It’s all bullshit guys, like on the other side we have to pay $1500 a month rent because the bank doesn’t believe we can afford a $1000 a month mortgage.
The rich convinced us that taxing them is too complicated but everyday people can be taxed pretty easily
Submitted 1 day ago by VetOfTheSeas@discuss.online to workreform@lemmy.world
https://discuss.online/pictrs/image/39701ce1-938e-4286-8256-bc1caedbad05.png
Comments
Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
Gammelfisch@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
Are Ronnie Reagan’s advisors still alive? Those fuckers were heavily involved in creating the present day mess.
DylanMc6@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 hour ago
If only Jimmy Carter is re-elected in 1980…
Gammelfisch@lemmy.world 55 minutes ago
+1…The US Naval Academy graduate would have ended the BS in the middle-east too.
wpb@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
The “it’s not real money until it’s sold” argument is such horseshit. Just give it to me then if it’s not real. It’s like saying the money in your bank account isn’t real until you take it out at an atm. Dumbest shit, but for some reason a super appealing argument because people keep repeating it.
krisevol@lemmus.org 4 hours ago
They can’t give it to you because it’s not real.
Also your money in your account isn’t real until you take it out of the bank is true. You never heard of a rush on the bank? Your bank isn’t keeping most of your money, they are using it. The system only works if everyone believes it works, but if everyone took it the money, 90% of people would find out there money isn’t there.
Same with taxing stocks. It only works if everyone isn’t rushing to the market to sell. If we taxed stocks, the money would have to come from somewhere or the system collapses. This is why no party has dared yet taxing unsold stocks. It would collapse the system.
InputZero@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
Have you heard of a federal reserve? Yes your bank doesn’t have your money, but someone does. Your money someone else has is insured by the federal reserve so bank runs don’t happen. You’re talking about an economy that existed 100 years ago.
wpb@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
They can’t give it to you because it’s not real
You literally can. You can transfer ownership of stocks.
ExtremeDullard@piefed.social 1 day ago
They’re right: it is pretty complicated to tax the rich using the current tax code. And there’s a very good reason for that: they made sure it’s as complicated as possible.
krellor@fedia.io 1 day ago
I think the idea that taxing the rich is difficult or our tax code is too complicated feeds into the narrative around the problem being too hard to solve. I think the reality is more straightforward:
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Bring back the previous top tax bracket of 39% that Republicans did away with. That will bring in a significant revenue.
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Raise or add the top brackets on the capital gains taxes.
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Add a new top tax bracket of you want to raise more revenue, e.g. 46% above X millions.
When you look at reports by the congressional budget office or independent budget groups, most of the other proposals are noise in the grand scheme of things. Even the buy, borrow, die strategy that gets a lot of airtime (because it rightfully violates most people's sense of fair play) only really accounts for something like 2% of the funds used by the ultra wealthy.
Most of the things like wealth taxes would require more complex legislation and be treated by the courts, certainly going to the supreme court. But the above three bullets would meaningfully raise revenues, are simple in terms of legislation, and have clear statutory authority and case law on their side.
The only thing hard is electing enough people who actually care about the budget and the people.
tburkhol@slrpnk.net 23 hours ago
Income tax may be a solution to government revenue, but it’s not a solution to inequality.
Capital accumulates exponentially, and if you don’t address that exponential growth, then there will be ludicrously wealthy people, social immobility, and all the problems we have now. Tax wealth.
Of course it will be complicated. Of course there will be court cases. All of that is true of the current system. We can’t get to a working system if we don’t even start. Tax wealth.
MasterBlaster@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
Forget 39%. We have greater national debt as a percentage of GDP than we did in 1944. We need to reinstitute the tax brackets from then until 1965, which had a top rate of 90%. There are reasons we had a middle class back then, and this is one of them.
Zarxrax@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
Capital gains should just be taxed as regular income instead of having a special rate.
bufalo1973@piefed.social 20 hours ago
Proposal:
minimum wage = 0% taxes
N * minimum wage = N% taxes
JoeBigelow@lemmy.ca 22 hours ago
How difficult would it be to enact legislation to prevent using loans against stock/assets and avoiding income/capital gains tax? Something like “if you have things worth money you need to sell them before taking a frivolous loan.”? Idk I just hate that loophole
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BlackLaZoR@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
How about removing property tax for sake of consistency?
MyVeryRealName@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
How is the government supposed to make money then?
Nathan@sopuli.xyz 11 hours ago
It’s wild how the rules work. We pay taxes on every little unrealized gain, while the wealthy can enjoy tax-free yachting lifestyles in Dubai with zero capital gains or annual taxes. The gap just keeps getting wider.
collapse_already@lemmy.ml 18 hours ago
You wouldn’t even have to make a huge reform to make a big difference. If we changed using “unrealized gains” as collateral to count as realizing those gains, the ultra wealthy would pay a fuck ton more in taxes. Also, the interest on those loans should not be deductible. Boo hoo if you end up with a margin call. Don’t make risky bets.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
This is where I stand on it. Charging taxes on unrealized gains is never going to happen, and its not like we’re going to give them a refund if it swings the other way.
Taxing collateralizion and usage of the unrealized gains would be massive, and if they don’t like the new system, then sell them and pay taxes like everyone else.
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 18 hours ago
Don’t try to tax the dollar value of the securities. Enact a wealth tax of the securities themselves. Transfer shares of the security to the IRS, to be liquidated slowly over time. Non-liquid securities would be held much like a lien.
HrabiaVulpes@europe.pub 12 hours ago
Okay a history lesson on how capitalism started and feudalism fell.
When you are “rich” in feudal society it means you have land. Land that everyone sees, that gives predictable income and even least educated peasant would be able to tax you reasonably (reasonably = as high as possible without you starting a rebellion over it). But then come merchants - they can have a wagon full of wood or just a small pouch of spices and it would be worth the same. Nobody really knows how much their wares earn because it fluctuates and every goods transport is a huge risk. So the merchants gain wealth indefinitely because king can’t see how much they have ant tax them accordingly, while landowners get poor because they are taxed to oblivion.
Now who is the modern “nobility”? Who has wealth tied up and measured in such a way that government knows exactly how much to tax them? Wage workers. In fact your employer rats you out to government on how much you earn. In exchange things like companies, banks, stocks, loans etc. are in the “nobody knows how much they are worth” category. Say you are taxed 10% on the value of all the stocks you own, this means you have to sell 10% of your stocks annually, and by selling stocks you make those stocks less valuable for everyone… so technically they should be taxed less because value drops down? Generally speaking if taxing something changes it’s value drastically then governments avoid taxing it.
My personal solution - outlaw stocks, bonds and loans for fucks sake.
almost_genocide@lemmy.world 40 minutes ago
Say you are taxed 10% on the value of all the stocks you own, this means you have to sell 10% of your stocks annually, and by selling stocks you make those stocks less valuable for everyone… so technically they should be taxed less because value drops down?
Just a note, suggesting a 10% tax is pure fear mongering that billionaires and capitalists use to scare people. The average property tax rate in the United States is 1.1% so that’s a reasonable percentage to give. People don’t sell 1% of their home every year.
Property taxes are a thing. Stocks are property.
Canconda@lemmy.ca 4 hours ago
IMO just stop letting them borrow against the unrealized values. You can borrow against what you’ve paid taxes on.
ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 3 hours ago
Just have countries force the “you can’t charge interest” rule on Christians.
Islam coming later was able to see the obvious loophole so they added you can’t accept loans with interest btw.
Gonzako@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Yeah, the financial market was never actually useful. Its just a money vacuum that the rich benefit from
yakko@feddit.uk 12 hours ago
I enjoyed reading this perspective, thanks. It’s definitely compelling.
lechekaflan@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
That’s why they’re going to great lengths to remove or at least weaken government legislation limiting their acquisition to more wealth, while putting the screws on anyone below them.
Doubleohdonut@lemmy.ca 8 hours ago
Mitch McConnell on the bottom left, looking like he came in through The Wall
False@lemmy.world 1 day ago
This was an interesting point I hadn’t thought of before, so I wanted an alternate perspective since a Twitter meme is a little one sided:
Property taxes are ancient — they predate modern stock markets by centuries. Land was the dominant form of wealth, and crucially, you can’t hide a house from the assessor. Real estate is immobile, visible, and tied to a specific jurisdiction. Stocks are the opposite: mobile across borders, easy to hold through trusts or shell entities, and private holdings are genuinely hard to value year-over-year.
The other piece is who’s collecting and why. Property taxes are local — they fund schools, fire, roads, the stuff that directly makes your property more valuable. There’s a clean “benefit” logic: the city paves your street, your house is worth more, you pay for it. A share of Apple isn’t enhanced by Seattle paving anything, so there’s no equivalent local nexus.
Stocks also already get taxed, just at different moments rather than annually: capital gains when you sell, dividends when paid, corporate income tax on the underlying company, estate tax at death. The argument against an annual wealth-style tax is partly that the system already takes its cut, just not on a recurring basis.
A few countries (Norway, Switzerland, Spain) do tax financial wealth annually, but most that tried it abandoned it — capital flight and valuation headaches. In the US there’s also a constitutional wrinkle: the federal government can’t easily levy direct taxes on wealth without apportionment among states, which is why Warren/Sanders-style wealth tax proposals have to be carefully structured to survive a court challenge.
4am@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
The system should take more of a cut, if that’s the argument we are going with.
Also? A new realization event should be defined: collateralization. When you take out loans against the value of your stock/bond/whatever holdings, you are realizing gains from those assets - you wouldn’t have gotten the line of credit otherwise.
People argue that this would prevent homeowners for taking equity lines of credit for improvements but that’s easily remedied by the collateral not being a real asset.
almost_genocide@lemmy.world 33 minutes ago
Also? A new realization event should be defined: collateralization. When you take out loans against the value of your stock/bond/whatever holdings, you are realizing gains from those assets - you wouldn’t have gotten the line of credit otherwise.
This is a pure red herring. County property assessors are a thing. We already have systems in place to address this concern.
Klox@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Also of interest: Taxes aren’t paid on stock buybacks which is why they became popular.
4am@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
They’re not traced because they used to be illegal and they shouldn’t ever be taxed because they should be made illegal again.
SippyCup@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Because that used to be illegal so there was no need to tax it
3abas@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
Stocks also already get taxed, just at different moments rather than annually: capital gains when you sell, dividends when paid, corporate income tax on the underlying company, estate tax at death. The argument against an annual wealth-style tax is partly that the system already takes its cut, just not on a recurring basis.
Yeah, that’s sort of the whole point of the post. If I buy a stock for $1 today and still it for $10 tomorrow, I pay taxes on the gains tomorrow.
If I buy it for $10 today and sell it for $1 tomorrow, I claim it as a loss.
If I buy a house for $100k yesterday, I’m paying taxes on $400k property today, and $900k tomorrow. Even if tomorrow I sell it for $200k.
tburkhol@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
For most of our history, real estate was wealth. You needed property to grow crops, mine resources, build a factory, or do any kind of venture that would make money. It’s only in the 20th century that we really start having a significant amount of wealth in stock markets that couldn’t be directly traced to a physical asset. The robber barons figured that was a good excuse to stop taxing their wealth.
Fribbizz@feddit.org 21 hours ago
Property taxes are local — they fund schools,
Funding schools by highly localized tax isn’t universal. The US adopted it to make sure less affluent areas have worse schools. I believe the UK does similar things, but they also want marked differences between public and private school alumnus.
but most that tried it abandoned it — capital flight and valuation headaches.
And most importantly: relentless lobbying by the wealthy to get rid of those taxes.
Artisian@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
source on the size of the effects of lobbying vs flight risk?
I would like to agree with you, its just very not-obvious which influence dominates.
Carrot@lemmy.today 23 hours ago
The main issue is that, once you have enough value in stock, you can take loans out against it, thus extracting the value of the stock without actually having to sell the stock.
youcantreadthis@quokk.au 23 hours ago
Let’s just say they won’t pay with money seems to be their current position
liuther9@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Just need ceiling
otp@sh.itjust.works 20 hours ago
At a certain level of wealth, we should be taxing wealth quarterly.
Grant an exception for a single place of residence (sure, let it be magnificent, whatever, but only 1).
Wealth taxes can have brackets like income taxes do.
Also, more luxury taxes etc!
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 hours ago
I mean the extremely literal answer is roughly:
All counties/cities have a bureaucracy dedicated to doing the equivalent of yearly audits to determine your home/property’s value.
This does not exist for corporate capital assets.
Instead, the audits are privately conducted (either internally or via a contracted private accounting firm), and valuations are basically only issued around time of sale, when corporate capital changes specific private ownership.
Even earnings reports are not done by an outside agency for the purposes of assessing a tax, they’re either done privately by the owner (again, internal or contracted out), or as private market research for something like a hedge fund or something like that.
We as a society (legal system?) just decided that homes get a bureaucracy and taxation, capital does not, it plays by different rules.
Its… its the oligarchy baked into the system, been like this for quite a long time.
Its not that its… any kind of theoretically impossible to imagine a or many different kinds of systems…
Its that rich people have rigged so many things so far in their favor, for so long, that they believe these artificial engineered differences … are fundamental rules of reality.
Like yes they’re very hubristic and classist… but a part of it is that they’ve basically indoctrinated themselves into thinking this is… objectively correct. Its sort of like a religion, its their dogma.
I will note that at least some billionaires don’t buy into this dogma nearly at all… either out of genuine empathy and humanity, or pure self preservation of not wanting to be guillotined… you do end up with the ‘Tom Steyer <-> Mr Wonderful’ spectrum.
Of course, the Steyer types are exceedingly uncommon.
Thrawne@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
Hfs, i never drew that correlation before. Yeah, fuk them.
MasterBlaster@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
That simplistic comparison has absolutely zero relationship to reality. Think about it a bit more, if you know how making money on stock investing works, and see if you can find the differences.
Derpenheim@lemmy.zip 20 hours ago
“I wont explain my point that is very much wrong, and instead will (attempt to) make you sound like the fool, when in reality I am an insufferable douchebag that cant see he has tread into water before learning to swim”
10/10, no notes.
Thunderwolf@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
To play devil’s advocate, a lot of money that is tied up in retirement accounts of the “average Joe” would also be taxed, so if your retirement accounts aren’t outpacing your income tax rate, then it’d hurt main street too
TBi@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
Should be easy. If you are a billionaire you should be paying at least 40% in tax. So at least 400 million for each 1 billion you are worth.
If you want to pay less then you need to justify it. So pay up front and refund later. Easy.
ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 22 hours ago
No one needs 600M, your tax rate is too low.
TBi@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
I fully agree. Maybe a 70-80 tax on everything over 10 million.
SnarkoPolo@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
You wouldn’t believe (or maybe yes) how many struggling, regular schmuck commuters I hear saying “But but we can’t tax the Job Creators!” Meanwhile they’re spending two hours in traffic each way, taking any shit from their four bosses while trying to keep their 2011 Camry in one piece and scrounging enough for mortgage, streaming, and the third star on the fourth stripe on little McEllough’s tae kwon do white belt.
It’s the evil brilliance of Republican marketing. And just maybe, the mistake being made by modern Marxists is ignoring the so-called middle class in favor of the blue collar classes only. Goddamn it I’m pretty bourgeois, but comes down to it, I’d give up a few things to have free health care and education for everyone, and Uni for those that need it.
frongt@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Twitter screenshot meme slactivism aside, it’s because private land is a limited resource. The more you keep for yourself, the more you pay (generally).
LouNeko@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Plus, property tax is one of the only taxes that really hits wealthy people hard.
rf_@lemmy.world 1 day ago
In California the property taxes are such that it punishes people that didn’t buy a house 30 years ago. The apartment I rent pays property taxes on a valuation of ~$250k. This property just went for sale at $1.2 million. Whoever buys it now will pay property taxes on a $1.2 million valuation, while right now due to how the law is structured, the current owner pays taxes on $250k.
It’s just a big fuck you by the system. The tax law was modified because they saw that if they kept increasing the tax proportionally with the market value of the home, soon a bunch people would lose their homes because wages are stagnant and home prices are rocketing. So they passed this cap that helps current homeowners.
I don’t know if there is a reasonable tax under these conditions where home speculation and investment-mindset inflates home prices while wages are stagnant and inflation is a bustling.
discocactus@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
But none of it is so simple that it can’t be done by a computer. Instead we need a whole industry of middlemen because it’s so convoluted and opaque…but also they know what you owe, and then want you to tell them. It’s fucking dumb.
Mulligrubs@lemmy.world 1 day ago
100% agreed. This has been going on for some decades, hand-in-hand with “The FED” being so complex that only bankers and their ilk can handle banking, so we must have bankers control their banking and our dollar.
Banking is easy. You put money in the bank, they save it until you need it for a small fee. But they don’t save it any more, you see. They have about one dollar for every 10 dollars deposited. The rest exists only in banking system itself.
I’d get into it, but mods often think anything about The FED is a conspiracy. Don’t be like them. Take The Fed at its word, note who serves and where they worked before and after their terms, and reach your own conclusions.
False@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
But they don’t save it any more, you see. They have about one dollar for every 10 dollars deposited. The rest exists only in the banking system itself, and is not a tangible asset.
Fractional reserve banking has been around for hundreds of years
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 13 hours ago
they only need to convince the conservative plebs.
RamRabbit@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Wealthy folks (in general) are heavily involved in property and consequently pay considerable property taxes.
It is taxed as such as it is a limited resource.
nerv@fedinsfw.app 12 hours ago
That might be correct in some places but not where I live.
Recurring taxes on property are calculated with the age of houses taken into consideration. This means the property value for taxation actually decreases over time, unless a given area undergoes through a serious development effort that forces property value up. This can reach such extreme cases that it is possible to get away with remodelling a house - as in a single standing building - completely, fully modernize it, and still keep its property value untouched, unless swimming pools and other value increasing additions are put in.
Property value and commercial value are separate and independent concepts. A property appraised for taxation in 100€ can sell for 100 times that value. There will be sale fees taxes applied to the transactions itself, for the buyer, and the seller may have to pay income taxes on the sale, but there are way to skirt most of these.
And then there are rents.
I pay more taxes on my work than a person for the rent they receive by renting property. It used to be a flat rate of 28%, equal to deposit interest and other values, but then someone said if the taxation on rents was to go down, the rents would go down and more home would come into the market. Except it did not happen and instead rent shot up and opaque companies started buying homes to rent from people that could not be bothered to manage what they have and pay their taxes on a yearly basis.
Everyone loses.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 18 hours ago
this doesn’t really have anything to do with “work”, therefore it’s questionable whether it belongs in the “work reform” community. anyways, it’s a good post, with a good point.
it’s quite clear that we need tax reforms. the current system works for no-one anymore, not even for the rich. the stock market is a bubble only waiting to burst, and everybody’s well aware of it. the economy, the way it is today, is absolutely not sustainable. people are getting poorer, due to not having jobs, or rather the jobs pay like shit (bullshit pay for bullshit jobs) because the jobs aren’t fundamentally important to the economy. there’s a declining labor market because there’s not so many new inventions compared to 1900 when stuff was new and hot. (consider that the electric grid was literally invented around 1900, there’s an interesting chapter of history there, current wars). that’s why the labor market is cooling down.
i advocate for spaceflight partially because it would create jobs. also waging wars would create jobs but deeply unpopular so nobody wants to do that. so jobs will still be lost, and can only be partially replaced. we need a universal basic income or sth similar to give people enough resources to live. we need to start writing policy proposals for that. i propose the following fields should be covered and provided for by state-run services somehow:
- water, food, healthcare
- housing
- transport
- energy
- IT, telecommunication, education
FiniteBanjo@feddit.online 15 hours ago
To play devil’s advocate, homeowners use a lot of publicly owned civil infrastructure such as water, power, data, and roads. Property taxes are very local.
Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Play? You’re always billionaires’ advocate. Water, power, and data have their own separate bills already. Roads are paid for through gas taxes.
FiniteBanjo@feddit.online 14 hours ago
The county offices aren’t billionaires. They tax the billionaires. They are literally the kind of institutions that billionaires fight to control or dismantle.
Impractical_Island@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
Jokes on you, I cost taxes. I work with the F-I mean the CIA, that’s who I work for, writing educational propaganda on Lemmy World. I’m a “crackhead,” which is different than a “pothead,” which is a festival cop. I do counterintelligence, obviously, as it is important to know what the surveillance state does, watching places where I frequent, which is here, on the Lemmy World work reform community, where I write educational propaganda, obviously. Wasn’t this about taxes? Surveillance state, y’know? I don’t even know what I do, but I cost taxes as a whole.
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 18 hours ago
WTH? That reads like the first kind of LLM, the random sentence generator with a small database of words.
Impractical_Island@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
No it reads like someone who stares at goats wrote it, being as naturally counterintelligent as I be n are, but you got that cultural reference, yea?
Here lemme give you a guided reading quiz to help facilitate your education, cuz that’s what I’m about, education:
Question 1: Who do I work for?
A) Some agency that starts with the letter F
B) The CIA
C) The Illuminati, that decentralized autonomous organization of secret police described in the New Testament at an eighth grade reading level
D) Some unnamed organization that stares at goats
E) All of the above
Question 2: What is my job?
A) Cop
B) Counterintelligence
C) Education (our best crime deterrent)
D) Professional goat-starer
E) All of the above
Question 3: What is a one “Donald Trump?”
A) President of the United States
B) A pedophile, by normative definition of the word
C) A cop
D) A distraction
E) All of the above
Question 4: What do you live in and are a part of?
A) A police state
B) A decentralized autonomous organization (society)
C) The Empire of the Sacred Heart
D) A topological matrix
E) All of the above
Question 5: In 2000-7000 of your own words, which is what I write everyday, tell me what you think of feet.
Badargel@thelemmy.club 18 hours ago
Wtf are you saying
Impractical_Island@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Well, I said it as clearly as I could
go_go_gadget@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Property taxes are a thing.
Stocks are property.
It’s not rocket science.
MasterBlaster@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
How long does one own property, and what resources are used by structures on that property that the community has to supply, maintain, or upgrade? What damage might said structures cause to the community while in use? What is lost by the community by selling that property to a private owner? How does a community fund its own services, governance, police, fire department? How are roads and power lines built?
Now, what community is incurring costs by someone owning a stake in a business? What resources does that transfer of money take away from the community? What is the community? What did that community supply to make it possible to invest in that company or buy that stock?
It might not be rocket science, but it is not a “no brainer”. Stocks, like “intellectual property”, have no physical presence. They are not semi-permanent objects taking physical space or requiring physical resources to create or maintain over time. They do not take physical resources that can no longer be used elsewhere.
Folstar@lemmus.org 18 hours ago
Pretending businesses exist in a vacuum is a very weird take. The government spends a considerable amount of time and cost in maintaining business interests. Maintaining the legal framework for business to operate so we’re not Mad Maxxing for more petrol is, on it’s own, justification. Then there’s the intellectual property side of things. Law enforcement. Military action. Foreign relations. The SEC and similar agencies that exist solely to facilitate business.
go_go_gadget@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
🙄 Hey look it’s another loser who spends their free time bravely defending billionaires wealth.
SabinStargem@lemmy.today 12 hours ago
I think that a completely reworked economy, can make it much easier to tax the wealthy. Specifically, by using fixed incomes according to job rank, and having leadership roles change pay grade according to what workers vote for. Each worker can vote for who holds a leadership position, alongside their job ranking.
As to the fixed incomes, by having all job types assigned a rank with a fixed income throughout the entire nation, that prevents leadership from coercing changes in worker pay. They can’t underpay, nor overpay the workers, which makes it easier to assess and collect taxes. If everyone falls into very specific tax obligations, it is harder to game the system.
Alongside UBI, universal benefits such as guaranteed shelter, food, transport, utilities, and healthcare, money becomes optional. This allows workers to not be blackmailed into working for bad employers, which also puts a stick in the wheels of the wealthy. Coercion is the great power the elite uses to abuse ordinary people, so we need to eliminate that.
Also, absolute caps on wealth and assets, both for individuals and corporations. No one should be able to hoard resources that would allow any single entity to manipulate society. Sure, it would suck if someone can’t have dozens of vacation homes and yachts, but realistically, most folks won’t need more than one vacation spot with a nice boat.
BC_viper@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
Well thats not a good comparison. Everyone pays property taxes.
MyVeryRealName@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
They’re right. Taxing them isn’t possible but you can be taxes pretty easily.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 1 day ago
We need a tax system where the government figures out how much they need each year, and then just takes it proportional to net wealth above a certain amount.
You can bet Elon won’t be declaring himself a trillionaire under that system.
lemmyman@lemmy.world 1 day ago
We need a tax system where the government figures out how much they need each year, and then just takes it proportional to net wealth above a certain amount.
That’s exactly how property taxes work if you replace “net worth” with “assessed property value.”
(As opposed to what some people think, that rising property values on their own lead to rising property taxes)
So yeah, why the heck not do the same with other forms of wealth?
MasterBlaster@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
So, the government should decide how much wealth its citizens should have, and enforce that? I think there are better ways to approch this than turning citizens into subjects.
YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today 1 hour ago
I might catch heat for this take, but having today’s and schools is nice. But billionaires should be paying for the car majority of it
HertzDentalBar@lemmy.blahaj.zone 27 minutes ago
You’re right though. However the problem is when people’s property tax goes up by more than their wages. My parents had an $800 increase even though the property assessment dropped by 100k. They keep allowing all this residential to go up without letting industrial build aswell meaning the tax burden mostly on residential and not commercial.
YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today 3 minutes ago
Til, I pay less than a grand a year on two properties but I’m also in a fairly rural area.