Make one simple change to capitalism: put in. A constitutional hard cap on personal wealth. Anything income or gift or whatever over 1 million goes 100% to taxes
Nobody has some inherent right to be rich or powerful. Nobody got extremely rich by themselves or through hard work, it’s just sheer fucking luck and standing on the backs of others
Nobody should have to be poor either
So without changing and overhauling the entire world, just set a hard cap on personal wealth.
May e also company sizes. Any networth over 1 billion? 100% to tax. Companies shouldn’t be able to have over, say 1000 employees either.
I don’t want a trillion dollar company with 200.000 employees. Give me 10.000 companies worth 100 million dollar companies that each employ a hundred or so workers.
Two simple rules that would change the world. Nobody would be sicher more powerful than anyone else.
All it requires is that everyone in the world says ENOUGH. Enough with the abuses from the rich and powerful
Huey Long campaigned on a wealth cap back in the 30’s on his ‘Share our wealth’ platform. The excess wealth taxed at 100% was to be used for essentially a universal basic income (Each person to receive the equivalent of $38k yearly).
He was assassinated. The rich elite of Louisiana and the Oil companies he massively increased state taxes on to fund his public programs rejoiced.
You are a CEO and you get a salary of, say, $10k, plus 1000 shares, each worth $1. So, in total, that year your worth is $120k + $1000 = $121k.
Now, you’re incredibly successful as a CEO, you make your shareholders drool for your company’s shares. Which makes their price skyrocket. Each share is now worth $1000! Such success!
But wait! No! Catastrophe!
Your worth has just gone up to $120k + $1000k! The share’s value on their own hits the upper limit of wealth!
They’re not your money, mind you, you can’t do anything with them unless you cash them in, sell them.
So, you have two choices - you stop getting any salary and have $0 for spending (hopefully the office cafeteria is well stocked!), or you sell some shares, give the money to charity, and pray the stock price doesn’t go up. And if it does, you have to sell again, lose the money, and… oh, but now you no longer hold a controlling interest in your own company - some three dudes who work together bought up the shares, spread them around evenly (so neither of them goes above the $1000k), and they effectively control your own company, telling you what to do with it.
Companies shouldn’t be able to have over, say 1000 employees either.
So, instead of having some large companies, you end up with chains of “totally not the same” companies that just work together. “Oh, we’ve outsourced our HR to company X, which is Totally Not The Same as our company, they just don’t work with anybody else and we have full data transparency with them.”
I am pretty sure than between the current model that is slowly but inexorably going towards: “2 kinds of people in the world: trillionaires and people depending on trillionaire’s charity to survive”, and the model decribed above, we can find a middle ground.
Not so long ago, the ratio between CEOs pay and median worker pay was 20. Today it’s 280. There were successful and motivated CEO at the time.
The US had a period during which the highest tax bracket was 90%. There were CEO, there were rich folks and there were entrepreneurs.
Enough with all the “impossible”. The current situation is the anomaly. The current situation is the not sustainable approach. It’s not just the US, neo-liberalism has spread over the decades with the very very very exact same results absolutely everywhere it was tried:
-impoverished population overall
-reduction of services to the population
-increased public deficit
-ultra-rich getting immensely richer
Either we keep saying “it’s complicated” and keep course. Its end is already known: a collapse of the economy on itself: there is not enough people left making a decent enough living to buy what is produced, and everything belong to the ultra-rich.
Or we change course. It’s almost a matter of survival for the poor.
So, what you’re writing is in good faith, I can tell, but shows a fundamental lack of understanding how shares work.
If the value of a company goes up, the number of shares doesn’t change, the price per share increases. So, if a company emitted 100 shares, and they were valued at $10 each, for the worth of the company being $1,000.
Now, stuff happens, and the company is now worth $10,000. It doesn’t mean that there are now 1000 shares, it means that each share is now worth $100.
Which means that there are no “excess shares”.
What a company could do is something called “stock dilution”. For example, you have that company from before, worth $10,000, with 100 shares, $100 per share, right? They dilute the shares and emit another 100 shares, bringing the total to 200. But the value of the company is still $10,000, it just means that the value per share is now $50.
Seems like a good idea? Here’s the problem - control over a company is still determined by the percentage of owned shares. You had 100 shares? You need 51 to independently control the company. You now have 200? You now need 101 shares for the exact same level of control.
Which means: either the CEO of that company loses control of the company (effectively “gives it away”, potentially to malicious actors from the competition who just want to shut him down), or he still needs to own 50%+1 shares (so from 51 to 101 shares), meaning his wealth doesn’t change at all.
Make one simple change to capitalism: put in. A constitutional hard cap on personal wealth. Anything income or gift or whatever over 1 million goes 100% to taxes
You don’t understand where the vast majority of the wealthiest’s wealth comes from. There’s no “income” or “gift” at that level, it’s just the fact that they own things that are becoming more valuable over time. The vast majority of the increase in these people’s wealth over time is newly-created; it’s value that literally didn’t exist before, not an amount of cash money taken away from anyone else.
Speaking of value: net worth is just a valuation, a price tag. It’s the market saying “I would pay you $X for a share of this if you sold it”. If I buy a rookie baseball card for $5 and the player becomes famous for whatever reason and my card is now worth $100 because the demand significantly increased, my net worth increased by $95, but no one was deprived of $95 to make that so.
A hard cap on wealth is effectively legislating that if something you already own becomes too valuable, you’re not allowed to continue owning it anymore. And any sensible person should understand why that makes zero sense.
The vast majority of the increase in these people’s wealth over time is newly-created; it’s value that literally didn’t exist before, not an amount of cash money taken away from anyone else.
A wealth tax will go after that, and that will absolutely make sense. They can sell the shares they have in the companies, and that will make them think twice before cheating the system to grossely exagerate the value of their companies.
And if we talk about start-ups or other special cases where the CEOs can’t sell shares and/or we don’t really know their worth, we can have them give shares as payment. The gov will sit on them until they have actual value and sell them, or relesase them back if said value was lower than estimated at the time.
A wealth tax will go after that, and that will absolutely make sense.
It absolutely doesn’t make sense to charge a tax of real/actual money on a value that’s theoretical.
They can sell the shares they have in the companies, and that will make them think twice before cheating the system to grossely exagerate the value of their companies.
It’s irrational to assume “cheating the system to grossely [sic] exagerate [sic] the value of their companies” of every entity valued at more than an arbitrary $X.
It absolutely doesn’t make sense to charge a tax of real/actual money on a value that’s theoretical.
That “theoretical value” is used as collateral to borrow money for billionaires expenses.
Companies can even buy one another through shares exchange. So tell me:
Why is it theoretical only for taxes purpose, but very real when you talk to a bank?.
It’s irrational to assume “cheating the system to grossely [sic] exagerate [sic] the value of their companies” of every entity valued at more than an arbitrary $X.
I didn’t write it was all of them. I’m talking about the AI bubble and IPO scams.
“The stuff you own is now too valuable, so we get to steal it from you.”
Is that your opinion on properties taxes? Because that’s something you own, and you pay a tax based on its value. That value is also theoretical, by the way: as long as you don’t sell the house, who knows how much it’s worth?
And… is that not the most expensive thing you own??
Or is it stealing only when we talk about billionaires wealth?
And at this scale, it’s not “stuff you own”. You may have an issue assessing what a billion is. Do you know the difference between a million and a billion? It’s roughly a billion…
That 20M$ mansion gaining 10% is absolutely peanuts.
That “theoretical value” is used as collateral to borrow money for billionaires expenses.
And unless the loan is defaulted on, it never stops being theoretical.
Why is it theoretical only for taxes purpose, but very real when you talk to a bank?.
Loaded question, it’s not any less theoretical in the latter case.
Also, it’s entirely possible for some scandal to plummet the value of a stock overnight, such that the value that was used as collateral is now not worth nearly that much. But it is the lender’s prerogative to decide to take that risk, it’s no one’s business other than the lender and the borrower, both private entities.
Is that your opinion on properties taxes?
Yes, property taxes should not be a thing.
Hypocrisy detection failed, lol.
And at this scale, it’s not “stuff you own”. You may have an issue assessing what a billion is. Do you know the difference between a million and a billion? It’s roughly a billion…
You may have an issue understanding the simple phrase “stuff you own”, since you’re here apparently arguing that beyond a certain valuation, assets are no longer assets.
Also, it’s entirely possible for some scandal to plummet the value of a stock overnight, such that the value that was used as collateral is now not worth nearly that much. But it is the lender’s prerogative to decide to take that risk, it’s no one’s business other than the lender and the borrower, both private entities.
1.Sure, I will take your risk assessment over these banks anytime (not).
2.If the value is so unstable it can plummet over night, then it was grossly overestimated initially, back to my previous point.
Yes, property taxes should not be a thing.
Neither should roads, schools, garbage collection, police, firefighters, etc, I guess.
Hypocrisy detection failed, lol.
You know, it was either hypocrisy or weird cult of the billonaires, as I fail to see why you so much want to protect them from paying any tax…
You may have an issue understanding the simple phrase “stuff you own”, since you’re here apparently arguing that beyond a certain valuation, assets are no longer assets.
It’s not “stuff” in the sense no one will come after a house, a car, a yacht, etc. It’s not money they need to survive. You could still tax by hundreds of billions the ultra-rich class at the country level (I assume US here) and neither their lifestyle nor their long term prospective lifestyle would be impacted the slightest. That’s the scale we’re talking about.
Or alternatively, we can keep saying it’s complicated and/or doesn’t make sense, and you can enjoy record breaking wealths of a few that will make headlines while the life expectation, education level, overall population health keeps going down and poverty keeps going up… until one day, it catches you!
1.Sure, I will take your risk assessment over these banks anytime (not). 2.If the value is so unstable it can plummet over night, then it was grossly overestimated initially, back to my previous point.
Again, none of your business, because you’re not the lender.
Neither should roads, schools, garbage collection, police, firefighters, etc, I guess.
Idiotic straw man which I will be ignoring.
I fail to see why you so much want to protect them from paying any tax…
This is you projecting your unwillingness to support anything that doesn’t personally benefit you.
The principle of taxing people based on the value of what they already own is nonsensical, no matter how much or how little that value is. Objecting to both wealth taxes and property taxes just means I’m not a hypocrite.
You could still tax by hundreds of billions the ultra-rich class at the country level (I assume US here) and neither their lifestyle nor their long term prospective lifestyle would be impacted the slightest.
Taxing based on ‘you could do without it’, especially when the definition of that excess is completely arbitrarily defined, is a horrendous precedent to set. Vibe taxation. Every wealth tax aimed at the ‘ultra-rich’ in other countries in the past has either been repealed outright, or was broadened so that it, surprise surprise, is no longer aimed only at the ultra-rich, and falls into the lap of of the middle class, once again.
Or alternatively, we can keep saying it’s complicated and/or doesn’t make sense
Based on the failures already witnessed elsewhere in the world, yes. It objectively doesn’t make sense.
you can enjoy record breaking wealths of a few that will make headlines
Inflation is a thing, so those records will always be broken eventually. It only “makes headlines” to appeal to dullards who don’t understand things like that. The same type of people who freak out over sensationalist “medical headlines” that are never as drastic as the clickbait article makes them out to be. The same type of people think the violent crime rate is constantly rising because they stare at 24-hour news networks who are incentivized to get your attention, not be accurate, while the actual rate has dropped steadily for decades and decades.
while the life expectation education level, overall population health keeps going down and poverty keeps going up…
Again, none of your business, because you’re not the lender.
Let’s take a practical example: please find a decent DDR5 offer. No way it could have gone up because virtual money bought it all, couldn’t it?
Idiotic straw man which I will be ignoring.
If you don’t understand the relation between taxes and their use, yeah: better ignore it, for your sake…
The principle of taxing people based on the value of what they already own is nonsensical, no matter how much or how little that value is. Objecting to both wealth taxes and property taxes just means I’m not a hypocrite.
Keep repeating it’s “nonsensical” doesn’t make it nonsensical.
Taxing based on ‘you could do without it’, especially when the definition of that excess is completely arbitrarily defined, is a horrendous precedent to set. Vibe taxation. Every wealth tax aimed at the ‘ultra-rich’ in other countries in the past has either been repealed outright, or was broadened so that it, surprise surprise, is no longer aimed only at the ultra-rich, and falls into the lap of of the middle class, once again.
Wrong. France had a wealth tax for decades. It was repealed by current President Macron, who was propped by… a billionaire.
A proposal for a ultra-wealth tax (proposal was above 100M$ of wealth) was proposed by an economist in France, and he got support from a bench of Nobel Prize of Economy recipients (among a large support from economy experts).
Inflation is a thing, so those records will always be broken eventually. It only “makes headlines” to appeal to dullards who don’t understand things like that.
From 2020 to 2025 Q1 to Q1, from 12T$ to 22T$, that’s the equivalent 12.9% per year. “inflation”, sure…
Based on the failures already witnessed elsewhere in the world, yes. It objectively doesn’t make sense.
It didn’t fail. Billionaires managed to get rid of it. They use their virtual non-real money to acquire as much news medias they could, so that they could prop their guy all the way up.
A hard cap on wealth is effectively legislating that if something you already own becomes too valuable, you’re not allowed to continue owning it anymore
I don’t know how else it would work. Do you? The alternative is that a handful of people are permitted own and control most of society’s resources while everyone else subsists on scraps. No one person should control the same amount of resources as a small or medium-sized government, except without the checks and balances that governments (should) have. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
The way I imagine it working is that if you own stock in a company that now went up in value and now pushes your net worth above the cap, this puts you in a position where you now have more control than society permits you to have. In this case, some of your stock is sold off for taxes or parts of the company are split off and sold for taxes. You can of course proactively structure your business with the understanding that you’ll give up business unit x and y while keeping z if you do get close to the cap rather than waiting and having the government force your hand. Either way, the end result is that you have less control, the government gets tax money to fund social programs, and others take on some of the control you previously enjoyed by buying up your stock or business units (e.g., a worker collective pools their savings to buy it).
Not sure how well all that would work in practice, or all of the detailed policies that would be required to make it fair and avoid major disruptions to the market. All I know is what we have now is definitely not working.
That’s my point, actually. It doesn’t work in practice. Given that ultimately, it’s third parties that determine the value of things you own that are on the open market, placing hard limits like that would open the door to massive gaming of those systems. It’d also be practically impossible to enforce in any real way, as that would require an actual full audit (net worth figures you see in the media are educated guesses, not enough certainty for the application of law), during which the valuation of the assets in question can be manipulated downward in myriad ways.
The alternative is that a handful of people are permitted own and control most of society’s resources while everyone else subsists on scraps.
The poor aren’t poor because the wealthy are wealthy. Like I said, the vast majority of the wealthiest people’s wealth is not cash money, it’s a theoretical price tag going up over time. Over the past hundred years, the number of billionaires per capita has increased 7x, but a hundred years ago, poverty was MUCH more prevalent than it is today.
The two simply aren’t connected the way you assume they are, because wealth isn’t the zero-sum game you assume it is.
The way I imagine it working is that if you own stock in a company that now went up in value and now pushes your net worth above the cap, this puts you in a position where you now have more control than society permits you to have.
Really take a moment to think about this concept. You own a thing that’s valuable to others. If it becomes too valuable (a threshold defined completely arbitrarily, by the way) to others, “society” no longer “permits” you to continue owning it?
In this case, some of your stock is sold off for taxes or parts of the company are split off and sold for taxes.
In other words, the government will literally steal your stuff if the public decides it’s more valuable than the amount the government arbitrarily decided is too much?
the government gets tax money to fund social programs
Extremely wishful thinking. You’re actually more likely to net a loss of tax revenue overall attempting this, as people nearing the cap will rearrange their assets to avoid going over the cap, so no new revenue will be coming in, meanwhile the logistic cost of even determining whether someone is over the cap is certainly going to cost much more taxpayer money than what is brought in (which, again, is most likely to be literally zero or very close to it).
There is a reason that every country that’s previously attempted a policy like this aimed at the wealthiest has either since repealed it, or changed it such that it no longer targets the wealthiest (i.e. a ‘wealth tax’ that the middle class is made to pay as well). I’m interested in learning from their mistakes, not repeating them.
You make valid points and perhaps a wealth cap is a naive solution to the problem. Enhancing or even just properly enforcing existing anti-trust laws might be a better way to accomplish many of the same goals.
To your point about wealth not being a zero-sum game, it depends. There have been many innovators who have created wealth for both themselves and society as a whole and have been justly rewarded. I have no problem with that. Then there is wealth that is created via anti-competitive, exploitative, and rent-seeking practices. In many cases, a company will start off doing the former, then grow to be a huge monster that no longer innovates and instead continually enshittifies and becomes an overall parasite on society that blocks competition and stifles innovation, often capturing regulatory agencies and doing all sorts of unethical things with no consequences. At that point, the company and the individuals controlling it are no longer net contributors to society and need to be put in check, or otherwise, it does become a zero-sum game.
a huge monster that no longer innovates and instead continually enshittifies and becomes an overall parasite on society that blocks competition and stifles innovation, often capturing regulatory agencies and doing all sorts of unethical things with no consequences.
Regulation that prevents the anti-competitive etc. behaviors directly, instead of trying to assess a roundabout ‘fine’ based on net worth (which also carries the implicit assumption that any entity that reaches the ‘cap’ does so unethically, which is absolutely not the case—for example, Costco is a company with a famous reputation for being generous to both its customer base and its workforce, and it’s valued at several hundred billion, its founder is a billionaire himself), is the best way to approach this, I think.
And honestly, if we’re at a point where the sources of the regulation are truly “captured”, then we’re also at a point where trying to deal with the above behaviors with a tax is even less likely to succeed. Fixing that ‘capture’ should be the primary focus in that case.
At that point, the company and the individuals controlling it are no longer net contributors to society and need to be put in check, or otherwise, it does become a zero-sum game.
That’s not really what “zero-sum” means. What you’re describing is the company/entity becoming a net drain on the economy, but that doesn’t change the fact that wealth isn’t zero-sum. Being zero-sum would mean that it’s impossible for the grand total combined wealth among everyone to ever change, and therefore no one’s wealth can ever go up without someone else’s going down, or vice versa.
The poor aren’t poor because the wealthy are wealthy. Like I said, the vast majority of the wealthiest people’s wealth is not cash money, it’s a theoretical price tag going up over time. Over the past hundred years, the number of billionaires per capita has increased 7x, but a hundred years ago, poverty was MUCH more prevalent than it is today.
The poor are poor because while they’re paid peanuts, everybody else estimates the value they create through their work in very large numbers. It is absolutely a matter of work-value distribution. Calling that “wealth redistribution” is an artifact to prop the “tax is steal” propaganda.
Tax the companies “theoretical price tag” and see it adjusting to much more realistic numbers, that would be beneficial for everyone.
Lastly, we can keep saying all we want about one hundred years ago, but at the time, economic growth was 2 digits. Today it’s one digit, and almost all of it value goes straight up to the ultra-rich. Growth is decreasing but ultra-rich worth net keeps increasing at faster rate. How can one not see this is bonkers?
Want to fix all this?
Make one simple change to capitalism: put in. A constitutional hard cap on personal wealth. Anything income or gift or whatever over 1 million goes 100% to taxes
Nobody has some inherent right to be rich or powerful. Nobody got extremely rich by themselves or through hard work, it’s just sheer fucking luck and standing on the backs of others
Nobody should have to be poor either
So without changing and overhauling the entire world, just set a hard cap on personal wealth.
May e also company sizes. Any networth over 1 billion? 100% to tax. Companies shouldn’t be able to have over, say 1000 employees either.
I don’t want a trillion dollar company with 200.000 employees. Give me 10.000 companies worth 100 million dollar companies that each employ a hundred or so workers.
Two simple rules that would change the world. Nobody would be sicher more powerful than anyone else.
All it requires is that everyone in the world says ENOUGH. Enough with the abuses from the rich and powerful
Huey Long campaigned on a wealth cap back in the 30’s on his ‘Share our wealth’ platform. The excess wealth taxed at 100% was to be used for essentially a universal basic income (Each person to receive the equivalent of $38k yearly).
He was assassinated. The rich elite of Louisiana and the Oil companies he massively increased state taxes on to fund his public programs rejoiced.
Ken Burn’s first documentary was on Huey Long, highly worth a watch.
Putting a hard cap on the ratio between the highest and the lowest paid workers in any organisation would help as well.
THIS might be a better solution, although it still doesn’t fix the “CEO is only earning $1 a year” situations like with Bezos or Zuckerberg.
Alright, let’s run a quick model.
Let’s say the upper cap is $1000k.
You are a CEO and you get a salary of, say, $10k, plus 1000 shares, each worth $1. So, in total, that year your worth is $120k + $1000 = $121k.
Now, you’re incredibly successful as a CEO, you make your shareholders drool for your company’s shares. Which makes their price skyrocket. Each share is now worth $1000! Such success!
But wait! No! Catastrophe!
Your worth has just gone up to $120k + $1000k! The share’s value on their own hits the upper limit of wealth!
They’re not your money, mind you, you can’t do anything with them unless you cash them in, sell them.
So, you have two choices - you stop getting any salary and have $0 for spending (hopefully the office cafeteria is well stocked!), or you sell some shares, give the money to charity, and pray the stock price doesn’t go up. And if it does, you have to sell again, lose the money, and… oh, but now you no longer hold a controlling interest in your own company - some three dudes who work together bought up the shares, spread them around evenly (so neither of them goes above the $1000k), and they effectively control your own company, telling you what to do with it.
So, instead of having some large companies, you end up with chains of “totally not the same” companies that just work together. “Oh, we’ve outsourced our HR to company X, which is Totally Not The Same as our company, they just don’t work with anybody else and we have full data transparency with them.”
I am pretty sure than between the current model that is slowly but inexorably going towards: “2 kinds of people in the world: trillionaires and people depending on trillionaire’s charity to survive”, and the model decribed above, we can find a middle ground.
Not so long ago, the ratio between CEOs pay and median worker pay was 20. Today it’s 280. There were successful and motivated CEO at the time.
The US had a period during which the highest tax bracket was 90%. There were CEO, there were rich folks and there were entrepreneurs.
Enough with all the “impossible”. The current situation is the anomaly. The current situation is the not sustainable approach. It’s not just the US, neo-liberalism has spread over the decades with the very very very exact same results absolutely everywhere it was tried:
-impoverished population overall -reduction of services to the population -increased public deficit -ultra-rich getting immensely richer
Either we keep saying “it’s complicated” and keep course. Its end is already known: a collapse of the economy on itself: there is not enough people left making a decent enough living to buy what is produced, and everything belong to the ultra-rich.
Or we change course. It’s almost a matter of survival for the poor.
I agree! I’m only saying that often the “simple solutions” aren’t really solutions when you stop for a moment to really think about the consequences.
There are several countries that have a wealth tax and they still have rich CEOs, so there is a way to address the problems that you’re describing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_tax
Of course! It’s just never as easy as people think.
Oh yeah, 100% agree.
You’re right that their plan won’t literally work as they’ve designed it, but they have the right idea and ideas can be refined.
Yes, they’ll find loopholes. Close those, too.
When share prices drive someone above the wealth limit, the excess shares are distributed equally among everyone involved in the companies
So, what you’re writing is in good faith, I can tell, but shows a fundamental lack of understanding how shares work.
If the value of a company goes up, the number of shares doesn’t change, the price per share increases. So, if a company emitted 100 shares, and they were valued at $10 each, for the worth of the company being $1,000.
Now, stuff happens, and the company is now worth $10,000. It doesn’t mean that there are now 1000 shares, it means that each share is now worth $100.
Which means that there are no “excess shares”.
What a company could do is something called “stock dilution”. For example, you have that company from before, worth $10,000, with 100 shares, $100 per share, right? They dilute the shares and emit another 100 shares, bringing the total to 200. But the value of the company is still $10,000, it just means that the value per share is now $50.
Seems like a good idea? Here’s the problem - control over a company is still determined by the percentage of owned shares. You had 100 shares? You need 51 to independently control the company. You now have 200? You now need 101 shares for the exact same level of control.
Which means: either the CEO of that company loses control of the company (effectively “gives it away”, potentially to malicious actors from the competition who just want to shut him down), or he still needs to own 50%+1 shares (so from 51 to 101 shares), meaning his wealth doesn’t change at all.
Agreed. Fixing our issues has nothing to do with invading Greenland and Venezuela, but is entirely to do with the redistribution of wealth.
You don’t understand where the vast majority of the wealthiest’s wealth comes from. There’s no “income” or “gift” at that level, it’s just the fact that they own things that are becoming more valuable over time. The vast majority of the increase in these people’s wealth over time is newly-created; it’s value that literally didn’t exist before, not an amount of cash money taken away from anyone else.
Speaking of value: net worth is just a valuation, a price tag. It’s the market saying “I would pay you $X for a share of this if you sold it”. If I buy a rookie baseball card for $5 and the player becomes famous for whatever reason and my card is now worth $100 because the demand significantly increased, my net worth increased by $95, but no one was deprived of $95 to make that so.
A hard cap on wealth is effectively legislating that if something you already own becomes too valuable, you’re not allowed to continue owning it anymore. And any sensible person should understand why that makes zero sense.
A wealth tax will go after that, and that will absolutely make sense. They can sell the shares they have in the companies, and that will make them think twice before cheating the system to grossely exagerate the value of their companies.
And if we talk about start-ups or other special cases where the CEOs can’t sell shares and/or we don’t really know their worth, we can have them give shares as payment. The gov will sit on them until they have actual value and sell them, or relesase them back if said value was lower than estimated at the time.
It absolutely doesn’t make sense to charge a tax of real/actual money on a value that’s theoretical.
It’s irrational to assume “cheating the system to grossely [sic] exagerate [sic] the value of their companies” of every entity valued at more than an arbitrary $X.
For example, Costco is a company worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and yet it’s famous for how generous it is both to its customers and to its workforce. Its founder left the company a billionaire himself.
“The stuff you own is now too valuable, so we get to steal it from you.”
No.
That “theoretical value” is used as collateral to borrow money for billionaires expenses. Companies can even buy one another through shares exchange. So tell me:
Why is it theoretical only for taxes purpose, but very real when you talk to a bank?.
I didn’t write it was all of them. I’m talking about the AI bubble and IPO scams.
Is that your opinion on properties taxes? Because that’s something you own, and you pay a tax based on its value. That value is also theoretical, by the way: as long as you don’t sell the house, who knows how much it’s worth?
And… is that not the most expensive thing you own??
Or is it stealing only when we talk about billionaires wealth?
And at this scale, it’s not “stuff you own”. You may have an issue assessing what a billion is. Do you know the difference between a million and a billion? It’s roughly a billion…
That 20M$ mansion gaining 10% is absolutely peanuts.
And unless the loan is defaulted on, it never stops being theoretical.
Loaded question, it’s not any less theoretical in the latter case.
Also, it’s entirely possible for some scandal to plummet the value of a stock overnight, such that the value that was used as collateral is now not worth nearly that much. But it is the lender’s prerogative to decide to take that risk, it’s no one’s business other than the lender and the borrower, both private entities.
Yes, property taxes should not be a thing.
Hypocrisy detection failed, lol.
You may have an issue understanding the simple phrase “stuff you own”, since you’re here apparently arguing that beyond a certain valuation, assets are no longer assets.
1.Sure, I will take your risk assessment over these banks anytime (not). 2.If the value is so unstable it can plummet over night, then it was grossly overestimated initially, back to my previous point.
Neither should roads, schools, garbage collection, police, firefighters, etc, I guess.
You know, it was either hypocrisy or weird cult of the billonaires, as I fail to see why you so much want to protect them from paying any tax…
It’s not “stuff” in the sense no one will come after a house, a car, a yacht, etc. It’s not money they need to survive. You could still tax by hundreds of billions the ultra-rich class at the country level (I assume US here) and neither their lifestyle nor their long term prospective lifestyle would be impacted the slightest. That’s the scale we’re talking about.
Or alternatively, we can keep saying it’s complicated and/or doesn’t make sense, and you can enjoy record breaking wealths of a few that will make headlines while the life expectation, education level, overall population health keeps going down and poverty keeps going up… until one day, it catches you!
Again, none of your business, because you’re not the lender.
Idiotic straw man which I will be ignoring.
This is you projecting your unwillingness to support anything that doesn’t personally benefit you.
The principle of taxing people based on the value of what they already own is nonsensical, no matter how much or how little that value is. Objecting to both wealth taxes and property taxes just means I’m not a hypocrite.
Taxing based on ‘you could do without it’, especially when the definition of that excess is completely arbitrarily defined, is a horrendous precedent to set. Vibe taxation. Every wealth tax aimed at the ‘ultra-rich’ in other countries in the past has either been repealed outright, or was broadened so that it, surprise surprise, is no longer aimed only at the ultra-rich, and falls into the lap of of the middle class, once again.
Based on the failures already witnessed elsewhere in the world, yes. It objectively doesn’t make sense.
Inflation is a thing, so those records will always be broken eventually. It only “makes headlines” to appeal to dullards who don’t understand things like that. The same type of people who freak out over sensationalist “medical headlines” that are never as drastic as the clickbait article makes them out to be. The same type of people think the violent crime rate is constantly rising because they stare at 24-hour news networks who are incentivized to get your attention, not be accurate, while the actual rate has dropped steadily for decades and decades.
Liar on all counts:
Hopefully, one day, the facts will catch you.
Let’s take a practical example: please find a decent DDR5 offer. No way it could have gone up because virtual money bought it all, couldn’t it?
If you don’t understand the relation between taxes and their use, yeah: better ignore it, for your sake…
Keep repeating it’s “nonsensical” doesn’t make it nonsensical.
Wrong. France had a wealth tax for decades. It was repealed by current President Macron, who was propped by… a billionaire. A proposal for a ultra-wealth tax (proposal was above 100M$ of wealth) was proposed by an economist in France, and he got support from a bench of Nobel Prize of Economy recipients (among a large support from economy experts).
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBLTP1246
From 2020 to 2025 Q1 to Q1, from 12T$ to 22T$, that’s the equivalent 12.9% per year. “inflation”, sure…
It didn’t fail. Billionaires managed to get rid of it. They use their virtual non-real money to acquire as much news medias they could, so that they could prop their guy all the way up.
Indeed, my bad! It’s a world class winning https://www.healthdata.org/news-events/newsroom/news-releases/increases-us-life-expectancy-forecasted-stall-2050-poorer-health
https://www.future-ed.org/what-the-new-pisa-results-really-say-about-u-s-schools/
https://www.cbo.gov/interactive/2025-reconciliation-act
I don’t know how else it would work. Do you? The alternative is that a handful of people are permitted own and control most of society’s resources while everyone else subsists on scraps. No one person should control the same amount of resources as a small or medium-sized government, except without the checks and balances that governments (should) have. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
The way I imagine it working is that if you own stock in a company that now went up in value and now pushes your net worth above the cap, this puts you in a position where you now have more control than society permits you to have. In this case, some of your stock is sold off for taxes or parts of the company are split off and sold for taxes. You can of course proactively structure your business with the understanding that you’ll give up business unit x and y while keeping z if you do get close to the cap rather than waiting and having the government force your hand. Either way, the end result is that you have less control, the government gets tax money to fund social programs, and others take on some of the control you previously enjoyed by buying up your stock or business units (e.g., a worker collective pools their savings to buy it).
Not sure how well all that would work in practice, or all of the detailed policies that would be required to make it fair and avoid major disruptions to the market. All I know is what we have now is definitely not working.
That’s my point, actually. It doesn’t work in practice. Given that ultimately, it’s third parties that determine the value of things you own that are on the open market, placing hard limits like that would open the door to massive gaming of those systems. It’d also be practically impossible to enforce in any real way, as that would require an actual full audit (net worth figures you see in the media are educated guesses, not enough certainty for the application of law), during which the valuation of the assets in question can be manipulated downward in myriad ways.
The poor aren’t poor because the wealthy are wealthy. Like I said, the vast majority of the wealthiest people’s wealth is not cash money, it’s a theoretical price tag going up over time. Over the past hundred years, the number of billionaires per capita has increased 7x, but a hundred years ago, poverty was MUCH more prevalent than it is today.
The two simply aren’t connected the way you assume they are, because wealth isn’t the zero-sum game you assume it is.
Really take a moment to think about this concept. You own a thing that’s valuable to others. If it becomes too valuable (a threshold defined completely arbitrarily, by the way) to others, “society” no longer “permits” you to continue owning it?
In other words, the government will literally steal your stuff if the public decides it’s more valuable than the amount the government arbitrarily decided is too much?
Extremely wishful thinking. You’re actually more likely to net a loss of tax revenue overall attempting this, as people nearing the cap will rearrange their assets to avoid going over the cap, so no new revenue will be coming in, meanwhile the logistic cost of even determining whether someone is over the cap is certainly going to cost much more taxpayer money than what is brought in (which, again, is most likely to be literally zero or very close to it).
There is a reason that every country that’s previously attempted a policy like this aimed at the wealthiest has either since repealed it, or changed it such that it no longer targets the wealthiest (i.e. a ‘wealth tax’ that the middle class is made to pay as well). I’m interested in learning from their mistakes, not repeating them.
That’s for sure.
You make valid points and perhaps a wealth cap is a naive solution to the problem. Enhancing or even just properly enforcing existing anti-trust laws might be a better way to accomplish many of the same goals.
To your point about wealth not being a zero-sum game, it depends. There have been many innovators who have created wealth for both themselves and society as a whole and have been justly rewarded. I have no problem with that. Then there is wealth that is created via anti-competitive, exploitative, and rent-seeking practices. In many cases, a company will start off doing the former, then grow to be a huge monster that no longer innovates and instead continually enshittifies and becomes an overall parasite on society that blocks competition and stifles innovation, often capturing regulatory agencies and doing all sorts of unethical things with no consequences. At that point, the company and the individuals controlling it are no longer net contributors to society and need to be put in check, or otherwise, it does become a zero-sum game.
Regulation that prevents the anti-competitive etc. behaviors directly, instead of trying to assess a roundabout ‘fine’ based on net worth (which also carries the implicit assumption that any entity that reaches the ‘cap’ does so unethically, which is absolutely not the case—for example, Costco is a company with a famous reputation for being generous to both its customer base and its workforce, and it’s valued at several hundred billion, its founder is a billionaire himself), is the best way to approach this, I think.
And honestly, if we’re at a point where the sources of the regulation are truly “captured”, then we’re also at a point where trying to deal with the above behaviors with a tax is even less likely to succeed. Fixing that ‘capture’ should be the primary focus in that case.
That’s not really what “zero-sum” means. What you’re describing is the company/entity becoming a net drain on the economy, but that doesn’t change the fact that wealth isn’t zero-sum. Being zero-sum would mean that it’s impossible for the grand total combined wealth among everyone to ever change, and therefore no one’s wealth can ever go up without someone else’s going down, or vice versa.
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The poor are poor because while they’re paid peanuts, everybody else estimates the value they create through their work in very large numbers. It is absolutely a matter of work-value distribution. Calling that “wealth redistribution” is an artifact to prop the “tax is steal” propaganda.
Tax the companies “theoretical price tag” and see it adjusting to much more realistic numbers, that would be beneficial for everyone.
Lastly, we can keep saying all we want about one hundred years ago, but at the time, economic growth was 2 digits. Today it’s one digit, and almost all of it value goes straight up to the ultra-rich. Growth is decreasing but ultra-rich worth net keeps increasing at faster rate. How can one not see this is bonkers?