With wealth inequality and billionaire control over American society growing ever more obscene, it’s well past time to implement a maximum wage limit.
Maximum profit laws.
Everyone makes $1/hour.
But everything only costs $1.
1 hour of labor = any 1 thing.
Work three hours, buy house, sports car and superyacht.
Which everyone works to make because a single grain of rice is $1.
They already play a shell game with wages, so they don’t pay income taxes. Most of the really rich and successful people have their incomes derived from capital gains and then use the talking point that it’s already money that was taxed through their business so it shouldn’t be taxed further.
TAX CAPITAL GAINS.
We do tax capital gains. It’s just at a lower rate than regular income and the first $50k or so is 0%. Some states tax capital gains as regular income.
They do a shell game by using their losses to offset their gains.
This would be something anyone could do but most people don’t have the ability to let stocks sit for over a year before taking the capitol loss strategically.
The system is built for the wealthy to have less risk.
They’ll use those laws on regular folk while they ignore them or use loopholes
“It’s maximum wage. I don’t receive any wage, I receive a dividend”
“It’s maximum wage. I don’t receive any wage, I receive rent”
That won’t solve the borrow, die, repeat. It’s a great idea and should definitely have been implemented yesterday to modify the incentives of middle management but we REALLY need to start taxing people on a “personal GDP” after a certain level.
Space Kare pays proportionally 1\10 of the taxes I pay without having a “wage”.
“Oh, you want to buy twitter for 50b, here’s your M&A property tax of 25%”
90% tax rate over 1million a year including capital gains. No cap on social security
Why the fuq someone needs 1 mil year? 500 is enough
Just trying to be reasonable
What you meant to say is we need a wealth tax.
We need maximum wealth, maximum power and maximum influence laws, enforcement and strict punishments for corruption.
I agree with the sentiment, but it’s worth noting that the current excesses of CEO compensation through stock incentives are a response to a poorly implemented attempt to curb high CEO salaries.
We do need to reign in CEO compensation, but directly going after wages made the problem worse. I don’t see the article addressing this, but a Clinton-era policy aimed to curb excessive CEO wages. IIRC the ratio of CEO pay to lowest paid worker within the same company was as bad as 30:1 at the time, but has since ballooned to hundreds: 1.
Maybe something as simple as capping stock incentives at N% of total compensation could work. But we’d need to make sure we’re not just encouraging a new way to skirt around the legislation like last time.
If we broke up all their massive companies, they could not get such compensation. But they decided not to use the antitrust laws that already exist or say no to literally any merger.
This might be even more important.
I agree with the sentiment, but it’s worth noting that the current excesses of CEO compensation through stock incentives
Securities tax, payable in shares of the security. 1% of all registered securities are transferred directly to the IRS each and every year. Natural persons can request an exemption for up to $10 million worth. No exemption for corporate or other artificial “persons”.
IRS liquidators will auction the taxed shares over time, such that sale of taxed shares are never more than 1% of total traded volume.
Switzerland had a vote on this in 2013. Max would be 12x the min. The motion lost thanks to corporate propaganda.
But there is the shining example in the Basque region of Spain… in Mondragón, the highest and lowest paid workers in Mondragón, for example, remains about six to one.
The problem of this is always the same. Contractors. Is your janitor holding the wage of your CEO down? Easy fix, you are the CEO. Fire the janitor and hire a cleaning company. Since the employees of the cleaning company are not your employees, their wages are no longer relevant.
At some point, the CEO can just have its own company of 1 employee (himself) which owns 100% of the stakes of the real company, and he can also be CEO of the real company. The real company would just pay massive amounts to the CEO company for “IP” or “consulting”.
This policy can be implemented voluntarily by companies, but I don’t think a government can make a law to implement this policy without obvious loopholes.
If you had a minimum wage and defined maximum wage in terms of that, you’d bypass this issue.
The “creating shell companies to get around laws” and “outsource to contractors to get around employee protections” points are still problems of course. I suspect the most realistic way of dealing with it is making it unprofitable.
Shell companies are already used to evade tax. That does not necessarily mean we should abolish tax as perhaps calcopritus is suggesting (I can’t tell).
Mind you it is arguable that a wealth tax or land tax should replace income tax. That would make the tax dodging more difficult.
None of that would matter if Switzerland also set a minimum wage.
I don’t see what Switzerland has to do with any of this. And why it would be fixed if Switzerland set a minimum wage.
I told you: Switzerland is the only country to have held a referendum on maximum wages.
What we need is a wealth tax. If you don’t want wealth to be hoarded, then you tax it. The rich and their stooges online will parrot that “wealth taxes don’t work” precisely because it is the only tax that does work and that is why they oppose it.
Maximum wage laws don’t make sense because the ultra rich get their wealth from investments, not wages.
Nailed it.
What we need is a securities tax: a tax on every stock, bond, and other financial instruments in their portfolio. No need to liquidate it; the shares are simply transferred to the IRS annually. They’ll liquidate those shares slowly over time.
Natural persons are exempted on the first $10 million of their portfolio. No exemptions for artificial persons.
At some point, we decided that people who work and make $100K a year get taxed 50% more than people who make the same money from investment. Income is income. Get rid of capital gains special status.
And this loophole of borrowing money against stock value is income, and should be taxed as such. If we did this, everyone’s income taxes would be much lower, national debts would be in reduction.
But the Wall street dicks consider taxing on investments “getting taxed twice”, and hedge fund managers still pay NO income taxes, only CGT.
I’m in favour of maximum ratios of total compensation. Stock values, dividends, salary are all added together to get a total compensation value.
Start it at something like 50-1, then gradually lower it as the actual workforce is allowed to control an increased share of the company.
There is still incentive for growth; the growth is simply distributed more equitably.
Could the United States Follow This Lead?
😂
No chance anything that actually attacks inequality ever gets implemented through existing legislative channels.
We need monopoly busting, and inheritance tax, and general wealth redistribution. We need to stop monetizing basic needs and start paying fair wages. Income cap solves none of that. No way you can sell ‘income caps’ to the general public.
It’s simple, any income is income and taxed as income. this means loans, gains, etc. alll income.
Then everyone pays less income taxes. The current system puts the tax burden on the poorest people.
Monopoly busting, hell yes!! All the other ideas come from people who were unlucky enough to have nothing passed down to them.
I am sorry for your situation, but my father worked his ass off to leave me and my siblings something (it was meager compared to most I’m sure but it helped me out immensely when I needed a leg up), but blanket laws like this would have royally screwed me just because “well I didn’t inherit anything from my parents, so NOBODY ELSE SHOULD EITHER!!” mentality.
Inheritance tax is what stops you having a noble class or owner class with a long line of inherited wealth.
A good inheritance tax would be tiered like income tax. Lower amounts would be untaxed with higher numbers being taxed at higher rates.
