Billionaire wealth tax / UBI bill

Wealth confiscation is protected by the constitution.

Nothing to see here

 

Interesting

Rocket River

 

Five whole percent, huh?

 

5% Annually is a lot, IMO.

 

If Billionaires are escaping taxes by never selling and just living off loans, why not just create a new tax on specifically loans using stock as collateral?

You either sell and get taxed or you get taxed on any sort of loan or line of credit.

This should also be limited to publicly traded stocks.

 

Even MUSK is (was?) for it.

If you believe that machine / automation will take over, the logical choice is clear.

 

Not able to access the actual bill, but are they seriously suggesting a 5% annual tax? Not a one time fee? That includes unrealized wealth based on random valuations?

It's been said to death, but we can tax billionaire's 100% and we'd only be funded for 3 years. What then? How will you generate revenue, innovation and taxes? Palmer Luckey in california has said he wouldn't be able to generate the capital as all his money is in his start up and he would have to move, and that's just a one time fee.

And this guy produces cutting edge equipment for our military.

 

There's nothing responsible about incentivizing people living on handouts to have more children. Or for single mothers to go on racking up partners.

If you want to have more than 2 kids, you need to be able to support yourself. If you're a single mother by choice (not due to death), then there has to be a cap on funds for kids.

UBI without safeguards only opens new doors for waste, fraud and abuse as we always see with the promise of handouts. 5% each year on 960 people isn't sustainable -- most of whom aren't close to Elon or Zuckerberg's wealth.

 

The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money.
- a popular paraphrase of Margaret Thatcher

The actual quote was, "Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money."

 

That is why no one is saying we should be socialist.

Now a democratic socialist government is quite different, it is RESPONSIBLE CAPITALISM - but I am sure you knew that, right?

Countries like Norway, Denmark, Sweden, UK, France, Germany, etc..etc..etc..etc...

DD

 

The idea that we run out of "other people’s money" is about government spending. We do have a spending problem, or a debt problem, and it has gotten worse because more of that "people’s money" is being funneled to the top, such as through recent permanent tax breaks for the very wealthy. It is not that we are short on money. We are short on balance. Wealth is already heavily concentrated, and AI and automation are likely to accelerate that. Re-balancing is basic risk management. A wealth tax is simply that idea applied to an economy that is already over-concentrated. It is re-balancing, not socialism.

If we allow concentration to continue and speed up, we risk a weak economy because demand collapses, a political pressure cooker driven by anger and populism, and eventually unrest and even violence at extreme levels. What we have today is not real capitalism but crony capitalism, where the wealthy shape the rules in their favor and lock in the imbalance.

If you do not like a wealth tax, then propose something else to break up crony capitalism. This system is not sustainable and will eventually collapse on itself.

 

UBI in the age of potential AI disruption is a discussion worth having. When humans aren't creating the capital gains, but a narrow sliver are profiting while tons are fired and machines do their work, there's a situation that platitudes likes "go find a new job" don't apply.

 

I doubt we are anywhere close to a world where "humans aren’t creating the capital gains." The problem is that the gains are too concentrated. This is not a new issue. It has appeared repeatedly throughout history, from the Gilded Age in the U.S. to periods leading up to major social unrest, and it is rearing its ugly head again.

 

Yes, looks like it is annual, so the wealth would get taxed again and again. In our recent experience, billionaire wealth has grown much, much faster than 5%, though. We probably wouldn't be able to destroy our billionaires with that rate or even cap the growth of their wealth. I'd also point out that they are not proposing to fund the government (which has a huge budget) with this tax, but to fund certain social safety net programs including UBI. So we would still have all our regular taxes and deficit spending for the regular government functions.

Honestly, I don't much like the explicit wealth redistribution link this bill would create. I'd like to blunt the power of capital to hoover up all the wealth creation at the expense of labor (taxing being the easy button, but not the ideal), and I'd like to look at things like UBI to decouple household income from value creation in the face of a world in which robots create more value than we do. But I don't want to pair the two.

I'm not too worried about it, honestly. I'm much more concerned that 960 people control $6 trillion and growing, using the power of that wealth to leverage outsized returns. A little waste, fraud, and abuse might make the lives of 36 million people living below the poverty line a bit more enjoyable without really much depreciating the lifestyle of those 960 people.

In the British context at that time, they really did have a problem with a dysfunctional economy that was overly nationalized. I think we should learn from history and from Britain's experience then. But, I also don't want simplistically apply the lesson to our own circumstances without recognizing we have a different system, at a different time, in a different place. A pithy quote is unfortunately inadequate policymaking.

Very much this. I don't like the taxation approach which strikes me as a band-aid. I want a real systemic change that addresses the drivers of this hyper inequality in the distribution of wealth generation. But, if we can't figure out the elegant, built-in system, I'll settle for the tax. If we keep going on this trajectory, everything will break.

 

For Anduril, (Palmer Luckey's company), the money was from a virtual reality headset he sold to facebook or microsoft. He created jobs there and he created jobs here, keeping us ahead of China. He reinvested every dollar to build Anduril which has cutting edge drone equipment for the military and recon purposes but doesn't have a clear path to profitability yet. A lot of investment and innovation is done by billionaires whether you like it or not, and we run the risk of stagnating against economies where labor is much cheaper (Asia, South America) / care less about "human rights" if we keep incentivizing people to get paid for doing nothing.

The whole targetting of unrealized gains creates a dangerous precedent. One of the richest man, larry ellison, ha seen his company's value drop by over 50% in the past 5 months. Total market cap has gone from 900 billion in Fall of 2025 to 420 billion today. His unrealized wealth would have been halved in the span of those 4 months. Why should he be punished for holding onto shares of his company, generating investor confidence, instead of selling every time it goes up?

It'd be great if AI could cook up some models regarding re-distribution of wealth and how it would affect creation of wealth. As a non billionaire, that's my ultimate issue with attacking billionaire's too much. They're the most mobile people in the world and they do create jobs across many industries. Entire livelihoods are downstream of their principle companies. What would Houston be without oil and gas billionaires? Lewis Hamilton didn't like the UK's wealth tax, so he moved to Monaco. They still travel wherever they want, but now you don't have access to their money. ON the flip side, the current welfare mode in the US has the bottom 25% with the same spending power as the 25-75% due to the high proportion of benefits they receive.

The European welfare model has the lower income brackets paying a much higher share of their income in taxes vs the rich.

In short, I'm fine having ceiling's on the wealth billionaire's can accumulate. But I know taxing them absurd amounts like 5% per year isn't a long term solution to the welfare state. Focus should be on actual affordability -- by increasing supply, as opposed to endless subsidies we can't sustainably fund. Every program eventually goes the way of SS where you just run out by targeting the biggest suppliers. By not promoting overspending and taking on endless amounts of debt, whether rich or poor. It's not as glamorous as saying free everything for free everyone, but it's the real way to avoid societal collapse. People only care about billionaires becoming trillionaires because their wages aren't increasing and everything around them is more expensive than ever. Having child care paid off for a few years won't change the underlying issue.

 

Perfect. Everyone should pay their fair share. And limiting it to loans backed by publicly traded stock avoids penalizing ordinary borrowers taking HELOCs or other normal credit.