Lobbying needs to gtfo and be illegal already. We don’t talk enough about it because the America is on a tilt-a-whirl as it is
Just fucking pay the tax, dickwad.
Would be cheaper…
Actually, there’s a huge return on investment with bribes and political influence when you’re a billionaire.
Citizens united was a death blow.
Reaganomics -> Contra -> Bush Sr -> Citizens United -> 9/11 -> Patriot Act -> Middle East wars -> bank bailouts -> Pause for pandemic -> insurrection -> old man Biden sleeps on imprisoning trump -> literal gestapo in the streets.
That’s pretty much exactly what the Antichrist would do.
No no no, the anti-Christ is obviously every single person who opposes invasive tech and the obscenity of billionaires. Doing the exact opposite of what Christ would do doesn’t make you the anti-Christ, that would be too obvious.
When they pay obscene amounts of money to prevent paying taxes, or break unions, or disenfranchise voters, it’s because they calculate that the obscene amount of money is less than what they’d expend otherwise.
Honestly - in the event that this nature fails, California should just unleash a barrage of similar legislation like this, year after year. Eventually it would end up cheaper to just pay the taxes than continually fight against it.
@epicthundercat we all need to tax billionaires back to being millionaires - healthier for our societies, our economies and much healthier for climate and politics! #TaxBillionaires
Just make it illegal to be a billionaire, punishable by death. We’d have a lot less billionaires one way or another.
How would that work?
Do you mean that as soon as someone has a billion dollars in their bank account the would get a hit squad sent after them?
Because that is really dumb.
Just about every billionaire have their assets invested in several diverse financial instruments, usually not even directly under their own name.
It is a highly complex task to uncover all that wealth.
Aslo, why kill them?
I have always thought that once a person amasses say 500 million (or some other arbitrary ammount) they should not be able to earn more money directly for themselves, but rather, all money earned on top of the set limit will be taxed to 100%, while maintaining stats to show who earned what so these rich guys can still have their highscore list that they seem to enjoy.
To further incentivize these guys to keep working to bring in more taxes, the state should build statues and name important buildings in honor of them, you know, exploit their egos.
Killing them is just a waste of talent and experience.
Foreword: I am not the person you replied to, and I also don’t agree with killing anybody.
That being said, I have to comment on this:
Killing them is just a waste of talent and experience.
I would argue they have neither. The people they employ are the ones with the talent and experience.
Take Elon Musk, for example. He makes big claims that sound plausible, but anybody who actually understands what he’s talking about knows that he’s only pretending to be knowledgeable in the subject. It’s the engineers and designers at Tesla that do all the hard work in bringing products to market, yet he gets the absurdly high pay package for doing little more than lying to consumers.
I’d go by net worth. And if you’re and $900mm you should be scared that the death squad’s math is different than yours. It’s ridiculously easy to not be a billionaire.
Why kill them? Because they broke the social contract. We let them be enormously wealthy by having a net worth near a billion. It’s not like they were so valuable or productive that they earned that much money. All we ask is they keep their greed under one billion.
If the punishment isn’t severe and final they will find ways to work around it. Their greed cannot be contained by normal methods.
Billionaires don’t add value. That money is locked up. You recommend taxing it at 100% but they will find ways to avoid paying it.
Broke the social contract?
Say that I develop a new kind of solar panel, that is 10 times as effective while being a quarter of the cost as current alternatives.
I sell them cheaper than the alternatives, the manufacturing process requires less staff so I can pay them very well, with plenty of vacation times and low stress work.
I make a small profit on each panel, but they sell increadibly well and money just rolls in, I am busy managing the company, and don’t have time to look at my personal finances other than to make sure that my taxes are paid and I am not being stolen from.
I live in Sweden while doing this, a country with a progressive tax code, I don’t try to hide anything from the tax man.
Despite high taxes, money just keeps rolling in.
Finally I am ready to retire, the product still sells very well, but I don’t have the energy to deal with it anymore, so I make a highly controversial decision, I release the patent to the public domain, no one can own it, everyone can use it, I don’t want some random patent troll to get their hand on it and exploit it.
As I retire I check my balance and see that I have 1.02 billion dollars.
Where did I break the social contract, and deserve to be killed?
I know the scenario is absurd, but I enjoy finding the limits of rules and other scenarios.
If you were able to get such an absurd amount of money out of it, you definitely didn’t pay the people who did the manufacturing and mining etc. enough for their work. If you did, would wouldn’t have become a billionaire in your lifetime.
That is an interesting point, that I didn’t consider, thank you for taking my scenario seriously
@Brkdncr too drastic - pls, no death penalty. Not even for greedy fascists.
kill billonaire :3
Ew.
Idk there are some people who deserve what we did at the Hague in the 40s or worse. We were too nice to the fascists last time.
Another scam artist ,move on nothing to see here
In a just world we would follow the money, and charge them with treason.
Oh and also freeze all his accounts, then charge every member of his staff associated with treason and him as well.
Manipulating voters or congressmembers is treason. If they want the death penalty to exist. Give it to all of them that don’t rat out their senior who commanded it.
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