Mamdani is the first politician that makes me hopeful that the US might make progress into being FOR THE PEOPLE. Not FOR THE BILLIONAIRES
This is like literally all I want to see from politicians currently.
The DNC chair has been saying he wants to run a presidential candidate like Mamdani since Mamdani won his primary…
He probably thought it long before then, but he won’t weigh in on any primary.
Which is more than we’ve got from the DNC in about 50 years…
That means they are getting scared of us. Keep up the pressure.
He’s been saying that stuff for well over a decade when he was Minnesota’s state chair…
The voting meme era of the DNC learned their lesson, probably back in 2020 even tho Biden squeaked by. They just didn’t have a chance between 2017 and 2025 to vote for a chair, 2021 Biden got to pick like every incoming Dem president.
Which makes it a much better thing, we’re not fighting the party anymore.
They won’t put a finger on the scale for or against the oligarchs, and that’s all the people ever need, a fair fight. We just can’t fuck up the primary and let a neoliberal win, because if they go on to win the general then they get to name party chair.
There’s a lot at stake next primary, that’s why so many people are pushing for people to not vote in it.
Alright everyone. To anyone checking in to this please we must push the open source community-run operating systems, social media, apps, and web apps for people to switch to. Tell them to get others on board too after they get comfy
Online and in-person we must keep switching people over!! The less people on those corpo ones the better!!
To make it easier tell people to use legacy social media and people social media until people social media has a big enough audience of people using them
Please do not scroll away we must all keep getting people to move. Many of us are but the more the better!!
Not sure why so many downvotes on an openspurce social media platform. Folks must really like the small nature of Lemmy currently. The world’s digital town squares shouldn’t be owned by anyone, but by everyone!
‘I don’t think we should have billionaires’
Half of America’s trailer-park residents pass out because he dared to attack our beloved billionaires. “But what about when we become billionaires!?!”
The reason we have had to deal with this over the centuries is half our population is authoritarian. The idea that someone can punch up as a violation of the laws of man.
Because of what seems to be uniquely an American ideology: they too could be a billionaire someday, so therefore an attack against billionaires is an attack against them.
It’s not. On some level it’s in many, many people.
A while ago, Poland wanted to introduce extra property tax on the owners of three and more properties. The idea was to combat “investors”, and flippers. The Polish Internet lost its god damn mind.
Of course, a lot of the noise must’ve been sponsored, but regular people, people who can barely afford the mortgage rates for a single apartment started shouting against that property tax, as if they were at any risk of getting hit by it.
I don’t trust this guy. An honest man wouldn’t wear expensive clothes.
Yeah I mean I want my socialists to only wear Mao suits. Otherwise how can I possibly trust them?
BetterHelp.com I’d mention your trust issues at the intake session.
Mamdani gets his suits from Suitsupply. Suitsupply makes nice suits but I wouldn’t call it a luxury brand. Its about 1k for a suit.
Also basically every politician wears expensive clothes.
My god, this is such a hilariously ridiculous take! XD
Haha, happy to bring a laugh!
well you see there’s this thing the corporate media calls ‘electability’ that evaluates metrics like physical appearance into an aggregate quotient of how they predict public sentiment will form around a candidate. they also factor in made up stuff that they can use to cast doubt on candidates their board of directors view as a threat to the establishment they profit from.
Zoran already had to grapple with enough manufactured electability concerns based on his identity, politics, economics, etc that he probably did the calculus and recognized that his best chance for success in the election required him to uphold a fairly typical politician’s outward appearance to cut through all that.
no idea what his personal fashion sense is but he walked a ton doing door-to-door canvassing during his campaign. i’d imagine he would have much prefered to do so in comfort than in a suit.
This idiot should have a conversation with Dolla Bill
99.9999% tax rate beyond $10 million total worth would be a great start.
To be honest I think it’s weird to have a system where you give people a bunch of wealth only to then have the state later take it away. Why does the system work such that they get all that wealth to begin with?
Yes the problem lies in how the wealth is accumulated, its extracted from someone. If they all worked super hard for it nobody would have a problem. But the reality is, all workers get a paycut so the equity owner can chill and see his money rise.
Why does the system work such that they get all that wealth to begin with?
Because capitalism is the best way to distribute resources (to the top).
Originally it was just a really high tax rate at the highest bracket. This accounted for a monetary system that is essentially gamed. In the US the government reversed this under the theory of trickle down economics. This allowed a large group of people to greatly grow their investments and their wealth accordingly.
Inheritance tax is used to recoup some of these lost taxes but it is a poor way to do it. The correction should be at the beginning not the end. I agree with you.
You wouldn’t get much from that. These people usually don’t have much income. Most of the richest CEOs famously earn “1 dollar a year”, and people applaud that as honourable or something. It’s not, it’s a method to not just lower their income tax, it gives them massive tax breaks.
Most of the “wealth” of these people is in company shares. If the company’s value goes up, the shares’ value goes up, and so the CEO’s “wealth” goes up, even if they’re not actually getting any cash from it.
When they need to buy something, they just go to a bank and get a super easy loan for any amount of money, that they can pay from interest on their shares. But they won’t even pay the capital gains tax, because they were poor, they had negative money because of the loan, so they get extra tax breaks on top of tax breaks.
It’s super hard to tax these parasites in a way that actually makes them give back any meaningful amounts of money to the public…
Nothing you say is untrue. That is why I said total worth. You would of course make sure the policy specifically includes stock as this total worth. They would be forced to cash out to keep it under the allowable amount.
Not saying this is possible in our current political climate, but it is definitely possible to tax the wealthy. You just have to create the policy and enforce it. Close all the loopholes, prevent things like trusts or shell corporations to hide wealth, and aggressively police unrealized gains.
You can’t tax “total worth”.
Imagine this - you have an average paying job, right? You have an apartment, a mortgage, you can afford to go out with friends, visit the cinema, etc. Nothing obscene, just a comfortable life.
Your relative dies and you suddenly find yourself owning an extra house. Your “total worth” has now shot up significantly, therefore your tax rate has gone up. You can no longer afford your mortgage.
See where the problem is?
And then you have things like the 401k in the US, which is your retirement fund, but the money is invested in the stock market.
Or even your own investments. Imagine you invested $10 000 in Nvidia in 2020. You forgot about the money, but suddenly you get a horrendous tax requirement, because you’re wealthy - your $10 000 has turned into $134 600. It has absolutely no bearing on how much spending money you have, but somehow you now have to pay increased tax?
See where the problem is?
You, refusing to sell your extra house.
You can certainly exempt things like a primary residence and allow grace periods to sell off inheritance to pay the taxes.
Taxing anything over $10 million of worth at an effective 100% puts a cap on your total worth. This is completely possible, but obviously would be extremely unpopular amongst all wealthy people.
Everyone would still pay other taxes, but I have a feeling that it would no longer be necessary considering how much money a policy like this thought exercise would generate.
Execute anyone over $10 million net worth
You’re even harsher than I am, I would put it at 100M, but I’m totally down to negotiate.
I would even go up to 1B.
It really depends on what your goal is. If the goal is to dillute power and prevent corruption this would be the minimum I think. Anymore and it just frees up too much money that will inevitably be used to tip the scales in a typical representative democracy.
Honestly though it is really needs to be a solution everyone can agree to even if there are some winners and losers. Figuring out a way to allow people to accumulate without damaging society really is the goal and you could argue ultimately it is just a cultural issue and perhaps not a policy one.
I personally think in the US the greed culture has completely dominated and overshadowed everything else to a point that only money matters anymore. Classism it out of control and no one is around to say stop. We are reminiscent of a spoiled toddler that has never been told no.
The goal should be to address wealth inequality, which inevitably leads to oppression, as the wealthy have more power to write laws and entrench their wealth and power further. We either mitigate this legally / socially, or it will fix itself, and the fix will not be comfortable or gentle.
If someone has hundreds of billions of personal wealth then he has more individual wealth than the cumulative sum of the bottom perhaps 30 or 40% of the planet. This is 2 to 3B people. This is not defensible.
No, we should not.
I like the sentiment, but I hate white type on a light grey background. I’m half blind from a lifetime of jerking off, take it easy on an old incel.
simple solution, tax rate goes up by margins based on the standard deviation from the last year’s income mean. for income more than one standard deviation above the mean, your tax rate for that margin is the percentile rank of your income compared to the last year’s incomes. something like that would be fair. then mandate certain percentages be spent on education, welfare, etc. anything left over in the budget from the last year gets split evenly among all taxpayers.
Here’s the problem: Zuckerberg and Bezos have an income of $1/year.
Of course, they also earn a tonne of shares, but you can’t tax that until they cash out. Which they don’t, because they don’t have to - if they need cash, they take a loan, meaning they have negative income.
And if you start taxing unrealised gains, they’ll think of yet another method of ignoring it, while you’d be killing all the middle-class people who’ve invested money in stock.
bezos takes a smallish salary, I don’t care about that myth, or them, or unrealized gains. we need to rebalance the tax system. if unrealized gains are really such a loophole, then tax borrowing against it. This would hurt small borrowers too. so what?
the rich man loan problem is a red herring. if we ever rebalanced the system, there would also be political will to close loopholes. thus tax code can be directed at large borrowers or some other solution. your response is the “oh it is hopeless so don’t consider it” crap brought up on reddit every time this subject comes up.
That’s actually a really simple and neat solution. My only worry is there’s minor possibility that it could be abused, but not nearly as much as current systems are.
yeah, loans and hising income.overseas, stuff like that. guarantee 5% for the irs budget and regulate them to track down income tax schemes.
there would be some struggle, but things would level out after a couple of decades, and head towards real prosperity.
of course the idea is rough, you’d want narrow margins, and the ability shift it if there aren’t enough high earners, and to apply the same scheme to corps too. all sorts of edges cases and fail points to consider.
You can’t even spend a billion dollars with the most ridiculous luxury items you can think of. Spending that much in a lifetime for things you would even remotely appreciate would feel like work.
The only difference having billions of dollars makes instead of only a few millions in a rich person’s life is that it enables them to singlehandedly influence politics to their personal liking by buying politicians and media institutions. Which is something nobody should be allowed to do to begin with.
Meanwhile had that billion dollars been distributed to the worker class through fair wages or even to the consumers through fair prices it would have contributed to the economy and the well-being of everyone. Having to tax it to avoid seeing that money sit in some asshole’s offshore bank account is a failure of the system to properly distribute wealth when it is generated to begin with and even that isn’t being done right now.
Even worse than that, with just $100 million in a risk-free CD making 3% APY, one receives $3 million per year from interest alone.
Nevermind how to spend a billion dollars in one lifetime, how do you spend three million dollars in one year?
Any wealth above $100 million should be taxed at the end of each fiscal year. Nobody could reasonably need more than that. Of course, it would be complicated by carving out exceptions for real assets. Anyone with that much money would just buy a new yacht every September to avoid it, but that should still be taxed as capital gains.
it enables them to singlehandedly influence politics to their personal liking by buying politicians and media institutions.
Most conservative americans seem to believe “freedom” includes permitting the wealthy to rig the game in their own favor. They don’t seem to consider the ways in which that infringes on everyone else’s freedom.
That’s why “anarcho-captialism” and even “libertarian-capitalism” are both farces. There’s no room for liberty under plutocracy. Only the financial oligarchs have any degree of freedom in those systems, which is no better or different than an aristocracy, just without the overt nepotism (the nepotism becomes covert instead, by mislabelling generational wealth as a “meritocracy”).
Meanwhile had that billion dollars been distributed to the worker class through fair wages or even to the consumers through fair prices it would have contributed to the economy and the well-being of everyone.
I agree, but too many people only measure the success of an economy by top-down metrics such as GDP, gross revenue, stock market growth, etc. They ignore factors such as cost of living, wage stagnation, median income, RIFs, and the job market in general, social mobility, cost of healthcare and education, etc., leading to such buffoonery as claiming “unemployment is good for the economy” and “deflation is bad for the economy.”
And then they come back with stupid arguments like “econ 101, bro.” Classical economic theories are a soft science at best, arguably even a pseudoscience, and yet finance bros treat it like it’s a hard science. They cite them like scripture, or like laws of physics, but they’re not nearly so immutable or infallible. Especially when they focus solely on supply-side and neoliberal economics, which were clearly developed with an agenda.
Even Adam Smith gets quoted out of context, while ignoring the fact that he was opposed to many of the ideas his work is often used to rationalize.
The difference between 1 million and 1 billion is about 1 billion.
And the prediction is that we’ll have a few trillionaires soon. The difference between 1 billion and 1 trillion is about 1 trillion.
Personally I’m hoping we see a couple multi trillionares. Rapidly followed by their assets depreciating into worthlessness and the USD becoming worth less than monopoly money.
A billion dollars buys you power. That kind of money gets you a seat at the table.
How many “billionaires” actually have a billion dollars to spend though? They usually are “worth” a billion dollars through stocks they can’t sell, with a couple of million in the bank
Aaaannnd the inevitable arrival of the “nothing we can do about it guyz, it’s hopeless, we just need to accept it.”
It takes a different form from time to time, but the ubercapitalist cultists always show up in these threads.
Except that they do just that by borrowing money against their stocks, which also incidentally allows them to avoid paying taxes. That’s how Musk bought Twitter.
I think it might be a good idea to tax loans like this as income, but I’m not an economist and am not sure what the follow on effects would be. I feel like if there were exceptions it might be used as a loophole, but if there aren’t it might affect poorer people trying to get loans for housing.
Yup, their latent wealth grows faster than what they borrow to use as actual spending, they literally don’t spend money, they accumulate it
This is like saying “they don’t actually have that much oxygen. They’ve got it compressed in massive liquefied tanks. You can’t breathe liquid oxygen, so it doesn’t really count as breathable air. So nevermind that a billionth of the population controls 50% of the oxygen on the planet because the actual gaseous air they breath on the day to day is just an extremely comfortable level of oxygen.”
Maybe a single person shouldn’t have enough wealth to rival a country? It’s almost like that gives them more power than the government that is supposed to keep them in check.
I work for a small city that’s an enclave for the super-rich. Literally every household is multi-millionaires (I don’t live there, of course).
When we butt heads with a resident, it’s a challenge because most of our residents have a larger budget and pool of resources than the city. My favorite example was when a resident tried to build a retaining wall in a drainage easement for a new home that would result in a street behind them flooding any time it rained. When we told them no, they tried to buy the Engineering firm we hired to review their development.
Individuals having the ability to operate private space programs is insane.
I have a secret hope that they use it to fly the fuck away from earth forever
I also can’t think of a more insane pick than to let that individual be Elon Musk. Really shows how billionaires fail their way to the top.
At the end of the day I think billionaires owning space companies undermines the pursuit of humans going into space and studying space in general as it is difficult enough to justify to the average person normally that space exploration is important but when you have the people leading the pursuit of it hoarding enough wealth to lift an astounding amount of people out of poverty, then the association of those people with space exploration threatens to make space exploration a target of populist austerity sentiment unfairly because by its very nature it is a loud thing that draws lots of attention.
There aren’t any good billionaires. They get rich leeching off everyone else’s work, suppressing wages and compensation, and avoiding taxes on their insane wealth. On top of that, a seemingly normal person is likely to become a complete PoS when they no longer have to face any consequences for being a PoS because of their wealth.
The way I see it, billionaires are best understood as an autonomous cancerous process of money hoarding money, the human being who is the billionaire at the center of it hardly has any agency, just raw and pure complicity in the growth of the cancer enveloping them in a replacement of their human identity with an approximation of one constructed from financial abstractions.
Billionaires think they are making more and more important choices as they get richer but what really is occurring is they are becoming less and less a relevant part of the money they hoard in terms of what actions that entity of money takes and why it does so.
To be a proud billionaire is to be a proud insect host for the paratisoid wasp that is wealth hoarding. It is a strange and disturbing ideology from the perspective of an insect to take pride in being the vessel for a process that will most certainly annihilate you from within.
I like the way you write, good style 💜
They become very much like that kid in Twilight Zone’s It’s a Good Life
not saying shes a good one and i am not a fan, but i dont think taylor swift did that did she?
Once you get rich enough you pretty much don’t have a choice. Your investment portfolio is based on companies making the line go up. That line goes up because they get tax breaks from trump, they cut or suppress employee wages and benefits, they enshittify, they get AI and fire people, etc. In her case there’s also the absurd ticket prices and fees people have to pay to see her concerts. You cannot be a billionaire with clean hands, you’re skipping out on taxes, nobody “earns” a billion dollars.
Okay so she didnt do wage theft
Can the city raise billionaires taxes to a significant level?
Of course they can. Will they? Of course they won’t.
So common-sense yet how many political leaders are brave enough to say it?
We need more politicians talking like this often and publicly, then actually working to make it reality.
They will find a way to fuck him, I’m certain of it. That’s why we don’t have more- they get rid of them via smear campaigns, primarying someone else, etc. It’s a miracle anyone like him or Sanders ever gets elected with all the headwinds they have against them.
They’re more likely to defend the billionaires.
A person cannot earn a billion dollars on his labor, it’s impossible. The only way one becomes a billionaire is by stealing from the ones who did the hard work and enriching yourself off their labor. Billionaires are leeches, every single one is a disease on humanity. There are no good billionaires, they should all be shot and have their assets redistributed.
