Comment on What a night

stateofaffairs@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

• echodot@feddit.uk ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Yeah well the standard line they always trot out whenever anybody starts talking about taxing billionaires is the threat of the billionaires leaving. The thing is, if they were actually prepared to do that they wouldn’t spend all the money fighting it, they would just wait until it happened, and then leave.

  Billionaires don’t really care about tax, it’s like the least expensive thing they spend money on in a year. They’ll quite happily spend 10,000 times as much on a yacht, it’s like asking an average earner if they would consider moving to get out of paying a 40 cent annual surcharge.

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  • ElDuderino@lemmus.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Billionaires don’t really care about tax,

    I think they do. Money going to tax is under public control and cannot be used to buy influence.

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    • patchy2eyes@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      It’s just about power. Their influence comes from their wealth and paying taxes would mean giving power away.

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  • Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Yep, Billionaires are where they are. In general, they do not move when tax laws change (of all billionaires moving per year, only a single digit percentage can be brought in connection with wealth taxes)

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• meme_historian@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Probably cause half the people currently sleeping in their car in Californian cities are worried how it’ll affect them eventually when they finally get their start-up off the ground and make their first billion

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• cloudshouter@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  The very shallow take that taxing the rich will make them move somewhere else or hurt jobs. They are already hoarding the money and jobs are based on other factors. If the rich moved around based on taxes, they wouldn’t live in any western countries at all. Terkministan would be the prime destination. They live in places like California and New York because they like it there, otherwise North Dakota would be the new hotspot in the US.

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• technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  The billionaires bought two fake propositions to cancel out 40, then they pushed endless ads about saying that your retirement, schools, hospitals, etc. woudl be destroyed by yes on 40, no on 41, no on 42.

  AKA Capital and its state doing what the enslavers concocted it to do.

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• RustyEarthfire@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Prop 40 is not a good way to tax billionaires. A wealth tax is extremely messy. To institute an entirely new approach to taxation would create years of accounting and legal headaches, and only help short term.

  And it’s hard to overstate how shortsighted a single-time tax is.

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