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And some guy says “hey man, you need to give back like 20% of that. And that’s kinda lowkey generous tbh.” And their response is literally like “no.”
Beyond every great fortune is a great crime.
Why would you think the modern day Robber Barons could be swayed by social need? If they cared about social need, they wouldn’t be billionaires to begin with.
Why would you think the modern day Robber Barons could be swayed by social need?
If they need say first aid or a blood transfusion or the mob to stop beating them to death I think they could be persuaded to understand that we live in a society.
Oh sure. But then they wouldn’t be Robber Barons so much as they’d be French Aristocracy on Bastille Day. Totally different position.
And even then, when Robespierre had King Louis by the balls, what did Marie Antoinette do? Austrian mercenary jailbreak.
“I’d rather fight to the death to keep my yacht than let anyone else have public health care” is just hardwired into some of these people.
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I think you gotta check your math there. I think you meant to say 100.5% with a 0.5% error.
Uh I don’t thing deciliter is the unit you want lol
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What does <current year> have to do with it? I had no idea what scale you meant because I’d forgotten the extremely rarely used prefix deca. Plus even decaliters isn’t really a lot when talking about hoarding water. Maybe literal cubic meters.
Yeah, a decalitre would just be a bucket of water.
You want exalitres.
It’s not too rare when using the (superior) metric system.
With the exception of deci and centi, I know literally nobody who uses prefixes that aren’t multiples of 1000. I’ve been using the metric system all my life. Have you?
Yeah. I have, I wasn’t thinking much, early morning today. I’m used to seeing more of them in my career, but I guess it’s not really “common” outside of that. Sorry, didn’t want to come off as confrontational.
the importance of charity is that it is voluntary, taking advantage to tax loopholes is the closest that tax ever gets to charity.
Also
Tax wealth, not work
TAX WEALTH, NOT WORK
Don’t shout so loud. Some of us sensitive ears, owie.
That’s kinda why the rich are called “the wealthy” and not “the worky”
From his wiki:
In the 1980s, Icahn developed a reputation as a “corporate raider” after profiting from the hostile takeover and asset stripping of Trans World Airlines.
I remember being in uni when George W got elected the first time. I recall my uni friends were saying there’s no point taxing the rich because they’ll always find another loop hole. I guess we should realize they’d never stop. They’re never like, “hmm that’s enough”.
Freeloaders
You’re gonna love this. We (Australia) give a bunch of gas away (no royalties), barely tax the companies on their profits, and then most of it gets shipped overseas so it’s expensive here.
We’re a third-world country in disguise.
(Gas is dumb and should stay in the ground, but it’s even more stupid for us not to get any revenue from it)
https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/gas-exports-56-given-to-corporations-royalty-free/
Making the rich pay their fair share works great for my slogan: Make American Work for Everyone.
Tax the rich? Its far too late for that
Not big enough. We have the technology…
Everytime I hear arguments against wealth tax, gift tax, property tax or inheritance tax. It’s the same argument, it’s unfair towards the people who has worked all their life and want to leave their already taxed money to their family.
In Norway we have no inheritance tax and no tax on gifts. Most people have no taxes on homes either. We do have some wealth tax.
My main issue with the arguments against it is that its is lacking imagination. We make the rules, we can decide to make it fair. We can set a limit for when taxation occurs at a really high number. Just so that 98% of Norwegians get zero taxes on these things.
Zero taxes for 1 000 000 euros and then 75% on every euro above. Is possible.
Zero taxes on gifts up to 50 000 euros a year is possible.
No taxes on homes worth less than 1 000 000 is possible.
Bringing wealth with you when you permanently move out of the country is possible for values less than 5 000 000 euros for instance.
Then adjust for inflation every year (like we do with many of our welfare systems)
If we do this we can get rid of the wealth tax that the rich hate so much (because they are disadvantaged owners compared to owners of businesses in other countries)
No regular people will feel these taxes at all, and they make sure that the wealth is distributed over time. It’s still possible to get rich, and remain rich. But your children can be rich but not insanely rich.
Exactly what the rates should be is up for debate, but this system is in my opinion a better one.
You can index the values to a multiple of the median salary instead of a fixed number.
This is in Norwegian, but most services is based on this number https://www.nav.no/grunnbelopet
Which currently is 124 028 NOK which is roughly 10 350 euros.
This number is referenced as G (Grunnbeløpet)
So for instance if I lose my job I can get up to 62.4% of a salary up to 6G. Which is the maximum.
Meaning the maximum payout is 744 168 (6G) * 0.624 = 464 360 NOK.
We have tons of calculations like this for all sorts of welfare services.
Every year in may this number is adjusted.
In the U.S. gift tax is exempt on the first $14 million you give. You just have to submit a tax form when you file your taxes. So someone can gift each of their 5 grandchildren a million dollar house, and then give them $1.8 million dollars in cash each before they die. And avoid any gift tax on any of that. Then get taxed an inheritance tax. There is no Federal inheritance tax. Which if you live in a state like Tennessee where I live, the inheritance tax is 0%. So you have now avoided paying any taxes passing down any amount of wealth you potentially have. If you are a billionaire and have an accountant that can’t figure out how to bypass paying taxes you or they must be willfully choosing to do so in the U.S.
Just mandate a luxury tax on all things normal people don’t buy. You can have wealth, but you cannot have anything normal people cannot have without paying. Oh you want to acquire a whole ass business? You want to donate millions for political influence? You want a Ferrari? Want more land or a huge house? You pay demoralizing amounts of luxury tax.
You can take this a step further and ask why we have this aggregation of wealth at all. Private wealth consolidation is a form of malinvestment resulting from a handful of individuals who are told they can effectively loot the economy unchecked.
Taxation “solves” the problem by clawing back some of that malinvestment. But if you recognize it as malinvestment from the outset, you can see arguments against having these private aggregators of wealth at all.
Instead of taxes, why not simply impose a maximum income? In baseball, you’d call it a salary cap.
if there was a maximum income people would still bitch and whine about those with mansions aquired through non monetary means.
Perhaps the next step is to improve our land use policy, such that one individual isn’t afforded a mansion’s worth of real estate.
a farm uses more land than most small mansions though, and plenty of individuals own farms.
Not as many as you would think, actually. And that is not the same thing that is being talked about.
Farm collectivization isn’t a new idea
Of course, but we are as a society so far away from that. It requires a bigger cultural shift than we are anywhere near. Even the thought of an inheritance tax is very unpopular.
Yes, even as a very social democratic country with a highly educated populace, we can be pretty stupid about taxes.
Also most really rich people have their wealth in assets and make their money as gains on those assets. So it does not really tax the most important people, except maybe some C-suites.
Harvard is missing from that list as well
Tax the rich ? No Seize the means of production yes
To continue to industrially rape the planet? To the global south, indigeneous peoples, and all natural peoples, the results of capitalism or Marxist socialism looks exactly the same - we’ll all be industrialized science addicts under capitalism or socialism, and all other non-European cultures must commit cultural suicide to become a “proletariat” worker of some factory. Your so-called “leftist revolution” isn’t a revolution, it’s merely a continuation of the European mindset that considers the natural world and natural peoples an acceptable sacrifice.
Would you like to know more? Check this out to gain some non-white eurocentric perspective because I got news for you - white supremasist eurocentric industrialization is not the dominant ideology. Did you think the peoples living in South American jungles for thousands of years need some 19th century European to teach them “complex” philosophy of sharing?
Never missed the laugh emoji react in the fediverse until now.
Did I say something funny?
Yea never seen a bigger strawman
You said “seize the means of production” and I described how the very means of production is a deadly problem. How is that a strawman?
No it isn’t you made it one. Means of production is anything from a steel plant to my plow. You are very confused about Marxism basics. If you are in control you can choose what to make of it. I have no wishes for a plague planet of a few surviving hippie communes here and there , but you are more than welcome to have yours. The rest of would build star trek instead.
We won’t make it to a Star Trek future if we pursue industrialism at all costs.
" The statement of the Soviet scientist’s is very interesting. Does he know what this alternative energy source will be? No, he simply has faith. Science will find a way. I hear revolutionary Marxists saying that the destruction of the environment, pollution, and radiation will be controlled. And I see them act on their words. Do they know how these things will be controlled? No, they simply have faith. Science will find a way. Industrialization is fine and necessary. How do they know this? Faith. Science will find a way. Faith of this sort has always been known in Europe as religion. Science has become the new European religion for both capitalists and Marxists; they are truly inseparable; they are part and parcel of the same culture. So, in both theory and practice, Marxism demands that non-European peoples give up their values, their traditions, their cultural experience altogether. We will all be industrialized science addicts in a Marxist society.
I do not believe that capitalism itself is really responsible for the situation in which American Indians have been declared a national sacrifice. No, it is the European tradition; European culture itself is responsible. Marxism is just the latest continuation of this tradition, not a solution to it. To ally with Marxism is to ally with the very same forces that declare us an acceptable cost.
There is another way. There is the traditional Lakota way and the ways of the other American Indian peoples. It is the way that knows that humans do not have the right to degrade Mother Earth, that there are forces beyond anything the European mind has conceived, that humans must be in harmony with all relations or the relations will eventually eliminate the disharmony. A lopsided emphasis on humans by humans — the European’s arrogance of acting as though they were beyond the nature of all related things — can only result in a total disharmony and a readjustment which cuts arrogant humans down to size, gives them a taste of that reality beyond their grasp or control and restores the harmony. There is no need for a revolutionary theory to bring this about; it’s beyond human control. The nature peoples of this planet know this and so they do not theorize about it. Theory is an abstract; our knowledge is real.
Distilled to it’s basic terms, European faith — including the new faith in science — equals a belief that man is God. Europe has always sought a Messiah, whether that be the man Jesus Christ or the man Karl Marx or the man Albert Einstein. American Indians know this to be truly absurd. Humans are the weakest of all creatures, so weak that other creatures are willing to give up their flesh that we may live. Humans are able to survive only though the exercise of rationality since they lack the abilities of other creatures to gain food through the use of fang and claw."
- Russel Means of the Lakota People (Full speech here)
So uh what are we going to do with all the bodies since we’re moving back to a pre industrial society.
I’m not a huge fan of in dusters luxation but the people are already alive and I’d prefer that we don’t have mass death via starvation so that we can stop it.
Mass death via starvation and thirst is a certainty thanks to climate change. Depleting water-tables and dumping toxic waste into landfills will happen under capitalism or socialism, we need a different way. American Indians have been screaming the solutions in Europeans face for centuries yet Europeans still choose the route of mass destruction.
People could be fed for free if rooftops and parking lots were turned into food gardens, or if we taught children about growing food from the earth with as much importance as we do with maths or languages, a las, that’s the antithesis of European concept of “legitimate” thinking; what is written down has an importance that’s denied the spoken. They have already demonstrated through their history that they cannot hear, cannot see; they can only read through the dead, dry leaves of a book.
Sound like the time to tax the rich was from 2016 to 2024. It’s now time to do something else
Tax wealth, not work.
Taxing the rich is the start, eating them is the finish.
Nah. Who wants to eat that filth? Let’s compost them so they can actually do something useful.
Too late we’re already an oligarch dictatorship
That’s exactly how they win, by people going “well, it’s already bad, not worth doing anything to make it better.”
We are pushing back but so far things seem to be getting worse
You’re not pushing back, you’re picketing. This is not a situation that can be fixed by picketing.
Taxes won’t work now anyway. A redistribution of wealth is required.
That’s what tax is.
Not through a dictatorial government it’s not.
Tax is a redistribution of new wealth. A redistribution of existing wealth is required.
Where the wealth tax is measured in calibre.
Always has been
One of the arguments by the rich is that excessive tax hampers progress. Now we can all see why that is a critical safeguard to have.
They like to say these things that don’t actually make any sense.
It’s the same with the crying around Europe’s mandatory USB-C connector. “Oh it stifles progress” Apple protested.
Forgetting they had the same unchanged connector, and in fact data protocol on their devices for twelve years before Europe decided they wanted a standard, with all the freedom to improve it.A standard, apple already adopted for everything not iPhone no less.
