this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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They can live, but it has to be on 60k a year, with all of their initial assets liquidated and used to support people in need.
60k a year is probably already too generous in most cases, make them live off of the equivalent salary of their lowest paid employee
yeah i'm fine with that but not murder like a lot of people here say they want
I think most of us start with the assumption that they'll never give up their stranglehold willingly, and move on to more practical solutions.
They need to make the choice: pay a lot more taxes, or take the second option. I'm not threatening violence, but as our society gets more desperate the targets on their backs get larger.
There are 756 billionaires in the US and 330 million of us. Once that becomes clear to people things might change, one way or the other. All other "culture wars" are noise generated to distract from this one.
Shameless displays of excess wealth is increasingly being met with more and more cultural hostility, especially amongst younger people. Gen Zers are highly likely to view people who flaunt their wealth or indulge heavily in luxury goods as being tacky or just generally negatively. The hostility as the climate crisis increases will only increase as well.
Former tax professional here. The problem is that the billionaires aren't really billionaires. Elon Musk does not have a quarter trillion dollars in his bank account. His net worth is calculated from what other people think his holdings are worth. He cannot be taxed on this.
Unless someone is game enough to pass legislation enabling taxation of "unrealised gains" (while not allowing credits/offsets for unrealised losses), billionaires will continue not paying their fair share of tax.
The end result of revolution is.... For them to pay more taxes.
Ah, teenagers
what other pressure do you have the ability to put on a billionaire that they wouldn't find utterly laughable, if they even noticed it? but you can't buy your way out of death. sure, if the threat to their lives were to become credible, they could leverage their wealth to protect against it, but being surrounded by bodyguards at all times, having every rooftop surveyed for snipers before you go out to get coffee - these are things that disrupt their overly-cruisy existences. and the more people there are gunning for them, figuratively or literally, the worse their lives get.
and sure, if you off them, their wealth will just default to someone else. but if billionaires start dying left and right, their inheritants might just start to find ways to make sure their fortune stays a little shy of that magical 9-digit mark.
This is the teenager equivalent of telling Santa you want a pony
Who is Santa in this analogy? And why is a teenager talking to Santa? I'm lost.
To a billionaire that fate is worse than being murdered.
B
Look I'm all for taxing the wealthy, but saying we should force billionaires, or really anyone for that matter, to give up everything more than $60k/year is fucking laughably insane.
Why, exactly? Only two years ago, 37.9 million people were below the poverty line, which is only $20k/yr. And that's only counting the US. If we can do it, they can do it.
If those making over $60k currently cannot make it work when so many of their own countrymen have been doing so for their entire lives, perhaps we need to talk. If nothing else, I can give you financial advice.
Nice red herring. The argument was that demanding a billionaire give up all of their money and live on a relatively small salary is absurd, and nothing you said refutes that.
Sounded to me like what they meant was basically as a friendlier option than death. What's absurd about it if you weren't saying it's too little to live on?