A Boring Dystopia

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Steve Ballmer is set to make $1 billion a year for doing nothing | CNN Business (edition.cnn.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/aboringdystopia

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[–] throwwyacc 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Do you want to maybe suggest something practical? I'm not particularly interested in the relentless "capitalists are evil" meme. I am interested in hearing about alternatives with merit Also inert? Are these people really sitting on cash? Or are they investing in various parts of the economy?

[–] jantin 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

t a x t h e r i c h At, say, 90% above 2m earnings and also bring in a generous estate tax - one which would trigger above some large value, say 10m$ so that a lucky rando with a house isn't hit, but someone with 9 digit net worth is.

And yes, they do sit on a ton of this cash. Buying yachts, flipping artworks and building bunkers in New Zealand aren't exactly productive investments. And yes, a large amount gets invested here and there but it would still be better to deconcentrate this.

[–] throwwyacc 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You want to tax existing assets? How on earth is that supposed to work? You just make people liquidate assets to pay a tax? The idea of taxing an unrealised gain is ridiculous

For the record he is paying 200M in tax on that income. Though I agree 20% is probably too low here, that's up to your govt to fix and isn't a failure of capitalism but of the specific implementation

[–] jantin 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Yes, I would make people sell off excess property to pay taxes, why not? It would take some fine tuning of course byt how else are you willing to fight the wealth gap?

[–] throwwyacc 1 points 10 months ago

I don't really care if there is a wealth gap. Even though I'm definitely on the lower income side

What I think we should focus on instead is making sure everyone's base line needs are met. So healthcare (including dental), housing, food, etc. And I don't think you need to tax wealth to do it, rather you'd be better off closing off issues in the current tax system and increasing taxes in the upper brackets For the lower tax brackets you could even implement a negative tax rate to achieve it without having to resort to a blanket system like UBI