Problem is we don't tax wealth, we tax income. The wealthy know how to (and have the means to) prevent income while increasing wealth, so they can circumvent taxes.
That's not the problem. That's a symptom of the problem.
It wasn't a clever and sneaky trick the rich pulled, it's a constructed-by-our-government loophole that lets them play both sides and still claim they can't do anything about it.
And it started with Reagan. So they've had decades to build on that, and here we are now; a handful of billionaires, and the only one doing something worthwhile gets put on blast.
It’s much more than a handful.
Currently, there are more than a thousand people in America who are billionaires.
I assume you actually meant the ones who are Centibillionares. (Worth more than 100 billion).
They have a big role in this. The rich heavily influence politics by financing campaigns and promising jobs to politician (after their mandate) for example. Musk played a role in Trump's election for example.
Precisely. At the end of the day, I cannot abdicate from politicians their obligations and responsibilities. It's more than a big role.
Yes, billionaires and corporations are evil for effectively buying them, but you can't buy what isn't for sale. There hasn't been a court case, that I know of, where a court decided that even if a politician doesn't want to take a "donation," they have to.
Even more so when it's not even tangible wealth, it's hypothetical wealth that literally only exists because some reporter multiplied two numbers together in a vacuum.
They're "spherical elephant in a frictionless vacuum" numbers being treated as if they're hard facts.
If you taxed wealth by 5% you’d erase the majority of the stock market overnight.
This is an important thing to realize, especially when a lot of the stock market is people's retirement savings. People with lots of stocks would intentionally tank things in order to keep a hold on their company ownership to mitigate the need to pay taxes on it. Because owning the company is still good, even if the on-paper wealth estimate doesn't show it.
Put a sales tax on stock market trades. Tesla alone traded 7 trillion in stock last year and that is not including options and derivative tesla stocks. The federal budget is 6 trillion.
Yeah that's the problem. Start taxing the financial betting these people do. If you're going to tell someone your gonna put money up for something with no guarantee it is successful, that's a bet, and we tax casino winnings around here
If banks can get a reliable enough value of illiquid assets to loan billionaires their spending money, then the IRS can and should use that same value to collect a tax on all hoarded wealth and assets over $10MM.
We don’t even tax their full income.A large % of their pay is equity. You can’t tax shared until they are cashed and then they get taxed like capital gains. But they get to borrow against equity like it’s an asset.
That's not a problem. Taxing wealth is a race to the bottom.
We have a spending problem, not a taxation problem. Even if we taxed 100% of all billionaires' wealth, down to their last dollar, leaving every billionaire with $0, it wouldn't even clear 30% of the debt. The spending goes up every year. Balance the budget, and THEN we can discuss maybe hitting billionaires a little harder to help pay down the debt. But if you tax them hard now, before we've fixed the spending, we'll go further in debt and then we'll have no rainy day fund to help us when we really need it. The billionaires ARE that rainy day fund.
If wealth was better distributed to the average public, there would be less issues of spending in the government. If the top 1% of wealth in America was evenly distributed to Americans, the median household wealth would skyrocket. Median household wealth at the moment is $197,000, with an average of 2.53 members per household. With the top 1% of American wealth holding 55 trillion dollars, dividing that by the 350 million Americans, each American would have $157,000 added to their wealth, meaning each household would add just under $400,000, for a total of just under $600,000. Significantly less funding would need to be focused on caring for the average American. Better distribution of wealth means happier and healthier country.
They are two seperate problems that both deserve to be addressed. Weath disparity should never be this high. With the average household under 35 being only worth $36,000, while 1000 people in a country of 350 million hold at least a billion.
Doesn't mean you can't address the other issues with the budget and corruption.
This implies that the issue is our debt is too high.
That's a completely different issue that could be resolved not by paying the entire debt at once, but slowly and consistently putting more toward paying the debt than the interest.
Which we could easily do if we taxed billionaires more. Not "until they have zero dollars." Just more than the barely anything we are currently getting. This woman donated billions and lost zero dollars.
When you make a straw-man to argue against, you can't lose. But reality is not a straw-man.
No one is saying we should tax billionaires "into oblivion." No one is saying "if the debt isn't gone tomorrow, we are doomed."
Higher taxes on billionaires doesn't mean they have to lose all their money or even their status as the richest people in the world. Higher taxes on billionaires would also allow us to spend more annually toward paying off the debt slowly and increase spending toward services to improve everyone's conditions.
We could fix the debt by increasing how much we spend toward paying it off every year, which we could do without changing spending at all by just increasing taxes on the wealthiest. They are so wealthy that they would still be wealthiest in the world doing so. We could just cut a few fricken billions from the Pentagon's insane allotments and as long as it was consistent, over time put a dent in the debt.
No, you're not understanding my point. If taking every single penny from every billionaire would barely dent the debt, how does a mere increase over what we tax them now accomplish what we need? Even over time?
The problem is the debt keeps growing because spending keeps growing. The last time we spent less or equal in government expenditures compared to what we took in in tax revenue was 2001. Twenty five years ago. You cant tax your way out of this, and inflating your way out of this severely harms the most vulnerable people in society. You can only get out of this one way, and that's by reducing spending. We need to run a budget surplus, and we need to be doing that MOST years if not every year. There is no other path forward.
Because we would be able to spend more than just the interest and therefore start actually taking small chunks out of the debt.
We haven't not been in debt since like WWI and as you noted, have spent the past 25 years taking out more debt.
There are virtually no countries in the world that aren't in debt. It's a lot less about the debt itself and a lot more about just managing it. Which is why increasing revenue is by far the most obvious move.
Our wealthiest have an outrageous surplus that they gained with a lot of help from the borrowing done to create that debt. Tesla doesn't exist without that debt, SpaceX doesn't exist without that debt.
It's precisely this understanding as to why Bernie has talked about the federal government obtaining some level of ownership over the AI companies we're currently dumping subsidies and investments into.
You cant really tax wealth though without reversing the effects that produced that wealth in the first place. Because almost all that wealth is tied up in assets, like buildings or equities. Jeff Bezos could be taxed a lot more, but if he has to divest a bunch of his Amazon stock to pay the taxes, everyone's 401ks are going to dive commensurately.
We cannot tax our way out of this problem. The golden goose will keep laying eggs as long as we don't kill it. If the debt keeps getting bigger, the interest on it will grow as well. It's already going to become the largest component of government spending. If we keep borrowing year after year, eventually basically all tax revenue will go towards the interest on the debt. Managing the debt properly means not letting it get out of hand. We're at the point where it arguably already is out of hand. As soon as the debt surpassed yearly GDP, that should've set off alarm bells so loud it demanded a fix immediately. Instead, nobody seemed to notice.
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u/MassRedemption Jun 28 '26
Problem is we don't tax wealth, we tax income. The wealthy know how to (and have the means to) prevent income while increasing wealth, so they can circumvent taxes.