A better approach to tax the rich.
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I've honestly been curious how that would play out. Almost all of it is on computers. Couldn't someone craft a virus or trojan to do just that?
PLEASE IRAN….All of trumps pedophile friends would be devastated by this more than murdering any Americans! These fucks only care about greed and raping children!
That’s Tyler’s objective in Fight Club.
This is the idea on Mr Robot. He does it and it causes chaos. Deconstructing one system without the presentation of another system usually causes problems. I'm not saying we shouldn't cancel debt but wiping it out with a virus will result in destabilized world infrastructure. ...
99% tax over 1 billion\*. PS: \*Including unrealized gains on stocks.
The issue there is that say someone starts a company and it goes great, and the company's value surpasses a billion dollars. Are you going to just take the company away from the person? Furthermore, what do you do when a stock skyrockets one year and you tax someone through...
Who is buying the stocks that these rich people are being forced to sell in order to pay their wealth tax?
Stock markets would collapse along with most working folk’s retirement. Meanwhile qualified investors aka the very rich would use alternative investment strategies to invest
We should implement jubilee years in the US and then watch congress try and argue the bible is wrong.
One just ended back in January. Next one isn't for another 50 years.
My favorite part about the Bible is passages like this that have the most magnanimous shit, then a few lines later say “you can buy servants from the lands around you, and they will become your property, and your children can inherit the slaves from you; you can make them slav...
This person Bibles.
In "Debt the First 5000 Years" David Graeber goes into lengthy detail about how back in the day debt jubilees were a common occurrence. Due to a variety of causes, usually to pay for elaborate rituals like weddings or funerals, or because of bad harvests, peasants would have ...
Something something, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people that their homes and life's savings were financial instruments, etc.
If you enjoy Graeber's work, be sure to check out Dr. Michael Hudson's *Forgive Us Our Debts*. It's an absolutely phenomenal read about the ubiquity of debt jubilees prior to the Roman Empire. It really throws the ministry of Jesus into a whole new light!
No. Just go back to the exact 1945 american tax laws - 90% tax on overything over a quarter mil.
Nah, $250k isn't nearly as much income as it was back then. That's the range where you have actual hardworking professionals, many of whom went through a bunch of school. Over a million though, I can get behind.
250k is a bit low for that, I think 10 mil is fine.
the moment someone says they can solve world debt in two seconds i already know the replies are about to be chaos
Not as much as the chaos created by the people who would complain until the sun explodes that they weren't given enough time to max out their credit lines before the Day Of Forgiveness. Or that they sacrificed for 30 years to pay off their debts and it all would have been wipe...
When they talk about the interest the Treasury pays on the national debt, who do you think is collecting interest? Your taxes just go to the pockets of the rich
A quite large of people who collect interest from bonds is regular people, especially people's retirements. That also includes you.
How dare you not put the shareholders first!!!!
$24.4 trillion held by Pension funds. Yes "the rich" have more but I always laugh when people make cliche "shareholder" comments as if that wasn't exactly how pension funds work. Without rising stock prices every single pension fund would fail.
Is there a source for this stat aside from a social media screenshot? Government debt is owned by teacher pension funds, university endowments, and your retirement fund. It could be local, state, or federal debt obligations. You can't just delete assets or ignore property rig...
This isn't true, though. A lot of that debt is borrowed from the savings and pension funds of working class people. Billionaires are the one's holding the bag.
That 70% number is completely made up.
What about a structure that doesn’t aim to solely tax ‘wealth’, but instead aims to put a real cost on everything. Assign environmental costs to jet fuel. On a big plane it can be spread out per person. Individual/low occupancy planes it goes up vastly. It wouldn’t be a 1:1 th...
That isn't true lol
Most of it is held by banks and retirement fonds so that people get their 1% interest on the money in their accounts. Cancelling that would just mean millions lose their retirement and the money they have in their bank account. Then we go straight back to people not trusting...
Tell me you know nothing about economics some more.
Fuck that. This only advantages the US
And a good chunk is large corporations.
if the billionaires still own the means of production it will not change a lot tbh
Wtf is a lot
What do you think pension money is invested in.
Default on loan and bonds? Sure, go for it. Happened 140 times since 1960. But then you get taken over, either economicly like Greece, physically like Mexico, or pushed to the brink like Russia, Ghana, Venezuela.
One thing people don’t understand about older tax policies with a 90% top rate was this: Corporations could lower their tax burden and bracket by INVESTING IN THE STAFF AND COMPANY. And so they did. Guess what, when we removed it the ratio of the CEO pay to lowest paid went...
Capital will literally kill most of the human population before they cede their power. They're lining it up now.
Cue up "where is my mind" by the Pixies. This is indeed a very strange time of our lives.
the lot??
Greece (6th Century BCE): Solon implemented the seisachtheia (***shaking off of burdens***) Ancient Mesopotamia (3000–1000) BC Kings frequently proclaimed the cancellation of personal debts owed to the state. There's certainly precedents. The problem is that the debt is he...
> What's the downside for the bulk of humanity? A financial market crisis dragging all financial institutions into either bankruptcy or something very close to it, and, following that, an economic meltdown on a never before seen scale. The sort that leads to a breakdown in...
>Ancient Mesopotamia (3000–1000) BC Kings frequently proclaimed the cancellation of personal debts owed to the state. Yeah but the amounts were small and generally unpayable anyway so it wouldn't do any good to hold onto it. It's like saying you told your cousin he doesn...
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I don't want new taxes on the rich, i think limiting deductions would be much better. Apple didn't day any effecting tax for years, Tesla reduced their to zero but can offer the most massive compensation package in history? BS, if they can't operate and give out huge bonuses w...
The rich only own everything as long as we allow it. Say a law passes that just made it so they don't have all that wealth anymore, like a cap on net worth of a penny shy of $1B. What can they do about it? Not a damn thing.
Aren't billionaires massively in debt though? I thought the whole point of stocks/assets is to borrow against them and keep the debt until you die?
If you owe $10k, that’s your problem. If y’all owe $10B that’s their problem.
You'd collapse every single pension fund, so good luck with that.
The grammar here is fucky as hell and confusing. But wow, great idea. End debt by ending debt. Fucking genius man. "I can create world peace easy: just stop all war, duh."
Or you could just eat the richest 0.01% and 70% of debt is gone
isnt that just yassified sovereign default
It’s your debt whether or not you realize it Say goodbye to your house!
This is a horrible idea lmfao
Wrong argument people. What happens if everyone's debt is cancelled to zero?
I'm a socialist but that is NOT how the economy works. You cant just cancel debt. The web of money is way too complex. The everyman would be the one who feels this the most.
Next time credit companies beg for another bailout, just create the debt equivalent of food stamps. Free money to debt-holders that can only be spent to pay off debt. That way the companies get their money and people with debt can finally exhale.
I know it sounds good, but the result would be so disruptive it would end life as we know it. Those truly rich would quickly seize power and assets. And those a little rich would be worse off and those with little would have nothing.
Fight Club is not real life
While I get it, it would also mean no one would loan money any more. Which means good luck making big purchases. Which means bye bye economy.
This is the way.
You could? Then do it!
This only works if the rich report income
100% tax on all stock holdings worth over 50 million.
cant we pin all the debt to one billionaire and then do the jesus thing ?
Both. Do both.
Oh no I can think of a better way. Actually redistributing it properly.
The sad truth is all the billionaires in the world cannot match the US federal government's spending. Many of these people are not even US citizens and became billionaires overseas. But if we confiscated every penny they own - not tax them mind you but bankrupt them - it wou...
Except the rich are tax dodging by leveraging their assets to live on debt. Canceling all debt would *double* the wealth of the richest people on earth.
Debt without jubilee is just slavery.
Ah you watched Mr. Robot too
Genuine question, as I don't want to outright imply it's false: But how do you even arrive at this statistic? I need more context.
Man, you liberals are idealistic beyond practicality. Your worldview is so infantile
The top 0.01% also *own* a lot of that debt. Most of the worlds debt exists in the form of government or corporate bonds, which is a common piece of basically every rich person portfolio.
AND poor people's portfolios too. Actually, the poorer you are, the more it will be balanced towards bonds. "But I don't have a portfolio", but actually you do if you have retirement savings, as many workers do.
Default, cynical response is, "not gonna happen." Less cynical ask is, "how do we make it happen?"