I got into it with someone I worked with [who made exactly as much as me.] Asked what would someone buy with $5 billion that they couldn’t get with $1 billion. He couldn’t come up with something, but was still going to defend someone else’s right to have it.
They’re all just as entitled as this character was too.
“We have this fantasy that our interests and the interests of the super rich are the same. Like somehow the rich will eventually get SO full that they’ll explode. And the candy will rain down on the rest of us. Like they’re some kind of pinata of benevolence. But here’s the thing about a pinata: it doesn’t open on its own. You have to beat it with a Stick.”
If they did tax the wealthy heavily, they’d probably leave the country, and pull their money and resources with them.
I’m sure another nation would be more than willing to house billionaires/ultra millionaires and their assets, and your country would lose a lot of money/cash flow/jobs
It’s a hard challenge to solve in a world wide setting.
While that is a load of horseshit, it doesn’t matter.
Either they leave and cost the country less to prop up their businesses through tax exemptions so someone else can fill the void, or they don’t leave and pay their taxes. Society wins either way.
If they did tax the wealthy heavily, they’d probably leave the country, and pull their money and resources with them.
We did tax the wealthy heavily- in the period between FDR and Reagan. From the 40s to the 80s the top marginal income tax rate was between 70 and 94%. And do you know what the ultra-rich did? They prospered along with everybody else, they stayed put in the USA, and they seethed about other people prospering and their loss of power and influence.
You know what else they did? They spent money to corrupt politics, to pack the judiciary, to legalize bribery and money in politics, to build international legal frameworks to prevent countries from regulating or taxing their billionaires. They stood up propaganda organs to subvert democracy, they paid politicians to betray the voters and strip away their labor protections, and here we are today deep into the garters of another gilded age.
That is contradictory. If there are no billionaires you cannot tax them. Obviously the 35K guy reacts to that.
I still call the guy with 900 mil “ultra wealthy”.
Why should the fact the guy makes 35k change his opinion?
