Not that I’m particularly against that - quite the opposite, in fact. But I’m wondering if anyone sees, or had seen a path to social and climate recovery/progress that could occur without first eradicating the class of people who most enjoy the present status quo.
Demand money be removed from politics and follow through to make it happen. Make laws that no longer favor the rich.
It’ll never happen, but it’s what it would take.
I’ll add that we can now remove the tax exempt status for religious organizations. Only problem is it puts more money in the hands of the government so they mismanage that as well.
I wish we could get full transparency of where literally every dollar is spent. We shouldn’t have to ask for that.
Think globally act locally y’all
So, let’s put aside for a moment the rather shocking number of people casually advocating for murder in this thread.
I want to talk instead about how everyone here is just talking for granted the notion that removing the billionaires, Republican politicians, or whatever “they” you care to think of, would be a solution, or even a positive step, for modern social ills.
There’s a big undercurrent in almost any political discussion online, this implication that every one of the world’s problems actually has a super simple solution, that The Powerful could just snap their fingers and make it happen if they wanted to, and it’s only because of their greed etc that we have any problems that all. Obviously we live in a time of huge inequity and we’d be a lot better off if we found a good way to improve it.
But many (most?) of our biggest problems are inherent to the challenge of keeping 8 billion people alive and happy in a hostile universe, and in fact nobody has ever had a perfect solution. Throwing the entire planet into chaos by causally throwing away human beings’ rights and leaving an enormous portion of the world’s capital in uncertain hands, ready to be seized by some other set of psychopathic opportunists who happen to be in a position to do so, certainly ain’t it.
I mean, take all their money so that they’re no longer billionaires.
I think it’s possible they might have an opinion on that subject, perhaps loosely phrased as “over my dead body”
Well, then they’ll have consented, then. Ethical conundrum solved!
THE TEST IS OVER
Tax all billionaires more?
The problem isn’t the exact rate, it is their ability to pay for tax experts so they can avoid having most of their wealth taxed at all. This is why Biden wanted to beef up the IRS and sic them on billionaires. Scrutinize the cracks they slip through.
That’s part of the problem; but, increasing tax rates (income, capital gains, depreciation recapture, 1031 exchanges etc) is needed even more than enforcement of existing. You’d be surprised how much of what the rich do to reduce their tax burden is perfectly legal and IRS enforcement would just be an annoyance.
Adjust our economic system to disallow inherited wealth beyond a lavish amount. I don’t mind a person getting rich for starting and succeeding with a massive company. I do mind the 100B being passed to their children, who will never have done anything to earn it.
Let the kids have $10 million each or something, the government should take the rest. If they try to “leave” the country the same thing should apply.
This will also adjust the incentive for billionaires to just make more money since they know they won’t be able to pass it on maybe they will start actually spending it to keep the
RIP BlameThePeacock. Tragically eaten alive by billionaires before they could finish their post.
F
Oh no they got SquiggleMonster too!
Japan solved the overpaid corporate culture nonsense. Australia has the most wealth equality, without the parasitic billionaire problem. The solutions have existed for a long time.
The real issue in the USA is the lack of effective legislation. There is no political accountability. This is all due to a two party system. All it takes to fix the USA is outlawing gerrymandering, rejecting the electoral college, and institute tiered voting where everyone votes for the candidates based upon their preferred priority order. Popular votes is the only Democratic method. Representative republics are a corruption of democracy that was a necessity with the travel and communication limitations of 300 years ago but not now. Voting for candidates by priority would make party affiliation nearly meaningless and force accountability and substance because the difference between candidates would drastically decrease. It would eliminate the polarized nonsense that all the billionaires want. It isn’t about the ridiculous nonsense, it is about ensuring very little productive legislation is possible. No laws means do anything you want. The US has a tenth of the laws and protections of any other western country.
I’ve always interpreted that idea as “make it so billionaires can’t exist” change the system so that people can’t actually make all that money.
Befriend them and work to change their hearts, maybe?
I appreciate your optimism
If I didn’t feel like @canitendtherabbits would spend the rest of their life being disappointed I’d agree.
Can we all at least try to pretend that unflagged sarcasm is humorous - or at least exists - for a while?
Seemed obvious to me.
Welp, I mean you can target them with hatred and bitterness and have that animosity inside of you or you can mind your own, do what I said when your paths cross, and be free to live a life better than that. It really is that simple.
They don’t have those. Or souls.
How about; befriend them, lure them into a fatal trap, eat their heart?
This is a meme, right? …right?
You don’t have to eradicate all of them, just each year have the richest person in the world executed. Only one. Watch all these billionaires race to give their money away and put it into philanthropic endeavours.
Of course, if any of them are found to be evading or hiding the true extent of their wealth, execution. And money invested in their own organisations/businesses would also of course be counted as theirs.
Yes, you’re supposed to eat them too. This helps reduce world hunger.
In all seriousness, we’ve dealt with this problem before. We had a time we call the era of the robber barons if you want to read a little about it.
The problem with some of them is that they can do whatever they want for just a little more money and they do it all the time, thats why regulation is a must if the people is what matters, CMV
All it is necessary to do is to abolish all other forms of taxation until the weight of taxation rests upon the value of land irrespective of improvements, and take the ground-rent for the public benefit.
~ Henry George, Social ProblemsNice try CIA/FBI
We’re not having the CIA do it for you you coward
The problems is not that rich people exist, millionaires are few and far between, but that rich people that are able to screw everyone over.
What we have to do is to stop giving the rich so much power, especially over the government. Less corruption means that we can better regulate large companies, including enforcing pollution emission limts.
In fact, you are already helping with that, by using Lemmy and not corporate social media like Twitter or Reddit.
