Hell, we only have to do it once per billionaire. Since they only got to that point through their own self sufficient blood sweat and toil they'll have no problems doing it again and better with all the experience they've learned along the way!
And if they don't feel like it, remember to point out that no one wants to work anymore!
If we always kill off 99.9% and grant the remaining 0.1% who actually bounce back immunity, we'd end up creating an even worse billionaire class. Kinda like with antibiotics.
No matter how many times you let that happen to a bacteria, as long as you're killing them with a handgun, it keeps working. They don't evolve defenses without becoming something different.
So I guess it's a bit metaphorgotten, but the point is that that's only true if it's a system where starting from zero to a billion is something that can be selected for, and it pretty much just is not.
Bring back Dragon Slaying. These fucks are greedier than a 10,000 year old Red Ancient Wyrm. No really. The absolute most that a dragon hoard will come out to is those guys, and they'll only have 3.5-5 million gp worth of hoard after 10,000 years. That's only 350,000 to 500,000 oz of gold. So $820,452,500 to $1,172,075,000
Can we stop pretending billionaires are like Scrooge McDuck?
They don't have money, they have assets. You can take those, but dafuq you wanna do with it? Let the state run the companies? Have you seen any state-ran stuff? Idk, if I want amazon state run.
so you're saying they're billionaires, but ackshually they're cash poor? They have that much in assets specifically because they can't be taxed on it. they funnel all their income through LLCs and corporations so that they can write off their expenses on their tax returns as corporate expenses.
Tax them on their income, then tax them on their assets. It's not unprecedented, they tax our real properties based on value, why not tax the super rich based on their assets as well?
Apparently Warner Brother's (and other's of the same) can produce and shelve a movie, and use it as a tax write-off. So if my taxes can prop up an industry that has the ability to "conveniently" shelve their works, while recouping a bad investment...why aren't their shelved movies "public domain"? We kinda paid for them the moment they became a write-off
If I paint on canvas, and decide to never even try and earn income from it; do I get to recoup my losses in supplies? Or does the "standard deductible" override my loss, and the tax-burden falls back (again) on the working class? Or I'm dumb and don't understand taxes, so please enlighten me
Yes, run the companies democratically instead of individually.
The post office and fire department are great.
The post office has problems largely because of a decades-long campaign by one of our two major political parties to neuter it completely for the benefit of private shipping companies. And the funny part is, for all their efforts, it's still pretty damn good at its core mission.
What's the issue with fire departments? They're pretty great.
~pssst, worker run co-ops~
Nah, fuck that.
I don't want my salary dependent on how we are doing on a monthly basis.
If I create my own company, sure. But I can kinda control it.
If there are a thousand other people voting for dumb stuff and I loose a third of my income, I'm gonna loose it.
Also if we are doing equal splits, college is actually useless. Why would I waste my time becoming an engineer, if I could have earned the same money the whole time instead. Even worse with american college, where you not just loose all the salary from not working but also like 10-20,000 in tuition.
Anyone with a billion in assets also has enough access to cash to buy mansions and planes and stuff. They just have tricks to hide it as something other than personal income.
It's hard to say what the best solution to this is, because you're absolutely right, many billionaires don't spend "money" - they leverage their assets to get stuff. If they need to liquidate anything, someone that monitors some portfolio at some wealth management firm will do that with a few clicks and some signatures.
Perhaps the best option is regulation of a banks ability to finance against leveraged assets above a certain threshold? I'd also be for a cap on CEO salaries and bonuses, perhaps with both shareholder and employee approval needed to execute executive bonuses. I imagine that alone would mean most CEO's would lose a fuck-ton of money.
I'd love for a wealth tax to be viable, but it would require balls of steel from the president, and a central tax authority that won't be coerced into accepting loopholes. Even then, it would be hilariously easy to get around by moving wealth elsewhere.
I don't think salary caps are necessary. Just having steeper tax brackets will eventually lead to a soft cap, while not feeling like a punishment. Maybe even a simple function instead of brackets, its more dynamic and easier to calculate.
Wealth tax is kinda weird, since first someone needs to estimate the wealth, which is not easy. Then the amount to be paid probably needs to be cash, since 20% of e.g. a house is pretty useless. But actually liquefying enough wealth can have wild effects. For example Tesla stock plummeted for a while due to elon needing twitter-money.
In a sense it could prevent companies from growing. If I own a company imma make sure it stays below the threshold, since I don't want to sell my shares and loose voting-rights.
Or if you look at countries trying to seize Russian oligarchs' property: A lot failed, due to no one knowing who actually was the owner.
And then the trophy explodes
