Once we’re all gone, who’s going to be left to remind them that those numbers don’t mean anything?
It’ll be the same circular lending schemes, only instead of self-fellating about becoming trillionaires, they’ll be self-fellating about becoming quadrillionaires. And so on…
They’re like children playing imagination, arguing over whose stick is really “the most powerful sword in the game.” The adults have left the room.
Affluence is a mental illness.
Just a reminder that Hayek and his mob were opposed to the application of the scientific method to economics, and also that the only place any of them had any experience of actual governance was in the proto-fascist pre-Anschluss government of Austria, where their proposed policies failed.
The survival of American democracy depends on
taxingimprisoning billionairesBeheading
Democracy is incompatible with capitalism. If you do not revise the capitalism part, it will naturally progress to fascism again no matter what else you do.
This… And look to the Nordic countries for the best example of this. It doesn’t matter houw good your reforms are, capitalism destroys, consumes and corrupts.
What’s the point when the pentagon can’t even pass an audit?
It’s a black hole, sucking in every dollar with insatiable greed, straight into the deep pockets of military contractors. They’ll just buy more robots like there’s no tomorrow at millions a pop. Every dollar will be killer robots…
I’m all for taxes, but with our government in this state, I don’t think an increased billionaire tax, or any tax, will solve any of our problems, not even one.
If a company can’t pass an audit, it’s dismantled, with legal consequences.
I don’t think any amount of increased tax income can save the USA at this point when we don’t even know where the money is going. It’s like giving money to a drug addict, except the drug is terminators.
Well it’s not going to happen. Here in California, we are about to reject a billionaire tax, and vote for what will essentially mean privatization and the end of many social services.
Here in Massachusetts our “millionaire tax” has been well received and widely supported. Probably helps that the extra income is partly targeted toward stuff that directly helps people: school lunches, free tuition, transit…… but here on Lemmy I see people bitching about our governor “taxing everyone for everything”
Wolf, I always thought California had a level head
I made this website to be able to find wealth tax supporters, it also has a parliamentary seats view, directory and other stuff. Linking to the US but I’ve added 25 countries so far: https://wealthtaxsupporters.com/us
Survival? It’s been dead for decades
The US has never been democratic for the working classes, and certainly not for indigenous peoples. Even if the US taxes billionaires, it will still not be able to stop the inherent crisis of profitability that is to come.
