How make no billionaires if capitalists allowed to keep owning means of production? Allow to get rich, and then kill?
Here’s a small set of proposals, definitely well thought of and not made up specifically for this comment to make a point:
Start taxing them heavily on wealth INCLUDING unrealized gains once it hits a threshold, but no wealth tax for normal people. Force companies to become either co-ops or publicly traded when certain thresholds are met - and if the founder has too much stock, the taxes on unrealized gains will force them to sell. But if it’s a co-op, don’t count anyone’s share in it as wealth for taxation, only any profit actually paid out by the co-op. My prediction is that companies with high profit per employee (think Steam) will become worker-owned co-ops and companies with lower profit per employee will be publicly traded (think Walmart, except of course Walmart is already publicly traded)
Essentially, I want people to be able to own property, but not own so much that it negatively affects everyone else - everyone should be able to have a primary residence tax-free and I don’t think it’s bad for someone to own a second home either, except that shouldn’t be tax-free. Hoarding property isn’t OK though - that affects everyone else’s housing situation. I don’t like the idea of the state owning all homes - I want there to be strong rules protecting me from being evicted because the state needs a factory built right where my neighbourhood is - but there SHOULD also be state sponsored housing for those who can’t afford their own homes, and they should be easily attainable, and built to a good standard.
I’m okay with people making a plentiful living from passive income off ownership in some company they built, I’m just not okay with it being so much that they make more in a year than the rest of us do in a hundred thousand.
How’s public trading supposed to reduce wealth accumulation? Tesla is publicly traded but Elon still had enough money to buy and ruin Twitter.
Ultra high taxes on unrealized gains. There are no taxes on unrealized gains presently, nor a wealth tax. Which is why if his wealth increases 2x, his taxation… just does not, unless Tesla pays him dividends or a salary.
If Elon had to live with a, say, 99% tax rate on anything above a billion dollars and it included his Tesla stock not just money he has for real, he’d be forced to sell, or go to jail for unpaid taxes.
Why 99% and not 100%? Just to mock them.
I mean… If they’re forced to game the system so they stay just below the “rich” threshold all that extra money has to go somewhere besides their pocket.
You don’t fuck with the tax man. They got Al Capone, they’ll get you, and they’ll get the billionaires, if the laws are right and there’s enough funding to investigate ownership structures of large companies, and the relationships between different major shareholders.
Plus I don’t think anyone has hundreds of family members to hide away hundreds of billions.
Besides, you’d have to divide it before the company gets large enough for it to matter. If your company is worth 800 mill and you’re the only shareholder, selling off half to anyone for anything significantly less than the perceived value of the company, would be investigated as potential tax evasion.
I think a lot of people forget that tax authorities are supposed to look for these cases of hiding wealth. In many civilized countries, they do it for real.
We used t have “progressive” income taxes where higher income paid more, but tax breaks have largely gone to the wealthy over the last half century. While we still have tax brackets, they top off much lower than they used to. More importantly we have a really complex tax code, where some people are able to use loopholes and exceptions, such that many wealthy people pay at a lower rate. Were effectively a “regressive” tax code now
