I think that, somewhere north of $1 ~ $5 million is life-changing on its own. There’s no need for someone to have tens of millions or hundreds of millions. Tens of millions is like, changing multiple lives in a family with how much that can stretch.
Whenever someone has billions to their name, it is boggling to think about. That it becomes just ‘fuck you’ money at that point because more often than not, not a lot of billionaires out there being charitable. When they know they’re set for a few lifetimes just by a single billion alone.
No single person should ever have that amount of gross wealth.
The problem with “wealth” or taxing it while someone is alive is that there’s a problem when it comes to businesses.
If you taxed Zuckerburg, Musk, or Bezos 90% of their wealth, they would lose control of their companies because that’s where most of their wealth exists as the stock they own in their company.
I’m a big fan of a limit on wealth transfer to your children though, cap that shit at 10 million and give the billionaires a reason to spend or give away all their money before they die. Spent money stimulates the economy.
Not seeing the downside here.
And a lot of social good can come from this.
From which, taxing people on death or taxing them while living?
¿Por qué no los dos?
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Progressive income taxes until 100m, then 100% wealth taxes. Estate taxes of 50%. The kids will be fine as a 2 kid family would get 25 mil each.
So as the company you founded gets bigger, you’re forced to just give more and more of it away to the government until you don’t control it anymore?
I would much prefer to see a higher estate tax, 100% of all amounts over 10-20 million.
If you know you can’t keep it you’re far more likely to do something useful with it while you’re alive.
Good point, but easily resolved with share classes.
Estate taxes don’t help, for example we can’t afford to wait for Musk to die to rectify the political and institutional damage he has done and is doing.
You don’t need to prevent rich people to remove money from elections. There are laws that other countries have passed that effectively nuter their influence on that.
Bootlicker. Those laws get repealed when you control enough wealth.
Yea, because you don’t have an economics degree.
Musk may be an asshole, and Tesla may be absolute shit, but SpaceX is a good company and would have never existed without Musk’s wealth from other ventures.
That process of making a fortune, then investing in other companies so that they can become successful is a critical factor for many organizations.
Google is another example, it took millions of dollars from a few wealthy investors before it blew up.
Wait, wut?
SpaceX has advanced what humanity can do in space by a significant amount. It achieved something no government was even considering attempting until they proved it possible.
Google has added some massive value to the world, making information more accessible and advancing hundreds of other services and companies. From Gmail to Waymo it too has advanced humanity significantly.
If that’s what you learned from your economics degree, you’re part of the problem. Spend a lot more time on business ethics, moral philosophy and humanities, maybe get some degrees in that too before you start feeling like you’re qualified deciding how the world ought to work.
Economics is about studying how it works, not forming opinions on how it should work.
If you want to discuss changing economic systems entirely, then discuss that, not ways to break the current one.
Our current economic system would not function with the changes proposed. All sorts of problems occur if you try to tax wealth when it’s created. Companies would receive no investment because anyone with money would have already hit the threshold and wouldn’t benefit from investing it. Not to mention that founders would be forced to walk away fairly early in the business even if they succeeded without investment.
Capitalism is inherently exploitative. You can’t have a profit as a company if you pay workers the same amount that you earn. If you pay workers out the entirety of the value and cut out the shareholders, you’ve just created socialism.
In my opinion, guided capitalism is the best system. Which means adding taxes and regulations to prevent the worst problems.
Like the fact that we already tax wealth somewhat when it’s sold off, and my proposal adjust inheritance taxes to 100% over a certain dollar value (10-20 million for example)
Great, they did it and were successful. Now they can fuck off and do something else with their money, hopefully not something so destructive to society.
How does that statement make any sense? If you tax them, they won’t have the money to fuck off with.
You have hurt yourself in your confusion.
Ah yes the famous 100% tax. /s