this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
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IMO if you're a billionaire and stay a billionaire, you're incapable and unworthy of being called altruistic. Nobody needs a billion dollars. Nobody even needs a tenth of that. There should be a $1 million annual asset cap on all income sources, full stop. Everything else should go to social services, infrastructure, etc. and NOT person or military anything.
Well, okay but selling a single family home these days goes for over a million commonly in the cities, even if it’s your only family home and for example you are moving into smaller home or selling for money for health care or to move into retirement home etc
A home you could have bought between 30-50 k 30 or 40 years ago could easily be worth over 1 million now
But doesn't that have a lot to do with the fact that millionaires and billionaires are buying property and jacking up prices? If the cap is 1 million and someone sells their house for 1 million, if they make any more money that year, it goes to taxes. That would give incentive to people to actually live life instead of being completely focused on the rat race. I don't think 1 million is a good cap, certainly not with the value of the dollar being what it is. However, I do think setting a cap and having it automatically lower a little bit every few years is a good idea. That would need to also be accompanied with a limit on liquid assets to be gradually taken down as well, if anyone is hoarding money, they would be forced to either give it away or donate to charity if they didn't want all of it going into public programs. There shouldn't be limit on what someone can buy/own.
I disagree with giving go charity to get out of paying for public services. Tons of shit charities out there.
But they're shit because the people who work for them take all the money. With the cap greed is a much smaller factor and would likely lead to those charities to either get their shit together or shut down
Edit: and you're right in an ideal government charities wouldn't even be necessary because taxes are handling everything a charity would but it will never be perfect and I think giving people the option of where their earned money goes would be a lot less aggravating than being forced to give it to the US government
A million a year barely lifts you beyond the middle class these days. You would still need a mortgage ( at least for a couple of years ) where I live.
I think maybe $10 million would be better. But I prefer a progressive system over a cap. Earning more money should always make you more money. People respond to incentives. We just need to increase the tax rate as high as 90% by the time you are making $10 million or more.
If a few billionaires had $100 million, it would not wreck society.
I mean, I like to shit on Billionaires as much as anyone, but they don't really own a Billion dollars like sitting around in their bank accounts. They own it in assets like stocks of companies, real estate, etc. The money they spend are usually loans against these assets which they then pay back by selling some because their values usually increases more than the interest rates.
So I don't understand how you are envisioning this asset cap and going to social services. Imagine you have stock In a company that's growing more than a million dollars. Would they be forced to sell the stock to 'social services'? Who controls these assets then? Or are they forced to sell them? Then the assets just get passed around.
I don't think a solution is that simple. Maybe it would be better if we regulate the companies more. But for that we need to agree on rules on an international level because otherwise, as it is now already happening, they just switch their HQ to less regulated countries. The EU approaches this with regulations you need to follow if you want to operate in the EU at all. Which makes the corps found subcorps to operate in EU. They evade all regulations as long as we can't agree on an international standard.
Long story short. It's not the billionaires money that's the problem, it's the power they hold in their assets in multinational corporations that enables them to operate above any laws of one nation.