With wealth inequality and billionaire control over American society growing ever more obscene, it’s well past time to implement a maximum wage limit.
What we need is a wealth tax. If you don’t want wealth to be hoarded, then you tax it. The rich and their stooges online will parrot that “wealth taxes don’t work” precisely because it is the only tax that does work and that is why they oppose it.
Maximum wage laws don’t make sense because the ultra rich get their wealth from investments, not wages.
At some point, we decided that people who work and make $100K a year get taxed 50% more than people who make the same money from investment. Income is income. Get rid of capital gains special status.
And this loophole of borrowing money against stock value is income, and should be taxed as such. If we did this, everyone’s income taxes would be much lower, national debts would be in reduction.
But the Wall street dicks consider taxing on investments “getting taxed twice”, and hedge fund managers still pay NO income taxes, only CGT.
I’m in favour of maximum ratios of total compensation. Stock values, dividends, salary are all added together to get a total compensation value.
Start it at something like 50-1, then gradually lower it as the actual workforce is allowed to control an increased share of the company.
There is still incentive for growth; the growth is simply distributed more equitably.
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
I mean I’m still thinking of you have more money than you and all your currently alive descendants could possibly spend in their lives, you shouldn’t be able to receive any money for anything at all.
And once you cap out how much you are able to spend personally, anything you get at that point should already be at least halved, if not stricter.
No idea about specific numbers, but I like this as a starter.
There shouldn’t be any billionaires at ALL. And very few multi millionaires. And by “multi”, I mean I’m the double digit millions. That should be the extreme high end. Nobody needs that much, even with today’s prices.
So:
A loan of $1 m is given to Mr. Richbitch McDouchebag based on owning $1 m worth of stock.
Eventually that loan has to be paid off.
When McDouchebag sells off some stock to pay the loan, the amount paid presumably enters a bank account, either in their name or in the name of a numbered company they control, yes?
That’s income. Apply tax to it before they pay off the loan. In Canada, the top marginal tax rate is 33%, so $330k minus the other marginal tax amounts for the lower brackets would be applied before this money can go to pay off a portion of that $1 million loaned.
It’s either this, or we rip up the income tax act alongside finding a different revenue stream for the government.
I’m for whatever we can get on board with most people, because I am pretty sure most of us who aren’t accountants hate filing income taxes.
If we instead got most of our money from other things that the government sold, then (a) big companies couldn’t use the same accounting tricks to hide income, as we would no longer be taxing those precious profits of theirs (b) the rest of us wouldn’t have to go through tax pain every April.
I realize that for some people, they get things like tax credits for a bunch of things like home renos, etc.
Perhaps under a no income tax system, the incentive to do these activities that reduced their income tax would have to be changed to something more tangible, like a guaranteed lower rate on utilities or something. I dunno.
Also capital gains tax should be based on total net worth. So if fElon sells some stock, his capital gains tax is based on his obscene net worth.
Or tax funds borrowed at ultra-low rates against unrealized capital gains as collateral. If you can spend it, it’s income.
That makes no sense. Then what happens when the market crashes, tax rebates?
Just eliminate this loop hole of borrowing against stock values tax free. It just encourages hording and increasing wealth with no taxation.
We need monopoly busting, and inheritance tax, and general wealth redistribution. We need to stop monetizing basic needs and start paying fair wages. Income cap solves none of that. No way you can sell ‘income caps’ to the general public.
It’s simple, any income is income and taxed as income. this means loans, gains, etc. alll income.
Then everyone pays less income taxes. The current system puts the tax burden on the poorest people.
Monopoly busting, hell yes!! All the other ideas come from people who were unlucky enough to have nothing passed down to them.
I am sorry for your situation, but my father worked his ass off to leave me and my siblings something (it was meager compared to most I’m sure but it helped me out immensely when I needed a leg up), but blanket laws like this would have royally screwed me just because “well I didn’t inherit anything from my parents, so NOBODY ELSE SHOULD EITHER!!” mentality.
Inheritance tax is what stops you having a noble class or owner class with a long line of inherited wealth.
A good inheritance tax would be tiered like income tax. Lower amounts would be untaxed with higher numbers being taxed at higher rates.
Maximum wage would be nice, but the inequality doesn’t happen with wages, it’s stock options, asset hoarding, and rent seeking. These people don’t pay taxes, or claim wages lol. Inheritance tax of 95% of 11Million that’s an idea! Need to strip the aristocracy of its belongings.
That wealth is also largely unrealized wealth on those stock options. I’m pretty against taxing unrealized gains, but for the love of god, we need to tax their leveraging of those unrealized gains which is how they benefit and wield it as a weapon, all while not paying any taxes on it. The tax rate should be HIGH (I’d be okay with the tax rate part being wealth based when they leverage it).
All incoming money and assets. Hell, tax all assets at 100% over 100M. Maybe even hard code a limit to the size of corporations, since they are people the same rules apply.
We need a cap per owner. When you have multiple owners, the cap sums between them. Owners share equal rights.
So take a megacorp, like Google. They would be essentially need to make every employee an owner plus hire thousands of new “owner employees” to maintain their profit margin. Those profits get divided equally among owners, and the owners decide the direction of the company.
This pattern is also future proof against AI.
I love it. Also the cap applies to all companies owned by a single individual, total not each.
The thing about most mega rich people is they don’t earn wages. So this wouldn’t affect them.
Semantics. We’ll change the wording to “assets controlled”.
Came here to say this. They’re poor, see how much their salaries are? Just a million, which they reinvest into the company for another share of 1% of their 3 trillion dollar company… that they control, and fire 20k employees to get back 50 million in just a week for their share…
Semantics. “Max income law”
Any income over $300,000 per year goes to the State to cover programs to eradicate poverty. Easy.
Ok so then once you hit $300k in income you should stop working? That sounds like a great way to have a shortage of working necessary skilled labor eg surgeons and lawyers who stop working after a few months every year.
My buddy is a spinal surgeon. He would stop working by May and his area would have no spinal surgeons for more than half the year under your suggestion.
That’s how you get a bunch of great Cuban surgeons
If those people are actually taking home $300k/year after deducting things like business expenses and student loan payments, then they’re either way overpaid or they seriously need a vacation.
OR they have incredibly niche skills that are extremely hard to obtain and maintain.
The part that makes me think certain forms of leftism are really foolish is that they count on people not wanting to be compensated for the greater amount of harder work or risks they are willing to take on. People don’t work like that.
The risk to even get to that level was incredibly high as well. Medical school bills are no joke and you don’t know you’re going to become some top notch surgeon by the end, you might just wash out and be swimming in debt.
that would kill lotteries
Why should I care? There’s no inherent reason lotteries deserve to exist. There are several reasons they shouldn’t exist.
gambling is fun
Lotteries are hardly gambling. You’re going to loose, statistically
Statistically, this applies to all other forms of gambling as well. The house almost always wins.
There are gambling where there is no house
Darn
Most billionaires don’t earn a wage at all. So they’re ahead of you on this. Most of their wealth comes from simply lying about what their shit is worth, and other rich people agreeing.
need it to cover all compensation but I agree. ben an jerrys had single digit multiples for the highest paid. don’t see why we can’t do 100.
This is a stupid idea. The ultra wealthy make a tiny portion of their income through wages- that’s kind of the entire point and problem of capitalism. It is ownership of capital that drives the income of the ultra wealthy. Jeff Bezos’s salary from Amazon is only $80,000 per year, and he is one of the richest people on Earth. Maximum wage laws only hurt workers, while not impacting the ultra wealthy at all. When you see the giant compensation packages of CEO, very little of that is actually in wages. It’s in stock in the company, and other non-cash benefits. Even if you restrict this practice, that wouldn’t have done anything to prevent the wealthiest people on Earth from getting where they are since they are all founders or descendants of founders. I can’t think of a single billionaire who got there from wages or any kind of compensation working for someone else- it’s all ownership of capital.
I don’t think you’re helping the cause. A perfect solution is not the goal, and a good idea that fails to address the targeted problem is still a good idea.
You can at the same time think:
- people shouldn’t be allowed to have a salary of 1 million
- that the ultra rich aren’t ultra rich because of their salary
- believe that we should tax ultra-high income individuals highly
- believe that we should tax ultra-wealthy individuals highly
Don’t be a bad progressive by discouraging progress. “Tax wealth not work” is a great slogan to unify the working class. We should also probably tax ultra-high income individuals as well.
The ultra rich own assets. Their wealth does not come from monopoly money from a paycheck. So you can’t tax them unless you go after unrealized gains.
You absolutely can tax assets. Idk what your point is here, are you anti-taxing the rich? Or are you hyper fixating on the fact that I’m also pro-taxing ultra high income earners more? I don’t get your comment.
I’m against taxing unrealized investment gains.
The issue is that this is literally not a problem. It’s like deciding that the best course of action when you’re starving in the woods is to hunt and eat Bigfoot instead of foraging for food. It’s a waste of time and resources at best, and a distraction from real solutions at worse. Nobody in the history of the world has become ultra wealthy through high salary.
Idk if you know this but governments are composed of a lot of people. We can fix multiple issues with multiple solutions. Right now the top 0.01% have absolutely too much money. The top 0.1% also don’t get taxed enough. The top 1% also don’t get taxed enough. The top 10% likely could handle more taxing as well depending on what country we’re talking about.
The reality is there are hundreds of problems modern governments need to solve, most of which require revenue, so getting more revenue from the people who own a ton and people who make a ton is good.
I don’t understand why we have to pick one solution when we definitely can handle talking about (especially casually on the Internet) multiple solutions, those solutions are good, and we agree on the ranking of importance (wealth tax first, anything that goes after the top 1%, and then income taxes, anything that goes after the top 10%). Like, I don’t think it’s that hard.
*aside from pro-sports competitors.
He is right though. Those rich guys won’t have an income at all, they just live on loans., get driven around in cars owned by the company, live in houses owned by the company etc, etc etc.
I’m literally agreeing with that statement. The ultra wealthy make all their money from their wealthy. Yes. Can we all agree that that’s what’s happening? Yes? Good.
Now ALSO can we agree it’s sane for someone to suggest taxing ultra high income earners? Like in 2012, just reading off the wiki here, the median cash compensation for a US CEO was 5.3 million. That’s cash. That’s about as much money as I want the limit to be on anyone in the world in terms of wealth and these fuckers are getting paid that a year. Can we agree we should tax cash incomes over oh idk 1 million dollars at something like 90%?
Like guys come on, this isn’t hard. Don’t just knee jerk react to the topic, read what is being written. Yes, tax wealth. That’s the most important thing every government can do. Yes, I’m saying that because I know wealth begets wealth and it cascades, the wealthy are wealthy because of their wealth (no shit). ALSO, yes we should tax ultra-high income earners. If you get paid enough money to retire in two years of normal full time work you should be taxed accordingly (with something like Germany’s tax law that let’s you spread it out over X years so if it was a one time thing you get taxed normally but if it’s an every year salary it gets taxed correctly).
It’s not wages that are the problem, it’s compounding multi-generational wealth. It’s very easy for rich people to make their income zero.
Can’t they both be a problem?
Well like I said, pretty much all of these mega rich people don’t have any income on paper, otherwise they would have to pay income tax. And rich people hate paying taxes.
multi generational wealth is the only way to have any fun though
That’s the whole problem.
if fun is a problem then I don’t want it fixed
Found the trust fund baby.
Amen. Minimum wage was a good start, but it’s become a mere virtue signal for labor rights. I have no reason to believe a maximum wage wouldn’t function similarly. Furthermore, nominal sums are pretty meaningless with currency anyway. Inflation makes them irrelevant pretty quickly. Progressive tax and social subsidy is what works, historically.
I worked for a guy that got paid $1 a year. The business paid for everything for him. Wage caps will not work.
These cunts will spin it like, 'Society will break down if we pay more than 20 an hour. Don’t you like cheeseburgers? Don’t you like groceries?
