The percentage of sociopaths involved with creating a society should never be greater than zero.
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.
Which means it can be burnt or stolen. Would be a shame if people started eating the rich and taking some of that loot home for themselves.
Yep.
Saw a vid about doing that recently. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsDsDqIxgfg
And when I searched for that again just now, saw there are dozens of others too, about “borrow until you die” and similar. “Tax is for the poor” they say.
So much for progressive tax system.
The whole system (not just the tax system) is broken by design.
And they fight against the wealth tax like it were heresy.
this is also pretty good vulnerability, should people start to think at somepoint that maybe billionaires shouldnt have all the wealth in the world. I wonder how the ones who have loaned them money would feel if the asset they have loaned the money for would just… go away.
Any person should consider billionaires like foreign occupation, though the occupation consists the entire planet. Maybe we shouldn’t eat the rich, but eat their art collections.
Oh was that why they threw the tomato sauce on that one painting? Now it all makes sense
Isnt this monetary policy rather than taxes?
If we didnt make borrowing so cheap then it wouldnt be cheaper to borrow to avoid taxes. QE has huge effects on making the rich richer, as wages are debased via the money printer.
https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff_reports/sr1108.pdf?sc_lang=en
Its the same with a minimum income, why have a minimum income if you’re just going to deliberately actively erode it via inflation and growing the money supply 7-8% a year?
Its also the obvious cause of the housing crisis, which lets people profit off the cantillon effect utilizing cheap credit, which disadvantages the poor and the young who own less collateral. Those with the best access to credit profit, and those with the least are debased to feed the rich.
Rich ppl exploit systems regardless of the cost to society. They don’t care about anyone but themselves and will be why society fails.
They also have bank accounts here and in the Cayman Islands
The way wealth is structured definitely shapes how opportunity flows. It’s worth having thoughtful conversations about tax policy and fairness without turning it into pure outrage—systems matter.
I used to work in fair tax policy. It exists.
Everyone hates it. That’s all I ever learned from years of work on the issue. Even the people who would benefit from it, hate it.
People really really like unfair tax policies, because they imagine themselves on the unfair side of it benefiting from it. They love loopholes because it makes them feel ‘smart’, etc. Our politicians are aware of this. They know that fairer tax code reforms are unpopular. People very much adore the system we have of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ and they generally want more of that because emotionally that is what they regard as ‘fair’.
There is a major gap between what people say they want, and what they actually want. Everyone says they want ‘fairness’ but what they want… is a system they feel they can exploit to their own advantage. They want the appearance of fairness, but the don’t want to pay taxes, especially taxes that come due as separate payments once a year.
I won’t even go into the other problem that ‘fair’ taxation would be incredible intrusive.
You can see this effect in other areas too. JC Penny tried to stop deceptive pricing tactics and just offered the lowest price they could. It almost bankrupted them.
I saw it a bunch in retail too. We had a few items in the store that would never go down in price. Our price was lower than the competition’s sale price because they were loss leaders.
People would have the item in their cart, ask me if it was on sale, I’d give them the above statement, and every time they’d put it back and walk away. I’d even comparison shop for them.
“Ferengi workers don’t want to stop the exploitation. We want to find a way to become the exploiters.” – Rom, DS9, S4E16
Oh no, AI on Lemmy. It’s joever :(
Capitalist apologia AI, of course
This is completely nonsensical.
Tax portfolio loans over a certain amount. That’s pretty much it. Sure, there will need to be some moving parts beyond that, but basically if you treat a loan as an income rather than something like a primary residence purchase in the buyer’s own name, it gets taxed.
I think the ‘unrealized assets’ should be taxed as ‘realized’ if they are used as collateral. Yes, it would affect the reverse mortgages and such, or home equity loans, but fuck it, I’d take those relatively small pains against the massive societal gains.
Reverse Mortgages are usually predatory anyway, so more scrutiny and regulation isn’t a bad thing.
I don’t know what the financial consequences would be. Taxing unrealized assets would also have to have limits because so many retirement funds and the like are unrealized gains, we don’t want to hurt people’s ability to retire. That’s why putting a tax on trying to sidestep paying capital gains makes more sense. We’re not going to figure out how that all works here today. People won’t sit on unrealized gains, they’re going to have to use them in some fashion even if just as collateral, and we need to tax whatever workarounds they use to make those funds work for them.
The rule applies for people with billion dollars of assets.
They divest the assets into holding companies, like they already do, held by LLCs.
Then make it also apply for LLC, or for everyone except (list). I mean every set can be quantified.
Yes, this. Tax collateral as advance on capital gains and the whole incentive to dodge taxes with loans go away and it remains fair too
You could make exceptions for loans taken to improve the same asset (home improvement loans) but you’d have to pass strict audits to get the exception approved
Wealth and Asset Taxes now!
And they benefit the most from taxes too.
Public education gives me better opportunities.
Public education gives them thousands of literate employees who can do basic math, think logically, use technology, and learn anything new.
This applies to everything from building roads to government scholarships and health programs. They benefit much more from the military too.
Might be a silly question –
Why not get taxed by selling it once and for all instead of paying interest on the loan against it for years.In the long run won’t interest surpass the one time tax?
Also assuming they invest the surplus after the sale, it should be the cheaper option.
They can get interest rates that are lower than the tax they would pay. Often, they hardly pay any interest at all.
Why do banks do this? Sounds like a favor.
Because a small rate on a large loan is still a lot of income to the bank
And of course because banks can create more money than they have.
Well, many of the people that do this have large stakes in banks.
Can’t say much about US, but in my country if you get 100k assured by an investment of 100k, for exemple, you pay 1.2% in the loan, but the investment keeps going up by 1.1%. So you pay 0.1% for the 100k. A LOT less that you’d pay if getting your own money back
Sounds like a bank interest problem, no?
If all I need to beat is 1.1% annual growth rateon my investments, I would take loans against most of my assets and turn a profit.
Why the low interest rates in the banks in your country?
It’s not a low interest for everyone. But here its like this: of you pay, fine, at the end your money (invested) is yours to do what you want. If you don’t pay, the bank will keep your investment as payment. The investment is the way the bank assures you are going to pay. If you can’t put anything in the deal (car, house, investment) you’ll pay full interest, which could be anything. I see clients getting 6,5% interest all the time
Coincidentally, I saw an article entitled “Buy, Borrow, Die”. If you don’t need to have a salary paying job (so not applicable to almost everyone I know or have ever met), you buy an asset let it grow, refinance it (borrowings grow), spend the money you borrowed (tax free) some for more assets, some for pleasure. Rinse and repeat until you die with a shitload of debt that then gets wiped out.
