The prospect of still being billionaires, but with less billions, was just too much to handle
Exactly why they need to be taxed more.
Billionaires shouldn’t exist to begin with and don’t assume tax money are used by governments for good.
I mean, you don’t become a billionaire by giving money away.
Uh, yeah you do. What do you think charities are for? Helping people?
Now imagine if there was some way a government could take a percentage of that and put it towards improving society as a whole.
Oh well, guess we’re fucked.
BUT THAT WOULD BE COMMUNISM!!1!
stop stop i’m already hard
Now imagine if there was some way a government could take a percentage of that and put it towards improving society as a whole.
Yes, some form of “giving pledge” where the amount was standardized and there was no option to back out. Radical thinking here.
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
I really like that as a term, never come across it before.
tbh I’m surprised that there are 9 who did
as a reward we should leave them for last
On an unrelated note, Bill Gates is in the epstein list.
And the reason Melinda divorced him.
Serious or joke?
We can only speculate, but his infidelity with staffers was known, and him being on the Epstein list may have been the final straw.
A decent person would have gone to the press with it, but she’s wealthy so she didn’t.
Didn’t know that, but not surprised.
Meh. I actually don’t think its a good idea. You just draw power away from the best of a segment empowering the biggest assholes. Taxes should be progressive and include all sources of income not just wages and the tax brackets should go all the way up to the highest income level. So there should be a level for over 100 billion and another for over 10 billion and over 1 billion and so on. Five figure income should be zero.
Taxes should be progressive
Yeah ofc. Why do you think the billionaires came up with this BS plan instead?
I agree with you and your proposal with the exception of 5 figure income having no income tax. At a billion level it might not be so important the difference between one or two billion. But on the 5 digits salaries, the difference of someone making 30k or someone making 80k is definitely meaningful. And as someone being in a comfy point in between there I do think everyone in my bracket should be paying taxes. Not high, but definitely something. Then lower incomes then yes, definitely 0% tax. But the amount of people on 5 digits salaries that are on the higher end is definitely worth having some tax, even when a small amount it already helps support the system with so many.
At the upper end you might be able to swing the more modest of housing and put away for retirement and that is great but it is not like changes circumstances that much. I would argue that opposite that the 2billion is one billion of funny money over what the one bilion guy has and should be taxed along the lines of lottery winnings.
Five figure income should be zero? $10,000/year is not a livable income.
as papastevesy said im advocating for zero tax on five figures which would go up to 99,999.99
They’re saying the tax rate should be 0 for 5-figure incomes.
It’s not a serious income. Why penalise the ppl at the bottom?
oh I misunderstood. I thought “five figure income should be 0” meant “people shouldn’t be able to make even five figures.”
The fact that there are 256 billionaires is an absolute failure of our society.
256 billionaires that we know of!
Soon to be a few trillionaires and a thousand billionaires
They broke their arms patting themselves on their backs and can’t write checks anymore. 😢
Wowza scoob. Imagine that. Rich people lying.
Just wow.
Sound like rich people ought to be dying
Ruh roh!
why did they only use an 8-bit number to count billionaires , surely there are more of em
/dumbface
What are you, one-based or something? If it were an 8-bit integer there would have been 255.
it’s 255 for maximum index, but still 256 for maximum count though lol but agreed, 255 would be more obvious
Well still 255 for maximum count if you’re using an 8-bit number to COUNT billionaires like your initial comment said - but if you’re using an 8-bit number to index your collection of billionaires, then yes, you could get up to 256.
For counting we should always at least have the possibility of a 0 value, hence we count actual billionaires from 1-255. With indexing, 0 is already the first billionaire, so we get billionaires from 0-255, or a total of 256
Yes, 8 bit indexing. We should have Null billionaires.
You don’t understand, they’re making money so much faster than they can reasonably give away.
making money
I think you mean stealing money.
Not true.
They’re also using imaginary methods to make money grow out of other money.
Isn’t that basically just stolen money from stolen money?
If you say things with enough confidence, maybe toss in the phrase “AI” somewhere…yeah you kinda can just create money from nothing.
In entirely unrelated news grocery prices go up.
Which then needs someone in the real economy to make goods and services to back up the value of that money.
They are basically printing UOM instead of IOU vouchers.
This is kind of the actual problem though. It’s hard to actually have effective charities. Even some of the most ethical, and well run charities, end up with surplus funds (Dolly Parton’s charity for example). The government is setup to spend that much money helping people though. But paying taxes is somehow bad and wrong. I don’t know if I had a real point other than maybe we should actually tax these rich folks so they can achieve their dream of giving away at least half their wealth.
There was a post a while ago where a German person posted that they were confused by the US nonprofit systems, they basically said I pay my taxes and the government makes sure it’s spent feeding the needy and foreign aid and all that. Why should I go through the trouble of researching all these charities trying to find a good one to donate to.
Not that Germany doesn’t have non profits, but they really should be for special interest type cases where you explicitly want to send money to a cause, not general global well being.
It is a bit more complicated than that.
First of all the social security system in Germany should not be tax funded. It is a mandatory insurance which should finance its activities through the insurance rate collected on income. However with demographic shifts and the like it is notoriously unstable, in particular the pension fund. So what happens is the social securities being cross financed from tax money.
Like with climate change, we are talking about the issue since more than 30 years, the problematic effects are becoming ever more apparent, but no government is willing to address the fundamental issues, instead kicking the can down the road, until the system will collapse.
Then another issue is that the government activities are far from sufficient and it is en vogue to attack social security further. Especially in the last years we saw an unprecedented rise in people relying on food banks as unemployment checks and the equivalent for refugees, who are prohibited from working, are insufficient. But rather than adjust the payments to reflect the rising costs of living, we see a distraction debate about people “refusing to work” which make up only a tiny minority of people receiving benefits, but the goal is to abolish unemployment insurance.
Then another issue is that nonprofits are often used by rich families to circumvent inheritance tax. This year there will be an unexpected windfall of 4 billion Euros to the inheritance tax, as a rich family failed to set up their construct in time. Furthermore “nonprofits” by industrialists are often used for lobbying for more capitalism. In particularly infamous is the “Stiftung Familienunternehmen” (family run businesses trust). You would think this represents your local bakery run in the fourth generation. Instead it is run by “family businesses” such as Henkel (washing ingredients, chemicals) whose owners are billionaires.
Finally, Germany has the whole range of non profits which follow purposes that genuinely follow causes that benefit humanity and the environment and they also receive billions in donations in Germany every year. Overall the donations to nonprofits in Germany amounted to 12.5 billion € last year, or about 150 € on average. This includes a wide range of purposes. For instance sports clubs are usually nonprofits and donations to them are usually tax deductible. So it might be the father of one of the kids in the football club donating a new set of jerseys.
Sounds a bit like the US. I live in New York City, there are a lot of bloated non profits that are just used as slush funds for rich people and networking. I’ve met a few people on occasion who work in non profits that do things like provide hiring metrics for other non profits instead of actually doing direct good, so you really need to be careful who you donate to.
I’m sorry that Germany also has long term issues with its social safety net, but it’s morbidly reassuring as an American to hear we’re not going to be the only ones on the sinking ship.
Please do not compare Dolly Parton to Bill Gates.
Then they’re not really trying. I get what @Hobo@Lemmy.World is saying, but I find it hard to believe. If their bar for “respectable charities” leads to them not being able to find charities, then just lower the bar. Or just give money to people.
Yep, pay for everyone’s university for a year, pay everyone’s healthcare debt, do something.
A pizza party would be cool also.
nah I get those at work instead of a raise
Who would have thought
I forget where I heard this story, but apparently Bill and Melinda were at a dinner party during the Obama Presidency. Bill said that he had “way more power than Obama” and Melinda kicked him under the table. TBF I think he was completely right: politicians in the US derive their power from their ability to raise money from rich donors, while rich donors derive their power directly from their money. And they continue to derive power from their money even when they deposit it into a “foundation” which doles it out tax-free to favored recipients.
In Gates’ case, a lot of his “charity” involves donating patent-protected drugs to third world countries to forestall their saying “fuck your patents” and producing life-saving drugs for themselves. Preserving intellectual property rights is the primary goal here, with actually helping people secondary. Anyone who thinks these ruthless multi-billionaires suddenly become benign, caring people in their advanced years is a rube.
politicians in the US derive their power from their ability to raise money from rich donors, while rich donors derive their power directly from their money
Technically they derive their power from the electoral mandate, but to achieve it requires a lot of money from said rich donors - so they don’t derive their power from it, it’s more a prerequisite to play at all. The second half is true. The rich are just rich, nobody voted them into wealth, that’s why they’re more powerful than the politicians.
by followed up you mean: “Ok after I die, I will donate half of my money to my tax-exempt family-owned-and-operated charity, that just happened to only pay salaries and donations to causes that serve the interests of our family-owned-and-operated shell companies”… :D
it’s like sequeezing your late’s father dry-drenched cumsocket which he used his entire life, then drinking it, and brag about it… to which I say thanks but no fucking thanks.
Link to report instead of awful Fortune link: Giving Pledge
