99.9999% tax rate beyond $10 million total worth would be a great start.
No, we should not.
Can the city raise billionaires taxes to a significant level?
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.
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.
Personally I’m hoping we see a couple multi trillionares. Rapidly followed by their assets depreciating into worthlessness and the USD becoming worth less than monopoly money.
A billion dollars buys you power. That kind of money gets you a seat at the table.
a greed
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 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.
“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.
agreed
I totally agree with the no billionaire concept - but I don’t even think that is the point of contention. I hate that we have been spinning on this for a decade. The real issue his HOW we do it from both a strategic and execution perspective
Do you implement changes slowly to minimize resistance? Do you do a lot at once to ensure changes don’t stall? Do we have an income tax? How do we tax non-liquid assets? What if those assets are held outside the US? And so on…
Most people don’t want billionaires. Let’s shift the discussion so that is the assumption we are starting with - and now we just have to implement.
Amen to that
If I ever win a lottery where I get more than a billion in one fell swoop, I’ll give everything above a billion away…maybe have a presser stating agreement with the notion that billionaires should not be a thing.
If I ever win a lottery over $100M I’ll giveaway everything above $100M away…
If I ever win a lottery over $10M I’ll give away everything above $10M…
