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Maximum wage only makes sense as a percentage of other people in the company. Ie. The maximum allowed is 10x more than the minimum wage paid in the company
Anything else means the money would just go to shareholders
And obviously, a minimum wage permitted too by amount
C-suite compensation is already largely handled by share offers - which get further pumped/paid for by share buyback schemes.
This would just further exacerbate it, unless we first re-ban buybacks.
Honestly, we should just ban them regardless.
I think we can do better: nobody who doesn’t work X nunber of hours per week can own stock. That’s how law firms organized as S-Corps do it. Even if the decisionmakers hardly do real work, they have to be at work to gain on their investment. But also, no golden parachutes and executives should be legally responsible for suffering and death from their policies.
Jello Biafra proposed this as a policy when he ran for mayor of SF in 1980 and has been humping this idea ever since. It wouldn’f fly legally but as someone else here noted, you can tax at 90% above a threshold and do it that way.
Of course there is a Maximum wage. According to my employers I am making it,.
Not even on the table whole inflationary spending is allowed. Maximum currency issuance first, then lets talk. Otherwise you just have a time bomb.
Just tax an income above $10,000,000 per year at 90%. There really isn’t a need for more than that.
Billionaires have very little taxable income. We need a wealth tax.
Many also don’t truly “pay” for things. They leverage debt against their assets, essentially like a fancy credit card that says “I own MegaCorp, you know I’m good for it, just send the bills to this wealth management firm”.
So it’s not out of the realms of possibility to say that a billionaire is actually spending very little money, ever. What they have is essentially gifts from whoever manages their assets, and that company just skims whatever things “cost”.
IMO taxing wealth is what’s needed, but it needs to be framed in a way that makes a billionaire want to invest in their country through high taxes. Make it a privilege that is praised, and ostracise those business that excuse themselves from contributing.
Also immediately redefine income more broadly. Tax law says it’s one narrow thing, but in reality a lot of money comes in. Let the law march reality.
Billionaires don’t have taxable income because they’ve successfully lobbied for carve outs that exempt them from taxation.
That’s what makes a wealth tax impractical. How do you pass it through a Congress that’s been wholely co-opted by a billionaire friendly caucus?
Chuck Schumer, the senior senator from Wall Street, isn’t going to author a wealth tax. Kamala Harris, the former Senator from Silicon Valley isn’t going to sign it. And the SCOTUS majority that’s on the Harlan Crow payroll isn’t going to uphold it.
That wouldn’t catch the people who are the real problem, billionaires, who report something like $1 per year in income.
When you have billions in shares, you can use that as collateral to borrow money from the bank, and then you just spend that money. That’s not “income” so it isn’t taxed.
What’s needed is a 90% tax on people reporting high incomes as a start. But, then you need to close loopholes. The carried interest loophole for a start, which would nail most of the hedge fund crowd. Then, tax unrealized gains when they’re in the tens of millions range. Then prevent billionaires from handing billions to their children tax free by preventing the “stepping up” of capital gains for their heirs.
If I have $250k in shares I can also use that as collateral for a mortgage to buy a house. It would be pretty odd and problematic to be taxed on that like it’s income when it’s not, despite me spending it on a house…because I need to pay it back.
I agree with the rest though. And definitely would love to see 90% for anyone reporting extremely high incomes.
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Most of the super rich don’t make their Monday through wages.
well most of us super poor can’t even make an afternoon, much less an entire day. jfc the entitlement of these assholes
Most of the super rich don’t make their Monday through wages.
Certainly they must make their Tuesday through wages?
You’d think so, but they don’t even make their Wednesday through wages, let alone Tuesday.
I’ve often said we don’t need billionaires. That when one reaches that milestone anything above $999,999,999 should be taken as taxes from that person.
When I say this people often become defensive saying that the government shouldn’t be able to dictate how much wealth one person can accumulate. (It also happens that many of these people are prolife but that’s neither here nor there.) Often times comparing this action to communism which of course it isn’t.
The issue of course is that many people don’t understand what a billion of anything is. The human brain can’t comprehend such massive numbers. But nevertheless, there are people that are approaching the trillion dollar mark a number even further removed from a billion by several magnitudes.
Should there be billionaires. Probably not… What do you think?
What would be the point in amassing more wealth when its capped? At that wealth no matter what you do, its not gonna get less really if you invested into things. How does that solve any of the problems we have in society?
There wouldn’t be a point aside from maybe philanthropy. That these powerful Rich individuals will continue in Mass more wealth above the $1 billion cap specifically so others can benefit from it. I wouldn’t hold my breath for anything like that.
Considering there’s no fully legal and definitely no moral way to get that kind of money, they should all be behinds bars. As for kids that inherit such wealth, shame on them for accepting blood money and doing literally nothing with it, besides make the world around them even worse.
people often become defensive saying that the government shouldn’t be able to dictate how much wealth one person can accumulate
Of course it should. If we’re expecting to live in a democracy, then people need to have equal voices. If you’re a billionaire you have a megaphone, as Elon Musk has shown. Democracy can’t work if some people have far more power than others.
There really isn’t much difference in lifestyles between billionaires and people with 100 mil. No one needs that much money. Anyone who has made more than 100 million has done something truly heinous to do so. I feel we should set our sights at a much lower tax bracket to cut down any potential antisocial oligarchs.
if you exceed $999,999,999 it should reset, giving people a motivation to keep things well under the cap. like exceeding the high score registers in a game, let it roll over.
I think all the talk about billionaires is using a completely arbitrary number and subject to inflation. Wealth inequality is the big problem, it doesn’t matter what number on their bank account is.
The problem is that they have enough independence to just cross borders and easily pay for new citizenship if it suits them. It would have to be a world wide movement. It’s impossible, or at least would only be possible within some mythical completely self-sufficient country that could withstand their meddling.
The US has exit taxes, as do many countries. If you try to renounce your US citizenship, you can be taxed based on the value of unsold assets.
I hate that the US is one of the few countries in the world that has citizenship-based taxation. It’s awful and stupid. But, in theory, it does mean that an American couldn’t just avoid taxes by moving to another country.
Those are meaningless, when their taxable income is meaningless.
But, if they tried to move to another country and renounce their US citizenship they’d have to pay an exit tax based on the entire value of their assets, including unrealized gains.
Also gameable.
Sure, everything is gameable if you’re a billionaire, but it would require clever lawyers and involve some risk.
The biggest problem is that part of the way they usually game is by trying to create and promote a legal minefield by promoting footnotes in the law.
Before you get to their armies of clever lawyers, you will be inundated with rights issues from Accidental Americans and senior expats who have not resided in the US for decades. Not even from taxes as most publications seem to claim but from the far steeper charges of failing to report “foreign bank accounts” of normal banks people have been living literally right beside of for normal day to day tasks, which have been mined with things like fines that are life shattering for anyone but billionaires.
It is designed so that any such solution will grind to an halt by fostering the prosecution of those least capable to defend themselves who are earning even well below what they would in the US. It is why the US renunciation rate is at record highs in the US, because the nation of immigrants have forgot what it is to be an immigrant.
So bringing it back to the point at hand, it isn’t just that they have clever lawyers, like Charles Rettig who was literally appointed by Trump to lead the IRS, it’s that they are able to hire and influence everyone involved in the process, not just on their side, to make sure they are the last to ever be affected.
My solution:
Your tax burden is your tax burden. If it’s 15% and you run off to a country where it’s 5% to avoid taxes, that’s fine. You can pay them 5%.
But you’re still on the hook for the remaining 10%.
If the 5% country tries to act as a tax haven and refuses to enforce the remaining 10%, they get a national embargo until they get in line.
I have to repeat my response here, that is meaningless, when their taxable income is meaningless. How much did Trump pay in taxes again? The trick is to keep it tied up in an “investment” until they need it.
Isn’t that already how it works? Currently, US citizens still have to pay taxes when living outside the country unless they’re paying taxes to a specific set of other countries. Although consequences are on the individual who fails to pay and not their country of residence.
I’m not saying for US citizens and US companies. That’s how they avoid taxes - by registering in anther country.
Any person or company that does business in the US, even tangentially.
You’re based out of Panama? Cool. Pay them what they require, then pay the remaining X that a US company would own to either Panama, the US, or some other country you operate within.
Don’t grant them tax havens.
Welcome to yet another world war I guess?
I was thinking about this the other day, one of my favorite analogies is seconds.
A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. A trillion seconds is … 31,688 years.
The analogy already breaks down, because while most people could understand 12 days and a lot of adults can understand 31 years for having lived it (some even twice or more!), 31,688 years is completely incomprehensible again. How many human generations is that? All of recorded human history is only like 5,000 years. It’s utterly, mind-numbingly insane. No trillionaires, ever! No billionaires!!!
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/17/business/elon-musk-richest-person-trillionaire/index.html
This was published on September 17th of this year, after most of the nonsense of Twitter and utter things. He’s still on track, by 2027 no less. There’s no telling how directly and flagrantly he’ll benefit from a Trump win, either.
I think the best way I’ve seen to illustrate it is the stories of immortals earning incredible amounts of money every day who still can’t reach the wealth of Elon Musk.
Like, you’re an immortal born during the ice age 80,000 years ago. You are somehow making $5000 per day (or its equivalent in gold for the 79,700 years before dollars are invented, and you save all of it. You’re not as rich as Elon Musk.
Use milliseconds instead: a million milliseconds is 17 minutes, a billion milliseconds is 12 days, a trillion is 31 years.
My favorite is “do you know the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire? About a billion dollars”
Like, being a millionaire is a pretty sweet spot to be in if you’re lucky enough. Not quite like a millionaire of decades ago but still good. But if you’re a billionaire, a million dollars is basically a rounding error.
Show them the money visualizer website https://alteredqualia.com/xg/examples/money.html#s[orders_of_magnitude]
personally i absolutely support billionaires if you remove the actual issues like them being able to lobby and remove legal forms of tax evasion so that the country is benefitted more, especially when they are creative(ish) like elon and do stuff actually beneficial to humanity like space programs (may be wrong but i believe hearing news abt him making that and running it), and honestly it would be great if more billionaires focused on space exploration as well as the governments, its just the next step in mankind tbh
You dropped these bootstraps, bootlicker
I just want to start off by saying that your opinion is valid and it’s not even necessarily wrong. So don’t listen to anybody trying to disparage you on this.
If we are to allow billionaires to exist, they should take considerably more responsibility for the power that they wield and they of course should be taxed fairly in accordance to their income.
Also, lobbying should just be downright illegal. Which it is borderline is anyway.
Agreed except the part about lobbying. The EFF and ACLU are lobbying groups, and I don’t think you want to outlaw them. Heck, signing a petition is a form of lobbying.
Fuck off back to shitter Elon.
Scenario: you have 10 kids. Would you rather 1 kid thrive, 4 do alright, 4 struggling to find food, and one starving, or all 10 eat well?
The reason that kid is starving is directly tied to why the first one is thriving. It isn’t because there wasn’t enough food, it’s because the one thriving was taking the food from the rest, and throwing away a lot of it along the way, not caring at all about his siblings
Billionaires mean that workers are exploited and underpaid somewhere in the chain. Support for billionaires means support for exploitation and resource extraction from actual workers (and the government initiatives and representatives they pay for).
Their money doesn’t come from nowhere, it comes from us. It comes from income taxes spent on subsidies, it comes from stock dividends paid for by mass layoffs, it comes from not having to pay a commensurate fine when hundreds of thousands of gallons of pollutants leak into the water we drink and fish in.
“Absolutely supporting billionaires” is a decidedly uninformed position.
In a very real sense the money doesn’t even exist. It’s the worth of their holdings… Which for some reason they can often borrow against… that adds the extra 2 or 3 zeros.
Yeah, that’s why I specifically mentioned dividends. A lot of executives are also paid bonuses on their salaries based on stock performance, so they can “double dip” in these cases too. This is on top of lobbying for deregulation.
Must be great to not have to worry about money and be able to simply fire other people if it ever becomes a concern; it just further goes to show that these people don’t actually add value to even their own companies.
Oddly enough, the same people that wouldn’t want a maximum wage also don’t want a minimum wage. Go figure!
Because making 400k/yr by sitting on a pile of assets and living a low-cost life in a paid-off small-town cottage is not the same as making 400k/yr as a debt-saddled surgeon renting in a high-cost city center, so targeting income instead of wealth gets us farther from a fairer economy.
Next question.
Lets put that maximum at $10M/month (or year). Now your counter argument doesn’t work any more.
I think we should be setting these max/min wages as relative values, not absolute values. Otherwise we have to pass laws every time the min wage needs to be adjusted. And we’ll end up with stagnation.
For example, a person’s wage can only be X% higher than the lowest wage of someone a step below them in hierarchy. Including contractors and suppliers so they can’t skirt or find loopholes.
There still might be some haywire incentives that require more thought, but it should hopefully encourage labor to be valued at an appropriate proportion of value. Either everyone makes good money, or nobody does.
Should also probably deincentivize layoffs, stock buybacks, etc. at the cost of shareholder earnings / value.
but then businesses couldn’t run properly right? idk for sure but I feel like smaller businesses would be paid to a person and distrubuted to the company
The people who make that kind of money don’t make it through wages but other compensation.
Which is why we need to not allow borrowing against assets to get over the maximum.
Yes, so block that at a maximum rate (too)?
I am not an accountant but from what I know, taxing stuff like compensation in the form of stocks is pretty hard to do.
I’m not disagreeing with you, the system is just rigged in favor of very wealthy people.
the system is just rigged in favor of very wealthy people
I think that’s the whole point we’re trying to change in this discussion. 👍
Oh for sure, it’s just going to be a really long uphill battle as long as the current liberal system is in place.
I don’t have any faith in any reform happening with wealth in any country. Money is too powerful to change anything at the top. 😔 So in that sense, a very long battle indeed. 😞
Not with that attitude ;-)
So when the yankocide starts where will you hide?
Next question, why did you immediately go to 400k? Why not 1 million? If you make a million dollars then you’ve made half the average lifetime earnings of a worker. Double question, if we capped earnings at 400k, would school lenders not take that into account?
I think a maximum yearly income, including any money you could conceivably spend for personal use, would be a wonderful idea. It would certainly put a damper on being a billionaire if you know you could never actually get more than about a hundred million dollars in your life. Just literally running the score up at that point.
Ok sure, but if you frame the conversation to mean the limit would be set at $400k/year then you’re missing the point. We’re talking billionaires not single digit millionaires. Despite how those numbers sound to the average person there’s several orders of magnitude between them.
i couldnt read the article (paywall) but is that applicable when billionaires often get paid significantly less than $400k/yr?
I don’t mean to argue against your point but they became billionaires somehow. There are people who are becoming billionaires today and their wealth accumulation could be limited. It seems like more than one solution is needed. I don’t think billionaires are good for society… They have too much power, political power
If the minimum wage was a comfortable living wage — like it should be, in my and many other folks’ opinion — then it wouldn’t matter. One person’s excess isn’t a problem, unless it’s at the expense of someone else (which, you know, is kinda the case…).
A handful of people’s excess is exactly the problem.
Even if it’s not at the expense of someone else, too much wealth in the hands of one person is still harmful. It gives one person too much power over others, allows for people to buy their way out of legal trouble, buy politicians, etc.
In the mean time, decorate some pikes with billionaire noggins. The problem might fix itself if extreme wealth becomes a mortal liability.
Trickle-down economics works like a piñata - you gotta crack it open before anything starts to trickle.
The Hamster from The Hamster Dance 2.0 makes maximum wage
My favourite line from the song.
Tax rates used to extend over 100% in the USA. The IRS lost the case. They were limited to all of the money earned, not more.
So there used to ba maximum wage.
