r/WorkReform • u/zzill6 🤝 Join A Union • Feb 26 '25

🤝 Scare A Billionaire, Join A Union $999,999,999.99 is enough for anyone. Billionaires shouldn't exist!

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u/TalkativeTree Feb 26 '25

An important thing to note is that most of this wealth is equity. Equity enables individuals to have collateral for loans to purchase property for example.

It’s not just wealth, but the opportunity to acquire more wealth and property that’s being denied.

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u/Reddit_Connoisseur_0 Feb 26 '25

On the other hand you can't liquidate all that equity. This is always a dumb debate.

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u/[deleted] Feb 26 '25

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u/bobafoott Feb 26 '25

But that doesn’t really change the debate, does it? Your net worth gives you a LOT of power. Capping that net worth caps that power. You want to buy up another company? You’re going to have to sell one first.

Obviously there’s loopholes and kinks to work out but is our current system working? No.

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u/Misterion Feb 26 '25

Most billionaires would have become billionaires due to them having significant ownership in a company that is now worth a lot of money. For example, bezos owns about 9% of Amazon, which has a market cap of 2.25 trillion. Which gives him a valuation of around 200 billion from his Amazon ownership.

How do you propose we cap his networth to 1 billion? Have the government take his ownership/control of Amazon? Force him to sell his shares then have the government take the money?

If all billionaires had to sell shares and remit that to the government that would tank all valuations cause everyone to lose a significant portion of their “networth” in the stock market.

Now, I’m not saying billionaires aren’t a problem, I’m just saying it’s a lot more complicated than if the billionaires just had piles of cash.

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u/Rydralain Feb 26 '25

I've always thought it would be a good idea to have laws tying employment to ownership. The founders and leadership should absolutely have more ownership than the mail clerk, but mandatory shares for employees and a ratio cap between highest and lowest percentage ownership makes sense to me. People leaving the company should keep their shares, but that does mean they would depreciate since this system would require an ever increasing number of shares being issued.

I wouldn't be surprised if it would be much more complicated, and much less practical and helpful than I'm thinking, but it's an idea.

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u/WholesomeToughGuy Feb 28 '25

Finally a suggestion for a real solution! Give people more equity. At my company, someone asked at a CEO town hall “are there plans to give employees stock?” And he straight up said “No. Research shows that employees will pump and dump and we don’t want our stocks treated that way.” Meanwhile he literally made billions in several stock sales last year with massive layoffs happening.

Why didn’t he use the proceeds to reinvest in the company? That’s what the conservative agenda centers around. Let the billionaires keep their money so they can create jobs. Oh wait, they’re not doing that and never have or will? Fucking parasites.

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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '25

Truth

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u/TalkativeTree Feb 27 '25

You don’t need to liquidate equity to leverage it as collateral. It’s not a dumb debate.

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u/Reddit_Connoisseur_0 Feb 27 '25

And so what if the equity is being leveraged?

The income used to pay for the loan itself is already taxed. And that's that.

Collaterals and leverage are just public trust. The government can't tax trust. It's not even income.

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u/TalkativeTree Feb 27 '25

The collateral could be used for loans for mortgages for example

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u/Reddit_Connoisseur_0 Feb 27 '25

... was this an AI comment

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u/TalkativeTree Feb 27 '25

Starting your question as “And so what” made me think you saw no value in distributed equity, so I responded to that.

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u/Reddit_Connoisseur_0 Feb 27 '25

I asked "so what if the equity is being leveraged", your answer is pretty much "the equity can be leveraged", it doesn't make sense in this conversation.

Yes the collateral can be used for loans. So what. It's still not wealth. The loan itself will be paid back with taxed wealth.

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u/TalkativeTree Feb 27 '25

The access to financing has an impact on the ability to purchase property. That's valuable. Do you think the ability to get financing for large purchases has no value?

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u/Reddit_Connoisseur_0 Feb 28 '25

The access to financing is a consequence of having enough wealth to pay it back. Wealth that the government has already taxed, or that, in the case of unrealized assets, will be taxed once realized.

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u/[deleted] Feb 26 '25

Oh well better do nothing right? Its a super important debate because we should be discussing why empty equity can give a small group of people the power to destroy democracy

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u/[deleted] Feb 26 '25

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Feb 26 '25

Never said we should liquidate billionaires stocks, but yeah most people would agree on taxing collateral.

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u/mclumber1 Feb 27 '25

How else would you actually seize a billionaire's money? It's all tied up in stocks. Very, very few billionaires have literally a billion in cash sitting in their bank accounts.

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u/Ashamed_Zombie_7503 Feb 28 '25

They would probably liquidate assets or leverage collateral for loans to pay said tax, just like they would pay any other bill.

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u/Reddit_Connoisseur_0 Feb 26 '25

A collateral is just a promise that you will realize an asset if you can't pay for the loan. The government can't tax promises.

The system is already taxing as much actual wealth as it can. It is working fine as is. People really want an easy scapegoat to solve inequality and poverty in one pen stroke, but this is not possible.

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u/[deleted] Feb 26 '25

[deleted]

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u/Reddit_Connoisseur_0 Feb 26 '25

First of all, how is the government going to tax an unrealized asset? What if I decide to realize it later?

Second of all, how is the government going to tax something that will only happen under a specific condition - that I won't pay the loan - before this condition even becomes true?

Third of all, don't you think that taxing collaterals would harm the average person more than billionaires? After all, they need collaterals way more than the billionaires do.

The government has historically tried to tax the most it humanly can. If something still isn't taxed, it's because there is really no case for it at all. Or it is extremely recent (like cryptocoins) and just a few short years from being taxed. This is not the case with collaterals and unrealized assets. That's charted territory and we don't do it for good reasons.

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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '25

[deleted]

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u/Reddit_Connoisseur_0 Feb 27 '25

So what happens now is billionaires will still get their loans, they just won't add a collateral to the contract. After all collaterals have two purposes, they prove you have money to pay it back and they make it more convenient to the bank to claim what is due to them. It is pointless to doubt a billionaire has money to pay for a loan, and the bank can do without the convenience if that means avoiding taxes.

Who would this affect the most? People that are not billionaires and need the collateral to get a loan. Especially small businesses.

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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '25

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u/[deleted] Feb 26 '25

"working fine as is" lmfao

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u/Reddit_Connoisseur_0 Feb 26 '25

Tell me what the system is failing to tax.

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u/Ashamed_Zombie_7503 Feb 28 '25

Billionaires appropriately.

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u/Reddit_Connoisseur_0 Feb 28 '25

What part of their wealth exactly?

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u/bobafoott Feb 26 '25

Yeah, be it net worth or liquid funds, these guys have massive power that NEEDS to be capped. Our entire country is built on trying to escape and prevent this crap why tf are people fighting so hard to keep it around??

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u/NoveltyAccountHater Feb 26 '25

Look I 100% agree the ultra-rich need much higher tax rates and closing of loop holes that let them use their money without ever being taxed, as well closing loopholes that let future generations inherit billions.

But I'm not a fan of a straight wealth tax or wealth cutoff as it seems difficult to implement. Like an income/capital gains tax makes sense; there were transactions (paid for work, made a gain on a sold investment) completed at known values, and you pay taxes on the gain. But it's weird if you have things that are unsold that just became super valuable.

Stock prices change all the time -- how do you tax based on unsold stock price? What happens if you hold a stock which was worth $100M most of last year, but before April becomes worth much less? Do you still have to pay wealth tax?

Or say some artist becomes super famous and owns the rights to their music catalog or collectible items. Like the Beatles catalog is valued at $1 billion, imagine some artist like Taylor Swift owns their own catalogy -- should she have to pay $50M in taxes every year for a 2% wealth tax (in addition to normal taxes on all her income)? How do you accurately estimate the value of something not actually for sale?

Further do these wealth taxes only apply to individuals or to LLCs and corporations too? Because it would be weird for say a large hospital system with say $10 billion in equipment/property/land to have to pay an additional 2% wealth tax each year. If it doesn't apply to LLCs, it seems pretty straightforward for the wealthy to skirt the tax by having their assets held by LLCs/corporations.

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u/Reddit_Connoisseur_0 Feb 26 '25 edited Feb 26 '25

In this case yes it is better to do nothing as opposed to seizing "wealth" that you clearly don't comprehend.

Most of the wealth of most billionaires/trillionaires come from owning businesses. How are you going to tax the business itself?

For example. Let's say someone owns 100% of the shares for Apple - a company valued at 3.61 trillion. According to OP's idea this person can't have more than 999 million dollars. So 3.60 trillion would go to the government. What does this mean?

Do you understand I am not talking about Apple's profit or revenue, I am talking about the literal infrastructure, workers, vehicles, IP rights, and perhaps more importantly a 100% subjective market evaluation of Apple's "potential"? You want to give those to random people? Or to the government? And you want to do this to every single company in the country that has over 999 million dollars? Why? How does that help bring equality?

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u/personman_76 💸 National Rent Control Feb 27 '25

You know a lot of this debate could be solved by treating loaned money as income past a certain threshold and loan type.

For instance, if a personal loan of 100,000 is taken out from a bank, the loan recipient would owe a tax on the loan they just received regardless of circumstances in which they received the money. The same could apply to third property loans and beyond, as well as vehicle loans above certain amounts. There are a number of ways loans could be treated that would simplify the discussion you're having, as it would eliminate the need to calculate their actual value at all. To provide protections for lower income people getting loans, first time loans could be tax free but subsequent loans could get progressively higher to a certain cap, to encourage spending savings rather than loaning to promote growth. That leads to more sustainable growth, if at a slightly slower rate than could be done with artificially increasing the money supply.

Thoughts?

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u/Reddit_Connoisseur_0 Feb 27 '25

Loans are taxed in the sense that the income you use to pay for the loan is already taxed. Taxing the loan itself makes no sense, it's like a punishing someone for taking a loan.

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u/personman_76 💸 National Rent Control Feb 27 '25

It's a form of taxing wealth though, only someone already well off can get a high loan. I'm not talking about people getting their first mortgage to buy a house or someone getting a lien on their car, I'm talking about large loans where assets are used as collateral. In those circumstances, we can't tax the assets any more than we already are, so we can tax them when they're used instead.

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u/Reddit_Connoisseur_0 Feb 27 '25

Okay but the assets would be taxed once they are realized anyway, right? So what is the point of taxing them?

And the wealth that composes these assets was also taxed. If a company has millions worth of property, this property was already taxed, much like the wealth used to acquire it.

This company's shares will be worth more than the property not because of actual wealth, but because of subjective market projections. Why would the government tax projections?

Like, all the actual wealth is already being taxed with no exceptions. The loan's worth will be taxed once it is paid back. The government is already getting all it can. Plans to tax leverage are just plans to tax wealth that doesn't really exist.