Billionaires are the worst in so many ways

I would like to point out that this is broadly worse than what Deus Ex (2001) predicted 2052 would be like.

Leo Gold:

Number One: In 1945, corporations paid 50% of federal taxes; now they pay about 5%. Number Two: In 1900, 90% of Americans were self employed; now it’s about 2%… It’s called consolidation; strengthen governments and corporations, weaken individuals. With taxes, this can be done imperceptibly over time."

Also, obligatory:

That’s terror.

EDIT:

Oh right, here are the last gas prices from a post apocalyptic California that was utterly destroyed some time before 2052 (and I guess after 2027), by the San Andreas fault just completely cutting loose.

“Gee why was everything cheaper in the 50s, 60s, 70s? how could a family of 4 afford a single family home and two cars on a single income that only required a high school education? Why was XYZ product of a higher quality? Why did worker productivity keep up with wages?”

There’s the obvious answer to this question “we taxed the rich so hard they couldn’t use their wealth to consolidate power and influence, and preventing them for redirecting resources from improving people’s standard of living to deranged self aggrandizing projects.”

And the dumbass mental gymnastics answers “Guberment regulation infringing on the free market, women have some rights now, LGBTQ people aren’t oppressed enough anymore, people don’t go to church enough, THE DEEP STATE!, we used to be more racist, and (((international finance))).” Funny how all those arguments have a bunch of well funded think tanks and unprofitable privately owned media organizations making arguments for them.

because the new deal didn’t actually address the root problem of billionaires owning the means of production.

that’s where the real power is, and why just taxing them isn’t fixing the issue long term.

So let’s eat them?

Murder them?

Kill them?

I agree with the anti-billionaire sentiment.

But the headline is written in a misleading way. I don’t know why we’re sharing a low quality substack with 2 likes when there are plenty of higher quality pieces that come to this conclusion.

“Study:” in the headline implies that they are repeating what a single study said. It’s the journalistic convention for using university press releases. In this case they are not doing that. But compiling a bunch of sources (none of which are academic as far as I can tell) and coming to their own conclusions. Nothing wrong with that. But it makes the title misleading.

Secondly in their own first couple paragraphs they show that the 0% while existing in some cases is not what usually happens. The truer “in practice” average is 3.4% or 8.2% depending on how you calculate.

So we can all agree that’s shocking and needs to be changed. But no point in making misleading headlines because it just makes us seem less serious when arguing about this to people who need to be convinced.

We dont need to tax the rich its time for disembowelment, eating, guillotine and corpse wagons.

But all the money they donate to political campaigns totally doesn’t influence policy.

This is a return to the 60s that I can get behind.

Fun fact: In 1966, the Beatles released “Taxman”, protesting the 95% tax rate imposed by the Labour government. It was their first political song. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxman

I know that Lemmy is always on the side of poor, starving artists. So when you demand higher taxes, bear in mind that only one of the four Beatles lived long enough to become a billionaire.

When the King of Rock, Elvis Presley, died in 1977, he only had a wealth of $5 million. Today, poor Taylor Swift is only a billionaire, and we’re all appalled how little she gets from streaming. Think about how terrible it would be, if all that money went to taxes.

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.

Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.

And everyone with no hope takes the easily available addictive drugs indirectly supplied by the same billionaires.

I think it would take nothing less than a radical overhaul of society to fix this snowballing of power.

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Having it so that individuals can only run a single company within a niche, and capping annual income to an absolute amount would be a very basic start. It would take even more to make such restrictions stick.

Corporations having wealth and asset caps based on their employee headcount & incomes, requiring that leaders have to be annually voted into their positions by their workers, their income voted by said workers, and so on.

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Our economics are made out of inherited junk and bubblegum. A clean sheet redesign is needed.

There is no reason regular human beings shouldn’t be going FULL IRAN on all responsible.

I feel like the only reason it hasn’t happened is because there is so much psychological manipulation and marketing that goes into keeping citizens passive and easy to lead.

So do I understand correctly that the top income tax bracket is 0% today? Or is this just another shitty ragebait headline. Oligarchs shouldn’t exist, but almost none of their money comes from wages or capital gains anyways, so any polemics about income tax are mostly meaningless for this issue. Any type of wealth tax is fairly trivial to evade at that level.
The only thing that would work would be to enforce existing anti fraud laws to prevent oligarchs from gaining power in the first place, as well as convicting them for the white collar crimes they commit open daylight, and use fines as a way to get some of the absurd concentration of wealth out of the system.