I guess I just totally imagined that $1 trillion pay package for Elon Musk.

In most recent years they stopped doing part of that equation.

Taxes are not a punishment.

Arguably these and billionaires have become a social menace. They undermine democracy, destroy our environment, and prioritize shareholder value over long term well being of the economy they live in.

If they all had unified in one voice against the administration, Trump might be more constrained. They might not be so hated. If they realized, like Henry Ford, that a strong middle class actually is good for THEM too, all this could be avoided. Instead they’re showing up at Melania screenings while average citizens are getting shot in the streets.

I don’t think they realize the fire they’re playing with my stomping on the social contract that made them so wealth.

And not investing in society has some consequences as well... Increasingly it seems big business is bad business (again).

The double irish, single malt, capital allowances for intangible assets.

If everyone would be able to play these tax avoidance schemes I'm sure society would collapse. For big players these are easy schemes and somewhere this untaxed wealth must be recaptured. Just favoring the rich further accelerates the wealth imbalance.

> Now the government wants to tax them on the company value?

I’m genuinely baffled at the incredulous tone here. Yes, that is exactly what should happen: laws, subsidies, and incentives enable a company to grow and flourish. Then, as the company grows, other laws incentivize it to give some of its state-sponsored affluence back to benefit the country.

Like, sure, the execution of that process is often dysfunctional, but the fundamental contract there does not seem like it should be surprising to people: we don’t have (many) socialist state-owned businesses, but the point of a functioning country is still to provide good things to the people living in it. Not to benefit businesses or a tiny sliver of the population.

That’s why we have everything from income taxes to interstate highways: to distribute wealth and resources to (a flawed approximation of, but it’s still the goal) everyone in the country. That’s just how non-corrupt governments are supposed to work!

Ultimately, an economy is all about the side effects you describe (goods and services for the population). The fact that, while producing these side effects, the machine also leads to massive wealth accumulation among a small number of people is another side effect that basically has nothing to do with the core tasks of the economy. The question now is how to evaluate this additional side effect. If it does not have any negative consequences, it can be ignored. If it does, it should be counteracted.

It's like in a combustion engine. Oil has to be added for the engine to work. But over time, dirt particles, metal abrasion, soot, and combustion residues accumulate in the oil, overwhelming the oil filter and reducing its lubricating ability. If you don't reset it to a “healthy” basic state at regular intervals, it gets so bad that it prevents the engine from operating and ultimately even destroys it.

Does the massive wealth inequality we see today cause problems that lead to the erosion of society itself? I would say yes, definitely. Of course, it is frustrating for these people when the money they have generated is taken away from them. But let's look at it realistically: if someone has $100 billion and $99 billion is taken away from them, they are still in a situation where they lack nothing financially.

At some point, you've played capitalism through to the final level. And then you should put down the controller and go outside to listen to the birds chirping instead of frantically chasing after the growth of a number that, due to its sheer size, no longer has any concrete meaning, apart from the fact that there may be two other people whose numbers are bigger or who are hot on your heels.

Perhaps I missed it, but your TL;DR seems like a personal view rather than what is in the article. Do you have sources for your claims?

People have been saying it about NYC forever, but last I checked the millionaire+ population of NYC had grown, not shrunk.

Ah yes. There are famously no billionaires who live in New York City

I mean, net millionares are massively up in the UK, not nearly as many left as are created, so it's not really a good case study there.

Meh. Good riddance.

Norway also ranks as seventh happiest nation in the world. Correlation or causation?

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-...

I do wonder still if the country is better off. Billionaires investing in an area tends to skyrocket rent, housing tax from greedy councils, and skews food and utilities upwards too.

The loss of the richest man in the village might mean the baker now has to kowtow his prices to his less well-to-do neighbours again

Who said "we have to tax them, or else they leave"? That doesn't seem to be what anyone is saying. The issue is that this group is threatening to leave if they are taxed.

I agree you should want to avoid having an income disparity like this, but we are where we are. The goal of this tax is to help correct that disparity.

Then the next question is why does wealth, in practically all industrious countries seem to distribute disproportionally and not uniformly?

One argument could be that maybe entrepreneurial personality traits aren't normally distributed, and unless you find a way change people's personalities in mass, the imbalance in wealth attraction will remain inherent.

Then you might ask, if that's true, do you I want to enforce equality, potentially dragging down the economy to mediocracy (for example many stagnating European economies) or maybe accept that current nature does not meet our societal desire for equality.

>Organizing your country with more sustainable growth where income disparities aren't so high means you don't have this problem to this extent.

Sounds like US vs Europe. Having redistributive policies funded by taxes works well until your most productive people flee for a country that doesn't, and you steadily lose ground to competitors economically.

Countries in which the income disparities ARE so high are also the ones where the "poor" are the richest. They just feel poor in comparison not in absolute terms.

70K a year is poor in California, but top 1% rich in almost any country in the world.

Low income disparities are countries like Albania, Afghanistan, Armenia to name the first three with below 30 GINI income.

You could argue that the world is way more globalized today.

Kind of a false statement; on paper it was higher, but the exemptions were also significantly much bigger and more nakedly biased.

So it's not like it was actually a tax on the wealthiest, more a targeted tool to apply state power.

>at one point Taxes in the US were 70-90%.

That figure is highly misleading to cite by itself because the high tax rate also came with a bunch of loopholes and exemptions. That's why despite the drop in the headline rate of 70-90% or whatever, the actual tax take as % of GDP has remained remarkably steady in the past 7 decades.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S

They tried, Trump rolled it back.

A billion in the bank is invested - that's how fractional-reserve banking works. And people that wealthy don't really just put their money "in the bank". They usually invest it in riskier things.

I would hesitate to call consumption "better" than investment.

Sort of, with at least two caveats.

1) velocity of money matters, some spending creates more economic activity than others due to re-spending.

2) Investment is not the same as having your money sitting idle. Investment makes certain activities possible because of scale, payment made with the expectation of future value, financing capital goods or R&D, etc.

There are literally two economies - the one most people live in, and the asset owning economy which deals exclusively in land, property, resources, and shares.

The health of an economy is defined by the permeability of the border between those two classes, and the direction of flow.

If the flow is mostly one way, you're getting wealth extraction, not investment.

But assets are not easy to move. So if you tax assets and not income, it doesn't matter where the owners are. It only matters where the assets are.

Most wealthy people aren’t sitting with their money in the bank but in investment assets like real estate and stocks.

Banks don't just keep your money in a vault when you store it in a bank account - that would be stupid both of both the bank and of you. Money looses value over time due to inflation, so banks reinvest 90% of your stored balance into loans, stocks, bonds, etc. This means that a theoretical 1B account, would allow someone else to take a 100M loan to fund a new venture. This is how banks make money, and they pay you a small portion of their profits as interest on your money (since they're profiting off it).

This is still not a good idea for you, as the interest doesn't make up for inflation. Most people keep a small portion of their wealth in the bank, as easy access for emergencies (this is called dry powder[0]). The rest is typically invested into private equity, which allows new ventures to be created.

It's very rare for anyone to have more than $50m in the bank. The money is usually out in the market doing it's work.

[0] - https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/drypowder.asp

Communism has never been tried at a large scale. Soviet Union didn't have it. China doesn't have it.

Just because someone has "communism" on paper doesn't mean the society actually functions according to the communist idea.

Social democracy has been tried in many places and it has produced things such as the Nordic Model and the Nordic states that have been very successful.

After the 2nd World War USA was very close to socialism. High wealth taxes, workers unions etc. As a result your average worker had a lot of purchasing power which of course fuels economic strength.

In fact many if the world's best performing companies are a kind of exercise in socialism since the RSU programs share ownership and results of the company to the workers (even if it's a small share)

The book about rules and regulations on this law would be larger than divorce law book.

>The greater issue is we allow the richest to basically print money via their stock based compensation, which allows them to turn unrealized gains into loans backed by these stocks.

How's this different than if CEOs or whatever were paid in cash, and then they immediately bought stocks with the cash?

This only works if stocks go up, up, and up. Otherwise they will have to realize gains at some point to pay off the loans.

I don't get why we have to jump all the way to a wealth tax, could they not just force asset backed loans to trigger a tax? This seems way more targeted and we won't have people assessing what everyone is worth. I think it would avoid some unnecessary precedent setting. They could put the impetus on the billionaire taking the loan to state what the assets are worth and related gains.

Also the way QE works is that the rich companies and individuals are the ones who can take out large loans against their previous economic assets as collateral and leverage that money in the market such as the AI bubble. They also are the first to spend the new money so the inflationary effects only kick in after they've taken out then loans.

The wage earners feel the inflation in their wallets.

The answer is just no. Massachusetts passed a tax on income over a million dollars and despite the ads that were obvious lies, we have more millionaires now than we did a few years ago. Turns out, rich people like to live in places that have well funded infrastructure, good schools, a thriving art scene, etc...

Billionaires tend to have multiple properties in multiple states/countries. This is more a residency issue and probably low friction for them to change states personally. The thing holding back would be where their business and employees are located.