Proposition 40, which will be on the ballot in November, would impose a one-time, 5% tax on California’s 200 billionaires,
These fucks will do anything to avoid paying taxes…
with 90% of the revenue from the proposed measure going toward the state’s health care program and 10% going toward education, food assistance, and administration. Brin, with a net worth of nearly $260 billion, could owe about $13 billion as a result of the tax.
Can’t be contributing to “socialism” I guess? Get some of that $260 billion liquid and pay up, dickhead.
He already changed his tax residency before the cutoff so that he would owe $13b if the law passes is not really accurate
Maybe aim confused, but I thought the California billionaire tax was being applied based on historic address. So changing shouldn’t matter, no? Maybe I’m wrong.
The cutoff time was 2026-01-01. He changed his residency the month before.
So even this has a goddamn loophole they’re already exploiting
Well, Zuckerberg didn’t make the cut, so his billions are somewhat on the line.
Good, fuck him.
Okay, just a couple of details here I’d like to put out in the open.
First and foremost, I don’t like billionaires. I think they should all have their wealth stripped down until they’re under a billion dollars. There is no reason why billionaires should exist. That’s such an incredibly large number that our human brains don’t even really understand the difference between a million, 100 million, and a billion. It’s visually difficult to even represent. So as far as I’m concerned, the sooner these guys can get their wealth back down to a more reasonable level, the better it is for the world in general.
Second, I really like Proposition 40. It’s got some real teeth to it. The proposition doesn’t simply charge taxes on revenue that a billionaire produces; it charges the tax against their net worth, which I think is absolutely fantastic because it actually targets accumulated wealth.
And that’s important because billionaires don’t have billions of dollars sitting around in a checking account. They may have significantly less than even a billion dollars in liquid cash. If Mr. Sergey Brin is worth $250 billion, for example, a 5% wealth tax would represent roughly $12.5 billion. He’s going to have to come up with that money somehow. He can cash out assets, borrow against them, sell investments, or use other sources of liquidity. The proposition also provides for payment over a period of up to five years, although doing so comes with additional charges.
That’s going to be a real interruption for billionaires, and I absolutely love that aspect of it. These people have accumulated enormous amounts of wealth while the rest of us live in an economy where ordinary people are taxed on their income, their purchases, their property, and virtually everything else they do.
For decades, America’s tax system has allowed enormous fortunes to accumulate largely through appreciating assets rather than ordinary taxable income. Billionaires can therefore become dramatically wealthier without necessarily realizing that wealth as conventional income.
Good on California for proposing a tax on extreme wealth that actually has the potential to put a dent in those fortunes.
Mind you, these billionaires are ultimately trying to avoid what amounts to superficial damage to their coffers. Five percent of a $250 billion fortune is still an enormous amount of money, but it leaves $237.5 billion behind. And if their assets continue appreciating, they can potentially recover that lost wealth relatively quickly.
I’m not saying 5% is going to destroy these people. It won’t. But that’s exactly why I think it’s a good step. It’s a real tax on accumulated wealth, it actually requires the ultra-wealthy to part with a meaningful amount of money, and it demonstrates that enormous fortunes aren’t necessarily untouchable simply because the wealth isn’t sitting in a bank account.
Rather old but still very true.“But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education SUCKS, and it’s the same reason it will never, ever, EVER be fixed. It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you’ve got. Because the owners, the owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the real owners now, the BIG owners! The Wealthy… the REAL owners! The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. They are irrelevant. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice! You have OWNERS! They OWN YOU. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want: They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. That’s right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that! You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitty jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later cause they own this fucking place! It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it! You, and I, are not in the big club. By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table has tilted folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care! Good honest hard-working people; white collar, blue collar it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard-working people continue, these are people of modest means, continue to elect these rich cock suckers who don’t give a fuck about you…. they don’t give a fuck about you… they don’t give a FUCK about you. They don’t care about you at all… at all… AT ALL. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. That’s what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes everyday, because the owners of this country know the truth. IT’S CALLED THE AMERICAN DREAM, BECAUSE YOU HAVE TO BE ASLEEP TO BELIEVE IT.” George Carlin
Christ, Carlin died in 2008. If only he saw how infinitely stupider and more depraved western society has become since then.
Life is just good enough where people don’t care enough, just brainwashed enough to believe they have a chance for they themselves to get rich, and just distracted enough to make them forget about the red white and blue dick that’s jammed up their assholes even further.
Even 5% per year sounds pretty reasonable, honestly.
If you are a billionaire within a lifetime, then the yearly growth of your assets has been so insane that a 5% headwind should not scare you, you big crybaby.
Or if you inherited it and don’t have a rapidly growth net worth… cry me a river.
Billionaires are a symptom of the broken system.
Only 13 billion?
Removed by mod
I came here from reddit recently and find this kind of content refreshing.
It reflects the will of people, but gets you perma banned on reddit if you even hint at it
It apparently does get removed by mods, however.
Please refer to lemmy.ca instance rule #2 re: civility
Argue in good faith, attack the argument; not the person, and promote a healthy debate. That includes implying violence, threats or wishes of violence and/or death.
I think that threats are one thing and close to implying violence. But wishes of violence are like dreams. Like I wish I had a R34 GTR but that’s just a dream.
The plumbing work, someone has to dispose of the shit of a clogged toilet, of Mario’s brother was widely celebrated. I would say it was in good faith. Or shall we argue in good faith about WW2?
Because reddit is one of them.
I remember when it was all nerds and edge lords. Now it is corporate tools, bots, and people who haven’t figured that out yet.
Fuck u/spez
There is enough for all, the scarcity is fake and controlled by the wealthy, to maintain their place at the top, in this punching down system they invented. Read a summary of Democracy In Chains to learn more and all the propaganda they used to fool the public for decades with coordinated lies and distraction to keep their wealth and prejudice safe.
If this wins and not struck down or delayed for ages, it’s supposed to bring income over five years with delayed payments so they can sell stuff lol.
A one-time money infusion is terrible policy. I support it because taxes should be re-distributive, but there is no way to budget a sustainable social policy that way. If the tax policy was more progressive and most importantly assessed annually (and nationally) it would be a huge win.
Could we just vote on it every year? Then it might be more resistant to corruption. Certainly not gratis and not perfect, though.
We should convert these billionaires to islam so they pay 2.5% every year
But then they will murder even more of us.
Went and ruined a perfectly good joke with overt Islamaphobia. Get bent.
It’s not islamaphobia. I’m taking them at their word. That’s not “phobic”.
When someone says they want your head, and you say “you’re monstrous”, it’s not a PHOBIA. Read a book (try Koran), or watch an imam’s proudly posted video on youtube. He’ll agree with me, he knows I tell the truth.
Why don’t you and your seculophobia go pound sand?
It is amazing the amount of money and effort Billionaires put into avoiding paying taxes. They aren’t hated enough.
I dont care how many billions he’s gonna lose
It’s literally a one-time 5% tax.
The more money they scream they’re gonna lose the more I can see them afford to pay
It shouldn’t be 1 time, it should apply every year
That likely isn’t sustainable, unless their wealth always grows back and exceeds the tax they paid, by the following year. Also, this sort of tax policy tends to have a negative impact on the speculation market that creates that growth in the first place.
I’m not defending billionaires here, I’m just highlighting the mathematics of doing it every year.
I’m aware, the point is to eliminate them as a class, not to make them sustainable.
It’s just 5% of his wealth. Most people give anything from 20% to 50% of their annual income to taxes and will pay income taxes on all their retirement savings when they pull it.
I’d gladly pay 5% of my total wealth once in lieu of taxes. It’d amount to about $50. Granted all of society would grind to a fucking half if us workers weren’t paying taxes because the other leeches fucking aren’t.
Actually we’re counting debts so we have to pay you.
Bring back pre-Reagan tax rates on the rich.
Those 1950s glory days that Republicans keep harkening back to involved Ike, a Republican president, taxing the [very] wealthy
like 52% (fake viral posts say 90%).at a rate of around 90%.EDIT: Corrected based off of comments. The 52% rates seem to be more common among the “wealthy” at the time, but in comparison to billionaires today, the 90% rate would be more accurate. The “fake viral posts” is in reference to memes that make it sound like every person who counted as “wealthy” were taxed at 90%. I realize I could have written all of that more clearly.
Is it fake viral posts, or just people not understanding how marginal tax rates work or how they differ from your effective tax rate again? The highest tax rate did cross over 90% at the tail end of WWII, but very few people actually had to pay taxes at that rate, and even then, their effective tax rate would have been much lower.
Edit: Just to illustrate, this site has historical tax rates for the period in question. For the sake of simplifying then math, I’m doing this assuming you only paid 3% income tax on income up to $100,000/year, and 94% on earnings above that with the surtax. Source for the income numbers is straight out of my ass, but it doesn’t really matter, as it’s only to illustrate the point. So, say that year, you managed to make $110,000. You would pay 3% on your first $100,000 in taxable income, and 94% on the remaining $10,000 you earned above that, making your effective rate 11.27% across your whole income, with a tax liability of $12,400. You can have both lower effective tax rates and higher marginal tax rates for your highest earners without either one negating the truth of the other.
It’s worth noting that the tax rate might be 90, but the effective taxation is a much lower percentage of the earnings.
Corporate Tax is calculated after costs, while personal tax is calculated more or less directly on earnings and then you need to cover your costs from whatever remains. This might explain the confusion.
I suspect the bigger cause is just people constantly being told straight-up lies founded on misunderstandings of how tax brackets work from a young age. I got my work permit to be able to get part time jobs when I was 14, and even when I was legally barred from working anywhere close to 40 hours a week, my father was already warning me “be careful if you take extra work, because if you do too much overtime, you could wind up in a different tax bracket and have to pay so much in taxes, you wind up with less money than if you kept working.” Which, now that I think about it, in light of you bringing up corporate taxes and how they work, I believe could just be clever propaganda from business owners misapplied by workers. During that time period, it was a perfectly valid tax strategy for companies to take extra profits and chuck them into capital improvements and similar projects to raise their costs. If they had just kept it as profits, they would have paid substantially more taxes on profits past a certain threshold, and they would make more money in the long term by avoiding those taxes than they would have if they just “made too much in profit” in the one year, to begin with. So, there would be a grain of truth to it in that specific instance, but it’s wholly inapplicable to a worker who believes their check will be smaller after working 50 hours a week than if they had just worked 40.
Yeah, companies still do that regardless of the rate.
As for understanding progressive taxation, I think the easiest way to explain it is simply to ask how much money you’d have after taxes. It always pays off to make more money. Perhaps show a XY diagram with income and income after taxes. There’s no magic bracket where the graph goes downwards.
They still do it, but in different ways now. The government has removed the incentive to reinvest in capital projects and wages to reduce your tax liability, and now companies game it in different ways that tend to just juice the compensation of the executives. Your CEO in 1955 had minimal incentive to boost their own pay above $200,000 because they could only keep 9% of what they earned past that point. It made more sense for them to just reinvest in their companies because they could ensure long-term stability and profitability, or spend money in the short term that ultimately reduced the amount of work they had to do in the future to complete all the tasks they were hired to manage for their $200,000/year salary. Nowadays, companies can just get tax exemptions up front for “creating jobs” before they even break ground on a new plant, put off maintenance and investments into the company and just chuck all that money they saved into stock options for their executives that will be taxed at a rate comparable or lower than what their lowest paid workers will have to pay on their salaries.
There was little point in burning the candle at both ends as a CEO in 1951 to get a $50,000 quarterly bonus for hitting targets if you only got to keep $4,500 of it. Why go nuts trying to juice your income by a measly 2.25% a year when you’re already at the very peak of US incomes? In contrast, a CEO today can go full MBA corporate raider mode, run a company into the ground so it’s shuttering its doors within 5 years, and then screw off to wreck another business after collecting a few quarters’ worth of multi-million dollar stock option bonuses that they’ll only have to pay some modest capital gains tax on. The incentives for good corporate leadership have been completely dismantled and replaced with an entirely perverse set of incentives that are now causing everything to be run into the ground.
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/i1040--1955.pdf
1955 top income tax bracket is 91% for single income over $200k ($2.5M today). IDK what’s fake about that, except if you don’t understand the concept of bracketing taxes.
The problem is that no one actually paid that, during that same time period tax avoidance was stupidly easy. The average tax rate for the highest earners (over 200k) rarely paid over 45%. Still higher than the average of today, but nowhere near what most people claim about the time.
Plus, before 1986 a lot of the really rich people who could afford to lobby politicians used to be able to create “riffle-shot provisions” basically highly personalized tax carve outs created for them by individual politicians.
The most famous individual tax carveout in American history occurred in the Revenue Act of 1951. Louis B. Mayer, the mega-wealthy head of Hollywood studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), wanted to retire and cash out his massive share of the studio’s future profits. Under normal rules, this lump sum would be taxed as personal income at a whopping 91% rate. Mayer hired a powerful Washington lobbyist who worked with standard-setting politicians to write a highly specific amendment. The law stated that a taxpayer could treat a retirement payout as a lower-taxed capital gains distribution (taxed at only 25%), but only if: • The taxpayer had been employed by the company for more than 20 years. • They had held a contractual right to a share of future profits for at least 12 years. • They had been entitled to these rights for at least 5 years after termination of employment. • The entire payout occurred in a single block in one tax year. The criteria were so incredibly specific that Louis B. Mayer and one other MGM executive were the only two people in the United States who qualified. It saved Mayer an estimated $2 million ($23+ million in today’s money).
The average tax rate for the highest earners (over 200k) rarely paid over 45%. Still higher than the average of today, but nowhere near what most people claim about the time.
This sounds to me like people misunderstanding of the concept of tax brackets, not a deliberate deception. Yes, most people making over $200k in 1955 paid less than 91% of their income in taxes, because of course they did. In fact, they all did. It’s mathematically impossible for them to be required to pay 91% of their income as taxes because the income below $200k (again, $2.5M equivalent today) is taxed at a lower rate, and with a smaller wealth divide, fewer people were making vast sums above that amount.
Sure, there may be a handful of stable geniuses out there, the types of people who would turn down a raise because it would put them in a higher tax bracket, who could misinterpret “the marginal tax rate was 91%” as “91% of their total income was taxed”, but we dont need to cater every statistic to those people.
This sounds to me like people misunderstanding of the concept of tax brackets, not a deliberate deception.
Yes, there is a difference between an effective tax rate and marginalized tax rate. However, my point was that no one ever paid the marginalized income tax rate of 91% for income over 200k. In fact the 1% of their day had an average effective income tax rate that was lower than the lowest marginalized bracket available which was 17.4%
How could it be that the tax code of the 1950s had a top marginal tax rate of 91 percent, but resulted in an effective tax rate of only 42 percent on the wealthiest taxpayers? In fact, the situation is even stranger. The 42.0 percent tax rate on the top 1 percent takes into account all taxes levied by federal, state, and local governments, including: income, payroll, corporate, excise, property, and estate taxes. When we look at income taxes specifically, the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid an average effective rate of only 16.9 percent in income taxes during the 1950s
There were just a lot more loopholes back in the day that catered to the super wealthy. They still had things like capital gains, but they also had the oil depletion allowance, accelerated real estate depreciation allowance, collapsible corporations, and the ability to daisy chain their reported income across a number of years. The ultra wealthy who could afford to lobby members of Congress also had the ability to pay politicians to create specified tax carve outs personalized to their specific needs.
God I fucking hate the rich. He’s spending thousands of times my yearly pay just to avoid paying less in taxes than I do
And he’ll still be a billionaire after that.
Imaginary money. By this point, their only still a hpper class because the pedestal under them hasn’t collapsed.
This is the point we’ve reached. It may as well be monopoly money. A billionaire trapped in a burning car; meh good luck, not my problem, hope EMS makes it in time. I’ll rephrase it this way; car accident, I will go help whoever is in the 90’s corolla while whoever in the Bentley can get bent.
Well, he seemingly scraped together 102 million in real money to avoid paying even more, so I assume it’s real enough.
