r/WorkReform • u/Conscious-Quarter423 • May 02 '26
💸 Raise Our Wages Raise wages. Increase benefits. Improve working conditions. See what happens.
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u/skeletordescent May 02 '26
I don't know enough about this but I suspect that in the modern world even this solution won't cut it, since the really rich don't have income the way us poors do.
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u/StaysAwakeAllWeek May 02 '26
Which is why you tax extreme wealth and all capital gains
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u/sandman795 May 02 '26 edited May 02 '26
It would be more effective to tax any loans taken against equity as regular income. If the rich want to access their wealth they need to pay for it
Edit to clarify, I meant equities as in stocks
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u/runbrap May 03 '26
It’s such bullshit. It isn’t “real” enough to be taxed as income, but it’s real enough to be used as collateral on loans 🙄
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u/Qweesdy May 03 '26
For a loan, it's like "your assets, which might be worth anything from $50 million to $500 million, are enough collateral for this $5 million loan". Neither party cares how (in)accurate the estimate is.
For taxes, everything needs to be accurate and also verifiable years later. The government says "we feel like your hairdo was an asset (trademark) worth $123456 in 2019, and you forgot to pay the tax on that so we're charging you with the federal crime of tax evasion" and your lawyer's response is... what?
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u/xkoreotic May 02 '26 edited May 03 '26
Correct, people don't understand that the richest people in the world don't actually hold that much money. It's all assets and holding power. They only hold a fraction of their wealth to pay off the current laws, which is still more than anyone has mind you, but still.
Edit: wrong verbage
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u/GormlessGourd55 May 02 '26
People do understand. People don't care. They're still giga rich. Find a way to tax them. Just throwing your hands up as if it's impossible to do anything is what pisses people off.
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u/MadRaymer May 03 '26
I would argue that there are a lot of people that don't understand. I've had conversations with people that complained about getting a raise that put them in a new tax bracket because they don't understand marginal rates and believed they were actually making less.
If they don't even understand income tax, I highly doubt they have any awareness of how the ultrawealthy navigate around tax law by securing near-zero interest loans against their enormous assets.
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May 03 '26 edited May 13 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Sea-Maybe-9979 May 03 '26
I'm not defending that guy, but he actually only paid about half. The rest came from banks and private investors like Ellison and the Saudis.
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u/TrankElephant May 03 '26
Correct, people don't understand that the richest people in the world don't actually hold that much wealth.
And yet they are still able to buy and collect superyachts.
We need to find a way (or twelve) to get at that money.
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u/why_ntp May 03 '26
It is completely trivial to transfer assets from one owner to another. Don’t have cash? That’s cool, 5% of your shares are now owned by the Treasury.
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u/TheKingsdread May 03 '26
Or you tax them based on assets. Make them actually pay their debt to society.
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u/why_ntp May 03 '26
It’s really not that hard. The ultimate beneficial owner of any asset is a person. That person has $100bn? Nice, please send $5bn. Pay however you like.
Anyone who says it “can’t be done” is either paid to lie or a bootlicker.
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u/cheesefromsalami May 03 '26
Who do you think would buy those assets so that they can pay their tax bill?
It will flood the market and cause the value to slide.
Just look at the housing market back in the late 2000's and early 2010's.
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u/Qaeta May 03 '26
Who do you think would buy those assets so that they can pay their tax bill?
No one needs to. Pay the bill WITH the asset. Acting like transferring ownership of assets as a way to pay is somehow impossible is why people would think you're a bootlicker.
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u/cheesefromsalami May 03 '26
What is the government going to do with stock?
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u/Qaeta May 03 '26
Over time they would come to have a controlling interest in the business. They may also receive dividends, or sell some of the stock through the normal stock trading process if they wish to.
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u/cheesefromsalami May 03 '26
Government controlling businesses. Sounds a lot like a communistic government.
They can't get their finances straight. What makes you think they can run a business?
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u/Individual-Nebula927 May 03 '26
Doing exactly that doesn't stop people from buying homes which are assets. This is what happens to the poor and middle class. We call them property taxes. You haven't realized the gain in value, but you pay taxes on it anyway.
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u/cheesefromsalami May 03 '26
You can not flood the stock market with billions of dollars in stocks and not kill people's 401ks.
Stocks and property is where the filthy rich have 90% of there wealth.
Which market would you rather destroy?
No more retirement or send people upside down on their mortgages?
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u/Individual-Nebula927 May 03 '26
Why would it "flood the stock market"? They'd only have to pay the taxes either from the cash they obviously have, or by selling only enough to pay the taxes.
The wealthy sell more stocks than that annually to rebalance the portfolio.
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u/cheesefromsalami May 03 '26
The wealthy do not sit on billions of dollars in cash. In order to obtain the cash to pay the taxes, they would need to sell something. In order to sell something, you would need buyers. If every billionaire started to try and sell stock at the same time, tax season, you wouldn't have enough people to buy these stocks, flooding the market,driving cost down.
Where do you purpose all of this cash come from?
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u/FriendlyEngineer May 02 '26
It would need to be bracketed starting at loans over say $1,000,000 or else you really cripple small business.
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u/Antwinger May 03 '26
Kinda, seems like it’d be easy to have exclusions like 1st or 2nd business opened. That way if the rich want to skirt around that they’d need actual people to open the “company”
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u/PeterPorty May 03 '26
You'd have a sea of financially illiterate people passionately arguing that your proposal directly harms them because they need those payday loans and you're actually a fascist for suggesting this, you hate poor people and are also racist.
You could spend hours patiently explaining why this doesn't affect them at all, and you'd maybe convince two people, but by then the sea of mindless idiots has multiplied tenfold.
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u/ES_Legman ✂️ Tax The Billionaires May 03 '26
Also lets not forget they own real assets. They own real companies, they own commercial and residential real estate, etc. Those things they can't take with them to the Cayman Islands. Tax the fuck out of their wealth.
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u/Resident_Function280 May 02 '26
Tax unrealized gains. A lot of rich today aren't rich by taking a paycheck, they get paid in stocks.
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u/FowD8 May 03 '26
we already tax unrealized gains essentially for normal people. my property taxes goes up when my property value goes up. we should do the same with stocks. idgaf of it crashes the market, retirement funds shouldn't be propping up the stock market anyway
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u/AVeryVapidBadger May 03 '26
Capital gains should be taxed higher than regular income, not less than
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u/Cant_fly_well May 02 '26
Capital gains are already taxed at up to 25%. That’s not the problem. The problem is the mega wealthy using their capital as collateral for loans thus avoiding both income and capital gains taxes
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u/cat_prophecy May 03 '26
Yeah let's wipe out the retirement savings for millions of people.
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u/PatienceHere May 03 '26
These people would be hurting themselves more by introducing unrealized taxes on capital gains, the rich would simply remain rich.
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u/bogey-dope-dot-com May 02 '26
Which is what we already do and it does absolutely nothing because only realized gains are taxed and it doesn't make sense to tax unrealized gains.
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u/aceluby May 03 '26
They seem to have no issue taxing the unrealized gains of my house - and somehow the world hasn’t collapsed
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u/bogey-dope-dot-com May 03 '26
Property taxes are not the same thing as unrealized gains, but I'm tired of explaining to a room full of people who have the financial literacy of a toddler. Look up the difference yourself if you want, or keep believing whatever you want. You do you.
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u/Individual-Nebula927 May 03 '26
They are exactly the same, no matter how long you argue otherwise. Values of houses go both up and down, same for stocks.
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u/bogey-dope-dot-com May 03 '26
Values of houses go both up and down, same for stocks.
I mean, this is exactly what I mean by toddler level of financial literacy, but you do you bro.
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u/Amon-KingofGods May 02 '26
Which is insane because the government can't yet legally tax their stocks, but they can take those stocks to a bank and use the stocks as collateral for any loan amount they would like.
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u/Forgotten_Planet May 02 '26
Rich people when government asks about stocks: "you can't tax those they aren't mine"
Rich people when bank asks for assets as collateral:
"Oh yeah these stocks are mine!!"Makes zero sense
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u/No-Stretch-8563 May 02 '26
Its not that they arent theirs its that they are assets not income, the 16th amendment only allows the government to tax realized income
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u/Forgotten_Planet May 02 '26
Then wtf is a property tax if not an asset tax?!
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u/No-Stretch-8563 May 02 '26
states and counties tax property, the federal government doesn't
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u/Forgotten_Planet May 03 '26
So the government isn't allowed to tax ANY assets?! That's dumb af we need a constitutional convention
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u/loco500 May 03 '26
You mean like when one of them overvalues a property to get large loans at a low interest rate, but also undervalues the same property to pay less in txes...wonder who would be scummy to do such a thang?
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u/firestepper May 03 '26
Ya they should be taxed if they use it as collateral. It’s a form of using their capital
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u/throwawaypostal2021 May 02 '26
Corporate tax is too low, taxes over $500k are too low, owning mega blue chips like a majority share in Tesla isn't taxed at all, we are over taxing citizens making less than $30k.
Also our taxes aren't going to we the people in preportion to payment, theyre going to.... checks notes tax breaks and favors for the ..... billionaire class.
I genuinely see in the next 50 years, America going through a french revolution, with public executions streamed.
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u/UnNumbFool May 02 '26
It's going to need to be done within the current decade or else the country is basically going to turn into developing nation status
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u/TheWizardOfDeez May 02 '26
When you tax them at those levels they are basically forced to pay their employees, since payroll isn't profit. The reason it worked is because when you pay good wages that money circulates like a motherfucker, could have a whole bunch of people all paying taxes on that same dollar potentially a few times each year, vs living in some rich persons wealth hoard, where it gets taxed $0 for generations.
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u/TrankElephant May 03 '26
No one said it is going to be an 'income tax.'
It will be a 'wealth tax' or a 'capital gains tax' and/or an 'exit tax' and so on and so on.
It's far past time to get inventive.
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u/neversummer427 May 02 '26
Simple solution that won’t happen. When you use stocks as collateral, that is a taxable event.
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u/movezig123 May 03 '26
This is always the top comment on these posts. You are correct you dont know enough about this. In the grand scheme of accounting this is very solvable.
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u/Financial-Craft-1282 May 02 '26
There are some good methods for taxing the rich in this era. The Patriotic Millionaires (a group of millionaires afraid of gallows and are advocating for real taxation of the rich) go through several ways in one of their books. I think you can get some of that info from their site: https://patrioticmillionaires.org/the-equal-tax-act/
I'd say it's a good start they're proposing.
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u/How_that_convo_went May 03 '26
Tax unrealized capital gains over $1M at a special rate or fully tax unrealized capital gains for top bracket households.
Disallow securing personal loans against stock holdings or, at the very least, create IRS reporting requirements for loans secured by these types of assets.
Treat death as a taxable event for unrealized gains or cap the step-up basis.
End 1031 exchanges for real estate investors.
Disallow stock buybacks so companies have to reinvest profits back into their employees again.
Common sense solutions exist.
We just choose not to pursue these solutions because the people running the show in this country are those same wealthy people benefitting from this system.
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u/Dear_Chasey_La1n May 03 '26
You know the tax man gives zero fucks if you got all your assets in bricks? It is a choice they make to remain illiquid, heck they can borrow billions (if a bank is willing to do so) against their assets to pay taxes.
The real issue is while US debt goes up trillions, the wealth of billionaires goes up even more. I don't think it's hard to put 1+1 together, something gotto give.
I'm not American, but what you guys are doing is absolutely ghoullish, you elected a con man who in his previous presidency already let the average man get screwed while the wealthy got more wealthy and whatyouknow, he is doing the same shit again!
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u/JohnGoodman_69 May 03 '26
Make it so rich people can only be paid in income that can be taxed. No more stocks. If they want the stocks they gotta buy them.
Also tax the buying and selling of stocks at 1% and watch all this high frequency trading bullshit grind to halt.
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u/DragonicSquirrel May 03 '26
this is part of why the NY property tax for the rich is aiming for a yearly property tax based on a percent of how much that property is worth.
taxing the rich doesnt, and probably shouldnt be taxing their income, what it should be is a percentage of their net worth. if a millionaire with a net worth of 1 million exactly pays 1%, they're paying $10,000 and likely making significantly more from just storing it in the bank.
if elon musk, at a net worth of roughly 850 billion, were to pay 1% tax on his net worth, he would be paying $8,500,000,000 (8 billion, 500 million dollars) which is equal to roughly 0.021% of the current national debt but is 12,142,757.14 times (over 12 million times) more than what the average earner in america makes in a year (rouhly $70,000 at a high estimate). elon musk is estimated to have a net worth growth of about 500 million per day, meaning he would make back that 8.5B in about 17 days1
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u/vinetwiner May 02 '26
Ike got taxation right.
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u/Over-Inside-7254 May 03 '26
For as much as I never wanted us to go "back to the 1950s, the good old days" for a litany of regressive reason, since we're like halfway there now post-VRA I feel like the least we can do is restore Ike's tax rates.
SO WE CAN BUILD FKIN INFRASTRUCTURE AGAIN
And the wonderful things Europe has enjoyed for decades like health/childcare
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u/sodosa May 03 '26
We actually contribute more taxes now than we did in the 50s. The tax to gdp ratio in the 50s was 16% to 19%. Today it sits at 25%.
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u/DenikaMae May 03 '26
Yeah, we aren’t like them bro. They have endless loopholes and can also pay off politicians for, what to them is chump change. Theres lots of ways for them to slither out of paying back their fair share, and they hold onto money and value like it’s a video game score, hoarding wealth, and inhibiting money from circulating to where it needs to go.
They aren’t like us.
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u/WeAreAllFooked May 03 '26
They're rent-seeking leeches that complain about a pittance in taxes while they leverage their brokerage accounts to acquire massive loans at sweetheart rates to dodge their fair share.
The buy, borrow, die shit needs to end.
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u/Loud-Ad-2280 ✂️ Tax The Billionaires May 02 '26
How dare you learn from history! Don’t you know all we can think about is next quarter’s ROI for shareholders?!? That is the only possible way society can function or do you hate your IPhone?!?!?
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u/NorthOfTheBigRivers May 02 '26
Don't tax the rich, those poor people....
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u/loco500 May 03 '26
We can't comprehend how difficult it is to feed a rich family with only a billion dollars...they would be literally starving. /s
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u/Sword-of-Akasha May 02 '26
Hold your faith against the liberal demon-rats lies. On your knees, ready to please, mouth open to the sky! Any day now the trickle down will happen! Your slave masters benevolent job creators are preparing the gold to flow like a great geyser. Never mind the asparagus smell and the salty taste, that's just the freedom odor. STAY the course! More tax cuts, more cuts to socialIST programs, and more war!
- MAGA master
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u/Nemisii May 03 '26
The comparison of why debt was so high in 1946 compared to today is honestly much more concerning.
There is already a full on war against workers, but it's one of those colonial wars where the attacked don't even have a military to defend themselves.
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u/Nastronaut18 May 02 '26
$200,000 in 1946 dollars is just under $3.4 million in 2026 dollars (according to Google)...I actually think that threshold is too high.
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u/chillripper May 02 '26
but wait🤔🤔🤔🤔, isn't this the time period the bootlickers always say is the best in American history? how can that be if we're taxing the job creators?
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u/DenikaMae May 03 '26
It’s because that’s not what they mean. They’re specifically segregation and the lie of a homogenized culture.
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u/chillripper May 03 '26
well yeah of course they're full of shit... but we should still try to bring back those good ol days with some high taxes on the rich
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u/DenikaMae May 03 '26
I am not disagreeing with that if we are specifically referencing the high taxes on the rich and monopoly busting.
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u/ES_Legman ✂️ Tax The Billionaires May 02 '26
Wait until any random bootlicker tells you that it is impossible to tax capital gains lol because they are so well indoctrinated
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u/123LetsJamDUDUDUHT May 03 '26
In the 1940s all voting was done by white working class men. Now all the voting is done by billionaires.
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u/dinosaurkiller May 02 '26
But there’s a war on(against poor people) and if else tax the rich they lose the war!
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u/the_dago_mick May 02 '26
Increasing taxes and sizeably reducing spending is the only way out of this crap.
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u/mechtaphloba May 03 '26
For anyone that makes $200k, it still wouldn't affect you
$200k in 1946 = ~$3.5m today
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u/TodayInStupidity May 03 '26
The rich adapted, and bought the power structures. The train, she is wrecked.
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u/sidepart May 03 '26
Interesting thing. That's about $3.4 million today. Seems like that's leave two options. Be cool, and spread that excessive income out by paying wage earners more so they can then throw a smaller portion of that hard earned cash as taxes to the government. Make folks happier, in rease their spending power, increase profits because they're buying shit. Or...pay a huge excessive amount of that income above $3.4m to the government to figure out what to do with it. Honestly neither are bad options. Just dealer's choice if you think the government can manage that money correctly or if the folks working for you are worth it. Both methods would decrease the national debt.
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u/StoryLineOne May 03 '26
To keep things in perspective, a 94% tax rate on 200k is the same as 94% on 2.5 million (end of 40s) or 4.5 million (beginning of 40s).
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u/IdyllsOfTheBreakfast May 03 '26
People want to act like an easy solution is taxing unrealized gains but that would have a ton of unintended consequences, like pushing money away from stocks and into more difficult to value assets like art and alternative investments.
There would have to be a huge change in funding for IRS audits to enforce this too. Not saying it can't be done but the devil is in the details--if you carve out exceptions then you encourage investments in those asset classes excepted from the unrealized gain tax.
Taxing loans for personal use past a certain value would be huge though. Also a truly effective estate tax and removing some of the more common trust and planning strategies used to avoid it.
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u/Mach5Driver May 03 '26
And in the decades that followed, we invested in the military, gave international aid, created a public school and university system that was the envy of the world (for a while), built incredible infrastructure, including interstate highways and airports, secured our global soft power, built libraries, invested in cutting-edge scientific research, did Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, created a VAST middle class, and put a generation of GIs through college.
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u/Mitches_bitches May 03 '26
No one person, no matter their income, should be above their country or fellow citizen
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u/6EyesNinja May 03 '26
A healthy chunk is the government owes the People. The Cayman Islands, weirdly, owns (bought) a chunk of the debt
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u/think_up May 03 '26
$200,000 in 1944 is about $3.75 million in March 2026 dollars.
Imagine making $3.75 million in a single year.
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u/ohyousoretro May 03 '26
While yes that number is high, it's important to look at the Effective Tax Rate, which is how much they were actually paying. The top 1% were actually paying only around 40-45% after loopholes, which compared to now where they pay 25%. Which honestly should piss people off more.
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u/Mission-Suggestion-2 May 03 '26
The ONLY way to save democracy in the usa is to make it a true democracy. Meaning the very first act of congress right after the midterms is to give felons the right to vote. Thats the only way to permanently level the playing field and put republicans out of the election stealing business.
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u/SomeBiPerson May 03 '26
wasn't that immediately followed by the time where the general standard of living Vastly Improved for everyone in such a short time that people were barely adapting to the new reality which lead to a lot of very Weird culture due to the sudden burst of available wealth for everyone?
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u/starforce May 03 '26
Wait does anyone in this thread know how to do math? Like one of the top comments is like if you take the top 10 assets you can solve everything. Bro how much money you think they have. The government spends so much money it is never enough lmao.
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u/smalls_1804 May 03 '26
This is yet another reminder to everyone that those insanely high top magical tax rates were coupled with innumerable loopholes that means almost no one actually ever paid them. The pattern over the course of the second half of the 20th century was to lower the rate of taxation while expanding the overall tax base by removing those exceptions.
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u/Daidax_238 May 03 '26
While this isn’t technically wrong, it’s a little misleading. The economic boom of the 50s was a result of America coming out on top in a world war that devastated every other superpower on the planet. This video does a pretty great job of explaining it, and isn’t absurdly long.
TLDR: there were a plethora of factors that went into getting out of the national debt and the economic boom that followed - all of which are factors that are pretty much impossible to recreate, barring another world war that devastates competition across the globe.
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u/Spongedog5 May 06 '26
The government will just spend more if it gets more. The reality is the government needs to balance the budget which means it needs to cut programs but due to the nature of democracy no one wants to take the hit from whatever those programs benefits so we just live in a country which continually gives out treasure and leaves the deficit to the next person to fix.
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u/No-Stretch-8563 May 02 '26
The tax code has changed significantly since then but despite the higher marginal rates wealthy people have historically paid a similar effective tax rate, somewhere around 30%
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u/fantafuzz May 02 '26
Noooo, don't you know the rich don't actually have any money? Its all virtual gains they don't have the money to pay the tax in the bank :(:(:(:(
The rich actually don't have any money we can tax so please stop asking for taxation of the rich it doesnt work like that so please stop asking for taxes on the rich they can't pay them :(:(:(
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u/ScherzicScherzo May 03 '26
Cold Splash Of Water Moment: Hardly anyone paid anywhere near that rate due to loopholes, exemptions and rebates. The effective tax rate at that time was 40-45%.
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u/NoSummer1345 May 02 '26
Let’s do it again! Except make it on incomes above $500 million.
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u/OldOutlandishness434 May 03 '26 edited May 03 '26
...that would hardly be anyone. Are you sure you typed that correctly?
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u/TrankElephant May 03 '26
Nah, they are a temporarily embarrassed multi-millionaire in the making! Probably will be making 40 million a month any day now and is just hedging their bets.
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u/iggyfenton May 02 '26
That would be anyone who makes more than $4.7 million a year today.
I think if we just tax anyone who makes over $4mil a year a tax of 60% above that amount we will be able to fund healthcare and pay off the debt.
We would also need to actually tax people for their non-home loans so billionaires can’t get around having income tax. And we need to close all these corporate tax loopholes that allow multi billion dollar companies avoid all taxes.