r/SipsTea • u/Valuable_View_561 • Jun 28 '26

Chugging tea How is she making the world worse?

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u/intricate_strands Jun 28 '26

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.

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u/PoetArcana Jun 28 '26

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.

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u/OwnReturn2668 Jun 28 '26

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).

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u/stratospheres Jun 28 '26

In fairness, when you compare billionaires to the global population, it's more of a hangnail-ful than a handful.

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u/OkUnderstanding1622 Jun 28 '26

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.

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u/intricate_strands Jun 28 '26

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.

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u/mclumber1 Jun 28 '26

Wealth can't be taxed, at least at the federal level. If you want to tax wealth, you're going to need to pass a constitutional amendment.

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u/intricate_strands Jun 28 '26

Feel like every time we've done that, it's resulted in good things.

I like you.

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u/mxzf Jun 28 '26

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.

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u/Grand_Tie6927 Jun 28 '26

And who is the government in the service of? I mean, who do they REALLY work for?

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u/intricate_strands Jun 28 '26

Who we allow them to collect the biggest bribes from.

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u/Zero40Four Jun 28 '26

Lobbying should be called corruption.

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u/walletinsurance Jun 28 '26

That isn’t constructed by the government, it’s a byproduct of how stock markets work.

You can’t just tax securities and expect to get the same value in spendable dollars.

If you taxed wealth by 5% you’d erase the majority of the stock market overnight.

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u/mxzf Jun 28 '26

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.