0.1% of a billion dollars is still 10m. Since we’re on track to see our first trillionaires soon, I’d argue we need a 100% tax bracket as well. 0.1% of a trillion is 10 billion.
We need to change how stocks work. Separate investing in a company and buying control. That way we can tax unrealized capital gains. Put a 100M$ cap on personal wealth. Since the argument against it is always that people will lose control of companies if they’re forced to sell stock. Either that or ban stock as a medium of anything other than investing in the company. No using it as collateral, no trading it, just straight back to the company for what it’s worth.
How likely is it that the trump tax giveaway was all about FUNDING the Fascist takeover of America ? Because they wouldn’t have had the money otherwise
I hate how politicians always use these things to get their rich loving person in the office. Like they didn’t get richer during Biden administration. Who really thinks that rich getting richer is a Trump or Republican problem is completely unaware of the political situation in the entire World right now. I wish Democrat politicians would stop using this platform to manipulate us into voting for some genocide rich idiot instead of thinking of real solutions. Democrat party will NEVER help us solve this problem in any slightly meaningful way.
I see what they do when they are given a chance. They do the same tax cuts for the rich and fund genocides. It isn’t just republicans that got us into this mess, they are working together for the same rich donators. Thinking they can be your allies is most dangerous thing you can do in politics.
“The same tax cuts.” I don’t like giving a break to low millions earners either but linking to an article describing how the bill raised taxes on high millions earners doesn’t actually support your both sidesing.
See that part you missed about significant majority.
The bill now faces an uphill battle in the Senate, where moderate Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin has expressed major concerns over a variety of elements of the plan.
Oh yeah, this is just a GOP problem. Like people don’t get richer during Biden administration. Please stop using every problem in this system to get your rich genocide candidate elected instead of looking for actual problems.
Stop manipulating people into flip flopping voting for the other party every time this system hurts us more and more, if we don’t get rid of both of them at the same time we only made one monster bigger.
Nitpicking stories out of context is just as bad as lies. Biden does the same things, just lies more about it and hides it better. investmentnews.com/…/biden-bill-provides-tax-cut-…“However, the updated figures also show that despite the higher tax rate, those earning at least $1 million would collectively pay $46.8 billion less in taxes in 2022.”
For what, to make more number go up? Or would you murder someone if you could get away with murder? Or maybe they didn’t get that rich in legal ways, in the first place?
There’s a concept called the hedonic readmill. Essentially “nothing is ever enough.”
You chase power/money for greater happiness, but our natural tendency is to then feel neutral once we achieve it and so you want to chase greater happiness and so on and so on…
Congress is more in charge of taxes and budgets, not the president. However, it would seem Democrats in general want to use this for the upcoming elections (along with nearly everything they promised last election).
I would personally love more information on this topic. I view elections for Congress to be much more important than presidential elections.
Looking around I found this website via her Wikipedia entry. It’s a website that measures how close a member of Congress votes with Biden (but only from 2020 to 2022) and Sinema and Manchin seem to vote with Biden on nearly everything he wanted. My personal opinion is those two senators along with Biden act as the “centrists” (right of center) that we expect them to be.
That’s why I added “against things that mattered.” They mostly voted along party lines on the small stuff, but for the major things that would have been impactful then one or the other would swap their vote or hold back their vote until the bill was watered down enough. It felt almost like it was planned which one would be the block so that neither was the block too often. And eventually the bill would get watered down enough that it wasn’t as impactful and then they could vote yes.
I did get your point, I just wanted more examples. I do believe you, it’s just the info I found must have been incomplete or counted the times they voted with Biden once the bill was watered down.
It did lead me to an interesting point. I’m used to seeing independents being progressive. Not leave the Democrats because they are not centrist enough.
Till we close the loop holes for these billionaire foundations buying elections (i.e. the Koch network) - billionaires will continue to tip the scales their way. Courts also need to be 10 year appointments, not life time.
More over we need to make it easier to remove both federal and state judges from their positions if necessary. As it stands now removing judge for any form of misbehavior is far too difficult.
I read somewhere that that was literally only for a single person. But the fact that taxes were used to aggressively trying to curb wealth hoarding is something we need to look at today
When you’re a billionaire, most of your net worth comes from businesses assets you own (and can borrow against without having to claim the loans as income), not liquid assets.
And guess what those business have? Valuations. Stock price is just an aggregate indicator of the valuation for a company, for the given percentage of shares that are publicly traded. But private companies have valuations, too, and even if they’re not tied to a public stock offering, those valuations are used to form these Billionaire lists.
Same thing with real estate. The value of any asset is based on what someone is willing to pay. Sometimes, you’ll find some crazy billionaire or investment firm who grossly overvalues an asset relative to their peers, and that insane overvaluation does get rolled into those lists.
But such is the nature of economics. You’ve neither gained nor lost value until someone pays you. Until then, it’s anyone’s guess.
No, they don’t. Liquid assets don’t increase in value. If they had $1 in cash seven years ago, it would be worth less than that today due to inflation.
I’m pretty sure that liquid assets are things that you can spend, so cash and bank accounts. Anything that you have to sell to buy things is not a liquid asset. (Note that we are not talking about barter. I had a friend at college who traded a snake for a VW camper, neither of which would be considered a liquid asset. Even though technically you could put the snake in a giant blender…)
No, a liquid asset is one that can be sold quickly for its full market value.
For example, if you have stocks worth $100K, you can quickly convert them to $100K in cash. Whereas real estate is not liquid, because you usually cannot quickly convert a house worth $100K into cash.
Some people make a distinction between “liquid assets” and “near-liquid assets” and would classify something like a money market account (which also does grow in value as many liquid assets do) as a liquid asset, and maybe some forms of stock as near-liquid assets…but I’m splitting hairs.
But is it really fair that a person with 50 million can turn that into 100 million
Yes.
And since that can only happen by investing that amount into the economy, it’s wisely encouraged by the system, versus putting the 50 million in a vault somewhere.
It’s essentially an investment in the country’s further financialization and privitization…both of which are things completely ruining the country (unless you’re rich, then these movements just make more parts of the country your own personal playground).
And, it’s worth pointing out that the rich carry a large asset base in their own companies which they can borrow against tax free while the value of the underlying assets continually grow. The only thing similar a non-rich person has access to is a home equity line of credit…and even then you own a home with equity which…you ain’t rich but you ain’t exactly broke either.
You think it’s sad because you’re deeply ignorant. Do you also think that if the $5 baseball card you bought becomes worth $100, that that means you’ve stolen $95? lol
The median 40 year old has retirement savings of $45K, not $5K. And the median 70 year old has savings of $200K. In both groups, doubling the amount is quite significant.
Using median makes it a loaded statistic skewed in favor of the minority (in this case, the wealthy).
Over half the country is living paycheck-to-paycheck, so that median number is already in the ‘well-off’ category by default, making them irrelevant to the main point of discussion.
Is that true? Median is literally taking the value in the middle. So if there are 30 million 70 year olds then it would be picking the 15th millionth person and using their savings.
Averages or Means are skewed by outliers, not the median. The median is just picking the middle number in a list of numbers. There is no skewing possible. If you have 99 people making $1 per year and one person making $1B per year, the median is $1. The average/mean is $1,000,000.99 which is way skewed.
What does fairness have to do with it? Compound interest is just math.
One could trivially make an argument that we should redistribute the wealth among the population, but there is not a clear way how to do this effectively, or it would have been done already.
The hard part is taking on the appropriate amount of risk in order to actualize those gains; a bank won’t just give you a 10% interest rate, you have to work your ass of for it. An entrepreneur needs to assess the landscape and invest in what the market will want tomorrow, and most people guess suboptimally (3-6%), or end up losing money, whether in fact (negative returns) or relative to inflation (0-3%).
Even pointing to the S&P 500, as most people do, you still need to make the conscious decision to sell and take profits, FOMO be damned. Or alternatively, taking a perceived loss but actual profit (e.g., you didn’t sell right at the peak, but that’s usually okay). It’s not easy, and most people don’t have the time or stomach for it; these people are best served by long term, government-backed bonds, after which you will come out only slightly ahead of inflation.
Using the rule of 72, and a 3% bond rate, it would actually take you 24 years to double your money, not seven. And that, my friend, is why you and I are not billionaires.
but there is not a clear way how to do this effectively, or it would have been done already.
That is terrible reasoning. That would only be true if every idea ever come up with had been tried and no new ideas will come up.
UBI would be quite effective for many reasons. The reason it hasn’t been done already has nothing to do with how effective it might be. And we know giving everyone money is effective, because Alaska does it with their oil dividends.
Another method that has definitely not been fully implemented is debt jubilees for people with more debt than assets to cover that debt (e.g. student debt forgiveness, medical debt forgiveness, etc.).
It’s not reasoning, or an argument for or against, it is just a statement. I’d admit that it’s probably a tautology.
What the post described is a taxation and societal problem, not a problem with investing or compound interest in general.
I’d easily agree that society is unfair, and that our taxation policies are directly antagonistic to the middle class, but again, this is simply math (and though it is theoretical, microeconomics).
Add comment