you dont need a max wage if you tax effectively. it would be 100% past a certain, massive amount.
That's exactly how the article suggests setting the maximum.
"Wage" is rather poor wording then.
Wage is worthless wording. Most ultra rich don’t have wages - at least not relative to their change in worth. We need to change how taxes fundamentally work.
How does that work when the super rich don’t pay any taxes to begin with? How do you tax wealth? How do you tax loans against shares?
in the united states, there were all kinds of 'wealth' taxes that prevented the loop holes. all that was systematically deleted over the last 60 years as conservatives decided 'me want money, fuck society'
The top marginal tax rate in the US peaked in 1951 at 92% on income in excess of $400k (joint filing two income), the equivalent of about $4.7M in today's money. That should come back.
Take a listen to the recent Grey Area podcast episode with Ingrid Robeyns. Her book is "Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth." and they talk about this very subject.
That just sounds like a maximum wage but with more steps.
its actually a max wage with fewer steps. no need to have a max wage definition at all, just extend current tax practices.
e. less to fewer, because details matter
Not necessary. Just tax the fuck out of them.
Specifically, tax the fuck out of the massive earnings they rake in from investments while claiming the have next to nothing on their taxes.
Stock buy backs should be quadruple taxed too. Or banned.
That's the same thing. The default implementation for this is a tax bracket for the ultra-rich that uses 100% marginal tax rates.
I'd be satisfied with 90% for a top tax bracket.
Problem is that once you are wealthy enough you can move around the world. Similar to how Microsoft Ireland is somehow where most of Microsoft's profits occur. I think there is a big role for international treaties here.
No, the problem is that most of the truly wealthy peoples' wealth is not in the form of income. A high income tax bracket does nothing.
It needs to be a property tax, and it needs to be on everything they own, not just real-estate. Once that happens, it doesn't need to be 90%, or anywhere near it.
There's a reason why the PR-friendly rich people keep talking about wanting high income taxes, but no one's talking about a total property tax.
Well count me in for 90% if we can get there, don't want to let perfect be the enemy of good.
Wealth moving around isn't that big of a problem really, people keep touting "wealth exodus" is a huge economic risk but rarely has that really outweighed whatever the benefits that caused it.
LoL yeah as if they won't put loopholes in there like they did with taxes.
Let’s put aside the fact that the super rich don’t have a wage. How the fuck are you going to make and apply laws against the people who have the most power in the system you’re supporting?
Let’s just say if they have too much, we just put them in a big stew and eat them.
As others have said, the problem isn't wages, rich are rich because of returns, dividends and other stuff that, depending on the country or city, is tax exempt, precisely to avoid paying anything. A cynical asshole might even go so far as to say that it creates jobs for lawyers and accountants, which is technically true. It's a win-win-lose for the rich-those ethically wrong workers-everyone else.
Unless the UN or really big blocks like the EU+BRICS start pressing every tax haven to stop pretending that they're doing nothing wrong (which, let's be honest, won't happen, ever), the rich will just move around. They have that luxury, thanks to effectively infinite money.
they are rich because they own property other people depend own
Wage is not the issue
One of the challenges is of course that the wealthy don't get paid. They own and control assets that appreciate in value.
What if we ended private ownership of businesses. I don't mean ending ownership of businesses, but that every business became publicly tradeable. No more private ownership of businesses.
I'm not actually advocating this (yet), just curious what people think would happen if we did this.
The same as now
The people that own it privately will have controlling public shares. Can’t force them to sell at a given value and if you did they would just have a diverse portfolio that they swap between each other
I think finding a private company that brings people the levels we are talking about here are not an issue
Profit sharing works better, after x earned, everything is divided up between workers
Enshittifcation would be mandatory via forced infinite growth to profit shareholders.
Instead, we can make the employees up to middle management and lower own a minimum of 60% shares of every company that way they're not constantly getting fucked and they actually have a voice.
What if we ended private ownership of businesses. I don't mean ending ownership of businesses, but that every business became publicly tradeable. No more private ownership of businesses
Not sure if that would really lead to any significant change. Most billionaires "own" publicly traded companies. In fact, most billionaires became billionaires when their companies initiated an IPO.
The problem is that rich people can use their stock as collateral for huge untaxable loans. What we need to do is figure out a way to classify and tax these loans without taxing things like mortgages.
They usually dont get paid much in wages. I think zuckerberg got paid $1/hr?
I think the word you're looking for is "income" or "net worth"
Setting a maximum wage for them wouldn't do a damn thing. They'll just use the wealth they already have to hoover up more through things like insider trading or flat out stealing company money.
Adding a maximum wage for the rich would be like trying to drain the ocean using a toy bucket.
In an ideal world anyone making more than, let's say for an example, $1 million in a year would pay 100% tax on anything more.
No one needs more than $1,000,000 a year for anything. No one works hard enough to actually deserve that. It's just pure luck and/or screwing over other people to get more than that.
Unfortunately if one country implements that, all the rich people leave and go live somewhere else that doesn't tax that much.
On paper they don't make anything a year and pay less tax than you or I. The only way that's going to change is a massive world-wide effort to crack down on tax havens and to start taxing their assets fully.
The author in the article talks about how most of the wealth is either coming from capital gains and/or inheritance. They know wage isn't the thing to cap, the article is likely just trying to maximize clicks. The subject is still worth exploring and the author is very well informed.
Taylor Swift is the new posterchild for billionaires, but honestly, she's the least egregious example of a billionaire. She makes a fuck load of money because her concert tickets are like $1000 a pop. She's known to give huge bonuses to her tour staff. If anyone is getting exploited, its her fans, but she's literally just a performer. She's hardly manipulating stock prices and doing pump and dump schemes and not paying her staff a livable wage.
The author mentioned in this article was recently on The Grey Area podcast and the arguments and reasoning is pretty compelling. It's also about the discussion and civic involvement and not a particular limit. But the reasoning behind a Limitarianism makes a lot of sense.
If person A makes 100million a year, that's 1,000 times more than person B making 100k a year. Can you honestly say that person A is working 1k time harder, or is contributing 1k times more than the person B? Also remember that we're not talking about the hordes of people working below person A who execute most of the work. We're just talking about that one individual and their contributions.
Either way, the discussion about the subject is the important thing here. What do you want your society to look like in the future and for the next generation? Even if it's not Limitarianism, starting the conversation and cival discourse to push society towards a better version of its current form is worth the effort.
This is going to get downvoted ):
Preventing people from becoming rich is not what we should be focused on. A maximum wage is a good headline but doesn’t make any sense at all (read other comments on this post).
We should be focused on eliminating poverty and building up the middle class.
I hate the reality of super rich people existing in a world where millions starve to death or don’t have access to clean drinking water, but rather than focus on eliminating the ultra wealthy (which just won’t happen), we should be pushing to lift people out of poverty, which might happen if push comes to shove.
You know... it might be just a little bit easier (/s) to take people out of poverty if the trillions didn't go to pockets of ultra rich and the companies.
In a limited capital economy (and we are in such an economy despite capitalists thinking we're not) every dollar that ends up in a pocket of ultra rich is a dollar that cannot be spent on food and housing by regular people.
Every single dollar in companies and ultra rich pockets comes from regular people's work. Thus, if someone despite working lives in poverty then they are actively being exploited by the ultra rich. Jeff Bezos and Amazon workers living on food stamps is a great example.
We simply can't take everyone out of poverty if we don't distribute the money even slightly more fairly.
We should return very high taxes for the rich, use the proceeds to expand the middle class. We had that in the past, assholes got rid of it with bullshit economics.
maximum wage? maybe it works for ceos and such but most billionaires are way beyond their wages. lets start by employing preventative measurements that prevent billionaire charities to be used for money laundering or agenda pushing. then we continue by forcing strict regulations on tax havens. what else? we can also limit the number of estates a person can own and don't allow companies to buy estates. finally, limit operational size of the media conglomerates and how much a single group can have influence on media. Support the hell out of small independent media operations. I know all very vague but very critical problems imo.
Why on Earth would they use Taylor Swift as an example. Seriously?
Taylor Swift, so hot right now.
100% agree with all the people saying it's not enough, but it could be a start, which potentially forces interesting changes at the company level even if it doesn't do much with the economic system.
I would rather see no shareholder influence, but weakened shareholder influence and less incentive for CEOs and execs to be douchebags can still be meaningful (though perhaps not alone). Unfortunately, since people who want to lead others tend to be empathetically challenged, they still need explicit incentives for them not to just go through the same old exploitative and abusive patterns. Say this went through, the people who replace the spoiled CEOs who decide to leave would just end up being corrupt as well if some kind of positive reinforcement doesn't also exist.
100% tax over 100 million or something?
I'd like to know more about how this is supposed to work.
What is considered a wage? Is it net worth, increase in worth from one year to the next? Liquid capital?
Are benefits (insurance, child care, etc) counted towards this wage cap? What about company cars or housing? What about profit sharing through bonuses and / or stock grants?
Would loans be counted towards the wage cap? If not, can you borrow more than the wage cap?
What happens if you own a home or business that is worth more than the wage cap? Would you only be able to sell that commodity for the wage cap or would any excess of the wage cap be spread over multiple years?
Would inheritance or "gifts" be tallied towards the wage cap? Would donations to charitable organizations offset the wage cap?
Would companies be subject to these caps? What if a person incorporated, had all of their wealth and earnings go through that incorporation which they had sole discretion and control over the use of those funds?
What about foreign entities? Would people, companies, or even governments from other countries who exceed the maximum wage be allowed to buy / sell goods, direct / manage corporate interests, invest in land or stocks, or even reside in a country with a maximum wage? What authority or oversight would exist to even identify such a wage of a foreign entity? Or
Every single one of those questions represents a potential loophole that could be exploited to circumvent a "maximum wage" and I'm sure that somebody who has studied or worked in finance could think of others.
I have better idea: 100% tax
Anything over a $500 million in asset value taxed at 100%.
Far above what anyone should own. And yet, you'll get middle-class people defending the people with those riches, that they deserve to keep their billion dollars.
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