A one-time 5% wealth tax would bring Silicon Valley’s billionaires’ wealth back to where it was just 31 days ago, on September 7.
When it was “just” 178% higher than on January 1, 2023.
They’d rather let 3 million people lose their health insurance than let that happen.
Graph here: https://cabillionairetracker.org/
Rather than paying their fair share of taxes, Sergey Brin, Pether Thiel, and Patrick Collison prefer to spend tens of millions to manipulate the vote.
Stupefying levels of greed and lack of civil-mindedness.
$45 million in a week: California’s wealthy aren’t holding back to try to stop ‘billionaire tax’
All credits to Gabriel Zucman
Shareholder primacy is fundementally broken. We must tie ownership back to the direct stakeholder of each firm. Shareholders dont care about goods, services, or utilies; they only care about line go up.
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.
I do not agree with the 2. sentence.
Why?
You don’t become a billionaire with a intact moral code. Those sort of people must feel the consequences of their wrong doings or it escalates always further.
Removing their wealth isn’t the end goal, I see it as a necessary first step that can inform further corrections should they be necessary.
Not wealth, public service, cleaning up their messes themselves and jail time.
They’re additive, not mutually exclusive.
It’s literally impossible to allow this to continue. Something will give.
We are far, far beyond the wealth inequality that spurned the French Revolution and yet, here we sit.
I’d attribute this to two main factors:
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The wealth inequality we’re dealing with has a higher ceiling (and higher floor) than the wealth inequality in pre-revolution France. We’re poor and hurting financially, but most of us are still able survive day-to-day without viscerally feeling the effects of our poverty.
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The internet keeps us apart. Pre-internet, people built communities, coalitions, and armies much more effectively because they weren’t so isolated in their homes, and so paralyzed by screens.
EDIT: the advent of suburbanism & carcentric infrastructure is another factor that keeps us more isolated than past populations have been. People used to live right alongside each other and their communities used to be walkable. The most disadvantaged among us (and therefore the most personally motivated to mobilize) are also the most limited by carcentric infrastructure.
They also had the advantage of surprise which you can’t really have with everything being tracked
True, it is much harder than it used to be to catch the oppressor class off guard.
But given how hard they work to discourage us from even nonviolently protesting, I suspect that they understand that once we truly collectively achieve class consciousness, it’s over for them.
Two people in my extended social network have died of curable health issues in the last 30 days.
I’m very sorry for your losses. I suspect that my own quality of life has been severely affected by undiagnosed curable health issues, and I’ll be genuinely surprised if I make it into old age.
Capitalism has murdered and continues to murder countless human lives.
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The French Revolution was not a peasant revolt, it was a movement of the upper-middle class. Nobody with money is interested in changing the government right now.
Newsom’s prepared to give his life defending the billionaires.
I misread it as 31 years ago. But when I saw 31 days I was like… And of course they are opposed to it!
I would rather have 1000 millionaires than 1 billionaire
So we can hit them with 5% every month
Just hit all billionaires, worldwide, with 100% tax of all wealth over a billion dollars every year. A billion dollars is really an inconceivable amount of money for one person to have. Far more than one person could ever legitimately earn in a lifetime.
Letting them retain one billion dollars is probably far more charity than they deserve, but what can I say? I’m just a softie.
$30 million is generous and plenty to live on. Everything above that is capital that is only to be used to get even more.
Moreover even at $30 million, it’s difficult not to fall upwards. You can make really bad decisions, whether cruel, ignorant, reckless, or offensive to the public, and still turn a profit. It’s actually an argument against hiring upper management who are already well-to-do.
Like your card’s not getting declined for anything, ever. Why keep running up a high score when it makes many others suffer? It’s entirely unrelatable to me that anyone could be so fortunate and yet so callous.
Spreading that out would likely create more businesses, art, shows, and everything for them to try. They could spend a life time and not run out of new experiences as is, but they like staring at a chart that looks like it says they are winning.
I posted this comment on another topic but it’s relevant here too:
The sick part is that what is being asked is actually so inconsequential to the billionaires that not only will their line still go up, if we change nothing else but this, even wealth inequality itself will still keep going up, it will just go up at a slightly less supersonic speed. They don’t even care about the amount of money we’re asking for, they care about the precedent that if we can take this from them, what’s stopping us from taking everything from them.
That’s what they’re actually scared of. That’s why they resist this so hard. That’s why they don’t bend. They think that once the people slip out of their stranglehold they will get a taste of billionaire blood and they will like it.
And they might be right.
It’s not the money, it’s control of their companies. To pay the tax they have to sell stock which reduces control. They, rightly I think, also believe it’s a one time tax until the next time the tax gets passed. Maybe this a good thing but it should also be addressed by those pushing the wealth tax…
The tax rate on billionaires might be so important that it requires everyone’s attention every year until the problem is solved.
Would much rather make their worst nightmares come true. Anything less feels like leaving money on the table, ya know?
I noticed that in 2024, when Bernie was pushing the wealth tax, billionaires funneled a lot of money toward Trump. “Worst nightmares” is a double edged sword…
They’re gonna destroy our world, and we’re just going to tut-tut each other while they do it.
They freak out about this because their wealth is in holdings and isn’t liquid. They leverage debt and play these games to avoid paying their share the freeloading welfare queens that they are
This is probably more painful than “it’s just 5%.” And I love that for them
It also sets a precedent - why not an annual 5% tax? why not 50%?
That’s why they’re afraid of it. It’s not just the liquidity, because 5% they can easily liquidate without affecting any of their hedged-leveraged debt coverage.
Yeah we should tax billionaires until they become “only” millonaires
yeah, I think it’s more about power than money
Money is more about power than money once you’re over ten mil
totally
Billionaires should be illegal. That’s wages stolen from the workers.
They remember (or have schools that teach) the 90+% wealth tax back when accountants hadn’t hidden it all. You know, in the 1950s and before ‘boomer golden age’, which, along with strong unions, made the middle class happen. and what shall never again happen if the parasite class can help it.
That wasn’t a wealth tax though? That was an income tax and only on the top bracket. Very, very different things.
There’s a pretty straightforward solution to that, as well: tax unrealized capital gains as income the moment they’re used as collateral. If you can spend it, it’s income, you fucking cheaters.
Sure, simpler times back when accountants hadn’t hidden it all
And before the laws hadn’t been changed to make it so easy to hide it all
The wealthy and powerful want to keep their control over people with the “good insurance” that many still have financial issues and bankruptcies with it, which is wrong. Reducing this scarcity along with others like paid leave helps people live better lives, and the owners don’t want that.
Sadly I predict this won’t pass. The traditional media like tv commercials is flooded with propaganda to vote no on this. Newsom, Becerra and Hilton are all saying to vote no (that should be the biggest clue that you should vote yes) The commercials offer different and conflicting narratives as to why you should vote no (another clue you should vote yes) And there are NO commercials telling you to vote yes. (That should be another clue, those who control the media do not want this.) The only news available telling you to vote yes is Bernie Sanders visiting California for some sort of rally. But those supporters also tied in props 41 and 42, pushing for a “no” vote on those, which I think might have been a mistake and hurts their message.
5% off the top!
The math is a bit counter intuitive, but increasing by 5% then decreasing by 5% of the new value does not get you back to the start exactly.
You take a value v, increase it by 5% to 105% of the previous you now have 105% * v. Now you take that new values as the basis for the next calculation, and decrease by 5% to 95% of the previous, you now have 95% * 105% * v which is actually 99.75% * v.
You need to find the day from which their wealth increased by 5.263% so that a 5% tax would bring them back.
But yeah, whatever it doesn’t make a material difference to the argument. A one time tax sounds a bit weird to me, but I don’t live there, Californians should do whatever they can. Maybe a one time tax is a good first domino stone.
People who are cool with not having the maximum amount of money possible don’t end up billionaires
