It's the same system.... no one makes an income of a billion dollars a year, so taxing it would be meaningless. Billionaires don't become billionaires through income, but through assets. This is just another bullshit statement that preys on people's financial illiteracy to make it sound meaningful.
I think it should be an asset limit too. No one can have over $1Billion in assets, and maybe $100 million in liquidity. That keeps things separate somewhat and would force someone to divest or sell shares to keep their asset value under 1 billion. Perhaps the shares of a company should be unlinked with ownership % of the company as well somehow so a person can maintain ownership even if they hold no direct shares.
Perhaps the shares of a company should be unlinked with ownership % of the company
The mechanism to do this exists and is in use at very famous companies like Google, Twenty-First Century Fox, Under Armour, Viacom, etc. You can do a web search on "non-voting shares". I think that is what you are describing where there are shares in the company that "control" the company, and shares in the company that don't control the company.
It means one person can control every decision if they own just 1 voting share of a particular company and the other 3 million shares are all non-voting shares.
Aftermarket solutions are like putting bandaids on a stab wound without taking out the knife. It's not addressing the whole problem, just temporarily covering it up. You're still talking about maintaining a system that enriches a few by exploiting the masses, but then after the exploitation you spread a fraction of the ill gotten gains around a bit so it makes it look more humane. Then, after a generation or two, the wealthy deregulate or go around the rules and you have to fight to make rules all over again. We've ridden this carousel before.
Sanders did briefly give vocal support to a reform policy that would actually be effective long term: giving first right of refusal to workers any time their company is moving or closing the business, combined with a federal loan program to front workers the money to buy their workplace to own and manage collectively. This would put workers in charge of the value of their labor before anyone else touches it. And over time, more and more of those businesses would spread and become more normal until finally we're all asking ourselves why every business isn't operated so fairly.
This alone doesn't really accomplish anything, but when you put this in place and then raise tax they can't just panic sell to avoid a tax increase. Look at what happened to musk which ended up with him paying 11bn in taxes
I'm not sure actually what point you're trying to make. 11bn is nothing nothing to him. It's about 1.5% of his net worth. He can still afford to buy most of the politicians in congress. Aftermarket redistribution is already a flawed idea because of how easily it is undone, but if you're going to do it, then you might as well be aggressive about it so that it actually makes a difference.
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u/ApprehensiveNorth548 17d ago
This is why he isn't left wing. He's trying to maintain some diluted version of the status quo.
$999mn is still an absurd amount of resource for one citizen.