Political Memes

Some dude I work with said “man, if they start taxing Bezos more, at what point are they gonna come after me?”

Maybe when you start making billions of dollars? Fuckin idiot

I truly don’t understand these people. Their life is generally stressful to the extreme and the current system of “trickle down” has been for a long time shown to not work. So why not tax the rich, install some decent social systems, make the world better for the general public and move on?

Friendly reminder that the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is still essentially one billion dollars. Billionaires shouldn't exist

My dad always says "but then what motivation will they have to make money and innovate." To which I respond, "they'll still be millionaires and far richer than either of us will ever be."

If I defend billionaires online, they'll let me have a mansion on Mars

Dumbasses

It's just pure propaganda working out. Our society is composed of roughly the same gene pool it was composed of a millennia ago, and education clearly isn't compensation when it gets treated more and more as just simply a place to discard children off to so people can work without interruptions.

I do not understand people who rent caring this much about someone who owns houses, a cruise ship and a jet just for laughs. I feel like I need to start carrying copies of “so. you’re in love with a narcissist” to give out whenever I run into one of these stupids.

He’s just not into you, sweetheart.

They’re not temporarily embarrassed millionaires. There’s no such thing, really.

They’re groupies. They don’t care how bad their life is, they’re star-crossed and get a weird vicarious thrill from it. They know they’ll never be that rich, but as long as their star is rising, they’re happy. It’s more like fans of a sports team. If their star quarterback is winning – even if that means they’re personally doing worse – they’re on the winning team.

The false narrative of ‘temporarily embarrassed millionaires’ is detrimental because it’s misleading in how we talk to and about them. I don’t remember who started that, but it’s dead wrong.

e: to clarify, they aren’t supporting this shit because they think it will benefit them someday. If that were the case, they could be reasoned with. It’s worse:

They support this shit because they believe those billionaires are deserving or anointed by god. A fundamental part of conservatism is the belief there is a natural order to society with more deserving people on top, and if that hierarchy is disrupted, all of society will fall into chaos. They believe certain people should naturally be on top, and there’s honour in knowing your place and performing it well. Conservatism was born when feudalism died and the historical lords shifted their ideology from feudalism to capitalism to keep their wealth and power.

That ‘knowing your place in the hierarchy’ bit is a large part of racism as well as their penchant for fascism. The world makes more sense and is thus safer when everyone is in their proper place.

An income tax would be pointless for the wealthy. Most of their wealth is in unrealized capital gains or other investment vehicles, not from salaries.

There would need to be a mechanism to tax unrealized capital gains, or just networth in general.

Should just start by issuing a 80 percent tax in wealth that we haven't hit yet

Say, 400 billion.

That way when they can pass it and say it doesn't impact anyone. It's just there as a buffer.. And when musk or zuck hit that eventual trigger we tax the piss out of them

Measures like these often fail, because a lot of people dream of being these people that earn that much money. They don't want to limit their possibly future unrealistic imaginary self.

People ~~cosplaying as folks~~ making under $50k per year

Friendly reminder that Joe The Plumber wasn't named Joe, wasn't a Plumber, and was earning well into the six-figure tax bracket before he spent a year on the right-wing freak show talk circuit.

It isn't even temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Its astroturfed outrage by paid performers and fellow grifters, intended to give their wealthy peers cover when they pile out into the suburbs waving No Step On Snek flags from their BMWs and F-350s.

I think the thing for everyone not making >$1m/yr to firmly understand is that when top marginal rate income isn't taxed seriously and antitrust laws aren't enforced, they have to bid for housing in markets where the prices are set by top-bidders, and your grocery bill is whatever they feel like charging you and that means your normal $50k/yr income can't afford rent and food without roommates. High inequality means everything becomes expensive.

It's the "low-tax" countries that create unaffordable real estate, the 'free market' countries are where you can't afford necessities. It's the ones that invest in public goods and infra (and regulate their capitalism) that yield high standards of living for most people.

Billionaires make money off stocks and asset gains, so taxing income higher generally only hurts the upper middle class (i.e. doctors, high earning professionals).

In Canada the average effective tax rate actually decreases once you hit like $750k (I don't have exact numbers, it's been a while since I analyzed this one) because those people stop paying as much employment tax and instead pay capital gains which are taxed at 50%.

So, if you're middle class, or upper middle class, you're paying twice as much as the millionaires and billionaires are per additional dollar made.

And that's the best case because the really rich people put their assets under a corporation and continually "reinvest" their gains while harvesting their losses (businesses pay 26.5% tax).

So Rich people pay a marginal rate of 26.5/26.8%, while the upper middle class pay 53.5% on their income.

Also people who dream about earning 50k a year