Nonsense. There's quite a bit of room to work with when billionaires get taxed. It's not like a billionaire's compensation is equivalent to the cost to write and print a book, so that any tax on the book must be made up with a price increase.
You can see this in what people did with pandemic relief checks: regular people used it to buy necessities, or pay rent. The rich invested it. If the rich hadn't gotten a relief check, they wouldn't even have noticed.
I'm looking for a good stock to invest in. One in which there are few, if any, 'centi-millionaire' owners. That way, I don't get left holding the bag, when the 'centi-millionaire's have to liquidate. Remember what happened last year when Elon Musk had a forced-sale of Tesla stock?
In countries where people die from famine there are not a lot of rich people. High concentration of rich people is found in societies where people are not starving.
So you are right in saying that in a world of starvation rich people should be an aberration. That is to be expected.
We tried that in many parts of the world. It was called social realism, socialism and communism. It never worked out. There’s always a group of people who just don’t care and the rest is much worse off than in capitalism. So what do you do with those outliers?
"... minimum 20% tax rate that would hit both the income and unrealized capital gains of U.S. households..."
a tax on unrealized capital gains of any kind is idiotic; literally taxing imaginary wealth. The "unintended consequences" of such a law would be a disaster, in two ways:
1. as intended, by focusing on 'billionaires', the tax will force mass liquidation events on young volatile companies, wiping out the very wealth the law sought to tax (and not just the billionaires' wealth, either)
2. as not intended, assuming the notion of taxing unrealized capital gains (i.e. theoretical gains on paper, not actual income) survives logical and legal challenges, when the "only on billionaires" part gets dropped and "also on your house's market value" comes into play.
The first income tax was a tiny percentage on millionaires. It didn't stay that way, neither would this.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 47.2 ms ] threadThey don't even need a loophole to make up for the loss...
No, it never was. There was a headline rate at that level. But the actual rate was much lower.
You can see this in what people did with pandemic relief checks: regular people used it to buy necessities, or pay rent. The rich invested it. If the rich hadn't gotten a relief check, they wouldn't even have noticed.
If one of your founders is worth more than $100mm on the back of your venture, you’re no longer a startup.
In a world where people die from famine, billionaires should be seem as an aberration, or something immoral.
Taxes wouldn't solve the problem, billionaires must be extinct.
So you are right in saying that in a world of starvation rich people should be an aberration. That is to be expected.
a tax on unrealized capital gains of any kind is idiotic; literally taxing imaginary wealth. The "unintended consequences" of such a law would be a disaster, in two ways:
1. as intended, by focusing on 'billionaires', the tax will force mass liquidation events on young volatile companies, wiping out the very wealth the law sought to tax (and not just the billionaires' wealth, either)
2. as not intended, assuming the notion of taxing unrealized capital gains (i.e. theoretical gains on paper, not actual income) survives logical and legal challenges, when the "only on billionaires" part gets dropped and "also on your house's market value" comes into play.
The first income tax was a tiny percentage on millionaires. It didn't stay that way, neither would this.