• Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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    6 days ago

    Tax.

    Tax them like there is no tomorrow.

    Billionaires should simply not exist. Put a cap on total net worth and if you pass that, income tax goes to 100. If your networth goes up anyway because of stocks or whatever, tax that too. Tax stocks, homes, boats, etc.

    Enormous wealth should be like the speed of light. The closer you get there, the heavier it becomes to stay there, you need to spend more and more energy to get less and less higher.

    This should not be a crazy idea.

    • abracaDavid@lemmy.today
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      6 days ago

      Billionaires have such a heavy say in our government that it will never go that way unless it’s forced.

      • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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        3 days ago

        Bullshit

        Stop the calls for killing the rich. Don’t blame people for playing the game, just change the rules. Tax the rich for all they have until everyone lives in a tops 1-5 ratio of networth. All of the sudden, poverty gone, we can do universal healthcare easily, government will have boat loads for anything to make our lives better

      • theherk@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        I have been saying something slightly similar, but rather that laws should no longer protect them.

        • pinkystew@reddthat.com
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          5 days ago

          they’re so nice, so surely everybody else is too

          This right here.

          I think many poor people do not realize how deliberately cruel the rich are being. They cannot imagine someone looking at a whiteboard planning debilitating poverty and misery for millions of people. They think that the situation is unfortunate and unavoidable somehow, and not deliberately made.

      • BigBenis@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        This violence-against-the-owning class rhetoric is going too far. Killing other humans is never justified. Tax them into oblivion and make them work for a living like the rest of us. There’s a massive difference between having disdain for billionaires and wanting to kill them.

          • BigBenis@lemmy.world
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            5 days ago

            I’d wager we have a much better shot at passing legislation for a billionaire tax than legalizing murder.

        • jaek@lemmy.world
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          5 days ago

          Killing other humans is often justified. For instance, it would be completely justified to kill someone who was in the process of shooting up a school.

          In the same way, billionaires are guilty of causing the deaths of millions of people through their hoarding of necessities. Killing the billionaires would allow this wealth to be redistributed, saving potentially millions of lives.

          • BigBenis@lemmy.world
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            5 days ago

            I think the difference is that a school shooter is in the middle of a violent act and is an immediate threat to the lives of anybody around them. Usually the only way to put an end to the harm they’re causing is to meet that violence with the same level of violence. It’s not a just act, it’s a tragedy, but it’s ultimately necessary to prevent further injustice.

            Hoarding an incomprehensible amount of resources and lobbying for a system is easier to exploit is amoral and causes harm to our society but it is not a violent act and is not an immediate threat to anybody’s life.

            These memes spreading violent rhetoric against a class of people this community is at odds with is starting to feel like other corners of the internet that I don’t want to be involved in.

            • jaek@lemmy.world
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              5 days ago

              It absolutely is a violent act. In the same way that locking a person in a cage is a violent act, depriving people of the things they need to live is a violent act.

              The fact is, simply asking these people to stop hoarding and polluting is not going to work (duh).

              Is there a non-violent solution?

      • kent_eh@lemmy.ca
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        5 days ago

        I’d rather not become the monsters just to get rid of the monsters.

    • UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml
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      6 days ago

      gilded age

      Reforming capitalism will only delay end stage, not prevent it.

      Imagine getting something like the early 20th century labor movement going these days. Seems impossible right? We we did do it once and guess what, we are back again. What was the point of spilling all that blood sweat and tears if we just go right back to where we started? We wasted those lives lost and ruined because we thought capitalism could be salvaged. It is not salvageable.

      • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        We we did do it once and guess what, we are back again. What was the point of spilling all that blood sweat and tears if we just go right back to where we started?

        30 years of relative prosperity?

        Also, I don’t understand how you think we’d be able to abolish capitalism without much more blood, sweat, and tears than would be spent building a labor movement. I also think that a strong labor movement would be a necessary prerequisite to abolishing capitalism. I don’t see how you build a movement to abolish capitalism with millions of isolated, fractured consumers. By magic? Will AI or crypto solve this? 😄

  • capital_sniff@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    Very simply. Raise their taxes.

    Less simply. Remove the cap on social security tax. Tax long term capital gains beyond a certain amount as regular income. Put the top rate income tax closer to 90%. Fix the god damn estate tax situation. Why on god’s green earth do the children of Sam Walton occupy so much space on the Forbes 400.

    • wolfpack86@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      France will review your company’s ledger if you want to fire people en masse. If you can afford to keep them you can’t fire them

      • capital_sniff@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        I mean, I guess, but why complicate this stuff. We already have the systems and administration to do taxes. We could break up monopolies and enforce the laws we already have.

        I’d keep it real real simple for folks. We should stop letting corporations and their owner class privatize the gains and stick the rest of society with the losses. Take the 2008 fiasco, if we are bailing out a bunch of companies we should be bailing out a bunch of home owners.

        • wolfpack86@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          Still doesn’t feel good to get fired and get an unemployment check with all sort of conditions attached, just because some company decided to clean up operations after hiring way too much.

          Non sequitur to my point, but to what you wrote… I would support that any bailouts come with the condition that 50%+ of the share capital is given to a Sovereign Fund. There should be no corporate welfare… Only investment opportunities.

          • capital_sniff@lemmy.world
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            2 days ago

            Why complicate the onion by adding more layers? Why do we want a sovereign fund? Your solution just seems like another way to funnel more money to US corporations. We already let them switch to defined contribution 401k retirement funds. More money to companies public or private is just more money empowering little corporate fiefdoms.

            We should simply tax these corporations and their owner class at a much higher rate. Take that money and fund social programs. For example, it is completely idiotic to have healthcare tied to employment and subsidizing it through the gov’t.

            If we removed corporate welfare from our system it would be really bad until something else took its place. We subsidize our entire food production system, removing that would drive up the cost of food. The Jones Act subsidizes our shipping industry. The price of drugs would also probably sky rocket the second you remove the public funding that goes into the early stage research.

            And what happens to our military industrial complex when you remove corporate welfare?

            The problem is we have Bezos playing rocket man and newspaper baron to the tune of three billion dollars a year. We have Musk fucking with our elections to the tune of some hundred million dollars a month. They have this money because we don’t tax them. Tax that money away and they won’t be fucking with shit.

  • electric_nan@lemmy.ml
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    6 days ago

    We have to scare the rich. Organize, agitate, break shit, etc. They have been too successful at dividing us along arbitrary lines. No war but class war. Fight back.

  • HomerianSymphony@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    Hence the rising fascism. The corporate class knows the only way to get the common people to continue to support them is through scaremongering about imagined threats.

  • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    I wish it was a Gilded Age. At least Rockefeller and Vanderbilt had some fucking taste.

    All of this will happen before, and all of it will happen again. Except uglier and dumber.

  • LustyArgonianMana@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    There’s like 600k people dying of cancer at any given time, and seperately theres only like 800 billionaires who are probably somewhat directly responsible for their cancer and lack of access to medical care. If I had a bucket list bc I was dying of cancer, I know what would be on it.

    • TheOgreChef@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      They definitely notice, why do you think they’re pushing the birth rate and great replacement theory BS so damn hard? They want everyone young, broke and uneducated so they can keep the grift going.

      • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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        4 days ago

        They’d care because if the masses are too poor to afford their products, that’s actually a threat to their power.

        • Jiggle_Physics@lemmy.world
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          4 days ago

          They would, then, but that is not now. Right now they are concerned with us not having enough children, because capitalism requires population growth, and, as places become richer, they have fewer children. The most industrialized places are in decline, outside of immigration. So this is where you see the consternation of the rich and powerful.

            • Jiggle_Physics@lemmy.world
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              4 days ago

              Doesn’t work, places have tried that. The collection of conditions are not conducive to it, for most people. That’s why it is getting very “handmaid’s tale” in rhetoric from a lot of the rich and powerful.

  • Nuke_the_whales@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    I’m ready to eat the rich and sacrifice myself for the next generation, but I’m not a leader, I’m good at building scaffolds though. I wish we had a François Hanriot or a John Brown

  • Dagwood222@lemm.ee
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    6 days ago

    Anyone who owns a house is a millionaire.

    So we’ve got a tiny number of billionaires in charge.

    An ever dwindling number of millionaires desperately holding onto their small privilege

    An ever growing number of working poor who need two paychecks to live

    Sounds like Tsarist Russia, with no single royal family to execute.

    • vithigar@lemmy.ca
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      6 days ago

      Anyone? There are lots of houses worth less than $1,000,000. Sure, by the time a mortgage is paid off and you fully own the house yourself a person should also have some savings, but I certainly wouldn’t expect that to be universal.

      • M0oP0o@mander.xyz
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        6 days ago

        My house is now worth a bit over $350,000. And although that is less then $1,000,000 I bought it at $185,000 (and had to use every penny saved to get a down payment) just a decade ago. Even in my small rural town I currently could not afford to buy the house I live in, I doubt this will improve in time.

        I might not be a millionaire, but I would guess I am now in a smaller class of people that owns where they sleep. And if the market keeps doing whats its doing I might be a millionaire in time (this is not overall a good thing).

        • tacosplease@lemmy.world
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          5 days ago

          Plus the bank owns any house with a mortgage. It’s not your house until it’s paid off. Can’t be a millionaire with $400,000 in assets and $375,000 in debt.

          • M0oP0o@mander.xyz
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            5 days ago

            I am not sure you understand how a mortgage works. Why would I have $375,000 on a mortgage for a house I bought for $185,000 over a decade ago?

            The bank “owns” only what is owning on the mortgage with the property and buildings on it as collateral. Even if I stopped paying all together (for some reason) the bank does not want the house, they want the money and will force a sale though foreclosure.

            The issue is that we now have two “classes” of non rich people, those that spend money on rent (a cost without equity) and those like me ether old enough or lucky enough to have a mortgage where the money we spend on a mortgage (reducing that debit) is not wasted and the value of our homes keeps going up.

            • tacosplease@lemmy.world
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              5 days ago

              Wasn’t speaking to your specific home value. I was adding to the point that every homeowner is not a millionaire.

              If someone has a house worth $350,000 but they’ve only paid off $50,000 from the principal, then they aren’t worth $350,000. I’d argue they’re not even worth $300,000.

              Miss a few payments, and they lose the house plus whatever payments they’d already made. That’s not personal wealth. We’re just living in the bank’s house until it’s paid off and the deed gets transferred.

    • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      Anyone who owns a house is a millionaire.

      So we’ve got a tiny number of billionaires in charge.

      An ever dwindling number of millionaires desperately holding onto their small privilege

      I mean this simply cannot be true.

      If everyone who owns a house is a millionaire, then in order for the “number of millionaires” to be “ever dwindling” we would need not only a housing shortage, but an eroding quantity of housing or a drastic drop in home ownership rates. Neither is happening. The home ownership rate in 2024 is 65.8% according to this site: https://www.simplyinsurance.com/how-many-homeowners-in-the-us/ which puts us at a much improved rate of ownership from when the housing crash happened in 2008, when we were running somewhere in the low 60s.

      So not everyone who owns a house is a millionaire, or millionaires numbers aren’t dwindling. It simply cannot be the case that what you’re saying here is all true.