What Happens When You Tax Billionaires At 90%

[Winston]

You think that link helps Biden somehow? DURR

Most certainly dumbass. Germany and Spain have higher rates as do most of the countries in the EU. Riddle me this, how would Trump have handled things differently? How would it be different if Trump were president? What is the price of diesel right now? Notice you right wingers quit talking about gas and diesel prices.

To be blunt, you are all pieces of shit. You actually want things to be bad because of your obsession with a self-absorbed absolute dumbass. You aren't Americans, you are Trump dick suckers. Just change the name of the country from the United States of America to Trumpenstien, eliminate the Constitution and replace it with a monarchy. Trump is king and Donald Jr. becomes first in line to the throne. That should turn out really well.

 

[kaz]

Eliminating all taxes and replacing them with a national sales tax is another one of those con jobs the wealthy and powerful are attempting to sell to you. I mean they have already convinced many of the simple minded that cutting taxes ALWAYS increases revenue when the reality is that hasn't been the case since Kennedy's tax cut.

And I have a hard time believing that anyone that claims to have had five businesses advocates for small businesses to become the collection agent for the federal government. I mean already small businesses have to collect state and local sales taxes and remit them to the state and local government. Why would you want to add even more paperwork, more accounting, to hard working business owners?

The sales tax is highly regressive, and despite what you might think, that ain't a good thing. The poor and the middle class, they spend everything they make for the most part, which means they would pay taxes on all their income. But the wealthy, they don't spend all their money so they wouldn't pay taxes on all their income. How does that seem fair, and regardless, how does that seem appropriate in any reality?

Can't you see the con here? Oh, the poor should be taxes on all their income. But the wealthy, they should only pay taxes on the money they spend, and certainly not the money they invest to make more money. Damn, that is insulting on it's face.

I guess my biggest problem with those that see things like you do is this. And it has been posted in this thread. Like somehow, the workers are indebted to the owners for the job they have. What total horseshit. The owners are dependent on the workers, without them, the owners don't have anything but an idea. And make no mistake about it, the owners "profit" from the labor of the workers.

Too many chiefs and not enough Indians. Dad said it often, and of course that would be politically incorrect to say today. But it is so true. Everyone wants to be a chief, no one wants to be an Indian, and the tax code only exacerbates that problem.

I'm not explaining this to a Communist. It's actually very simple and straight forward, but if you were smart enough to understand it, you wouldn't be a Marxist

 

[Toddsterpatriot]

Most certainly dumbass. Germany and Spain have higher rates as do most of the countries in the EU. Riddle me this, how would Trump have handled things differently? How would it be different if Trump were president? What is the price of diesel right now? Notice you right wingers quit talking about gas and diesel prices.

To be blunt, you are all pieces of shit. You actually want things to be bad because of your obsession with a self-absorbed absolute dumbass. You aren't Americans, you are Trump dick suckers. Just change the name of the country from the United States of America to Trumpenstien, eliminate the Constitution and replace it with a monarchy. Trump is king and Donald Jr. becomes first in line to the throne. That should turn out really well.

Spain and Germany make Biden less of an idiot? LOL!

 

[Winston]

I'm not explaining this to a Communist. It's actually very simple and straight forward, but if you were smart enough to understand it, you wouldn't be a Marxist

LMAO, you are an idiot. I hate to break the news to you but having a couple of yard sales, selling girl scout cookies in front of Walmart, and helping your kids have a lemonade stand in the front yard doesn't count as owning a business.

I am not a Marxist and you wouldn't know a Marxist if they jumped up and bit you in your nasty ass. I am all about "free markets" and the really funny thing, is I am about the only person on this board that actually knows what a free market is. I am here to tell you, that ain't what we have right now. Far from it.

You are not explaining it because you can't explain it, it has nothing to do with me. Poor people should pay taxes on all their income, rich people shouldn't--explain it. Why? I mean I double dog dare you.

 

[initforme]

The funny hypocritical thing is that many crazies say one needs to work harder but never take a stand that employees should earn more, instead they side with employers. And then they claim one should work their best for that wage. Econ 101 is that pay me more I do my best pay me less I slow it down. That IS the american way.

 

[Markle]

Medicare also pays peanuts, to the point that many doctors either don't take it or limit it greatly, because they LOSE money.

That may be true for some but I kept my same HMO and have loved my doctors and my care. Recently they added a special, separate facility for us old codgers.

It all comes down to personal responsibility.

 

[Markle]

Hallelujah, yes I am. Praise the Lord. You can also be a winner if you give your life to Jesus, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. He's my older brother and His heavenly Father, is also my Father. He can save you in the blink of an eye and to the uttermost.

Oh, can it.

You proved you're a sock, liar, and troll on your first day here. You demonstrated that you didn't know diddly about at least one of the most popular passages in the Holy Bible.

 

[tahuyaman]

Read the requirements for Medicaid.

 

[Markle]

The funny hypocritical thing is that many crazies say one needs to work harder but never take a stand that employees should earn more, instead they side with employers. And then they claim one should work their best for that wage. Econ 101 is that pay me more I do my best pay me less I slow it down. That IS the american way.

That is the exact reason some folks are failures and others succeed.

 

[TruthNotBS]

Oh, can it.

You proved you're a sock, liar, and troll on your first day here. You demonstrated that you didn't know diddly about at least one of the most popular passages in the Holy Bible.

How did I misinterpret it?

 

[Redfish]

What legal protections are you referring to? The workers have to negotiate with their powerful, wealthy employers, as one individual (one little average Joe)? Why would you assume that in the past it had a place, and it doesn't today when the relationship between employers and employees hasn't changed?

The reality is that union workers earn more money, have better benefits and creates a system of checks and balances between employees and their employers.

Why do you have such an aversion for the working-class unionizing but not the wealthy elites, doing the same? The capitalist-class knows the value of collectivizing their efforts to defend and advance their vested interests in the halls of government. This is why they have chambers of commerce, super-PACs, industry associations, armies of lobbyists, think tanks, guilds.etc. These wealthy elites, control the government, the media, essentially everything. Are you concerned with the unions or what Adam Smith identified as "the combinations of the masters" (masters = capitalists)? No, you're not. You're all for it. You will defend the rich, until the very end, but if the working-poor and the middle class unionize. You have a fit.

Why is that? Ask yourself that question. Only the rich can unionize, can combine, and can collectivize their efforts, to advance their financial interests, but not the working class. They can't do it, according to you because it's immoral when workers do exactly the same thing, that their employers do to advance their own interests. Amazing.

horseshit, we have child labor laws, hour per week limitations, mandatory overtime pay, anti-discrimination laws. Unions today are nothing but a fund raiser for the far left (using your money which you are forced to pay)

 

[Redfish]

That is the exact reason some folks are failures and others succeed.

yep, its never my fault, its always my mean boss.

 

[Redfish]

Most certainly dumbass. Germany and Spain have higher rates as do most of the countries in the EU. Riddle me this, how would Trump have handled things differently? How would it be different if Trump were president? What is the price of diesel right now? Notice you right wingers quit talking about gas and diesel prices.

To be blunt, you are all pieces of shit. You actually want things to be bad because of your obsession with a self-absorbed absolute dumbass. You aren't Americans, you are Trump dick suckers. Just change the name of the country from the United States of America to Trumpenstien, eliminate the Constitution and replace it with a monarchy. Trump is king and Donald Jr. becomes first in line to the throne. That should turn out really well.

This country was at its best during Trump's term, low unemployment, low inflation, no new wars, secure borders, lower taxes, companies expanding in the USA, companies moving back to the USA, secure currency, opened dialog with North Korea and kept Iran in check. Best president in my lifetime and I have been around a long time. But he talks mean like all new yorkers, so ya gotta hate him, you fricken idiot.

 

[Redfish]

A Free Market Means That Whatever Clique Controls the Market Is Free to Do Whatever It Wants

There were no unions in the Soviet Union. Anyone who tried to organize one was shot. Strikers were shot. Communism is the ideal Capitalism; the owners (the Communist elite) and managers demand absolute obedience and can get away with incompetence and wage-gouging.

You know why Commies have as much contempt for and feelings of superiority over the workers as Cappies do? Because they come from the same HeirHead guillotine fodder. That explains the contradiction between their professed love for the working class and the way they treat it.

you are totally brainwashed by left wing lies and bullshit, you are a blind sheep. nothing in your talking points repeat is true.

 

[Redfish]

The funny hypocritical thing is that many crazies say one needs to work harder but never take a stand that employees should earn more, instead they side with employers. And then they claim one should work their best for that wage. Econ 101 is that pay me more I do my best pay me less I slow it down. That IS the american way.

right your failures in life were never your fault, it was always the evil rich guys fault for exploiting you. No one can exploit you unless you allow it. That is the main lesson of capitalism and freedom.

 

[Flash]

 

[Flash]

 

[Flash]

Tax Americans to pay for stupid social programs and what do you get? You get Negroes beating up on White social workers.

 

[Dragonlady]

Bidenflation isn't helping our rankings.

Which 10 European countries have the highest standards of living? How high are they?

Why don’t you Google the answers to these questions? Why do you keep asking me?

 

[healthmyths]

“Succession” is over, but spoiled, entitled billionaire man-children are still very much with us, running social media companies, owning newspapers and television networks, and funding politicians and judges who then keep their taxes low and regulations minimal.

America’s billionaires (and soon to be trillionaires) pay an average of around 3.1 percent as their functional income tax rate; as a result, America is the most unequal developed society in the world. The last time severe poverty and extravagant wealth coexisted in such extremes as today in this country was during the 1920s and 1930s.


Today we read about roving gangs doing smash-and-grab operations against retailers like Nordstroms and Home Depot; in Red states our schools are falling apart, defunded to pay for vouchers to all-white “Christian” academies; gun violence plagues our nation with particularly high homicide rates in rural Red states; and homelessness stalks city-dwellers at every turn.

The last time we saw the consequences of such inequality was during the Republican “Roaring ‘20s” 100 years ago, when Warren Harding dropped the top income tax rate from 91 percent to 25 percent, the morbidly rich openly bought our politicians, and gangs whose names are still known today roamed the country robbing and killing with impunity.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal put an end to all that, and we need to repeat his example today.

FDR raised the top income tax bracket from 25 to 90 percent. Wealthy people in America screamed and yelled, claiming it would crash the economy, but instead that top tax rate kicked off the first middle class to encompass more than half a nation’s population in world history.

As Roosevelt noted in 1936:


FDR created America’s first widespread middle class with a combination of high taxes on the rich and strong unions for working class people. He broke the politically corrupt power of organized wealth for two generations.

Abraham Lincoln was the first president to use the word unions to describe labor organizations; it was such a novelty that newspapers of the day put the word in quotation marks. By the 1920s the union movement had seized the nation, but employers and Republican politicians were still using police, the army, and private armed militias to kill union leaders and intimidate people who wanted to join them.

Franklin Roosevelt put an end to that with the Wagner Act in 1935, fully legalizing unions. By the time Reagan took office in 1981 about a third of Americans had a good union job, and as a result fully two-thirds of American workers had union-level wages and benefits (because unions created the local wage and benefit floor for employers).

The people who were obscenely rich throughout the era from the 1930s to the 1980s had mostly inherited their money from their 19th century Gilded Age ancestors (the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, DuPonts, Carnegies, etc.), because the combination of the 90 percent income tax bracket and union demands for meaningful wages kept inequality at reasonable levels.

Rich people were still rich, but that top income tax bracket combined with the power of unions kept the average CEO from taking much more than 30 times what their lowest-paid worker made every year. (Today, some CEOs make more than a thousand times what their workers make.)

FDR’s and LBJ’s social safety nets caught Americans before they could fall into the dire poverty that characterized earlier eras when Republicans ran the show. Social Security and unemployment benefits — both rolled out by FDR in the 1930s — lifted the elderly and the jobless out of poverty, and LBJ’s Medicare and Medicaid (1960s) kept Americans healthy.

The result of this was that crime went down and lifespans increased. When the grinding inequality of the Roaring ‘20s and the Republican Great Depression went away in the 1940s and 1950s, the crime sprees and hate-promoting demagogues went with it. Working people with decent wages and benefits, after all, have neither the time nor the need to engage in criminal activity.

Corporate executives lived and worked in normal — albeit upscale — neighborhoods (watch an episode of Bewitched or The Dick Van Dyke Show from the 1960s to see the homes Madison Avenue executives and media bigwigs lived in), and workers made enough to sustain a decent lifestyle.

Nonetheless, the morbidly rich campaigned relentlessly to take us back to the oligarchic 1920s, demanding tax cuts and union-busting. They funded media campaigns, think tanks, publications, judges and politicians.

In 1981 they got their guy into office; Reagan dropped the top tax rate all the way down to 27 percent and destroyed the nation’s air traffic controllers union as his opening salvo in the modern-day Republican War Against Workers.

Reaganism kicked off a 42-year-long explosion of wealth at the very top of our economic hierarchy, making today’s billionaires richer than the pharaohs. They compete with each other to see who can own the largest private jets and mega-yachts, multiple mansions all over the world, private islands, and even their own spaceships.

Disney’s old Scrooge McDuck comics (that I’m now reading to my grandkids) and their unfathomable money bins have come to life.

Simultaneously, the middle class began its collapse from two-thirds of us in 1980 all the way down to today’s 45 percent (and today it takes two incomes to sustain the same middle class lifestyle that could be done with just one when Jimmy Carter was president).

As the middle class collapsed, lifespans in America followed the same trajectory, unlike other countries in the world that rejected Reaganomics.

Source: Our World In Data
Reagan wasn’t alone in destroying the American Dream, however. He had big-time help from the nation’s highest court.

Five Republican appointees on the Supreme Court initiated the process with their First National Bank decision in 1978, which said that billionaire and corporate money wasn’t money but instead was a form of “free speech” and that corporations weren’t a legal fiction but instead were “persons” with full rights under the Bill of Rights, including the right to use their “free speech” to own politicians.

That decision, authored by the infamous Lewis Powell himself, made possible the purchase of the Republican Party by the morbidly rich in 1979, floating Reagan into office in 1980 on a tsunami of corporate and billionaire (in today’s dollars) cash, much of it from the oil and banking industries.

Reagan then rewarded the GOP’s affluent paymasters with lower taxes, more tax-code loopholes, and a campaign of massive industrial and banking deregulation, giving particular preference via his EPA Administrator — the disgraced Anne Gorsuch (Neil’s mom) — to fossil fuel and other polluting industries.

So, here we are in a situation much like the one that FDR faced when he first came into office in 1933. Homelessness stalks the nation; three morbidly rich individuals own more wealth than the bottom half of Americans; gun crime is at Bonnie and Clyde levels; and workers are terrified of their employers, who force them to sit through anti-union indoctrination sessions or lose their jobs.

To solve this crisis, we must gather and gain the political strength and will to once again raise the top income tax rate up to 90 percent; to overturn the Taft-Hartley Act and restore the right to unionize without interference; and to strip the poison of big money out of our political system.

The morbidly rich will squeal at even the mention of these tried-and-tested solutions, just like they did in the 1930s. They’ll warn that the country will collapse, or that communism will take us over and we’ll become Venezuela or Cuba. They’ll say that the “job creators” will go on strike like in an Ayn Rand novel and take the economy with them to Gault’s Gulch.

And, like FDR, we need to call them on their bullsh*t.

What Happens When You Tax Billionaires at 90 Percent?

“Succession” is over, but spoiled, entitled billionaire man-children are still very much with us, running social media companies, owning newspapers and television networks, and funding politicians and judges who then keep their taxes low and...

www.dailykos.com

Billionaires are the problem. Not the solution. Prosperity is created when the morbidly rich, and corporations are taxed at much higher levels. Not lower. Just like FDR proved beyond any doubt.

You have to be a total tool, to buy into the oligarch bullshit talking point, that low taxes and deregulation is what creates prosperity. Or you're a toady working for a billionaire selling that crap.

I loved your comment "They compete with each other to see who can own the largest private jets and mega-yachts, multiple mansions all over the world, private islands, and even their own spaceships.
I was a data consultant for a yacht builder and most of the workers really liked the fact these billionaires were buying those mega-yachts. Plus there were a lot of real estate brokers made great living selling those multiple mansions. What is really funny is
I haven't heard of any of those evil wealthy people burying their tax savings in the back yard or under their mattresses. Seems they with their "yacht" experiences could see with those poverty ridden workers the adage..."rising tide raises all ships". US Average Hourly Earnings is at a current level of $33.44.

United States Average Hourly Wages

Wages in the United States increased to 29.79 USD/Hour in March from 29.72 USD/Hour in February of 2024. This page provides - United States Average Hourly Wages - actual values, historical data, forecast, chart, statistics, economic calendar and news.

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