fair share?

I mean you could even take the bottom number and leave them with the top number and they could still live in unimaginable luxury forever. Or just take the lot because fuck em lol.
- I couldn't imagine spending $1 billion in my entire life, let alone 3-4.
  
  Most of their billions is ownership in companies they grew into what they are today. It's not like they have billions to spend, it's that their ownership is worth billions according to the market.
- If they are self-made millionaires/billionaires as they claim, take everything they have/own and tell them to start the quest again, no glitches, DLC, or saved progress.
- the garfield wealth tax
- You all realize they don't have that money laying around to pay the IRS right? They own companies, those companies are worth that much. To pay that you would have to liquidate those companies. So no more Amazon, Tesla, Space X, etc...
  
  no more Amazon, Tesla, Space X, etc...
  Oh no! Anyway, so how can we make this happen, like, yesterday?
  
  Don't be a bootlicker or bot or idiot.
  When they sell their shares to buy twitter or pay the tax man, those companies still exist. It just means that other people get to buy those shares and that's a good thing, because that way those companies get owned by the public.
  Tesla and SpaceX still exist even after Elon overpaid by some $30B for his Twitter adventure.
  
  You don't have to liquidate. Giving governments around the world more of a direct say in these international companies would be good.
  
  Brings a tear to my eye, I tells ya
  
  I would be happy to take taxes in the form of ownership of the company
  here the tax genius of Henry the 8th comes into play "pay me my money or else"
  when noblemen didn't pay william the conqueror the taxes he felt were due on time he would boil them. The principle being that if the rich face consequences for breaking the law they obey.
  
  Don't threaten me with a good time
  
  Well they are public companies bar space x so. Just redistribute those shares.
  
  I highly recommend you to read the paper billionare argument. The market can stand the liquidation of most of those companies without making them go bankrupt, we don't want them to stop existing, just to make them smaller and not a threat to democracy.
  For the whole scale of wealth I also recommend going through wealth shown to scale
  
  No, they'd just need to liquidate their share in those companies. Those shares would then get bought up by other people or by pension funds.
  
  All they’d need to liquidate is part of their ownership in said companies. Companies themselves will be ok, don’t you worry your bleeding heart.

Tax billionaires until there are no more billionaires
- It's really insane that we legally treat the tenth billion dollars at the same level as a working persons house or car.
  Everything is legally just "property".
  No, fuck that.
  The law should protect the first million of every citizen with ferver. (and when we tackle wealth inequality, most people will have this level of wealth at the end of their working life. The fact that most currently don't is due to inequality. )
  Up until 100 million, it should be taxed at a reasonable level. Because at some level, it's fair that people prefer watching Taylor Swift instead of me sing on a stage.
  Above that it should be taxed heavily.
  And above a billion, it should be just confiscated. As in, oopsie, our system malfunctioned, you weren't supposed to end up with more wealth than what a thousand normal people would save up after a whole lifetime of work, so we are taking it back.
  
  you weren't supposed to end up with more wealth than what a thousand normal people would save up after a while lifetime of work
  I actively try to cheat at every single-player game that I play. I still don't think I've accumulated a billion anything other than self-criticisms. Even that's questionable.
  
  I'm cool with numbers past a billion being asymptotically possible. Let the money-addicts keep chasing N+1 dollars, if each +1 puts ten times more money into public funding.
  
  It's actually taxes less if it's earned from investments
  
  At a billion you get a small plaque that says 'yay you won capitalism', they name a park bench after you and you replay from scratch.
  
  The problem is that this wealth is ownership in companies they made. If you start a company and it becomes too successful, Is it right that we really just forcefully take that ownership away from you? Who wants to start or keep a company in a country that takes away your company from you if it's too successful?

Do billionaires actually have billions in real money sitting around? I've always thought the billions were in stocks and couldn't be taxed until they cashed it out and they could technically lose everything if the stock price falls. That's really fucked up if true
- Nobody keeps that amount of cash. Even below a million, most people have most of their wealth in either real estate (their own house) or financial securities (stocks, ETFs, bonds).
  Yet, we all gotta pay property tax and capital gains.
  The billionaires just have loopholes that they use to never realize gains with loan schemes and trust funds.
  
  The billionaires just have loopholes that they use to never realize gains with loan schemes and trust funds. <
  Isnt that then bigger problem than generally tax the rich?
- That is actually the case. Billionaires aren't swimming in a room full of cash and they don't some some secret mega vault that holds $100 billion. Most of these guys are founders of very successful corporations, and so they naturally have a larger than average share. Bezos has most of his wealth in Amazon stocks, Zuckerberg in Meta, Musk in Tesla and SpaceX, Gates in Microsoft, and so on. Their wealth goes up and down depending on how well the company they're most tied to is doing. In the US and most other places, stocks aren't taxed until they're sold. Once a transaction happens, there will be a tax. Usually tax rates go up with profits and income, and there are deductions for losses (to a degree). It's an okay system, the issue is that it isn't being enforced. Our system is full of loopholes that these billionaires exploit to pay way less than they should. But billionaires not paying taxes are nothing compared to corporations not paying ANY taxes on billions in annual profits. That's what we should go after.
  
  Just spitballing here.
  As you said, right now, you only pay taxes on profits at the time stocks are sold. Which means I could gather billions in "wealth" and never cash in, thus never pay a single dollar in taxes.
  Suppose we would change how taxes are paid on stock profits. What if you had to pay taxes on yearly profits every year? This way, you can cash out at any time, because the tax is already paid. It would work just like regular income tax. Deductions and losses on the market would still apply.
  
  How do they have cash on hand to do stuff then?

Sad day when "billionaires should pay taxes" is considered a far left position.
- Well, when even the "moderate" right thinks everyone left of the Strasserites is a commie, this is what you get.
- Billionaires should pay a wealth tax is considered a far left position. Billionaires should pay an income tax is a position supported by all except maybe some tea party folk.
  
  That!... That's literally what I meant!!

Take the inverse of that and you're getting closer to what actually needs to happen.
- Well-behaved oligarchs gets the Pu Yi treatment, the rest gets the Romanov treatment.
- Least economically illiterate hexbear user
  
  What a loser, stalking all the lefty subs just to shit on people they disagree with in the laziest possible fashion. JFC find a hobby.

- This isn't capitalism, this is corporatism
  
  Go ahead and define those terms
  
  You'd have to be dense to think this is capitalism. The corporations are clearly communist
  
  No, this is actually existing capitalism. The utopian fantasies of capitalist theorists like Adam Smith and Keynes simply do not work or exist in reality.
  
  This isn't capitalism, this is corporatism
  Which is capitalism
  
  theres no such thing as corporatism, liberal
  Death to America
  
  they are the same thing.
  
  Funny how capitalism seems to evolve into "corporatism" every time. Almost like there's a well-documented cycle, or something
  
  embarrassing
- I want to try taxing first. Maybe if we can just remake a bunch of Pre-Reagan SEC rules and raise the top earning brackets, add some tiers, that might help like it did after the Gilded Age and Great Recession.
  Of course the only way to do any of that is to vote blue and the USA is kind of fucked as far as the political spectrum goes. Again, Reagan's fault for deregulating campaign finance.

Wealth taxes are stupid. That said, nobody needs multiple hundreds of billions of dollars.
The solution is to have regulations and laws in place that prevent them getting this large in the first place. The fact that Amazon and Google own 90% of the internet is absolutely fucked.
- I agree, no one should be able to hold such an obscene amount of wealth. Right now they do, though. How do you propose this be remedied?
  
  Tbh you would have to create a really good anti trust taskforce full of people that lost everything to these humongous companies, people whose stores got undercut and etc.
  I say this because the only way Colombia fought against Escobar's control of the police was by having a task force full of people whose family or friends had died to the cartel.
  This said, yhe defenetly, not one entity that has that much power should be there without being voted in. How would you feel if the gov owned the internet, cuz that doesn't sound good to me. Soo yhe between voting for whomever controls most of the internet or having better anti trust laws and regulating forces idk
  
  Not with a wealth tax. I'd say just break up the companies and share prices will adjust to reflect.
- Right, let's go back in time and fix it.
- Wealth taxes are a concrete solution. Your proposal is instead some vague notion of regulations and laws. By the way, a wealth tax would help prevent the rich from having so much money which allows them to set those regulations and laws in the first place.
- 60% of middle class wealth is held in their property. Guess what get's taxed? Their property. Right now we have a wealth tax on the middle class who are carrying a very disproportionate tax load compared with the rich.
- And, even if they don't own it, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google probably still help run it with Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud.
- Because a ton of wealth is caught up in assets that were already taxed in some way, or is not directly usable. Yeah I might have a few million dollars in assets, but if those are all caught up in shares of a company I'd have to sell a ton just for the mere fact of me owning them.
  I'm personally not at all a fan of double-dipping on taxes. I was taxed to make money and taxed to buy stocks, that should be it until I've sold them or realized any gain from them. Property tax makes sense on some level, since you're taking up physical space and helping to pay for the utilities you use in your area. But I don't agree on a tax for just owning something otherwise, it feels incredibly scummy.
  There are other solutions to the problem that don't involve losing shares in a company you've built yourself and still taxes in a way that's less shitty. The rich pay less in taxes by taking out loans against their assets, which is fine, but those loans aren't counted as income for good reason (otherwise buying a house would mean tens of thousands in taxes just for getting the loan), but they need an income to pay back those loans and that income would be taxed, so I'm not certain there's a lot that could be rightly done there, either. It would also fuck with a lot of business financials if you start progressively taxing larger loans as income, but it's something to consider I guess.
  I'm not sure what the solution is. Personally I see little difference in someone having 200 million in assets and 70 billion purely from the standpoint of "how much could a person reasonably spend in a year," but I digress.
  In my opinion, the more egregious issue is that the mere fact of having that much money could be easily used to manipulate markets and should be considered anti-competitive from its mere existence. Good on you for making that much money, I applaud you, but capitalism requires healthy competition and if you have literal trillions to outcompete competition by hemorrhaging money through losses for hundreds of years then that's fundamentally anti-competitive because nobody's going to challenge you. It's a losing game and breaks the capitalistic contract necessary for a healthy economy.
  Companies should not have any means of becoming so unfathomably large, and that alone would resolve the issue of "paying their fair share."

Billionaires shouldn't exist. Their fair share is more like 95%.
- how about they can keep whatever the total minimum wage equivalent for 40 hours a week 50 weeks a year times how ever many years they were in business.
- And if 95% still leaves them with more than you have you will feel that that rate needs to go higher.
  
  I don't agree with that. I'm personally completely fine with millionaires or perhaps even 100 millions. Like there should be a social safety net at the bottom there should be a social safety limit at the top even if it is very high and more wealth than anyone could reasonably need. Because beyond that point it's not they are just getting more wealthy. Everyone else is getting poorer for it.

The tax should be even higher. No one needs $100 billion.
- No one needs $1 billion
  
  God the insanity of that wealth is hard to fathom.
  Nobody needs $100m, which is itself a totally insignificant amount compared to $1b… and we’re talking people with hundreds of billions :/
- How do you handle a CEO owning stock worth that amount in the marketplace, then?
  
  They don't. No one can explain how a wealth tax work because it doesn't work.

Uhhh is the ask to liquidate their assets? They will just sell a Picaso painting that they 'value' at 60% of their gross income.
Why do you guys fetishize these billionaires and not the giant hedge fund pools that make these guys rich in the first place?
- Um, tax those too.
  We don't need to be perfect with just one proposal. We can have at least 2 proposals.

I'd be willing to be taxed into oblivion if I knew it'd mean everyone else could lead full lives. And I make nothing.
Now imagine the good their excess wealth could do.
- Fuck it, I'm willing to die if it came down to it to ensure the safety and prosperity of my countrymen. And I actually hate most of my countrymen.
  If we ask and freely give such sacrifices from the working class, then asking the elite to stop hoarding gold like a dragon really shouldn't be a big deal.
  I do respect Warren Buffet for being honest about it. It's up to us (the public) and the politicians who work for us to change the system to make it more fair.
  There was also another billionaire who gave his money away and is no longer a billionaire. Mad respect for the guy, but he is a rare breed. We have to fix the system, not depend on charity.

Yeah and maybe also cutting down on their non-profit organisations scheme to avoid taxes would be nice..

- Lenin and Stalin would have moved you up in the party quickly. You're family now would probably be an oligarchy. You were born to late. Think of all the expensive yachts and million dollar homes you could have today?

Wealth taxes actually work, that's why the rich attack them so vehemently.
- I think you're wrong on both points. I've heard plenty of rich people say they believe their tax rate should be higher including some of the ones on that list. You're also wrong when you say it works. It works for who? If you don't attack the spending problem it's just more money to be wasted. Let's face it the political system is outstanding and finding some need to spend every cent they can possibly get their hands on. It won't matter if they spend it on your priorities or someone else's they will always find the need to spend it. In our current inflation based economy they don't even need to spend what they take in it's easier to just print more and that's exactly what they're doing.
  
  rich person talk: it's not a tax problem, it's a spending problem.
  No it's not, money spent in the economy is money going around. rather than hoarded offshore.
  
  The rich saying their tax rate should be higher only advocate for higher income tax rates, which they are already avoiding for the most part. It's just another PR stunt.

Chump change lmfao, Eisenhower was taxing 90% of J. Paul Getty’s yearly earnings

- Finally a head tax I can get behind!

10% off the top

By body weight

The relationship between the University and the Patrician, absolute ruler and nearly benevolent dictator of Ankh-Morpork, was a complex and subtle one.
The wizards held that, as servants of a higher truth, they were not subject to the mundane laws of the city.
The Patrician said that, indeed, this was the case, but they would bloody well pay their taxes like everyone else.
The wizards said that, as followers of the light of wisdom, they owed allegiance to no mortal man.
The Patrician said that this may well be true but they also owed a city tax of two hundred dollars per head per annum, payable quarterly.
The wizards said that the University stood on magical ground and was therefore exempt from taxation and anyway you couldn't put a tax on knowledge.
The Patrician said you could. It was two hundred dollars per capita; if per capita was a problem, decapita could be arranged.
The wizards said that the University had never paid taxes to the civil authority.
The Patrician said that he was not proposing to remain civil for long.
The wizards said, what about easy terms?
The Patrician said he was talking about easy terms. They wouldn't want to know about the hard terms.
The wizards said that there was a ruler back in , oh, it would be the Century of the Dragonfly, who had tried to tell the University what to do. The Patrician could come and have a look at him if he liked.
The Patrician said that he would. He truly would
In the end it was agreed that while the wizards of course paid no taxes, they would nevertheless make an entirely voluntary donation of, oh, let's say two hundred dollars per head, without prejudice, mutatis mutandis, no strings attached, to be used strictly for non-militaristic and environmentally-acceptable purposes.

Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

well their fair share would be they get nothing (or close to compared to what they do have)

their fair share is connected to their necks, but im sure we can figure out a way to get it off them
Death to America
- look, 10% off the top isn't too much to ask
- lets be reasonable here their fair share is all their stuff

I always use seconds as an allegory to dollars when I explain to people the difference between thousand, million and billion (I did the number crunching in my head and rushed it, so if I made any errors lemme know).
1000 seconds = 17 minutes
100,000 seconds = 27 hours
1 million seconds = 11 days
1 billion seconds = 31.70 years
148 billion seconds (Bezos' net worth) = 4693 years
- I like it, it's like saying: Imagine how rich you would be if you got a dollar every second. Well, not as rich as Jeff Bezos.

- Okay but why did you call it "millionaires tax" instead of like "1% earners tax" or something? Headlines are all scaring lazy people who don't read the article to think that their lifetime retirement savings is at risk. When it's really for people making over a million per year!
- Being a millionaire isn't really that much of an accomplishment anymore, unless you're talking about hundreds of millions. For most people just owning a house, having a good retirement fund, and a couple of other assets/investments (cars, a small business, some stocks, etc) puts them over $1 million. A lot of middle class grandparents are in that tier, especially in Massachusetts.
  
  It's for people with annual incomes over $1 million. An article I saw says there's about 16,000 such people in Massachusetts raising $1.3 billion in 2023.

- Alternatively some of us have taken economics classes and history classes and know how poorly wealth taxes have worked.
- I swear corporations hire these people to come in here and defend billionaires. Billionaire who will never even spend any of that in a hundred life times.

Counterpoint: But they don't wanna pay taxes! They don't wannaaaaaaaaaaa.... why are you being so mean to the precious billionaires?
So there are irreconcilable issues on this issue and Congress is currently too busy trying to impeach Biden because his son had dick pics on his laptop.
- Other counterpoint, say you're in a position of power and are thinking about implementing a wealth tax. When along comes one of these people with a bri- I mean donation to just not do that. Can we really expect you to turn down the money? /s
- I think its more than just his own dick pics.
  
  Who cares

Here's the basic idea of what I'd think is fair
You have a basic rate for income below the 20th percentile of all incomes
Multiply that by 1.5 for income between that and the 40th percentile
Multiply that by 1.25 for income between that and the 60th percentile
Multiply that by 1.125 for income between that and the 80th percentile
Multiply that by 1.0625 for income between that and the 95th percentile
Multiply that by 1.03125 for income between that and the 99th percentile
Multiply that by 1.015625 for all income above the 99th percentile, with the additional caveat that people who top this bracket even once cannot hold public office, donate to political campaigns, or hire lobbyists and lobbying firms for ten years following them topping out.
Imagine something similar for taxes on units of housing owned, dividends earned, and so on and so forth.
The idea being that the highest rate can't be adjusted without significantly reducing the tax burden of the poorest, basically erasing the only way conservatives have been able to balance the books whenever they try that shit.
- Not more complicated than current US income tax system. Maybe a few more tax brackets...
- Specific example: I think you may want to check your rates, the rate differential between highest and lowest in your example seems much lower than the current system. General idea: Couldn't the rates just be adjusted to the base or unlinked later? Changes would have to be legislative anyway.
  
  I kinda pulled the exact multipliers out of my butt, however! I've spreadsheeted this shit out and there's a way to do it such that 60% of Americans wind up with a tax break while putting some serious screws to obscene wealth in the highest brackets. I even added an additional multiplier for every multiple of twenty times the average of the lowest quintile's wages someone's income rises above. Twenty because that's the predicted "ideal" wage ratio between an organization's lowest and highest compensated members.
  So you have the top bracket rate, and then after the first multiple is passed, that gets taxed at the nominal rate times the multiplier, and so on and so forth past each new multiple.

- There are so many ways to avoid paying income taxes in a country. Perhaps the easiest is taking a loan with security in stock. Wealth tax and taxing stock in general is practiced in my country with great success (should be much higher still) and is in fact great for the economy: it forces people to invest or see their fortunes diminish. Your statement shows lack of knowledge and imagination that other systems than the one you preside in could exist.
  
  How do they pay those taxes though? I imagine by forcing the companies they've invested in to give them a higher dividend? Or do they actually sell stocks in order to pay the tax?
- Your comment proves that you have no idea what you are talking about. Typically the ultra rich do not have income. They are paid in stocks and other things of the sort.
  Their "income" comes from their stock portfolios and etc
  
  When you receive a stock as a form of payment its value when received is filed at income on once taxes, as are any dividends unless they are commuting tax frauds or using loopholes. We should close any loopholes
- We should at least start by closing the stepped-up basis loophole, but stopping there would require patience that i don't have.
- Just take the list of the fortune 500 and have the IRS hit them up for cash individually, then.
- You don't know how any of this works, but you've been fed a lie about how it supposedly works and now you think you know how it works and try to lord your false knowledge over others. A wealth tax that includes stocks would simply be another calculation to make as to whether they're worth holding.

- None of these guys has income anywhere near a billion in yearly income. They have stock and other assets that are worth billions but it is not income per se. If anything they go to extreme lengths to minimize their income.
  
  Make that illegal too. It goes against everything that humans have learned about living in a community. They're like monkeys with some sort of brain malfunction that makes them horde bananas and starving out the rest of the group.. if they did that in the wild they'd get torn apart by other monkeys
  
  is there anyway to classify new/gained assets and tax that?

3% is a fair share?
- 3% annually would be really huge, and probably shrink a lot of personal wealth out there. 3% one time is not as big of a deal, but it also doesn't raise so much revenue. The problem with a one time wealth tax is it incentivizes a future government to try a second one-time wealth tax, and then maybe a third. Soon enough it's not really a one-time tax any more.
  In the United States there would also be a serious question on whether wealth tax was constitutional. The income tax was not raised until the 16th amendment explicitly gave Congress the power. It's possible the court will say there's no power to levy a national wealth tax absent an amendment.
  
  I imagine a realistic implementation would involve a system of progressive brackets and minimums/deductibles, modeled after the way income tax is. Ideally, things are modeled such that the tax is only full percents among those absurdly high brackets that can afford them
  Constitutionality is another matter though, and yeah it seems like it would be awful hard to get that through the current court
- This is a wealth tax, not an income tax.
  
  too low

As a temporarily embarrassed billionaire myself, I have reservations about this

When do we start burning things.

As of this point every wealth tax that has been implemented ends up getting abandoned because if how inefficient they are. It's like rent control, it sounds great on paper bu historically never works out like it was planned.
- Forcing Bezos to liquidate $6b of Amazon would have an effect on the economy.
  Plus, you don't think they would really pay that tax, do you? There's always a loophole.

Unpopular opinion: You’ll get the same amount out of the billionaires if you tax them 3% or 97%.
- Ah yes, apathy is a famous solution to all our problems!
  
  I’m not being apathetic, just pragmatic. If you want to bring about positive change you need a better solution than something that has failed and will continue to do so.
- Remember: Every dollar you don't tax them goes straight to funding far right death squads and inciting genocide against minority groups.
  
  Calm down their soldier. Massive jump from taxation reform to full blown death squads. This ain’t 1939.

- Or they'll send spend it on social programs or they'll spend it on themselves. There lies the root of the problem

The problem is, unless them getting taxed more results in you getting taxed less, it almost doesn't matter. It seems like any extra money the government ever gets just ends up going to more war.
- Found the US American.
  
  So are most of these billionaires. The dude is right, giving more money to the US government just means inflating Washington’s war chest.

Wealth is not money. There's nothing to tax.
- This is a very true statement.
  Stocks won't get taxed unless they get actioned on. That is where the majority of their preceeded wealth is.
  
  The US government is sovereign, it can very much either take ownership of the stock, or estimate its value and construct a loan that the company owners needs to pay back because they owe this tax. Or probably 100s of more clever solutions as well.
  It can definitely decide to tax wealth if it wanted to, it could also break up large companies to at least spread the wealth of these institutions wider. It mostly just doesn't "want" to.
  This argument is so unnecessary defeatist pretending the most militarised and police ridden country in the world has no power to enforce laws it could write.
  Opposite to that notion I think if the US had any interest in fairness in taxation, especially on a more global scale, it could easily get all the common tax havens/financial secrecy jurisdictions, to fold to essentially whatever demands if has. But again it seems like the US government strangely doesn't really want that either.
  Which is still the central issue the US government is more captured by the billionaire class than a lot of people like to think they are, and it's never just the dem or just the reps, it's large portions of both parties that are essentially captured in this way, or just fall into it because preserving the status quo is easy.
- It's also real money, otherwise Musk couldn't have bought Twitter for $44 billion. He sure didn't have that amount on his bank account but he still bought it all the same, thus giving him a substantial soft power through information.
  
  True, but that would mean to tax billionaires by taking money from their lenders?
  
  Elon would have triggered a taxable event using his wealth to buy Twitter.
  
  And now Twitter is down to $4b. Because wealth is not money.
- No.
- I think you meant to say “wealth is not income”. That’s the whole point of it being a “wealth tax”. That said, there’s pretty sound law arguing that wealth taxes are unconstitutional. There are far better ways to effect similar change, such as capital gains tax reform, and closing transfer tax exemption loopholes.
  
  No, I said what I meant. Wealth is not money. Even if we try to express wealth in a monetary value, it's not money. And there's nothing to tax.

Even if the wealth tax will get passed, it'll cost much less than a billion dollars to hire a big and expensive team of lawyers and accountants that can find several ways to bypass it.
- Look at that it's already creating more jobs and it hasn't even been implemented yet

How would this be implemented? I don't think the market would appreciate if all billionaires were suddenly forced to sell off billions worth of their shares. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to fight back against these tyrants, but not if it crashes the economy and makes the lives of workers worse.
- Say it with me: The stock market is not the economy.
  
  I hate the stock market as much as the next guy. Glorified gambling.
  But, the stock market is tied directly to the economy
  What do you think most people's retirement accounts are tied to?
  According to a quick Google, 61% of adults in US own stock. Which means more than half the population has an interest in the stock market not crashing.
  Yes the 1% probably owns the majority of stocks. Quick Google says 54% of all stocks.
  US Dollar is a fiat currency. It's only backed by the faith of the people behind it.
  It can absolutely crash and while the 1% will suffer, we will all suffer at least a little bit.

I may be dumb here, but how a real version of this tax would work? This example is basically pocket change and they'd pay cash (numbers on a computer} through some form of credit (against equity, etc}.
But if the tax left them with 1 million remaining for example, I assume that it'd basically be impossible to pay without changing the underlying ownership / means of production, no? The boring liquidity thing people say would actually apply because there wouldn't be enough cash (even as computer numbers) to pay the tax. So the gov would have to "print" the money for it. And then the rich would get a loan from the fed to pay the tax,(?) which seems circuitous, but also it seems circuitous even if they got a loan from a normal bank. The super-rich would essentially then just be constantly building this really large debt that would exceed the total amount of money. Because no underlying ownership or production would change, it would basically be the same as now, right? literally just numbers on a computer? Taking debt forever with unlimited credit to pay the people who gave you the money?
I'm sorta falling into a weird spot where:
Taxes seem to not really be about funding government in the sense that the gov controls the money supply (unless that's not true actually?), so, uh, are taxes a very dull game that everyone has to play? Is this what people are talking about when they say "providing base demand for the currency"?
All of these numbers seem much larger than they need to be...? In that you could only really buy 'investments' with them. Mostly being further means of production or scams. I get that there are markets for really expensive things (yachts come to mind), but honestly comparatively those don't really seem expensive. Is there some other use for money that I'm too poor to understand?
Money does seem kinda fake as well tbh.
So am I being uncharitable and there is a way for a tax to actually un-rich billionaires? Would they have to sell shares/debt to the state eventually building state ownership? It all seems a bit difficult and roundabout, but maybe that's just my lack of understanding. Also please don't respond with something from an econ class.
- Why wouldn't you want an educated response out of an econ class?
- One possible approach is to tax the expense on luxuries rather than the income. But the potential problem with that is it becomes a bigger hurdle for middle or upper middle class to experience any luxury.
  
  That sounds like a sales tax, no? Which would be regressive unless you charged sales tax on purchase of debt / equity. Doesn't matter if it's only a sales tax on yachts or whatever because they would have to buy like every single yacht to come close to comparing with their spending on further means of production as expressed by ownership / debt.
  Edit: Honestly, I'm not sure if it would stop being regressive even if there was sales tax on buying stock or whatever. Mostly going off vibes with that one.
- I think taxes are supposed to be in cash, but it's not as though that couldn't just be changed (I think lol). Probably easier to implement on the corporate tax side, like "20% of shares go to gov per year" and it would dwindle down until the companies are public. I think this would get weird with rich ppl having a bunch of debt instead of shares though(?).

Wouldn't a wealth tax be a yearly thing?
- They can be one off or multi year. Taxes don't have to be annual.

- There are more than 3 billionaires. And there are many, many, millionaires in the 9 figures range.

For a community named lefty memes you sure do get a lot of people adding ""nuance"" to taxing billionaires.
Almost makes you wish the .ml circuit was here to dunk em.
Almost.

I agree we should have a more progressive tax. The problem is fair is a relative term. When is fair fair enough? The fact is the underlying problem is overspending and no amount of "fair" increases to the tax rate is going to solve that problem.
- At this point I'd be happy if they would just stop CUTTING the taxes for the rich. Somehow even with massive deficits, that continues to be one of the primary policy positions of the Republican party.
  
  I completely agree. At this point, I really just don't understand the Republican party. I'm somebody that has always considered myself to be on the side of smaller government and conservative in general but this Republican party does not represent me.

consider the following: We forcefully seize the means of production and get rid off all parasites

But it's not real money until they want to use it.

They'd rather spend a few mill on PR and call it a day.

Only $4.6 Billion for Musk? I'm sure he'd appreciate that, since he paid $11Billion in 2021.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/10/investing/elon-musk-tesla-zero-tax-bill/index.html

Regardless of how hard it's to do this, you'll get what out of this... 15B? That's nothing... the government spends that in less than a day. Maybe cut government spending in half first. None of this is sustainable.
https://www.usdebtclock.org/
- You hear that everyone? $15 billion is nothing.
  
  …yeah when you think about how the US government spends money, a one-time injection of 15 bil is nothing. Hell, the combined lifetime wealth of ALL billionaires wouldn’t reach the ANNUAL budget of the US military.
  
  You do understand that the government budget is 4 trillion per year, right? Do the math! What's wrong with you?
- well, the top 25 wealthiest americans are together worth about 1.8 trillion, which according to your clock is just about the federal budget deficit and a third of federal spending. The numbers OP gave assume a tax rate of 3% which is already fairly substantial (it would be 3% of the deficit), but we could always raise that number if you feel fit isn't enough.
  
  I'll do you one better. Even if you take ALL their money, that's less than 6 months budget. You steal it from them, spend it in a few months, and you're back where you started in no time. It doesn't fix anything or change anything, but introduces tremendous problems (like inflation).
  And besides that and completely ignoring all these direct problems, these assets are not even liquid (Surprise surprise, Jeff Bezos doesn't store $5B in his safe). So, in order to cash them out, you're gonna have to sell them on the open markets, crash the stock markets, crash real estate markets, etc, which will lead to much higher unemployment, and pension funds will be destroyed (just like in 2008), and millions will go bankrupt. And all this even ignores that the net worth you're assigning to them ignores slippage, so it's much less than 1.8 Trillion when sold on the open market, ignoring automated bots that will sell even more to protect their hedge funds.
  Yes, let's do all that destruction in the economy just for 6 months worth of spending. Great plan!
  Like I always say: A bunch of ignorant, uneducated, stupid and entitled teenagers who don't know anything about the economy want to decide how the economy works. Go read a book, and stop telling us how to run the world before you learn how the world works. Go learn, and your realistic suggestions are welcome. We all want a better world.

Why is it assumed that if the government has more money, then things will be better?
The government is filled with inefficiency that will just be made worse by throwing more money at the issue. Americans are not getting value out of their taxes.
Americans have record low confidence in congress and many officials in government (Supreme Court). Why would we give them more money when they, congress in particular, is responsible for setting the budget?
- Why would we give them more? Oh damn, are you a billionaire?
  
  Should billionaires make as much as they do? No
  However just taxing them doesn't get rid of the root issue. It just addresses a symptom.
  We should break up the companies that enable billionaires to exist, stimulate competition, raise the minimum wage, put bounds on CEO bonuses, and limit executive pay to a reasonable ratio when compared to the lowest paid worker in the corporation.
- The reason for a tax isn't to give the government money to spend, it already has the ability to spend infinite money for all intents and purposes. The taxation is there to destroy some part of that money to sort of balance the money supply after the fact.
  This way of thinking about tax also makes very obvious that taxing income might make the least amount of sense and taxing wealt and transactions, probably is the more reasonable way to go.
  The government in the us is obviously innefective but it's not going to get better by withholding it's spending money, in fact I'm fairly certain that for almost all government agencies in the US the requirements the law asks of them are largely impossible to hit on their current budget. Sure maybe the regulation could be easier and the oversight requirements less strict, but reducing the budget (except for military and police) wouldn't help any of the problems that exist when interfacing with these government agencies today, it'd just make them worse
  
  There's also the fact that Americans have record low confidence in the government as a direct result of the actions of the people who give their billionaire friends tax cuts year after year and make it up by raising taxes for everybody else.

Jhahja Idiot. They dont have that much in cash. Its all invested

Bernie shit lol, this is never gonna happen