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Reading all the comments so far I have not seen one mention of taxing organized religious institutions. For something that (sadly) has so much influence of far too many lives it is far overdue to have them share the bounty from their tax-free windfall
I think if the churches wish to remain tax exempt then they need to not get involved in politics. No donation to any party, and no rallying for any politician on any level.
Technically this is already the law (in the US at least). And while Churches are generally careful about not donating, the rallying thing gets bent quite often. Arguments I’ve heard are generally of “free speech” and/or “churches are above the law, and we shouldn’t bind God to the laws of man.” Occasionally there are high-profile cases where the IRS does go after a church for boldly breaking the law, but it’s rare.
I think it’s perfectly fine for a religious organization to be tax exempt provided they provide the same level of service as other non-profit orgs. I also think we desperately need to overhaul the requirements and auditing practices of organizations claim to be non-profits.
I don’t think a religious organization on its face deserves to be tax exempt.
I feel like we need a general rule that if the head of your organization makes an appearance in or owns a room where everything is literally plated in gold then you immediately lose non-profit status.
Museuems?
Very few items in them are actually gold let enough to plate everything in there. I’m talking shit like the pope or queen of england giving some half hearted speech sitting on a golden chair/throne in front of a gold plated piano and holding a sceptre with enough gems in it to end world hunger.
taxeat the rich.governments taxed rich people before. it went away because money is power and the rich are in power, they simply decided not to anymore.
solving the problem involves socialism, as in rebuilding the system to impede this accumulation of wealth in the first place. and sometimes the deposition of these people.
taxes are a volatile stopgap solution that look leftist if you squint, but they will use violence if needed to undo that win whenever they feel like they need that money back. this WILL NOT solve the problem by itself.
Starting to see upvotes over 1k on lemmy is encouraging, glad to see we are still growing
I paid thirty fucking thousand dollars last year.
the children amputees with no surviving relatives in Gaza who received your contribution thank you
Is there a name for a phenomenon where most of the people in this country are for this, but it can’t possibly be passed into law?
though it could also just be called good old oligarchy with a thin veneer of democracy
Awesome, that seems the perfect term.
Futilism
Dictatorship of the bourgeoisie
Grapes of Wrath Car Freshener.
You misspelled “put their heads in a basket”
It’s too late for them to apologize with paying their fair share.
Unless that share is sanguine in nature.
The issue I have with this sentiment is that some percentage of the rich made active pursuits to deny our freedoms and destroy democracy; while others were…just quiet and uninvolved in politics.
What’s more, much as it makes sense to change our hyper-capitalistic society, this is the society we’re working within in order to make change. Even printing a poster that explains why capitalism is bad costs money. By that token, we will likely need some support from some wealthy people to make change. And yes, that support exists to some degree, and no, we don’t literally need to have “more money” than the opposition.
So maybe you were just shortening sentiments for the sake of a snarky post, which is fine. We can pursue better tax rates for wealthier people, while also pursuing criminal investigations and metaphorical guillotines for the Heritage Foundation. Literally seize all their money. If I’m to make one point though, you don’t want those quiet wealthy people to feel that the Heritage Foundation are their only friends.
I know, man. There’s lots of people I dream about taking a crowbar to. But when I’m done with the violent rhetoric in my head, I think of the most practical actions.
The issue I have with this sentiment is that some percentage of the rich made active pursuits to deny our freedoms and destroy democracy; while others were…just quiet and uninvolved in politics.
The act of acquiring a billion dollars worth of financial assets is itself an attack. If you have a billion dollars, you have systematically overcharged your customers, underpaid your workers, and leveraged your wealth to do the same.
There is a term for a predator that remains “quiet” and “uninvolved” in its prey’s activities: “Parasite”.
I’d counter with examples like Gabe Newell and Steam.
Gabe’s estimated worth is around $6bil. Steam is commonly regarded as the cheapest source of games, and has some of the highest average pay at Valve. There are absolutely arguments to be made around exploitation within the CS:GO gambling market, but that’s still probably not a majority of Valve’s business and income, and they’d have similar numbers regardless. They made a good product, and have generated value from it.
Fine, one exception, right? Except with low visibility on their own internal practices, there’s probably many other wealthy people like them - who have contributed something valuable, which puts them on the first rung of a machine that will, almost through comparatively little effort on their part, catapult their wealth.
There’s something to be said about what happens naturally through inertia, rather than due to willful malice. We are seeing lots of willful malice, make no mistake - but quite a lot of it is simple indecisiveness. A CEO who is shown a study by his shareholders that if you offer one raise, everyone will want one - and decides to just go with the suggestion not to give any raises. A wealthy person whose accountant has the idea of hiding taxes offshore, just because “everyone is doing it”.
These people would not be harmed by tighter restrictions on investment opportunities, closing the loopholes letting people borrow from themselves in so many absurd ways. But many of them are not nearly so active in the exploitation as you seem to suggest.
To extend the example to someone like myself; I would generally say I make more income than I need to survive. I’m no millionaire, but to support myself I don’t need much. I also have no workers underneath me. In these current times, I have done my best to locate worthwhile causes to give up some of that money to. But that act takes time and energy I don’t always have, and given my habits I have a LOT of mailers and spam from less reputable charities of many kinds. Bill Gates founded a charity, but it’s easy to imagine many billionaires won’t bother.
And to further extend my own example: I would be okay with paying more in taxes if it meant a safer world for people with less means than myself - people who often do more valuable work for the world like teachers, nonprofits, and social workers. The task of allocating that distribution and sending checks myself just isn’t something I know how to do easily. I do my best, but it’s stressful and I often worry about whether I’m getting exploited by bad causes.
Again - I’ll emphasize that everything you’re saying is horrible about billionaires is very true about a sizable number of them - probably most we could name. And, I think in a fair future system, it would be much harder to become a billionaire due to tax nets redirecting wealth to better causes. But I also think some current billionaires have been riding a wave of a broken system without actively wanting it to be harmful.
The point, though, is not to garner sympathy for a small minority of a small minority. The point is that their capacity to effect change through their wealth is important enough for the act of change that we shouldn’t actively antagonize them all by incorrectly grouping them. We’re coming for their wealth, yes, but not for their heads (unless they’ve cheated or stolen their way up). And that wealth is meant to be put to good use.
Gabe’s estimated worth is around $6bil.
That $6 billion came out of the hands of consumers, and didn’t go into the pockets of workers. That is exactly the kind of exploitation I’m talking about. I don’t have a problem with people being rich. This goes beyond “rich”. “Obscene” is the right word, but it has been used so often in this context that its meaning doesn’t even register anymore.
That we like his products, like him as a person, and recognize he’s far less exploitative than Jeff or Elon does not mean that his business practices are laudable. Gabe Newell is not an exception. He is part of the problem.
We’re coming for their wealth, yes, but not for their heads
It is not particularly difficult to get rid of wealth. Gabe could gift a good chunk of his wealth to the people who actually generated it. If he chooses to unload enough of wealth to stay under the head-chopping line, we won’t need to come for his (proverbial) head.
A lot of them make their money through exploiting labor via the stock market. That’s how Taylor swift became a billionaire. It’s the same thing you said but in a less direct way.
And newsflash, any of us with retirement accounts are making use of that same stock market.
It’s like blaming anyone with a smartphone for exploiting rare mineral mining. It is absolutely fair to hate the game instead of the players (even the successful ones), especially when so much of its designed to disconnect you from the elements of dehumanization.
I would say that fixing the taxes that the rich are (not) paying, would be more… Prevention for the future.
Heads in baskets is more, paying for the sins of the past.
I am not pro-violence, but putting heads in a basket worked out really well in France
This is very true.
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Why do those who make the rules
Claim they have no control of the rules?
Quite simple, those that make the rules first had to get elected into that spot and needed money to get there, so now they are there the person ‘giving’ them comes calling saying they need the rules to look like such and such. But they promised something different to the voters, so they choose to lie so they can have their cake and eat it. Circle of
lifepolitics.
Too late we’re already an oligarch dictatorship
That’s exactly how they win, by people going “well, it’s already bad, not worth doing anything to make it better.”
We are pushing back but so far things seem to be getting worse
You’re not pushing back, you’re picketing. This is not a situation that can be fixed by picketing.
Where the wealth tax is measured in calibre.
Taxes won’t work now anyway. A redistribution of wealth is required.
That’s what tax is.
Tax is a redistribution of new wealth. A redistribution of existing wealth is required.
Not through a dictatorial government it’s not.
Always has been
I’ll make the same argument that I made in another thread, but now that I’ve got Bernie on my side, maybe people will listen.
TAXING THE RICH DOESN’T MEAN RAISING THE TAX RATES.
It means regulation, oversight, and accountability. You can set the tax rate to any number you want, but it won’t matter if no one is making them pay it. We have to hold them accountable first, and then we can bring the rates back up to something from the pre-Reagan era.
Funny that trump is trying to get rid of regulation, oversight, and accountability.
Funny how he prefers tariffs over taxes so he and his rich buddies don’t have to pay out more from their end.
They have to pay the same as anyone else buying material things. The issue is that if a person worth a billion has to buy a phone that cost $1,000 but is now $1,800 thanks to tariffs it’s probably not even on their radar. If your household makes $80k a year that phone is a measurable and significant expense that will probably be postponed or avoided altogether. Now add up all the other consumer items that will go up thanks to tariffs.
As usual, the point being that the rich are far, far, less affected by price fluctuations than the average family in the US even if they have to pay the same tariff.
I agree the rich aren’t being taxed right now, but why argue on what the phrase does or doesn’t mean instead of argue how it can best be achieved? Or like Bernie does, argue why it is necessary?
What irks me the most is that you have more than you could ever want or need. Like water. You are sitting on a well of decalitres. In a desert. And everyone is dying of thirst. And some guy says “hey man, you need to give back like 20% of that. And that’s kinda lowkey generous tbh.” And their response is literally like “no.”
Just. When is that rocket to the sun scheduled for completion already???
And some guy says “hey man, you need to give back like 20% of that. And that’s kinda lowkey generous tbh.” And their response is literally like “no.”
Beyond every great fortune is a great crime.
Why would you think the modern day Robber Barons could be swayed by social need? If they cared about social need, they wouldn’t be billionaires to begin with.
That’s even stranger to me. That the one true sign of immorality and a lack integrity is literally wealth. Oh you got wealth? Yeah you’re 99.5% probably a POS. And there is a .5% chance of error.
I think you gotta check your math there. I think you meant to say 100.5% with a 0.5% error.
Why would you think the modern day Robber Barons could be swayed by social need?
If they need say first aid or a blood transfusion or the mob to stop beating them to death I think they could be persuaded to understand that we live in a society.
Oh sure. But then they wouldn’t be Robber Barons so much as they’d be French Aristocracy on Bastille Day. Totally different position.
And even then, when Robespierre had King Louis by the balls, what did Marie Antoinette do? Austrian mercenary jailbreak.
“I’d rather fight to the death to keep my yacht than let anyone else have public health care” is just hardwired into some of these people.
Uh I don’t thing deciliter is the unit you want lol
I’m stunned people still do this. In 2025.
What does <current year> have to do with it? I had no idea what scale you meant because I’d forgotten the extremely rarely used prefix deca. Plus even decaliters isn’t really a lot when talking about hoarding water. Maybe literal cubic meters.
Yeah, a decalitre would just be a bucket of water.
You want exalitres.
It’s not too rare when using the (superior) metric system.
With the exception of deci and centi, I know literally nobody who uses prefixes that aren’t multiples of 1000. I’ve been using the metric system all my life. Have you?
Yeah. I have, I wasn’t thinking much, early morning today. I’m used to seeing more of them in my career, but I guess it’s not really “common” outside of that. Sorry, didn’t want to come off as confrontational.
Fair enough, in some careers you may see them more. In normal day to day life I’d say even decimeters are uncommon. You get deciliters in recipes when cooking, centiliters are often used for alcoholic beverage bottles, centimeters are the most common. Deca I think is especially rare, hecto is something you might see used with pressure (hectopascals apparently are equivalent to millibars), but even that is fairly uncommon in day to day usage.
To be fair, I did learn about deca and hecto in elementary school, but it was so long ago and I haven’t really seen them used since lol
the importance of charity is that it is voluntary, taking advantage to tax loopholes is the closest that tax ever gets to charity.
Everytime I hear arguments against wealth tax, gift tax, property tax or inheritance tax. It’s the same argument, it’s unfair towards the people who has worked all their life and want to leave their already taxed money to their family.
In Norway we have no inheritance tax and no tax on gifts. Most people have no taxes on homes either. We do have some wealth tax.
My main issue with the arguments against it is that its is lacking imagination. We make the rules, we can decide to make it fair. We can set a limit for when taxation occurs at a really high number. Just so that 98% of Norwegians get zero taxes on these things.
Zero taxes for inheritance up to 1 000 000 euros and then 75% on every euro above. Is possible.
Zero taxes on gifts up to 50 000 euros a year is possible.
No taxes on homes worth less than 1 000 000 is possible.
Bringing wealth with you when you permanently move out of the country is possible for values less than 5 000 000 euros for instance.
Then adjust for inflation every year (like we do with many of our welfare systems)
If we do this we can get rid of the wealth tax that the rich hate so much (because they are disadvantaged owners compared to owners of businesses in other countries)
No regular people will feel these taxes at all, and they make sure that the wealth is distributed over time. It’s still possible to get rich, and remain rich. But your children can be rich but not insanely rich.
Exactly what the rates should be is up for debate, but this system is in my opinion a better one.
Just mandate a luxury tax on all things normal people don’t buy. You can have wealth, but you cannot have anything normal people cannot have without paying. Oh you want to acquire a whole ass business? You want to donate millions for political influence? You want a Ferrari? Want more land or a huge house? You pay demoralizing amounts of luxury tax.
You can take this a step further and ask why we have this aggregation of wealth at all. Private wealth consolidation is a form of malinvestment resulting from a handful of individuals who are told they can effectively loot the economy unchecked.
Taxation “solves” the problem by clawing back some of that malinvestment. But if you recognize it as malinvestment from the outset, you can see arguments against having these private aggregators of wealth at all.
Instead of taxes, why not simply impose a maximum income? In baseball, you’d call it a salary cap.
Of course, but we are as a society so far away from that. It requires a bigger cultural shift than we are anywhere near. Even the thought of an inheritance tax is very unpopular.
Yes, even as a very social democratic country with a highly educated populace, we can be pretty stupid about taxes.
Also most really rich people have their wealth in assets and make their money as gains on those assets. So it does not really tax the most important people, except maybe some C-suites.
if there was a maximum income people would still bitch and whine about those with mansions aquired through non monetary means.
Perhaps the next step is to improve our land use policy, such that one individual isn’t afforded a mansion’s worth of real estate.
a farm uses more land than most small mansions though, and plenty of individuals own farms.
Farm collectivization isn’t a new idea
Not as many as you would think, actually. And that is not the same thing that is being talked about.
In the U.S. gift tax is exempt on the first $14 million you give. You just have to submit a tax form when you file your taxes. So someone can gift each of their 5 grandchildren a million dollar house, and then give them $1.8 million dollars in cash each before they die. And avoid any gift tax on any of that. Then get taxed an inheritance tax. There is no Federal inheritance tax. Which if you live in a state like Tennessee where I live, the inheritance tax is 0%. So you have now avoided paying any taxes passing down any amount of wealth you potentially have. If you are a billionaire and have an accountant that can’t figure out how to bypass paying taxes you or they must be willfully choosing to do so in the U.S.
You can index the values to a multiple of the median salary instead of a fixed number.
This is in Norwegian, but most services is based on this number https://www.nav.no/grunnbelopet
Which currently is 124 028 NOK which is roughly 10 350 euros.
This number is referenced as G (Grunnbeløpet)
So for instance if I lose my job I can get up to 62.4% of a salary up to 6G. Which is the maximum.
Meaning the maximum payout is 744 168 (6G) * 0.624 = 464 360 NOK.
We have tons of calculations like this for all sorts of welfare services.
Every year in may this number is adjusted.
Also
Tax wealth, not work
That’s kinda why the rich are called “the wealthy” and not “the worky”
TAX WEALTH, NOT WORK
Don’t shout so loud. Some of us sensitive ears, owie.
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One of the arguments by the rich is that excessive tax hampers progress. Now we can all see why that is a critical safeguard to have.
They like to say these things that don’t actually make any sense.
It’s the same with the crying around Europe’s mandatory USB-C connector. “Oh it stifles progress” Apple protested.
Forgetting they had the same unchanged connector, and in fact data protocol on their devices for twelve years before Europe decided they wanted a standard, with all the freedom to improve it.A standard, apple already adopted for everything not iPhone no less.
Tax wealth, not work.
It’s not even all wealth that is the problem. The problem is their wealth is held in financial assets designed to strip wealth from workers and deliver it to hoarders.
We need a securities tax, payable not in dollars, but in shares of the security. Exempt the first $10 million held by a natural person. IRS liquidators will sell off the shares slowly over time, such that the liquidated shares will never consist of more than 1% of total traded shares of that issue.
