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
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
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
This is treating a symptom and not the cause.
Assets will be kept elsewhere; it’s an inconvenience, but not solving the fundamental problem.
All corporate entities must have employee ownership. Only government can enforce this, the shareholders and board won’t willingly share any assets, they will always fight for the closest thing to slavery that they can get, they will fight to the last penny.
Corporations would still move most assets overseas, but at least some of the earnings can be redistributed when they do business in your state.
(See Panama and Pandora papers for more details on international tax evasion, which will always be an option, as there is always a country eager to make hundreds of billions)
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.
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.
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
