No Stupid Questions

With bullets. On all of them.

It's actually easy if you think about it.

Rich people love comparing their wealth to others, so they can feel better about themselves. So we know quite precisely how much each billionaire is worth, cause they really like measuring those dicks.

Anyways, we can use this against them. You just tax the wealth. Not the income. Not the surplus or the profit. You tax the wealth.

For instance, during the Danish election, there were some parties who proposed the idea of a wealth tax such that all wealth above, say 30 million DKK would be taxed by 0.5% to 1% (depends what party you ask) every year. Someone worth 100 million Danish kroner would therefore need to pay 70*0.01 million or 700.000 kroner in taxes every year.

You could do more than 1% and 30 million for billionaires if you ask me.

outlaw wealth at 10x median, same way they have civil forfeiture for drug crimes in the US.

There are two loopholes to close:

1. Capital gains taxes - income is income, not one guy pays 50% less tax than another based on how the money is defined. ie. plumber pays 45% taxes but if a guy invests in a plumbing shop, he only pays 30% or less. And for no good reason, hedge fund managers only pay CGT. Get rid of CGT and make lower income taxes.

2. Borrowing money against stock values -this is a huge form of tax evasion.

3, heavily tax any money taken offshore.

Set up a flat tax to close to 40%.

Can be paired with an automatic credit for around half of the poverty line.

Tax=(income × 0.40) - (poverty / 2)

The poor people get a negative income tax, while the people who earn more pay more.

No capital gains or any other loophole.

Listen the IRS has routinely made clear that every time it's forensic accountants get to sink their teeth into a billionaires financials, the return on that effort is enormous. Don't ask "how are going to tax billionaires," first demand that they actually BE taxed.

We'll figure it out later, man. Realistically, just have a team of specialists that focuses solely on the ultra-wealthy, and then let "unrealized gains" be taxed if they were ever used as collateral for a loan.

In several different ways. The trick is to attack the problem of excessive wealth accumulation by making the system feed more aggressively on accumulated wealth.

A wealth tax is important to prevent the excess accumulation of capital. Money is only really working if it's in motion. Once it stops moving it stops adding value to the economy which is fine sometimes and in small amounts.

Tax disuse. Vacant real estate should be taxed extra. If they don't want it taxed it should be actively used in a non-extractive way. This means low impact agriculture, preservation, or occupancy not mining, dumping or logging.

Tax non-resident ownership. You can own as many houses as you want but each additional one beyond your primary residence is going to incur a scaling tax penalty. Two probably would be manageable Three would be difficult once you get to four and five houses you're going to find it extremely difficult to make any money. And the scaling tax penalty would apply to the most expensive one first.

If they're extracting resources from it or doing heavy agriculture they should be paying a premium and not externalizing wastes. They could be taxed to ensure compliance and enforcement is adequate. They should also be taxed in advance to fund potential cleanup of any toxic or environmental hazards. The money can be held in escrow but it needs to not be held by the same people who have a financial incentive to cut corners.

See I don't actually believe the problem is rich people or income inequality broadly it's the runaway effect of the accumulation of wealth in the absence of any kind of functional theory about how money is supposed to actually work in the economy.

There are people that are going to just work like crazy people and they will in any fair system acquire more resources than most other people.

I think in a fair system the people who are likely to end up with more resources would look very different than the people who end up with more resources in our systems.

Something people don't often understand about American dollars and American taxes is that the function of the government's tax policy is not to pay its bills. Our government doesn't need taxes to pay its bills. The function of the government collecting taxes is to delete money from the system.
They need to be deleting money from the places where there's too much of it. Otherwise that money crowds out legitimate money that is the representative of economic value produced through labor. If labor has no voice, then the economy stops functioning.

Land value tax and unrealized capital gains tax.

I wouldn't tax rich in any special way.

I'd get rid of all income taxes, and tax the shit out of luxury good consumption

Like the French.

almost forgot... global corporation tax

there is no escape for weather hidden in companies and transferred around the world to avoid taxation

the current global corporation tax just the first step of destroying tax havens

Tax things they can't move like land and only things they pay for like jets, yachts, art...

At gunpoint.

The biggest loophole they use is taking out loans and using stock as collateral. Stock is supposed to be unrealized so if it is used as part of ANY transaction it should instantly become taxable.

Take all of it every year. They are claiming that they are smartest people on this planet so they figure something out.

Wealth caps

Worldwide wealth caps

Start at 100 million..after a decade, lower that to 10 million

Anything, income, gift, whatever, over that goes 100% to taxes

Nobody had the right or need to be worth over 10 million dollars

Wealth caps are also an extremely simple solution, a very simple rule to add to the current system to fix so maby issues.

Governments will get so much more Income that they can immediately do free healthcare, free education, etc.

Nobody will have a huge amount of money, and as such, a huge amount of power anymore which will lower the chance of wars. With that we can significantly lower expenses to killing materials and instead focus on life

We can solve poverty, which, in addition to free mental health care, will also solve most crimes (yeah, crimes of passion will remain)

We can finally spend a huge amount of resources on climate change and fixing the environment around us!

We can make government funded non profit investment foundations for infrastructure projects, for independent journalism, etc so that we have great independent news and great infrastructure

A simple rule with so many great consequences...

But it would would require the rich allowing us to implement that simple rule. World wide. So it won't ever happen

You have a special division of the IRS whose job is to identify the top few hundred wealthiest individuals and then tax them. These people wouldn't have to self report like the rest of us.

Two prongs. One, tax loans against stock options and publicly traded shares. Two tax foreign investment dividends that constitute more than 10% of the total value of a publicly traded company. Step one makes them live off of dividends and realized assets. They can't live off other loans of other people's money and just keep hording assets, two pins them down and keeps them from trying to take their money and run to a tax haven.

They will eventually find a way around those, and you will have to adjust the tax code to accomodate, but that's going to be true regardless. It's a bit like digital hygene and cyber security. An endless arms race between states trying to build more effective risk management tools and people trying to exploit and the system and thus the people living within the system.

Tax them? Nationalize their assets

Tax the total of any loans backed by speculative assets taken out in a one year period as both realized gains and income if they total more than 100x the average take home pay of the bottom 20% of earners (currently around $16k).

If they want higher loans without taxes, people have to be paid more.

Make assets not count towards wealth.

What's that? Your wealth can't be taxed because they're not really money? Oh, I guess you're not really rich then. No Forbes lists for you :(

Not exactly a solution for the ultra rich oligarchs, but a progressive consumption tax would be a good policy. It would be applied as a sales tax on everything, everyone would get regular rebate checks to cancel out the tax on spending up to the exemption. It could make all the megayachts more expensive.

I guess you tax assets more and salaries less - and work internationally to make tax avoidance harder and less profitable by taxing capital flows and by cracking down on tax havens.

Unless you can get a political consensus on it, I don't think an inheritance tax will be very effective. Tax planners will find a way to transfer the wealth before it gets inherited, helped by certain kinds of politicians whenever they have power.

An incremental step would be to look at the tax cuts of the last few decades, and role them back. That especially includes other types of income and passthroughs

As someone who has participated in startups, the options and shares market is a rigged game. We also need to restore rules for the ultra wealthy so they play the same game as we do

That’s the thing. If you pay people to figure it out, they will. It’s only through massive defunding that the IRS has become completely incompetent. They used to be quite good at their jobs.

Demand full proof of ownership from any company and asset. If they provide strawman, tax those.

If they don't provide verifiable information, seize the companies and assets and put them into public hands, or if that's not possible (digital services for example) deny them to operate in your country. The actual owners will reveil themselves quickly. Then tax them.

100% of what they make over $1B.

With a large bladed machine.

I fall to see any argument for one person controlling even 8 digits, much less any more.

If you have even half a million of disposable money to spend, you shouldn't be even close to be allowed a loan in any form. Being rich shouldn't be a collateral for more money.

Given that it's a common way they increase their worth, they should be barred from utilizing it.

Every dollar past 10 million should be gone right off the top, no exceptions.

Enacting it should either be completely secret, or enforced on everyone here now, regardless of where they move after this point.

That payday would fix a lot of immediate problems.

Bring obscenely rich should be meet with obscene "punishment". At least they would call being cut down to size punishment.

I'd argue that stealing that much wealth and health care should be a capital crime. If I could bring them back so they could experience a capital punishment more than once, that would be justified IMO. That's a harder sell to some, but there are no billionaires that should be allowed to live. Even the squeakiest clean (ethically speaking) one should be taxed and fined out of existence.

5% wealth tax, and no loans for corpos or other orgs, only for humans and even then it would be considered a charity (meaning if they default money goes puff), this would mostly be coming from tax that was collected earlier.

Also no patents, only open source research. So people can set up bussinesses easily and anywhere, buyers will pay for labour.

We already know how to grow food and build houses, let's end these issues first and only then focus on advancing science and tech, and any advancement should be for betterment of all humanity, not for individualistic gains.