With wealth inequality and billionaire control over American society growing ever more obscene, it’s well past time to implement a maximum wage limit.
My limited understanding is that once you’re super wealthy your actual income doesn’t matter. They take loans against their wealth to pay for whatever they want.
We need to tax both capital gains at a rate higher than labor and tax loans as income if they use stock as collateral.
Yes but this is an article aimed at a casual audience of wage-laborers, who undestand wealth as the thing you get for a job.
And the details of the demand don’t really matter that much, because at this point it’s clear that even a milquetoast request like this will still prompt the US oligarchy to have the secret police fire on protesters. Imo if anything you want the demands to initially be as mild as possible, makes them look more unreasonable. Once people are onboard you can push for more important goals.
I think we need to decide, if unrealized gains are real gains. How you can loan using unrealized gains as collateral if from tax purposes it’s not real money.
If you can loan money using unrealized gains a collateral you should be taxed. I am not saying you tax unrealized gains, but taxing when get money “from” it.
But loan is considered a loss and you even get a tax break.
Also need to limit tax write-offs to really business needs, like rich people can get a huge car like a Mercedes G class on their business and write-off the cost for instance. The rich have a lot of loopholes. Incentives should be limited to people and companies making a X sum. If your company makes billions, I don’t think you need a tax incentive.
I propose we tax owning stock like property
They already play a shell game with wages, so they don’t pay income taxes. Most of the really rich and successful people have their incomes derived from capital gains and then use the talking point that it’s already money that was taxed through their business so it shouldn’t be taxed further.
TAX CAPITAL GAINS.
We do tax capital gains. It’s just at a lower rate than regular income and the first $50k or so is 0%. Some states tax capital gains as regular income.
They do a shell game by using their losses to offset their gains.
This would be something anyone could do but most people don’t have the ability to let stocks sit for over a year before taking the capitol loss strategically.
The system is built for the wealthy to have less risk.
Tax debt over say $1 million as income
90% tax rate over 1million a year including capital gains. No cap on social security
Why the fuq someone needs 1 mil year? 500 is enough
Just trying to be reasonable
Everyone makes $1/hour.
But everything only costs $1.
1 hour of labor = any 1 thing.
Work three hours, buy house, sports car and superyacht.
Which everyone works to make because a single grain of rice is $1.
Why don’t you buy me? ;)
(Disclaimer: I am NOT worth $1)
Bro we’re gonna starve.
They’ll use those laws on regular folk while they ignore them or use loopholes
“It’s maximum wage. I don’t receive any wage, I receive a dividend”
“It’s maximum wage. I don’t receive any wage, I receive rent”
Maximum profit laws.
What you meant to say is we need a wealth tax.
I predict we’re going to see our first trillionaire by the end of the decade. It’s beyond obscene. If you “earn” (lol) more than 5 million dollars a year, you should have that part taxed at 100%
Musk is currently trying to negotiate a pay package from Tesla, which, if approved would pay him roughly a trillion dollars over the next decade. It’s into the “not really comprehensible by humans” range.
Why the fuck does this ugly cunt need more money?? It’s just a small dick competition at this point.
That won’t solve the borrow, die, repeat. It’s a great idea and should definitely have been implemented yesterday to modify the incentives of middle management but we REALLY need to start taxing people on a “personal GDP” after a certain level.
Space Kare pays proportionally 1\10 of the taxes I pay without having a “wage”.
“Oh, you want to buy twitter for 50b, here’s your M&A property tax of 25%”
Yes. If congress really had their shit together, they could implement something at the IRS where each really wealthy person is audited and taxed on their personal GDP. Auditors could present their findings of wealth and a committee could tax the value at an appropriate level.
We need maximum wealth, maximum power and maximum influence laws, enforcement and strict punishments for corruption.
This article is TERRORISM (according to Trump’s Republican Administration!)! If you would like to NOT be Terrorists please SHOOT UP A CHURCH IN A MAGA HAT instead!
“It’s not that I must always have a lot. I must always have more than everyone else. Forever. And everyone else must show their enthusiasm about me having the most.”
I agree with the sentiment, but it’s worth noting that the current excesses of CEO compensation through stock incentives are a response to a poorly implemented attempt to curb high CEO salaries.
We do need to reign in CEO compensation, but directly going after wages made the problem worse. I don’t see the article addressing this, but a Clinton-era policy aimed to curb excessive CEO wages. IIRC the ratio of CEO pay to lowest paid worker within the same company was as bad as 30:1 at the time, but has since ballooned to hundreds: 1.
Maybe something as simple as capping stock incentives at N% of total compensation could work. But we’d need to make sure we’re not just encouraging a new way to skirt around the legislation like last time.
If we broke up all their massive companies, they could not get such compensation. But they decided not to use the antitrust laws that already exist or say no to literally any merger.
This might be even more important.
I agree with the sentiment, but it’s worth noting that the current excesses of CEO compensation through stock incentives
Securities tax, payable in shares of the security. 1% of all registered securities are transferred directly to the IRS each and every year. Natural persons can request an exemption for up to $10 million worth. No exemption for corporate or other artificial “persons”.
IRS liquidators will auction the taxed shares over time, such that sale of taxed shares are never more than 1% of total traded volume.
Switzerland had a vote on this in 2013. Max would be 12x the min. The motion lost thanks to corporate propaganda.
But there is the shining example in the Basque region of Spain… in Mondragón, the highest and lowest paid workers in Mondragón, for example, remains about six to one.
The problem of this is always the same. Contractors. Is your janitor holding the wage of your CEO down? Easy fix, you are the CEO. Fire the janitor and hire a cleaning company. Since the employees of the cleaning company are not your employees, their wages are no longer relevant.
At some point, the CEO can just have its own company of 1 employee (himself) which owns 100% of the stakes of the real company, and he can also be CEO of the real company. The real company would just pay massive amounts to the CEO company for “IP” or “consulting”.
This policy can be implemented voluntarily by companies, but I don’t think a government can make a law to implement this policy without obvious loopholes.
If you had a minimum wage and defined maximum wage in terms of that, you’d bypass this issue.
The “creating shell companies to get around laws” and “outsource to contractors to get around employee protections” points are still problems of course. I suspect the most realistic way of dealing with it is making it unprofitable.
Shell companies are already used to evade tax. That does not necessarily mean we should abolish tax as perhaps calcopritus is suggesting (I can’t tell).
Mind you it is arguable that a wealth tax or land tax should replace income tax. That would make the tax dodging more difficult.
Shell companies are already used to evade tax
Yes, and I hate it, but I’m not sure I have a workable solution.
Mind you it is arguable that a wealth tax or land tax should replace income tax. That would make the tax dodging more difficult.
I think it’s a good idea, but it’ll be a hard one to implement
Taxing wealth is simpler to implement than taxing work. Political will is the obstacle.
I don’t say to abolish tax. With tax, however, you can set taxes on the transactions made for evading taxes. You can’t set a maximum wage on foreign companies though.
A clue would be to see how the following was implemented (from the same article):
A referendum in [that same] year to give shareholders a binding say over executive pay and ban golden handshakes and parachutes was overwhelmingly backed by voters.
None of that would matter if Switzerland also set a minimum wage.
I don’t see what Switzerland has to do with any of this. And why it would be fixed if Switzerland set a minimum wage.
I told you: Switzerland is the only country to have held a referendum on maximum wages.
But how would setting a minimum wage fix the loopholes of setting a maximum wage. That makes no sense unless you explain further.
Could the United States Follow This Lead?
😂
