Their tax rate isn’t the real issue. The fact that they extract that much wealth out of the labor and production of others is the real problem.
No human being should have a billion dollars. The workers who got you to your level of privilege and status should be paid based on their worth.
A boss that pays fairly would never become a billionaire, and their workers would live good lives being paid the actual value of their labor. Increased demand from increased household discretionary income would create a boom on the supply side.
But it will never happen, because billionaires own everything and will always manufacture consent. Democracy will die to thunderous applause.
Us poors (the dumb ones, because education will be forever castrated) will clap for the billionaires and lay our thrift store hand-me-down jackets over the curb so they can cross a puddle in the street lest they get a drop of water on their 100k elephant skin boots. It’s coming to a head
Although this is true, I’d like this graph on a billboard outside every polling location in November:
That there are even billionaires, let alone multi-billionaires. It’s an immoral, unethical system that fundamentally exploited labor that allowed for this.
That productivity has gone up but wages have remained stagnant should boil everyone’s blood. All the wealth stolen and sent upwards into fewer and fewer hands. Legalized theft by way of capitalism.
Not even our closest cousins would tolerate a member that hoarded bananas so. No, it would be fangs, and ripping and all sorts of face-eating, and a whole bunch of other stuff we should be taking inspiration from.
Tax the rich, the banks, and the churches. Then see if you still need anything from the normies.
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For the FIRST time? Yeah, no. How about ALL the time?
Did you see a flaw in the analysis? Not sure what you mean
This is something Warren Buffet has been complaining about for years. It’s not exactly a new development.
He’s talked about not paying his fair share. I don’t recall him ever saying “billionaires literally pay a lower effective tax rate”.
From 2012:
https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2012/01/warren-buffett-and-his-secretary-talk-taxes
"Buffett’s secretary since 1993, Debbie Bosanek, sat next to her boss just hours after being invited by the president to the State of the Union address, where the president made her the face of tax inequality in America.
Bosanek pays a tax rate of 35.8 percent of income, while Buffett pays a rate at 17.4 percent."
Idk, I’m not seeing anything there that he acknowledged he paid a lower rate than the average American. He was just contrasting himself with one person. He didn’t say “rich people have a lower effective tax rate than everyone else”. He just says “I have a lower tax rate than this one other person”.
It means that methodologically collected data is less accurate than popular sentiment.
But it isn’t for the first time. This has been happening for years
That analysis you linked isn’t about income taxes. The NYTimes analysis is just about income taxes. It is the first time, although the report is on data that’s a few years old
Fat orange and his repuglican crew got it done
Yeah, Trump was standing on the shoulders of giants like Regan, Bush, and Bush to get us into mess. Thanks Republicans!
Do not forget Bill Clinton, he played a huge role. Essentially fulfilling republican dreams of deregulation by joining hands with them. It’s when the Democratic party embraced corporate interests and neoliberalism. Clinton deregulated banking (see Glass-Steagall) which led to the financial crisis and banking/finance today.
Biden didn’t fix 40 years of Republican corruption in 3 years therefore he’s just as guilty, and I’m voting Republican!!! - Average American
moronvotercommenter wasn’t even mentioning time frames involving Biden, but way to play the
victim cardaverage democrat playbook
Great article. Nice to see an economist doing such important work. I don’t really understand finances. I snipped the parts of the article that helped me understand the finding/headling. There’s a great chart in the article of taxation differences since the 1960s too - staggering! Plutocracy in action!
Published in The New York Times with the headline “It’s Time to Tax the Billionaires,” Zucman’s analysis notes that billionaires pay so little in taxes relative to their vast fortunes because they “live off their wealth”—mostly in the form of stock holdings—rather than wages and salaries.
Stock gains aren’t currently taxed in the U.S. until the underlying asset is sold, leaving billionaires like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Tesla CEO Elon Musk—a pair frequently competing to be the single richest man on the planet—with very little taxable income.
“But they can still make eye-popping purchases by borrowing against their assets,” Zucman noted. “Mr. Musk, for example, used his shares in Tesla as collateral to rustle up around $13 billion in tax-free loans to put toward his acquisition of Twitter.”
We can tax registered securities. Stock holdings. We can take 5% or 50% of all outstanding shares, each and every year, and transfer them to IRS liquidators to be resold in small lots over time.
We can exempt the first $10 million held by a natural person, (which exempts about 99.5% of the populace from the securities tax) and establish a progressive tax schedule that causes the tax rate to exceed average gains when holding more than $100 million worth of securities.
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You are familiar with the concept of democracy, are you not?
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First Tuesday after the first Monday in November.
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Sometimes I think we shouldn’t have photoshop.
Then I drink more 🖖🏻
Sisko is the best captain.
Hands down. He tko’d Q… and lived to tell about it.
Taxing billionaires will just get rolled back, the problem is Capitalism itself.
Collectivize the Means of Production.
What the MSM considers normal regular American I consider upperclass. What they consider poor I consider normal. What they consider homeless is actually the new poor.
Yeah, a whole lot of working folks are one missed paycheck from homelessness. I’m old enough to remember that it wasn’t always like this, if you were working you didn’t have nearly so much anxiety and exhaustion, you could afford to look after a kid or have the occasional holiday, maybe own a home. Not anymore. The rich are getting richer though.
I’ve watched some of my friends struggle with homelessness. They are amazing people with brilliant minds, but just got unlucky while working a dead end job. It’s fucking terrible.
Yeah, it’s really messed up. And getting worse. I’m just not sure how we change it without violence though. Voting doesn’t fucking help. And, like me, most of the people who are hurting don’t want violent change. Rightly, because like capitalism, revolution hurts a lot of people. But it feels like society is a balloon and the rich are squeezing it and wondering when it’ll pop. It’s hard to predict what’s gonna happen but based on the way things have been I’d say worse.
A general, mass strike would probably never happen. But it should. More strikes in general. I feel like there are still things to try before going full Joker
LOL this isn’t going to last much longer. It’s like comedy at this point, what a trend. The system will break before they’re taxed appropriately.
Doubtful
So what do you see changing any time in the near future regarding this issue?
It will be a tug of war between the right and the left, leaning slightly right on economic issues pretty much forever.
America is basically run by large corporations. I don’t see them just willingly changing course. We will get small wins here and there, but nothing drastic for a long time.
Edit - the spice must flow
Capitalism naturally declines over time, that’s why America and other developed countries have expanded internationally via Imperialism in order to super-exploit the third world for super-profits. Capitalism cannot last forever, eventually third world countries will shake off US influence and the empire will crumble.
for the first time
Nobody ask about the long-term capital gains rate going back to Ronald Reagan’s '83 reform.
Not 100% sure but I imagine they’d count capital gains in the analysis. The full read in The NY Times was interesting but behind a paywall
I imagine they’d count capital gains in the analysis
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/8544719
The NYTimes analysis is just about income taxes
Aren’t you contradicting yourself here?
Once again, the problem is that the banks aren’t being taxed. The reason the billionaires don’t pay taxes is that they buy everything with money they borrow from the banks.
Borrowing against assets should be income that cannot be offset by the debt.
You want to squints get rid of mortgages and thereby get rid of home ownership?
Good point… it might have come across like that… but that is for sure not what I meant.
A home is already taxed. An asset portfolio like stock only when realized. Borrowing against it should count as realizing the gains.
Or maybe better yet, we tax the whole portfolio like we do real estate against the value at the measuring point. Cause a portfolio is either something because it is used as collateral and thus taxed… or it’s nothing and cannot be borrowed against without realizing the gains.
The problem is more that one person can control billions in assets, particularly when the staff that generates the revenue that gives these assets value are in poverty.
